Alan Shreve, ngrok | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone. We're back here live at kubecon a little bit of a lull on the floor.

I'm gonna assume some sessions are going on and that's good. It'll be a little less noise because I want you to pay attention to our next guest here. I want to introduce you to Alan Shreve Alan is the CEO founder of a company called engrock Allen.

Welcome to Tech strong TV. Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

It's great to have you on so Alan as I mentioned founder CEO and Rock you don't mind. I don't want to start a little bit with your own personal Journey sir, you know you we said you're sitting here today, but you know, how'd you get here? That's that's a great question.

You know, I started my career in in software development. I was one of the first engineers at twilio. I helped build their their SMS product and really, you know built a lot of like, you know, my first like distributed systems there and it led me into a set of problems that really ultimately a Fed into the the creation of encrock and and the founding of androc has a company tryingtastic.

So look we're talking about Dan crock. How would you know for our audience? Maybe who's not familiar with Encore?

How would you describe and rock to them? Yeah, and rock is in Ingress as a service platform and what that means is there are a number of disparate technologies that you have to tie together to really receive Ingress receive like traffic from the internet to applications that you're trying to deliver to your customers these include things like, you know, delivery networks kind of content. Your networks firewalls reverse proxies and you know firewalls laughs like things like that engrock is a unified solution that allows you to essentially like combine all those pieces into one and the as a service part is that we run that service for you, right?

So this is not like a piece of software or really a hardware that you need to operate on your own. Great. Yeah.

Ingress is a service. Let's you know, I love one of the great things about twilio is where you date, they really they solved so many different little thorny issues in in terms of delivering in terms of delivery in terms of making things work together, right? This Ingress is a Services a great example of that almost surprised.

They didn't do it. But if we could frame the problem Of Ingress. Yeah, how Go ahead.

Yeah, I mean Ingress is a is a challenging problem that affects, you know, a number of different departments at an organization. That's trying to deliver software specifically web software. Really when you are delivering a piece of software to the internet, you know thing of like a website or an API.

You have a number of different concerns that you need to address as a developer you are trying to essentially like ensure that your application has the proper authentication you're in trying to ensure that it will have the correct resiliency that if there's too much traffic that you know, the application will be able to scale up or respond that you have the right observability for the traffic that comes in all of these are our different pieces and developers, you know have have some responsibility of like how they deliver the application the operations teams are often tasked with, you know developers asking them to stand up like caching or load balancing or other things. In front of their applications and then security is often looking for pieces like, you know guaranteeing that the authentication pieces are correct or looking for observability on the traffic that is going through it. You know, the even even things like observe really really apply to all of those stakeholders, right?

And so it is a a multi-faceted problem that really affects everyone across an organization trying to deliver soccer sure, you know. Listening to you describe some of the disparate. players in the you know In the chain here, it almost sounds kind of like what you hear about with kubernetes not with kubernetes, but with cloud with mesh, you know on the kubernetes environment, how would you contrast that compare that?

to what I'm doing with Ingress you're talking about like a service but service but yeah service brushes are predominantly focused on connecting applications within a kubernetes cluster Ingress as a service is predominantly about how to deliver those applications external for the cluster to the to the internet at large right those kind of similar functions and So let me ask you what before end Rock what were people doing. Yeah, it Ingress is is such a broad problem and there are many different ways in which you need Ingress. So it really depends on which one you're talking about engrock originally started as a developer tool and it was specifically targeted at developers who needed Ingress to their laptops.

So they were Building Services locally, and they really needed Ingress to their laptops to be able to test them with live Production Services that wanted to make requests to the things that they were working on. What we really discovered while building, you know ngrok and and having it adopted by five million developers around the world was that the problem of creating Ingress was one that you know, really there was no solution for in development but in staging and production like especially as you go to production folks had to develop other Solutions and those Solutions were often not developer friendly and they were often challenging to stand up and operate and Ingress as a service and really like the the transformation that ngrok has gone under gone to become the platform that it is today. It's about taking that same experience that we delivered for, you know Ingress to laptops and making that super easy and extending that ease of use to production while also layering on the additional pieces that are needed to allow developers to run developers and operations and security teams to really run these services in production.

What a great. What a great story this is right, so it started off primarily for I was using on their laptop, but when we look at the whole Ingress problem it, you know, it is a much bigger. Problem or a much bigger more adjustable Market that deal with the same issue and and got engrack sort of filled that vacuum if you will, that's that's exactly right.

We want we want teams to be thinking about Ingress. In in a unified way right where you shouldn't have to like have different solutions for Ingress if you're in development or in production or even if you're in you know, Google or Amazon's clouds or your own on-prem data centers right now, each of those requires bespoke networking configurations that often works with specific services to a particular cloud or often like unique Hardware devices like in your on-prem data centers. What engrock is really building towards is that unified Vision that Ingress is something that you can declare and that the the runtime, you know and rock functionally as the Ingress as a service delivers that to your applications regardless of what it's one one Ingress solution across all of you are you know use cases if you will for Ingress, that's right.

And that's really one of the reasons it's so appealing to folks in operations and security is that it provides that that unified piece. So for operations folks as they're starting to think about multi-cloud as development teams are working on unifying like how they work in CI and testing in CI the same way that they test same way their services run in production and for security teams right of having a single unified pane of glass being able to answer the question like what are all the points of Ingress into, you know, everything across the organization that's not something that many security teams can answer right now. Right.

You know what? I've been in security 20 years. You're right.

You're 100% right? Hey, let's let's turn and talk a little bit about an announcement. You guys recently had.

Around Ingress obviously because that's what engross about but God I tell our audience if you don't mind absolutely. So we just released our careers Ingress controller and there are there are a number of existing Ingress controllers that folks have already packaged with with kubernetes engrox Ingress controller is a bit unique it does, you know conform to the Ingress spec and so in in that way, you know, it's kind of a drop-in replacement drop in replacement is a little dicey with Ingress controllers because so much of it is contained in Vendor specific annotations. Yeah, but engrox controller is is particularly unique because the way that it creates Ingress most other Ingress controllers require you to configure the hardware that they run on right you have to give them access to the networks and interfaces to receive traffic from the from outside the cluster and then you also have to plan all of that like whether it's Hardware virtualized networking software to IPS and subnets and open firewall ports and things like that.

Engrox Ingress controller is simply just an installation and it essentially like the authentication keys to talk to the ngrok service. And rocks Ingress controller pushes Ingress really like out to our Global points of presence. So encrock runs a Global Network of points of presence around the world where when you create Ingress objects, the Ingress controllers more or less shipping them to our Global Network and we are accepting Ingress on your behalf.

Almost like a reverse CDN kind of thing, you know there there are sometimes we've you know, kind of called it like an application delivery Network, right? And so it does certainly have the right thing. Yeah, very cool what you know that that architecture has a number of unique benefits similar some of which are similar to cdns one of which is acceleration, right?

I pushing Ingress to these Global points of presence and rock can do geo distributed, you know acceptance of traffic for you moving some of that termination and speed closer to your customers including like the the execution of authentication middlewares that you can hand off to end Groff to do something like single sign on in front of your applications for instance as well as a number of like security and resiliency benefits as well where essentially like traffic that is unauthenticated or is you know blocked because it is dangerous or attacking traffic never makes it back to your origin Network. You can almost think rock as like a global DMC. That protects your origin Services before the traffic reaches your applications.

That's pretty cool too. Actually when you think that's a great thing to do. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking Ma'am, why hasn't someone done this before but you know what until you had sort of widespread adoption of sass.

because the idea of handing this off to something not on my network to you know, a remote even though you have all these points of presence and you have that scalability and less this city that you would want for this kind of thing. It really couldn't exist. I mean we were talking earlier.

Is it a SAS product? Is it so far you put This wouldn't work well in anything but sort of Assassin's environment you think? I it's a good question what you mean by assas environment, but but you know, but another word.

so by sassava, I'm not talking about I think I understand what you're doing. So yeah, nothing about a monthly fee. Yeah.

I'm talking about the idea of Outsourcing this to a third party off of my Particular Network. Yeah, I think you know a lot of businesses, you know, the vast majority of business are much more comfortable handing off, you know a number of important pieces of their infrastructure to other companies realizing that really their value added that it is it is not a you know beneficial to them to invest the resources in building for critical not for to their you know, undifferentiated critical to their business, but it's not really critical right now to their knowledge base a hundred percent. Yeah.

And so I agree like engrock is part of that wave of, you know, turning more and more things into more and more services into services that you do not have to run on your own and we've seen that transition already in you know in the storage Market in the kind of the database Market where they're more databases as a service certainly in compute, which is probably the oldest of the as a service markets and networking is one of them that is still you know, kind of lagging behind. We have a few pieces here and there. That run as a service, but really this idea of a globally distributed Ingress network is something that major corporations like have built themselves and still continue to build and operate despite.

It not being core to their value. Yeah, and We really think that they should be that you know that those folks should be focusing their engineering effort elsewhere. And we also want to bring that kind of power to the folks who don't have the engineering and operations departments to really build and run those those large networks because it is a serious challenge to build and operate that kind of software.

and I think that what you just described really hits the critical core. Issue right back in the com days. I helped start a company was what we call Dan ASB application service provider.

Yeah, and we did. Through a hosting Lotus nodes and people soft and Oracle sure before there's Cloud, you know, there was the virtualization wasn't so great. But you know, we did a lot of studies on what people are willing organizations, you know should Outsource on what they do Outsource.

And organizations who won't Outsource things that are critical but not core. Eventually you get yourself into a position where there's a handful of companies. Who can do those kinds of things that will in continue to just throw money into the fire basically?

Into non-core but yet critical, you know functionality for whatever reason he's the highly regulated or just a general lack of trust or whatever it is, but eventually it dwindles. Right to a smaller and smaller people get smart about it. And I imagine that's what's going on.

We then Rock here as well. I organizations have to say wait. They got a better mouse trap.

Why am I why am I you know shoveling sand against the tide here? Sorry. Absolutely.

Yeah and you know being able to to be that, you know, critical service provider for businesses really is the honest is on you as a service provider to prove, you know, the the Safety and Security of your your product as well as the resiliency of it. And so we've invested a tremendous amount and have customers running their real production like transactional workloads through us every day and entrusting, you know, kind of like millions of dollars in their their businesses absolutely every day to us and that's really a core proof point for us to take out to other customers and say like this is a solid, you know piece of infrastructure that yeah, you can bet your business on. Yeah, I mean and that's what I was getting at, you know what the widespreaded guy adoption of as a service kind of models like right You you've invested far more than I'm gonna invest in it.

I mean, it's silly for me to kind of reinvent that wheel. We we even we invest our own we use ourselves as our own proof point. We dog food and rock for our own Ingress, right?

So our our public facing like dashboard that is run through through N Rock itself, right? So we're we're entrusting our own business to our own piece of software just like we would expect our customers to actually you mentioned earlier five million developers. Maybe more are using and grout today out here.

There may be some but not the five million new ones. How do they how do they onboard with engraq? How do they ramp up here?

One of the things that we're really most proud of with androc is spending the time to make the product incredibly easy to get started with developers really thrive on on getting something working and then iterating to to something more complex. Yep. We we see on a daily basis that you know, a significant portion of signups like activate and get something working within 60 seconds of signing up really critical piece for the adoption event rock and why we have such a strong position and why we've built such a strong product is really that focused on productivity and instant instant value.

So Alan look at this camera right here. Where did they go and within 60 seconds, they're up and running. com sign up and from there.

It's it's pretty simple to Simply download an executable or to import a library add a few lines of code or run a single command and get Ingress directly into your applications. No matter where they're running. Fantastic.

Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on board here today with us and rock and gr. Okay, calm go check it out.

We're live here in Amsterdam. We'll be back in a moment.