Bassam Tabbara, Upbound | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back many thanks to my co-host Mike bizaard. Who if you've been paying attention on the feed has been doing a some of the earlier interviews, but I'm back for the afternoon, and I'm really happy to introduce you to our next guest here of live in Amsterdam at cubecon.

His name is Bassam tomorrow. And Bassam is with upbound but some welcome. Welcome to text Charles Brown air show.

Thank you. Thank you for being here. I guess we should start with a little bit about yourself Balsam if it's okay.

Yeah, definitely share with our audience. So I'm Bassam. I'm the CEO and founder of upbound where the company and the crossbank project which I was one of the folks that started the project.

It's one of the cnci projects here that cloud control plane. And actually I started another project here. That's a graduated cncf project The Rook project sure feel like you know, this is you know, it's exciting to be here and see the growth of the cloud native community and all these amazing projects and companies and everything else around this.

I agree. It is exciting. I mean, so you know what before we jump into how exciting it is though?

If you don't mind a little bit about each of the Cross plain and projects for our audience. So Rook is the storage project for kubernetes. It's actually the first storage project that was done at the cncf.

That's the sixth project overall. And it's a graduated project. It's deployed all around the world and mad large deployments super exciting see the growth around rook and then Crosspoint is the project that I'm currently most involved in and that upbound is actually that my company is in a commercializing and cross-plane is a cloud control plan.

So the way to think about it is it's a control plan that you're able to connect to all your Cloud, you know resources and manage them all from a single point of control and it's based on the kubernetes. Control plane. So it's instantly familiar to folks that know how to use kubernetes and basically lets you use the kubernetes style management.

Not just for containers, but for the rest of cloud right very popular project these days that's in you know ties into what people are doing around platform Engineering Building platforms within their companies tends to be the most Central piece of what companies are building with the platform sure put a control plane in build a build a platform right a great idea. So you know, let us take advantage of you being here and talking just between you and I how did how did you sort of come up with the idea for this one? Yeah, crossbody is actually so, you know the goes back the idea goes back to maybe 2017.

it was so yeah, you have to go back in time and think about 2017 kubernetes wasn't yet? I think right 2016 is actually when I cross playing effectively was was but, you know being incubated if you will and at that time, you know darker was a big thing mesosphere know what all Container or Wars, right? It wasn't until kind of towards the end of the middle towards the end of 2017 when Amazon announced support for eks and literally seal the deal right that kubernetes emerged as a the, you know standard for container orchestration, right?

And You know, I looked at and it was actually also the first time. history cloud computing or it history where there was a single API that supported by multiple vendors including Amazon Microsoft Azure and Google. Yeah, right, you know that competing they compete in different, you know services and products, but they actually all agree that kubernetes was a common thing that they were in sports, right?

And so cross plane came about essentially realizing that you could actually use kubernetes to manage things Beyond containers. And you know, so I basically started the project with basically getting kubernetes to be used to manage the rest of cloud and we've been on that Journey since then it felt super early back then. but it's so amazing to see the you know, like if you Went to kubecon four years ago.

Everybody was talking about microservices and containers and you know, it was all about compute. And you know, how do you run Computing schedule computes containers on clusters? And now that discussions all around how you use kubernetes to manage everything right?

And that's literally what crossbones about absolutely I mean, I just give you a little yeah 2016-2017. I'm going to dockercon. I've been Seattle.

Yeah, I came back. I said we got to do a dedicated site just to this whole this whole community's exploding and I'm thinking what are we gonna name the site? I came up with all these names around Docker and I realized by picking darker.

I'm gonna wind up with trademark. Yeah issues. So I said, you know what, but it's really about because it was the Container Wars.

and I I saw we picked the name container journal and that was our you know, Cloud native site up until Today until yesterday actually, okay, you renamed it and we renamed it because the following year I went to Austin for dockercon, and it was all kubernetes. I came back from that doctor can't say. Oh my God.

Thank God. We didn't name it for Docker. He goes kubernetes is gonna rule the whole thing here.

Maybe we should name it. I said no we can't use Google now. He's in the day.

It's also trademark issue also trademark, so we kept it his container Journal But you know watching how this you can spell container with a K and I could have done that or a little late in there. I'm glad we didn't. Because it's not all about kubernetes anymore either with observability and and service Smash and everything happening.

com. Yeah, and I think that one I'm safe with it's kind of very much. It's it's amazing to see the expansion that has happened in terms of you know, policy observability cost control agreed, you know governance compliance.

Everything's now be build around the cloud native stack if you will, right and it's so much more than just containers and microservices and all that. I agree with you. So let's talk a little bit about upbound.

So it's it's a commercial company built around, you know, supporting the Cross Point project, but what so there's different business funnels. Are you offering it as a service a hosted service? Is there premium free medium kind of both short answers, but so yeah, our customers are mostly Large Enterprises that are effectively building what people would call an internal Cloud platform or internal development platform people use different names, right?

But almost all almost everyone these days is layering on top of cloud computing and they're using multiple vendors and they have an internal set of developers that need to support so they tend to organize into Central teams shared services teams search platform teams here the term platform engineering and those are primarily our customers. They're using cross-plane and they're using upbound products around it to build these platforms that both that help them manage all the infrastructure their on top of Cloud and also offer our self-service experience to developers. So what about offers is we sell a effectively an Enterprise version of cross plain that comes with support and sla's and we partner with these teams to build with them and partner with them in terms of what they're you know, all the platforms that they're offering and we have of our app on product which is a you know, a managed implementation of cross plain and okay and that actually launched two weeks ago.

io and get started really quickly really a turkey solution around Crossing. It's it's, you know, probably the easiest way to get started with crossbody. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Who are like, I mean who? The demographic if you will of the users of mostly people that are half titles like SRA and you know, or even Cloud Architects it infrastructure.

Yeah devops. Basically people that are responsible for managing Cloud infrastructure and helping teams build applications on top of them and they tend to be Central teams these days. So that's the that's our primary user, you know, and again, That's another week.

We were talking about kind of how this community has evolved. You know, if you go back. To San Diego pre-covid coupon right?

I think the community well, maybe it was starting to change Seattle before that Barcelona. The community was developers very developer-centric developing a multi-threaded application. I'm going to use containers.

I'm gonna use kubernetes to do. So what I've seen here more than I mean really it's it's a you can put your thumb on it. You could kind of smell it before but now you see it.

Yeah is bsres the platform Engineers the the Ops people if you will, who are Utilizing these cloud-native Technologies to not just develop and deploy Cloud applications, but to really run and manage their infrastructures. That's right. Yeah, and I think that's a big change I'd say even in the early days there were a big presence of operation.

Yeah platform at that time. I always felt it was developer Centric and another thing I'm saying Islam and I'm interested in your view is it's almost like we're pulling these developers, right? We spent so many years talking about shift left.

Yeah, but now we're pulling developers, right? into the The the Ops if you will into the you know, the managing, right the terminology is interesting here. I mean if you say developers a software engineer, right?

Okay. Yeah, and there are software Engineers that specialize in writing app code and their software Engineers that specialize in writing platforms and infrastructure, right? They're all developers at the end of the day.

Everyone's a developer if you're writing code and so but I I definitely see the, you know, people think of developers typically or use the word developer to mean people are running application code and and then you know, there's a bit of confusion around if you're a developer and Ops, what do you call that? Right? So there's a bit of a terminology thing going on here.

I agree with you. Anything else we mentioned there were two you mentioned both. Yes.

Yeah. I mean I our news as of two weeks as we launched the up-end products. I'd love for people to go.

Try it out this week. We're talking about our partnership with VMware VMware just integrated our Universal Crossing offering into the tanzu platform. Oh excited about partnership there sure definitely a lot of exciting things happening in our space and then again amazing to see all the growth around the cloud native because absolutely people want to go get more information about Uptown.

I found that I am dadaio remember that and they can probably get to cross playing from there. Very good also some best of luck with up down and it sounds exciting. Keep up.

I mean, you know two different open source cncf projects not just open source projects. That's an amazing amazing accomplishment. We're gonna take a break as the sun is shining through here to us on textrung TV.

We're live in Amsterdam. We'll be right back.