Matt Butcher, Fermyon | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

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My next guest is a friend of ours. It's it's Matt, butcher Matt is the CEO founder of a company called Fairmont for me on yeah. Yeah for me.

It's great answer right for me on yeah, Mitch always gets me to sing the take me on aha song for oh, yeah. I have to sing at all right looking that camera. I'm only do that what you know, it's the third day of the conference.

I can't sing anymore. I guess you've been doing a lot of things. Yeah.

Yeah. So hey Matt, seriously, though. Let's start with a little bit about you read a lot of people out there.

We we interview Founders all day here. There's a lot of people out there say man, you know, my dream is to find a company one day. Talk to them about your journey.

Yeah, the big thing for me the way I the way I really started to get into the onto the path that eventually led to being able to start up a company who's getting involved in open source. I'm very early in my career. I dabbled around in a few projects, but gradually started to understand that you find projects that are interesting.

You contribute to them you participate you start you find yourself not just writing code but becoming part of a community, I mean kubecon today, excellent example of a community that when we went to the first coupon there were under a hundred people there, right? You can pretty much meet everybody at the conference and you you kind of form those relationships and you build up a network of people and when you become part of it that thing that takes off like this not only do you have the ideas and the background that go with understanding the ecosystem, but you already have those relationships with people who can help you out along the way for us, you know, we started a company called Deus Deus ended up getting acquired by Microsoft. Sure did there you know, we formed this great team of people who are just Innovation minded people, you know creative engineers and when we had that kind of idea that was like this is the thing.

This is the next big thing. This is what we want to build. We could just go together and say all right, we know how to do this.

We're gonna go make a shot at it and and it has been fantastic. So we started fermy on right at the end of 2021. We all kind of came out of the the real Funk of covid right and said, right this is the time.

Let's do it. We've got an idea and you know here we are here and a half later, you know having having a great time sort of pioneering this next wave of cloud computing and we're gonna get into that here, but you know, what day is I'm just trying to think my friend from day is from Bold or went to Microsoft anyone to digital ocean. He just love there and he went now I Gabe was that day Gabe was the CEO of okay.

Yes and was Chief Products. Yeah. Yeah, so he just left digital ocean.

And did he go to Google? He's a vice president to Google now. Yeah.

Yeah. Good people smart guy. Oh, yeah.

I remember meeting him. It was thing. com Interview because you know my roots were in Boulder.

Yeah, and I was like, wow, he's smart smart guys kids gonna do something. I'll tell you a funny story about Gabe. In fact, you know, when I worked for Gabe at Deus he comes and we were Gabe and I and a small team had been talking about this new emerging technology called kubernetes.

Right right at the very beginning of the kubernetes ecosystem. Add and Gabe Gabe says, you know, I think we should take the project. We're working on the platform as a service that we're building and we should Port it over to kubernetes and make it the first kubernetes pass and it's Dave.

That's an excellent idea. I am all in on this he says so we're having an all all hands meeting next week. I'd really like you to explain kubernetes to everybody and I said, So to all the engineers and he said no took the whole company including you know, finance and marketing and oh, yeah, that would be an easy.

Okay? Yeah, but so that was okay. Yeah, and then he says and I gave you the slot after lunch and I'm going Gabe everybody sleepy.

Yeah, so it's a scintillating conversation. Yeah. Yeah, so I went home found some of my daughter's stuffed animals and took a couple pictures of them and and built a little story around these animals that I called The Illustrated children's guide to kubernetes really and and then we we pitched you know, I I put it together the world's worst PowerPoint presentation right sat in front of the company explained kubernetes using these stuffed animals and Karen chew who is in the marketing department say, oh we should turn this into a book and so she took it turned it into a book and now, you know years later right here the the characters to see yeah, they're now like that.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

It here, right? That's right. I love that good stuff and all because Gabe made me explain kubernetes after lunch to the whole company.

Absolutely. Shout out to game. Good luck in the new gig.

Um, so Matt, let's let's talk about very much. Yeah very much for me on yeah. There you go.

I sang, you know, the friend of mine has a company called firemind. Oh, yeah, Jody Brazil. Oh very rich Mogul is VP of cloud over there, but that's right.

Keep getting it see them next week at RSA anyway for me on. Can't sit safe for me on without thinking about webassembly. That's good.

That's right. So I'm gonna play Gabe you're mad again. It's right after lunch.

Hahaha. The timing is perfect. But where my stuffed animals anybody that's stuffed animal I could get you more.

We'll go get him. Yeah, so Explain web assembly to our audience, you know, the interesting thing about webassembly as the name implies. It was a browser technology that was designed.

So that developers could bring their own programming languages and use them with JavaScript in the browser. But there are three characters of webassembly that make it really interesting one is has a very very good security model, but what we would call an isolation model to prevent that application running inside the webassembly runtime from doing anything dastardly with your system, right? The second characteristic is it's very high performance language.

It's designed to start fast and execute fast, you know, if you remember back in the early Java days, one of the big critiques of java was the speed and the developers who built web assembly said, okay. Well if we're building this kind of Technology It's gotta be fast. And then the third one is it needs to be cross-platform and cross architecture run on Windows run on without having to recompile for arm or recompile for Intel.

So, you know, that's where it came from for us. Oh, here's here's my team of Engineers and we're going okay. We want to build a cloud service that is far more economical far more performant and easy for developers to use and we want to have this thing be the third kind of cloud computer.

We've got virtual machines. We've got containers and we knew we needed this kind of high performance Bucket over here where we could execute the kind of serverless workloads that we've all been trying to build the right model for and so we start looking around the ecosystem and the surprise to us is hey this little browser technology. Actually we could pick it up and put it over here on the cloud and check off every one of those checkboxes.

So for me on began building that particular platform started working with other people in the ecosystem webassemblies that w3c standard. So that means the same standards body that's doing HTML and CSS. They're the ones who are doing webassembly.

So you've got this great sort of incubated incubation engine for pushing forward to standard and then we can just really focus on that serverless application of this. Technology, so it's been you know year and a half now and webassembly is kind of caught on quite a bit here at kubecon where we are are today, you know, the very first day of kubecon on Tuesday. They had the wasm day event with where hundreds of webassembly Engineers got together here discussed the state of the standard.

I heard it was standing room only. Oh, it was fantastic. It was fantastic.

And that's that really I think colors when we did our fermione on Workshop earlier this week. We thought we'd have about 50 people show up here. We had about 340 people show up.

It's just been and that's the way the web assembly ecosystem is going now and that I think really indicates that this idea of having three kind of cloud run times a big heavyweight, you know, we're course like virtual machines a middleweight one where you can bring existing services like containers and then it's lightweight one for serverless. It's powered by webassembly. That's a model that's really resonating with people.

So, I think it's resonating now. But I really in my mind look the whole awesome webassembly thing as we continue to move to the edge, uh-huh to embedded. Yep, and these kinds of things that light that lightweight model.

Becomes a lot more. The advantages of it become a lot more powerful. Yeah.

Yeah, you know because when you're in the cloud, yeah, you know what I don't care all good. It's like, you know, your dad wanted to ride the big old Cadillac right? He didn't care.

That was a gas guzzler. Yeah, right. and you know But when you don't have that option webassemblies the best game in town for yeah.

Yeah, and I think that's very much. I mean Edge has really kind of developed in us as software developers as platform Engineers this recognition that Simply dividing the world into the data center and and the local network is not going to cut it. Right we carry our mobile devices with us everywhere.

We walk from one network to another we drive from one network to another with great regularity and to figure out how to be good stewards of the compute resources around us and make the most of them. You need a technology that can kind of move along with you and webassembly really I think is that technology more than anything I've seen in my tomorrow something year long career right here. We've all been there.

Yeah. and and so that I think it's gonna continue but here and you don't have to answer this if you don't want but but the cameras rolling anyway, right? What point does webassembly?

need Its Own Foundation Well, so there's there is a foundation around webassembly that's focused very much on the specification, right? It says, you know somebody when you think about the way that kubernetes ecosystem goes they're really too foundations that come into play there's cncf which you know puts on these fantastic events really good for you. Yeah, 50 whatever it is Project.

Yeah, which gubernetes is what a big one but just one. Yeah. Yeah, and then there's also the oci the sort of lesser known the open container initiative and they really focus on saying okay.

We need to get the container part to work. Well, we need to be able to move the containers, you know, when we store them and Registries when we pull them down. We need to find common formats.

It's an unglamorous life, but it has to be done. I think that for in the webassembly ego system. The bike code Alliance is sort of like the OCR but then as we just talked about right wallism day is run by the CNC.

Yeah, and so the way started looking at this is foundations can play different roles in any ecosystem cncf has done an extraordinary job of saying we will be sort of like the the ecosystem and Community destination where you know, people can Mill around get to know each other are these amazing events, right? You know, there's a commercial space for companies. There's a social space for individuals to get together, you know in that kind of metaphorical science, right we go out to dinner together we spend time together then we walk the show floor the next day and stop by and get our squishy toys and all the and I think cncf really could play that role in the webassembly ecosystem as well.

It's not especially from my perspective. There's still operating in the same realm, but I'm happy to see the bike code Alliance as this place where we can get together. We can work on the specifications.

We can write reference implementations and they tend to be very much focused on the engineering effort. It's sort of the foundation for the community and ecosystem that's built upon it. Left you so here's what I'd like to ask you to do though.

You know, I'm not gonna sing again. Am I no, no, I Mitchell makes you sing. I'm not gonna do that wind up getting the whole frat suspended.

Yeah. No, but I'd like you to look into that camera. And for people who are saying man, I want to get in on this webassembly thing.

I want to understand wants them, but I'd like to understand. Firm me on right right? Hahaha.

I got it right by the end you did. You didn't even have to sing it like I know. Well, I can't sing.

That's why I feel bad making you think I'm terrible. But like what's the on-ramp given that's right from the past. I mean ad for me on what we are building is a serverless platform where you can very quickly and easily write serverless applications, right and you should be able to go.

This is our core user story. You should be able to go from blinking cursor to a deployed application in two minutes or less. com and click on the the spin quick start guide and you can be up and running and two minutes or less.

How do you spell for me on f e r m y o n? There you got it for me on hey Matt a pleasure, man. Always always a pleasure.

You know what you heard it here today, the the origin of the kubernetes stuffed animal the carnative Computing Foundation stuffed animals is met but you're right here. He doesn't get credit for it. Now we know but also go check out for me on it's great.

We've got a lot more going on here at Cloud native conqcon. Stay tuned. We're gonna be back in a minute.