Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Building a Successful Business in Cloud Native - Liz Rice, Isovalent; Guillermo Rauch, Vercel; Kelsey Hightower, Google; Sheng Liang, Acorn Labs; Tom Manville, Kasten by Veeam The cloud native community brings together an ecosystem of open source projects, end user companies, and vendors. Like a natural ecosystem, there’s a delicate balance between the species, and some will thrive while others struggle. In this panel we’ll discuss how start-ups and smaller vendors can best take advantage of opportunities to succeed within the cloud native ecosystem. How can contributing to open source projects help a business? How can vendors make their products appeal to a community centred around open source? How does this business environment differ from traditional markets, and how can you use these differences to best effect? Our panel includes practitioners and entrepreneurs who will share the lessons they have learned from their own companies and from their broad perspective across the cloud native ecosystem. We’ll help you understand what works and what doesn’t when you’re building a cloud native business.
get right ahead we're starting a little bit early a minute early and we have time for introductions I'm going to introduce myself I'm Guillermo Rauch the CEO and founder of versel the company behind next.js I think it's interesting that I'm here today because we provide a serverless deployment platform for front-end applications uh and I think it's funny that you know that behind serverless there's always servers so it's proper that I'm here being surrounded by the greatest Minds in the kubernetes world the folks that are creating the foundational layers of the cloud the basic infrastructure and
above which we create the most exciting and the most developer friendly Platforms in the world so I want to go right ahead and help these folks introduce themselves please go ahead my name is Tom Anvil can you hear me my name is Tom I lead the engineering team for Caston by veeam where we do data protection and application Mobility for kubernetes applications I'm really excited to share my experience here today so um as a startup we found in 2017 and we were relatively early in the kubernetes
life cycle and when we started in fact I would say that stateful applications were you know very foreign to kubernetes right it was mostly a stateless sorry State full were foreign and it was mostly a stateful stateless platform um so I'm excited to share my experience coming from a very small startup in the space and eventually growing to uh growing going through the growth motions and becoming successfully acquired by by veeam our new parent company and I hope that's helpful for all of you hi I'm Kelsey Hightower I'm currently learning kubernetes so please be kind
and I advise a lot of the companies that are going from uh Community to customer and so hopefully we can share a little of that Insight today thank you Kelsey this is a I'm Shin Liang I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of acorn Labs we have a we have exhibit Booth out there we're a new company and earlier I started a company called Rancher labs and they have a business
Booth here as well so check us out hi I'm Liz rice I am chief open source officer at a company called I surveillance which was the original creator of the psyllium project and we donated psyllium to the cncf and we get a lot of questions about well how does the business model work why did you contribute your project how can we also be successful in the cloud native ecosystem and I hope that I'll be able to share a little bit of
that with you today perfect and we have that experience ourselves as well because we built next.js which is open source I like to call it the kubernetes of the front in the world it builds on top of react and we built a platform on top that's Cloud native and it's a business on top of the open source project so Kelsey has been an advisor to our company and this is a topic that I'm really passionate about so if folks want to find me after the session and ask me you know what are
what are some of the best practices of building this kind of business I can help elaborate further so without further Ado I think when I first got started using kubernetes many years ago I think part of what drove this excitement was there's an open standard there's a there's something that folks are converging around everything is open source I can run a database on top of it I can run my workers on top of it and run my servers on top of it but over
time folks have also started to realize that managing all of that responsibility is tricky you have to run a business right so where does open source start and end how do we help companies get more efficient with their kubernetes use and what are some of your thoughts I think um one of the things that you need to do if you're building a business on open source is figure out what the value you add as a business you know the value that you're creating you've given away the software that the software is not