Tech Lounge
00:02:39 · Will Stewart
[00:02:39] S1: Generally speaking, Northflank, we speak in workloads rather than infrastructure to create this EC2 group and create this load balancer and create this Kubernetes cluster. We think about the developer experience. What does the developer want to do? They want to get a Postgres database. They want to get Mongo. They want to get Redis. They want a preview environment for their Node. Js app or their Golang application. And that's what Northflank is trying to do, a post commit platform for engineers to self-service apps, databases, jobs to cloud infrastructure. We happen to leverage Kubernetes as an operating system, but ultimately the end user doesn't really know Kubernetes is in the background. It could be any container orchestrator. So today, users can deploy on Northflank on our managed infrastructure. They don't have to worry about no cloud at all. Or they can connect their own AWS account, their own GCP account, their own Azure account, and then leverage Northflank to then power their cloud account. So they get the beauty of data residency, the security of their own cloud account, but then they have the automation of their DevOps, their infrastructure, really to empower engineers to do their best work or reinforce overburdened DevOps and platform engineering teams who have to do more with less. They're always on call, they're always responding to outages. But Northflank is this concept of unifying the post commit experience. So whether that's you push your code to GitHub, Northflank will then build it, deploy it, help you release it from preview, staging, production. Then when it reaches production, help you with all the data operations like logs, metrics, auto scaling, disaster recovery. When something goes wrong, the platform is there to help you. Do you also have your own cloud or is
00:04:15 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:04:15] S0: it just deploying to other clouds? [00:04:17] S1: So Northflank multi tenancy runs on cloud infrastructure, but the underlying hardware is actually Google Cloud or Azure. We're just basically taking larger clusters and then putting our secure runtime on top, powered by Cardi containers and Gvisor, Cilium service and Istio service mesh. We sort of can securely divide up those resources and then resell them to customers. [00:04:38] S0: We're actually speaking at Navigate. Civo is a European based private cloud. So do you also support I'm assuming you Absolutely. Also [00:04:49] S1: today or tomorrow we'll be announcing that we've recently hit general availability of our Civo integration. So with Northflank, you can start with Civo, you connect your Civo credentials, and then we can do the full cluster lifecycle management of your Civo cluster. Boots up in about ninety seconds, then Northflank is installed on top. And in under ten minutes, you have a production ready workload platform where you can deploy databases, highly available services, and you can just get back to doing what you do best, is building your application.
00:04:49 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:04:49] S1: today or tomorrow we'll be announcing that we've recently hit general availability of our Civo integration. So with Northflank, you can start with Civo, you connect your Civo credentials, and then we can do the full cluster lifecycle management of your Civo cluster. Boots up in about ninety seconds, then Northflank is installed on top. And in under ten minutes, you have a production ready workload platform where you can deploy databases, highly available services, and you can just get back to doing what you do best, is building your application. [00:05:16] S0: Know any company founder hates this kind of question, but even in the vendor hall here, there are some companies doing similar things, some of whom I actually know way better. So again, this sort of platform as a service, platform team replaced your DevOps engineers, etc. There's still a few companies doing this and you've given some details, but in comparison to those who also say we focus on the developer experience, etc. They all say that. So really, I actually can see some things on your more technical details that I think are more interesting. But where would you really say your points of differentiation?
00:05:59 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:05:59] S1: I think the proof's in the pudding. We've got hundreds of API endpoints. Every single feature we've added to the Northflank platform is available in a real time beautiful UI, an API, CLI, and GitOps. So if you're a platform engineer or you're a platform leader and you want to build something special, you want to build a platform for your team, you just leverage Northflank's APIs. Or you can have those engineers then self-service to a real time API. So we've sort of got like a platform API that some of our largest customers and enterprise customers are using today, and they looked at the market and saw that Northflank was the only team offering that level of abstraction, this higher level of abstraction of workloads, but also giving them the capability of some of these sort of platform I'd say if we look to the past, people like Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and Heroku, very successful platforms. Cloud Foundry, sort of defeated by Kubernetes, and then Heroku sort of sold too early to... [00:06:55] S0: To defeat themselves.
00:06:55 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:06:55] S0: To defeat themselves. [00:06:56] S1: Exactly. Then stopped innovating. So I'd say that rather than we've come at a different angle, some of the fine folks in the room are building, and some don't necessarily have to name some, but very effective at marketing, very effective at getting the word out. And then we say, Well, where's the product? Where can I actually use the product? And I think that's where Northflank, we've come at it from a different angle. We spent five years building a very sophisticated, very well thought product that's rich in-depth and breadth. Self-service gets started in minutes, and then we have teams deploying a thousand microservices on the platform, but we also have mothers deploying glucose monitors for their kids. So we've managed to solve the developer experience where you can self serve and deploy complex applications with zero dev experience, all the way to engineering teams of 50 platform engineers deploying very complex workloads. [00:07:46] S0: Yeah, that's an interesting one. Let's come back to that in a second. Just one final question on comparing to the competition. Often in places in products like this, the biggest competition is actually people just doing it themselves. We kind of know there is a business justification for not having your team doing it themselves. But often that comes later. Yep. So yeah, you know, why not just use Kubernetes yourself or Open Tofu or Pulumi or, you know, a whole bunch of other options, you know. Why not do it yourself?
00:07:46 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:07:46] S0: Yeah, that's an interesting one. Let's come back to that in a second. Just one final question on comparing to the competition. Often in places in products like this, the biggest competition is actually people just doing it themselves. We kind of know there is a business justification for not having your team doing it themselves. But often that comes later. Yep. So yeah, you know, why not just use Kubernetes yourself or Open Tofu or Pulumi or, you know, a whole bunch of other options, you know. Why not do it yourself? [00:08:18] S1: So I 100% agree. 99% of our competition is DIY. That's even what we tell the investors. It's the truth, There is no breakaway product yet, but that's also a good thing for us. That's an opportunity. People are doing DIY because that's credibly the only option for them. You can't buy a product that doesn't it has to do everything. If you buy a product and it doesn't do 15 of your 100 tasks you need it to do, that's not good enough. And that's the methodology when we think about product development at Northflank is to work with customers very closely to understand what do you actually need. Do we actually meet your objectives? If not, let's rapidly build those features.