Mitch Ashley: Hey there, everybody. Welcome back to Chicago to KubeCon 2023. We are on day two of our live-streaming on Techstrong TV across all of our sites, DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Techstrong.TV, and Cloud Native Now. So, we’ve got more great interviews. Alan’s just finished a couple and I’m teed up now with Amit Gorvin. Nice to meet you.
Amit Eyal: Very nice to meet you.
Mitch Ashley: And you are with, say the name.
Amit Eyal: Kubiya AI.
Mitch Ashley: Kubiya AI, okay. That’s a lot of syllables there, but okay. I’m just kidding you.
Amit Eyal: We do this on purpose to confuse.
Mitch Ashley: You know what? Once you hear it, it’s unique, right? You remember those [inaudible 00:00:45].
Amit Eyal: Hundred percent.
Mitch Ashley: Exactly. Okay, so I know you’ve talked with this before and you’ve talked about IDPs. It’s a really fast-growing area, right? Everybody’s focused on-
Amit Eyal: Absolutely.
Mitch Ashley: How do we help developers, platform engineers, the people all working together to make lives easier, self-service, that kind of thing, portals and all of that. I know you had some announcements recently. Talk about that, but maybe set it up of what you all do and why that’s a little different.
Amit Eyal: Sure. I think maybe to take one step back, one of the things that I think a lot of companies in the industry, including ourselves are doing is, how do you create a better exchange between the developers and the DevOps, the operators on one side, developers on another hand where you have the golden path towards productivity. IDPs, internal developer platforms, have been known backstage being the primary leader in this space to unlock lab productivity.
One of the things that we, at Kubiya, have discovered, and this is what we’ve tried to essentially address, is the self-service is only as good as the interaction between the users and the tools. And where often it does break down is on the fact that it’s a one directional exchange between the user and the tool. If you fail on authentication, fail on permission, don’t know the variables you need to pass or anything just doesn’t work as expected, you have a question, you have to go back and do a Jira ticket queue in order to go and to essentially get assistance from a human being.
So, what has come to fruition in the last year, obviously ChatGPT doing the market education for this, is conversational AI, having a two directional exchange between machines and humans. We’ve married these two worlds together. We’ve created that exchange between your users, developers, and operators with the tools in a way where you can have a full-on conversation with it.
You can go and spin up a Kubernetes deployment, it will ask you how many you replicated. You can scale it up, scale it down. You can have for your Jira ticket queue, for example, and ask it questions about who owns what, where they’re assigned creation, notating, anything that you would be able to do as a human, only in this case, you’re just having a conversation. Because imagine having on the other side, someone like Fred, John, Bob on the on-call channel having a conversation with you. We’re replacing that with the virtual assistant.
Mitch Ashley: Interesting. So, replacing the virtual assistant model. It sounds like also you were maybe describing, if I got this right, that the developer technical staff can interface through ChatGPT to say… I mean the nice thing about ChatGPT is you can talk to it like a programming language just in conversational logic, right? I want you to create this for me with blah, blah, blah. Is that part of what you’re saying? You can give it instructions or requests?
Amit Eyal: One minor information, we’re not using ChatGPT. It’s a ChatGPT-like experience.
Mitch Ashley: I see.
Amit Eyal: It’s probably the best way to anchor people to-
Mitch Ashley: I jumped that.
Amit Eyal: Which is fine. We’re using about eight different language models, both large and small. We’re actually using conversational AI piece with GPT-4 for Azure, just a FYI, but that’s separate. The experience is ChatGPT-like. Only here, it’s your tools, your programs, your scripts, essentially a personalized IDP, if you may, for each and every persona in organization, each and every individual in the organization.
Mitch Ashley: Okay. So, are you using generative AI large language models underneath, or that’s just the experience that you’re delivering with whatever technology?
Amit Eyal: Certainly. So, large language models are giving that natural exchange, essentially the benefits of large language models and the generative piece we’re using. But we’re also harnessing and scaffolding it with rule-based systems, with sound engineering practices. So, that’s how you get the benefit of an expected outcome on one hand. Our users would expect an expected outcome. Essentially, it has to be deterministic what they’d get on the other end.
Mitch Ashley: I’m glad you said that because I was thinking down the ChatGPT line. It’s nice, but you don’t get the same response, same outcome. It’s not necessarily guaranteed to be consistent, to be accurate. So, it makes sense on the backend scaffolding part.
Amit Eyal: And there’s permissioning and rule-based systems in place to harness the LLM to function the way you would expect it to.
Mitch Ashley: Very nice. So, you talked about the developer experience, and I totally get the cognitive dissonance between I’m working in my IDE and doing my developer thing, and then I got to go to this ticketing system or go to some weird operating portal that wasn’t built for developers, but I still got to use it in a huge sense.
Amit Eyal: Maybe it is, but it’s only as good as how it’s been upkept, maintained or what you’ve actually input into there. So, you still have to go in to program it to act the way you expect it to.
Mitch Ashley: And it’s part of the flow too, right?
Amit Eyal: Yeah.
Mitch Ashley: I might not know answers to all 10 questions at the start of the interaction, but I need to get it started, and then finish it at some point in the process. But it’s about in the flow of the developer work, not I’m a form, fill me out. Right?
Amit Eyal: A hundred percent.
Mitch Ashley: Great. So, the announcement then, summarize again for us because I stepped on it with the GPT stuff.
Amit Eyal: Sure, yeah. No, it’s fine. So, we came out last year actually with our initial platform, which was more resembling next generation of workflow automation because it was more so to get people connected to the world of conversational AI into the world of IDPs. Where we took it from there, and especially with the evolution of large language models, is an agent-based approach where we’re using different models and different agents trained on different models in order to map out effectively different functions within a transaction, almost like the human brain and the lobes interacting with each other.
So, when you go and interact with the system, depending on how you approach it, it could be, show me how I do something. Say, set up a VPN. That may be in your docs. So, we’re using RAG techniques obviously to go into a train on your knowledge base. But if you’re going to go and run a query against a data source or a database, or maybe show me all my Jira tickets for current sprint for certain… That’s a different language model that’s interacting with you.
And then if you’re going to go and create a Terraform, create a Kubernetes deployment, destroy Terraform, that’s an action base that’s also needing to go into verify permissions. We’re using open policy agent. We’re also using all the techniques to or data masking, and then we obviously have the orchestration there, a state machine that will go in to orchestrate all of those with the business logic of the organization. So, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.
Mitch Ashley: There is. Well, a lot of different kinds of users’ requests.
Amit Eyal: To the user, it’s seamless. You have a brain emoji thinking and then reading back to you what it’s doing. So, it’s actually very fun interaction, human-like interaction, but then behind the scenes, there’s a lot that’s going on.
Mitch Ashley: Very cool. Do you integrate at all with IDEs and go that far with it or is it a separate portal?
Amit Eyal: Users can integrate with their IDEs. They can go and plug in. We have a SDK and it’s all open API based. So, essentially, you can connect to any tool.
Mitch Ashley: I think it’s really nice and important because for one, it’s right there handy. And also, if you’re delivering any information that you can deliver in the way the code looks like or structured or auto-fill, you can mimic the behaviors of what you do in an IDE that… Very natural. So, I don’t have to go look up an API or what that call is; it’s right there. Or I don’t have to go look up what that thing’s called on my request; it’s right there.
Amit Eyal: Agreed. So, I think maybe the one call-out I would love to make is people are thinking about the co-pilot approach or ChatGPT approach as a code completion tool. What we’re doing is, we’re doing an operations’ completion tool. Essentially, all of the next step, what would you do, how would you deploy the code, run your CI/CDs and maintain it for day two operations, so that’s where you can think about us filling that gap.
Mitch Ashley: Okay, interesting. So, congratulations on the announcement.
Amit Eyal: Thank you.
Mitch Ashley: That’s fantastic. And every time you come, you’ve got new, in progress and things happening. I’m curious, maybe you’ve talked to Alan about this or Mike, your backstory, you’re CEO, founder of the company. How did you get going down this path? Was that, I was doing this at a big company and this is like a huge need, I’m going to go forward or?
Amit Eyal: It’s a great question. So, the first time we came on it was myself and my co-founder, who he himself is an operator who built a self-service platform for his platform team in his previous company at Bluevine, and I came from AWS where I was managing partnerships for all the DevOps and DevSecOps-
Mitch Ashley: Nice couple.
Amit Eyal: Tier one players. So, I saw where they were possibly struggling with some of this self-service, and where I was in the middle of trying to assist them. And that’s where the thesis on the business side, which is this is a much larger problem and how we’ve actually solved this ourselves came together.
Mitch Ashley: Interesting. Talk a little bit about your experience in the partnership side of it. Has that come to fruition as an important part of the business? I would imagine when you’re integrating with lots of things, just to look up the API, you can do it. You want to build relationships, partnerships with other companies.
Amit Eyal: So, we have a very strong ecosystem of partners really looking to have the conversation. I experienced essentially that assistant experience on top of their platform. And right now, we’re letting into queue a few of the strategic ones that we feel that we can both have a strong alignment with, but also maintain. As we grow our team, we’re going to have a much larger ecosystem. We’re already at probably 10, 15 very strong players in the industry who want to have a partnership in place. So, I feel it’s only going to grow from that point.
Mitch Ashley: Good, good. Amit, you already know this. I learned that lesson on one of the products I worked on where you didn’t design it with you were going to have a partner ecosystem in mind. You get to a point like, okay, we can’t do what we want to do. We got to go back and add that in. So, having that perspective upfront, if that’s a place you’re going to want to go at some point in the life cycle, it’s-
Amit Eyal: That’s exactly it. Our ecosystem is built to be two-way conversation with all tools. So, if our customers are asking for it, there’s no reason why the vendor on the other side wouldn’t have a stronger alignment so we can have a better user experience for both sides.
Mitch Ashley: I’m curious, do you sell to the engineering development community? Do you sell more to the platform engineering, operational DevOps tool folks? Where do you tend to focus?
Amit Eyal: I would say usually that decision is made jointly. The platform teams typically have to have a handshake with the engineering managers. So, whether it’s an engineering manager taking us to the platform team, platform team taking us to the engineering manager, typically, we see both sides involved at least in validating this. But the easiest way to get started is really with the platform teams because they’re the power users typically of the system. They’re the ones creating and scaffolding the configurations of these systems, so it’s easiest for them to get started, test it internally on themselves. And very easily, we usually see that they roll it out to the rest of the engineering team.
Mitch Ashley: They already have a good idea of what kind of requests come their way.
Amit Eyal: Precisely.
Mitch Ashley: And it would make that easier for people.
Amit Eyal: Otherwise, the other way around would be, let me go and bring in a platform team. So, it’s a more direct approach [inaudible 00:13:09].
Mitch Ashley: That makes sense and it’s nice. I could totally see. It’s starting, “Well, hey, something might make it easier to take a load off-
Amit Eyal: Precisely.
Mitch Ashley: The platform engineering team” or them saying, “Hey-
Amit Eyal: We’re here to augment them.
Mitch Ashley: … that’s an easier way to work with this.” Right?
Amit Eyal: We’re here to augment them. Not everybody has a luxury of hiring three to five more headcounts for next year, but if you could do so with one or two headcounts and then Kubiya, now you can scale.
Mitch Ashley: Great. If you look forward a little bit, maybe this next six months or maybe 12 months, six months or so, what things are happening in the industry, maybe where you’re heading, what are you thinking about next?
Amit Eyal: The most recent announcements by OpenAI have been very interesting, because from our perspective, it’s giving us even more tools in order to get to our end goal, which is, in my opinion, a self-driving operator. A self-driving operator that will be able to take end-to-end tasks away from human beings and really free them up to do the highest and best use of their time. It’s still going to require human-in-the-loop interaction and we don’t expect it to be overnight. But I think a lot of the things that was announced recently is already in line with what we’ve been doing, but it’s only making it easier and again unlock more and more use cases.
Mitch Ashley: Seems like OpenAI have done a pretty decent job of, don’t throw it all out there, incrementally add capability when you’re ready to handle it.
Amit Eyal: Yes. Because we’ve been in this space a couple of years, we’ve been thinking about, we’ve already been architecting our platform to be conversational native. That’s allowing us to move very fast in this space.
Mitch Ashley: Great. Well, tell folks where can they go check it out?
Amit Eyal: Absolutely.
Mitch Ashley: Can they get a demo online or what can we do to help?
Amit Eyal: That’s a beautiful part. We open our platform up for self-service. So, you could actually sign up at Kubiya.ai, www.kubiya.ai. Sign up for a free trial. We also have a sandbox where you could, without needing to put in organizations credentials, anything. It’s a gated experience. Obviously, it’s a bit more limited, but you could go and have that nice exchange with Kubi, our DevOps assistant, and really enjoy the experience before committing to going into a trial.
Mitch Ashley: Appreciate the sandbox. You don’t want to quite turn it loose on your infrastructure quite yet. Let’s kick the tires and then get there.
Amit Eyal: Mostly read only. We have a few write actions in there, but typically, we want to make sure it’s rated PG for what people can do.
Mitch Ashley: Exactly. Exactly. Great. And it’s spelled K-U-B-I-Y-A.ai.
Amit Eyal: Y-A.ai.
Mitch Ashley: Great.
Amit Eyal: Thank you very much.
Mitch Ashley: It was on the… I’m sure on your title but-
Amit Eyal: Yes, it would be there.
Mitch Ashley: Amit, pleasure talking with you and congrats on the new progress, new release and capabilities, where you’re headed next. Great market to be in.
Amit Eyal: I appreciate it and I appreciate your time here today.
Mitch Ashley: Of course. Great to have you on. For our folks, for the people in the audience, Amit’s representative of some of the great things that are happening not just at KubeCon but in our industry, and progress that’s happening overall. So, stay tuned. We’ve got more great interviews coming back up. Don’t go away. We’ll be right here in a few minutes. So, we’ll be back.
