Hydrolix specializes in Kubernetes-native, highly scalable data platform for processing logs, called “streaming data lake.” Hydrolix partners with major cloud providers and ecosystem partners like Akamai and Quesma to offer real-time observability and security solutions.

At KubeCon+CloudNativeCon hosted in Salt Lake City, Utah, Tony Falco, VP of Marketing at Hydrolix, joins me to talk about Hydrolix’ presence at the event to support two of its partners. He talks about how Akamai is leveraging the TrafficPeak, for real-time monitoring and actionable insights, enhancing customer experience.

“TrafficPeak is the fastest growing observability product in the market, and we’re here to help with demos and to support them (Akamai) in any way we can,” said Falco.

Falco highlighted the importance of Kubernetes in managing costs and scaling, noting that many companies rely on it. He also emphasized the value of multi-CDN use cases, particularly for media and gaming companies, and introduced Cascade for AWS, which integrates various AWS services for comprehensive observability at a low cost.

Guest: Tony Falco
Company: Hydrolix
Show: Let’s Talk

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Unedited Transcript (Note: the text is AI generated, it has not been edited or reviewed. It may contain errors, including incorrect names. It’s provided here under Creative Commons license (CC by 4.0) to be used by bloggers, journalists and analysts for creating their own content.)

Swapnil Bhartiya: This is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and we are here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah. Today we have with us once again, Tony Falco VP of marketing at Hydrolix. Tony, it’s great to have you back on the show in person. Nice to be here as well. Thank you. I mean, of course, we are here at the show, so we are going to talk a lot about Kubernetes, the whole KubeCon, the whole ecosystem. But before we go there, just for the sake of our audience, tell them, what is Hydrolix all about? What do you folks do?

Tony Falco: So Hydrolix is a highly scalable data platform for processing logs. We call it a streaming data lake because it combines a lot of the the architectural aspects of a data lake or lake house, with real time stream processing, and it is 100% focused on logs. And it originated from work that Marty and Hassan Ali, Marty Kagan and Hassan aleli, our founders, did at sodexis, where they were building CDN Observability, really the first real time CDN Observability product. And what they found, was that the cost of logs, the swim logs, was very quickly rising close to the cost of head count. And so when they sold us to Citrix Hassan, set out on a mission to solve that problem.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Talk a bit about your presence. And of course, you have been talking to folks, what kind of discussions you are having, what kind of patterns you’re seeing? What are the trends you’re seeing happening in this ecosystem?

Tony Falco: That’s great question. So we’re here supporting two of our partners, Akamai, with which has the Linode cloud, Akamai connected cloud, which is, of course, runs Kubernetes, and then Quesma, which is a database translation layer that allows you to use different front ends with different different back ends. You know, we’re here because, first and foremost, Hydrolix would not exist without Kubernetes. You know, Hydrolix is a Kubernetes native application in the purest sense. We basically turned all of the all of the elements of a of a database into micro services that each run on an independently scalable subsystem. On Kubernetes, we use decoupled storage with sort of the modern, modern data architecture that you see a lot. So we use object storage for our main storage, but then we have independently scaling ingest, ETL and query all running on Compute. On Kubernetes powered compute, and we wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the hyperscalers excess capacity and and their parallelism, the that they support without Kubernetes, without being able to scale up and scale down. And that also has a huge impact on cost. And if you want to what I’ve been seeing here that you see that the data dog side, the data data dog booth, it’s really got, it’s a really nice booth. What you’re seeing is the cost of running Kubernetes and monitoring that in real time is a theme that I’ve heard. So people want to be able to not just take advantage of Kubernetes, but understand it’s definitely matured when they’re when they’re managing the cost so closely. So, you know, I think that’s a theme. Basically, I see a real maturation. And I see a lot of companies here who wouldn’t be here without Kubernetes. We’re one of them.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, as you mentioned that you are here to support two of your partners. Talk a bit about the importance of partnership for Hydrolix.

Tony Falco: So we partner in a couple of ways. We partner with with Kubernetes enabled clouds, obviously. So the hyper scalers we currently have presence on, on optimize connected cloud, Google, Google, GCP and an AWS and Azure, so the places you’d expect, but we also have a lot of ecosystem partners. We have data partners that help get data in mux is a partnership we just announced. They have device telemetry data that feeds into our system. We also have a partner here that we’re supporting quesma, which does translations between front end dashboards and the data layer, and we’re using them for Kibana to Hydrolix translation. And of course, our most important partner here is important in many, many ways, is Akamai, because traffic peak, the product that they white label is fast. It’s really the fastest growing Observability product in the market, and and we’re here to help with demos and to support them in any way we can.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you talk a bit about traffic peak and also talk a bit about for CDNs like Akamai and other players, what is the important Observability? Because we do talk a lot about Observability, but in a totally different context.

Tony Falco: You know, one of the, one of the interesting misconceptions when we talk to companies, or, you know, even investors, about about the fact that we’re doing Observability, is they think this is a very red ocean, a very, a very cluttered space. And in fact, we found what is essentially a pocket of blue ocean. You know, the metaphor of red ocean and blue ocean. What we have is a kind of data, this high cardinality, high dimensionality data that CDNs, ad servers, you know, the log line data from ad tech. You know, XDR data, firewall data. It all creates these really difficult to deal with logs and CDNs and. Particular with and with Akamai, where we they’re also a very big seam provider. So we we ingest their seam data. What we’re doing is handling this, this, this data that was just being discarded. We have customers who weren’t using Observability for their CDNs because it just cost too much and they could not get the performance they needed. You know, a CDN. A CDN, when you have an issue that’s impact impacting your end users, and you need to be able to solve that, you know, say you’re having a live stream, a live sporting event, if it takes you 20 minutes to be able to query the data that’s coming from the CDN, you can’t do anything to change the outcome. But going back to Kubernetes, what we’ve built is a system that can scale up for large events, for seasonal traffic to keep the query latency very low and get rid of any kind of query, anytime query competition, or any time outs. And it’s query isolation. And you know, with for optimized customers, what we provide is the ability to query and alert on ingest, meaning that as soon as a problem is beginning to manifest, they’re able to get in touch with Akamai. Akamai has a view of it, and it’s really just changed the game for the customer experience. We have had some very notable live sporting events where the company that was the content provider, was given effusive praise for the way it went for the end user. They didn’t know anything about Observability. They didn’t know anything about CDNs. They just knew that the end users had a wonderful event for multiple, multiple weeks in the summer and and it was because we were able to take advantage of optimized, connected cloud their Kubernetes to scale up to handle all the issues they saw.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And since you talk about multi CDN, can you we talked about that? Can you discuss the multi CDN in the context of CDN.

Tony Falco : Many media companies, not not other companies, but typically media companies and gaming companies will use multiple CDNs to try to sort of hedge their bets, get better performance in regions where there might be, you know, but just to have options and, and actually, multi CDN is almost a simplification, because, like many companies also use device telemetry, like mux or their own device telemetry. So they’re getting a view of the origin site. They’re getting a view of three or more CDNs, how they’re performing, and they’re also getting a view of what’s happening on the clients and with with traffic peak, Alchemy lets these customers bring all that data together into a single view. So instead of having five different dashboards for five different CDNs and and your and your mux data and your origin stuff, you have one single view of it that you can take action on. So the power of multi CDN is that in real time. You can, you can do the ETL to process all of those logs into the same format, manifest it in a table and on a dashboard and with alerts and take action before customers see the issue.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When we look at this, this multi CDN use case, is it unique to just one, as you said, media, or it goes beyond that, and can be related to other use cases as well.

Tony Falco: So multi CDN itself is pretty limited to the global media companies, gaming companies. It’s a great use case for them, because they want to deliver great customer experience. But at its core, that great customer experience really spans different the pattern of being able to combine lots of different services into a single view that spans lots of different verticals. So e commerce companies that want to be able to put rum data in with CDN data in with the sales data and see what is the actual performance minute or minute, hour over hour, for us to be able to and what issues are impeding our revenue, especially during peak times. Again, you know, using Kubernetes to scale up to ingest all this data that’s being thrown off by all these services. So multi CDN is actually an example of a larger pattern. As companies become more more as they move their whole business online, they’re using all sorts of different services, and all of those services essentially have an impact on their availability and on the customer experience that they’re delivering. So they need a way to bring data like that all together, whether it’s E commerce, whether it’s ad tech. I think fraud detection is something where being able to bring together multiple sources of data, including multiple CDNs, but also credential data, really the key that multi CDN points to is that the day of single source Observability and seeing and looking at vendor by vendor, Observability doesn’t that doesn’t make sense, not just because it’s operationally a pain, but because you don’t get a true view of what’s happening in your for your customer experience.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Does multi CD play any role in edge also, because we have started talking a lot about edge computer, and when we talk about edge it, I mean, Edge has no definition. We are still trying to define edge.

Tony Falco: That’s a great question. You know, CDN is, in many ways, a simplification. You know, Akamai is really what we should say is, is edge data optimize origin and edge data. So, you know, like Akamai has got the security data. There’s web application firewalls, there’s, you know, DNS data, you know. So some of that to edge. But then they also have, you know, they have origin information, you know, they have, they have the impulse product, they have, you know, a ton of different data. That is really, it wouldn’t exist without the CDN in the first place. But it really, I mean, if you look at Akamai, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re a very successful security company with a fast growing compute component, and it was all made possible by that initial CDN. So when I say CDN, CDN, for the for the content provider, is definitely focused on delivery first, and smooth delivery, but that includes monitoring, say, the elemental encoding, or, you know, using media Taylor, by by by date, by elemental, to to keep track of how ad revenue is coming in. You know, with over the top television being able to, being able to, you know, track how frequently an ad runs in a stream, and therefore how long people stay on the stream? That’s a kind of Observability, and it relates, and it would not exist. That kind of insight would not exist without being able to without the CDN in the first place. What

Swapnil Bhartiya: is your takeaway from not only this conference, but where the whole Kubernetes ecosystem is heading in the context of Hydrolix,

Tony Falco: I think that it’s good. One thing that we’ve observed is it’s going to be more and more difficult to support on prem deployments, unless you want to make the investment to support the Kubernetes and the object storage ecosystem. And you know, I think that people that companies will try to do that, and I think they’re really great technologies here to help people continue to manage things on prem, but I think that the constant tension between moving to the cloud and moving to moving on prem, you know that you see, I mean, obviously, most companies have moved to the cloud at this point, but there’s still, you know, we were talking to an analyst from Gartner, who said that, you know, 20% of the they see, 25 to 20% of their the People they talk to her are still on prem without the ability to run Kubernetes, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the and that means also the spare capacity that you just have to have idle, and the object storage that can be delivered through a third party, like an appliance. You won’t be able to take advantage of a bunch of the architectures that we see around here. You know, a lot of the providers that are here are like us. They would not exist. Their Value Proposition would not be, would not be fulfilled without Kubernetes.

Swapnil Bhartiya : You, as you earlier mentioned, you know, partnership is, you know, important to you, you, you talked about, you know, you but can you talk about other players and how folks you know can use it, how they can reach out? Yes, yeah. So

Tony Falco : the traffic peak is the is a way to use Hydrolix on the Akamai connected cloud, and that’s for Observability and security solutions that aka my cells, plus third party data like multi CDN. But in addition, we have Hydrolix enterprise, which is basically a managed solution that can run on any cloud. And most recently, and something that we’re quite, quite excited about is that we’ve launched cascade for AWS. So AWS service services from origin to the screen, you know, origin. So Cloud front monitoring, WAF, web application firewall, route 53 we’ve got a few of the elemental services in which give you encoding and add insertion data. And finally, that partnership with mux and with data zoom and others like that means that we we can connect from your origin site, the logs that are being generated from CloudFront about your origin site, your firewall, all that data together for AWS customers. So if you’re a CloudFront customer, you’re going to find a yeah, just because of our design, we didn’t really talk about the design that much, but with a decoupled storage and our decoupled storage and our compression, you’re getting your lowest cost per gigabyte of hot data in the industry. And that’s not a commercial it’s a fact. So I think, you know, people are using CloudFront on Amazon. Should, you know, would really benefit from checking out cascade by Hydrolix is in the marketplace, and it’s, you know, within we’ve designed it along the very modern sort of approach. You’re ingesting data within minutes of signing up.

Swapnil Bhartiya : Tony, once again, thank you so much for joining me today. Of course, talk about your partners and the role that you folks are playing in this ecosystem. Thanks for great insights. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Tony Falco : It’s always delightful, and it’s great to meet you at this event. It’s a great event, and to be able to talk about this community and how it’s growing with You, it was a real pleasure. So thank you.
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