With Google this week announcing a range of hybrid and multicloud innovations, along with seven new partners in open-source technology, the importance of a hybrid approach to computing infrastructure is clear.  And while it seems the push is toward simplicity, multicloud integration remains a complex obstacle for enterprise computing.

Complexity must be embraced through all of this integration, however, according to Karthik Rau (pictured, right), founder and chief executive officer of SignalFx Inc., and Leonid Igolnik (pictured, left), executive vice president of engineering at SignalFx. Both Rau and Igolnik are intimately involved with this new ecosystem through their roles at SignalFx in providing real-time cloud monitoring for infrastructure, microservices and applications. SignalFX allows businesses to monitor Google Cloud functions in real time.

Igolnik and Rau spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. They discussed multicloud, microservices and integration (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Multicloud is obviously a tailwind to you, but multicloud to date really hasn’t been a strategy. It’s an outcome of multi-vendor. So is multicloud increasingly becoming a strategy for your customers? And what specific role are you playing there to facilitate that?

Rau: Absolutely. I think, particularly most of the larger enterprise accounts, tend to have a multi-vendor strategy for almost every category … including cloud, which typically is one of their largest spends. And … typically what we see is, people looking at certain classes or workloads running on a particular cloud — so maybe transactional systems running on [Amazon Web Services], a lot of their more traditional enterprise workloads that were running on Windows servers, potentially running on Azure.

I think larger companies tend to look at it in terms of what’s the best platform for the use case that they have in mind. But in general, you know, they are looking at multiple cloud vendors.

Furrier: I want to talk to you about how you relate to some of Google’s announcements. You’re seeing open source being much more of a production IT capability. Integration seems to be the secret sauce with cloud to play in this ecosystem. Could you elaborate on that dynamic? Because it changes the old formula for ecosystem.

Rau: In the old days, you had proprietary systems. So the only way you could actually build an integration is, you had to get your product managers in a conference room with the vendor and get visibility in their roadmap — access to everything. That’s why … it just took a lot longer to get things done. I think what you’re seeing with Google is they’ve taken a very standards-based approach to everything. So whatever technologies that they’re releasing, they’re trying to build it as a standard. You can run it on any cloud.

Instrumentation is a core part of their philosophy of any technologies that they’re releasing. What that does is it makes it easy for the ecosystem [to] just pick it up. In the old days, monitoring was all about proprietary instrumentation and collection. Today, it’s all about analysis. So the fact that all of this is openly available in open source or standard space mechanisms, it’s great for us. It’s great for the customer. It’s is great for the ecosystem.

Igolnik: I think that the other dynamic of embracing open sources is it allows us as a vendor to focus not on the meetings with product managers and getting the insight into the roadmap, but on getting the standards-based integrations deeply configured with some of the … content we’ll provide out of the box. And that’s where the differentiation and the value for the customer is — not in getting together on the roadmap and figuring out what to build next.

Furrier: One theme here is, complexity is increasing. The business model that seems to work well is taking complexity and making it simple — whether it’s abstraction, layers, or other techniques. How does a customer who’s got all these new suppliers, new dynamics, new shift in the marketplace, new business models, how does a customer deploy cloud and move the complexity to a simplicity model?

Rau: I think that’s one of the fundamental mental model shifts that a new organization needs to make. Complexity was your enemy in the old days … because you were releasing software once a year or twice a year, and so you don’t want it to be complex. But if your goal is speed and innovation, you’re gonna have to accept some complexity to get that speed in innovation. You just have to decide where is that complexity acceptable? And how do you change your processes in your tooling to minimize the impact of that complexity?

I would disagree with that sentiment because I think organizations have to start thinking about things differently if they’re really want to move quickly. You have to embrace complexity. And you have to think about, ‘What are the mitigating factors I need to take in my organization structure, my processes, my tooling to compensate for the additional complexity I’m creating but … still release software as quickly as I used to.

Igolnik: The story is about … embracing the complexity of the enterprise and recognizing that not every application that will come to Google Cloud will be architected in a modern way. There are thousands upon thousands of applications that have to lift and shift to survive. And so some of the announcements around the service mesh are great enablers for those customers to start embracing the cloud technology.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next event. (* Disclosure: SignalFx, Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither SignalFx nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE