The fortunes of modern businesses ride on the ability to adapt to a digitally driven world. Waves of technology come and go. Some solutions stick. Others die by the roadside. In this fast-paced environment, the ability to predict the next big thing is key to gaining an advantage over the competition.

“What everyone used to say about me, is I’m always right,” said Yaron Haviv (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of Iguazio Ltd. “We’ve been picking on many of those trends. We invented serverless before it was even called serverless, with [open-source serverless platform] Nuclio. Now we’re expanding it further.”

Haviv spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer, chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego. They discussed the increasing importance of intelligent applications to business and the technology required to build these apps.  (* Disclosure below.)

Iguazio offers data science as a service

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are rising in importance. A third of the people Haviv speaks to have “some relationship to ML and AI. That’s our space,” he said. “We’re essentially doing a data science platform as a service, fully automated around serverless constructs.”

How does this relate to Kubernetes?

“It’s simple,” Haviv said. There are two workloads involved in cloud migration, he explained. Lift-and-shift workloads don’t need to be moved to Kubernetes. But new workloads are focused around being cloud native, flexible and intelligent, which requires containerization.

“Everyone has to feed data and machine learning into those new applications,” Haviv said. “This is why you see those trends that talk about data integration, various frameworks and all that in that space.”

Kubernetes is ‘not a big deal’

The driving force behind this change is the need for corporations to compete in a digital marketplace, according to Haviv. Kubernetes has adjusted to these demands by moving “away from infrastructure to become more application specific,” said Miniman.

However, “Kubernetes is not a big deal,” according to Haviv. “The big point is about delivering new applications with elastic scaling, because your customer may be a million people behind some app,” he said.

Rather than focusing on Kubernetes, the technology should be considered a way to deliver microservices, according to Haviv. “The focus is on building the application. The focus is not about tuning your Kubernetes,” he said.

Iguazio’s platform sets out to simplify and speed the process of building intelligent applications through “a combination of high-speed data technology … and extremely high speed set of functions that work on the different domains of data collection and ingestion, data analytics, machine-learning training, and machine-learning model serving,” Haviv explained.

In simple terms, that means customers get the benefits of AI and ML faster and with fewer complications. “Things they thought about building on Amazon, or even on-prem, for months and months, they build in our platform in two weeks, with fewer people,” Haviv said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Iguazio Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Iguazio nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE