Lightbend: Towards The Real-Time Enterprise

Richard Wozniak
Nov 1 · 10 min read

A Conversation with Brad Murdoch

Brad Murdoch is the VP of Corporate and Business Development at Lightbend.

RW: So, you are the first person I’m interviewing in what I plan to be a series of talks with IBM partner companies about their business in general, and maybe a little about their relationship with IBM.

Some people reading this might not be that familiar with Lightbend. I think your name is out there, a lot of people have heard of it, but not everyone knows what the elevator pitch is, so maybe we could just start with that —

What is Lightbend all about?

Brad Murdoch: Sure. Great way to start. First of all Lightbend is a company that has been working in the space that we now call “cloud native” since long before the term “cloud native” was around.

Essentially what we provide are a set of technologies that are founded in open source: technologies such as Akka, which is a distributed computing framework. Play, which is a high-velocity web framework. Lagom, which is a micro-services framework, and some other recent additions. We’re also the company behind the Scala language. And all of those are a set of open source technologies that are getting really broad adoption in the industry.

What Lightbend as a company does is we build on top of those open source projects, to create an application platform that allows enterprise developers to build modern, distributed, data-centric applications. As a company we provide what we call the Lightbend Platform to many Global 2000 enterprises, in many different industries.

We have a very strong partnership with IBM. IBM invested in and led our last funding round at Lightbend. We have many common customers that are heavily invested in IBM’s Data and AI strategy. But also use Lightbend to build and run these modern, data-centric cloud-native applications.

RW: When I joined IBM in 2001, that was the Age of WebSphere. If you wanted to put an enterprise application up, it was probably going to be WebSphere or another J2EE Application Server, the app written in Java and connecting to a big enterprise database like Db2 or Oracle. That was the standard for 15 years, and now you guys, and others in the industry, are finding a way to do something different with micro-services.

I know a lot of people reading this will be familiar with this, but some will not. Can you give us an overview of what the micro-services revolution is all about?

Brad Murdoch: So the concept of micro-services is fairly straight forward. And for those or your readers that are as old as you and I, Richard, that remember the whole revolution around Service Oriented Architecture, the concepts are not new.

The idea is that you build your software as discreet sets of code that can operate effectively, independently, from the other parts of the application. This allows two major advantages:

One it allows a much more agile development and deployment capability for your development teams. You can have smaller and more focused development teams that can release their components without having to be dependent on a large release that is done once a year. Like we used to talk about with your Web Sphere or Oracle updates, it was a big deal.

RW: Yes, I’ve been through a lot of those!

Brad Murdoch: Now your development teams, if they are working on individual micro-services, can release them when ever they are ready. Some of our customers are releasing dozens of updates on a daily basis. It’s a real change to your developer productivity, number one.

The second thing is the ability to be able to scale, and the ability to be able to leverage the cloud native, or cloud-style infrastructure. Where you effectively have a distributed computing environment available to you that is, to all intents and purposes, unlimited in scale and elastic in nature. That you can scale up and scale down, based on demand, and based on requirements. And if you have the right technology, such as Lightbend’s micro-services technology, then that can all be taken care of by the framework itself.

So you, as a developer, can take advantage of the fact that you’ve got a distributed environment, like the cloud, without having to understand all the challenges of things like concurrency, and resiliency and having to deal with global consistency at scale, and having to respond to failures, and so on.

That’s Lightbend’s approach. Akka is our core, at the core it provides global consistency at scale, it provides self-healing capabilities, and it is super high performance. Meaning, when you have your micro-services built using Akka as a base, you can build applications that can really scale and can really be super-fast.

One of the major points where we see the great opportunity to partner with IBM, is the ability to process big datau at high speeds. Big data is a core requirement for the future when we are looking at businesses moving to be what we call “cognitive”. 0r what we might call “real time enterprises” now, where the ability to apply intelligence to data in real-time is a differentiation for your business.

RW: That was a fantastic summary, thank you.

How big is Lightbend? Do you consider yourself a start-up? How do you think about yourself, and the evolution of the company? What’s the big next step for Lightbend?

Brad Murdoch: We do think of ourselves as a start-up. I’ve seen many different definitions, but we are still are an early stage company. Let’s call it that. We are a dedicated team of about 150 individuals, the majority of those people are technical. Either engineers or the technical side of the business. Obviously we have a heavy investment in our core technologies, but we also invest in additional value-added components for our enterprise customers to help with things like: management, monitoring, integration, security, support and education, and so on. And that’s how we have a business.

We think of our ourselves as being open source leaders, first and foremost. We have a community built up around Lightbend and those open source projects. That’s an absolutely essential part of being in the infrastructure space today. Application infrastructure — if you don’t start with an open source base — it’s going to be very, very hard to reach developers. It’s important to us that we develop and maintain that community. And we’ve seen an incredible growth in the adoption of our open source over the past two to three years.

Literally an order of magnitude increase in the number of people that are downloading and using our open source frameworks. That provides a very good base for us to start with. We’ve got some of the world’s largest web properties using our technology in order to be able to scale. But our value add is for the enterprise, as they are looking to move to this cloud-native capability. And as they introduce cloud-native applications, we want to make that as easy as possible for them. To get the same kind of value as web-scale companies that are building on top of Akka see as well.

RW: You guys are the masters of all of these open source technologies, there are a lot of them. I remember when I first started working with you I had to write a four page cheat-sheet for myself, where I would name Akka and then cut the paragraph out of Wikipedia, then Scala — so when I was talking to you — and they all have these funny names. Was there a contest or something?

One thing that stood out to me after I got to know your technology was the work you put into management and installation. That’s really the tricky part of using all these open source components. We have our own internal cloud which we share with our partners for tests and such. And we’ve all been on calls with five engineers from three groups trying to get something running. You guys have encapsulated that, and greatly simplified it for people.

Could you talk about how you came upon that as a focus for your added value, and tell us a little bit more about that.

Brad Murdoch: Sure. The key thing for a company that is founded on open source principles, is you have to be able to pay the salary for those developers. So it’s important that a company like ours has an appropriate business model in order to be able to support the continued investment in our open source.

Our business model is very simple. We provide the Lightbend Platform on a subscription basis, and the Lightbend Platform includes a set of open source frameworks and runtimes, which we provide support and education for.

But secondly it provides a set of additional commercial technologies, that are not available in the open source, that are designed for enterprise developers and enterprise operations people. In order to make development faster and more productive. And in order to dramatically reduce the challenges that operations people can have with these, frankly, pretty complex environments that we are running in.

And one of the major investments that we made was, like IBM and like Red Hat of course, we recognized the Kubernetes is really the go-to dominant infrastructure that is foundational for running these types of really complex workloads on. So we made a big investment in developing tools that make it easier to deploy, manage and run our applications, or applications built using our open source technologies, in a Kubernetes environment.

We used Red Hat OpenShift as our reference architecture for that. That’s been an important accelerator for us, particularly as a number of our enterprise customers have chosen OpenShift as their Kubernets based infrastructure. That’s been an important step for us, investing in the tools to allow OpenShift to manage Lightbend based applications more easily.

RW: Could you talk about public vs. private cloud, how does that look from where you sit? Is it really the same thing, and people deploy wherever they want, or do you think the idea of providing Lightbend Platform as-a-Service is something you will be doing at some point?

Brad Murdoch: Fundamentally we think we need to be able to support both models. Today Lightbend Platform can run identically in a private cloud or a public cloud. We have had a number of requests for our product, that is oriented around streaming data applications, and we could really help clients by having a service available. Something that people could have a cloud service that enabled building streaming data-based applications much easier. I can tell you that’s a direction Lightbend is investigating right now.

RW: How do you feel about IBM Cloud Pak for Data? You were one of the very first IBM partners to sign up to support it, so you have a lot of experience with it by now. What are you seeing?

Brad Murdoch: Over the past four years one of the major areas we’ve seen our customers invest in with the Lightbend Platform are a whole series of use-cases around real-time uses of data. So we’re thinking about things like real-time analytics, IOT platforms, real-time personalization. A whole plethora of real-time financial processes, real-time compliance, real time fraud-detection.

All businesses want to move to real time, but in order to be able to move to real-time there are two components to that. Number one: you have to be able to take advantage of your data. You have to have the data be governed, you have to have the data be collected, you have to have the data be able to be infused with intelligence.

Rob Thomas from IBM talks about the AI ladder, and the kind of information architecture that is needed to support that. Around data collection, data organization and data utilization. We firmly believe, based on what we’ve seen in the market place, and what customers are doing with our technologies, that all those steps are absolutely critical to providing a foundation for the kind of clean data, and managed and governed data, that you need in order to be able to run your business.

The last step, we believe, is operationalizing that into an application or system that can take all that data, data that has been infused with intelligence, and turn it into a run-the-business system.

Cloud Pak for Data provides an incredible foundation for providing the right data, and then Lightbend Platform, particularly our ability to manage streaming data applications, is that last step of operationalizing that data into a run-the-business system.

RW: Wow, that’s great. Especially your feelings about Open Shift and Red Hat, that’s very good. We made kind of a big investment in that ourselves!

Brad Murdoch: Yeah, a wee investment there!

RW: Sometimes I think we get one dimensional in the tech world, people are so focused on this stuff, because it is really cool. But there is so much more to everyone.

You know recently Ginger Baker died, the great drummer, and I watched a YouTube documentary on him, and it turns out he was a fanatic polo player. He lived all over the world, he owned 30 polo ponies at once, and was a great polo player. I never knew any of that.

That reminded me that the people I work with all the time, we’re trying to get systems up and running, and deals done, and I realized that I don’t know that much about the people I’m working with, outside of that. What’s your passion? When you not dealing with computer stuff what are some other things that you love?

Brad Murdoch: I’m a big sports fan. I like watching sports despite the fact that I’m Scottish, I love both the NFL and Major League Baseball. I am an Oakland Athletics fan. You know — fan is short for ‘fanatic’, and I am most definitely a fanatic when it comes up to my Oakland A’s! I also love the NFL, I love football and I’m a big fantasy football player. So, I’m very caught up in the American sports lifestyle.

RW: That’ great to know. I think we’re about 25 minutes in, and you are my first interview for the site, and this has been fantastic. I hope it gets out there and people can learn a little bit about LIghtbend. Thank you very much.

Brad Murdoch: My pleasure, thanks Woz.

Richard Wozniak

Written by

I am a computer software professional, working in the IBM Data and AI group. I’m currently focused on building our partner ecosystem. I’m not related to Steve.

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