1.65 Million Devices Enrolled – Techstrong TV

Fleet is an open-source device management platform Mike founded alongside Zach Wasserman, co-creator of OSquery. The company recently raised a $5M seed round. In this interview, we’ll learn more about what Fleet does, how they got 1.65M devices enrolled in less than a year, and why they believe open source is the future. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

Recorded Voice:     This is Digital Anarchist.

Alan Shimel:            Hey everyone welcome to another segment here on Techstrong TV. I’ve got a first-time guest, new company, open-source project I want to introduce you to. Say hello to Michael McNeil. Michael is a founder of Fleet or FleetO for Osquery is some we know. Hey Mike welcome to Techstrong TV.

Mike McNeil:          Hey Allan, thanks for having me.

Alan Shimel:            My pleasure. So Mike I, I, you know I guess we should jump right into it. Before we even get into who is Mike McNeil, let’s talk about Fleet and, and I guess to talk about Fleet we probably need to start with Osquery and then you know that kind of gave rise to Fleet.

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, for sure. So back in ’14 my cofounder, Zach, he and a guy named, Mike Arpaia and a small team at Facebook built this tool called “Osquery.” They were kind of trying to DIY their own security and they started realizing, “Hey it would be really great instead of running all these little scripts all the time, if we could have a standard way to talk to any computer, whether it’s a Mac, it’s Linux, Windows and it would be great if we could do it in SQL.” And that’s where Osquery came from. So it’s kind of a _____ [crosstalk] utility.

Alan Shimel:            Yep, but I mean look we’re being modest, it’s had a fair amount of success, yes?

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, it’s gotten pretty wide adoption at this stage.

Alan Shimel:            I mean can you give us some numbers to just put it in context? Like how many downloads, users, what have you, whatever you want.

Mike McNeil:          I’ve seen, so I’ve seen a wide number of stats on Osquery itself, but I can say it is used by a lot of the Fortune 100. It turns out the people that have this problem have a lot of computers, right, it’s a scale.

Alan Shimel:            It’s a scaled – you know it’s a problem and it’s at scale.

                                 So now, all right so we’ve got Osquery, now let’s talk about Fleet.

Mike McNeil:          So one of the problems with Osquery by itself is you have to go build a server to receive all the data from Osquery. So you can use Osquery to say, “Hey, Linux server” or “Hey, Windows laptop” or “Hey, Mac laptop,” “Hey code machine, tell me some information about you right now.” You can also schedule those queries, right, to run in the background on a certain cadence. But you got to have somewhere to collect that data and send it to where you want it to go. So Fleet is that, it’s an Osquery management server originally and lately it’s become a lot more than that.

Alan Shimel:            Okay. Now we’re going to get into what that “lot more” in one second, but while we’re, while we’re doing foundational stuff, Mike, let’s talk about you. Give us a little bit of your background and how you got to be here.

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, so let’s see a few years ago I started a open-source framework called “Sails.js,” kind of in the early days of no js back in 2012. Got mixed up in open-source that way. Published my first open-source modules. Then lo and behold in like 2013 Sails.js kind of took off. We started to build a community. Went through Y Combinator in 2015. That’s actually where I met Sid Sijbrandij from GitLab. That’s how – that was actually later on the same folks that ended up coming up with the idea of to build a company around Osquery. So, so we kind of got together and with Sid’s help and with and obviously with Zach’s help we build Fleet. We were able to take this kind of stem of a new open source idea. Apply the open-core business model and then run with it.

Alan Shimel:            Excellent. So Sid’s a friend. I mean he’s been on our show many, many times over the years. You know he’s – well since they’ve gone public he’s gotten a little bit more busier I guess. I should mention he’s also an investor in Fleet, right?

Mike McNeil:          That’s right.

Alan Shimel:            Yep. Okay, so now let’s talk about you know what, what’s Fleet doing and I mean recently it’s, it’s doing more than it sort of original sort of scope if you will, right? We’ve, we’ve added to the mission. And, and Fleet is – excuse me, Sid isn’t the only investor, right? You’ve raised some more money at seed rounds, there’s all kinds of stuff going on. But you tell us Mike what’s happening.

Mike McNeil:          Yeah. So we’re up to 22 people now. We just announced the seed rounds led by CRV. We have support from Mike Arpaia, so one of the other creators of Osquery, Nico Waisman, CSO at Lyft, and Jack Naglieri, the CEO of Panther Labs.

Alan Shimel:            Very cool. What, what’s, what’s you know beyond the amount of money what’s the money being used for?

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, yeah so when we started talking to users of Fleet early on and really trying to like understand what were the bigger problems, so what you’re trying to solve. We started to realize that there were these jobs that needed to be done, right, that kind of just were – they weren’t really satisfactory solutions for it yet out there. So a lot of people were using Fleet to kind of sniff out or like spyglass, right, to see like, “What’s going on on this machine right now?” Maybe it’s for incident response, maybe they’re just trying to kind of like diagnose a weird issue with a server. There’s all these different use cases where device data is useful. But one of the strongest is people needed peace of mind that their MDM is working, that their EDR tool’s working, and that the actual agents are – that they think are installed are actually there. So that’s been one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen driving Fleet so far in the adoption we’d seen last year.

Alan Shimel:            Absolutely. What about the go-to-market though, Mike? Like talk to us. How, how you know I mean at some level open source you know once you have an open-source product project like this the go-to-market is, “Hey man give it a try and if you like it you know maybe you’ll want a commercial version or added features or whatever. But here’s our GitHub, you know repo, download it and you know ask the community if you a question.” But is that the deal with Fleet? Talk to us about that.

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, so that’s how it all starts, right? And for a lot of users that’s going to be enough. You know we try to make sure that Fleet is enterprise ready. The free version is low. Like we don’t want anyone that needs to use the product to not be able to use the product there, but we are adding additional features and we’ve added some additional features last year around role-based access control that are, that are especially useful for a larger team to – or it makes sense for them to upgrade. That’s kind of been the, been the pay wall. The other thing is support, so if you need a little bit more support or an SLA that’s included with the paid subscription.

Alan Shimel:            Got it. What about going forward are there other… So this sounds almost like a little bit of an open-core model, right, where you’re going to get an open version and then there will be you know premium features. What other premium features do you see perhaps coming down the pike here?

Mike McNeil:          So a lot of options for that. What’s, what’s currently paid is the team’s feature. So if you want to have multiple, multiple different teams at your organization, like maybe you have one group that manages the laptops, the productivity end points, right, and you got another group managing your production servers, maybe you’ve got another group managing a few of the remaining core servers or maybe some laptops from an acquisition. That segmentation you can do in a Fleet Premium using the team’s feature.

                                 You can also do self-hosted auto updates. So if you want to use – you know a lot of folks are using Chef Ansible, something like that to deploy out the latest version of Osquery to all of their hosts. But if you are someone who would rather have that be taken care of automatically Fleet offers auto updates out-of-the-box, they come from fleetdm.com. If you want to host your own version of that and use the register yourself and kind of decide when the update happens that’s currently a paid feature of Fleet Premium as well.

Alan Shimel:            Excellent, very cool stuff. Mike are there any metrics in terms of how many Fleet downloads users or anything? Like give us a sense of, of just how widespread this is now?

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, so not everybody has usage analytics turned on. Obviously, you know some folks it makes sense not to do that, but between, between the data that we have and what we know about our customers, kind of a conservative estimate is 1.65 million devices enrolled.

Alan Shimel:            Wow, that’s crazy, huh when you think about it from a yeah.

Mike McNeil:          Yeah.

Alan Shimel:            From just a project you guys started up. That’s great. You know we didn’t mention for people wanting information where, what’s the URL for the Fleet project?

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, so it’s fleetdm.com and the D-M stands for “device management.”

Alan Shimel:            So it’s fleet device management, fleetdm.com.

Mike McNeil:          That’s right.

Alan Shimel:            Excellent. And then you probably don’t know this, but what, for someone that wants the open-source version they get it from there as well or do they got to go to like a GitHub or some other repo?

Mike McNeil:          Yeah, so there’s a, there’s a few ways to build Fleet. Look if you want to run it locally on your laptop that’s the easiest way to kind of see what it looks like and try it out real quick. We have an easy-to-use installer on the website, you can get going in like five minutes, you’ve just got to have Docker installed.

                                 And if you’re going to production we’re actually we just finished a Terraform in fig, so you can take that deploy straight to AWS quickly. We’re working on one for Google Cloud and Azure now.

Alan Shimel:            Yep, that seems to be the trail. Hey man, Mike, I want to thank you for coming onto Techstrong TV and enlightening our audience about Fleet. You know what it’s an open-source world so these are the kinds of projects that may not be household names in everyone’s house, but 1.6 million devices will tell you otherwise, right? Keep up the great work and come back and visit us.

Mike McNeil:          Thanks Alan, thanks for having me.

Alan Shimel:            My pleasure. Mike McNeil here for Fleet, fleetdm.com if you want to check that out.

                                 We’ll be going to take a break and we’ll be right back.

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