>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .Next 2018 here in London, England. We're gonna be talking about developers in this segment. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, Bala Kuchibhotla is the General Manager of Nutanix Era, and sitting next to him is Greg Muscarella who recently joined Nutanix, is Vice President of Products at Nutanix. Both of you been up on stage, Greg was talking about Carbon and cloud native, and of course Era is the databases of service. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Alright, so look, developers. You know, we were thinking back, you know, I love the old meme, developers, developers, developers! Balmer had it right, and style might not have been there. Microsoft, company that does quite well with developers. You know, my background is in the enterprise space. I'm an infrastructure guy that goes to cloud, and the struggle I've had a little bit is, you know, developers really work from the application down. It's like that's where they live, and as an infrastructure guy, it's a little uncomfortable for me. So maybe to set that stage, because you know I look at Nutanix, you know, at it's core, infrastructure's a big piece of it, but its distributed architectures, it's built from the architecture from like really the hyper-scale type of environments. So help connect the dots as to where Nutanix plays with the developers, and then we'll get into your products and everything else after. Bala, you want to start? >> Cool, okay. So as you know, Nutanix is definitely addressing the IT ops market. We cannot simply its storage, compute, networking, and build the infrastructure as service. Obviously if you look at the private cloud, the IT operators are becoming the cloud operators and then giving them to the developers. We are basically trying to build a cloud for IT operators so they can present the cloud to developer. Now that we have this infrastructure pretty much there for quite some time, we're not expanding the services to other things, the platform, the platform as service. Now going back to the developer community, you will have the same kind of cloud-like consumption. That these cloud operators, the IT operators are providing the cloud for you. US developers get the same kind of public cloud consumption. They lack ability, that the ability you are trying to do, easy tools, (mumbling), and S3s, that kind of stuff, EBS, you have the same kind of APS for our Nutanix that you can spin up a VM, spin up a database, spin up a storage and then do what you want to do kind of stuff. So that's the natural journey for that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, Greg? >> Yeah, I have to agree. Look, the world has changed quite a bit for developers, and it's gotten a lot better. If you look at the tooling and what you can now do on your laptop and spinning up what would be a pretty complex environment from a three tier application with a robust database, an app tier, anything else you might have on the storage side, spin it up, break it down, and with your CICD pipeline you can have it deployed to production pretty rapidly. So we look at doing is, you know, recreating that experience that the cloud has really brought to those developers and having the same type of tooling for those enterprise-grade applications that are going to be deployed, you know, on that infrastructure that is needed in private data centers. >> So looking at, you know, one of the reasons why developers love cloud services so much, it's easy for them. They can just consume it, it's very low friction. They don't even really, you know, need to go through a purchasing process, other than credit card maybe paid for themselves in the beginning. So you know, low friction is really the key word here. So I'm wondering, you know, looking at the Nutanix, the IT ops perspective, how are you kinda bring that low friction into the developer world? >> Yeah, so I'll take the question. So essentially what I am seeing is the world in the enterprise world is very fragmented. People doing silos kind of stuff. As you rightly said, developers really want to be liberated from all this bureaucracy, right? So they really need a service kind of world where they can go click on it, they get their compute kind of stuff. There's a pressure on the IT ops to give that experience, otherwise people will flee to public a lot. As simple as that, right? So to me, the way I see is the IT ops, the DB ops, the traditional DB ops inner ring, they are understanding the need that, hey well, we gotta be service-ified. We want to provide that kind of service-like interface to our teams who are consuming that kinda stuff. So this software, Nutanix as the enterprise cloud software, lets them create their own private cloud and then give those services to the developers kinda stuff. So it's a natural transition as a company for us. We got to start from the cloud operators, now we're exposing the cloud services from the cloud operators to the cloud consumers. Essentially the developers. >> Greg, up on stage you talked about cloud native, and your premise is that cloud native is a term for a methodology, not necessarily that it's born in the cloud. Maybe help explain that a little bit, and you know, we think Nutanix is mostly in data centers today, so, you know, why isn't this just saying, "No, no, no, we can be cloud native, too." >> Fair point, and I think we're not alone in that as well, in being an enterprise infrastructure company that was looking at enabling cloud native applications, our cloud native architecture within the private data center Say look, really it's a form of doing distributed computing, right, and that's the core to it, right? So you have a stateless, ephemeral infrastructure. You're not upgrading things, you know, you're blowing it away and rebuilding it. There's some core things like that, that will move across whether it be in the cloud or on prem. And of course you need tooling for that, right, 'cause that's not the methodology most enterprise developers or operators are really going through, right, so everything's pets, not much cattle. We're really trying to change that quite a bit, and that's both enabling technology but it's also the practices that people will deploy. And we're seeing is, it's not so much us trying to sell this it's more like hey, we're used to this in the cloud, why can't we do this on prem in our private data center where we have all of our data, and the other services that we need to interact with, like, that's where the demand's really coming from. So it's that mass of data they want to interact with with the type of architecture that they've gotten used to for rapid development and deployment. >> So one other thing, you mentioned pets versus cattle. One of the things I've been seeing from, you know, an IT ops perspective is you need a good ecosystem of management products around your pets or your cattle to be able to make it cattle, right? If you don't have the tooling, you're gonna do manual interaction, and it's going to become pets. So I'm wondering, you know, in that cloud native space, how are you helping the IT ops to actually make it a cattle experience, and you know, towards management or monitoring, or backup stuff like that? >> So, you know, a lot of that is surrounded around Kubernetes, right, as a center of mass. So it's not just us doing it, it's us pulling in a lot of the support and ecosystem that is being built by the community for that and leveraging that piece. And then we have other things we'll either add onto that as it integrates with our platform and some of the capabilities there, or things that we may do, just again, pure open source. Give you a couple examples of that, so I mentioned Epoch on stage, right, so it's sort of something that brings additional metrics to Prometheus. So in addition to CPU and memory storage consumption, you're actually getting latency and other more business metrics that you might be using to trigger things in Kubernetes, like auto-scaling. I don't necessarily always scale on CPU or memory, maybe it's a customer experience that's difficult to measure The other thing is because we have the storage layer underneath, you know, we look at doing things like, again it's early in Kubernetes, but snapshotting from within Kubernetes. Right, so if we have a CSI provider, why not from within Kubernetes let an application or a container trigger a snapshot. Underneath our storage layer will take that snap and then it becomes an object that's available from within Kubernetes. So there's a whole lot of things happening. >> I just want to add a couple of comments to that. This pets versus cattle is standardization, right, like we're talking about it. In typical, old legacy enterprises there are let's take the example of databases. Like, every application team has their own databases they are trying to pass, they're all trying to do management around it kind of stuff. When we do a couple of servers, like we looked at around 2,400 databases for a typical company, they have 400 different configurations of the software. And so like this is one of the biggest companies that we talking about kind of stuff. With that kind of stuff they cannot manage cloud, obviously. This is not no more a cattle kind of stuff. But how do you bring that kind of standardization, right? That is where the Era as a product is actually coming into this. We are trying to standardize, but when you try to standardize these database environments for on premise enterprise cloud, you have to do it at their terms. What I meant to try to say is when you try to go for public cloud, you have this catalog 11204 pull the node to PSE5, you can only create databases with whatever the software the public cloud guys are doing it. But on premise needs are slightly different. So that is where Nutanix, Era, and this products will come into. We allow to people to create the cloud, and then we allow them to create their own catalog of software that they can standardize. So that is what I call standardization at their customer terms, that's what we're trying. >> And let me add to that, though. It also brings in this convenience, 'cause not only is it coming up with standardize, but we've made it even more convenient, right, because now a developer can go provision their own database, they're gonna get a standard configuration for what that is, and so you made it easier for developers and you're getting something that is more cattle-like. >> Bala, I think you're in a good seat to be able to actually give us a little bit of independent commentary, you know. The movement of databases is one of the hottest topics in the industry. I haven't seen whether Andy Jassy was sparing back with Larry Ellison, you know, at re:Invent this week, but you know, we've been watching the growth of things like Postgres, and lot of these changes, you know, Era sits clearly in that space. So what do you seeing from customers, you know, the modernization of applications is, you know, what I call the long pole in the tent. It's the toughest thing for me to be able to do. I said we usually want to first, you know, you modernize your platform, Nutanix helps with that, public cloud helps with that, and then I can modernize my application. You know, database tends to be, it's the stickiest application that we have in the industry. So what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so there are two class of applications that we see. This space is completely green field We are starting off completely. People love cloud-like experience and cloud native databases that's where the public cloud can kind of try to help them. But if you see 70 to 80% of the money still is with all the traditional apps. You're trying to now cloudify them. The cloud native stack that we talk about, the cloud native database, is not going to the game. Like you really need to think about how do you kind of take these big, giant databases that are there with Oracles, and DBTools, that kind of stuff but give the cloud-like experience, right? So the actually very difficult game for any public cloud, that's why you don't see rack provisioning and a dot list is still not there, or even if JCP natively. Oracle does that but little bit difficult. Data gravity forces people to come to on premise, that's my humble take on this, right. But how do you build, how do you make this gray area I call it a brown field, and convert them into more of a consumer-centered kind of stuff? That's where Era actually tries to play. It has two roles that, if you have existing databases, we turn to kind of convert them into more of a cloud-like databases for you, or if you have a green field then we can get you directly onto the cloud native experience. Or if you're trying to migrate from technology to other technology, definitely we would like to help. These are the three things that we try to do through Era kinda of stuff, yeah. >> So looking forward, you know, we're starting out with databases, you know, making that simple, making that small so that there's less friction in that. So maybe a question for Greg, so what's the future for Nutanix in, you know, enabling other services, other cloud-like services on a Nutanix platform going forward? >> In addition to databases. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so we're a big proponent of standard APIs, as I talked about, right, so we have that in storage for a long time, that makes things easy with databases. We have a standard client talking to standard database backends. As we see other core building blocks, those are the kind of things that we're gonna want to build and deliver as well. So S3 is a defacto standard for object storage, for instance, so people are following that. You'll get Pub/Sub with Kafka APIs, Druid. There's a whole bunch of things, especially from the Apache project, that have become sort of defacto standards, so really it's like, okay, well which building blocks are needed by developers to build these applications that they want, and how do we really work the the community to establish those as open standards. 'Cause we really want, you know, I talked about the portability quite a bit. So we don't want anyone locked into our stack or anyone else's stack, it's like hey, let's build with the best toolkits, let's use standard, open APIs, and then developers get what they need which is portability, or run the application where they want to run it. So that's our strategy of going forward. >> Into some-I-tab we have easy to equal end, which is AHV, we have EBS equal end, we have our called Acropolis Block Services. We have S3 equal end, which is called Buckets, we have database RDS equal end, we have Era, and now we are going with content as which we call Carbon. So we are trying to kind of look at those critical services for anyone, especially for developers, to say that man, it's all ecosystem, it's not like one piece, single piece It's not this compute, it's not this storage, but it is an ecosystem of services that we need to kind of predict. >> Want to just come back to what we were talking beginning, the relationship with developers. How much of what Nutanix does is really kind of the IT ops that then enables developers, and how much direct developer engagement is it? Like, you know, is there development activity here at the conference going on that we should know about? I know that Nutanix goes to a lot of the developer shows. But maybe if you could give us some commentary on that. >> Yeah, I can start that, it's a path, right? So currently we certainly have the bulk of our interactions are gonna be on the IT operations side, and so it's only through them, because their customers are the developers that we really interact primarily today. But you should see that changing quite a bit, and I think that you'll that with the tools that we're providing directly to developers to interact with you know, through the APIs like they have Era. So for instance, if IT has deployed Era internally, then if I want a database I can go straight to those APIs or command line to grab those things. And you'll see that continuously be a trend as we let developers interact directly with our products. >> Just to give you an example, right, within the company, within Nutanix, we are drinking our own champaign, right. So we are operating a private cloud and we are exposing our APIs to all our developers. Today, if someone wants a database in Nutanix, they go to a control plane and say I want a database. Right, that's the API. How the infrastructure is getting, it's a means to an end for them, right. That's where we are going with our customers, too, hey, here is how you build your private cloud, here is how you expose all your service end points for different services, and your developers just need to enjoy them. And then there's a building aspect of it, that's the nuance that private clouds need to deal with. How do they charge the developers, how do they charge meter, that kind of stuff that people will talk about today. >> You know, I definitely heard when I talked to all the product teams, especially everything in Zai cloud, you know, extensibility with APIs is built into everything you're doing. So we're going to have to leave it there. Greg, we're gonna be catching up with you and the Nutanix team in two weeks at the Cube-Con show in Seattle. So thanks so much for joining us. Bala, pleasure, thanks for giving us all the update. And thank you, we're gonna be back with more coverage here. From Nutanix .Next 2018 in London, I'm Stu Miniman and Joep Piscaer is my cohost. Going to be do a Dutch session in a second, so be sure to stay with that. First foreign language interview on theCUBE, and thank you for watching. (electronic music)