>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost, John Troyer, and this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. We're in here San Diego and happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Amr Abdelhalem, who is the head of Cloud Platforms at Fidelity Investments. Of course, Fidelity, we love talking to an end user. Big financial company. Your boss was up on the main stage in front of 8000 people, just in that room, there's over 12,000 here in person. Fidelity itself, you know, founded in 1946, first computers in 1965. In the last year, you've now got over 500 applications running in the public cloud, and Fidelity also joined the CNCS. So let's start there, Amr, if we would. Just kind of how does Fidelity look at kind of Kubernetes and CNCS? How does that fit into your company's mission? >> Absolutely, I mean thank you so much for inviting me here. Innovation in Fidelity is, a big part of the process. We're very focused at this time in cloud computing and machine learning, NEI technology. We had the first financial robot in 2015, I believe. We have the first augmented reality financial advisor, was actually released this year as a prototype. So a part of that innovation, we're seeing, CNCF and cloud computing and Cloud Native, is keys for strategy for our innovation part. >> All right, maybe if you could, give us a little bit of the breadth and depth of your team, what they cover, cloud platforms. What does that mean inside of Fidelity? >> Sure, so Fidelity had over, like, over 10,000 of IT. Hundreds and hundreds of develop teams, thousands of applications. It's globally distributed. It had all kind of workloads, that you can imagine. And it's in a highly regulated environment as well. And that's where we are seeing that we are all looking for this autonomy between teams, and agility, and improved time to market and customer experience. And the key for that is Cloud Native. We're seeing Kubernetes and CNCF and Cloud Native technology is like a key player for us when we go, multicloud to hypercloud model. >> Can you talk a little bit about more into that portfolio of technologies? You know, there's a lot of talk about public cloud verses on-prem, and, as if one thing is going to, one knife is going to be the only thing you need in your kitchen. >> Amr: Right. >> So you have a portfolio of platforms, you have a portfolio of destinations and a portfolio of applications. Can you talk a little bit, both about what you're using, and maybe how you're organized to access and address all those needs? >> Absolutely. So, I think, 2019, I would say, is the year of multicloud-hypercloud modeling, right? Actually, I would say that 2020 is going to more about distributed cloud, where you can distribute your workload across multicloud providers. We're not there yet. I don't think we're, anyone, is there yet. But at least we should start somewhere. We already has this multicloud providing. Distributing the workload itself between, I mean, it's a journey to move thousands of applications and thousands workloads and data as well, between on-premises data centers to a public cloud. You need to move through this journey of hypercloud models. And be able to move apps slowly and aggressively to other apps. >> All right. Amr, I want to dig into what you talked about there, multiclouds. >> Sure. >> So when you talk about multiple clouds, yes, everybody has that. I've got, walk us through a little bit, you know, where you have workloads and how many public clouds you use in life, but I want to set you up with a premise. You know, we really said, for multicloud to really be a reality-- >> Amr: Right. >> The value that you extract should be greater than the sum of its parts. And most of us lived through the multi vendor years, and that wasn't necessarily happiness and joy, when I had to span between those environments. So how do we make sure that multicloud doesn't become the least common denominator or a detriment to what I need to do with my data, my applications, the value that the company has? >> And that's why we are here. We are actually incorporated at Kubecon for that reason. That where we see this abstract layer that guarantee you the portability for moving your application from one cloud provider to another. That capability of the ability to deploy the same workload into multiclouds, the ability to have the workload itself, managed in different characteristic, next to assess services that you will find in AWS via Azure, via Google Cloud, the others. That's were we need that flexibility, and Kubernetes and Cloud Native itself, the ability to have the same deployable structure for your application, the ability to have the same ecosystem around that construction, around that artifact. The ability to move all of that, as-is, from one cloud provider to another cloud provider is big, big key. And that you can only find with script native. >> All right, Amr, can you share which cloud or clouds you're working on today, and what is your roadmap, do you have a timeline to when that vision becomes reality? >> At this moment, we're with a major cloud provider keys that, you guys can name them, all the colors. >> Stu: You're using all of them, okay. >> All the colors. >> And how are you using Kubernetes today? Where are you in that journey? >> So Kubernetes is mainly, I mean, I would say the majority is still running on premise. We are very intensively moving to public cloud in the Kubernates side. At this moment, actually, we're building an offer, inside my team, which is a cloud platform team. That offer will guarantee that portability between all the cloud provider. So for development team to port our platform, it will be kind of seamless for them, where it's going to land, is it going to be landing in AWS or Azures or on premise. >> Okay, joining the CNCF as a member, bring us inside. I understand the journey. Are there any specific goals you have? How do you measure the investment, and what you're hoping to, both as a company as well as part of the community, get out of it? >> So we have a big hold right now and opensource our project our little project about multiclouding, and our focus is mainly about the high regulation part. We're very focused in compliance and security, and in that way we can, I think, we can contribute back to the open source community around that. >> So Amr, you talked about, you know, we talked about the platforms here, and Kubernetes, but that goes hand-in-hand with the culture, and the up-skilling, and the organization and the processes. What intrigued me is you said, well, we put some things on Kubernetes on-prem, and then, and you know some things in the cloud, but then we're going to move some of those apps over time, we'll move to other appropriate homes. So that implies that you've changed process and you've changed, or maybe to be able to build cloud native apps, and that was actually separate, in some cases, from being in the public cloud. Is that the case, can you talk a little bit about how you've approached from the perspective of people who are listening or watching who are IT admins, and wondering how a company, a major organization, like your org, gets there? >> Right, and this is a main challenge. The challenge is not in the technology side itself, or the tools, that seems a majority there in the ecosystem at this moment. The challenge is mainly building the sculpture inside teams. So we're building many like, star-point or COEs across all of our business unit and all of our teams. And again, to build a sculpture across 10,000 developers plus, that's a major. >> And it's funny, because sometimes people go, well, COE is a dirty word, right, don't do a COE, but you said multiple COEs distributed across. >> So it's like nuclear reaction, our COEs, the first one, that will communicate with few COEs, each one of them would be with other COEs, and that's how that chain will go and expand quite quickly. >> All right. >> And this is happening at this moment. >> So, Amr, I have a few friends that this is the first time that they've come, and they go into the keynote, or they look at the schedule, and they're a bit overwhelmed. >> Amr: Right >> They say, it's not just Kubernetes, there's dozens and dozens of projects. The ecosystem is sprawling. If you could, give us a little walkthrough as to, the projects you're using, any key partners that you're allowed to talk about that are useful in helping you to achieve your mission. >> So, we're very focused at this moment, actually, in the Kubernetes project itself. We start exploring some of the open source project and in the CICD part, additional to that, we are starting using few frameworks like Flux, this is one of the frameworks like GitOps in general, building this culture of GitOps deployment, and moving toward, like, more ops of deployment, that's one of areas that we are very invested in. We're exploring service mesh at this time, and I hope like, we're going to get, like, maybe next year we can talk about service mesh more. >> Yeah, is there something that's holding you back on service mesh, 'cause there's a few options out there at various maturity levels, and who's driving them. What will some of your criteria be? >> I would say it's mainly, I'm waiting little bit more, I feel like 214 for me, when we had that discussion, instead of sitting here, 214, you will be discussing Mesos via Kubernetes via Swarm. So I think we are still moving at this time, service mesh as well. >> Any partners that you can speak to from a technology standpoint that are helping you, that you're allowed to talk about? >> Amr: Well, I mean, first of all CNCF. >> Yeah. >> I greatly appreciate all their help in that. Most of the public cloud providers are helping us in this areas as well, yeah. >> I'll be interested in catching you after the show and seeing how you thought, I mean this is, in some ways, it's a science project a few years ago, and now it's this robust thing. Did you bring, I'm curious, did you bring mostly engineers, mostly managers, a mix of the two? >> Amr: Mostly engineers, yeah, mostly engineers. >> Hands on? >> All hands on, I mean, this is like another change in culture right now, where most of our engineers are in innovation, like, they are full stack engineers. We're using VDI process at this moment, to move forward. All our road maps, in turn, have been published, it's being used like evolving process, to go, like, with continuous deployment, and continues feature enhancement for the teams. So it's fantastic honestly, yeah. >> Okay, Amr, what things does your team hope to achieve this week, anything that is on your roadmap, or on the public open source road map that you're waiting on? We talked a little bit, service mesh? >> We're definitely exploring OPA at this moment. I think that's like, that's big potentials there. So that's one of them, yeah. I think going through that showroom and try to see what option we have as well, that's on the area where we going to be very interested at. >> OPA, the Policy Agent, I mean, you talked about compliance before >> Yeah. >> A few years ago, with folks in the financial industry, you would have some arguments, some discussions, sometimes heated discussions about security in the cloud and et cetera and highly regulated industry, yet, kind of, maybe ironically or somewhat, maybe surprisingly for some, right? Very advanced in many areas, the whole industry. That's well known if you're in it. Do you still have to have discussions about compliance and security in the cloud? Maybe, I guess, maybe when you talk about data locality and international borders more? >> Right, and that's why we already have our own policy management tool, which is built in, we build it ourself, and that's where I see the potential, like, our moving from building it yourself to more of using an open source project and try to reuse it and contribute back to that open source community, like something like OPA, for example. So that's the next generation, where I can see it will help us as well. >> Amr, any advice you'd give your peers out there, if they're new to the community? Things you've learned along the journey so far? >> I would say start small, don't boil the ocean. Start with small COEs, small pilots program. Look for success, look for goals. Technology is great, but don't just move toward technology, because it's a moving target, it will never end. Try to set business goals for you, like targets for your project, and that's how you can achieve success. >> Well, Amr, really appreciate you sharing Fidelity's update. >> Thank you. >> Wish you and your team the best of luck here at the show and beyond, and we definitely hope to catch up soon. >> Thank you, I appreciate it. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to checkout theCUBE.net for all of the coverage of this, as well as all the cloud, Cloud Native, and more shows that we have. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)