(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>When Oracle acquired my SQL via the Sun acquisition, nobody really thought the company would put much effort into the platform preferring to focus all the wood behind its leading Oracle database, Arrow pun intended. But two years ago, Oracle surprised many folks by announcing my SQL Heatwave a new database as a service with a massively parallel hybrid Columbia in Mary Mary architecture that brings together transactional and analytic data in a single platform. Welcome to our latest database, power panel on the cube. My name is Dave Ante, and today we're gonna discuss Oracle's MySQL Heat Wave with a who's who of cloud database industry analysts. Holgar Mueller is with Constellation Research. Mark Stammer is the Dragon Slayer and Wikibon contributor. And Ron Westfall is with Fu Chim Research. Gentlemen, welcome back to the Cube. Always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >>So we've had a number of of deep dive interviews on the Cube with Nip and Aggarwal. You guys know him? He's a senior vice president of MySQL, Heatwave Development at Oracle. I think you just saw him at Oracle Cloud World and he's come on to describe this is gonna, I'll call it a shock and awe feature additions to to heatwave. You know, the company's clearly putting r and d into the platform and I think at at cloud world we saw like the fifth major release since 2020 when they first announced MySQL heat wave. So just listing a few, they, they got, they taken, brought in analytics machine learning, they got autopilot for machine learning, which is automation onto the basic o l TP functionality of the database. And it's been interesting to watch Oracle's converge database strategy. We've contrasted that amongst ourselves. Love to get your thoughts on Amazon's get the right tool for the right job approach. >>Are they gonna have to change that? You know, Amazon's got the specialized databases, it's just, you know, the both companies are doing well. It just shows there are a lot of ways to, to skin a cat cuz you see some traction in the market in, in both approaches. So today we're gonna focus on the latest heat wave announcements and we're gonna talk about multi-cloud with a native MySQL heat wave implementation, which is available on aws MySQL heat wave for Azure via the Oracle Microsoft interconnect. This kind of cool hybrid action that they got going. Sometimes we call it super cloud. And then we're gonna dive into my SQL Heatwave Lake house, which allows users to process and query data across MyQ databases as heatwave databases, as well as object stores. So, and then we've got, heatwave has been announced on AWS and, and, and Azure, they're available now and Lake House I believe is in beta and I think it's coming out the second half of next year. So again, all of our guests are fresh off of Oracle Cloud world in Las Vegas. So they got the latest scoop. Guys, I'm done talking. Let's get into it. Mark, maybe you could start us off, what's your opinion of my SQL Heatwaves competitive position? When you think about what AWS is doing, you know, Google is, you know, we heard Google Cloud next recently, we heard about all their data innovations. You got, obviously Azure's got a big portfolio, snowflakes doing well in the market. What's your take? >>Well, first let's look at it from the point of view that AWS is the market leader in cloud and cloud services. They own somewhere between 30 to 50% depending on who you read of the market. And then you have Azure as number two and after that it falls off. There's gcp, Google Cloud platform, which is further way down the list and then Oracle and IBM and Alibaba. So when you look at AWS and you and Azure saying, hey, these are the market leaders in the cloud, then you start looking at it and saying, if I am going to provide a service that competes with the service they have, if I can make it available in their cloud, it means that I can be more competitive. And if I'm compelling and compelling means at least twice the performance or functionality or both at half the price, I should be able to gain market share. >>And that's what Oracle's done. They've taken a superior product in my SQL heat wave, which is faster, lower cost does more for a lot less at the end of the day and they make it available to the users of those clouds. You avoid this little thing called egress fees, you avoid the issue of having to migrate from one cloud to another and suddenly you have a very compelling offer. So I look at what Oracle's doing with MyQ and it feels like, I'm gonna use a word term, a flanking maneuver to their competition. They're offering a better service on their platforms. >>All right, so thank you for that. Holger, we've seen this sort of cadence, I sort of referenced it up front a little bit and they sat on MySQL for a decade, then all of a sudden we see this rush of announcements. Why did it take so long? And and more importantly is Oracle, are they developing the right features that cloud database customers are looking for in your view? >>Yeah, great question, but first of all, in your interview you said it's the edit analytics, right? Analytics is kind of like a marketing buzzword. Reports can be analytics, right? The interesting thing, which they did, the first thing they, they, they crossed the chasm between OTP and all up, right? In the same database, right? So major engineering feed very much what customers want and it's all about creating Bellevue for customers, which, which I think is the part why they go into the multi-cloud and why they add these capabilities. And they certainly with the AI capabilities, it's kind of like getting it into an autonomous field, self-driving field now with the lake cost capabilities and meeting customers where they are, like Mark has talked about the e risk costs in the cloud. So that that's a significant advantage, creating value for customers and that's what at the end of the day matters. >>And I believe strongly that long term it's gonna be ones who create better value for customers who will get more of their money From that perspective, why then take them so long? I think it's a great question. I think largely he mentioned the gentleman Nial, it's largely to who leads a product. I used to build products too, so maybe I'm a little fooling myself here, but that made the difference in my view, right? So since he's been charged, he's been building things faster than the rest of the competition, than my SQL space, which in hindsight we thought was a hot and smoking innovation phase. It kind of like was a little self complacent when it comes to the traditional borders of where, where people think, where things are separated between OTP and ola or as an example of adjacent support, right? Structured documents, whereas unstructured documents or databases and all of that has been collapsed and brought together for building a more powerful database for customers. >>So I mean it's certainly, you know, when, when Oracle talks about the competitors, you know, the competitors are in the, I always say they're, if the Oracle talks about you and knows you're doing well, so they talk a lot about aws, talk a little bit about Snowflake, you know, sort of Google, they have partnerships with Azure, but, but in, so I'm presuming that the response in MySQL heatwave was really in, in response to what they were seeing from those big competitors. But then you had Maria DB coming out, you know, the day that that Oracle acquired Sun and, and launching and going after the MySQL base. So it's, I'm, I'm interested and we'll talk about this later and what you guys think AWS and Google and Azure and Snowflake and how they're gonna respond. But, but before I do that, Ron, I want to ask you, you, you, you can get, you know, pretty technical and you've probably seen the benchmarks. >>I know you have Oracle makes a big deal out of it, publishes its benchmarks, makes some transparent on on GI GitHub. Larry Ellison talked about this in his keynote at Cloud World. What are the benchmarks show in general? I mean, when you, when you're new to the market, you gotta have a story like Mark was saying, you gotta be two x you know, the performance at half the cost or you better be or you're not gonna get any market share. So, and, and you know, oftentimes companies don't publish market benchmarks when they're leading. They do it when they, they need to gain share. So what do you make of the benchmarks? Have their, any results that were surprising to you? Have, you know, they been challenged by the competitors. Is it just a bunch of kind of desperate bench marketing to make some noise in the market or you know, are they real? What's your view? >>Well, from my perspective, I think they have the validity. And to your point, I believe that when it comes to competitor responses, that has not really happened. Nobody has like pulled down the information that's on GitHub and said, Oh, here are our price performance results. And they counter oracles. In fact, I think part of the reason why that hasn't happened is that there's the risk if Oracle's coming out and saying, Hey, we can deliver 17 times better query performance using our capabilities versus say, Snowflake when it comes to, you know, the Lakehouse platform and Snowflake turns around and says it's actually only 15 times better during performance, that's not exactly an effective maneuver. And so I think this is really to oracle's credit and I think it's refreshing because these differentiators are significant. We're not talking, you know, like 1.2% differences. We're talking 17 fold differences, we're talking six fold differences depending on, you know, where the spotlight is being shined and so forth. >>And so I think this is actually something that is actually too good to believe initially at first blush. If I'm a cloud database decision maker, I really have to prioritize this. I really would know, pay a lot more attention to this. And that's why I posed the question to Oracle and others like, okay, if these differentiators are so significant, why isn't the needle moving a bit more? And it's for, you know, some of the usual reasons. One is really deep discounting coming from, you know, the other players that's really kind of, you know, marketing 1 0 1, this is something you need to do when there's a real competitive threat to keep, you know, a customer in your own customer base. Plus there is the usual fear and uncertainty about moving from one platform to another. But I think, you know, the traction, the momentum is, is shifting an Oracle's favor. I think we saw that in the Q1 efforts, for example, where Oracle cloud grew 44% and that it generated, you know, 4.8 billion and revenue if I recall correctly. And so, so all these are demonstrating that's Oracle is making, I think many of the right moves, publishing these figures for anybody to look at from their own perspective is something that is, I think, good for the market and I think it's just gonna continue to pay dividends for Oracle down the horizon as you know, competition intens plots. So if I were in, >>Dave, can I, Dave, can I interject something and, and what Ron just said there? Yeah, please go ahead. A couple things here, one discounting, which is a common practice when you have a real threat, as Ron pointed out, isn't going to help much in this situation simply because you can't discount to the point where you improve your performance and the performance is a huge differentiator. You may be able to get your price down, but the problem that most of them have is they don't have an integrated product service. They don't have an integrated O L T P O L A P M L N data lake. Even if you cut out two of them, they don't have any of them integrated. They have multiple services that are required separate integration and that can't be overcome with discounting. And the, they, you have to pay for each one of these. And oh, by the way, as you grow, the discounts go away. So that's a, it's a minor important detail. >>So, so that's a TCO question mark, right? And I know you look at this a lot, if I had that kind of price performance advantage, I would be pounding tco, especially if I need two separate databases to do the job. That one can do, that's gonna be, the TCO numbers are gonna be off the chart or maybe down the chart, which you want. Have you looked at this and how does it compare with, you know, the big cloud guys, for example, >>I've looked at it in depth, in fact, I'm working on another TCO on this arena, but you can find it on Wiki bod in which I compared TCO for MySEQ Heat wave versus Aurora plus Redshift plus ML plus Blue. I've compared it against gcps services, Azure services, Snowflake with other services. And there's just no comparison. The, the TCO differences are huge. More importantly, thefor, the, the TCO per performance is huge. We're talking in some cases multiple orders of magnitude, but at least an order of magnitude difference. So discounting isn't gonna help you much at the end of the day, it's only going to lower your cost a little, but it doesn't improve the automation, it doesn't improve the performance, it doesn't improve the time to insight, it doesn't improve all those things that you want out of a database or multiple databases because you >>Can't discount yourself to a higher value proposition. >>So what about, I wonder ho if you could chime in on the developer angle. You, you followed that, that market. How do these innovations from heatwave, I think you used the term developer velocity. I've heard you used that before. Yeah, I mean, look, Oracle owns Java, okay, so it, it's, you know, most popular, you know, programming language in the world, blah, blah blah. But it does it have the, the minds and hearts of, of developers and does, where does heatwave fit into that equation? >>I think heatwave is gaining quickly mindshare on the developer side, right? It's not the traditional no sequel database which grew up, there's a traditional mistrust of oracles to developers to what was happening to open source when gets acquired. Like in the case of Oracle versus Java and where my sql, right? And, but we know it's not a good competitive strategy to, to bank on Oracle screwing up because it hasn't worked not on Java known my sequel, right? And for developers, it's, once you get to know a technology product and you can do more, it becomes kind of like a Swiss army knife and you can build more use case, you can build more powerful applications. That's super, super important because you don't have to get certified in multiple databases. You, you are fast at getting things done, you achieve fire, develop velocity, and the managers are happy because they don't have to license more things, send you to more trainings, have more risk of something not being delivered, right? >>So it's really the, we see the suite where this best of breed play happening here, which in general was happening before already with Oracle's flagship database. Whereas those Amazon as an example, right? And now the interesting thing is every step away Oracle was always a one database company that can be only one and they're now generally talking about heat web and that two database company with different market spaces, but same value proposition of integrating more things very, very quickly to have a universal database that I call, they call the converge database for all the needs of an enterprise to run certain application use cases. And that's what's attractive to developers. >>It's, it's ironic isn't it? I mean I, you know, the rumor was the TK Thomas Curian left Oracle cuz he wanted to put Oracle database on other clouds and other places. And maybe that was the rift. Maybe there was, I'm sure there was other things, but, but Oracle clearly is now trying to expand its Tam Ron with, with heatwave into aws, into Azure. How do you think Oracle's gonna do, you were at a cloud world, what was the sentiment from customers and the independent analyst? Is this just Oracle trying to screw with the competition, create a little diversion? Or is this, you know, serious business for Oracle? What do you think? >>No, I think it has lakes. I think it's definitely, again, attriting to Oracle's overall ability to differentiate not only my SQL heat wave, but its overall portfolio. And I think the fact that they do have the alliance with the Azure in place, that this is definitely demonstrating their commitment to meeting the multi-cloud needs of its customers as well as what we pointed to in terms of the fact that they're now offering, you know, MySQL capabilities within AWS natively and that it can now perform AWS's own offering. And I think this is all demonstrating that Oracle is, you know, not letting up, they're not resting on its laurels. That's clearly we are living in a multi-cloud world, so why not just make it more easy for customers to be able to use cloud databases according to their own specific, specific needs. And I think, you know, to holder's point, I think that definitely lines with being able to bring on more application developers to leverage these capabilities. >>I think one important announcement that's related to all this was the JSON relational duality capabilities where now it's a lot easier for application developers to use a language that they're very familiar with a JS O and not have to worry about going into relational databases to store their J S O N application coding. So this is, I think an example of the innovation that's enhancing the overall Oracle portfolio and certainly all the work with machine learning is definitely paying dividends as well. And as a result, I see Oracle continue to make these inroads that we pointed to. But I agree with Mark, you know, the short term discounting is just a stall tag. This is not denying the fact that Oracle is being able to not only deliver price performance differentiators that are dramatic, but also meeting a wide range of needs for customers out there that aren't just limited device performance consideration. >>Being able to support multi-cloud according to customer needs. Being able to reach out to the application developer community and address a very specific challenge that has plagued them for many years now. So bring it all together. Yeah, I see this as just enabling Oracles who ring true with customers. That the customers that were there were basically all of them, even though not all of them are going to be saying the same things, they're all basically saying positive feedback. And likewise, I think the analyst community is seeing this. It's always refreshing to be able to talk to customers directly and at Oracle cloud there was a litany of them and so this is just a difference maker as well as being able to talk to strategic partners. The nvidia, I think partnerships also testament to Oracle's ongoing ability to, you know, make the ecosystem more user friendly for the customers out there. >>Yeah, it's interesting when you get these all in one tools, you know, the Swiss Army knife, you expect that it's not able to be best of breed. That's the kind of surprising thing that I'm hearing about, about heatwave. I want to, I want to talk about Lake House because when I think of Lake House, I think data bricks, and to my knowledge data bricks hasn't been in the sites of Oracle yet. Maybe they're next, but, but Oracle claims that MySQL, heatwave, Lakehouse is a breakthrough in terms of capacity and performance. Mark, what are your thoughts on that? Can you double click on, on Lakehouse Oracle's claims for things like query performance and data loading? What does it mean for the market? Is Oracle really leading in, in the lake house competitive landscape? What are your thoughts? >>Well, but name in the game is what are the problems you're solving for the customer? More importantly, are those problems urgent or important? If they're urgent, customers wanna solve 'em. Now if they're important, they might get around to them. So you look at what they're doing with Lake House or previous to that machine learning or previous to that automation or previous to that O L A with O ltp and they're merging all this capability together. If you look at Snowflake or data bricks, they're tacking one problem. You look at MyQ heat wave, they're tacking multiple problems. So when you say, yeah, their queries are much better against the lake house in combination with other analytics in combination with O ltp and the fact that there are no ETLs. So you're getting all this done in real time. So it's, it's doing the query cross, cross everything in real time. >>You're solving multiple user and developer problems, you're increasing their ability to get insight faster, you're having shorter response times. So yeah, they really are solving urgent problems for customers. And by putting it where the customer lives, this is the brilliance of actually being multicloud. And I know I'm backing up here a second, but by making it work in AWS and Azure where people already live, where they already have applications, what they're saying is, we're bringing it to you. You don't have to come to us to get these, these benefits, this value overall, I think it's a brilliant strategy. I give Nip and Argo wallet a huge, huge kudos for what he's doing there. So yes, what they're doing with the lake house is going to put notice on data bricks and Snowflake and everyone else for that matter. Well >>Those are guys that whole ago you, you and I have talked about this. Those are, those are the guys that are doing sort of the best of breed. You know, they're really focused and they, you know, tend to do well at least out of the gate. Now you got Oracle's converged philosophy, obviously with Oracle database. We've seen that now it's kicking in gear with, with heatwave, you know, this whole thing of sweets versus best of breed. I mean the long term, you know, customers tend to migrate towards suite, but the new shiny toy tends to get the growth. How do you think this is gonna play out in cloud database? >>Well, it's the forever never ending story, right? And in software right suite, whereas best of breed and so far in the long run suites have always won, right? So, and sometimes they struggle again because the inherent problem of sweets is you build something larger, it has more complexity and that means your cycles to get everything working together to integrate the test that roll it out, certify whatever it is, takes you longer, right? And that's not the case. It's a fascinating part of what the effort around my SQL heat wave is that the team is out executing the previous best of breed data, bringing us something together. Now if they can maintain that pace, that's something to to, to be seen. But it, the strategy, like what Mark was saying, bring the software to the data is of course interesting and unique and totally an Oracle issue in the past, right? >>Yeah. But it had to be in your database on oci. And but at, that's an interesting part. The interesting thing on the Lake health side is, right, there's three key benefits of a lakehouse. The first one is better reporting analytics, bring more rich information together, like make the, the, the case for silicon angle, right? We want to see engagements for this video, we want to know what's happening. That's a mixed transactional video media use case, right? Typical Lakehouse use case. The next one is to build more rich applications, transactional applications which have video and these elements in there, which are the engaging one. And the third one, and that's where I'm a little critical and concerned, is it's really the base platform for artificial intelligence, right? To run deep learning to run things automatically because they have all the data in one place can create in one way. >>And that's where Oracle, I know that Ron talked about Invidia for a moment, but that's where Oracle doesn't have the strongest best story. Nonetheless, the two other main use cases of the lake house are very strong, very well only concern is four 50 terabyte sounds long. It's an arbitrary limitation. Yeah, sounds as big. So for the start, and it's the first word, they can make that bigger. You don't want your lake house to be limited and the terabyte sizes or any even petabyte size because you want to have the certainty. I can put everything in there that I think it might be relevant without knowing what questions to ask and query those questions. >>Yeah. And you know, in the early days of no schema on right, it just became a mess. But now technology has evolved to allow us to actually get more value out of that data. Data lake. Data swamp is, you know, not much more, more, more, more logical. But, and I want to get in, in a moment, I want to come back to how you think the competitors are gonna respond. Are they gonna have to sort of do a more of a converged approach? AWS in particular? But before I do, Ron, I want to ask you a question about autopilot because I heard Larry Ellison's keynote and he was talking about how, you know, most security issues are human errors with autonomy and autonomous database and things like autopilot. We take care of that. It's like autonomous vehicles, they're gonna be safer. And I went, well maybe, maybe someday. So Oracle really tries to emphasize this, that every time you see an announcement from Oracle, they talk about new, you know, autonomous capabilities. It, how legit is it? Do people care? What about, you know, what's new for heatwave Lakehouse? How much of a differentiator, Ron, do you really think autopilot is in this cloud database space? >>Yeah, I think it will definitely enhance the overall proposition. I don't think people are gonna buy, you know, lake house exclusively cause of autopilot capabilities, but when they look at the overall picture, I think it will be an added capability bonus to Oracle's benefit. And yeah, I think it's kind of one of these age old questions, how much do you automate and what is the bounce to strike? And I think we all understand with the automatic car, autonomous car analogy that there are limitations to being able to use that. However, I think it's a tool that basically every organization out there needs to at least have or at least evaluate because it goes to the point of it helps with ease of use, it helps make automation more balanced in terms of, you know, being able to test, all right, let's automate this process and see if it works well, then we can go on and switch on on autopilot for other processes. >>And then, you know, that allows, for example, the specialists to spend more time on business use cases versus, you know, manual maintenance of, of the cloud database and so forth. So I think that actually is a, a legitimate value proposition. I think it's just gonna be a case by case basis. Some organizations are gonna be more aggressive with putting automation throughout their processes throughout their organization. Others are gonna be more cautious. But it's gonna be, again, something that will help the overall Oracle proposition. And something that I think will be used with caution by many organizations, but other organizations are gonna like, hey, great, this is something that is really answering a real problem. And that is just easing the use of these databases, but also being able to better handle the automation capabilities and benefits that come with it without having, you know, a major screwup happened and the process of transitioning to more automated capabilities. >>Now, I didn't attend cloud world, it's just too many red eyes, you know, recently, so I passed. But one of the things I like to do at those events is talk to customers, you know, in the spirit of the truth, you know, they, you know, you'd have the hallway, you know, track and to talk to customers and they say, Hey, you know, here's the good, the bad and the ugly. So did you guys, did you talk to any customers my SQL Heatwave customers at, at cloud world? And and what did you learn? I don't know, Mark, did you, did you have any luck and, and having some, some private conversations? >>Yeah, I had quite a few private conversations. The one thing before I get to that, I want disagree with one point Ron made, I do believe there are customers out there buying the heat wave service, the MySEQ heat wave server service because of autopilot. Because autopilot is really revolutionary in many ways in the sense for the MySEQ developer in that it, it auto provisions, it auto parallel loads, IT auto data places it auto shape predictions. It can tell you what machine learning models are going to tell you, gonna give you your best results. And, and candidly, I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't wanna give up pedantic tasks that are pain in the kahoo, which they'd rather not do and if it's long as it was done right for them. So yes, I do think people are buying it because of autopilot and that's based on some of the conversations I had with customers at Oracle Cloud World. >>In fact, it was like, yeah, that's great, yeah, we get fantastic performance, but this really makes my life easier and I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't want to make their life easier. And it does. So yeah, I've talked to a few of them. They were excited. I asked them if they ran into any bugs, were there any difficulties in moving to it? And the answer was no. In both cases, it's interesting to note, my sequel is the most popular database on the planet. Well, some will argue that it's neck and neck with SQL Server, but if you add in Mariah DB and ProCon db, which are forks of MySQL, then yeah, by far and away it's the most popular. And as a result of that, everybody for the most part has typically a my sequel database somewhere in their organization. So this is a brilliant situation for anybody going after MyQ, but especially for heat wave. And the customers I talk to love it. I didn't find anybody complaining about it. And >>What about the migration? We talked about TCO earlier. Did your t does your TCO analysis include the migration cost or do you kind of conveniently leave that out or what? >>Well, when you look at migration costs, there are different kinds of migration costs. By the way, the worst job in the data center is the data migration manager. Forget it, no other job is as bad as that one. You get no attaboys for doing it. Right? And then when you screw up, oh boy. So in real terms, anything that can limit data migration is a good thing. And when you look at Data Lake, that limits data migration. So if you're already a MySEQ user, this is a pure MySQL as far as you're concerned. It's just a, a simple transition from one to the other. You may wanna make sure nothing broke and every you, all your tables are correct and your schema's, okay, but it's all the same. So it's a simple migration. So it's pretty much a non-event, right? When you migrate data from an O LTP to an O L A P, that's an ETL and that's gonna take time. >>But you don't have to do that with my SQL heat wave. So that's gone when you start talking about machine learning, again, you may have an etl, you may not, depending on the circumstances, but again, with my SQL heat wave, you don't, and you don't have duplicate storage, you don't have to copy it from one storage container to another to be able to be used in a different database, which by the way, ultimately adds much more cost than just the other service. So yeah, I looked at the migration and again, the users I talked to said it was a non-event. It was literally moving from one physical machine to another. If they had a new version of MySEQ running on something else and just wanted to migrate it over or just hook it up or just connect it to the data, it worked just fine. >>Okay, so every day it sounds like you guys feel, and we've certainly heard this, my colleague David Foyer, the semi-retired David Foyer was always very high on heatwave. So I think you knows got some real legitimacy here coming from a standing start, but I wanna talk about the competition, how they're likely to respond. I mean, if your AWS and you got heatwave is now in your cloud, so there's some good aspects of that. The database guys might not like that, but the infrastructure guys probably love it. Hey, more ways to sell, you know, EC two and graviton, but you're gonna, the database guys in AWS are gonna respond. They're gonna say, Hey, we got Redshift, we got aqua. What's your thoughts on, on not only how that's gonna resonate with customers, but I'm interested in what you guys think will a, I never say never about aws, you know, and are they gonna try to build, in your view a converged Oola and o LTP database? You know, Snowflake is taking an ecosystem approach. They've added in transactional capabilities to the portfolio so they're not standing still. What do you guys see in the competitive landscape in that regard going forward? Maybe Holger, you could start us off and anybody else who wants to can chime in, >>Happy to, you mentioned Snowflake last, we'll start there. I think Snowflake is imitating that strategy, right? That building out original data warehouse and the clouds tasking project to really proposition to have other data available there because AI is relevant for everybody. Ultimately people keep data in the cloud for ultimately running ai. So you see the same suite kind of like level strategy, it's gonna be a little harder because of the original positioning. How much would people know that you're doing other stuff? And I just, as a former developer manager of developers, I just don't see the speed at the moment happening at Snowflake to become really competitive to Oracle. On the flip side, putting my Oracle hat on for a moment back to you, Mark and Iran, right? What could Oracle still add? Because the, the big big things, right? The traditional chasms in the database world, they have built everything, right? >>So I, I really scratched my hat and gave Nipon a hard time at Cloud world say like, what could you be building? Destiny was very conservative. Let's get the Lakehouse thing done, it's gonna spring next year, right? And the AWS is really hard because AWS value proposition is these small innovation teams, right? That they build two pizza teams, which can be fit by two pizzas, not large teams, right? And you need suites to large teams to build these suites with lots of functionalities to make sure they work together. They're consistent, they have the same UX on the administration side, they can consume the same way, they have the same API registry, can't even stop going where the synergy comes to play over suite. So, so it's gonna be really, really hard for them to change that. But AWS super pragmatic. They're always by themselves that they'll listen to customers if they learn from customers suite as a proposition. I would not be surprised if AWS trying to bring things closer together, being morely together. >>Yeah. Well how about, can we talk about multicloud if, if, again, Oracle is very on on Oracle as you said before, but let's look forward, you know, half a year or a year. What do you think about Oracle's moves in, in multicloud in terms of what kind of penetration they're gonna have in the marketplace? You saw a lot of presentations at at cloud world, you know, we've looked pretty closely at the, the Microsoft Azure deal. I think that's really interesting. I've, I've called it a little bit of early days of a super cloud. What impact do you think this is gonna have on, on the marketplace? But, but both. And think about it within Oracle's customer base, I have no doubt they'll do great there. But what about beyond its existing install base? What do you guys think? >>Ryan, do you wanna jump on that? Go ahead. Go ahead Ryan. No, no, no, >>That's an excellent point. I think it aligns with what we've been talking about in terms of Lakehouse. I think Lake House will enable Oracle to pull more customers, more bicycle customers onto the Oracle platforms. And I think we're seeing all the signs pointing toward Oracle being able to make more inroads into the overall market. And that includes garnishing customers from the leaders in, in other words, because they are, you know, coming in as a innovator, a an alternative to, you know, the AWS proposition, the Google cloud proposition that they have less to lose and there's a result they can really drive the multi-cloud messaging to resonate with not only their existing customers, but also to be able to, to that question, Dave's posing actually garnish customers onto their platform. And, and that includes naturally my sequel but also OCI and so forth. So that's how I'm seeing this playing out. I think, you know, again, Oracle's reporting is indicating that, and I think what we saw, Oracle Cloud world is definitely validating the idea that Oracle can make more waves in the overall market in this regard. >>You know, I, I've floated this idea of Super cloud, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but, but there, I think there is some merit to it in terms of building on top of hyperscale infrastructure and abstracting some of the, that complexity. And one of the things that I'm most interested in is industry clouds and an Oracle acquisition of Cerner. I was struck by Larry Ellison's keynote, it was like, I don't know, an hour and a half and an hour and 15 minutes was focused on healthcare transformation. Well, >>So vertical, >>Right? And so, yeah, so you got Oracle's, you know, got some industry chops and you, and then you think about what they're building with, with not only oci, but then you got, you know, MyQ, you can now run in dedicated regions. You got ADB on on Exadata cloud to customer, you can put that OnPrem in in your data center and you look at what the other hyperscalers are, are doing. I I say other hyperscalers, I've always said Oracle's not really a hyperscaler, but they got a cloud so they're in the game. But you can't get, you know, big query OnPrem, you look at outposts, it's very limited in terms of, you know, the database support and again, that that will will evolve. But now you got Oracle's got, they announced Alloy, we can white label their cloud. So I'm interested in what you guys think about these moves, especially the industry cloud. We see, you know, Walmart is doing sort of their own cloud. You got Goldman Sachs doing a cloud. Do you, you guys, what do you think about that and what role does Oracle play? Any thoughts? >>Yeah, let me lemme jump on that for a moment. Now, especially with the MyQ, by making that available in multiple clouds, what they're doing is this follows the philosophy they've had the past with doing cloud, a customer taking the application and the data and putting it where the customer lives. If it's on premise, it's on premise. If it's in the cloud, it's in the cloud. By making the mice equal heat wave, essentially a plug compatible with any other mice equal as far as your, your database is concern and then giving you that integration with O L A P and ML and Data Lake and everything else, then what you've got is a compelling offering. You're making it easier for the customer to use. So I look the difference between MyQ and the Oracle database, MyQ is going to capture market more market share for them. >>You're not gonna find a lot of new users for the Oracle debate database. Yeah, there are always gonna be new users, don't get me wrong, but it's not gonna be a huge growth. Whereas my SQL heatwave is probably gonna be a major growth engine for Oracle going forward. Not just in their own cloud, but in AWS and in Azure and on premise over time that eventually it'll get there. It's not there now, but it will, they're doing the right thing on that basis. They're taking the services and when you talk about multicloud and making them available where the customer wants them, not forcing them to go where you want them, if that makes sense. And as far as where they're going in the future, I think they're gonna take a page outta what they've done with the Oracle database. They'll add things like JSON and XML and time series and spatial over time they'll make it a, a complete converged database like they did with the Oracle database. The difference being Oracle database will scale bigger and will have more transactions and be somewhat faster. And my SQL will be, for anyone who's not on the Oracle database, they're, they're not stupid, that's for sure. >>They've done Jason already. Right. But I give you that they could add graph and time series, right. Since eat with, Right, Right. Yeah, that's something absolutely right. That's, that's >>A sort of a logical move, right? >>Right. But that's, that's some kid ourselves, right? I mean has worked in Oracle's favor, right? 10 x 20 x, the amount of r and d, which is in the MyQ space, has been poured at trying to snatch workloads away from Oracle by starting with IBM 30 years ago, 20 years ago, Microsoft and, and, and, and didn't work, right? Database applications are extremely sticky when they run, you don't want to touch SIM and grow them, right? So that doesn't mean that heat phase is not an attractive offering, but it will be net new things, right? And what works in my SQL heat wave heat phases favor a little bit is it's not the massive enterprise applications which have like we the nails like, like you might be only running 30% or Oracle, but the connections and the interfaces into that is, is like 70, 80% of your enterprise. >>You take it out and it's like the spaghetti ball where you say, ah, no I really don't, don't want to do all that. Right? You don't, don't have that massive part with the equals heat phase sequel kind of like database which are more smaller tactical in comparison, but still I, I don't see them taking so much share. They will be growing because of a attractive value proposition quickly on the, the multi-cloud, right? I think it's not really multi-cloud. If you give people the chance to run your offering on different clouds, right? You can run it there. The multi-cloud advantages when the Uber offering comes out, which allows you to do things across those installations, right? I can migrate data, I can create data across something like Google has done with B query Omni, I can run predictive models or even make iron models in different place and distribute them, right? And Oracle is paving the road for that, but being available on these clouds. But the multi-cloud capability of database which knows I'm running on different clouds that is still yet to be built there. >>Yeah. And >>That the problem with >>That, that's the super cloud concept that I flowed and I I've always said kinda snowflake with a single global instance is sort of, you know, headed in that direction and maybe has a league. What's the issue with that mark? >>Yeah, the problem with the, with that version, the multi-cloud is clouds to charge egress fees. As long as they charge egress fees to move data between clouds, it's gonna make it very difficult to do a real multi-cloud implementation. Even Snowflake, which runs multi-cloud, has to pass out on the egress fees of their customer when data moves between clouds. And that's really expensive. I mean there, there is one customer I talked to who is beta testing for them, the MySQL heatwave and aws. The only reason they didn't want to do that until it was running on AWS is the egress fees were so great to move it to OCI that they couldn't afford it. Yeah. Egress fees are the big issue but, >>But Mark the, the point might be you might wanna root query and only get the results set back, right was much more tinier, which been the answer before for low latency between the class A problem, which we sometimes still have but mostly don't have. Right? And I think in general this with fees coming down based on the Oracle general E with fee move and it's very hard to justify those, right? But, but it's, it's not about moving data as a multi-cloud high value use case. It's about doing intelligent things with that data, right? Putting into other places, replicating it, what I'm saying the same thing what you said before, running remote queries on that, analyzing it, running AI on it, running AI models on that. That's the interesting thing. Cross administered in the same way. Taking things out, making sure compliance happens. Making sure when Ron says I don't want to be American anymore, I want to be in the European cloud that is gets migrated, right? So tho those are the interesting value use case which are really, really hard for enterprise to program hand by hand by developers and they would love to have out of the box and that's yet the innovation to come to, we have to come to see. But the first step to get there is that your software runs in multiple clouds and that's what Oracle's doing so well with my SQL >>Guys. Amazing. >>Go ahead. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>For example, >>Amazing amount of data knowledge and, and brain power in this market. Guys, I really want to thank you for coming on to the cube. Ron Holger. Mark, always a pleasure to have you on. Really appreciate your time. >>Well all the last names we're very happy for Romanic last and moderator. Thanks Dave for moderating us. All right, >>We'll see. We'll see you guys around. Safe travels to all and thank you for watching this power panel, The Truth About My SQL Heat Wave on the cube. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat synth intro music) >> Hey everyone and welcome to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago was, standing room only. The Solutions hall is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is Cloud Native at Scale. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers, structurally, will be transforming companies with just, they got to get powered somewhere. And, I think, the Cloud Native at Scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Kube alumnis. We're going to talk about Cloud Native at Scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture, should be great. >> All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here, as John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madhura Maskasky joins us, co-founder of Platform9. Sirish Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform9 joins us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Excited to be here >> So, talk to us. You guys have some news, Madhura, give us the sneak peak. What's going on? >> Definitely, we are very excited. So, we have John, not too long ago we spoke about our very new open source project called Arlon. And, we were talking about the launch of Arlon in terms of its first release and etcetera. And, just fresh hot of the press, we, Platform9 had its 5.6 release which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that we'd like to share as part of that. I think, the prominent one is, Platform9 added support for EKS Kubernetes cluster management. And, so, this is part of our vision of being able to add value, no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters, because, Kubernetes or cluster management, is increasingly becoming commodity. And, so, I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top, and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, DevOps solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments, with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So, towards that, key features in the 5.6 six release. First, is the very first package release of the product online, which is the open source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And, then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. >> I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this next, this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps, but, now, more than ever, you mentioned the application in Ops. You're seeing WebAssembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So, you're seeing a application tsunami coming. So, the pressure is okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. And, so, you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence trying to automate. So you got the automation, so you got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? what's in it for them right now? >> So it's, I think going back to what you just said, right, the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native, is always growing. So, it's not just a number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So, a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons, and operators, and extensions. Whereas, a different application may require something entirely different. And, now, you take this in an enterprise context, right. Like, we had a major media company that worked with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And, you now think about the breadth of applications, the hundreds of different applications being built. how do you consistently build, and compose, and manage, a large number of communities clusters with a a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. >> Scott Johnston just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now than in the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. >> And, that's where, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNCF ecosystem technologies. And, the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And, what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters, using templates, and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects, that are all very interesting and powerful. >> So Project Arlon really helping developers produce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. >> That's exactly right. >> Talk about the, the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What's does it turn into for a benefit standpoint? >> Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do Cloud Native at Scale faster, and while still keeping a very lean Ops team that is able to spend, let's say 70 plus percent of their time, caring for your actual business bread and butter applications, and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right. If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70% of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stoves etcetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal, because, that is your core key ingredient. But, what happens today in most enterprises is, because, of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling, being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70% plus, gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right. And, that is exactly what we are looking to solve, online. >> What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform9? What, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of like really inefficient infrastructure, or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So, someone needs to look at their environment and say, okay, maybe I should call platform9. What's it look like? >> So, we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One, is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically, 30 or more clusters already. These are the people that already know containers. They know, they've container wise... >> Savvy teams. >> They're savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because, now, the problem is how do I scale us? So, that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell, is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies that, as what I would call the mainstream enterprise. We're in Detroit in Motown, right, And, we're outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right. For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So, what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay. And, what does it take, to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve, is, because, we have technologies like Kube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but, while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So, I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern. And, the advanced savvy users, for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale. >> And, what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups, as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but, there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform9 is the right one for you, in the both of these groups. >> And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, to get started with existing applications that they have, on the infrastructure that they have. Number one. And, for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams. Especially, with the economy being the way it is, people are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people, right. So, that all of them are being asked to do more with less. And, our team, our technology, and our teams, help you do more with less. >> I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here, he is one of their engineer open source advocates. He's always on the ground pumping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services, with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on-premises. But Amazon's doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, If I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? >> Yeah, so, and it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is, Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So, customers are going to find the right home whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, AKS, GKE, or their own infrastructure, to run Kubernetes. And, so, where we want to be at, is, with a project like Arlon, Sirish spoke about the barbell strategy, on one end there is these advanced Kubernetes users, majority of them are running Kubernetes on AKS, right? Because, that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So, now, they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their DevTest, their staging, their production. And, that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform... >> So you come in and solve that. >> That is where we come in and we solve that. And it, you know, Amazon or EKS, doesn't give you tooling to solve that, right. It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. >> Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you got regions and locations... >> Exactly >> ...that's kind of a super cloud problem, we're seeing, opportunity problem, and opportunity is that, on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but, now, also, you got regions. >> That is absolutely right. You're on point John. And the way we solve it, is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a yaml file, you define exactly how for your DevTest environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS. And then you stamp it out. >> So let me, here's an analogy, I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, that's got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give 'em the sports car. You allow them to stay on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed, Edge, Global. >> I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to... ... they can focus on driving the car, rather than trying to build the car. >> You don't want people to stop, once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger. >> That's right. >> To accelerate that applications. >> Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time, and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. >> And we got four right behind us, so, we'll get them involved. So that's... >> But, you're not reinventing the wheel. >> We're not at all, because, what we are building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right. One, is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run Cloud Native private clouds. And, this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself. You really have to be a car builder, to be able to do this with our Platform9. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And, the other end is, we help you operate at scale, in the hyperscalers, right. Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem, or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently? And, how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? >> I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service. We previously mentioned up coming into KubeCon, but, here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, 'cause Intuit was on stage on the keynote, getting an award for their work. You know, Argo, it comes from Intuit. That ArgoCon was in Mountain View. You guys were involved in that. You guys were at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because, Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? >> I can talk about it. So, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes, is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, the infrastructure management story, right. So, we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We, really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, as part of this effort, in 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service, in its GA version, right. Because, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service, in our mind, is enabling you to run on one end, your infrastructure as a scale, through GitOps, and infrastructure as a code practices. And on the other end, your entire application fleet, at scale, right. And, just marrying the two, really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. >> But, and avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So, this is really solves that problem, mainly. >> That is exactly right. And if you think of it, the way those problems are solved today, is, kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CI/CD tools, like Argo CD is an excellent one. There's some other choices, which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But, that team, is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts, or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts, which are very difficult to manage. >> So, Arlon changes sure, as they change the complexity and also the sprawl. But, that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast, they're adding more capability. That's what trouble starts, right? >> I think in two ways, right. Like one is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common long-standing problems we've had, is, how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right. And, you've seen Argo's really get adopted by the application teams, but, it's now something that we are making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right. And, what that's going to do is, help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency, and improve the developer experience. Because, that's what it's all about, ultimately. >> And, I know that you just released 5.6 today, congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any, any customers that you've been able to talk to, or have early access? >> Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And, their feedback has been that this, basically, helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space, down to the infrastructure management teams, right. And, we are also hearing a lot of customers, that I would say, large scale public cloud users, saying, they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that's been the feedback, is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. >> Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question, for me, before I end up, for Lisa to ask her last question is, if you had to explain Platform9, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? >> If I take that? I would say that the reason why Platform9, the reason why we exist, is, putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today, historically, has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car, or you can enjoy the car, you really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe a 100 tech companies of the world, but, for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why Platform9 exists, is, we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. >> Why you cool and relevant? How would you say it? >> Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease, is going to be the key. And that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. >> With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madhura, for you, is, where can Devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? >> Absolutely. Go to platform9.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it right on the website. And, if they want to learn about Arlon, it's an open source GitHub project. Go to GitHub and find out more about it. >> Excellent guys, thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver Cloud Native at Scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John, and I, appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks so much >> Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. Just a minute. (light synth outro music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, we are in the meat of the conference. >> It's really in crunch time, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage and this next guest is running the show at CNCF, the OG and been in the community doing a great job. I'm looking forward to this segment. >> Me too. I'm even wearing... You may notice, I am in my CNCF tee, and I actually brought my tee from last year for those of you. And the reason I brought it, actually, I want to use this to help introduce our next guest is the theme last year was resistance realized, and I think that KubeCon this year is an illustration of that resistance realized. Please welcome Priyanka Sharma to the show. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> This is your show. How are you feeling right now? What does it feel like to be here? >> It's all of our show. I am just another participant, but I am so happy to be here. I think this is our third hybrid in person back event. And the whole ecosystem, we seem to have gotten into the groove now. You know, the first one we did, was in LA >> Savannah: Yes. >> Where you have that shirt from. Then we went to Valencia, and now here in Detroit I could sense the ease in the attendees. I can sense that it just feels great for everyone to be here. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you guys, who were face to face in LA, but this is really kind of back face to face, somewhat normalized, right? >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> And so that's a lot of feedback there. What's your reaction? Because the community's changed so much in three years, >> Savannah: Yes. >> Even two years, even last year. Where do you see it now? Because there's so much more work to do, but it feels like it's just getting started, but also at the same time it feels like people are celebrating at the same time. >> Yeah. >> Kubernetes is mainstream, CloudNative at scale. >> Savannah: That feels like a celebration. >> People are talking about developer... more developers coming on board, more traction, more scale, more interoperability, just a lot of action. What's your thoughts? >> I think you're absolutely right that we are just getting started. I've been part of many open source movements and communities. This is... I think this is something special where we have our flagship project considered mainstream, but yet so much to be done right over there. I mean, you've seen announcements around more and more vendors coming to support the project in, you know, the boring but essential ways that happened I think this week, just today, I think. And so Kubernetes continues to garner support and energy, which is unique in the ecosystem, right? Because once something becomes mainstream, normally, it's like, "Okay, boring." (John laughs) But that's happening. And I think the reason for that is CloudNative. It's built upon Kubernetes and so much more than Kubernetes. >> We have 140 plus projects >> Absolutely. >> and folks have a choice to contribute to something totally cutting edge or something that's, you know, used by everyone. So, the diversity of options and room for innovation at the same time means this is just the beginning. >> And also projects are coming together too. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see formation, you're starting to see some defacto alignment. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see the- >> Priyanka: Clustering. >> Some visibility into how the big moves are being playing out, almost the harvesting of that hard work. >> Priyanka: Yes, I do think there is consolidation, but I would definitely say that there's consolidation and innovation. >> John: Yeah. >> And that is something... I genuinely have not seen this before. I think there are definitely areas we're all really focusing on. I talked a lot about security in my keynote because it continues to gain importance in CloudNative, whether that is through projects or through practices. The same, I did not mention this in my keynote, but around like, you know, continuous delivery generally the software delivery cycle, there's a lot coming together happening there. And, you know, >> John: Yeah. >> many other spaces. So, absolutely right. >> Let's dig in a little bit actually, because I'm curious. You get to see these 140 plus projects. >> Yes. >> What are some of the other trends that you're seeing, especially now, as we're feeling this momentum around Kubernetes? The excitement is back in the ecosystem. >> Yes. So, so much happening. But I would definitely say that like the underlying basis of all these projects, right? I brought that up in my keynote, is the maintainers. And I think the maintainer group, is the talent keeps thriving and growing, the load on them is very heavy though. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And I do think there's a lot more we all company, the companies around us need to do to support these people, because the innovation they're bringing is unprecedented. Besides Kubernetes, which has its own cool stuff all the time. I think I'm particularly excited about the Argo projects. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So, they're the quadruplets as I like to call them. Right? Because there's four of them within the Argo banner. I had Yuan from Argo on my keynote actually. >> Savannah: Oh, nice. >> Alongside Hiba from Kubernetes. And we talked about their maintainer journey. And it's interesting. Totally different projects. Same asks, you know, which is more support and time from employers, more ways to build up contributors and ultimately they love the CNCF marketing supports. >> That Argo project's really in a great umbrella. There are a lot of action going on. Arlon, I saw that. Got some traction. A lot of great stuff. The question I want to ask you, and I want to get your reaction to this, you know, we always go to a lot of events with theCUBE and you can always tell the vibrant of the ecosystem when you see developers doing stuff, projects going on. But when you start seeing the commercialization >> Priyanka: Yes. >> The news briefings coming out of this show feels a lot like reinvent, like it's like a tsunami. I've never seen this much news. Everyone's got a story, they got announcing products. >> Savannah: That was a lot of news. That's a great point, John. >> There was a lot of flow even from the CNCF. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? I mean like to me it's a tell sign of activity, certainly, >> Right. >> And engagement. >> Right. >> But there's real proof coming out, real visibility into the value propositions, >> Priyanka: Yes. >> rendering itself with real products. What's your reaction to the news flow? >> Absolutely. I think it's market proof, like you said, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> That we have awesome technologies that are useful to lots of people around the world. And I think that, I hope this continues to increase. And with the bite basket of project portfolios that's what I hope to see. CNCF itself will continue supporting the maintainers with things like conformance programs which are really essential when you are... when you have people building products on top of your projects and other initiatives so that the technological integrity remains solid while innovation keeps happening. >> I know from a little birdie, Brendan, good friend of mine that you had a board meeting today. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I am curious because I hope I'm not going out about an assumption I imagine that room is full of passionate people. >> Priyanka: Absolutely. >> CNCF board would be a wild one. (Priyanka laughs) What are the priorities for the board between now and KubeCon next year? >> Sure. So the CNCF governing board is an over... It's like an oversight body. And their focus is on working with us on the executive team to make sure that we have the right game plan for the foundation. They tend to focus on the business decisions, things such as how do we manage our budget, how do we deploy it, and what are the initiatives? And that's always their priority. But because this is CloudNative and we are all technologists who love our projects, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> we also engage closely with the technical oversight committee who was in the said meeting that we just talked about. And so lots of discussions are around project health, sustainability. How do we keep moving? Because as you said, Kubernetes is going mainstream but it's still cool. There are all these other cool things. It's a lot going on, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. You got a lot of balls in the air. It's complex decision making and balancing of priorities. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> John: And demands, stakeholders. You have how many stakeholders? Every project, every person, every company. >> Everyone's a stakeholder. You're a stakeholder, too. >> And a hundred... I mean, I love how community focused you are. Obviously we're here to talk about the community. You have contributors from 187 different countries. >> Priyanka: It's one of the things I'm the most proud of. >> Savannah: It's... Yeah. It gives me all the feels as a community builder as well. >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> What an accomplishment and supporting community members in those different environments must be so dynamic for you and the team. >> Absolutely, and it behooves us to think globally in how we solve problems. Even when we introduce programs. My first question is, are we by accident being, let's say, default U.S. or are we being default Europe, whatever it may be because we really got to think about the whole world. >> John: It's global culture, it's a global village. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I think global now more than ever is so important. And, the Ukraine >> Priyanka: Yes. >> discussion on the main stage was awesome. I love how you guys did that because this is impacting the technology. We need the diverse input. Now I made a comment yesterday that it's going to make... it might slow things down. I meant as is more diversity, there's more conversations. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> But once people get aligned and committed, that's where the magic happens. Share your thoughts on the global diversity, why it's important, how things are made, how decisions are made. What's the philosophy? Because there's more to get your arms around. >> Yes, absolutely. It may seem harder or slower or whatever but once it gets done, aligned and committed, the product's better, everything's better. >> Priyanka: Yes, absolutely. I think the more people involved, the better it is for sure. Especially from a robustness resilience perspective. Because you know, as they say, sunlight makes bugs shallow. That's because the more eyes on something the faster people will solve problems, fix bugs and make, you know, look for security, vulnerability, solve all that. So especially in those areas, I think, where you want to be more resilient, the more the people, the better it is. A hundred percent. And then when it comes to direct technical direction and choosing a path, I think that's where, you know it's the role of the maintainers. And as I was saying there's only a thousand audit maintainers for 140 plus projects, right? So they are catering- >> Wow, they have a lot of responsibility. >> Right. >> Serious amount of responsibility. >> It's crazy. I know. And we have to do everything we can for those people because they are the ones who set the vision, set the direction, and then 176,000 plus contributors follow their lead. So we have... I think, the bright mechanisms of contribution and collaboration in a global way are in place. And we keep chugging along and doing better and better each year. >> What's next for you guys? You got the EU of show coming out, >> Priyanka: Correct, Amsterdam. the economy looking, I don't see your recession for technology, but that's me. I'm Polish on tech. Yeah, there's some layoffs going on, some cleaning up, overinflated expectations on valuations of startups, but I don't see this stopping or slowing down. But what's your take? >> Priyanka: Yeah, I mean, as I said in my keynote, right? Open source usage soars in times of turmoil and financial turmoil is one example of that. So we are expecting growth and heavy growth this year, next year and onwards. And in fact, going back to the whole maintainer journey, now is a time there's even more pressure on them and companies as they manage their, you know, workforces and prioritization, they really need to remember they're building products off of open source. They are... This is open sources on which what their business realize, whether they're a vendor or end user and give maintainers a space time to work on what they need to work on. >> Yeah. They need a little work-life balance. I mean the self-care there, I can't even imagine the complexity of the decision matrix in their mind. Speaking of that, and obviously you... Culture must be a huge part of how you lead these teams. How do you approach that as leader? >> I think the number one... So the foundation is a very small set of staff, just so you know. >> Savannah: I was actually... Let's tell the audience, how many people are on the team? >> Priyanka: You know, it's actually a difficult question because we have folks who like spin up and down and we have matrix support from the Linux Foundation, but about 30 people in total are dedicated to CNCF at any given time. >> Savannah: Wow. >> But compared... >> Savannah: You all do hard work. >> Yes. >> Savannah: You're doing great. I am impressed. >> It's a flat organization. >> It's pretty flat. >> Seriously, it's beautiful. >> It's actually in some ways very similar to the projects and there the, you know, contribution communities there where it's like everyone kind of like steps up and does what needs to be done, which is wonderful and beautiful, but with the responsibility on our shoulders, it's definitely a balancing act. So first off, it is, I ask everyone to have some grace for the staff. They are in a startup land with no IPO on the other side of the rainbow. They're doing it because they love love, love this community and technology so much. >> John: Yeah. Yeah, and then also they're acknowledging that nobody in open source wants to see a bureaucracy. >> Priyanka: Right. >> I mean, everyone see lean, efficient. >> Savannah: Yeah, absolutely John. It's great. It's a great point. And and I think that it's just... It's amazing what passionate people can do if given the opportunity. Let's talk a little bit about the literal event that we're at right now. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> Theme today, building for the road ahead. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> What was the inspiration for that? >> Detroit. (group laughs) We're in Detroit, people drive here. >> Savannah: In case you didn't know, cars have been made in this city. >> Motor city. >> It's everywhere being here in this city, which is awesome. >> But you know, it did... There was of course a geographical element but it also aligns with where we're at, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're building for the road ahead, which frankly given the changes going on in the world is a bumpy road. So it's important to talk about it. And that's what the theme was. >> And how many folks have shown up... This is a totally different energy from Los Angeles last year. I'm sure we can both agree. Everyone was excited last year, but this is an order of magnitude. >> Yes. >> How many folks do you think are milling around? >> Yeah, it's much more than double of Los Angeles. We are close to 8,000. >> Savannah: That's amazing. And it's so... You're absolutely right. The energy is just... >> Savannah: Way up. >> It's so good. People are enjoying themselves. It's been lovely. >> That's great. So you're feeling good? You're riding the high? >> Congratulations. >> Awesome. >> Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm a little bit of a zombie right now. (group laughs) >> You don't look it, we wouldn't know. Nobody knows. They don't know. >> If you want to take a break, We got 12 interviews tomorrow. (Savannah and Priyanka laughing) You can co-host with us. We'd love to have you. >> Exactly. You're welcome anytime. Welcome anytime, Priyanka. >> Well thank you. But no, it's been such a wonderful show and you folks are part of the reason you say everybody here is contributing to the awesomeness. >> John: Yep. >> You're part of it. Look at your smiley faces. >> John: And Lisa Marty is over there. Lisa's over there. >> Yes! >> Say hi to Lisa and team. >> Yes, the team is awesome. >> Guys, thank you for your support for theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We enjoy it a lot. And we love the community. Thank you. >> Yes. Thank you for your support for CloudNative. >> Thank you. >> One last thing I just want to point out, because it's not always it happens in this industry. The women outnumber the men on this stage right now. >> John: Proud of that? >> And I know the diversity and inclusion is a priority for CNCF. >> Priyanka: Top priority. >> Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> Yes. It is something at the forefront of my mind, no matter what we do. And it's because I have such great role models. You know, when I was just a participant in the ecosystem, Dan Conn was leading the foundation and he took it so seriously to always try to uplift people from a diverse backgrounds and bring those faces into CloudNative. >> Savannah: Yes. >> And he made a serious lasting impact. >> John: Yes. >> And I am not going to let that go to waste. It's not going to be me who drops the ball. (group laughs) >> We're behind you all the way. >> Right? >> We see improvement over here. >> We got your back. >> I mean, even from an attendance perspective on stage I feel like you've done just an outstanding job with the curation and representation. I don't say that lightly. It really matters to me. But even in the audience looking around, it's so refreshing. Even it sounds silly. The shirts are more fitted. >> It's not silly. >> There's different types of shirts, and I mean, you know how it is. We've been in this industry long enough. >> It's a shirt you want to wear. >> Savannah: Exactly. And that's the whole point. I absolutely love it. Have we announced a location for KubeCon North America 2023, yet? >> It's Chicago. >> Savannah: Exciting! >> Yes. >> Savannah: All right. So we'll be seeing you >> Midwest. >> not that far away. >> This is the first time I've said this publicly, I just realized, It's Chicago, people. >> The scoop, yay! >> Oh, I feel so lucky we got to break the scoop. I was learning from John's lead there and I'm very excited. Amsterdam, Chicago. It's going to be absolutely >> I'll get my hotel now. >> Fantastic. >> Yes. >> Smart move. Everybody listen to him. >> Yeah, right? Especially after Detroit. It's actually not a... It's not a bad move. Priyanka, is there anything else you'd like to say to folks? Maybe they're thinking about coming or contributing to the ecosystem? >> Priyanka: Yes. Anyone and everyone can and should contribute and join us. The maintainers are holding us all up. Let's rally to support them. We have more and more programs to do that. As you know, we did ContribFest here this week which was the first time. So we will help you get involved so you're not on your own. So that's my number one message, which is anyone and everyone, you're welcome here. We'll make sure you have a good time. So just come. >> Okay. Please do it. >> I can tell you that Priyanka is not blowing smoke. I feel very welcome here. This community has welcomed me as a non-technical, so I think you're absolutely preaching the truth. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us today on the show, for helping herd the cats and wrangle the brilliant minds that make CNCF possible. And honestly for just bringing your energy and joy to the entire experience. John, thank you for hanging out with me. >> I'm glad I can contribute in a small way. >> I was going to say... I was going to say thank you for founding theCUBE so that we could be here in this little marriage and collaboration can be possible. And thank all of you for tuning in to theCUBE here, live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. I am thrilled to be sharing this content with you today and I hope to see you for the rest of our interviews this afternoon. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Good morning and welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm here on set of the cube, my co-host John Farer. How you doing this morning, John? >>Doing great. Feeling fresh. Day two of three days of coverage, feeling >>Fresh. That is that for being in the heat of the conference. I love that attitude. It's gonna >>Be a great day today. We'll see you at the end of the day. Yeah, >>Well, we'll hold him to it. All right, everyone hold 'em accountable. Very excited to start the day off with an internet, a legend as well as a cube og. We are joined this morning by Matt Klein. Matt, welcome to the show. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Yep. >>It's so, what's the vibe? Day two, Everyone's buzzing. What's got you excited at the show? You've been here before, but it's been three years you >>Mentioned. I, I was saying it's been three years since I've been to a conference, so it's been interesting for me to see what is, what is the same and what is different pre and post covid. But just really great to see everyone here again and nice to not be sitting in my home by myself. >>You know, Savannah said you're an OG and we were referring before we came on camera that you were your first came on the Cub in 2017, second Cuban event. But you were, I think, on the first wave of what I call the contributor momentum, where CNCF really got the traction. Yeah. You were at Lift, Envoy was contributed and that was really hyped up and I remember that vividly. It was day zero they called it back then. Yeah. And you got so much traction. People are totally into it. Yeah. Now we've got a lot of that going on now. Right. A lot of, lot of day Zero events. They call 'em co, co-located events. You got web assembly, a lot of other hype out there. What do you see out there that you like? How would you look at some of these other Sure. Communities that are developing, What's the landscape look like as you look out? Because Envoy set the table, what is now a standard >>Practice. Yeah. What's been so interesting for me just to come here to the conference is, you know, we open source Envoy in 2016. We donated in 2017. And as you mentioned at that time, Envoy was, you know, everyone wanted to talk about Envoy. And you know, much to my amazement, Envoy is now pervasive. I mean, it's used everywhere around the world. It's like, never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that it would be so widely used. And it's almost gotten to the point where it's become boring. You know, It's just assumed that Envoy is, is everywhere. And now we're hearing a lot about Eeb p f and Web assembly and GI ops and you know, AI and a bunch of other things. So it's, it's actually great. It's made me very happy that it's become so pervasive, but it's also fun. Yeah. We mention to, to look around all other stuff >>Like congratulate. It's just a huge accomplishment really. I think it's gonna be historic, historical moment for the industry too. But I like how it progressed. I mean, I don't mind hype cycles as long as it's some vetting. Sure. Of course. You know, use cases that are clearly defined, but you gotta get that momentum in the community, but then you start gotta get down to, to business. Yep. So, so to speak and get it deployed, get traction. Yep. What should projects look like? And, and give us the update on Envoy. Cause you guys have a, a great use case of how you got traction. Right. Take us through some of the early days of what made Envoy successful in your opinion. Great question. >>Yeah. You know, I, I think Envoy is fairly unique around this conference in the sense that Envoy was developed by Lyft, which is an end user company. And many of the projects in this ecosystem, you know, no judgment, for better or worse, they are vendor backed. And I think that's a different delivery mechanism when it's coming from an end user where you're solving a, a particular business case. So Envoy was really developed for Lyft in a, you know, very early scaling days and just, you know, trying to help Lyft solve its business problems. So I think when Envoy was developed, we were, you know, scaling, we were falling over and actually many other companies were having similar problems. So I think Envoy became very widely deployed because many companies were having similar issues. So Envoy just became pervasive among lift peer companies. And then we saw a lot of vendor uptake in the service mesh space in the API gateway space among large internet providers. So, I I I, I think it's just, it's an interesting case because I think when you're solving real problems on the ground, in some ways it's easier to actually get adoption than if you're trying to develop it from a commercial backing. >>And that's the class, I mean, almost, It's almost like open source product market fit. It is in its own way. Cause you have a problem. Absolutely. Other people have the same problem finding >>Too. I mean, it's, it's designed thinking from >>A different, When, when I talk to people about open source, I like to tell people that I do not think it's any different than starting a company. I actually think it's all the same problems finding pro product, market fit, hiring, like finding contributors and maintainers, like doing PR and marketing. Yeah. Getting team together, traction, getting, getting funding. I mean, you have to have money to do all these things. Yeah. So I think a lot of people think of open source as I, I don't know, you know, this fantastic collaborative effort and, and it is that, but there's a lot more to it. Yeah. And it is much more akin to starting a >>Company. Let's, let's just look at that for a second. Cause I think that's a good point. And I was having a conversation in the hallway two nights ago on this exact point. If the power dynamics of a startup in the open source, as you point out, is just different, it's community based. So there are things you just gotta be mindful of. It's not top down. >>Exactly. It's not like, >>Right. You know, go take that hill. It's really consensus based, but it is a startup. All those elements are in place. Absolutely. You need leadership, you gotta have debates, alignment, commit, You gotta commit to a vision. Yep. You gotta make adjustments. Build the trajectory. So based on that, I mean, do you see more end user traction? Cause I was, we were talking also about Intuit, they donated some of their tow code R goes out there. Yep. R go see the CDR goes a service. Where's the end user contributions to these days? Do you feel like it's good, still healthy? >>I, I mean, I, I'm, I'm biased. I would like to see more. I think backstage outta Spotify is absolutely fantastic. That's an area just in terms of developer portals and developer efficiency that I think has been very underserved. So seeing Backstage come outta Spotify where they've used it for years, and I think we've already seen they had a huge date, you know, day one event. And I, I think we're gonna see a lot more out of that >>Coming from, I'm an end user, pretend I'm an end user, so pretend I have some code. I want to, Oh man, I'm scared. I don't am I'm gonna lose my competitive edge. What's the, how do you talk to the enterprise out there that might be thinking about putting their project out there for whether it's the benefit of the community, developing talent, developing the product? >>Sure. Yeah. I would say that I, I would ask everyone to think through all of the pros and cons of doing that because it's not for free. I mean, doing open source is costly. It takes developer time, you know, it takes management time, it takes budgeting dollars. But the benefits if successful can be huge, right? I mean, it can be just in terms of, you know, getting people into your company, getting users, getting more features, all of that. So I would always encourage everyone to take a very pragmatic and realistic view of, of what is required to make that happen. >>What was that decision like at Lyft >>When you I I'm gonna be honest, it was very naive. I I think we've, of that we think we need to know. No, just didn't know. Yeah. I think a lot of us, myself included, had very minimal open source experience. And had we known, or had I known what would've happened, I, I still would've done it. But I, I'm gonna be honest, the last seven years have aged me what I feel like is like 70 or a hundred. It's been a >>But you say you look out in the landscape, you gotta take pride, look at what's happened. Oh, it's, I mean, it's like you said, it >>Matured fantastic. I would not trade it for anything, but it has, it has been a journey. What >>Was the biggest surprise? What was the most eye opening thing about the journey for you? >>I, I think actually just the recognition of all of the non-technical things that go into making these things a success. I think at a conference like this, people think a lot about technology. It is a technology conference, but open source is business. It really is. I mean, it, it takes money to keep it going. It takes people to keep >>It going. You gotta sell people on the concepts. >>It takes leadership to keep it going. It takes internal, it takes marketing. Yeah. So for me, what was most eyeopening is over the last five to seven years, I feel like I actually have not developed very many, if any technical skills. But my general leadership skills, you know, that would be applicable again, to running a business have applied so well to, to >>Growing off, Hey, you put it out there, you hear driving the ship. It's good to do that. They need that. It really needs it. And the results speak for itself and congratulations. Yeah. Thank you. What's the update on the project? Give us an update because you're seeing, seeing a lot of infrastructure people having the same problem. Sure. But it's also, the environments are a little bit different. Some people have different architectures. Absolutely different, more cloud, less cloud edges exploding. Yeah. Where does Envoy fit into the landscape they've seen and what's the updates? You've got some new things going on. Give the updates on what's going on with the project Sure. And then how it sits in the ecosystem vis-a-vis what people may use it for. >>Yeah. So I'm, from a core project perspective, honestly, things have matured. Things have stabilized a bit. So a lot of what we focus on now are less Big bang features, but more table stakes. We spend a lot of time on security. We spend a lot of time on software supply chain. A topic that you're probably hearing a lot about at this conference. We have a lot of software supply chain issues. We have shipped Quicken HTB three over the last year. That's generally available. That's a new internet protocol still work happening on web assembly where ha doing a lot of work on our build and release pipeline. Again, you would think that's boring. Yeah. But a lot of people want, you know, packages for their fedora or their ADU or their Docker images. And that takes a lot of effort. So a lot of what we're doing now is more table stakes, just realizing that the project is used around the world very widely. >>Yeah. The thing that I'm most interested in is, we announced in the last six months a project called Envoy Gateway, which is layered on top of Envoy. And the goal of Envoy Gateway is to make it easier for people to run Envoy within Kubernetes. So essentially as an, as an ingress controller. And Envoy is a project historically, it is a very sophisticated piece of software, very complicated piece of software. It's not for everyone. And we want to provide Envoy Gateway as a way of onboarding more users into the Envoy ecosystem and making Envoy the, the default API gateway or edge proxy within Kubernetes. But in terms of use cases, we see Envoy pervasively with service mesh, API gateway, other types of low balancing cases. I mean, honestly, it's, it's all over the place at >>This point. I'm curious because you mentioned it's expanded beyond your wildest dreams. Yeah. And how could you have even imagined what Envoy was gonna do? Is there a use case or an application that really surprised you? >>You know, I've been asked that before and I, it's hard for me to answer that. It's, it's more that, I mean, for example, Envoy is used by basically every major internet company in China. I mean, like, wow. Everyone in China uses Envoy, like TikTok, like Alibaba. I mean like everyone, all >>The large sale, >>Everyone. You know, and it's used, it's used in the, I'm just, it's not just even the us. So I, I think the thing that has surprised me more than individual use cases is just the, the worldwide adoption. You know, that something could be be everywhere. And that I think, you know, when I open my phone and I'm opening all of these apps on my phone, 80 or 90% of them are going through Envoy in some form. Yeah. You know, it's, it's just that pervasive, I blow your mind a little bit sometimes >>That does, that's why you say plumber on your Twitter handle as your title. Cause you're working on all these things that are like really important substrate issues, Right. For scale, stability, growth. >>And, you know, to, I, I guess the only thing that I would add is, my goal for Envoy has always been that it is that boring, transparent piece of technology. Kind of similar to Linux. Linux is everywhere. Right? But no one really knows that they're using Linux. It's, it's justs like Intel inside, we're not paying attention. It's just there, there's >>A core group working on, if they have pride, they understand the mission, the importance of it, and they make their job is to make it invisible. >>Right. Exactly. >>And that's really ease of use. What's some of the ease of use sways and, and simplicity that you're working on, if you can talk about that. Because to be boring, you gotta be simpler and easier. All boring complex is unique is not boring. Complex is stressful. No, >>I I think we approach it in a couple different ways. One of them is that because we view Envoy as a, as a base technology in the ecosystem, we're starting to see, you know, not only vendors, but other open source projects that are being built on top of Envoy. So things like API Gateway, sorry, Envoy Gateway or you know, projects like Istio or all the other projects that are out there. They use Envoy as a component, but in some sense Envoy is a, as a transparent piece of that system. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in the ecosystem that we need to continue to make cloud native easier for, for end users. I still think it's too complicated. And so I think we're there, we're, we're pushing up the stack a bit. >>Yeah. And that brings up a good point. When you start seeing people building on top of things, right? That's enabling. So as you look at the enablement of Envoy, what are some of the things you see out on the horizon if you got the 20 mile stare out as you check these boring boxes, make it more plumbing, Right? Stable. You'll have a disruptive enabling platform. Yeah. What do you see out there? >>I am, you know, I, again, I'm not a big buzzword person, but, so some people call it serverless functions as a service, whatever. I'm a big believer in platforms in the sense that I really believe in the next 10 to 15 years, developers, they want to provide code. You know, they want to call APIs, they want to use pub subsystems, they want to use cas and databases. And honestly, they don't care about container scheduling or networking or load balancing or any of >>These things. It's handled in the os >>They just want it to be part of the operating system. Yeah, exactly. So I, I really believe that whether it's an open source or in cloud provider, you know, package solutions, that we're going to be just moving increasingly towards systems likes Lambda and Fargate and Google Cloud Run and Azure functions and all those kinds of things. And I think that when you do that much of the functionality that has historically powered this conference like Kubernetes and Onvoy, these become critical but transparent components that people don't, they're not really aware of >>At that point. Yeah. And I think that's a great call out because one of the things we're seeing is the market forces of, of this evolution, what you just said is what has to happen Yep. For digital transformation to, to get to its conclusion. Yep. Which means that everything doesn't have to serve the business, it is the business. Right. You know it in the old days. Yep. Engineers, they serve the business. Like what does that even mean? Yep. Now, right. Developers are the business, so they need that coding environment. So for your statement to happen, that simplicity in visibility calling is invisible os has to happen. So it brings up the question in open source, the trend is things always work itself out on the wash, as we say. So when you start having these debates and the alignment has to come at some point, you can't get to those that stay without some sort of defacto or consensus. Yep. And even standards, I'm not a big be around hardcore standards, but we can all agree and have consensus Sure. That will align behind, say Kubernetes, It's Kubernetes a standard. It's not like an i e you know, but this next, what, what's your reaction to this? Because this alignment has to come after debate. So all the process contending for I am the this of that. >>Yeah. I'm a look, I mean, I totally see the value in like i e e standards and, and there's a place for that. At the same time, for me personally as a technologist, as an engineer, I prefer to let the, the market as it were sort out what are the defacto standards. So for example, at least with Envoy, Envoy has an API that we call Xds. Xds is now used beyond Envoy. It's used by gc, it's used by proprietary systems. And I'm a big believer that actually Envoy in its form is probably gonna go away before Xds goes away. So in some ways Xds has become a defacto standard. It's not an i e e standard. Yeah. We, we, we have been asked about whether we should do that. Yeah. But I just, I I think the >>It becomes a component. >>It becomes a component. Yeah. And then I think people gravitate towards these things that become de facto standards. And I guess I would rather let the people on the show floor decide what are the standards than have, you know, 10 people sitting in a room figure out >>The community define standards versus organizational institutional defined standards. >>And they both have places a >>Hundred percent. Yeah, sure. And, and there's social proof in both of them. Yep. >>Frankly, >>And we were saying on the cube that we believe that the developers will decide the standard. Sure. Because that's what you're basically saying. They're deciding what they do with their code. Right. And over time, as people realize the trade of, hey, if everyone's coding this right. And makes my life easier to get to that state of nirvana and enlightenment, as we would say. Yeah. Yeah. >>Starting strong this morning. John, I I love this. I'm curious, you mentioned Backstage by Spotify wonderful example. Do you think that this is a trend we're gonna see with more end users >>Creating open source projects? Like I, you know, I hope so. The flip side of that, and as we all know, we're entering an uncertain economic time and it can be hard to justify the effort that it takes to do it well. And what I typically counsel people when they are about to open source something is don't do it unless you're ready to commit the resources. Because opensourcing something and not supporting it. Yeah. I actually can be think, I think it'd be worse. >>It's an, it's insult that people, you're asking to commit to something. Exactly. Needs of time, need the money investment, you gotta go all in and push. >>So I, so I very much want to see it and, and I want to encourage that here, but it's hard for me to look into the crystal ball and know, you know, whether it's gonna happen more >>Or less at what point there were, are there too many projects? You know, I mean, but I'm not, I mean this in, in a, in a negative way. I mean it more in the way of, you know, you mentioned supply chain. We were riffing on the cube about at some point there's gonna be so much code open source continuing thundering away with, with the value that you're just gluing things. Right. I don't need the code, this code there. Okay. What's in the code? Okay. Maybe automation can help out on supply chain. Yeah. But ultimately composability is the new >>Right? It is. Yeah. And, and I think that's always going to be the case. Case. Good thing. It is good thing. And I, I think that's just, that's just the way of things for sure. >>So no code will be, >>I think, I think we're seeing a lot of no code situations that are working great for people. And, and, but this is actually really no different than my, than my serverless arguing from before. Just as a, as a, a slight digression. I'm building something new right now and you know, we're using cloud native technologies and all this stuff and it's still, >>What are you building? >>Even as a I'm, I'm gonna keep that, I'm gonna keep that secret. I know I'm, but >>We'll find out on Twitter. We're gonna find out now that we know it. Okay. Keep on mystery. You open that door. We're going down see in a couple weeks. >>Front >>Page is still an angle. >>But I, I was just gonna say that, you know, and I consider myself, you know, you're building something, I'm, I see myself an expert in the cloud native space. It's still difficult, It's difficult to, to pull together these technologies and I think that we will continue to make it easier for people. >>What's the biggest difficulties? Can you give us some examples? >>Well, just, I mean, we still live in a big mess of yammel, right? Is a, there's a, there's a lot of yaml out there. And I think just wrangling all of that in these systems, there's still a lot of cobbling together where I think that there can be unified platforms that make it easier for us to focus on our application logic. >>Yeah. I gotta ask you a question cuz I've talked to college kids all the time. My son's a junior in CS and he's, you know, he's coding away. What would you, how does a student or someone who's learning figure out where, who they are? Because there's now, you know, you're either into the infrastructure under the hood Yeah. Or you're, cuz that's coding there option now coding the way your infrastructure people are working on say the boring stuff so everyone else can have ease of use. And then what is just, I wanna just code, there's two types of personas. How does someone know who they are? >>My, when I give people career advice, my biggest piece of advice to them is in the first five to seven to 10 years of their career, I encourage people to do different things like every say one to two to three years. And that doesn't mean like quitting companies and changing companies, it could mean, you know, within a company that they join doing different teams, you know, working on front end versus back end. Because honestly I think people don't know. I think it's actually very, Yeah. Our industry is so broad. Yeah. That I think it's almost impossible to >>Know. You gotta get your hands dirty to jump >>In order to know what you like. And for me, in my career, you know, I've dabbled in different areas, but I've always come back to infrastructure, you know, that that's what I enjoy >>The most. Okay. You gotta, you gotta taste everything. See what you, what >>You like. Exactly. >>Right. Last question for you, Matt. It's been three years since you were here. Yep. What do you hope that we're able to say next year? That we can't say this year? Hmm. Beyond the secrets of your project, which hopefully we will definitely be discussing then. >>You know, I I, I don't have anything in particular. I would just say that I would like to see more movement towards projects that are synthesizing and making it easier to use a lot of the existing projects that we have today. So for example, I'm, I'm very bullish on backstage. Like I, I've, I've always said that we need better developer UIs that are not CLIs. Like I know it's a general perception among many people. Totally agree with you. Frankly, you're not a real systems engineer unless you type on the command line. I, I think better user interfaces are better for humans. Yep. So just for a project like Backstage to be more integrated with the rest of the projects, whether that be Envo or Kubernete or Argo or Flagger. I, I just, I think there's tremendous potential for further integration of some >>Of these projects. It just composability That makes total sense. Yep. Yep. You're, you're op you're operating and composing. >>Yep. And there's no reason that user experience can't be better. And then more people can create and build. So I think it's awesome. Matt, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, this has been fantastic. Be sure and check out Matt on Twitter to find out what that next secret project is. John, thank you for joining me this morning. My name is Savannah Peterson and we'll be here all day live from the cube. We hope you'll be joining us throughout the evening until a happy hour today. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE here live in Detroit for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our seventh consecutive KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Since inception, theCube's been there every year. And of course, theCUBE continues to grow. So does the community as well as our host roster. I'm here with my co-host, Lisa Martin. Lisa, great to see you. And our new theCube host, Savannah Peterson. Savannah, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. >> Welcome. >> Welcome to the team. >> Thanks, team. It's so wonderful to be here. I met you all last KubeCon and to be sitting on this stage in your company is honestly an honor. >> Well, great to have you. Lisa and I have done a lot of shows together and it's great to have more cadence around. You know, more fluid around the content, and also the people. And I would like you to take a minute to tell people your background. You know the community here. What's the roots? You know the Cloud Native world pretty well. >> I know it as well as someone my age can. As we know, the tools and the tech is always changing. So hello, everyone. I'm Savannah Peterson. You can find me on the internet @SavIsSavvy. Would love to hear from you during the show. Big fan of this space and very passionate about DevOps. I've been working in the Silicon Valley and the Silicon Alley for a long time, helping companies scale internationally as a community builder as well as a international public speaker. And honestly, this is just such a fun evolution for my career and I'm grateful to be here with you both. >> We're looking forward to having you on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Lisa? >> Yes. >> KubeCon. Amazing again this year. Just keeps growing bigger and bigger. >> Yes. >> Keynote review, you were in there. >> Yup. >> I had a chance to peek in a little bit, but you were there and got most of the news. What was the action? >> You know, the action was really a big focus around the maintainers, what they're doing, giving them the props and the kudos and the support that they deserve. Not just physically, but mentally as well. That was a really big focus. It was also a big focus on mentoring and really encouraging more people- >> Love that. >> I did, too. I thought that was fantastic to get involved to help others. And then they showed some folks that had great experiences, really kind of growing up within the community. Probably half of the keynote focus this morning was on that. And then looking at some of the other projects that have graduated from CNCF, some of these successful projects, what they're doing, what folks are doing. Cruise, one of the ones that was featured. You've probably seen their driverless cars around San Francisco. So it was great to see that, the successes that they've had and where that's going. >> Yeah. Lisa, we've done how many shows? Hundreds of shows together. When you see a show like this grow and continue to mature, what's your observation? You've seen many shows we've hosted together. What jumps out this year? Is it just that level of maturization? What's your take on this? >> The maturization of the community and the collaboration of the community. I think those two things jumped out at me even more than last year. Last year, obviously a little bit smaller event in North America. It was Los Angeles. This year you got a much stronger sense of the community, the support that they have for each other. There were a lot of standing ovations particularly when the community came out and talked about what they were doing in Ukraine to support fellow community members in Ukraine and also to support other Ukrainians in terms of getting in to tech. Lot of standing ovations. Lot of- >> Savannah: Love that, yeah. >> Real authenticity around the community. >> Yeah, Savannah, we talked on our intro prior to the event about how inclusive this community is. They are really all in on inclusivity. And the Ukraine highlight, this community is together and they're open. They're open to everybody. >> Absolutely. >> And they're also focused on growing the educational knowledge. >> Yeah, I think there's a real celebration of curiosity within this community that we don't find in certain other sectors. And we saw it at dinner last night. I mean, I was struck just like you Lisa walking in today. The energy in that room is palpably different from last year. I saw on Twitter this morning, people are very excited. Many people, their first KubeCon. And I'm sure we're going to be feeding off of that, that kind of energy and that... Just a general enthusiasm and excitement to be here in Detroit all week. It's a treat. >> Yeah, I even saw Stu Miniman earlier, former theCube host. He's at Red Hat. We were talking on the way in and he made an observation I thought was interesting I'll bring up because this show, it's a lot "What is this show? What isn't this show?" And I think this show is about developers. What it isn't is not a business show. It's not about business. It's not about industry kind of posturing or marketing. All the heavy hitters on the dev side are here and you don't see the big execs. I mean, you got the CEOs of startups here but not the CEOs of the big public companies. We see the doers. So, I mean, I think my take is this show's about creating products for builders and creating products that people can consume. And I think that is the Cloud Native lanes that are starting to form. You're either creating something for builders to build stuff with or you're creating stuff that could be consumed. And that seems for applications. So the whole app side and services seem to be huge. >> They also did a great job this morning of showcasing some of the big companies that we all know and love. Spotify. Obviously, I don't think a day goes by where I don't turn on Spotify. And what it's done- >> Me neither. >> What it's done for the community... Same with Intuit, I'm a user of both. Intuit was given an End User Award this morning during the keynote for their contributions, what they're doing. But it was nice to see some just everyday companies, Cloud Native companies that we all know and love, and to understand their contributions to the community and how those contributions are affecting all of us as end users. >> Yeah, and I think those companies like Intuit... Argo's been popular, Arlo now new, seeing those services, and even enterprises are contributing. You know, Lyft is always here, popular with Envoy. The community isn't just vendors and that's the interesting thing. >> I think that's why it works. To me, this event is really about the celebration of developer relations. I mean, every DevRel from every single one of these companies is here. Like you said, in lieu of the executive, that's essentially who we're attracting. And if you look out over the show floor here, I mean, we've probably got, I don't know, three to four extra vendors that we had last year. It totally is a different tone. This community doesn't like to be sold to. This community likes to be collaborative. They like to learn and they like to help. And I think we see that within the ecosystem inside the room today. >> It's not a top down sales pitch. It's really consensus. >> No. >> Do it out in the open transparency. Don't sell me stuff. And I think the other thing I like about this community is that we're starting to see that... And then we've said this in theCube before. We'll say it again. Maybe be more controversial. Digital transformation is about the developer, right? And I think the power is going to shift in every company to the developer because if you take digital transformation to completion, everything happens the way it's happening, the company is the application. It's not IT who serves the organization- >> I love thinking about it like that. That's a great point, John. >> The old phase was IT was a department that served the business. Well, the business is IT now. So that means developer community is going to grow like crazy and they're going to be in the front lines driving all the change. In my opinion, you going to see this developer community grow like crazy and then the business side on industry will match up with that. I think that's what's going to happen. >> So, the developers are becoming the influencers? >> Developers are the power source for all companies. They're in charge. They're going to dictate terms to how businesses will run because that's going to be natural 'cause digital transformation's about the app and the business is the app. So that mean it has to be coded. So I think you're going to see a lot of innovation around app server-like experiences where the the apps are just being developed faster than the infrastructures enabling that completely invisible. And I think you're going to see this kind of architecture-less, I'll put it out there that term architecture-less, environment where you don't need an architecture. It's just you code away. >> Yeah, yeah. We saw GitHub's mentioned in the keynote this morning. And I mean, low code, no code. I think your fingers right on the pulse there. >> Yeah. What did you guys see? Anything else you see? >> I think just the overall... To your point, Savannah, the energy. Definitely higher than last year. When I saw those standing ovations, people really come in together around the sense of community and what they've accomplished especially in the last two plus years of being remote. They did a great job of involving a lot of folks, some of whom are going to be on the program with us this week that did remote parts of the keynote. One of our guests on today from Vitess was talking about the successes and the graduation of their program so that the sense of community, but also not just the sense of it, the actual demonstration of it was also quite palpable this morning, and I think that's something that I'm excited for us to hear about with our guests on the program this week. >> Yeah, and I think the big story coming out so far as the show starts is the developers are in charge. They're going to set the pace for all the ops, data ops, security ops, all operations. And then the co-located events that were held Monday and Tuesday prior to kickoff today. You saw WebAssembly's come out of the woodwork as it got a lot of attention. Two startups got funded heavily on Series A. You're starting to see that project really work well. That's going to be an additional to the container market. So, interesting to see how Docker reacts to that. Red Hat's doing great. ServiceMeshCon was phenomenal. I saw Solo.iOS got massive traction with those guys. So like Service Mesh, WebAssembly, you can start to see the dots connecting. You're starting to see this layer below Kubernetes and then a layer above Kubernetes developing. So I think it's going to be great for applications and great for the infrastructure. I think we'll see how it comes out and all these companies we have on here are all about faster, more integrated, some very, very interesting to see. So far, so good. >> You guys talked about in your highlight session last week or so. Excited to hear about the end users, the customer stories. That's what I'm interested in understanding as well. It's why it resonates with me when I see brands that I recognize. Well, I use it every day. How are they using containers and Kubernetes? How are they actually not just using it to deploy their app, their technologies, that we all expect are going to be up 24/7, but how are they also contributing to the development of it? So I'm really excited to hear those end users. >> We're going to have Lockheed Martin. And we wrote a story on SiliconANGLE, the Red Hat, Lockheed Martin, real innovation on the edge. You're starting to see educate with the edge. It's really the industrial edge coming to be big. It'd be very interesting to see. >> Absolutely, we got Ford Motor Company coming on as well. I always loved stories, Savannah, that are history of companies. Ford's been around since 1903. How is a company that- >> Well, we're in the home of Ford- as well here. >> We are. How they evolved digitally? What are they doing to enable the developers to be those influencers that John says? It's going to be them. >> They're a great example of a company that's always been on the forefront, too. I mean, they had a head of VRs 25 years ago when most people didn't even know what VR was going to stand for. So, I can't wait for that one. You tease the Docker interview coming up very well, John. I'm excited for that one. One last thing I want to bring up that I think is really refreshing and it's reflected right here on this stage is you talked about the inclusion. I think there's a real commitment to diversity here. You can see the diversity stats on CNCF's website. It's right there on KubeCon. At the bottom, there's a link in every email I've gotten highlighting that. We've got two women on this stage all week which is very exciting. And the opening keynote was a woman. So quite frankly, I am happy as a female in this industry to see a bit more representation. And I do appreciate just on the note of being inclusive, it's not just about gender or age, it's also about the way that CNCF thinks about your experience since we're in this kind of pandemic transitional period. They've got little pins. Last year, we had bracelets depending on your level of comfort. Equivocally like a stoplight which is... I just think it's really nice and sensitive and that attention to detail makes people feel comfortable. Which is why we have the community energy that we have. >> Yeah, and being 12 years in the business... With theCUBE, we've been 12 years in the business, seven years with KubeCon and Cloud Native, I really appreciate the Linux Foundation including me as I get older. (Lisa and Savannah laugh) >> Savannah: That's a good point. >> Ageism were, "Hey!" Thank you. >> There was a lot of representation. You talked about females and so often we go to shows and there's very few females. Some companies are excellent at it. But from an optics perspective, to me it stands out. There was great representation across. There was disabled people on stage, people of color, women, men of all ages. It was very well-orchestrated. >> On the demographic- >> And sincere. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And the demographics, too. On the age side, it's lower too. You're starting to see younger... I mean, high school, college representation. I saw a lot of college students last night. I saw on the agenda sessions targeting universities. I mean, I'm telling you this is reaching down. Open source now is so great. It's growing so fast. It's continuing to thunder away. And with success, it's just getting better and better. In fact, we were talking last night about at some point we might not have to write code. Just glue it together. And that's why I think the supply chain and security thing is an issue. But this is why it's so great. Anyone can code and I think there's a lot of learning to have. So, I think we'll continue to do our job to extract the signal from the noise. So, thanks for the kickoff. Good commentary. Thank you. All right. >> Of course. >> Let's get started. Day one of three days of live coverage here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin, and Savannah Peterson. Be back with more coverage starting right now. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone, to the special presentation of Cloud Native at scale, the Cube and Platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of Platform nine. Thank >>You very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization. Right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, Bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly, Yes. >>And so as infrastructure, as code comes in, we talked to Bacar, talking about Super Cloud. I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon. Connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it. Everybody or most people know about infrastructures code, but with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D. Instead, with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. Yeah, >>Yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integrations, configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you've got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. That's, >>I wrote a LinkedIn post today, it was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we tried to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into our line in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community invite in two where they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection to the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a serviced layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd want to have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which we will be covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced Arlon at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why arlon, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, >>And what's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened to need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I wanna run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. >>That's right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Arlon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, >>So essentially standard like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, deploy it. Now what there between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things got controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on it's super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge re's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring it's saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale mean? >>Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot. Rogue got Coan coming up and obviously this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time, there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cub cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, >>Well maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed, but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them, obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform now you's been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud a Rod team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Open Stack was an example where the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will, a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the, the, the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah. I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart Yeah. On this segment, what is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a, a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you Yeah, I would you describe that when people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. Yeah. >>And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year. And, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud Native at scale? >>The the hyper square? >>Yeah. Yeah. Abras, Azure, Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, They, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep Well, >>They got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems and the >>Platforms. Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh, the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware. And he kinda over, well he kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, Cloud native develop for developers. And John Feer with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up.

(uplifting music) >> Hello and welcome to The Cube, here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud-native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or SuperCloud for modern application cloud-native developers. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. My pleasure to have here Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and VP of Product at Platform9. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud-native at scale conversation. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, cloud-native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native developers, basically DevOps in the CICD pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the SuperCloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on SuperCloud as it fits to cloud-native as scales up? >> Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why SuperCloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud-native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where, instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right, where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private, on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think SuperCloud is an appropriate term for that. >> So, you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. What even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IOT, OT and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share, because you got to have edge. So, hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> But across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the SuperCloud or across multiple edges and regions? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think, you know, in the context of this, this term of SuperCloud, I think, it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axes, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then, on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axes you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it. Right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when your scale is not at the level. >> Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We're seeing cloud-native becomes successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because about at scale, >> Madhura: Yeah. >> Challenges here. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I like to call it, you know, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one problem, one way to think about it is you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right. Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, it's not working. And the exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right. Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right. And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster right. But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you got to make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So, I think that's another example of problems that occur. >> Okay. So, I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say, it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, okay, we got this, we configure it. And then, they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you got to scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about start expanding. I think, one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with P zeros and P ones from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage. Right. And so, in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. And so, as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like (indistinct) hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. >> So, this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >> Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what Arlon is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for a complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So, what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >> So, what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the bumper sticker? >> Yeah. >> What would it do? >> There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that assembly line brings, right? Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot, and it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well-structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like deliver the pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those. >> So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, CICD, pipelining. >> Madhura: Exactly. >> So, that's what you're trying to simplify that OPS piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really OPS, it's their OPS, it's coding. >> Yeah. Not just developer, the OPS, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middle layer of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability is integrated. And so, it solves problems for both those teams. >> Yeah, it's DevOps. So, the DevOps is the cloud-needed developer. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >> Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because you know, Kubernetes clusters are, or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source, well-known solutions. >> And, I want get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer, developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there, Platform9, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial. Can you explain the open-source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? >> Madhura: Yeah. >> And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, people want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but you know, maybe want to buy the commercial. So, I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share? >> Madhura: Yeah. >> Open source and commercial relationship. >> Yeah. I think, you know, starting with why open source, I think, it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open-source technologies components, and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open-source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that, we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with Fission, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why open source and also open source because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind a block box. >> Well, and that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with SuperCloud is the new model of consumption is I want to look at the code and see what's in there. >> Madhura: That's right. >> And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I want to move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way is, well, but that's the benefit of open source. This is why standards and open source growing so fast, you have that confluence of, you know, a way for us to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian (indistinct) uses the dating metaphor, you know, hey, you know, I want to check it out first before I get married. >> Madhura: Right. >> And that's what open source. So, this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think in, you know, two things, I think one is just, you know, this cloud-native space is so vast that if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprise's use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so. Right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a Saas-hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open-source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production environment. >> I have to ask you. Now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlon? What's in it for me? You know. 'Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlon? I'm a customer. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public cloud-native Kubernetes, and then, we have our CICD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then, there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can, your CICD pipelines can deploy the apps, somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah, you know, properly configuring them. And as these things start by being done hand grown. And then, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their homegrown DIY solutions for this. I mean, a number of folks that I talk to that have built Terraform automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So, it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course, technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think, (indistinct) would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on EKS Amazon, and we want to scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the ability to, >> Yeah, I think, people are scared. I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And I think, this is going to come up at (indistinct) this year where enterprises are going to say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I want to see track record, I want to see other companies that have used it. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> How would you answer that question to, or challenge, you know, hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLA, I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, two parts to that, right? One is Arlon leverages existing open-source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlon uses ArgoCD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open-source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Arlon also makes use of cluster API (indistinct), which is a Kubernetes' sub-component, right? For life cycle management of clusters. So, there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or open-source projects that will find Arlon to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with ArgoCD. Now, Arlon just extends the scope of what ArgoCD can do. And so, that's one. And then, the second part is going back to your point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arlon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your (indistinct) test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. >> And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform9 customers with, that are familiar with Argo and then Arlon? What's been some of the feedback? >> Yeah, I think, the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlon, and we talk about the fact that it uses ArgoCD they start opening up, they say, we have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So, we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlon before we even wrote a single line of code saying, this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, if you had it today, I would've purchased it. So, it's been really great validation. >> All right. So, next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, look at, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap, I don't need another project that's so I'm so tied up right now, and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform9 help me? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenants of Platform9 has always been that, we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS-hosted manner for our customers, right? So, our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so, from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlon will integrate with what they have, so, they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today, and, you know, give you an inventory. And then, >> So, customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign, >> Correct. >> Call you guys. >> Absolutely. Either they have massive large clusters. Right. That they want to split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now, they have management challenges. >> So, especially, operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure >> Madhura: Yeah. >> And or scale out. >> That's right. Exactly. >> And you provide that layer of policy. >> Absolutely. Yes. >> That's the key value here. >> That's right. >> So, policy-based configuration for cluster scale up. >> Profile and policy-based, declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >> If I asked you how this enables SuperCloud, what would you say to that? >> I think, this is one of the key ingredients to SuperCloud, right? If you think about a SuperCloud environment, there is at least few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life-saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale. You know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way. So, that Arlon solves, then you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are going to happen and you're going to have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And Arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then, especially if you're running at on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make SuperCloud successful. And you know, Arlon flows in one, >> Okay, so now, the next level is, okay, that makes sense. It's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. >> Madhura: Yeah. >> How does that impact the app developers of the cloud-native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems the apps are going to be impacted. Are they going to be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact, if you do all those things as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >> Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my OPS counterpart to do their part, right? And so, this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >> So, this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full-stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlon solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are going to be (indistinct), they're designed to do, the question is, what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer, >> Madhura: Yeah. >> That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlon, Argo, and on all the other goodness to automate, what does some of the signals, is it downtime? Is it failed apps, is it latency? What are some of the things that, >> Madhura: Yeah, absolutely. >> Would be indications of things are F'ed up a little bit. >> Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so your, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners, and they're extremely interested in this because the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own scripts. So, these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your mean time to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you're looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble OPS team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So, those are the signals. >> This is the cloud-native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that, if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the (indistinct) terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology's running, the business is the business. >> Yeah. >> Company is the application. >> Yeah. >> So, it can't be down. So, there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top-line revenue? That's the number one conversation. >> Yeah. >> Do you see the same thing? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO, CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, the technology that's, you know, that's going to drive your top line is going to drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially, when you're talking about, let's say, retailers or those kinds of large-scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So, I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >> Final question. What does cloud-native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want them to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >> What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee, production is running absolutely smooth. And he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. >> John: And the CIO doesn't exist and there's no CISO, there at the beach. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud-native at scale here on The Cube. Thank you for your time. >> Fantastic. Thanks for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier here, for special program presentation, special programming cloud-native at scale, enabling SuperCloud modern applications with Platform9. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Everyone, welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furry, your host of The Cube. We've got a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Mattor Makki, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloud native at scale. So enjoy the program, see you soon. Hello and welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube. Pleasure to have here me Makowski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. >>Thank you for having >>Me. So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is a, is an appropriate term for >>That. So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge Notes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, o ot, and it kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here, there's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenge. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and >>Regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that skill really needs some well thought out, well-structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer's site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on all of these various factors at their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success cloud native, you know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can configure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotpot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the, the two factors of scale is we talked about start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because yeah, you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say you radio sell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did it, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like ishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, Can you share what our lawn is, this new product, What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arwan is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what alarm lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in. What's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, >>What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right online. And if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each components, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the I pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency >>For those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. C C I CD pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, the developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of application that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both those >>Teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OP teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, Kubernetes really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, c communities clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so online addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>Ed, do I wanna get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model on from model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fi, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also opensource because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that, Well, but that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for helpers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating me metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo customer? >>Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native es, and then we have our C I CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS CD pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Spico would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on s Amazon and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us >>Stability. Yeah, I think people are scared, not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Lon uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is arlon also makes use of cluster api capi, which is a ES sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with algo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what Algo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform nine has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Alon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that sla. >>And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with, that are familiar with, with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD and they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our line before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and, you know, give you an inventory and that, >>So customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yeah. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. >>And you provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value >>Here. That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up >>Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables Super club, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And alon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And, you know, alarm flows >>In one. Okay, so now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. There's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for >>That. So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, there's designed to do, the question is, what did, does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo, and, and, and on all the other goodness to automate, What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be in indications of things are effed up a little bit. >>Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your, your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your, So those are, those are the >>Signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the IIA terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. The company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and see, and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yeah. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things with things. So just >>Taking care of, and the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CSO there at the beach. >>Yeah. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for having >>Me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here at Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine b. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or well later, earlier when opens Stack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now was realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructure's code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level. And then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure as configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah, yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. Not declaring, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code. It's code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space that, >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the by intu. They had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our inaugural event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so to deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just really wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD Stock is down arm has been on rise, we've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in, in this community of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Maria Teel at our super cloud event, She's a cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built AR lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads at the end of the day, and I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We've heard people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with AR loan you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call the profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, So >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, just deploy it. Now what there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructure as configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things are controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure as configuration is built kind of on, it's a super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year at CubeCon a lot of this, what does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot rogue, that CubeCon coming up and now this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? It's the big story this year. What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jockeying for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupon and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career VMware over decades with them within 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here a platform. I you's been around for a while at this game, man. We talked about OpenStack, that project we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a Cloud Aati team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Opens Stack was an example and then Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud need of its scale? >>The, the hyper squares? >>Yeah, yeah. A's Azure Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep well, >>They got great performance. I mean, from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, >>Right? Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyper skaters really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems, the platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware and he kinda over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, cloud native develop for developers. And John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud is around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and Edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark I put on on there. Panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's just thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm, right? >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what where we come into >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were kind of talking about the glory days in 2000, 2001 when the first ASPs application service providers came out. Kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like >>It wasn't, >>And web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>In fact, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflations sea year. It's interesting. This is the first downturn, the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. Nope. Cause pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some, you know, new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Alon and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, More dynamic, more unreal. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think Super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's, you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pan or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is as a pilot to get the conversations flowing with, with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third Cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. >>What's, >>What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have 1, 2, 3 container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And it, the beauty of it is yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool and >>Just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores about thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un on-prem as an air gap version. Can >>You give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right. >>So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact, the customer says like, like the Maytag service person, cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. What >>Benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we heard it all here, ops and security teams. Cause they're kind of part of one thing, but option security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right? >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So >>You working two sides to that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side. >>Okay. Another customer that I give an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on it's classic edge. It's classic edge, yeah. Right? They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a box, like a small little box, >>Right? And all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of >>Them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the locations. >>So you guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well. >>Tucan, of course Detroit's >>Coming so, so it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud, not you have to rewrite and redevelop your application in business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. >>And I'll give you an example, I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations >>Are >>For the customer. Customer, >>The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn. >>That's to wrap it up. I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now let's CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super Cloud. >>Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. CARSs being been in an asb, being in a real time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative. You know, that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce is interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the gain, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart that made you an e-commerce or e retailer or an e e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Nascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Fur with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Hello and welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Forer, host of the Cube. My pleasure to have here me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having >>Me. So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah. You know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is a, is an appropriate term >>For that. So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. We even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got I O D OT and IT kind of coming together. But you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructure is big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there, can you share because you gotta have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's some business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of notes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when your scale is not at the level, >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud data become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, it's not working. And the exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that >>Occur. Okay. So I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success cloud native, you know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the, the two factors of scale is we talked about start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalate to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like ishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured >>Properly. So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arwan is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what Arlan lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, >>What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Lon. And if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot, and it's because when we think of lon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well-structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Alon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those. >>So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing. See c i CD pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops is coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability is integrated. And so it solves problems for both those teams. >>Yeah, it's dev op, So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer, The kins have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, es really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because you know, Kubernetes clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlan addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source, well known solutions. >>Medo, I want to get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there, Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial. Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share that open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SAS model or onpro model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fi, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why open source and also open source because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a blog box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way it is. Well, but that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source growing so fast, you have that confluence of, you know, a way fors to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think in, you know, two things, I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprise's use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a sa hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production environment. I >>Have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo if I'm a >>Customer? Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you will hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS CD pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think spic would be delighted. The folks that we've spoken, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on s Amazon and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the ability. >>Yeah, I think people are scared. Not, I won't say scare, that's a a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises and, and I think this is gonna come up at Cuban this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the sla I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source kind of free, fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is arlon also makes use of cluster api capi, which is a sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with algo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what Algo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to your point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform nine has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy arlon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your dev tested environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that sla. >>And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with, that are familiar with, with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo cdn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our lawn before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SAS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and, you know, give you an inventory. And so >>Customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. >>So especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. Yes. >>That's the key value >>Here. That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale >>Up, well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for >>Clusters. If I asked you how this enables Super Cloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there is at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale. You know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way. So that are land solves, then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running at, on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And, you know, our long flows >>In one. Okay, so now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers of the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own these stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for >>That. So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the fulls stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this, our low solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they designed to do, the question is, what did, does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What does some of the signals, is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely. That would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. >>Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so your, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners, and they're extremely interested in this because the, the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own scripts. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you're looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the immediate terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards are saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see the same thing? >>Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the cx, OCI O level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, the, the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloud native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking >>Care and the CIO doesn't exist. There's no seeso there at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone, to the special presentation of Cloud Native at scale, the Cube and Platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or well later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of Platform nine. Thank >>You very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source, Docker now just the success of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, Bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Basco talking about Super Cloud. I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon. Connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it. Everybody or most people know about infrastructures code, but with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D. Instead, with Kubernetes you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. Yeah, >>Yeah. And that really means it developer just accessing resources. Okay, not clearing, Okay, give me some compute. Stand me up some, Turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean, now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you've got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these, these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. The that's, >>I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the computer by, in two, where they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Bacar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in aural event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system. So the deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, >>It's >>Gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built Arlan and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, >>And what's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, So let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads. And you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases, it's like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We've heard people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon, you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Arlon you can kind of express everything together. You can say, I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications, and your clusters and manage them in a very, So >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes, you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers, which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on its super set of infrastructures code because it's an evolution. You need edge retro's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring it saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, So, all right, so Cloudnative at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloudnative at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean, people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year at co con a lot of this, what does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users. There, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we, we try to address with Arlan. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, So I'll put you on the spot road that Coan coming up, and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jocking for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's their ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cub cons and I expect to continue, and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed, but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there're just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. Yeah. >>B, you've had a storied career VMware over decades with them, obviously with 12 years, with 14 years or something like that. Big number. Co-founder here, a platform. Now you guys been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud a Rod team at that time. We to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example where the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the, the, the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yeah, I think the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a, a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion tran billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud need of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers? >>Yeah. A's Azure, Google >>You mean from a business perspective, technical, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep >>Well, they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems and, and platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, and I remember our first year doing the cube, Oh, the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware and he kind of over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back in the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super Cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud. Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up.

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having me. >>So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good, in a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of microsites, these microsites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So I, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors are their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is in when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and pos from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, what >>Would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Our line, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what arlon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for >>Those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. See c i CD pipe pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both >>Those teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer's. That's right. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined a declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fision, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also open source, because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that long. But that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo? I'm a >>Customer. Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on ecos Amazon, and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the >>Ability to, Yeah, I think people are scared. Not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, platform line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that >>Sla. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with that are familiar with, with Argo and then rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo adn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our land before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customers' hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and you know, give you an inventory. And that will, >>So if customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value here. >>That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And you know, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >>So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're designed to do, the question is, what did does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. Yeah. >>More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because they're the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just the success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructure as code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. And that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or applications specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think that the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We remember pointing for many years now that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself. You can, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And is my workloads running effectively? So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, >>Right? So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's kinda like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Armon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, so >>Essentially standard creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on, it's as super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring and saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Could be nice, it has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform. Now you guys have been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud ERO team at that time. We would to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys tr pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example when the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud native of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep, >>Well they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes, that's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the the new risk and arm ecosystems and the platforms. >>Yeah, not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer, it's, it's hardware and he got software and you got middleware and he kind over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back on the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark. I put on on that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm? Yeah, right. >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And and web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>I, in fact you, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. >>Nope. >>Cuz the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing Infras infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools, It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Ante and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, more dynamic, more real. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pain, a single platform for you to build your innovations on regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to, as a pilots, to get the conversations flowing with with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration and then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. What's the, what's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here, it is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool >>And just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores are thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un OnPrem as an air gap version. >>Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your >>Customer? Right. So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have, I dunno, hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms but they really needed to bring the agility and they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact the customer says like, like the Maytag service person cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. >>What benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right. >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on, It's a classic edge. It's classic edge. Yeah. Right. They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a net box box, like a small little >>Box and all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage >>Thousands of them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So >>You guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, so we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>And I'll give you an example. I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. To wrap it up, I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super >>Cloud. Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Mascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. Welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around the solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

foreign [Music] to the special presentation of cloud native at scale the cube and Platform 9 special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development we're here with dick Lee who's the Chief Architect and co-founder of platform nine pick great to see you Cube alumni we we met at openstack event in about eight years ago or later earlier uh when openstack was going great to see you and great congratulations on the success of platform nine thank you very much yeah you guys been at this for a while and this is really the the Year we're seeing the the crossover of kubernetes because of what happens with containers everyone now was realized and you've seen what docker's doing with the new Docker the open source Docker now just the success of containerization and now the kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming bearing fruit this is huge exactly yes and so as infrastructure as code comes in we talked to baskar talking about super cloud I met her about you know the new Arlo our our lawn um you guys just launched the infrastructure's code is going to another level and it's always been devops infrastructure is code that's been the ethos that's been like from day one developers just code I think you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon connect the dots for us what is the state of infrastructure as code today so I think I think um I'm glad you mentioned it everybody or most people know about infrastructure as code but with kubernetes I think that project has evolved at the concept even further and these days it's um infrastructure as configuration right so which is an evolution of infrastructure as code so instead of telling the system here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it you know do step a b c and d uh instead with kubernetes you can describe your desired State declaratively using things called manifest resources and then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify so I think it's it's a even better version of infrastructure as code yeah and that really means it's developer just accessing resources okay that declare okay give me some compute stand me up some turn the lights on turn them off turn them on that's kind of where we see this going and I like the configuration piece some people say composability I mean now with open source so popular you don't have to have to write a lot of code this code being developed and so it's integration it's configuration these are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation machine learning assisting open source because you've got a lot of code that's what you're hearing software supply chain issues so infrastructure as code has to factor in these new Dynamics can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of as open source grows the glue layers the configurations the integration what are the core issues I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity right so um You know despite its expressive Power Systems like kubernetes and declarative apis let you express a lot of complicated and complex Stacks right but you're dealing with um hundreds if not thousands of these yaml files or resources and so I think you know the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key Challenge and opportunity in this space I wrote a LinkedIn post today those comments about you know hey Enterprise is the new breed the trend of SAS companies moving uh our consumer consumer-like thinking into the Enterprise has been happening for a long time but now more than ever you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in now with open source it's speed simplification and integration right these are the new Dynam power dynamics for developers so as companies are starting to now deploy and look at kubernetes what are the things that need to be in place because you have some I won't say technical debt but maybe some shortcuts some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure as code people have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructures code happen yes but to do it at scale yes is harder what's your take on this what's your view it's hard because there's a proliferation of of methods tools Technologies so for example today it's a very common for devops and platform engineering tools I mean sorry teams to have to deploy a large number of kubernetes clusters but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters and they're using a wide range of tools to do this right for example maybe ansible or terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the Clusters and then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the Clusters so you have this sprawl of tools you also you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with the more resources you have to manage and there's a risk of drift that people call that where you know you think you have things under control but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them so I think there's real need to kind of unify simplify and try to solve these problems using a smaller more unified set of tools and methodology apologies and that's something that we try to do with this new project Arlon yeah so so we're going to get to our line in a second I want to get to the yr lawn you guys announced that at argocon which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the community meeting by Intuit they had their own little day over their headquarters but before we get there um Bhaskar your CEO came on and he talked about super cloud at our inaugural event what's your definition of super cloud if you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical how would you look at the super cloud Trend that's emerging has become a thing what's your what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative well it's it's uh funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today speaking to you earlier today but I think based on what you said I I already get kind of some of the the gist and the the main Concepts it seems like uh super cloud the way I interpret that is you know um clouds and infrastructure um programmable infrastructure all of those things are becoming commodity in a way and everyone's got their own flavor but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business Problems by perhaps trying to abstract away you know all of those various implementations and then building uh um better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems yeah I remember it's a great great definition I remember not to date myself but back in the old days you know IBM had its proprietary Network operating system so the deck for the mini computer vintage deck net and sna respectively um but tcpip came out of the OSI the open systems interconnect and remember ethernet beat token ring out so not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there look just look up token ring you'll see if I never heard of it it's IBM's you know a connection for the internet at the layer two is Amazon the ethernet right so if TCP could be the kubernetes and containers abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history so at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value there's been an abstraction Yes somewhere yes what's your reaction to that I think um this is um I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and I forgot who originated it but um I think the saying goes like there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection right and we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified you know Computing and infrastructure management and I believe this trend is going to continue right the next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers I think that that's really a yeah it's going to continue it's interesting just when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on the rise we've been reporting for many years now that arm's going to be huge it has become true if you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds Azure AWS Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody the stuff that they're doing with the Silicon and the physics and the atoms the pro you know this is where the Innovation they're going so deep and so strong at is the more that they get that gets gone they have more performance so if you're an app developer wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd want to have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures code or infrastructure for configuration for provisioning for managing services and you're seeing that today with service meshes a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in this community of kubecon which we'll be covering so that brings up the whole what's next you guys just announced our lawn at argocon which came out of Intuit we've had Mariana Tesla out our supercloud event she's a CTO you know they're all in the cloud so there contributed that project where did Arlon come from what was the origination what's the purpose why our lawn why this announcement yeah so um the the Inception of the project this was the result of um us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier which is complexity right with all of this these clouds these infrastructure all the variations around and you know compute storage networks and um the proliferation of tools we talked about the ansibles and terraforms and kubernetes itself you can think of that as another tool right we saw a need to solve that complexity problem and especially for people and users who use kubernetes at scale so when you have you know hundreds of clusters thousands of applications thousands of users spread out over many many locations there there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management right so that means fewer tools more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency and and that's why um you know we built um Arlon and we built it um recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved so Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel it instead rests on the shoulders of several Giants right so for example kubernetes is one building block get Ops and Argo CD is another one which provides a very structured way of applying configuration and then we have projects like cluster API and cross-plane which provide apis for describing infrastructure so Arlon takes all of those building blocks and um builds a thin layer which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state so that's that's kind of the Inception and what's the benefit of that what does that give what does that give the developer the user in this case the developers the the platform engineer team members the devops engineers they uh get a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters but also applications and configurations they get away a system for provisioning configuring deploying and doing life cycle Management in a in a much simpler way okay especially as I said if you're dealing with a large number of applications so it's like an operating fabric if you will yes for them okay so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the abstraction or thin layer below is the infrastructure we talked a lot about what's going on below that yeah above our workloads at the end of the day and I talked to cxos and um I.T folks that are now devops Engineers they care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work they want to spend their time getting in the weeds figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened they need observability and they need to to know that it's working that's right and as my workloads running if effectively so how do you guys look at the workload side because now you have multiple workloads on these fabric right so workloads so kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can you know tell kubernetes I want to run this container this particular way or you can use other projects that are in the kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like k-native where you can express your application in more at a higher level right but what's also happening is in addition to the workloads devops and platform engineering teams they need to very often deploy the applications with the Clusters themselves clusters are becoming this commodity it's it's becoming this um host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it in many cases it's like an appliance right so devops teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down clusters are becoming more extremely like an ec2 instance spin up a cluster we've heard people used words like that that's right and before Arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as I explained so with our own you can kind of express everything together you can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this Ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies you can describe all of that using something we call the profile and then you can stamp out your app your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very essentially standard that creates a mechanism it's standardized declarative kind of configurations and it's like a Playbook you just deploy it now what's this between say a script like I have scripts I can just automate Scripts or yes this is where that um declarative API and um infrastructures configuration comes in right because scripts yes you can automate scripts but the order in which they run matters right they can break things can break in the middle and um and sometimes you need to debug them whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and Powerful you just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of uh figures it out and there are these things called controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire to say it's a much more powerful expressive and reliable way of getting things done so infrastructure as configuration is built kind of on it's a superset of infrastructures code because different Evolution you need Edge restaurant's code but then you can configure The Code by just saying do it you're basically declaring and saying go go do that that's right okay so all right so Cloud native at scale take me through your vision of what that means someone says hey what is cloud native at scale mean what's success look like how does it roll out in the future as you that future next couple years I mean people are now starting to figure out okay it's not as easy as it sounds kubernetes has value we're going to hear this year kubecon a lot of this what is cloud native at scale mean yeah there are different interpretations but if you ask me when people think of scale they think of a large number of deployments right geographies many you know supporting thousands or tens or millions of users there's that aspect to scale there's also um an equally important aspect of scale which is also something that we try to address with Arlon and that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this right so in order to describe that desired State and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in in relatively simple terms right and so we want uh the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible so there's I think there's going to be a number and there have been a number of cncf and Cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well and Arlon kind of Falls in in that category okay so I'll put you on the spot where I've got kubecon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this seg series out before what do you expect to see at kubecon issue it's the big story this year what's the what's the most important thing happening is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the the people jockeying for leadership I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space on the overall systems map about the different areas get runtime and observability in all these different areas what's the where's the action where's the smoke where's the fire where's the piece where's the tension yeah so uh I think uh one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupons and I expect to continue and and that is uh the the word on the street is kubernetes getting boring right which is good right or I mean simple well um well maybe yeah invisible no drama right so so the rate of change of the kubernetes features and and all that has slowed but in a positive way um but um there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff if you look at a stack necessary for uh hosting applications based on kubernetes they're just still too many moving Parts too many uh components right too much complexity I go I keep going back to the complexity problem so I expect kubecon and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce a further simplifications uh to to the stack yeah Vic you've had a storied career VMware over decades with them uh obviously 12 years for the 14 years or something like that big number co-founder here platform I think it's been around for a while at this game uh we man we'll talk about openstack that project you we interviewed at one of their events so openstack was the beginning of that this new Revolution I remember the early days was it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native I think we had a Colorado team at that time I mean it's a joke we you know about about the dream it's happening now now at platform nine you guys have been doing this for a while what's the what are you most excited about as the Chief Architect what did you guys double down on what did you guys pivot from or two did you do any pivots did you extend out certain areas because you guys are in a good position right now a lot of DNA in Cloud native um what are you most excited about and what is platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this yeah so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years right it's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software it's powerful it solves new problems you know every year and you have new things coming out all the time right openstack was an example within kubernetes took the World by storm but there's always that complexity of you know just configuring it deploying it running it operating it and our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it you know easy for users to consume regardless of the technology right so the successor to kubernetes you know I don't have a crystal ball but you know you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications there are many projects around there who knows what's coming uh next year or the year after that but platform will a Platform 9 will be there and we will you know take the Innovations from the the community we will contribute our own Innovations and make all of those things uh very consumable to customers simpler faster cheaper always a good business model technically to make that happen yeah I think the reigning in the chaos is key you know now we have now visibility into the scale final question before we depart you know this segment um what is that scale how many clusters do you see that would be a high a watermark for an at scale conversation around an Enterprise um is it workloads we're looking at or or clusters how would you yeah how would you describe that and when people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale what's the at scale kind of threshold yeah and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large but roughly speaking when we say you know large-scale cluster deployments we're talking about um maybe a hundreds uh two thousands yeah and final final question what's the role of the hyperscalers you've got AWS continuing to do well but they got their core I asked they got a pass they're not too too much putting assess out there they have some SAS apps but mostly it's the ecosystem they have marketplaces doing over two billion dollars billions of transactions a year um and and it's just like just sitting there it has really they're now innovating on it but that's going to change ecosystems what's the role the cloud play and the cloud native at scale the the hyperscale yeah Abus Azure Google you mean from a business they have their own interests that you know that they're uh they will keep catering to they they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of uh services and and apis um so I don't think that's going to change right they're just going to keep well they got great uh performance I mean from a from a hardware standpoint yes that's going to be key right yes I think the uh the move from x86 being the dominant away and platform to run workloads is changing right that that that and I think the the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of you know the the new risk and arm ecosystems and platforms yeah that joking aside Paul maritz when he was the CEO of VMware when he took over once said I remember our first year doing the cube the cloud is one big distributed computer it's it's hardware and you've got software and you got middleware and uh he kind of over these kind of tongue-in-cheek but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer yes exactly it's we're back in the same game Vic thank you for coming on the segment appreciate your time this is uh Cloud native at scale special presentation with platform nine really unpacking super cloud rlon open source and how to run large-scale applications uh on the cloud cloud native philadelph4 developers and John Furrier with the cube thanks for watching and we'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up foreign [Music]

>>Keon Cloud Native Con kicks off in Detroit on October 24th, and we're pleased to have Stewart Miniman, who's the director of Market Insights, hi, at, for hybrid platforms at Red Hat back in the studio to help us understand the key trends to look for at the events. Do welcome back, like old, old, old >>Home. Thank you, David. It's great to, great to see you and always love doing these previews, even though Dave, come on. How many years have I told you Cloud native con, It's a hoodie crowd. They're gonna totally call you out for where in a tie and things like that. I, I know you want to be an ESPN sportscaster, but you know, I I, I, I still don't think even after, you know, this show's been around for so many years that there's gonna be too many ties into Troy. I >>Know I left the hoodie in my off, I'm sorry folks, but hey, we'll just have to go for it. Okay. Containers generally, and Kubernetes specifically continue to show very strong spending momentum in the ETR survey data. So let's bring up this slide that shows the ETR sectors, all the sectors in the tax taxonomy with net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. Now, that red dotted line that you see, that marks the elevated 40% mark, anything above that is considered highly elevated in terms of momentum. Now, for years, the big four areas of momentum that shine above all the rest have been cloud containers, rpa, and ML slash ai for the first time in 10 quarters, ML and AI and RPA have dropped below the 40% line, leaving only cloud and containers in rarefied air. Now, Stu, I'm sure this data doesn't surprise you, but what do you make of this? >>Yeah, well, well, Dave, I, I did an interview with at Deepak who owns all the container and open source activity at Amazon earlier this year, and his comment was, the default deployment mechanism in Amazon is containers. So when I look at your data and I see containers and cloud going in sync, yeah, that, that's, that's how we see things. We're helping lots of customers in their overall adoption. And this cloud native ecosystem is still, you know, we're still in that Cambridge explosion of new projects, new opportunities, AI's a great workload for these type type of technologies. So it's really becoming pervasive in the marketplace. >>And, and I feel like the cloud and containers go hand in hand, so it's not surprising to see those two above >>The 40%. You know, there, there's nothing to say that, Look, can I run my containers in my data center and not do the public cloud? Sure. But in the public cloud, the default is the container. And one of the hot discussions we've been having in this ecosystem for a number of years is edge computing. And of course, you know, I want something that that's small and lightweight and can do things really fast. A lot of times it's an AI workload out there, and containers is a great fit at the edge too. So wherever it goes, containers is a good fit, which has been keeping my group at Red Hat pretty busy. >>So let's talk about some of those high level stats that we put together and preview for the event. So it's really around the adoption of open source software and Kubernetes. Here's, you know, a few fun facts. So according to the state of enterprise open source report, which was published by Red Hat, although it was based on a blind survey, nobody knew that that Red Hat was, you know, initiating it. 80% of IT execs expect to increase their use of enterprise open source software. Now, the CNCF community has currently more than 120,000 developers. That's insane when you think about that developer resource. 73% of organizations in the most recent CNCF annual survey are using Kubernetes. Now, despite the momentum, according to that same Red Hat survey, adoption barriers remain for some organizations. Stu, I'd love you to talk about this specifically around skill sets, and then we've highlighted some of the other trends that we expect to see at the event around Stu. I'd love to, again, your, get your thoughts on the preview. You've done a number of these events, automation, security, governance, governance at scale, edge deployments, which you just mentioned among others. Now Kubernetes is eight years old, and I always hear people talking about there's something coming beyond Kubernetes, but it looks like we're just getting started. Yeah, >>Dave, It, it is still relatively early days. The CMC F survey, I think said, you know, 96% of companies when they, when CMC F surveyed them last year, were either deploying Kubernetes or had plans to deploy it. But when I talked to enterprises, nobody has said like, Hey, we've got every group on board and all of our applications are on. It is a multi-year journey for most companies and plenty of them. If you, you look at the general adoption of technology, we're still working through kind of that early majority. We, you know, passed the, the chasm a couple of years ago. But to a point, you and I we're talking about this ecosystem, there are plenty of people in this ecosystem that could care less about containers and Kubernetes. Lots of conversations at this show won't even talk about Kubernetes. You've got, you know, big security group that's in there. >>You've got, you know, certain workloads like we talked about, you know, AI and ml and that are in there. And automation absolutely is playing a, a good role in what's going on here. So in some ways, Kubernetes kind of takes a, a backseat because it is table stakes at this point. So lots of people involved in it, lots of activities still going on. I mean, we're still at a cadence of three times a year now. We slowed it down from four times a year as an industry, but there's, there's still lots of innovation happening, lots of adoption, and oh my gosh, Dave, I mean, there's just no shortage of new projects and new people getting involved. And what's phenomenal about it is there's, you know, end user practitioners that aren't just contributing. But many of the projects were spawned out of work by the likes of Intuit and Spotify and, and many others that created some of the projects that sit alongside or above the, the, you know, the container orchestration itself. >>So before we talked about some of that, it's, it's kind of interesting. It's like Kubernetes is the big dog, right? And it's, it's kind of maturing after, you know, eight years, but it's still important. I wanna share another data point that underscores the traction that containers generally are getting in Kubernetes specifically have, So this is data from the latest ETR survey and shows the spending breakdown for Kubernetes in the ETR data set for it's cut for respondents with 50 or more citations in, in by the IT practitioners that lime green is new adoptions, the forest green is spending 6% or more relative to last year. The gray is flat spending year on year, and those little pink bars, that's 6% or down spending, and the bright red is retirements. So they're leaving the platform. And the blue dots are net score, which is derived by subtracting the reds from the greens. And the yellow dots are pervasiveness in the survey relative to the sector. So the big takeaway here is that there is virtually no red, essentially zero churn across all sectors, large companies, public companies, private firms, telcos, finance, insurance, et cetera. So again, sometimes I hear this things beyond Kubernetes, you've mentioned several, but it feels like Kubernetes is still a driving force, but a lot of other projects around Kubernetes, which we're gonna hear about at the show. >>Yeah. So, so, so Dave, right? First of all, there was for a number of years, like, oh wait, you know, don't waste your time on, on containers because serverless is gonna rule the world. Well, serverless is now a little bit of a broader term. Can I do a serverless viewpoint for my developers that they don't need to think about the infrastructure but still have containers underneath it? Absolutely. So our friends at Amazon have a solution called Fargate, their proprietary offering to kind of hide that piece of it. And in the open source world, there's a project called Can Native, I think it's the second or third can Native Con's gonna happen at the cncf. And even if you use this, I can still call things over on Lambda and use some of those functions. So we know Dave, it is additive and nothing ever dominates the entire world and nothing ever dies. >>So we have, we have a long runway of activities still to go on in containers and Kubernetes. We're always looking for what that next thing is. And what's great about this ecosystem is most of it tends to be additive and plug into the pieces there, there's certain tools that, you know, span beyond what can happen in the container world and aren't limited to it. And there's others that are specific for it. And to talk about the industries, Dave, you know, I love, we we have, we have a community event that we run that's gonna happen at Cubans called OpenShift Commons. And when you look at like, who's speaking there? Oh, we've got, you know, for Lockheed Martin, University of Michigan and I g Bank all speaking there. So you look and it's like, okay, cool, I've got automotive, I've got, you know, public sector, I've got, you know, university education and I've got finance. So all of you know, there is not an industry that is not touched by this. And the general wave of software adoption is the reason why, you know, not just adoption, but the creation of new software is one of the differentiators for companies. And that is what, that's the reason why I do containers, isn't because it's some cool technology and Kubernetes is great to put on my resume, but that it can actually accelerate my developers and help me create technology that makes me respond to my business and my ultimate end users. Well, >>And you know, as you know, we've been talking about the Supercloud a lot and the Kubernetes is clearly enabler to, to Supercloud, but I wanted to go back, you and John Furrier have done so many of, you know, the, the cube cons, but but go back to Docker con before Kubernetes was even a thing. And so you sort of saw this, you know, grow. I think there's what, how many projects are in CNCF now? I mean, hundreds. Hundreds, okay. And so you're, Will we hear things in Detroit, things like, you know, new projects like, you know, Argo and capabilities around SI store and things like that? Well, you're gonna hear a lot about that. Or is it just too much to cover? >>So I, I mean the, the good news, Dave, is that the CNCF really is, is a good steward for this community and new things got in get in. So there's so much going on with the existing projects that some of the new ones sometimes have a little bit of a harder time making a little bit of buzz. One of the more interesting ones is a project that's been around for a while that I think back to the first couple of Cube Cuban that John and I did service Mesh and Istio, which was created by Google, but lived under basically a, I guess you would say a Google dominated governance for a number of years is now finally under the CNCF Foundation. So I talked to a number of companies over the years and definitely many of the contributors over the years that didn't love that it was a Google Run thing, and now it is finally part. >>So just like Kubernetes is, we have SEO and also can Native that I mentioned before also came outta Google and those are all in the cncf. So will there be new projects? Yes. The CNCF is sometimes they, they do matchmaking. So in some of the observability space, there were a couple of projects that they said, Hey, maybe you can go merge down the road. And they ended up doing that. So there's still you, you look at all these projects and if I was an end user saying, Oh my God, there is so much change and so many projects, you know, I can't spend the time in the effort to learn about all of these. And that's one of the challenges and something obviously at Red Hat, we spend a lot of time figuring out, you know, not to make winners, but which are the things that customers need, Where can we help make them run in production for our, our customers and, and help bring some stability and a little bit of security for the overall ecosystem. >>Well, speaking of security, security and, and skill sets, we've talked about those two things and they sort of go hand in hand when I go to security events. I mean, we're at reinforced last summer, we were just recently at the CrowdStrike event. A lot of the discussion is sort of best practice because it's so complicated. And, and, and will you, I presume you're gonna hear a lot of that here because security securing containers now, you know, the whole shift left thing and shield right is, is a complicated matter, especially when you saw with the earlier data from the Red Hat survey, the the gaps are around skill sets. People don't have the skill. So should we expect to hear a lot about that, A lot of sort of how to, how to take advantage of some of these new capabilities? >>Yeah, Dave, absolutely. So, you know, one of the conversations going on in the community right now is, you know, has DevOps maybe played out as we expect to see it? There's a newer term called platform engineering, and how much do I need to do there? Something that I, I know your, your team's written a lot about Dave, is how much do you need to know versus what can you shift to just a platform or a service that I can consume? I've talked a number of times with you since I've been at Red Hat about the cloud services that we offer. So you want to use our offering in the public cloud. Our first recommendation is, hey, we've got cloud services, how much Kubernetes do you really want to learn versus you want to do what you can build on top of it, modernize the pieces and have less running the plumbing and electric and more, you know, taking advantage of the, the technologies there. So that's a big thing we've seen, you know, we've got a big SRE team that can manage that for use so that you have to spend less time worrying about what really is un differentiated heavy lifting and spend more time on what's important to your business and your >>Customers. So, and that's, and that's through a managed service. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>That whole space is just taken off. All right, Stu I'll give you the final word. You know, what are you excited about for, for, for this upcoming event and Detroit? Interesting choice of venue? Yeah, >>Look, first of off, easy flight. I've, I've never been to Detroit, so I'm, I'm willing to give it a shot and hopefully, you know, that awesome airport. There's some, some, some good things there to learn. The show itself is really a choose your own adventure because there's so much going on. The main show of QAN and cloud Native Con is Wednesday through Friday, but a lot of a really interesting stuff happens on Monday and Tuesday. So we talked about things like OpenShift Commons in the security space. There's cloud Native Security Day, which is actually two days and a SIG store event. There, there's a get up show, there's, you know, k native day. There's so many things that if you want to go deep on a topic, you can go spend like a workshop in some of those you can get hands on to. And then at the show itself, there's so much, and again, you can learn from your peers. >>So it was good to see we had, during the pandemic, it tilted a little bit more vendor heavy because I think most practitioners were pretty busy focused on what they could work on and less, okay, hey, I'm gonna put together a presentation and maybe I'm restricted at going to a show. Yeah, not, we definitely saw that last year when I went to LA I was disappointed how few customer sessions there were. It, it's back when I go look through the schedule now there's way more end users sharing their stories and it, it's phenomenal to see that. And the hallway track, Dave, I didn't go to Valencia, but I hear it was really hopping felt way more like it was pre pandemic. And while there's a few people that probably won't come because Detroit, we think there's, what we've heard and what I've heard from the CNCF team is they are expecting a sizable group up there. I know a lot of the hotels right near the, where it's being held are all sold out. So it should be, should be a lot of fun. Good thing I'm speaking on an edge panel. First time I get to be a speaker at the show, Dave, it's kind of interesting to be a little bit of a different role at the show. >>So yeah, Detroit's super convenient, as I said. Awesome. Airports too. Good luck at the show. So it's a full week. The cube will be there for three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thanks for coming. >>Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, sorry, >>Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is the cube, right? So thank you for that. >>And, and no ties from the host, >>No ties, only hoodies. All right Stu, thanks. Appreciate you coming in. Awesome. And thank you for watching this preview of CubeCon plus cloud Native Con with at Stu, which again starts the 24th of October, three days of broadcasting. Go to the cube.net and you can see all the action. We'll see you there.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, for a special program on Cloud Native at Scale, Enabling Next Generation Cloud or Supercloud for Modern Application Cloud Native Developers. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. My pleasure to have here, me Madhura Maskasky, Co-founder and VP of Product at Platform9. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud native at scale conversation. >> Thank you for having me. >> So cloud native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the CI/CD pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code. It's accelerating the value proposition. And the Supercloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Supercloud as it fits to cloud native, it scales up. >> Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting. And I think the reason why Supercloud is a really good and a really fit term for this. And I think I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multicloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model's kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro-sites. These micro-sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private OnPrem infrastructure deployment, or it could be your Edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think Supercloud is an appropriate term for that. >> So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge nodes. We're seeing not only Edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning, wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IoT, OT and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions. Global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, these new challenges there. Can you share, because you got to have Edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that, it's a steady state. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area yet, It hasn't been done yet, Spanning Clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water. It's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the Edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something, business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the Supercloud across multiple edges and regions? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in the context of this term of Supercloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axis, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deployed, a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis, you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site, or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites, with one node at each site, right? And if you have just one flare of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axis, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling, along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this, or when your scale is not at the level. >> Can you scope the complexity? Because, I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there. The technology is also getting better. We're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure. There's lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem because we're about at scale challenges here. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think I like to call it, you know, the problem that the scale creates, there's various problems. But I think one problem, one way to think about it is it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a famous saying between engineers and QA, and the support folks, right. Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic. It worked flawlessly on my machine. On production, it's not working. The exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right. Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within these sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right. And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the Edge location where a cluster is running there. Or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site, where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it. Or they configured the cluster right. But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale, in a distributed manner, you got to make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >> Okay, so I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native, you know, you see some experimentation, they set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes. And then you say, okay, we got this. We configure it. And then they do it again, and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you got to scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches. You're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is, in when companies transition from, I got this, to oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem. Which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with P 0s and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right. And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds. It goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters, and things work perfectly fine in those clusters, because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. And so as you give that change to then run at your production Edge location, like say your radial cell power site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, as you have these distributed clusters at scale. You got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. >> So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. But at scale, it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, can you share what Arlon is? This new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >> Yeah absolutely, I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now. Because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in OnPrem or in the cloud or at Edge environments. And what Arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, a Kubernetes native tool for complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >> So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the bumper sticker. What did it do? >> There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is, think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say an auto manufacturing factory, or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right. Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos, because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well-structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again, it gets processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the elevator pitch. If you have problems of scale, of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed, Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those problems. >> So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, see CI/CD pipe-lining. So that's what you're trying to simplify that OPS piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really OPS, it's their OPS, it's coding. >> Yeah, not just developer the OPS, the operations folks as well, right. Because developers, you know, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps. And then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with. But then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly. Monitoring and observability is integrated. And so it solves problems for both those teams. >> Yeah, it's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OPS team have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >> Absolutely, yeah. And you know, Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right. Because you know, Kubernetes clusters are you know your specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it. And it does that using existing open source, well known solutions. >> And do I want to get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer, developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there at Platform9. Is it open source, and you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? And what is the consumption? I mean open source is great. People want opensource, they can download and look up the code, but maybe want to buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through. Can you share open source and commercial relationship? >> Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why opensource? I think it's, you know, we, as a company, we have one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies, components, and then we make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or OnPrem model, right. But so as we are a company or startup, or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right I think in my mind that we do are part of the duty, right. And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products, starting all the way with Fission, which was a serverless product that we had built, to various other examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why open source. And also open source because we want the community to really first-hand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind a black box. >> Well, and that's what the developers want too. What we're seeing in reporting with Supercloud is the new model of consumption is I want to look at the code and see what's in there. >> That's right. >> And then also if I want to use it, I'll do it, great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I want to move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way it is, but that's the benefit of open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Kakroff uses the dating metaphor, you know, hey, you know, I want to check it out first before I get married. And that's what open source is. So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source. This is how companies are selling. >> Absolutely, yeah, yeah. You know, I think two things, I think one is just, you know, this cloud native space is so vast that if you're building a cluster solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case, if they choose to do so, right. But at the same time, what's also critical to us, is we are able to provide a supported version of it, with an SLA that's backed by us, a SaaS-hosted version of it as well for those customers who choose to go that route. You know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with who can support them for that production environment. >> I have to ask you. Now let's get into what's in it for the customer? I'm a customer. Why should I be enthused about Arlon? What's in it for me? You know, 'cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident, and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlon, if I'm a customer. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, are customers where this is a very kind of typical story that you will hear, which is we have a Kubernetes distribution. It could be On-Premise. It could be public cloud native Kubernetes. And then we have our CI/CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is, well before you can, your CI/CD pipelines can deploy the apps, somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters, and yeah properly configuring them. And as these things start by being done hand-grown. And then as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their homegrown DIY solutions for this. I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terraform automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source, or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits their problem. And so that's that pitch. I think OPS people would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with have been absolutely excited and have shared that this is a major challenge we have today, because we have few hundreds of clusters on EKS, Amazon, and we want to scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the ability to do that. >> Yeah, I think people are scared. I won't say scared, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And I think this is going to come up at KubeCon this year where enterprises are going to say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I want to see track record. I want to see other companies that have used it. How would you answer that question to, or challenge, you know, hey I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight. You know, I love the open source trying to free, fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >> Yeah, absolutely. So two parts to that, right? One is Arlon leverages, existing opensource components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically, one is Arlon uses Argo CD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD opensource tools that's out there, right. Created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team, and it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Arlon also makes use of cluster API, CAPI, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right for lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products or open source projects that will find Arlon to be right up in their alley, because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo CD. Now Arlon just extends the scope of what Argo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to your point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arlon at scale, because you've been, you know playing with it in your DEV test environments, you're happy with what you get with it. Then Platform9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. >> And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to, Platform9 customers that are familiar with Argo, and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >> Yeah, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where you know, initially, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a chord right away. But then we start talking about Arlon, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD. They start opening up, they say, we have standardized on Argo, and we have built these components homegrown. We would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlon, before we even wrote a single line of code, saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, if you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >> All right, so next question is what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, look, I'm so busy. My team's overworked, I got a skills gap. I don't need another project. I'm so tied up right now, and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform9 help me? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenants of Platform9 has always been, that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this and a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right. So our goal behind doing that is taking away, or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right. And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlon will integrate with what they have, so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today, and give you an inventory. >> So customers have clusters that are growing. That's a sign, call you guys. >> Absolutely, either they have massive, large clusters, right, that they want to split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today. Or they've done that already on say public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. >> So, especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and move things around, and reconfigure, and or scale out. >> That's right, exactly. >> And you provide that layer of policy. >> Absolutely, yes. >> That's the key value here. >> That's right. >> So policy based configuration for cluster scale up. >> Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >> If I asked you how this enables Supercloud, what would you say to that? >> I think this is one of the key ingredients to Supercloud, right? If you think about a Supercloud environment, there is at least few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a going back to assembly line, in a very consistent, predictable way. So that, Arlon solves. Then you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are going to happen, and you're going to have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And Arlon, by the way also helps in that direction. But you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Supercloud successful. And you know, Arlon is one of them. >> Okay so now the next level is, okay, that makes sense is under the covers, kind of speak under the hood. How does that impact the app developers of the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems, the apps are going to be impacted. Are they going to be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >> Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through. And any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right. I'm responsible for my code. I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own these stack end to end. I have to rely on my OPS counterpart to do their part, right. And so this really gives them the right tooling for that. >> This is actually a great kind of relevant point. You know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation, gone are the days of the full stack developer, to the more specialized role. But this is a key point. And I have to ask you, because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are going to do what they're designed to do, the question is what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer that they should be calling you guys up and implementing Arlo, Argo, and all the other goodness to automate, what are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it failed apps? Is it latency? What are some of the things that would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. >> Yeah, more frequent down times, down times that take longer to triage. And so your, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks in the field that have to take these apps, and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this, because the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges. So those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution. If you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you're looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small focused nimble OPS team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are the signals. >> This is the cloud native at scale situation. The innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application. Not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office, and the immediate terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology's running the business, is the business, company's the application. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now, and boards are saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Do you see the same thing? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CSO, CIO level, right? One, is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, the technology that's going to drive your top line is going to drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right. Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers, or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend providing those goods to their end customers. So I think both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >> Final question. What does cloud native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >> What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee. Production is running absolutely smooth. And he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of, at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. >> And the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CISO, they're at the beach. >> (laughing) Yeah. >> Madhura, thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on theCUBE. Thank you for your time. >> Fantastic, thanks for having me. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here for special program presentation, special programming Cloud Native at Scale, Enabling Supercloud Modern Applications with Platform9. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)