(funky music) >> Everyone, welcome to theCUBE studios here in Palo Alto for a CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, we're here with a great guest, Balaji Sivasubramanian, did I get it right? Okay, okay, VP of product and business development at OpsMx, formerly with Cisco doing networking, now you're doing a lot of DevOps, you guys got a great little business there. Realtime hardcore DevOps. >> Absolutely, so we help large enterprises do the digital transformation to help them achieve that transformation. >> You know, Stu Miniman and I were talking about cloud-native, one of the reasons I wanted to bring you in was, we've been talking about cloud-native going mainstream. And cloud-native essentially codewords for cloud, microservices, essentially DevOps 2.0, whatever you want to call it, it's the mainstream of DevOps, DevOps for the past 10 years has been kind of reserved for the pioneers who built out using open source, to the fast followers, building large startups, to now larger companies, now DevOps is turning into cloud-native where you see in the cloud, born in the cloud, on-premises cloud operations, which is hybrid, and now the advent of multicloud, which really brings the edge conversation into view, really a disruption around networking, and data, and this is impacting developers. And pioneers like Netflix, used Spinnaker to kind of deploy, that's what you guys do, this is the real thread for the next 10 years is data, software, is now part of everyday developer life. Now bring that into DevOps, that seems to be a real flashpoint. >> Yeah, so if you look at some of the challenges enterprises have to get the velocity that they have, the technology was a barrier. So with the Docker option, with the Cloudred option, cloud basically made the infrastructure on demand, and then the Docker really allowed, Microsoft architecture allowed people to have velocity in development. Now their bottleneck has been, "Now I can develop faster, I can bring up infra faster, "but how do I deploy things faster?" Because at the end of the day, that's what is the last mile, so to say, of solving the full puzzle. So I think that's where things like Spinnaker or some of the new tools like Tekton and all those things coming up, that allows these enterprises to take their container-based applications, and functions in some cases, and deploy to various clouds, AWS or Google or Azure. >> Balaji, tell me about your view on cloud-native, you look at, just look at the basic data out there, you got AWS, you got KubeCon, which is really the Linux Foundation, CNCF, I mean the vendors that are in there, and the commercialization is going crazy. Then you got the cloud followers from Amazon, you got Azure basically pivoting Office 365 and getting more cloud action. They're investing heavily in Google GCP, Google Cloud Platform. All of 'em talk about microservices. What's your view of the state of cloud-native? >> Yeah, I think, I probably talked to hundreds of customers this last year, and these are large, Fortune 100, 200 companies to smaller companies. 100% of them are doing containers, 100% of them are doing Kubernetes in some fashion or form. If you look at larger enterprises like the financial sectors, and other, what do you call the more Fortune 100 companies, they do actually do OpenShift. RedHat OpenShift for their Kubernetes, even though Kubernetes is free, whatever, but they definitely look at OpenShift as a way to deploy container-based applications. And many of them are obviously looking at AKS, EKS and other cloud form factors of the same thing. And the most thing I've seen is AWS. EKS is the most common one, Azure some parts, and GKS somewhat, so I mean you know the market trend that's there. So essentially, AWS is where most of the developments are happening. >> What do you think about the mainstream IT, typical IT company that's driven by IT, they're transforming just a few, I'd say about a year ago, most hands were like "Oh, the big cloud providers are going to be "not creating an opportunity for the Splunks in the world, "and other people," but now with that shifting, mainstream companies going to the cloud, it's actually been good for those companies, so you're seeing that collision between pure cloud-native and typical corporation enterprise, that are moving to the cloud or moving to at least hybrid. That's helping these Splunks of the world, the Datadogs, and all these other companies. >> I think there's two attacks on those companies that you talk about. One is obviously the open source movement, it's attacking everything. So anything you have in IT is attacked by open source. Software is eating the world, but open source is eating software. Because software is easy to be open source. Hardware, you can't eat it, there's no open source, nobody's doing free hardware for you. But open source software is eating the software, in some sense, but anyway, so any software vendors are fully, everybody's considering open source first. Many companies are doing open source first, so if you want to look at Datadog or Prometheus, I may look at Prometheus. If I look at IBM uDeploy or Spinnaker, I may look at Spinnaker, so everything Kubernetes or maybe some other forms of communities. So I think these vendors that you talk about, one is the open source part of it, the other is that when you go to the cloud, the providers all provide the basic things already. If you look at Google Cloud, I was actually reading about Google networking a lot of things, lot of the load balancers, and all those things are inbuilt as part of the fabric. Things that you typically use, a router or a firewall or those things, they're all inbuilt, so why would I use a F5 load balancer and things like that? So I would say that I don't think their life is that easy, but there's definitely-- >> All right, so here's the question, who's winning and who's losing with cloud-native? I mean what is really going on in that marketplace, what's the top story, what's the biggest thing people should pay attention to, and who's winning and who's losing? >> I think the channelization of the cloud-native technology is definitely helping vendors like AWS, and basically the cloud vendors. Because no longer you have to go to VMware to get anything done, they have proprietary software that they had and you don't have to go there anymore, everybody can provide it, so the vendors, I would say the customers, obviously, because now they have more choices, they're not vendor locked in, they can go to EKS or AKS in a heartbeat and nothing happens. So customers and vendors are big winners. And then I would say the code providers are big winners. open source is really hurting some of the vendors we talked about earlier, I would say the big guys are the-- >> Cloud's getting bigger, the cloud guys are getting bigger and bigger, more powerful. What about VMware, you mentioned VMware, anything to their proprietary, they also run on AWS, natively, so they're still hanging around, they got the operators. But they're not hitting the devs, but they have this new movement with the Kubernetes, they acquired a company to do that. >> I would say that the AWS, VMware on AWS, essentially is, I would say almost a no-op for VMware in some sense, in some sense. They have to be, it's almost like a place to sell their ware. They used to be on-prem vendors already have the infrastructure, then VMware goes, sells to that customer A. Now the customer says that "I'm not using it on on-prem server A, "I'm on AWS, can you provide me the same software." So essentially, number one, by moving to the cloud, they're essentially selling to the same customers, the same stuff, number one. Number two is but once now I'm in the cloud, I would obviously PWA my workload to native AWS or Google, so I think in the long run, I would say that it's a strategy to survive, but I don't think it's a long-term successful. >> Operators don't move that fast, devs move much faster. I got to ask you, in the developer world, and cloud-native and DevOps 2.0, 3.0, what are the biggest challenges that's slowing it down, why isn't it going faster, or is it going fast, what's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think I would say that the biggest change is obviously, I just said, the people. In some sense, people have to transform, and in large organizations, there's a lot of inertia that allows people, they are deploying existing services the way they're deploying services, some of them are custom-built, the guy who wrote it and they no longer exist, they've moved on, and so some of them are built like that, but I think the inertia is basically now "How do I transform them over to the new model?" If the application itself is getting more broken into more microservices, then it's a great opportunity for me to migrate, but if it's not, then I'm not going to touch something that's actually there. So I would say is that technology's complex. Actually, every day we have people, there's a lot of interest, there's a lot of people learning, learning, learning new stuff, but I cannot hire one Kubernetes good engineer if I want to try hard, independently at least. Because it's hard. >> 'Cause they're working somewhere else, right? >> Well they work somewhere else, or the technology is still early enough that people are learning in droves, don't get me wrong there, but I think it's still fairly complex for them to digest all of that. I think in five years, fast forward five years, you would see that technology, knowledge would be more, so it would be easier to hire those people, because if we want to transform internally, let's say I have my enterprise, I want to transform, I need to hire people to do that. >> What are the use cases, what are the top use cases that you're seeing in your work and out in the field in the business that people are rallying around, they can get some wins, top three use cases for end to end cloud-native development? >> I would say the use cases are like if I'm doing any kind of container-based applications, obviously, I would like to do through the new model of doing things, because I don't want to build based on legacy technology, for sure. I would say that the other ones are new age companies, they're definitely adopting cloud first, and they're able to leverage the existing models, the new models more quickly. I mean obviously there are two things, I think that if I'm doing something new, I take advantage of that. >> Do you think microservices is overrated right now, or is it hyped up, or is it? >> No, I think it's real, absurdly real. >> And what's the big use case there? >> The velocity that people get by adopting microservices. Before, I used to work at Cisco, and there's a software release I have planned for six months to release a software because there's so many engineers, and developing so many features, they develop it over a period of time, and then when they actually integrate, there's two, three months of testing before it gets out, because the guy who wrote the code probably left the company already, by the time the software actually sees the light of day. >> Give some data from your perspective, you don't have to name companies, but for the people that are successful with DevOps, at an operating level, what kind of frequency of updates are they doing per day, just give us some order of magnitude numbers on what is a success in terms of it? >> Yeah, I mean the great examples are something like Netflix and all, 7000 deployments a day, but obviously that's in the top of the pyramid, so to say. Many of the other customers are doing, some are bringing in one to two a week, these are very good companies. This is for the service level, I'm not talking about the whole application. Because the application may have 10, 20, 50 services in some way, so there's a lot of updates going on every week, so if you look at a week timeframe, you may have 50 updates for that service, but I think individual service level, essentially it could be one or two a week, and obviously the frequency varies depending on-- >> Just a lot of software being updated all the time. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Well Balaji, great to have you in, and I got to say, it's been, we could use your commentary and your insight in some CUBE interviews, love to invite you back, thanks for coming in, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, here in the CUBE Conversation we have thought leader conversations with experts. From our expert network theCUBE, CUBE alumni, and again, all about bringing you the data here from theCUBE studios, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (funky music)