(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE, in Palo Alto for "CUBE Conversation" with Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at Platform9. I've got a series of questions, had a great conversation earlier. Chris, I have a couple questions for you, what do you think? >> Let's do it, John. >> Okay, how does Platform9 Solution, you- can it be used on any infrastructure anywhere, cloud, edge, on-premise? >> It can, that's the beauty of our control plane, right? It was born in the cloud, and we primarily deliver that SaaS, which allows it to work in your data center, on bare metal, on VMs, or with public cloud infrastructure. We now give you the ability to take that control plane, install it in your data center, and then use it with anything, or even in air gap. And that includes capabilities with bare metal orchestration as well. >> Second question. How does Platform9 ensure maximum uptime, and proactive issue resolution? >> Oh, that's a good question. So if you come to Platform nine we're going to talk about always on assurance. What is driving that is a system of three components around self-healing, monitoring, and proactive assistance. So our software will heal broken things on nodes, right? If something stops running that should be running, it will attempt to restart that. We also have monitoring that's deployed with everything. So you build a cluster in AWS, well, we put open source monitoring agents, that are actually Prometheus, on every single node. That means it's resilient, right? So if you lose a node, you don't lose monitoring. But that data importantly comes back to our control plane, and that's the control plane that you can put in your data center as well. That data is what alerts us, and you as a user, anytime of the day that something's going wrong. Let's say etcd latency, good example, etcd is going slow. We'll find out, we might not be able to take restorative action immediately, but we're definitely going to reach out and say,, "You have a problem, let's get ahead of this and let's prevent that from becoming a bigger problem." And that's what we're delivering. When we say always on assurance, we're talking about self-healing, we're talking about remote monitoring, we're talking about being proactive with our customers, not waiting for the phone call or the support desk ticket saying, "Oh we think something's not working." Or worse, the customer has an outage. >> Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Can you explain the process for implementing Platform9 within a company's existing infrastructure. >> Are we doing air gap, or on-prem or SaaS approached? SaaS approach I think is by far the easiest, right? We can build a dedicated Platform9 control plane instance in a manner of minutes, for any customer. So when we do a proof of concept or onboarding, we just literally put in an email address, put in the name you want for your fully qualified domain name, and your instance is up. From that point onwards, the user can just log in, and using our CLI, talk to any number of, say, virtual machines, or physical servers in their environment for, you know, doing this in a data center or colo, and say, "I want these to be my Kubernetes control plane nodes. Here's the five of them. Here's the VIP for the load balancing, the API server and here are all of my compute nodes." And that CLI will work with the SaaS control plane, and go and build the cluster. That's as simple as it, CentOS, Ubuntu, just plain old operating system. Our software takes care of all the prerequisites, installing all the pieces, putting down MetalLB, CoreDNS, Metrics Server, Kubernetes dashboard, etcd backups. You built some servers. That's essentially what you've done, and the rest is being handled by Platform9. It's as simple as that. >> Great, thanks for that. What are the two traditional paths for companies considering the cloud native journey? The two paths. >> The traditional paths. I think that's your engineering team running so fast that before you even realize that you've got, you know, 10 EKS clusters. Or, hey, we can do this. You know, I've got the I can build it mentality. Let's go DIY completely open source Kubernetes on our infrastructure, and we're going to piecemeal build it all up together. They're, I think the pathways that people traditionally look at this journey, as opposed to having that third alternative saying can I just consume it on my infrastructure, be it cloud or on-premise or at the edge. >> Third is the new way, you guys do that. >> That's been our focus since the company was, you know, brought together back in the open OpenStack days. >> Awesome, what's the makeup of your customer base? Is there a certain pattern to the size or environments that you guys work with? Is there a pattern or consistency to your customer base? >> It's a spread, right? We've got large enterprises like Juniper, and we go all the way down to people with 20, 30, 50 nodes in total. We've got people in banking and finance, we've got things all the way through to telecommunications and storage infrastructure. >> What's your favorite feature of Platform9? >> My favorite feature? You know, if I ask, should I say this as a pre-sales engineer, let me show you a favorite thing. My immediate response is, I should never do this. (John laughs) To me it's just being able to define my cluster and say, go. And in five minutes I have that environment, I can see everything that's running, right? It's all unified, it's one spot, right? I'm a cluster admin. I said I wanted three control plane, 25 workers. Here's the infrastructure, it creates it, and once it's built, I can see everything that's running, right? All the applications that are there. One UI, I don't have to go click around. I'm not trying to solve things or download things. It's the fact that it's unified and just delivered in one hit. >> What is the one thing that people should know about Platform9 that they might not know about it? >> I think it's that we help developers and engineers as much as we can help our operations teams. I think, for a long time we've sort of targeted that user and said, hey, we, we really help you. It's like, but why are they doing this? Why are they building any infrastructure or any cloud platform? Well, it's to run applications and services, to help their customers, but how do they get there? There's people building and writing those things, and we're helping them, right? For the last two years, we've been really focused on making it simple, and I think that's an important thing to know. >> Chris, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE Q&A session here with Platform9. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light music)

(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)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone center it's theCUBE covering AWS Summits San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. Here at the Moscone Center West. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have a distinguished panel of guests on the program. Starting down of the fair side, Steven Jones whose the Director of Solution Architecture with AWS, helping us talk about how AWS gets to market is Chris Wegmann, Manager and Director of Accenture, and then super excited to have a customer on the program Chad Anderson is the IT Director of Operations at Del Monte Foods. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright Chad, we're going to start with you, talk to us a little bit about your role inside Del Monte and really the journey of the cloud, something we've been talking about for years, but Del Monte has an interesting story. I want to kind of understand your role in that. Start us off. >> Ya so I oversaw the project for us to migrate everything to AWS. We started off with just needing to really understand if were missing something here. Like, shouldn't we be moving to the cloud and that ended up in a study where we just kind of went threw the numbers, we looked at what the benefits were going to be and it kind of just turned into a obvious choice for us to do it. >> Back us up for a second, give us you know your organization Del Monte Foods and your technology group is this global and scope kind of how many end user do you have? How many sites? Can you give us a little bit of the speeds and feeds of what what was being considered, was it everything or some pieces, what was the impetus for the journey of the cloud? >> Ya, so we have about a thousand users, globally we are mostly in Manila, for our global share services our business back office work is done there and then most of it is U.S. footprint of plants and distribution centers and headquarters, et cetera operations. >> Alright so Chris, the SI partner for this cloud journey. So bring us a little bit of insight, bring us back to you know, kind of what was the business challenge and what was your teams role in helping along those journeys? >> The business challenge was getting Del Monte, getting the heart of their organization SAP to AWS quickly. Alright, there was a short time frame, I learned a lot about fruit packing during the project, but it was about how quickly could we get there? So, when we actually started, we started looking at taking seven months to do the migration of their environment. We really got into it and really got focused on what needed to be done. We looked at a lot of automation, put a lot of automation on the process, a very diligent approach, and we were able to do it, we thought we could do it in four months, and we did in three and a half months so very rapid, and I think as Chad will tell you we really kind of focused on building the right architecture, putting a lot of automation, and then also getting it in there with the right performance and then being able to tune things down, because you can you can move so quickly between engine sizes and memory and it was a really really exciting process to go through. >> Ya, so you said it originally we thought it was seven months, and it was good and done in half that time. That's not my experience with Enterprise Software roll outs. So, what was the delta there? How was the team able to move so fast? >> A lot of it was obviously AWS, being able to spin up the infrastructure, being able to automate a lot of the tasks that had to be done. Alright we did it threw three different environment sets. So we started diligent, moved to test, then went to production, and in each step we automated more and more of the process so we were able to condense the speed of the technical work that had to take place in a really short amount of time. >> We had to treat it also, like a mission critical thing across it wasn't just a infrastructure move it really the application guys were focused on this, we stopped all development of other activities going on. We really just kind of turned everybody and say "Let's get this done as soon as possible "and not be competing with each other." >> When you say stop everything, but of course the business didn't stop, but was transition pretty seamless. >> I mean other projects. >> Ya, ya, ya I understand, but I mean from the cut over and from your users stand point, did it go pretty smoothly? >> Oh definitely, these guys did an amazing job of putting together a plan that was really ready to be executed against. It took some, it took a lot of, I mean on my part it was really just to negotiate the extended maintenance window, but as far as the best compliment I ever got was people were like what did you do? Like I didn't even know that you guys did anything. From day one they took it and ran with it and we were stable. I mean it was pretty awesome. >> A black box, magic happens here and all of a sudden everything is running faster, scaling easier, cost is better, some of those types of thing? >> Ya, cocktails and beach time. >> Steve cocktails? I didn't realize that when I moved my enterprise application to cloud cocktails were involved. >> A few cocktails are involved. >> I mean look, I remember a few years ago where it was like well it's your development will do in the cloud, but I mean SAP has really raised cloud full boar and you know very strong partner, but bring us up to how does AWS help customers make sure that, this is critical things running the business, that it runs so smoothly. What have you learned along the way? What is different in 2018, then say it was even a year or two ago? >> A lot of great questions in there Stu, I would say this is become the new normal. Right? It use to be full disclosure, dev test, training type work loads in the early days but over the course of years we have taking a lot of learning with partners like Accenture and customers like Del Monte and we've taking those learnings and put them back into the platforms, so what you see today is a platform that a partner like Accenture could come in build a lot of automation tooling around, to reduce time frame from seven months down to three and a half. I think it was around two hundred servers, 50 of those were SAP related, and 25 terabytes of data that were moved in a short amount of time. So it's a combination of years worth of effort to build a platform that is scalable, resilient, and flexible. As well as the work that we have done directly with SAP that has gone right back into the platform. >> Chad bring us inside kind of operations on your team. What is the before and after? What's it look like? Was there change in personal or roles or skills? >> We transition services with our migration. So the Accenture team has taking over the long term operational activities as well as helping us through the migration efforts. We had a lot of preparation that was going on besides the server migration that was happening and I think what is really unique about them is because they can deliver these capabilities of the migration they have got a lot of the tooling and the automation is built into the operational mana services model as well. So it's been a much easier kind of hand over from those teams because we are working with the same vendor. >> Most of the time its not just that I've migrated from my environment to the cloud, but how does that enable the new services either Accenture from AWS from the marketplace. What has changed as to how you look at your SAP environment and kind of capability wise? >> It's just incredibly flexible now. It's just one of those situations where we can start small and we can scale so rapidly and it's like I feel like its kind of like walking into a fast food restaurant and just like oh, I'll take one of these, one of these, and one of these. You wait there and the food comes out, it just happens automatically. So, it's a great thing. >> Chris, I remember I interviewed a CEO a few years ago, and he said use to give me a million dollars in 18 months and I'll build you the Taj Mahal from my applications. Today I need to move faster and it's not a one time migration, but there's ongoing I've heard it a time and again there, so where does Accenture, it's not just the planning, where's Accenture involved? What is kind of the ongoing engagement? >> We go end to end. Right? So, we start out with strategy, we start out with a migration. The migration takes planning and execution, but really we focus on the run area as well using our Accenture platform and tooling that we have built. We really focus on how do you continue to optimize? How do you continue to improve performance? How do you govern? How do you do things like quota and security management and that type of stuff. I do think that a lot of our customers start with cloud think I can spin this stuff up, I can run it just like I ran my on premise data center and it's not the same. You go from a capacity planning person to a cost management person. You need to have a cloud architect understanding how you build your applications to be Cloud ready and AWS ready. There are a lot of great services, but if your not taking advantages of those services you can't auto scale, you can't do that stuff. So, we really help our clients go threw that entire process and make sure their getting the most value out of AWS all the way through the run for many years after they have done the migration. >> Chad, do you have any discussion of how are you reporting back to the business as to what were the hero numbers or success factors that said hey this was actually the right thing to do? >> Ya I mean we're a canned food company, so people are very interested in making sure that we are keeping our cost low. Most people from a business prospect want to talk to me about the efficiencies that their seeing and how's that going to show up a reduction in SG and A. We have seen it, I mean when you move to a group of people that can manage a larger set of infrastructure with a smaller group of people and the underline services can be turned on and off, so you only utilize what you really absolutely have. Those numbers show up on our bottom line. >> Steve, any other similar, what do you hear from customers when it comes to SAP, and what is the main driver, and what are the big hero things? >> So in the early days, it was all about cost right, driving cost out of the system. Now it's the flexibility, the ability to move quicker. Chad was relating earlier how you would spend a lot of time sizing environment and now there actually able to right size their environments using purpose built equipment the AWS has built for SAP. It's enabled them to actually reduce cost and move quicker. That's what we are hearing is common theme now these days. It's okay to move faster, to maybe not worry about sizing as much as we use to. >> Ya for future initiatives, I mean it's, there's all these windows of time that are just gone for us to stand up new services whether it's traditional application that needs servers and computer, whether it's SAP services, we are kind of all on that platform now where we can just click and plug in items much easier. >> Chad, what do things like digital transformation and innervation mean to a canned food company? >> We are desperately trying to get in touch of our consumer. So, whether were figuring out how to get improve kind of how we are managing our digital assets, how were managing, our pages on Amazon, or our pages on Walmart.com. We need to be much more in touch and much more consumer focused and a lot of these newer technologies, et cetera there built to run on AWS and we ready to kind of integrate that into our existing enterprise environment. >> Innervation has been a big part of our customers reason for moving to cloud. I'd say 18 months ago, we saw a big transition in our enterprise customers a lot of them were starting off with cost savings, for operational savings, just overall improvement of their operations, and then we seen about 18 months ago we saw a big shift of people very much focused on innervation and using AWS platform as that catalyst renovation. So, the businesses asking for Alexa apps, they're asking for the integration. Well, the SAP data has to be there to support that stuff. Right, and your enterprise tech has to be there, so by doing that it's enabled a lot of innervation in our processors. >> Chad, last question when you talk about innovation, are there certain areas that your team's investing in is it AI, is it IOT, you know what are some of the areas that you think will be the most promising and how do Accenture and AWS fit into those from your planning? >> Ya, I mean IOT is definitely an interesting area for us, and getting to a point where we can measure our effectiveness and our manufacturing processes, those are all really initiatives now that we're starting to focus on, now that we kind of gotten some of the infrastructure related stuff and were ready to kind of build out those platforms. We're talking about scaling out our OE software and our infrastructure its just such an easier conversation to kind of plan for those activities. We turned a three month sizing exercise as to how much IOT did and we think were going to have to process through these engines into a hey let's go with this and if it doesn't work then we'll take it out and increase the size. It really helps us deliver capabilities new capabilities and new types of ways of measuring or helping our business run in a much more effective and efficient way. >> Anything that you've learned along the way that you've turned to peers and say "Here's something I did, maybe do it faster or do it a little bit different way?" >> I think Accenture has been an amazing partner. I think a lot of people are skeptical about running their entire enterprise across the network and once you kind of bring them in and you really let them look under the cover of what you have. One of the reasons we went with them was just the trust and confidence that they had that we could do this. Once I kind of saw that it was like well I mean let's trust the process here. I mean these guys are the experts and so so that's been a big thing is just reach out learn about what people are doing. There's no reason why you can't do this. >> Well Chad, Chris, and Steve thank you both so much for highlighting the story of a customer's journey to the cloud. We will be back with lots more coverage here at AWS Summit in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)