(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase AI/ML Top Startups Building Foundation Model Infrastructure. This is season three, episode one of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem to talk about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin and today we're excited to be joined by two guests from Astronomer. Steven Hillion joins us, it's Chief Data Officer and Jeff Fletcher, it's director of ML. They're here to talk about machine learning and data orchestration. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Before we get into machine learning let's give the audience an overview of Astronomer. Talk about what that is, Steven. Talk about what you mean by data orchestration. >> Yeah, let's start with Astronomer. We're the Airflow company basically. The commercial developer behind the open-source project, Apache Airflow. I don't know if you've heard of Airflow. It's sort of de-facto standard these days for orchestrating data pipelines, data engineering pipelines, and as we'll talk about later, machine learning pipelines. It's really is the de-facto standard. I think we're up to about 12 million downloads a month. That's actually as a open-source project. I think at this point it's more popular by some measures than Slack. Airflow was created by Airbnb some years ago to manage all of their data pipelines and manage all of their workflows and now it powers the data ecosystem for organizations as diverse as Electronic Arts, Conde Nast is one of our big customers, a big user of Airflow. And also not to mention the biggest banks on Wall Street use Airflow and Astronomer to power the flow of data throughout their organizations. >> Talk about that a little bit more, Steven, in terms of the business impact. You mentioned some great customer names there. What is the business impact or outcomes that a data orchestration strategy enables businesses to achieve? >> Yeah, I mean, at the heart of it is quite simply, scheduling and managing data pipelines. And so if you have some enormous retailer who's managing the flow of information throughout their organization they may literally have thousands or even tens of thousands of data pipelines that need to execute every day to do things as simple as delivering metrics for the executives to consume at the end of the day, to producing on a weekly basis new machine learning models that can be used to drive product recommendations. One of our customers, for example, is a British food delivery service. And you get those recommendations in your application that says, "Well, maybe you want to have samosas with your curry." That sort of thing is powered by machine learning models that they train on a regular basis to reflect changing conditions in the market. And those are produced through Airflow and through the Astronomer platform, which is essentially a managed platform for running airflow. So at its simplest it really is just scheduling and managing those workflows. But that's easier said than done of course. I mean if you have 10 thousands of those things then you need to make sure that they all run that they all have sufficient compute resources. If things fail, how do you track those down across those 10,000 workflows? How easy is it for an average data scientist or data engineer to contribute their code, their Python notebooks or their SQL code into a production environment? And then you've got reproducibility, governance, auditing, like managing data flows across an organization which we think of as orchestrating them is much more than just scheduling. It becomes really complicated pretty quickly. >> I imagine there's a fair amount of complexity there. Jeff, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk a little bit about Astronomer through your lens, data orchestration and how it applies to MLOps. >> So I come from a machine learning background and for me the interesting part is that machine learning requires the expansion into orchestration. A lot of the same things that you're using to go and develop and build pipelines in a standard data orchestration space applies equally well in a machine learning orchestration space. What you're doing is you're moving data between different locations, between different tools, and then tasking different types of tools to act on that data. So extending it made logical sense from a implementation perspective. And a lot of my focus at Astronomer is really to explain how Airflow can be used well in a machine learning context. It is being used well, it is being used a lot by the customers that we have and also by users of the open source version. But it's really being able to explain to people why it's a natural extension for it and how well it fits into that. And a lot of it is also extending some of the infrastructure capabilities that Astronomer provides to those customers for them to be able to run some of the more platform specific requirements that come with doing machine learning pipelines. >> Let's get into some of the things that make Astronomer unique. Jeff, sticking with you, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the key differentiators that you articulate to customers? >> So a lot of it is that we are not specific to one cloud provider. So we have the ability to operate across all of the big cloud providers. I know, I'm certain we have the best developers that understand how best practices implementations for data orchestration works. So we spend a lot of time talking to not just the business outcomes and the business users of the product, but also also for the technical people, how to help them better implement things that they may have come across on a Stack Overflow article or not necessarily just grown with how the product has migrated. So it's the ability to run it wherever you need to run it and also our ability to help you, the customer, better implement and understand those workflows that I think are two of the primary differentiators that we have. >> Lisa: Got it. >> I'll add another one if you don't mind. >> You can go ahead, Steven. >> Is lineage and dependencies between workflows. One thing we've done is to augment core Airflow with Lineage services. So using the Open Lineage framework, another open source framework for tracking datasets as they move from one workflow to another one, team to another, one data source to another is a really key component of what we do and we bundle that within the service so that as a developer or as a production engineer, you really don't have to worry about lineage, it just happens. Jeff, may show us some of this later that you can actually see as data flows from source through to a data warehouse out through a Python notebook to produce a predictive model or a dashboard. Can you see how those data products relate to each other? And when something goes wrong, figure out what upstream maybe caused the problem, or if you're about to change something, figure out what the impact is going to be on the rest of the organization. So Lineage is a big deal for us. >> Got it. >> And just to add on to that, the other thing to think about is that traditional Airflow is actually a complicated implementation. It required quite a lot of time spent understanding or was almost a bespoke language that you needed to be able to develop in two write these DAGs, which is like fundamental pipelines. So part of what we are focusing on is tooling that makes it more accessible to say a data analyst or a data scientist who doesn't have or really needs to gain the necessary background in how the semantics of Airflow DAGs works to still be able to get the benefit of what Airflow can do. So there is new features and capabilities built into the astronomer cloud platform that effectively obfuscates and removes the need to understand some of the deep work that goes on. But you can still do it, you still have that capability, but we are expanding it to be able to have orchestrated and repeatable processes accessible to more teams within the business. >> In terms of accessibility to more teams in the business. You talked about data scientists, data analysts, developers. Steven, I want to talk to you, as the chief data officer, are you having more and more conversations with that role and how is it emerging and evolving within your customer base? >> Hmm. That's a good question, and it is evolving because I think if you look historically at the way that Airflow has been used it's often from the ground up. You have individual data engineers or maybe single data engineering teams who adopt Airflow 'cause it's very popular. Lots of people know how to use it and they bring it into an organization and say, "Hey, let's use this to run our data pipelines." But then increasingly as you turn from pure workflow management and job scheduling to the larger topic of orchestration you realize it gets pretty complicated, you want to have coordination across teams, and you want to have standardization for the way that you manage your data pipelines. And so having a managed service for Airflow that exists in the cloud is easy to spin up as you expand usage across the organization. And thinking long term about that in the context of orchestration that's where I think the chief data officer or the head of analytics tends to get involved because they really want to think of this as a strategic investment that they're making. Not just per team individual Airflow deployments, but a network of data orchestrators. >> That network is key. Every company these days has to be a data company. We talk about companies being data driven. It's a common word, but it's true. It's whether it is a grocer or a bank or a hospital, they've got to be data companies. So talk to me a little bit about Astronomer's business model. How is this available? How do customers get their hands on it? >> Jeff, go ahead. >> Yeah, yeah. So we have a managed cloud service and we have two modes of operation. One, you can bring your own cloud infrastructure. So you can say here is an account in say, AWS or Azure and we can go and deploy the necessary infrastructure into that, or alternatively we can host everything for you. So it becomes a full SaaS offering. But we then provide a platform that connects at the backend to your internal IDP process. So however you are authenticating users to make sure that the correct people are accessing the services that they need with role-based access control. From there we are deploying through Kubernetes, the different services and capabilities into either your cloud account or into an account that we host. And from there Airflow does what Airflow does, which is its ability to then reach to different data systems and data platforms and to then run the orchestration. We make sure we do it securely, we have all the necessary compliance certifications required for GDPR in Europe and HIPAA based out of the US, and a whole bunch host of others. So it is a secure platform that can run in a place that you need it to run, but it is a managed Airflow that includes a lot of the extra capabilities like the cloud developer environment and the open lineage services to enhance the overall airflow experience. >> Enhance the overall experience. So Steven, going back to you, if I'm a Conde Nast or another organization, what are some of the key business outcomes that I can expect? As one of the things I think we've learned during the pandemic is access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have for organizations. It's really an imperative. It's that demanding consumer that wants to have that personalized, customized, instant access to a product or a service. So if I'm a Conde Nast or I'm one of your customers, what can I expect my business to be able to achieve as a result of data orchestration? >> Yeah, I think in a nutshell it's about providing a reliable, scalable, and easy to use service for developing and running data workflows. And talking of demanding customers, I mean, I'm actually a customer myself, as you mentioned, I'm the head of data for Astronomer. You won't be surprised to hear that we actually use Astronomer and Airflow to run all of our data pipelines. And so I can actually talk about my experience. When I started I was of course familiar with Airflow, but it always seemed a little bit unapproachable to me if I was introducing that to a new team of data scientists. They don't necessarily want to have to think about learning something new. But I think because of the layers that Astronomer has provided with our Astro service around Airflow it was pretty easy for me to get up and running. Of course I've got an incentive for doing that. I work for the Airflow company, but we went from about, at the beginning of last year, about 500 data tasks that we were running on a daily basis to about 15,000 every day. We run something like a million data operations every month within my team. And so as one outcome, just the ability to spin up new production workflows essentially in a single day you go from an idea in the morning to a new dashboard or a new model in the afternoon, that's really the business outcome is just removing that friction to operationalizing your machine learning and data workflows. >> And I imagine too, oh, go ahead, Jeff. >> Yeah, I think to add to that, one of the things that becomes part of the business cycle is a repeatable capabilities for things like reporting, for things like new machine learning models. And the impediment that has existed is that it's difficult to take that from a team that's an analyst team who then provide that or a data science team that then provide that to the data engineering team who have to work the workflow all the way through. What we're trying to unlock is the ability for those teams to directly get access to scheduling and orchestrating capabilities so that a business analyst can have a new report for C-suite execs that needs to be done once a week, but the time to repeatability for that report is much shorter. So it is then immediately in the hands of the person that needs to see it. It doesn't have to go into a long list of to-dos for a data engineering team that's already overworked that they eventually get it to it in a month's time. So that is also a part of it is that the realizing, orchestration I think is fairly well and a lot of people get the benefit of being able to orchestrate things within a business, but it's having more people be able to do it and shorten the time that that repeatability is there is one of the main benefits from good managed orchestration. >> So a lot of workforce productivity improvements in what you're doing to simplify things, giving more people access to data to be able to make those faster decisions, which ultimately helps the end user on the other end to get that product or the service that they're expecting like that. Jeff, I understand you have a demo that you can share so we can kind of dig into this. >> Yeah, let me take you through a quick look of how the whole thing works. So our starting point is our cloud infrastructure. This is the login. You go to the portal. You can see there's a a bunch of workspaces that are available. Workspaces are like individual places for people to operate in. I'm not going to delve into all the deep technical details here, but starting point for a lot of our data science customers is we have what we call our Cloud IDE, which is a web-based development environment for writing and building out DAGs without actually having to know how the underpinnings of Airflow work. This is an internal one, something that we use. You have a notebook-like interface that lets you write python code and SQL code and a bunch of specific bespoke type of blocks if you want. They all get pulled together and create a workflow. So this is a workflow, which gets compiled to something that looks like a complicated set of Python code, which is the DAG. I then have a CICD process pipeline where I commit this through to my GitHub repo. So this comes to a repo here, which is where these DAGs that I created in the previous step exist. I can then go and say, all right, I want to see how those particular DAGs have been running. We then get to the actual Airflow part. So this is the managed Airflow component. So we add the ability for teams to fairly easily bring up an Airflow instance and write code inside our notebook-like environment to get it into that instance. So you can see it's been running. That same process that we built here that graph ends up here inside this, but you don't need to know how the fundamentals of Airflow work in order to get this going. Then we can run one of these, it runs in the background and we can manage how it goes. And from there, every time this runs, it's emitting to a process underneath, which is the open lineage service, which is the lineage integration that allows me to come in here and have a look and see this was that actual, that same graph that we built, but now it's the historic version. So I know where things started, where things are going, and how it ran. And then I can also do a comparison. So if I want to see how this particular run worked compared to one historically, I can grab one from a previous date and it will show me the comparison between the two. So that combination of managed Airflow, getting Airflow up and running very quickly, but the Cloud IDE that lets you write code and know how to get something into a repeatable format get that into Airflow and have that attached to the lineage process adds what is a complete end-to-end orchestration process for any business looking to get the benefit from orchestration. >> Outstanding. Thank you so much Jeff for digging into that. So one of my last questions, Steven is for you. This is exciting. There's a lot that you guys are enabling organizations to achieve here to really become data-driven companies. So where can folks go to get their hands on this? >> Yeah, just go to astronomer.io and we have plenty of resources. If you're new to Airflow, you can read our documentation, our guides to getting started. We have a CLI that you can download that is really I think the easiest way to get started with Airflow. But you can actually sign up for a trial. You can sign up for a guided trial where our teams, we have a team of experts, really the world experts on getting Airflow up and running. And they'll take you through that trial and allow you to actually kick the tires and see how this works with your data. And I think you'll see pretty quickly that it's very easy to get started with Airflow, whether you're doing that from the command line or doing that in our cloud service. And all of that is available on our website >> astronomer.io. Jeff, last question for you. What are you excited about? There's so much going on here. What are some of the things, maybe you can give us a sneak peek coming down the road here that prospects and existing customers should be excited about? >> I think a lot of the development around the data awareness components, so one of the things that's traditionally been complicated with orchestration is you leave your data in the place that you're operating on and we're starting to have more data processing capability being built into Airflow. And from a Astronomer perspective, we are adding more capabilities around working with larger datasets, doing bigger data manipulation with inside the Airflow process itself. And that lends itself to better machine learning implementation. So as we start to grow and as we start to get better in the machine learning context, well, in the data awareness context, it unlocks a lot more capability to do and implement proper machine learning pipelines. >> Awesome guys. Exciting stuff. Thank you so much for talking to me about Astronomer, machine learning, data orchestration, and really the value in it for your customers. Steve and Jeff, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure, thanks. >> And we thank you for watching. This is season three, episode one of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone, it's Vegas. Welcome back. We know you've been watching all day. We appreciate that. We always love being able to bring you some great content on the Cube Live from AWS Reinvented 22. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gill. And Paul, we've had such a great event. We've, I think we've done nearly 70 interviews since we started on the Cube on >>Monday night. I believe we just hit 70. Yeah, we just hit 70. You must feel like you've done half of >>Them. I really do. But we've been having great conversations. There's so much innovation going on at aws. Nothing slowed them down during the pandemic. We love also talking about the innovation, the flywheel that is their partner ecosystem. We're gonna have a great conversation about that >>Next. And as we've said, going back to day one, the energy of the show is remarkable. And here we are, we're getting late in the afternoon on day two, and there's just as much activity, just as much energy out there as, as the beginning of the first day. I have no doubt day three will be the >>Same. I agree. There's been no slowdown. We've got two guests here. We're gonna have a great conversation. Chuck Kubota joins us, senior Director of Cloud Services, GTM at Red Hat. Great to have you on the program. And Ted Stanton, global head of Sales, red Hat at IBM at aws. Welcome. >>Thanks for having us. >>How's the show going so far for you guys? >>It's a blur. Is it? Oh my gosh. >>Don't they all >>Blur? Well, yes, yes. I actually like last year a bit better. It was half the size. Yeah. And a lot easier to get around, but this is back to normal, so >>It is back to normal. Yeah. And and Ted, we're hearing north of 50,000 in-person attendees. I heard a, something I think was published. I heard the second hand over like 300,000 online attendees. This is maybe the biggest one we ever had. >>Yeah, yeah, I would agree. And frankly, it's my first time here, so I am massively impressed with the overall show, the meeting with partners, the meeting with customers, the announcements that were made, just fantastic. And >>If you remember back to two years ago, there were a lot of questions about whether in-person conferences would ever return and the volume that we used to see them. And that appears to be >>The case. I think we, I think we've answered, I think AWS has answered that for us, which I'm very pleased to see. Talk about some of those announcements. Ted. There's been so much that that's always one of the things we know and love about re men is there's slew of announcements. You were saying this morning, Paul, and then keynote, you lost, you stopped counting after I >>Lost 15, I lost count for 15. I think it was over 30 announcements this morning alone >>Where IBM and Red Hat are concern. What are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of some of the news, the innovation, and where the partnership is going? >>Well, definitely where the partnership is going, and I think even as we're speaking right now, is a keynote going on with Aruba, talking about some of the partners and the way in which we support partners and the new technologies and the new abilities for partners to take advantage of these technologies to frankly delight our customers is really what most excites me. >>Chuck, what about you? What's going on with Red Hat? You've been there a long time. Sales, everything, picking up customers, massively transforming. What are some of the things that you're seeing and that you're excited >>About? Yeah, I mean, first of all, you know, as customers have, you know, years ago discovered it's not competitively advantageous to manage their own data centers in most cases. So they would like to, you know, give that responsibility to Amazon. We're seeing them move further up the stack, right? So that would be more beyond the operating system, the application platforms like OpenShift. And now we have a managed application platform built on OpenShift called Red Out OpenShift service on AWS or Rosa. And then we're even further going up the stack with that with, we just announced this week that red out OpenShift data science is available in the AWS marketplace, runs on Rosa, helps break the land speed record to getting those data models out there that are so important to make, you know, help organizations become more, much more data driven to remain competitive themselves. >>So talk about Rosa and how it differs from previous iterations of, of OpenShift. I mean, you had, you had an online version of OpenShift several years ago. What's different about Rosa? >>Yeah, so the old OpenShift online that was several years old, right? For one thing, wasn't a joint partnership between Amazon and Red Hat. So we work together, right? Very closely on this, which is great. Also, the awesome thing about Rosa, you know, if you think about like OpenShift for, for, as a matter of fact, Amazon is the number one cloud that OpenShift runs on, right? So a lot of those customers want to take advantage of their committed spins, their EDPs, they want one bill. And so Rosa comes through the one bill comes through the marketplace, right? Which is, which is totally awesome. Not only that or financially backing OpenShift with a 99.95% financially backed sla, right? We didn't have that before either, right? >>When you say financially backed sla, >>What do you mean? That means that if we drop below 99.95% of availability, we're gonna give you some money back, right? So we're really, you know, for lack of better words, putting our money where our mouth is. Absolutely right. >>And, and some of the key reasons that we even work together to build Rosa was frankly we've had a mirror of customers and virtually every single region, every single industry been using OpenShift on AWS for years, right? And we listened to them, they wanted a more managed version of it and we worked very closely together. And what's really great about Rosa too is we built some really fantastic integrations with some of the AWS native services like API gateway, Amazon rds, private link, right? To make it very simple and easy for customers to get started. We talked a little bit about the marketplace, but it's also available just on the AWS console, right? So customers can get started in a pay as you go fashion start to use it. And if they wanna move into a more commitment, more of a set schedule of payments, they can move into a marketplace private offer. >>Chuck, talk about, how about Rosen? How is unlocking the power of technology like containers Kubernetes for customers while dialing down some of the complexity that's >>There? Yeah, I mean if you think about, you know, kind of what we did, you know, earlier on, right? If you think about like virtualization, how it dialed down the complexity of having to get something rack, get a blade rack, stack cable and cooled every time you wanted to deploy new application, right? So what we do is we, our message is this, we want developers to focus on what matters most. And that's build, deploy, and running applications. Most of our customers are not in the business of building app platforms. They're not in the business of building platforms like banks, I, you know, financials, right? Government, et cetera. Right? So what we do is we allow those developers that are, enable those developers that know Java and Node and springing and what have you, just to keep writing what they know. And then, you know, I don't wanna get too technical here, but get pushed through way and, and OpenShift takes care of the rest, builds it for them, runs it through a pipeline, a CICD pipeline, goes through all the testing and quality gates and things like that, deploys it, auto wires it up, you know, to monitoring which is what you need. >>And we have all kinds of other, you know, higher order services and an ecosystem around that. And oh, by the way, also plugging into and taking advantage of the services like rds, right? If you're gonna write an application, a tradition, a cloud native application on Amazon, you're probably going to wanna run it in Rosa and consuming one of those databases, right? Like RDS or Aurora, what have you. >>And I, and I would say it's not even just the customers. We have a variety of ecosystem partners, both of our partners leveraging it as well. We have solos built their executive management system that they go ahead and turn and sell to their customers, streamlines data and collects data from a variety of different sources. They decided, you know, it's better to run that on top of Rosa than manage OpenShift themselves. We've seen IBM restack a lot of their software, you know, to run on top of Rose, take advantage of that capabilities. So lots of partners as well as customers are taking advantage of fully managed stack of that OpenShift that that turnkey capabilities that it provides >>For, for OpenShift customers who wanna move to Rose, is that gonna be a one button migration? Is that gonna be, can they run both environments simultaneously and migrate over time? What kind of tools are you giving them? >>We have quite, we have quite a few migration tools such as conveyor, right? That's one of our projects, part of our migration application toolkit, right? And you know, with those, there's also partners like Trilio, right? Who can help move, you know, applications back 'em up. In fact, we're working on a pretty cool joint go to market with that right now. But generally speaking, the OpenShift experience that the customers that we have know and love and those who have never used OpenShift either are coming to it as well via Rosa, right? The experience is primarily the same. You don't have to really retrain your people, right? If anything, there's a reduction in operational cost. We increase developer productivity cuz we manage so much of the stack for you. We have SRE site reliability engineers that are backing the platform that proactively get ahead of anything that may go wrong. So maybe you don't even notice if something went wrong, wrong. And then also reactively fixing it if it comes to that, right? So, you know, all those kind of things that your customers are having to do on their own or hire a contractor, a consultant, what have to do Now we benefit from a managed offering in the cloud, right? In Amazon, right? And your developers still have that great experience too, like to say, you know, again, break the land speed record to prod. >>I >>Like that. And, and I would actually say migrations from OpenShift are on premise. OpenShift to Rosa maybe only represents about a third of the customers we have. About another third of the customers is frankly existing AWS customers. Maybe they're doing Kubernetes, do it, the, you know, do it themselves. We're struggling with some of the management of that. And so actually started to lean on top of using Rosa as a better platform to actually build upon their applications. And another third, we have quite a few customers that were frankly new OpenShift customers, new Red Hat customers and new AWS customers that were looking to build that next cloud native application. Lots of in the startup space that I've actually chosen to go with Rosa. >>It's funny you mention that because the largest Rosa consumer is new to OpenShift. Oh wow. Right. That's pretty, that's pretty powerful, right? It's not just for existing OpenShift customers, existing OpenShift. If you're running OpenShift, you know, on EC two, right. Self-managed, there's really no better way to run it than Rosa. You know, I think about whether this is the 10th year, 10 year anniversary of re right? Right. Yep. This is also the 10 year anniversary of OpenShift. Yeah, right. I think it one oh came out about sometime around a week, 10 years ago, right? When I came over to Red Hat in 2015. You know, if you, if you know your Kubernetes history was at July 25th, I think was when Kubernetes ga, July 25th, 2015 is when it g you have >>A good >>Memory. Well I remember those days back then, right? Those were fun, right? The, we had a, a large customer roll out on OpenShift three, which is our OpenShift RE based on Kubernetes. And where do you think they ran Amazon, right? Naturally. So, you know, as you move forward and, and, and OpenShift V four came out, the, reduces the operational complexity and becomes even more powerful through our operator framework and things like that. Now they revolved up to Rosa, right? And again, to help those customers focus on what matters most. And that's the applications, not the containers, not those underlying implementation and technical details while critically important, are not necessarily core to the business to most of our customers. >>Tremendous amount of innovation in OpenShift in a decade, >>Pardon me? >>Tremendous amount of innovation in OpenShift in the >>Last decade. Oh absolutely. And, and and tons more to come like every day. Right. I think what you're gonna see more of is, you know, as Kubernetes becomes more, more and more of the plumbing, you know, I call 'em productive abstractions on top of it, as you mentioned earlier, unlocking the power of these technologies while minimizing, even hiding the complexity of them so that you can just move fast Yeah. And safely move fast. >>I wanna be sure we get to, to marketplaces because you have been, red Hat has made, has really stepped up as commitment to the AWS marketplace. Why are you doing that now and how are, how are the marketplaces evolving as a channel for you? >>Well, cuz our customers want us to be there, right? I mean we, we, we are customer centric, customer first approach. Our customers want to buy through the marketplace. If you're an Amazon, if you're an Amazon customer, it's really easy for you to go procure software through the marketplace and have, instead of having to call up Red Hat and get on paper and write a second check, right? One stop shop one bill. Right? That is very, very attractive to our customers. Not only that, it opens up other ways to buy, you know, Ted mentioned earlier, you know, pay as you go buy the drink pricing using exactly what you need right now. Right? You know, AWS pioneered that, right? That provides that elasticity, you know, one of the core tenants at aws, AWS cloud, right? And we weren't able to get that with the traditional self-managed on Red Hat paper subscriptions. >>Talk a little bit about the go to market, what's, you talked about Ted, the kind of the three tenants of, of customer types. But talk a little bit about the gtm, the joint go to market, the joint engineering, so we get an understanding of how customers engage multiple options. >>Yeah, I mean, so if you think about go to market, you know, and the way I think of it is it's the intersection of a few areas, right? So the product and the product experience that we work together has to be so good that a customer or user, actually many start talk, talking about users now cuz it's self-service has a more than likely chance of getting their application to prod without ever talking to a person. Which is historically not what a lot of enterprise software companies are able to do, right? So that's one of those biggest things we do. We want customers to just be successful, turn it on, get going, be productive, right? At the same time we wanna to position the product in such a way that's differentiating that you can't get that experience anywhere else. And then part of that is ensuring that the education and enablement of our customers and our partners as such that they use the platform the right way to get as much value out of as possible. >>All backed by, you know, a very smart field that ensures that the customer get is making the right decision. A customer success org, this is attached to my org now that we can go on site and team with our customers to make sure that they get their first workloads up as quickly as possible, by the way, on our date, our, our dime. And then SRE and CEA backing that up with support and operational integrity to ensure that the service is always up and available so you can sleep, sleep, sleep well at night. Right? Right. One of our PMs of, of of Rosa, he says, what does he say? He says, Rosa allows organizations, enables organizations to go from 24 7 operations to nine to five innovation. Right? And that's powerful. That's how our customers remain more competitive running on Rosa with aws, >>When you're in customer conversations and you have 30 seconds, what are the key differentiators of the solution that you go boom, boom, boom, and they just go, I get it. >>Well, I mean, my 32nd elevator pitch, I think I've already said, I'll say it again. And that is OpenShift allows you to focus on your applications, build, deploy, and run applications while unlocking the power of the technologies like containers and Kubernetes and hiding or minimizing those complexities. So you can do as fast as possible. >>Mic drop Ted, question for you? Sure. Here we are at the, this is the, I leave the 11th reinvent, 10th anniversary, 11th event. You've been in the industry a long time. What is your biggest takeaway from what's been announced and discussed so far at Reinvent 22, where the AWS and and its partner ecosystem is concerned? If you had 30 seconds or if you had a bumper sticker to put on your DeLorean, what would you say? >>I would say we're continuing to innovate on behalf of our customers, but making sure we bring all of our partners and ecosystems along in that innovation. >>Yeah. I love the customer obsession on both sides there. Great work guides. Congrats on the 10th anniversary of OpenShift and so much evolution, the customer obsession is really clear for both of you guys. We appreciate your time. You're gonna have to come back now. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. For our guests and for Paul Gillin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(modern music) >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years today, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference. It's been quite a journey to see and, you know, virtualization just explode. We got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash McCarty, director of Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Prewitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. >> So, you know, the theme this year is multicloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which it really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure as code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades and business, but now with VMware putting it all together, it feels like, this year, it's like you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware software and now Cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. >> Perfect. That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes. So, yeah, happy to dive into it. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. >> Yeah, one of the things that we always talk about, you know, you read about it on the blogs and the news and the startup world, is "Oh, product-market fit," and, well, it kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on on the product side with the Edge emerging, hybrid cloud on pace with private cloud, and obviously, cloud native is great too if you have native applications in there, but now, putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud, I hear buzzwords like that, I hear supercloud, which we promoting, which you see in companies becoming cloud themselves, with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud, this is now cloud operations on premise and in hosting hardware, so I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, you've got huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What does the modern era look like for the customer? >> Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multicloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multicloud as a strategy, or are you multicloud as a situation? Because everybody's multicloud. That ship has sailed, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so, when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, you know, life-cycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult, and whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add, you know, you have the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do life-cycle management, so for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers, and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform improve life-cycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. >> So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little premier on what VxRail is. >> Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, so everything we do with VMware is better. >> So hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Hyperconverged infrastructure. >> What we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? >> All the storage is computed in there. >> Everything's in there. Right. >> Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software, which is really our secret sauce, we built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware, so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our life-cycle management, which is full stack, meaning it life-cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state, meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward versus spending time managing their infrastructure. >> And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace, when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? >> Oh, so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment, so you can have the system up and running in your labs, in your data centers in 45 minutes, and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. >> So what do you do with that kind of agility? >> Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that, and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud, and this is our platform that is based on VxRail, it's based on vCloud Director from VMware, and by having the VxRail is already RackStacked, ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today, and then, within a matter of minutes, give them access to a vCloud Director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want, but then, it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform, so you've got, you know, your full CI/CD pipeline, and so you have that full end-to-end capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud Director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Talk about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs. VxRail, you guys have some HCI-like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance, can you guys see? 'Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware DPUs really making things much faster. >> I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure, and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and will have the full life-cycle management, and what this really empowers customers to do is, as they're growing their environments that they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security, and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. >> Talk about the... I'd love to get your guys' perspective, while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second, if VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're kind of calling it supercloud, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, multicloud is a state, I agree. It's a situation and a state, but supercloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's tea leaves reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the Edge is there with, "Oh, the Edge is going to explode," and I can see the Edge having new kinds of apps that we've never seen before, whether it's on premise building lights and however they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen app/apps coming out that's not looking the same as now, or how are apps today changing for next gen? 'Cause you get more performance at the Edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in GEOS, so it's clear multicloud multi-presence is happening too, right? So what are you guys seeing? What's this... >> Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most with customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey, so beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there list for customers, another area is really in the AIML space, so we've been partnering with both VMware and Nvidia to simplify how customers deploy new AIML infrastructure. I mean, it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. >> Josh? >> And, you know, I think it really comes down to, whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or, you know, smart things, whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected, now, to capture all of the data to create a better user experience, and that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right, is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course, you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all of that great stuff, but at the same time, I also expect that, whenever, you know, now, whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're pinging my phone and pushing me push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. >> And do a database search on you too, by the way. >> Yeah, exactly, right? >> No search warrants out for 'em, you know, you're good. >> That's exactly it, so, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. >> Yeah, it's fun, as these cases are intoxicating to think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is, we were just talking on the analyst session earlier in theCUBE, if DevOps is here and won, which we believe it has and infrastructure as code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CI/CD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind, that's like cloud native developers, that's like traditional IT in my mind, so that's all part of the coding. DataOps and Security Ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new Ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new Ops, in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good on the developer's side. Yeah, shift left events happening up there, Kubernetes containers, but all the action on the Ops side seems to be data and security. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? Is that right? >> So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that, you know with great power comes great responsibility, right? And so the clouds have brought that to us, all of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see, kind of, the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as, you know, a cloud native development pipeline is really hard, it's really challenging, so I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow, I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability, and so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective, and from, you know, what folks are now calling DataOps perspective >> Data addressability, having the data available to be delivered in real time. >> You know, there there's been a lot of talk, here at the conference, about the disaggregation of, you know, the brainularism, if we're going to make up words, you know, the horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a Care-o-meter and I'm pointing at various people's foreheads, who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of security at the Edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously, we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff, you're deploying this stuff, but at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is RackSpace engaging customers and saying, "Look, here's the value proposition: we understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission." How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? 'Cause we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me. >> I think I defined it actually. >> Did you define DPU? Good. Thank you John. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But so who should care? Who should really care about that? >> Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included >> But a good one. But a good question. >> Oh, it's a great question. >> Thank you. >> Great question. (laughing) >> Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately, that is what matters. It is what matters, is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, "Hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff," but ultimately you get down to an IT staff, and to the IT staff, these things matter because the IT staff, they all have budgets that they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, you know, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes, and so we're having, you know, the business outcomes conversations with them and then, oftentimes, they will come back to us and say, "Okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure," whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts and we talk about how, you know, we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO, by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. >> Yeah, so there's a reason why I ask that awesome question, and it's because I can imagine a scenario where, and this speaks to RackSpace's position in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been, people want to know, "Well, why should I work with Rackspace instead of some mega-hyper-monster-cloud?" If part of the answer is: well, it's because, for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the Rackspace value proposition moving forward, that you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? >> Absolutely, it is, right? And a lot of the power of Rackspace is that, you know, we're the best-in-class pure play cloud solutions provider, and we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff, but we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell Technologies, and in this multicloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider, and we can help you get there, but just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized, they haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is, by far, the best way to do that, right? And Rackspace provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology, and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. >> So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters, Ash, yes? >> Absolutely, and I think he just highlighted, while what he does with his customers and what's important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers, to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at Rackspace, so I think, really, what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. >> Guys, while we got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explore, a lot of anticipation around how many people are going to show up and, you know, all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom. Big attendance here, I mean, I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem, this train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act, no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation of the show? Do you agree, or is there anything that you could want to share about for folks who didn't make it, what they missed? >> Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean, you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really missing the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multicloud, around all the announcements, around the vSphere 8 with the DPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technologies that are really empowering how customers, you know, the future of how customers are going to consume their workloads in their data centers. >> Josh, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff. And the cloud native stuff's looking pretty good too, off the tee. >> You know, it does feel like a focus on the core, though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, "And we got this, and this, and this, and this." It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. >> But you don't think of it as a little bit of a circus act. I mean the general keynote was theatrical, I thought, I mean, I thought they did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought they could have... They checked the box at the beginning. >> That's true, that's true. >> I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos. You know? Demos are usually great. But that's my only criticism. >> Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Storage architecture being integrated into VxRail, so I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and, you know, doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation and how they consume that technology. >> Yeah, you guys got good props on VxRail. We had a great chat about it yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing good? Quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? Give a quick plug for what the services are and the products you got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are that end-to-end cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them that private cloud experience. We've got everything from single-tenant running in our data centers on the backs of vSphere, vCloud Director, and VxRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, a really exciting time for Rackspace. >> Congratulations, we've been following your journey for a long time. Dell, you guys do continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing's a huge opportunity, we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks. Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level, in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (modern music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante semiconductors are the heart of technology innovation for decades technology improvements have marched the cadence of silicon advancements in performance cost power and packaging in the past 10 years the dynamics of the semiconductor industry have changed dramatically soaring factory costs device volume explosions fabulous chip companies greater programmability compressed time to tape out a lot more software content the looming presence of china these and other factors have changed the power structure of the semiconductor business chips today power every aspect of our lives and have led to a global semiconductor shortage that's been well covered but we've never seen anything like it before we believe silicon's success in the next 20 years will be determined by volume manufacturing capabilities design innovation public policy geopolitical dynamics visionary leadership and innovative business models that can survive the intense competition in one of the most challenging businesses in the world hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis it's our pleasure to welcome daniel newman in one of the leading analysts in the technology business and founder of futurum research daniel welcome to the program thanks so much dave great to see you thanks for having me big topic yeah i'll say i'm really looking forward to this and so here's some of the topics that we want to cover today if we have time changes in the semiconductor industry i've said they've been dramatic the shift to nofap companies we're going to talk about volume manufacturing those shifts that have occurred largely due to the arm model we want to cover intel and dig into that and what it has to do to to survive and thrive these changes and then we want to take a look at how alternative processors are impacting the world people talk about is moore's law dead is it alive and well daniel you have strong perspectives on all of this including nvidia love to get your thoughts on on that plus talk about the looming china threat as i mentioned in in the intro but daniel before we get into it do these topics they sound okay how do you see the state of the semiconductor industry today where have we come from where are we and where are we going at the macro level there are a lot of different narratives that are streaming alongside and they're not running in parallel so much as they're running and converging towards one another but it gradually different uh you know degrees so the last two years has welcomed a semiconductor conversation that we really hadn't had and that was supply chain driven the covid19 pandemic brought pretty much unprecedented desire demand thirst or products that are powered by semiconductors and it wasn't until we started running out of laptops of vehicles of servers that the whole world kind of put the semiconductor in focus again like it was just one of those things dave that we as a society it's sort of taken for granted like if you need a laptop you go buy a laptop if you needed a vehicle there'd always be one on the lot um but as we've seen kind of this exponentialism that's taken place throughout the pandemic what we ended up realizing is that semiconductors are eating the world and in fact the next industrial the entire industrial itself the complex is powered by semiconductor technology so everything we we do and we want to do right you went from a vehicle that might have had 50 or 100 worth of semiconductors on a few different parts to one that might have 700 800 different chips in it thousands of dollars worth of semi of semiconductors so you know across the board though yes you're dealing with the dynamics of the shortage you're dealing with the dynamics of innovation you're dealing with moore's law and sort of coming to the end which is leading to new process we're dealing with the foundry versus fab versus invention and product development uh situation so there's so many different concurrent semiconductor narratives that are going on dave and we can talk about any of them and all of them and i'm sure as we do we'll overlap all these different themes you know maybe you can solve this mystery for me there's this this this chip shortage and you can't invent vehicle inventory is so tight but yet when you listen to uh the the ads if the the auto manufacturers are pounding the advertising maybe they're afraid of tesla they don't want to lose their brand awareness but anyway so listen it's by the way a background i want to get a little bit academic here but but bear with me i want to introduce actually reintroduce the concept of wright's law to our audience we know we all know about moore's law but the earlier instantiation actually comes from theodore wright t.p wright he was this engineer in the airplane industry and the math is a little bit abstract to apply but roughly translated says as the cumulative number of units produced doubles your cost per unit declines by a fixed percentage now in airplanes that was around 15 percent in semiconductors we think that numbers more like 20 25 when you add the performance improvements you get from silicon advancements it translates into something like 33 percent cost cost declines when you can double your cumulative volume so that's very important because it confers strategic advantage to the company with the largest volume so it's a learning curve dynamic and it's like andy jassy says daniel there's no compression algorithm for experience and it definitely applies here so if you apply wright's law to what's happening in the industry today we think we can get a better understanding of for instance why tsmc is dominating and why intel is struggling any quick thoughts on that well you have to take every formula like that in any sort of standard mathematics and kind of throw it out the window when you're dealing with the economic situation we are right now i'm not i'm not actually throwing it out the window but what i'm saying is that when supply and demand get out of whack some of those laws become a little bit um more difficult to sustain over the long term what i will say about that is we have certainly seen this found um this fabulous model explode over the last few years you're seeing companies that can focus on software frameworks and innovation that aren't necessarily getting caught up in dealing with the large capital expenditures and overhead the ability to as you suggested in the topics here partner with a company like arm that's developing innovation and then and then um you know offering it uh to everybody right and for a licensee and then they can quickly build we're seeing what that's doing with companies like aws that are saying we're going to just build it alibaba we're just going to build it these aren't chip makers these aren't companies that were even considered chip makers they are now today competing as chip makers so there's a lot of different dynamics going back to your comment about wright's law like i said as we normalize and we figure out this situation on a global scale um i do believe that the who can manufacture the most will certainly continue to have significant competitive advantages yeah no so that's a really interesting point that you're bringing up because one of the things that it leads me to think is that the chip shortage could actually benefit intel i think will benefit intel so i want to introduce this some other data and then get your thoughts on this very simply the chart on the left shows pc shipments which peaked in in 2011 and then began at steady decline until covid and they've the pcs as we know have popped up in terms of volume in the past year and looks like they'll be up again this year the chart on the right is cumulative arm shipments and so as we've reported we think arm wafer volumes are 10x those of x86 volumes and and as such the arm ecosystem has far better cost structure than intel and that's why pat gelsinger was called in to sort of save the day so so daniel i just kind of again opened up this this can of worms but i think you're saying long term volume is going to be critical that's going to confer low cost advantages but in the in in the near to mid-term intel could actually benefit from uh from this chip shortage well intel is the opportunity to position itself as a leader in solving the repatriation crisis uh this will kind of carry over when we talk more about china and taiwan and that relationship and what's going on there we've really identified a massive gap in our uh in america supply chain in the global supply chain because we went from i don't have the stat off hand but i have a rough number dave and we can validate this later but i think it was in like the 30-ish high 30ish percentile of manufacturing of chips were done here in the united states around 1990 and now we're sub 10 as of 2020. so we we offshored almost all of our production and so when we hit this crisis and we needed more manufacturing volume we didn't have it ready part of the problem is you get people like elon musk that come out and make comments to the media like oh it'll be fixed later this year well you can't build a fab in a year you can't build a fab and start producing volume and the other problem is not all chips are the same so not every fab can produce every chip and when you do have fabs that are capable of producing multiple chips it costs millions of dollars to change the hardware and to actually change the process so it's not like oh we're going to build 28 today because that's what ford needs to get all those f-150s out of the lot and tomorrow we're going to pump out more sevens for you know a bunch of hp pcs it's a major overhaul every time you want to retool so there's a lot of complexity here but intel is the one domestic company us-based that has basically raised its hand and said we're going to put major dollars into this and by the way dave the arm chart you showed me could have a very big implication as to why intel wants to do that yeah so right because that's that's a big part of of foundry right is is get those volumes up so i want to hold that thought because i just want to introduce one more data point because one of the things we often talk about is the way in which alternative processors have exploded onto the scene and this chart here if you could bring that up patrick thank you shows the way in which i think you're pointing out intel is responding uh by leveraging alternative fat but once again you know kind of getting getting serious about manufacturing chips what the chart shows is the performance curve it's on a log scale for in the blue line is x86 and the orange line is apple's a series and we're using that as a proxy for sort of the curve that arm is on and it's in its performance over time culminating in the a15 and it measures trillions of operations per second so if you take the traditional x86 curve of doubling every 18 to 24 months that comes out roughly to about 40 percent improvement per year in performance and that's diminishing as we all know to around 30 percent a year because the moore's law is waning the orange line is powered by arm and it's growing at over a hundred percent really 110 per year when you do the math and that's when you combine the cpu the the the neural processing unit the the the xpu the dsps the accelerators et cetera so we're seeing apple use arm aws to you to your point is building chips on on graviton and and and tesla's using our list is long and this is one reason why so daniel this curve is it feels like it's the new performance curve in the industry yeah we are certainly in an era where companies are able to take control of the innovation curve using the development using the open ecosystem of arm having more direct control and price control and of course part of that massive arm number has to do with you know mobile devices and iot and devices that have huge scale but at the same time a lot of companies have made the decision either to move some portion of their product development on arm or to move entirely on arm part of why it was so attractive to nvidia part of the reason that it's under so much scrutiny that that deal um whether that deal will end up getting completed dave but we are seeing an era where we want we i said lust for power i talked about lust for semiconductors our lust for our technology to do more uh whether that's software-defined vehicles whether that's the smartphones we keep in our pocket or the desktop computer we use we want these machines to be as powerful and fast and responsive and scalable as possible if you can get 100 where you can get 30 improvement with each year and generation what is the consumer going to want so i think companies are as normal following the demand of consumers and what's available and at the same time there's some economic benefits they're they're able to realize as well i i don't want to i don't want to go too deep into nvidia arm but what do you handicap that that the chances that that acquisition actually happens oh boy um right now there's a lot of reasons it should happen but there are some reasons that it shouldn't i still kind of consider it a coin toss at this point because fundamentally speaking um you know it should create more competition but there are some people out there that believe it could cause less and so i think this is going to be hung up with regulators a little bit longer than we thought we've already sort of had some previews into that dave with the extensions and some of the timelines that have already been given um i know that was a safe answer and i will take credit for being safe this one's going to be a hard one to call but it certainly makes nvidia an amazing uh it gives amazing prospects to nvidia if they're able to get this deal done yeah i i agree with you i think it's 50 50. okay my i want to pose the question is intel too strategic to fail in march of this year we published this article where we posed that question uh you and i both know pat pretty well we talked about at the time the multi-front war intel is waging in a war with amd the arm ecosystem tsmc the design firms china and we looked at the company's moves which seemed to be right from a strategy standpoint the looking at the potential impact of the u.s government intel's partnership with ibm and what that might portend the us government has a huge incentive to make sure intel wins with onshore manufacturing and that looming threat from china but daniel is intel too strategic to fail and is pat gelsinger making the right moves well first of all i do believe at this current juncture where the semiconductor and supply chain shortage and crisis still looms that intel is too strategic to fail i also believe that intel's demise is somewhat overstated not to say intel doesn't have a slate of challenges that it's going to need to address long term just with the technology adoption curve that you showed being one of them dave but you have to remember the company still has nearly 90 of the server cpu market it still has a significant market share in client and pc it is seeing market share erosion but it's not happened nearly as fast as some people had suggested it would happen with right now with the demand in place and as high as it is intel is selling chips just about as quickly as it can make them and so we right now are sort of seeing the tam as a whole the demand as a whole continue to expand and so intel is fulfilling that need but where are they really too strategic to fail i mean we've seen in certain markets in certain uh process in um you know client for instance where amd has gained of course that's still x86 we've seen uh where the m1 was kind of initially thought to be potentially a pro product that would take some time it didn't take nearly as long for them to get that product in good shape um but the foundry and fab side is where i think intel really has a chance to flourish right now one it can play in the arm space it can build these facilities to be able to produce and help support the production of volumes of chips using arm designs so that actually gives intel and inroads two is it's the company that has made the most outspoken commitment to invest in the manufacturing needs of the united states both here in the united states and in other places across the world where we have friendly ally relationships and need more production capabilities if not in intel b and there is no other logical company that's us-based that's going to meet the regulator and policymakers requirements right now that is also raising their hand and saying we have the know-how we've been doing this we can do more of this and so i think pat is leaning into the right area and i think what will happen is very likely intel will support manufacturing of chips by companies like qualcomm companies like nvidia and if they're able to do that some of the market share losses that they're potentially facing with innovation challenges um and engineering challenges could be offset with growth in their fab and foundry businesses and i think i think pat identified it i think he's going to market with it and you know convincing the street that's going to be a whole nother thing that this is exciting um but i think as the street sees the opportunity here this is an area that intel can really lean into so i think i i think people generally would recognize at least the folks i talk to and it'll be interested in your thoughts who really know this business that intel you know had the best manufacturing process in in the world obviously that's coming to question but but but but for instance people say well intel's 10 nanometer you know is comparable to tsm seven nanometer and that's sort of overstated their their nanometer you know loss but but so so they they were able to point as they were able to sort of hide some of the issues maybe in design with great process and and i i believe that comes down to volume so the question i have then is and i think so i think patrick's pat is doing the right thing because he's going after volume and that's what foundry brings but can he get enough volume or does he need for inst for instance i mean one of the theories i've put out there is that apple could could save the day for intel if the if the us government gets apple in a headlock and says hey we'll back off on break up big tech but you got to give pat some of your foundry volume that puts him on a steeper learning curve do you do you worry sometimes though daniel that intel just even with like qualcomm and broadcom who by the way are competitors of theirs and don't necessarily love them but even even so if they could get that those wins that they still won't have the volume to compete on a cost basis or do you feel like even if they're numbered a number three even behind samsung it's good enough what are your thoughts on that well i don't believe a company like intel goes into a business full steam and they're not new to this business but the obvious volume and expansion that they're looking at with the intention of being number two or three these great companies and you know that's same thing i always say with google cloud google's not out to be the third cloud they're out to be one well that's intel will want to to be stronger if the us government and these investments that it's looking at making this 50 plus billion dollars is looking to pour into this particular space which i don't think is actually enough but if if the government makes these commitments and intel being likely one of the recipients of at least some of these dollars to help expedite this process move forward with building these facilities to make increased manufacturing very likely there's going to be some precedent of law a policy that is going to be put in place to make sure that a certain amount of the volume is done here stateside with companies this is a strategic imperative this is a government strategic imperative this is a putting the country at risk of losing its technology leadership if we cannot manufacture and control this process of innovation so i think intel is going to have that as a benefit that the government is going to most likely require some of this manufacturing to take place here um especially if this investment is made the last thing they're going to want to do is build a bunch of foundries and build a bunch of fabs and end up having them not at capacity especially when the world has seen how much of the manufacturing is now being done in taiwan so i think we're concluding and i i i correctly if i'm wrong but intel is too strategic to fail and and i i sometimes worry they can go bankrupt you know trying to compete with the likes of tsmc and that's why the the the public policy and the in the in the partnership with the u.s government and the eu is i think so important yeah i don't think bankruptcy is an immediate issue i think um but while i follow your train of thought dave i think what you're really looking at more is can the company grow and continue to get support where i worry about is shareholders getting exhausted with intel's the merry-go-round of not growing fast enough not gaining market share not being clearly identified as a leader in any particular process or technology and sort of just playing the role of the incumbent and they the company needs to whether it's in ai whether it's at the edge whether it's in the communications and service provider space intel is doing well you look at their quarterly numbers they're making money but if you had to say where are they leading right now what what which thing is intel really winning uh consistently at you know you look at like ai and ml and people will point to nvidia you look at you know innovation for um client you know and even amd has been super disruptive and difficult for intel uh of course you we've already talked about in like mobile um how impactful arm has been and arm is also playing a pretty big role in servers so like i said the market share and the technology leadership are a little out of skew right now and i think that's where pat's really working hard is identifying the opportunities for for intel to play market leader and technology leader again and for the market to clearly say yes um fab and foundry you know could this be an area where intel becomes the clear leader domestically and i think that the answer is definitely yes because none of the big chipmakers in the us are are doing fabrication you know they're they're all outsourcing it to overseas so if intel can really lead that here grow that large here then it takes some of the pressure off of the process and the innovation side and that's not to say that intel won't have to keep moving there but it does augment the revenue creates a new profit center and makes the company even more strategic here domestically yeah and global foundry tapped out of of sub 10 nanometer and that's why ibm's pseudonym hey wait a minute you had a commitment there the concern i have and this is where again your point is i think really important with the chip shortage you know to go from you know initial design to tape out took tesla and apple you know sub sub 24 months you know probably 18 months with intel we're on a three-year design to tape out cycle maybe even four years so they've got to compress that but that as you well know that's a really hard thing to do but the chip shortage is buying them time and i think that's a really important point that you brought out early in this segment so but the other big question daniel i want to test with you is well you mentioned this about seeing arm in the enterprise not a lot of people talk about that or have visibility on that but i think you're right on so will arm and nvidia be able to seriously penetrate the enterprise the server business in particular clearly jensen wants to be there now this data from etr lays out many of the enterprise players and we've superimposed the semiconductor giants in logos the data is an xy chart it shows net score that's etr's measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis market share is not like idc market share its presence in the data set and as we reported before aws is leading the charge in enterprise architecture as daniel mentioned they're they're designing their own chips nitro and graviton microsoft is following suit as is google vmware has project monterey cisco is on the chart dell hp ibm with red hat are also shown and we've superimposed intel nvidia china and arm and now we can debate the position of the logos but we know that one intel has a dominant position in the data center it's got to protect that business it cannot lose ground as it has in pcs because the margin pressure it would face two we know aws with its annapurna acquisition is trying to control its own destiny three we know vmware has project monterey and is following aws's lead to support these new workloads beyond x86 general purpose they got partnerships with pansando and arm and others and four we know cisco they've got chip design chops as does hpe maybe to a lesser extent and of course we know ibm has excellent semiconductor design expertise especially when it comes to things like memory disaggregation as i said jensen's going hard after the data center you know him well daniel we know china wants to control its own destiny and then there's arm it dominates mobile as you pointed out in iot can it make a play for the data center daniel how do you see this picture and what are your thoughts on the future of enterprise in the context of semiconductor competition it's going to take some time i believe but some of the investments and products that have been brought to market and you mentioned that shorter tape out period that shorter period for innovation whether it's you know the graviton uh you know on aws or the aiml chips that uh with trainium and inferentia how quickly aws was able to you know develop build deploy to market an arm-based solution that is being well received and becoming an increasing component of the services and and uh products that are being offered from aws at this point it's still pretty small and i would i would suggest that nvidia and arm in the spirit of trying to get this deal done probably don't necess don't want the enterprise opportunity to be overly inflated as to how quickly the company's going to be able to play in that space because that would somewhat maybe slow or bring up some caution flags that of the regulators that are that are monitoring this at the same time you could argue that arm offering additional options in competition much like it's doing in client will offer new form factors new designs um new uh you know new skus the oems will be able to create more customized uh hardware offerings that might be able to be unique for certain enterprises industries can put more focus you know we're seeing the disaggregation with dpus and how that technology using arm with what aws is doing with nitro but what what these different companies are doing to use you know semiconductor technology to split out security networking and storage and so you start to see design innovation could become very interesting on the foundation of arm so in time i certainly see momentum right now the thing is is most companies in the enterprise are looking for something that's fairly well baked off the shelf that can meet their needs whether it's sap or whether it's you know running different custom applications that the business is built on top of commerce solutions and so intel meets most of those needs and so arm has made a lot of sense for instance with these cloud scale providers but not necessarily as much sense for enterprises especially those that don't want to necessarily look at refactoring all the workloads but as software becomes simpler as refactoring becomes easier to do between different uh different technologies and processes you start to say well arm could be compelling and you know because the the bottom line is we know this from mobile devices is most of us don't care what the processor is the average person the average data you know they look at many of these companies the same in enterprise it's always mattered um kind of like in the pc world it used to really matter that's where intel inside was born but as we continue to grow up and you see these different processes these different companies nvidia amd intel all seen as very worthy companies with very capable technologies in the data center if they can offer economics if they can offer performance if they can offer faster time to value people will look at them so i'd say in time dave the answer is arm will certainly become more and more competitive in the data center like it was able to do at the edge in immobile yeah one of the things that we've talked about is that you know the software-defined data center is awesome but it also created a lot of wasted overhead in terms of offloading storage and and networking security and that much of that is being done with general purpose x86 processors which are more expensive than than for instance using um if you look at what as you mentioned great summary of what aws is doing with graviton and trainium and other other tooling what ampere is doing um in in in oracle and you're seeing both of those companies for example particularly aws get isvs to write so they can run general purpose applications on um on arm-based processors as well it sets up well for ai inferencing at the edge which we know arms dominating the edge we see all these new types of workloads coming into the data center if you look at what companies like nebulon and pensando and and others are doing uh you're seeing a lot of their offloads are going to arm they're putting arm in even though they're still using x86 in a lot of cases but but but they're offloading to arm so it seems like they're coming into the back door i understand your point actually about they don't want to overplay their hand there especially during these negotiations but we think that that long term you know it bears watching but intel they have such a strong presence they got a super strong ecosystem and they really have great relationships with a lot of the the enterprise players and they have influence over them so they're going to use that the the the chip shortage benefits them the uh the relationship with the us government pat is spending a lot of time you know working that so it's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out daniel i want to give you the last word your final thoughts on what we talked about today and where you see this all headed i think the world benefits as a whole with more competition and more innovation pressure i like to see more players coming into the fray i think we've seen intel react over the last year under pat gelsinger's leadership we've seen the technology innovation the angstrom era the 20a we're starting to see what that roadmap is going to look like we've certainly seen how companies like nvidia can disrupt come into market and not just using hardware but using software to play a major role but as a whole as innovation continues to take form at scale we all benefit it means more intelligent software-defined vehicles it puts phones in our hands that are more powerful it gives power to you know cities governments and enterprises that can build applications and tools that give us social networks and give us data-driven experiences so i'm very bullish and optimistic on as a whole i said this before i say it again i believe semiconductors will eat the world and then you know you look at the we didn't even really talk about the companies um you know whether it's in ai uh like you know grok or grav core there are some very cool companies building things you've got qualcomm bought nuvia another company that could you know come out of the blue and offer us new innovations in mobile and personal computing i mean there's so many cool companies dave with the scale of data the uh the the growth and demand and desire for connectivity in the world um it's never been a more interesting time to be a fan of technology the only thing i will say as a whole as a society as i hope we can fix this problem because it does create risks the supply chain inflation the economics all that stuff ties together and a lot of people don't see that but if we can't get this manufacturing issue under control we didn't really talk about china dave and i'll just say taiwan and china are very physically close together and the way that china sees taiwan and the way we see taiwan is completely different we have very little control over what can happen we've all seen what's happened with hong kong so there's just so many as i said when i started this conversation we've got all these trains on the track they're all moving but they're not in parallel these tracks are all converging but the convergence isn't perpendicular so sometimes we don't see how all these things interrelate but as a whole it's a very exciting time love being in technology and uh love having the chance to come out here and talk with you i love the optimism and you're right uh that competition in china that's going to come from china as well xi has made it a part of his legacy i think to you know re-incorporate taiwan that's going to be interesting to see i mean taiwan ebbs and flows with regard to you know its leadership sometimes they're more pro i guess i should say less anti-china maybe that's the better way to say it uh and and and you know china's putting in big fab capacity for nand you know maybe maybe people look at that you know some of that is the low end of the market but you know clay christensen would say well to go take a look at the steel industry and see what happened there so so we didn't talk much about china and that was my oversight but but they're after self-sufficiency it's not like they haven't tried before kind of like intel has tried foundry before but i think they're really going for it this time but but now what are your do you believe that china will be able to get self-sufficiency let's say within the next 10 to 15 years with semiconductors yes i would never count china out of anything if they put their mind to it if it's something that they want to put absolute focus on i think um right now china vacillates between wanting to be a good player and a good steward to the world and wanting to completely run its own show the the politicization of what's going on over there we all saw what happened in the real estate market this past week we saw what happened with tech ed over the last few months we've seen what's happened with uh innovation and entrepreneurship it is not entirely clear if china wants to give the more capitalistic and innovation ecosystem a full try but it is certainly shown that it wants to be seen as a world leader over the last few decades it's accomplished that in almost any area that it wants to compete dave i would say if this is one of gigi ping's primary focuses wanting to do this it would be very irresponsible to rule it out as a possibility daniel i gotta tell you i i love collaborating with you um we met face to face just recently and i hope we could do this again i'd love to have you you back on on the program thanks so much for your your time and insights today thanks for having me dave so daniel's website futuram research that's three use in futurum uh check that out for termresearch.com uh the the this individual is really plugged in he's forward thinking and and a great resource at daniel newman uv is his twitter so go follow him for some great stuff and remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search for breaking analysis podcast we publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and by the way daniel thank you for contributing your your quotes to siliconangle the writers there love you uh you can always connect on twitter i'm at divalanto you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com appreciate the comments on linkedin and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time you

>>Hello and welcome today's cube presentation of eight of us startup showcase. I'm john for your host highlighting the hottest companies and devops data analytics and cloud management lisa martin and David want are here to kick it off. We've got a great program for you again. This is our, our new community event model where we're doing every quarter, we have every new episode, this is quarter three this year or episode three, season one of the hottest cloud startups and we're gonna be featured. Then we're gonna do a keynote package and then 15 countries will present their story, Go check them out and then have a closing keynote with a practitioner and we've got some great lineups, lisa Dave, great to see you. Thanks for joining me. >>Hey guys, >>great to be here. So David got to ask you, you know, back in events last night we're at the 14 it's event where they had the golf PGA championship with the cube Now we got the hybrid model, This is the new normal. We're in, we got these great companies were showcasing them. What's your take? >>Well, you're right. I mean, I think there's a combination of things. We're seeing some live shows. We saw what we did with at mobile world Congress. We did the show with AWS storage day where it was, we were at the spheres, there was no, there was a live audience, but they weren't there physically. It was just virtual and yeah, so, and I just got pained about reinvent. Hey Dave, you gotta make your flights. So I'm making my flights >>were gonna be at the amazon web services, public sector summit next week. At least a lot, a lot of cloud convergence going on here. We got many companies being featured here that we spoke with the Ceo and their top people cloud management, devops data, nelson security. Really cutting edge companies, >>yes, cutting edge companies who are all focused on acceleration. We've talked about the acceleration of digital transformation the last 18 months and we've seen a tremendous amount of acceleration in innovation with what these startups are doing. We've talked to like you said, there's, there's C suite, we've also talked to their customers about how they are innovating so quickly with this hybrid environment, this remote work and we've talked a lot about security in the last week or so. You mentioned that we were at Fortinet cybersecurity skills gap. What some of these companies are doing with automation for example, to help shorten that gap, which is a big opportunity >>for the job market. Great stuff. Dave so the format of this event, you're going to have a fireside chat with the practitioner, we'd like to end these programs with a great experienced practitioner cutting edge in data february. The beginning lisa are gonna be kicking off with of course Jeff bar to give us the update on what's going on AWS and then a special presentation from Emily Freeman who is the author of devops for dummies, she's introducing new content. The revolution in devops devops two point oh and of course jerry Chen from Greylock cube alumni is going to come on and talk about his new thesis castles in the cloud creating moats at cloud scale. We've got a great lineup of people and so the front ends can be great. Dave give us a little preview of what people can expect at the end of the fireside chat. >>Well at the highest level john I've always said we're entering that sort of third great wave of cloud. First wave was experimentation. The second big wave was migration. The third wave of integration, Deep business integration and what you're >>going to hear from >>Hello Fresh today is how they like many companies that started early last decade. They started with an on prem Hadoop system and then of course we all know what happened is S three essentially took the knees out from, from the on prem Hadoop market lowered costs, brought things into the cloud and what Hello Fresh is doing is they're transforming from that legacy Hadoop system into its running on AWS but into a data mess, you know, it's a passionate topic of mine. Hello Fresh was scaling they realized that they couldn't keep up so they had to rethink their entire data architecture and they built it around data mesh Clements key and christoph Soewandi gonna explain how they actually did that are on a journey or decentralized data >>measure it and your posts have been awesome on data measure. We get a lot of traction. Certainly you're breaking analysis for the folks watching check out David Landes, Breaking analysis every week, highlighting the cutting edge trends in tech Dave. We're gonna see you later, lisa and I are gonna be here in the morning talking about with Emily. We got Jeff Barr teed up. Dave. Thanks for coming on. Looking forward to fireside chat lisa. We'll see you when Emily comes back on. But we're gonna go to Jeff bar right now for Dave and I are gonna interview Jeff. Mm >>Hey Jeff, >>here he is. Hey, how are you? How's it going really well. So I gotta ask you, the reinvent is on, everyone wants to know that's happening right. We're good with Reinvent. >>Reinvent is happening. I've got my hotel and actually listening today, if I just remembered, I still need to actually book my flights. I've got my to do list on my desk and I do need to get my >>flights. Uh, >>really looking forward >>to it. I can't wait to see the all the announcements and blog posts. We're gonna, we're gonna hear from jerry Chen later. I love the after on our next event. Get your reaction to this castle and castles in the cloud where competitive advantages can be built in the cloud. We're seeing examples of that. But first I gotta ask you give us an update of what's going on. The ap and ecosystem has been an incredible uh, celebration these past couple weeks, >>so, so a lot of different things happening and the interesting thing to me is that as part of my job, I often think that I'm effectively living in the future because I get to see all this really cool stuff that we're building just a little bit before our customers get to, and so I'm always thinking okay, here I am now, and what's the world going to be like in a couple of weeks to a month or two when these launches? I'm working on actually get out the door and that, that's always really, really fun, just kind of getting that, that little edge into where we're going, but this year was a little interesting because we had to really significant birthdays, we had the 15 year anniversary of both EC two and S three and we're so focused on innovating and moving forward, that it's actually pretty rare for us at Aws to look back and say, wow, we've actually done all these amazing things in in the last 15 years, >>you know, it's kind of cool Jeff, if I may is is, you know, of course in the early days everybody said, well, a place for startup is a W. S and now the great thing about the startup showcases, we're seeing the startups that >>are >>very near, or some of them have even reached escape velocity, so they're not, they're not tiny little companies anymore, they're in their transforming their respective industries, >>they really are and I think that as they start ups grow, they really start to lean into the power of the cloud. They as they start to think, okay, we've we've got our basic infrastructure in place, we've got, we were serving data, we're serving up a few customers, everything is actually working pretty well for us. We've got our fundamental model proven out now, we can invest in publicity and marketing and scaling and but they don't have to think about what's happening behind the scenes. They just if they've got their auto scaling or if they're survivalists, the infrastructure simply grows to meet their demand and it's it's just a lot less things that they have to worry about. They can focus on the fun part of their business which is actually listening to customers and building up an awesome business >>Jeff as you guys are putting together all the big pre reinvented, knows a lot of stuff that goes on prior as well and they say all the big good stuff to reinvent. But you start to see some themes emerged this year. One of them is modernization of applications, the speed of application development in the cloud with the cloud scale devops personas, whatever persona you want to talk about but basically speed the speed of of the app developers where other departments have been slowing things down, I won't say name names, but security group and I t I mean I shouldn't have said that but only kidding but no but seriously people want in minutes and seconds now not days or weeks. You know whether it's policy. What are some of the trends that you're seeing around this this year as we get into some of the new stuff coming out >>So Dave customers really do want speed and for we've actually encapsulate this for a long time in amazon in what we call the bias for action leadership principle >>where >>we just need to jump in and move forward and and make things happen. A lot of customers look at that and they say yes this is great. We need to have the same bias fraction. Some do. Some are still trying to figure out exactly how to put it into play. And they absolutely for sure need to pay attention to security. They need to respect the past and make sure that whatever they're doing is in line with I. T. But they do want to move forward. And the interesting thing that I see time and time again is it's not simply about let's adopt a new technology. It's how do we >>how do we keep our workforce >>engaged? How do we make sure that they've got the right training? How do we bring our our I. T. Team along for this. Hopefully new and fun and exciting journey where they get to learn some interesting new technologies they've got all this very much accumulated business knowledge they still want to put to use, maybe they're a little bit apprehensive about something brand new and they hear about the cloud, but there by and large, they really want to move forward. They just need a little bit of >>help to make it happen >>real good guys. One of the things you're gonna hear today, we're talking about speed traditionally going fast. Oftentimes you meant you have to sacrifice some things on quality and what you're going to hear from some of the startups today is how they're addressing that to automation and modern devoPS technologies and sort of rethinking that whole application development approach. That's something I'm really excited to see organization is beginning to adopt so they don't have to make that tradeoff anymore. >>Yeah, I would >>never want to see someone >>sacrifice quality, >>but I do think that iterating very quickly and using the best of devoPS principles to be able to iterate incredibly quickly and get that first launch out there and then listen with both ears just >>as much >>as you can, Everything. You hear iterate really quickly to meet those needs in, in hours and days, not months, quarters or years. >>Great stuff. Chef and a lot of the companies were featuring here in the startup showcase represent that new kind of thinking, um, systems thinking as well as you know, the cloud scale and again and it's finally here, the revolution of deVOps is going to the next generation and uh, we're excited to have Emily Freeman who's going to come on and give a little preview for her new talk on this revolution. So Jeff, thank you for coming on, appreciate you sharing the update here on the cube. Happy >>to be. I'm actually really looking forward to hearing from Emily. >>Yeah, it's great. Great. Looking forward to the talk. Brand new Premier, Okay, uh, lisa martin, Emily Freeman is here. She's ready to come in and we're going to preview her lightning talk Emily. Um, thanks for coming on, we really appreciate you coming on really, this is about to talk around deVOPS next gen and I think lisa this is one of those things we've been, we've been discussing with all the companies. It's a new kind of thinking it's a revolution, it's a systems mindset, you're starting to see the connections there she is. Emily, Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So your teaser video >>was amazing. Um, you know, that little secret radical idea, something completely different. Um, you gotta talk coming up, what's the premise behind this revolution, you know, these tying together architecture, development, automation deployment, operating altogether. >>Yes, well, we have traditionally always used the sclc, which is the software delivery life cycle. Um, and it is a straight linear process that has actually been around since the sixties, which is wild to me um, and really originated in manufacturing. Um, and as much as I love the Toyota production system and how much it has shown up in devops as a sort of inspiration on how to run things better. We are not making cars, we are making software and I think we have to use different approaches and create a sort of model that better reflects our modern software development process. >>It's a bold idea and looking forward to the talk and as motivation. I went into my basement and dusted off all my books from college in the 80s and the sea estimates it was waterfall. It was software development life cycle. They trained us to think this way and it came from the mainframe people. It was like, it's old school, like really, really old and it really hasn't been updated. Where's the motivation? I actually cloud is kind of converging everything together. We see that, but you kind of hit on this persona thing. Where did that come from this persona? Because you know, people want to put people in buckets release engineer. I mean, where's that motivation coming from? >>Yes, you're absolutely right that it came from the mainframes. I think, you know, waterfall is necessary when you're using a punch card or mag tape to load things onto a mainframe, but we don't exist in that world anymore. Thank goodness. And um, yes, so we, we use personas all the time in tech, you know, even to register, well not actually to register for this event, but a lot events. A lot of events, you have to click that drop down. Right. Are you a developer? Are you a manager, whatever? And the thing is personas are immutable in my opinion. I was a developer. I will always identify as a developer despite playing a lot of different roles and doing a lot of different jobs. Uh, and this can vary throughout the day. Right. You might have someone who has a title of software architect who ends up helping someone pair program or develop or test or deploy. Um, and so we wear a lot of hats day to day and I think our discussions around roles would be a better, um, certainly a better approach than personas >>lease. And I've been discussing with many of these companies around the roles and we're hearing from them directly and they're finding out that people have, they're mixing and matching on teams. So you're, you're an S R E on one team and you're doing something on another team where the workflows and the workloads defined the team formation. So this is a cultural discussion. >>It absolutely is. Yes. I think it is a cultural discussion and it really comes to the heart of devops, right? It's people process. And then tools deVOps has always been about culture and making sure that developers have all the tools they need to be productive and honestly happy. What good is all of this? If developing software isn't a joyful experience. Well, >>I got to ask you, I got you here obviously with server list and functions just starting to see this kind of this next gen. And we're gonna hear from jerry Chen, who's a Greylock VC who's going to talk about castles in the clouds, where he's discussing the moats that could be created with a competitive advantage in cloud scale. And I think he points to the snowflakes of the world. You're starting to see this new thing happening. This is devops 2.0, this is the revolution. Is this kind of where you see the same vision of your talk? >>Yes, so DeVOps created 2000 and 8, 2000 and nine, totally different ecosystem in the world we were living in, you know, we didn't have things like surveillance and containers, we didn't have this sort of default distributed nature, certainly not the cloud. Uh and so I'm very excited for jerry's talk. I'm curious to hear more about these moz. I think it's fascinating. Um but yeah, you're seeing different companies use different tools and processes to accelerate their delivery and that is the competitive advantage. How can we figure out how to utilize these tools in the most efficient way possible. >>Thank you for coming and giving us a preview. Let's now go to your lightning keynote talk. Fresh content. Premier of this revolution in Devops and the Freemans Talk, we'll go there now. >>Hi, I'm Emily Freeman, I'm the author of devops for dummies and the curator of 97 things every cloud engineer should know. I am thrilled to be here with you all today. I am really excited to share with you a kind of a wild idea, a complete re imagining of the S DLC and I want to be clear, I need your feedback. I want to know what you think of this. You can always find me on twitter at editing. Emily, most of my work centers around deVOps and I really can't overstate what an impact the concept of deVOPS has had on this industry in many ways it built on the foundation of Agile to become a default a standard we all reach for in our everyday work. When devops surfaced as an idea in 2008, the tech industry was in a vastly different space. AWS was an infancy offering only a handful of services. Azure and G C P didn't exist yet. The majority's majority of companies maintained their own infrastructure. Developers wrote code and relied on sys admins to deploy new code at scheduled intervals. Sometimes months apart, container technology hadn't been invented applications adhered to a monolithic architecture, databases were almost exclusively relational and serverless wasn't even a concept. Everything from the application to the engineers was centralized. Our current ecosystem couldn't be more different. Software is still hard, don't get me wrong, but we continue to find novel solutions to consistently difficult, persistent problems. Now, some of these end up being a sort of rebranding of old ideas, but others are a unique and clever take to abstracting complexity or automating toil or perhaps most important, rethinking challenging the very premises we have accepted as Cannon for years, if not decades. In the years since deVOps attempted to answer the critical conflict between developers and operations, engineers, deVOps has become a catch all term and there have been a number of derivative works. Devops has come to mean 5000 different things to 5000 different people. For some, it can be distilled to continuous integration and continuous delivery or C I C D. For others, it's simply deploying code more frequently, perhaps adding a smattering of tests for others. Still, its organizational, they've added a platform team, perhaps even a questionably named DEVOPS team or have created an engineering structure that focuses on a separation of concerns. Leaving feature teams to manage the development, deployment, security and maintenance of their siloed services, say, whatever the interpretation, what's important is that there isn't a universally accepted standard. Well, what deVOPS is or what it looks like an execution, it's a philosophy more than anything else. A framework people can utilize to configure and customize their specific circumstances to modern development practices. The characteristic of deVOPS that I think we can all agree on though, is that an attempted to capture the challenges of the entire software development process. It's that broad umbrella, that holistic view that I think we need to breathe life into again, The challenge we face is that DeVOps isn't increasingly outmoded solution to a previous problem developers now face. Cultural and technical challenge is far greater than how to more quickly deploy a monolithic application. Cloud native is the future the next collection of default development decisions and one the deVOPS story can't absorb in its current form. I believe the era of deVOPS is waning and in this moment as the sun sets on deVOPS, we have a unique opportunity to rethink rebuild free platform. Even now, I don't have a crystal ball. That would be very handy. I'm not completely certain with the next decade of tech looks like and I can't write this story alone. I need you but I have some ideas that can get the conversation started, I believe to build on what was we have to throw away assumptions that we've taken for granted all this time in order to move forward. We must first step back. Mhm. The software or systems development life cycle, what we call the S. D. L. C. has been in use since the 1960s and it's remained more or less the same since before color television and the touch tone phone. Over the last 60 or so odd years we've made tweaks, slight adjustments, massaged it. The stages or steps are always a little different with agile and deVOps we sort of looped it into a circle and then an infinity loop we've added pretty colors. But the sclc is more or less the same and it has become an assumption. We don't even think about it anymore, universally adopted constructs like the sclc have an unspoken permanence. They feel as if they have always been and always will be. I think the impact of that is even more potent. If you were born after a construct was popularized. Nearly everything around us is a construct, a model, an artifact of a human idea. The chair you're sitting in the desk, you work at the mug from which you drink coffee or sometimes wine, buildings, toilets, plumbing, roads, cars, art, computers, everything. The sclc is a remnant an artifact of a previous era and I think we should throw it away or perhaps more accurately replace it, replace it with something that better reflects the actual nature of our work. A linear, single threaded model designed for the manufacturer of material goods cannot possibly capture the distributed complexity of modern socio technical systems. It just can't. Mhm. And these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive that the sclc was industry changing, valuable and extraordinarily impactful and that it's time for something new. I believe we are strong enough to hold these two ideas at the same time, showing respect for the past while envisioning the future. Now, I don't know about you, I've never had a software project goes smoothly in one go. No matter how small. Even if I'm the only person working on it and committing directly to master software development is chaos. It's a study and entropy and it is not getting any more simple. The model with which we think and talk about software development must capture the multithreaded, non sequential nature of our work. It should embody the roles engineers take on and the considerations they make along the way. It should build on the foundations of agile and devops and represent the iterative nature of continuous innovation. Now, when I was thinking about this, I was inspired by ideas like extreme programming and the spiral model. I I wanted something that would have layers, threads, even a way of visually representing multiple processes happening in parallel. And what I settled on is the revolution model. I believe the visualization of revolution is capable of capturing the pivotal moments of any software scenario. And I'm going to dive into all the discrete elements. But I want to give you a moment to have a first impression, to absorb my idea. I call it revolution because well for one it revolves, it's circular shape reflects the continuous and iterative nature of our work, but also because it is revolutionary. I am challenging a 60 year old model that is embedded into our daily language. I don't expect Gartner to build a magic quadrant around this tomorrow, but that would be super cool. And you should call me my mission with. This is to challenge the status quo to create a model that I think more accurately reflects the complexity of modern cloud native software development. The revolution model is constructed of five concentric circles describing the critical roles of software development architect. Ng development, automating, deploying and operating intersecting each loop are six spokes that describe the production considerations every engineer has to consider throughout any engineering work and that's test, ability, secure ability, reliability, observe ability, flexibility and scalability. The considerations listed are not all encompassing. There are of course things not explicitly included. I figured if I put 20 spokes, some of us, including myself, might feel a little overwhelmed. So let's dive into each element in this model. We have long used personas as the default way to do divide audiences and tailor messages to group people. Every company in the world right now is repeating the mantra of developers, developers, developers but personas have always bugged me a bit because this approach typically either oversimplifies someone's career are needlessly complicated. Few people fit cleanly and completely into persona based buckets like developers and operations anymore. The lines have gotten fuzzy on the other hand, I don't think we need to specifically tailor messages as to call out the difference between a devops engineer and a release engineer or a security administrator versus a security engineer but perhaps most critically, I believe personas are immutable. A persona is wholly dependent on how someone identifies themselves. It's intrinsic not extrinsic. Their titles may change their jobs may differ, but they're probably still selecting the same persona on that ubiquitous drop down. We all have to choose from when registering for an event. Probably this one too. I I was a developer and I will always identify as a developer despite doing a ton of work in areas like devops and Ai Ops and Deverell in my heart. I'm a developer I think about problems from that perspective. First it influences my thinking and my approach roles are very different. Roles are temporary, inconsistent, constantly fluctuating. If I were an actress, the parts I would play would be lengthy and varied, but the persona I would identify as would remain an actress and artist lesbian. Your work isn't confined to a single set of skills. It may have been a decade ago, but it is not today in any given week or sprint, you may play the role of an architect. Thinking about how to design a feature or service, developer building out code or fixing a bug and on automation engineer, looking at how to improve manual processes. We often refer to as soil release engineer, deploying code to different environments or releasing it to customers or in operations. Engineer ensuring an application functions inconsistent expected ways and no matter what role we play. We have to consider a number of issues. The first is test ability. All software systems require testing to assure architects that designs work developers, the code works operators, that infrastructure is running as expected and engineers of all disciplines that code changes won't bring down the whole system testing in its many forms is what enables systems to be durable and have longevity. It's what reassures engineers that changes won't impact current functionality. A system without tests is a disaster waiting to happen, which is why test ability is first among equals at this particular roundtable. Security is everyone's responsibility. But if you understand how to design and execute secure systems, I struggle with this security incidents for the most part are high impact, low probability events. The really big disasters, the one that the ones that end up on the news and get us all free credit reporting for a year. They don't happen super frequently and then goodness because you know that there are endless small vulnerabilities lurking in our systems. Security is something we all know we should dedicate time to but often don't make time for. And let's be honest, it's hard and complicated and a little scary def sec apps. The first derivative of deVOPS asked engineers to move security left this approach. Mint security was a consideration early in the process, not something that would block release at the last moment. This is also the consideration under which I'm putting compliance and governance well not perfectly aligned. I figure all the things you have to call lawyers for should just live together. I'm kidding. But in all seriousness, these three concepts are really about risk management, identity, data, authorization. It doesn't really matter what specific issue you're speaking about, the question is who has access to what win and how and that is everyone's responsibility at every stage site reliability engineering or sorry, is a discipline job and approach for good reason. It is absolutely critical that applications and services work as expected. Most of the time. That said, availability is often mistakenly treated as a synonym for reliability. Instead, it's a single aspect of the concept if a system is available but customer data is inaccurate or out of sync. The system is not reliable, reliability has five key components, availability, latency, throughput. Fidelity and durability, reliability is the end result. But resiliency for me is the journey the action engineers can take to improve reliability, observe ability is the ability to have insight into an application or system. It's the combination of telemetry and monitoring and alerting available to engineers and leadership. There's an aspect of observe ability that overlaps with reliability, but the purpose of observe ability isn't just to maintain a reliable system though, that is of course important. It is the capacity for engineers working on a system to have visibility into the inner workings of that system. The concept of observe ability actually originates and linear dynamic systems. It's defined as how well internal states of a system can be understood based on information about its external outputs. If it is critical when companies move systems to the cloud or utilize managed services that they don't lose visibility and confidence in their systems. The shared responsibility model of cloud storage compute and managed services require that engineering teams be able to quickly be alerted to identify and remediate issues as they arise. Flexible systems are capable of adapting to meet the ever changing needs of the customer and the market segment, flexible code bases absorb new code smoothly. Embody a clean separation of concerns. Are partitioned into small components or classes and architected to enable the now as well as the next inflexible systems. Change dependencies are reduced or eliminated. Database schemas accommodate change well components, communicate via a standardized and well documented A. P. I. The only thing constant in our industry is change and every role we play, creating flexibility and solutions that can be flexible that will grow as the applications grow is absolutely critical. Finally, scalability scalability refers to more than a system's ability to scale for additional load. It implies growth scalability and the revolution model carries the continuous innovation of a team and the byproducts of that growth within a system. For me, scalability is the most human of the considerations. It requires each of us in our various roles to consider everyone around us, our customers who use the system or rely on its services, our colleagues current and future with whom we collaborate and even our future selves. Mhm. Software development isn't a straight line, nor is it a perfect loop. It is an ever changing complex dance. There are twirls and pivots and difficult spins forward and backward. Engineers move in parallel, creating truly magnificent pieces of art. We need a modern model for this modern era and I believe this is just the revolution to get us started. Thank you so much for having me. >>Hey, we're back here. Live in the keynote studio. I'm john for your host here with lisa martin. David lot is getting ready for the fireside chat ending keynote with the practitioner. Hello! Fresh without data mesh lisa Emily is amazing. The funky artwork there. She's amazing with the talk. I was mesmerized. It was impressive. >>The revolution of devops and the creative element was a really nice surprise there. But I love what she's doing. She's challenging the status quo. If we've learned nothing in the last year and a half, We need to challenge the status quo. A model from the 1960s that is no longer linear. What she's doing is revolutionary. >>And we hear this all the time. All the cube interviews we do is that you're seeing the leaders, the SVP's of engineering or these departments where there's new new people coming in that are engineering or developers, they're playing multiple roles. It's almost a multidisciplinary aspect where you know, it's like going into in and out burger in the fryer later and then you're doing the grill, you're doing the cashier, people are changing roles or an architect, their test release all in one no longer departmental, slow siloed groups. >>She brought up a great point about persona is that we no longer fit into these buckets. That the changing roles. It's really the driver of how we should be looking at this. >>I think I'm really impressed, really bold idea, no brainer as far as I'm concerned, I think one of the things and then the comments were off the charts in a lot of young people come from discord servers. We had a good traction over there but they're all like learning. Then you have the experience, people saying this is definitely has happened and happening. The dominoes are falling and they're falling in the direction of modernization. That's the key trend speed. >>Absolutely with speed. But the way that Emily is presenting it is not in a brash bold, but it's in a way that makes great sense. The way that she creatively visually lined out what she was talking about Is amenable to the folks that have been doing this for since the 60s and the new folks now to really look at this from a different >>lens and I think she's a great setup on that lightning top of the 15 companies we got because you think about sis dig harness. I white sourced flamingo hacker one send out, I oh, okay. Thought spot rock set Sarah Ops ramp and Ops Monte cloud apps, sani all are doing modern stuff and we talked to them and they're all on this new wave, this monster wave coming. What's your observation when you talk to these companies? >>They are, it was great. I got to talk with eight of the 15 and the amount of acceleration of innovation that they've done in the last 18 months is phenomenal obviously with the power and the fuel and the brand reputation of aws but really what they're all facilitating cultural shift when we think of devoPS and the security folks. Um, there's a lot of work going on with ai to an automation to really kind of enabled to develop the develops folks to be in control of the process and not have to be security experts but ensuring that the security is baked in shifting >>left. We saw that the chat room was really active on the security side and one of the things I noticed was not just shift left but the other groups, the security groups and the theme of cultural, I won't say war but collision cultural shift that's happening between the groups is interesting because you have this new devops persona has been around Emily put it out for a while. But now it's going to the next level. There's new revolutions about a mindset, a systems mindset. It's a thinking and you start to see the new young companies coming out being funded by the gray locks of the world who are now like not going to be given the we lost the top three clouds one, everything. there's new business models and new technical architecture in the cloud and that's gonna be jerry Chen talk coming up next is going to be castles in the clouds because jerry chant always talked about moats, competitive advantage and how moats are key to success to guard the castle. And then we always joke, there's no more moz because the cloud has killed all the boats. But now the motor in the cloud, the castles are in the cloud, not on the ground. So very interesting thought provoking. But he's got data and if you look at the successful companies like the snowflakes of the world, you're starting to see these new formations of this new layer of innovation where companies are growing rapidly, 98 unicorns now in the cloud. Unbelievable, >>wow, that's a lot. One of the things you mentioned, there's competitive advantage and these startups are all fueled by that they know that there are other companies in the rear view mirror right behind them. If they're not able to work as quickly and as flexibly as a competitor, they have to have that speed that time to market that time to value. It was absolutely critical. And that's one of the things I think thematically that I saw along the eighth sort of that I talked to is that time to value is absolutely table stakes. >>Well, I'm looking forward to talking to jerry chan because we've talked on the queue before about this whole idea of What happens when winner takes most would mean the top 3, 4 cloud players. What happens? And we were talking about that and saying, if you have a model where an ecosystem can develop, what does that look like and back in 2013, 2014, 2015, no one really had an answer. Jerry was the only BC. He really nailed it with this castles in the cloud. He nailed the idea that this is going to happen. And so I think, you know, we'll look back at the tape or the videos from the cube, we'll find those cuts. But we were talking about this then we were pontificating and riffing on the fact that there's going to be new winners and they're gonna look different as Andy Jassy always says in the cube you have to be misunderstood if you're really going to make something happen. Most of the most successful companies are misunderstood. Not anymore. The cloud scales there. And that's what's exciting about all this. >>It is exciting that the scale is there, the appetite is there the appetite to challenge the status quo, which is right now in this economic and dynamic market that we're living in is there's nothing better. >>One of the things that's come up and and that's just real quick before we bring jerry in is automation has been insecurity, absolutely security's been in every conversation, but automation is now so hot in the sense of it's real and it's becoming part of all the design decisions. How can we automate can we automate faster where the keys to automation? Is that having the right data, What data is available? So I think the idea of automation and Ai are driving all the change and that's to me is what these new companies represent this modern error where AI is built into the outcome and the apps and all that infrastructure. So it's super exciting. Um, let's check in, we got jerry Chen line at least a great. We're gonna come back after jerry and then kick off the day. Let's bring in jerry Chen from Greylock is he here? Let's bring him in there. He is. >>Hey john good to see you. >>Hey, congratulations on an amazing talk and thesis on the castles on the cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>All right, Well thanks for reading it. Um, always were being put a piece of workout out either. Not sure what the responses, but it seemed to resonate with a bunch of developers, founders, investors and folks like yourself. So smart people seem to gravitate to us. So thank you very much. >>Well, one of the benefits of doing the Cube for 11 years, Jerry's we have videotape of many, many people talking about what the future will hold. You kind of are on this early, it wasn't called castles in the cloud, but you were all I was, we had many conversations were kind of connecting the dots in real time. But you've been on this for a while. It's great to see the work. I really think you nailed this. I think you're absolutely on point here. So let's get into it. What is castles in the cloud? New research to come out from Greylock that you spearheaded? It's collaborative effort, but you've got data behind it. Give a quick overview of what is castle the cloud, the new modes of competitive advantage for companies. >>Yeah, it's as a group project that our team put together but basically john the question is, how do you win in the cloud? Remember the conversation we had eight years ago when amazon re event was holy cow, Like can you compete with them? Like is it a winner? Take all? Winner take most And if it is winner take most, where are the white spaces for Some starts to to emerge and clearly the past eight years in the cloud this journey, we've seen big companies, data breaks, snowflakes, elastic Mongo data robot. And so um they spotted the question is, you know, why are the castles in the cloud? The big three cloud providers, Amazon google and Azure winning. You know, what advantage do they have? And then given their modes of scale network effects, how can you as a startup win? And so look, there are 500 plus services between all three cloud vendors, but there are like 500 plus um startups competing gets a cloud vendors and there's like almost 100 unicorn of private companies competing successfully against the cloud vendors, including public companies. So like Alaska, Mongo Snowflake. No data breaks. Not public yet. Hashtag or not public yet. These are some examples of the names that I think are winning and watch this space because you see more of these guys storm the castle if you will. >>Yeah. And you know one of the things that's a funny metaphor because it has many different implications. One, as we talk about security, the perimeter of the gates, the moats being on land. But now you're in the cloud, you have also different security paradigm. You have a different um, new kinds of services that are coming on board faster than ever before. Not just from the cloud players but From companies contributing into the ecosystem. So the combination of the big three making the market the main markets you, I think you call 31 markets that we know of that probably maybe more. And then you have this notion of a sub market, which means that there's like we used to call it white space back in the day, remember how many whites? Where's the white space? I mean if you're in the cloud, there's like a zillion white spaces. So talk about this sub market dynamic between markets and that are being enabled by the cloud players and how these sub markets play into it. >>Sure. So first, the first problem was what we did. We downloaded all the services for the big three clowns. Right? And you know what as recalls a database or database service like a document DB and amazon is like Cosmo dB and Azure. So first thing first is we had to like look at all three cloud providers and you? Re categorize all the services almost 500 Apples, Apples, Apples # one number two is you look at all these markets or sub markets and said, okay, how can we cluster these services into things that you know you and I can rock right. That's what amazon Azure and google think about. It is very different and the beauty of the cloud is this kind of fat long tail of services for developers. So instead of like oracle is a single database for all your needs. They're like 20 or 30 different databases from time series um analytics, databases. We're talking rocks at later today. Right. Um uh, document databases like Mongo search database like elastic. And so what happens is there's not one giant market like databases, there's a database market And 30, 40 sub markets that serve the needs developers. So the Great News is cloud has reduced the cost and create something that new for developers. Um also the good news is for a start up you can find plenty of white speeds solving a pain point, very specific to a different type of problem >>and you can sequence up to power law to this. I love the power of a metaphor, you know, used to be a very thin neck note no torso and then a long tail. But now as you're pointing out this expansion of the fat tail of services, but also there's big tam's and markets available at the top of the power law where you see coming like snowflake essentially take on the data warehousing market by basically sitting on amazon re factoring with new services and then getting a flywheel completely changing the economic unit economics completely changing the consumption model completely changing the value proposition >>literally you >>get Snowflake has created like a storm, create a hole, that mode or that castle wall against red shift. Then companies like rock set do your real time analytics is Russian right behind snowflakes saying, hey snowflake is great for data warehouse but it's not fast enough for real time analytics. Let me give you something new to your, to your parallel argument. Even the big optic snowflake have created kind of a wake behind them that created even more white space for Gaza rock set. So that's exciting for guys like me and >>you. And then also as we were talking about our last episode two or quarter two of our showcase. Um, from a VC came on, it's like the old shelf where you didn't know if a company's successful until they had to return the inventory now with cloud you if you're not successful, you know it right away. It's like there's no debate. Like, I mean you're either winning or not. This is like that's so instrumented so a company can have a good better mousetrap and win and fill the white space and then move up. >>It goes both ways. The cloud vendor, the big three amazon google and Azure for sure. They instrument their own class. They know john which ecosystem partners doing well in which ecosystems doing poorly and they hear from the customers exactly what they want. So it goes both ways they can weaponize that. And just as well as you started to weaponize that info >>and that's the big argument of do that snowflake still pays the amazon bills. They're still there. So again, repatriation comes back, That's a big conversation that's come up. What's your quick take on that? Because if you're gonna have a castle in the cloud, then you're gonna bring it back to land. I mean, what's that dynamic? Where do you see that compete? Because on one hand is innovation. The other ones maybe cost efficiency. Is that a growth indicator slow down? What's your view on the movement from and to the cloud? >>I think there's probably three forces you're finding here. One is the cost advantage in the scale advantage of cloud so that I think has been going for the past eight years, there's a repatriation movement for a certain subset of customers, I think for cost purposes makes sense. I think that's a tiny handful that believe they can actually run things better than a cloud. The third thing we're seeing around repatriation is not necessary against cloud, but you're gonna see more decentralized clouds and things pushed to the edge. Right? So you look at companies like Cloudflare Fastly or a company that we're investing in Cato networks. All ideas focus on secure access at the edge. And so I think that's not the repatriation of my own data center, which is kind of a disaggregated of cloud from one giant monolithic cloud, like AWS east or like a google region in europe to multiple smaller clouds for governance purposes, security purposes or legacy purposes. >>So I'm looking at my notes here, looking down on the screen here for this to read this because it's uh to cut and paste from your thesis on the cloud. The excellent cloud. The of the $38 billion invested this quarter. Um Ai and ml number one, um analytics. Number two, security number three. Actually, security number one. But you can see the bubbles here. So all those are data problems I need to ask you. I see data is hot data as intellectual property. How do you look at that? Because we've been reporting on this and we just started the cube conversation around workflows as intellectual property. If you have scale and your motives in the cloud. You could argue that data and the workflows around those data streams is intellectual property. It's a protocol >>I believe both are. And they just kind of go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Right? So data for sure. I. P. So if you know people talk about days in the oil, the new resource. That's largely true because of powers a bunch. But the workflow to your point john is sticky because every company is a unique snowflake right? Like the process used to run the cube and your business different how we run our business. So if you can build a workflow that leverages the data, that's super sticky. So in terms of switching costs, if my work is very bespoke to your business, then I think that's competitive advantage. >>Well certainly your workflow is a lot different than the cube. You guys just a lot of billions of dollars in capital. We're talking to all the people out here jerry. Great to have you on final thought on your thesis. Where does it go from here? What's been the reaction? Uh No, you put it out there. Great love the restart. Think you're on point on this one. Where did we go from here? >>We have to follow pieces um in the near term one around, you know, deep diver on open source. So look out for that pretty soon and how that's been a powerful strategy a second. Is this kind of just aggregation of the cloud be a Blockchain and you know, decentralized apps, be edge applications. So that's in the near term two more pieces of, of deep dive we're doing. And then the goal here is to update this on a quarterly and annual basis. So we're getting submissions from founders that wanted to say, hey, you missed us or he screwed up here. We got the big cloud vendors saying, Hey jerry, we just lost his new things. So our goal here is to update this every single year and then probably do look back saying, okay, uh, where were we wrong? We're right. And then let's say the castle clouds 2022. We'll see the difference were the more unicorns were there more services were the IPO's happening. So look for some short term work from us on analytics, like around open source and clouds. And then next year we hope that all of this forward saying, Hey, you have two year, what's happening? What's changing? >>Great stuff and, and congratulations on the southern news. You guys put another half a billion dollars into early, early stage, which is your roots. Are you still doing a lot of great investments in a lot of unicorns. Congratulations that. Great luck on the team. Thanks for coming on and congratulations you nailed this one. I think I'm gonna look back and say that this is a pretty seminal piece of work here. Thanks for sharing. >>Thanks john thanks for having us. >>Okay. Okay. This is the cube here and 81 startup showcase. We're about to get going in on all the hot companies closing out the kino lisa uh, see jerry Chen cube alumni. He was right from day one. We've been riffing on this, but he nails it here. I think Greylock is lucky to have him as a general partner. He's done great deals, but I think he's hitting the next wave big. This is, this is huge. >>I was listening to you guys talking thinking if if you had a crystal ball back in 2013, some of the things Jerry saying now his narrative now, what did he have a crystal >>ball? He did. I mean he could be a cuBA host and I could be a venture capital. We were both right. I think so. We could have been, you know, doing that together now and all serious now. He was right. I mean, we talked off camera about who's the next amazon who's going to challenge amazon and Andy Jassy was quoted many times in the queue by saying, you know, he was surprised that it took so long for people to figure out what they were doing. Okay, jerry was that VM where he had visibility into the cloud. He saw amazon right away like we did like this is a winning formula and so he was really out front on this one. >>Well in the investments that they're making in these unicorns is exciting. They have this, this lens that they're able to see the opportunities there almost before anybody else can. And finding more white space where we didn't even know there was any. >>Yeah. And what's interesting about the report I'm gonna dig into and I want to get to him while he's on camera because it's a great report, but He says it's like 500 services I think Amazon has 5000. So how you define services as an interesting thing and a lot of amazon services that they have as your doesn't have and vice versa, they do call that out. So I find the report interesting. It's gonna be a feature game in the future between clouds the big three. They're gonna say we do this, you're starting to see the formation, Google's much more developer oriented. Amazon is much more stronger in the governance area with data obviously as he pointed out, they have such experience Microsoft, not so much their developer cloud and more office, not so much on the government's side. So that that's an indicator of my, my opinion of kind of where they rank. So including the number one is still amazon web services as your long second place, way behind google, right behind Azure. So we'll see how the horses come in, >>right. And it's also kind of speaks to the hybrid world in which we're living the hybrid multi cloud world in which many companies are living as companies to not just survive in the last year and a half, but to thrive and really have to become data companies and leverage that data as a competitive advantage to be able to unlock the value of it. And a lot of these startups that we talked to in the showcase are talking about how they're helping organizations unlock that data value. As jerry said, it is the new oil, it's the new gold. Not unless you can unlock that value faster than your competition. >>Yeah, well, I'm just super excited. We got a great day ahead of us with with all the cots startups. And then at the end day, Volonte is gonna interview, hello, fresh practitioners, We're gonna close it out every episode now, we're going to do with the closing practitioner. We try to get jpmorgan chase data measures. The hottest area right now in the enterprise data is new competitive advantage. We know that data workflows are now intellectual property. You're starting to see data really factoring into these applications now as a key aspect of the competitive advantage and the value creation. So companies that are smart are investing heavily in that and the ones that are kind of slow on the uptake are lagging the market and just trying to figure it out. So you start to see that transition and you're starting to see people fall away now from the fact that they're not gonna make it right, You're starting to, you know, you can look at look at any happens saying how much ai is really in there. Real ai what's their data strategy and you almost squint through that and go, okay, that's gonna be losing application. >>Well the winners are making it a board level conversation >>And security isn't built in. Great to have you on this morning kicking it off. Thanks John Okay, we're going to go into the next set of the program at 10:00 we're going to move into the breakouts. Check out the companies is three tracks in there. We have an awesome track on devops pure devops. We've got the data and analytics and we got the cloud management and just to run down real quick check out the sis dig harness. Io system is doing great, securing devops harness. IO modern software delivery platform, White Source. They're preventing and remediating the rest of the internet for them for the company's that's a really interesting and lumbago, effortless acres land and monitoring functions, server list super hot. And of course hacker one is always great doing a lot of great missions and and bounties you see those success continue to send i O there in Palo alto changing the game on data engineering and data pipe lining. Okay. Data driven another new platform, horizontally scalable and of course thought spot ai driven kind of a search paradigm and of course rock set jerry Chen's companies here and press are all doing great in the analytics and then the cloud management cost side 80 operations day to operate. Ops ramps and ops multi cloud are all there and sunny, all all going to present. So check them out. This is the Cubes Adria's startup showcase episode three.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 brought to you >>by IBM. Welcome back everyone to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual um john for your host of the cube. Our next guest taylor Holloway. Chief technology officer at advent one. Tyler welcome to the cube from down under in Australia and we're in Palo alto California. How are you? >>Well thanks john thanks very much. Glad to be glad to be on here. >>Love love the virtual cube of the virtual events. We can get to talk to people really quickly with click um great conversation here around hybrid cloud, multi cloud and all things software enterprise before we get started. I wanna take a minute to explain what you guys do at advent one. What's the main focus? >>Yeah. So look we have a lot of customers in different verticals. Um so you know generally what we provide depends on the particular industry the customers in. But generally speaking we see a lot of demand for operational efficiency, helping our clients tackle cyber security risks, adopt cloud and set them up to modernize the applications. >>And this is this has been a big wave coming in for sure with you know, cloud and scale. So I gotta ask you, what are the main challenges that you guys are solvent for your customers um and how are you helping them overcome come that way and transformative innovative way? >>Yeah, look, I think helping our clients um improve their security posture is a big one. We're finding as well that our customers are gaining a lot of operational efficiency by adopting sort of open source technology red huts an important partner of ours as his IBM um and we're seeing them sort of move away from some more proprietary solutions. Automation is a big focus for us as well. We've had some great outcomes with our clients or helping them automate um and you know, to live up um you know the stand up and data operations of environments a lot quickly a lot more easily and uh and to be able to sort of apply some standards across multiple sort of areas of their I. T. Estate. >>What are some of the solutions that you guys are doing with IBM's portfolio on the infrastructure side, you got red hat, you've got a lot of open source stuff to meet the needs of clients. What do you mean? What's the mean? >>Uh Yeah I think on the storage side will probably help our clients sort of tackle the expanding data in structured and particularly unstructured data they're trying to take control of so you know, looking at spectrum scale and those type of products from an audio perspective for unstructured data is a good example. And so they're flush systems for more block storage and more run of the mill sort of sort of environments. We have helped our clients consolidate and modernize on IBM power systems. Having Red Hat is both a Lynx operating system and having open shift as a container platform. Um really helps there. And Red Hat also provides management overlay, which has been great on what we do with IBM power systems. We've been working on a few different sort of use cases on power in particular. More recently, SAP Hana is a big one where we've had some success with our clients migrating Muhanna on to onto IBM power systems. And we've also helped our customers, you know, improve some um some environments on the other end of the side, such as IBM I, we still have a large number of customers with, with IBM I and and you know how do we help them? You know some of them are moving to cloud in one way or another others are consuming some kind of IRS and we can sort of wrap around a managed service to to help them through. >>So I gotta ask you the question, you know U C T. Oh you played a lot of technologies kubernetes just become this lingua franca for this kind of like I'll call a middleware kind of orchestration layer uh containers. Also you're awesome but I gotta ask you when you walk into a client's environment you have to name names but you know usually you see kind of two pictures man, they need some serious help or they got their act together. So either way they're both opportunities for Hybrid cloud. How do you how do you how do you evaluate the environment when you go in, when you walk into those two scenarios? What goes through your mind? What some of the conversations that you guys have with those clients. Can you take me through a kind of day in the life of both scenarios? The ones that are like I can't get the job done, I'm so close in on the right team and the other ones, like we're grooving, we're kicking butt. >>Yeah. So look, let's start well, I supposed to start off with you try and take somewhat of a technology agnostic view and just sort of sit down and listen to what they're trying to achieve, how they're going for customers who have got it. You know, as you say, all nailed down things are going really well. Um it's just really understanding what what can we do to help. Is there an opportunity for us to help at all like there? Um, you know, generally speaking, there's always going to be something and it may be, you know, we don't try and if someone is going really well, they might just want someone to help with a bespoke use case or something very specific where they need help. On the other end of the scale where a customer is sort of pretty early on and starting to struggle. We generally try and help them not boil the ocean at once. Just try and get some winds, pick some key use cases, you know, deliver some value back and then sort of growing from there rather than trying to go into a customer and trying to do everything at once tends to be a challenge. Just understand what the priorities are and help them get going. >>What's the impact been for red hat? Um, in your customer base, a lot of overlap. Some overlap, no overlap coming together. What's the general trend that you're seeing? What's the reaction been? >>Yeah I think it's been really good. Obviously IBM have a lot of focus on cloud packs where they're bringing their software on red hat open shift that will run on multiple clouds. So I think that's one that we'll see a lot more of overtime. Um Also helping customers automate their I. T. Operations with answerable is one we do quite a lot of um and there's some really bespoke use cases we've done with that as well as some standardized one. So helping with day two operations and all that sort of thing. But there's also some really sort of out there things customers have needed to automate that's been a challenge for them and being able to use open source tools to do it has worked really well. We've had some good wins there, >>you know, I want to ask you about the architecture and I'm just some simplify it real. Just for the sake of devops, um you know, segmentation, you got hybrid clouds, take a programmable infrastructure and then you've got modern applications that need to have a I some have said I've even sit on the cube and other broadcast that if you don't have a I you're gonna be at a handicap some machine learning, some data has to be in there. You can probably see ai and mostly everything as you go in and try to architect that out for customers um and help them get to a hybrid cloud infrastructure with real modern application front end with using data. What's what's the playbook? Do you have any best practices or examples you can share or scenarios or visions that you see uh playing >>out? I think you're the first one is obviously making sure customers data is in the right place. So if they might be wanting to use um some machine learning in one particular cloud provider and they've got a lot of their applications and data in another, you know, how do we help them make it mobile and able to move data from one cloud to another or back into court data center? So there's a lot of that. I think that we spend a lot of time with customers to try and get a right architecture and also how do we make sure it's secure from end to end. So if they're moving things from into multiple one or more public clouds as well as maybe in their own data center, making sure connectivity is all set up properly. All the security requirements are met. So I think we sort of look at it from a from a high level design point of view, we look at obviously what the target state is going to be versus the current state that really take into account security, performance, connectivity or those sort of things to make sure that they're going to have a good result. >>You know, one of the things you mentioned and this comes up a lot of my interviews with partners of IBM is they always comment about their credibility and all the other than the normal stuff. But one of the things that comes out a lot pretty much consistently is their experience in verticals. Uh they have such a track record in verticals and this is where AI and machine learning data has to be very much scoped in on the vertical. You can't generalize and have a general purpose data plane inside of vertically specialized kind of focus. How how do you see that evolving, how does IBM play there with this kind of the horizontally scalable mindset of a hybrid model, both on premise in the cloud, but that's still saying provide that intimacy with the data to fuel the machine learning or NLP or power that ai which seems to be critical. >>Yeah, I think there's a lot of services where you know, public cloud providers are bringing out new services all the time and some of it is pre can and easy to consume. I think what IBM from what I've observed, being really good at is handling some of those really bespoke use cases. So if you have a particular vertical with a challenge, um you know, there's going to be sort of things that are pre can that you can go and consume. But if you need to do something custom that could be quite challenging. How do they sort of build something that could be quite specific for a particular industry and then obviously being able to repeat that afterwards for us, that's obviously something we're very interested in. >>Yeah, tell I love chatting whether you love getting the low down also, people might not know your co author of a book performance guy with IBM Power Systems, So I gotta ask you, since I got you here and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but if you can just share your vision or any kind of anecdotal observation as people start to put together their architecture and again, you know, Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, every environment is different. But still, hybrid, distributed concept is distributed computing. Is there a KPI is there a best practice on as a manager or systems architect to kind of keep an eye on what what good is and how how good becomes better because the day to operations becomes a super important concept. We're seeing some called Ai ops where okay, I'm provisioning stuff out on a hybrid Cloud operational environment. But now day two hits are things happen as more stuff entered into the equation. What's your vision on KPs and management? What to keep tracking? >>Yeah, I think obviously attention to detail is really important to be able to build things properly. A good KPI particularly managed service area that I'm curious that understanding is how often do you actually have to log into the systems that you're managing? So if you're logging in and recitation into servers and all this sort of stuff all the time, all of your automation and configuration management is not set up properly. So, really a good KPI an interesting one is how often do you log into things all the time? If something went wrong, would you sooner go and build another one and shoot the one that failed or go and restore from backup? So thinking about how well things are automated. If things are immutable using infrastructure as code, those are things that I think are really important when you look at, how is something going to be scalable and easy to manage going forward. What I hate to see is where, you know, someone build something and automates it all in the first place and they're too scared to run it again afterwards in case it breaks something. >>It's funny the next generation of leaders probably won't even know like, hey, yeah, taylor and john they had to log into systems back in the day. You know, I mean, I could be like a story they tell their kids. Uh but no, that's a good Metro. This is this automation. So it's on the next level. Let's go the next level automation. Um what's the low hanging fruit for automation? Because you're getting at really the kind of the killer app there, which is, you know, self healing systems, good networks that are programmable but automation will define more value. What's your take? >>I think the main thing is where you start to move from a model of being able to start small and automate individual things which could be patching or system provisioning or anything like that. But what you really want to get to is to be able to drive everything through, get So instead of having a written up paper, change request, I'm going to change your system and all the rest of it. It really should be driven through a pull request and have things through it and and build pipelines to go and go and make a change running in development, make sure it's successful and then it goes and gets pushed into production. That's really where I think you want to get to and you can start to have a lot of people collaborating really well on this particular project or a customer that also have some sort of guard rails around what happens in some level of governance rather than being a free for all. >>Okay, final question. Where do you see event one headed? What's your future plans to continue to be a leader? I. T. Service leader for this guy? BMS Infrastructure portfolio? >>I think it comes down to people in the end, so really making sure that we partner with our clients and to be well positioned to understand what they want to achieve and and have the expertise in our team to bring to the table to help them do it. I think open source is a key enabler to help our clients adopt a hybrid cloud model to sort of touched on earlier uh as well as be able to make use of multiple clouds where it makes sense from a managed service perspective. I think everyone is really considering themselves and next year managed service provider. But what that means for us is to provide a different, differentiated managed service and also have the strong technical expertise to back it up. >>Taylor Holloway, chief technology officer advent one remote videoing in from down under in Australia. I'm john ferrier and Palo alto with cube coverage of IBM thing. Taylor, thanks for joining me today from the cube. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay, cube coverage. Thanks for watching ever. Mhm mm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon 2021 CloudNativeCon Europe. Part of the CNCF and ongoing, could be in there from the beginning, love this community, theCUBE's proud to support and continue to cover it. We're virtual this year again because of the pandemic but it looks like we'll be right around the corner for a physical event, hopefully for the next one, fingers crossed. Got a great guest here from Red Hat. Siamak Sadeghianfar, a Senior Principal Product Manager. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, this topic's about GitOps, Pipelines, code. Obviously Infrastructure as Code has been the ethos since I can remember going back to 2008 and the original cloutaroti vision. And we were always talking about that. Now it's mainstream. Now it's DevSecOps. So, it's now, day two operations, shifting left with security. OpenShift is continuing to get, take ground. Congratulations on that. So my first question is you guys announced the general availability of OpenShift Pipelines and GitOps at KubeCon. What are, what's this about? And what's the benefits for the customer. Let's get into the news >> Thanks for, to begin with for the Congress and this, this is definitely a hot topic around the DevSecOps. And the different variations of that year about some versions that during in, in FinTech and other verticals as well. The idea is here really is that CI/CD has been around for a long time, continuous integration and continuous delivery, as one of the core practices of the DevOps movement. DevOps movement is quite widespread, now. You, you see reports of above 90% of organizations are in the process of adoption in their journey. And this is one of the main practices but something that has become quite apparent is that many of these organizations that are investing more and more in Cloud Native apps and adopting Cloud Native ways of building applications the tooling and technology that they use for CI/CD since CI/CD is nothing new is from 10 years old, five years old pre Kubernetes era which is not quite Cloud Native. So there is always a clash of how do I build Cloud Natives application using these technologies that are not really built for Cloud Native space and an OpenShift Pipelines OpenShift GitOps is really an opening in this direction and bring more Cloud Native ways of continuous integration and continuous delivery to customers on OpenShift. >> Got it, so I got to ask you, so a couple of questions on this topic, I really want to dig into. Can you describe the Cloud Native CI/CD process versus traditional CI/CD? >> Sure, so traditional when we think about CI/CD there is usually this monolithic solutions that are running on a virtual machine on a type of infrastructure that they use to deploy applications as well. 'Cause you, you need reliability and you have to be making an assumption about an infrastructure that you're running on. And when you come to Cloud Native infrastructure you have a much more dynamic infrastructure. We have a lot less assumptions. You might be running on a public cloud or on premise infrastructure or different types of public cloud. So these environments are often also containerized. So there are, there's a high chance you're running on a container platform, regardless if it's a public or on premises. And with the whole containers, you, you have different types of disciplines and principals to think in, about your infrastructure. So in the Cloud Native ways of CI/CD, you're running most likely in a container platform. You don't have dedicated infrastructure. You are running mostly on demand. You scale when there is a demand for running CI/CD, for example, rather than dedicated infrastructure to it. And also from the mode of operation from organization perspective, they are more adapted to this decentralized ways of ownership. As a part of the DevOps culture, this comes really with that movement, that more and more development teams are getting ownership of some portion of the delivery of their applications. And it's cognitive CS/CD solutions, they focus on supporting these models that you go away from that central model of control to decentralize and have more ownership, more capabilities within the development teams for delivering application. >> Okay, so I then have to ask you the next question. It's like you, like a resource, you'd say: Hey Siri, what is, what is GitOps? What is GitOps? 'Cause that's the topic that's been getting a lot of traction, everyone's talking about it. I mean we know DevOps. So what is the GitOps model? Can you define that? And is that what a, it that what comes after DevOps? Is it DevOps 2.0, what is the GitOps model? >> That's a very good question. GitOps is nothing really new. It's rather a more descriptive way of DevOps principles. DevOps talks about the cultural changes and mindset and ways of working. And when it comes to the, to the concrete work flow it is quite open for interpretation. So GitOps is one, a specific interpretation of how you, you do continuous integration and continuous delivery, how we implement DevOps. And the concept have been around for a couple of years. But just recently, it's got a lot of traction within the Cloud Native space. >> So how does GitOps fit into Kubernetes then? 'Cause that's going to be the next dot that we want to connect. What is that, what is, how, how. How does GitOps fit into Kubernetes? >> So GitOps is really the, the core principle of GitOps is that you, you, you think about everything in your infrastructure and application in a declarative manner. So everything needs to be declared in, in, in a number of gate repositories and you drive your operations through Git Workflows. Which if you think about it is quite similar to how Kubernetes operates. The, the reason Kubernetes became so popular is because of this declarative way of thinking about your infrastructure. You declare what you expect and Kubernetes actualizes that on, on some sort of infrastructure. So GitOps is, is, is exact same concept, but the, but applied not to the infrastructure itself, but to the operations of that infrastructure, operations of those applications. It becomes a really nice fit together. It's the same mindset really applied in different place. >> It's like Kubernetes is like the linchpin or the enabler for GitOps. Just a whole nother level of, I mean, I think GitOps essentially DevOps 2.0 in my opinion because it takes this whole nother level above that for the developer modern developer because it allows them to do more. So it's been around for a while. We've been talking about this, it's got a new name but GitOps is kind of concept has been around. Why is the increase adoption happening now in your opinion or do you have any data on or any facts or opinion on why it's such an increase in, in conversation and adoption? >> You had the, you had like very accurate point there that Kubernetes has been a great enabler for, for DevOps and later the same applies to GitOps as well because of that, that great fit. It has been, GitOps the concept has been there but implementation of that has been quite difficult before Kubernetes and also for non-containerized environments. Kubernetes is, is a very potent platform for this kind of operation because the the mindset and the ways of working is really native to how Kubernetes thinks. But there is also another driver that has been influential in, in the rise of GitOps in the last year or two. And this is an observation we see at a lot of our customers, that the number of clusters that organizations are deploying, Kubernetes clusters increasing. As their maturity increases they get more comfortable with Cloud Native way of working and transfer the workflows to become Cloud Native, they are, they are having, they move more and more of their infrastructure to Kubernetes clusters. So a new challenge rises with this. And now that I have a larger number of clusters how do I ensure consistency across all these, all these clusters? So before I had to deploy an application to production environment, perhaps, which meant two clusters across two geographical zones. Now I have to deploy to 20 clusters. And these 20 clusters also change over time. So this week is a different 20 clusters then three weeks from now. So this, this dynamic ways of working and the customers maturing in, in dealing with Kubernetes operating communities has increased really the pace of adoption of GitOps because it addresses a lot of those challenges that customers are dealing with in this space. >> Yeah, you bring up a really good challenge there. And I think that's worth calling out, this idea of expansion. And I won't say sprawl because it's not a sprawl of cluster. It's more a state provisioning and standing up clusters. And you said they they're changing because the environment has needs and the workloads might have requirements. This makes total sense in a DevOps kind of GitOps way. So I get that and I see that definitely happening. So this brings up the question, if I'm a customer, what I'm worried about is I don't want to have that Hadoop factor where I build a cluster and it takes too long to manage it, or I can't measure it, or understand the data, or have any observability. So I want to have an ease of provisioning and standing up and I want to have consistency that my apps who are using it, don't have to be, you know mangled with or coded with. So, you know, this combination of ease of deploying, ease of integrating, ease of consuming the clusters becomes a service model. Can you share your thoughts on how that gets solved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So that, that's a great point because as, as this is happening, there is also heterogenesis in this, this type of Kubernetes infrastructure window. Like, they're all Kubernetes but this problem also has multiple facets as customers running on multiple public clouds and, and combination of that with their on-premise Kubernetes clusters. And that is, they may as well be OpenShift across all this, all this infrastructure. But the, the problem that GitOps helps its customers advise that they can have the exact same operational model across all these apps and infrastructure, regardless of what kind of application it is. And regardless of where OpenShift is installed or if you're using that combined with a public cloud managed a Kubernetes stats, is the exact same process because you're relying on, on the Gits Workflows, right? And even beyond that, this standard workflow has the benefit of something that many organizations are already familiar with. So if you think about what GitOps operations mean it is essentially what developers have been always using for developing applications. So this standardizes the operations of both application and infrastructure as solvers. >> Listen to me, I got to ask you as the product manager on the whole pipelining in Kubernetes deployments. In your opinion, share your perspective on, real quick, on Kubernetes, where we're at? Because just the accelerated adoption has been phenomenal. We've seen it mature this year at KubeCon. And certainly when KubeCon North America happens, you're going to see more and more end user participation. You're going to see much more end-user use cases. You mentioned clusters are growing. What's the state of Kubernetes from your perspective, from a developer mindset? >> So Kubernetes, I think it has moved from a place that it was seen as only a, a type of infrastructure for Cloud Native applications because of the capability that it provides to a type of infrastructure for any type of application, any type of workload. I think what we have seen over the last two years is, is a shift to expansion of the use cases. And if, if you are, you talked about head open if you are a data scientist, or if you are an AIML type of developer or any type of workload really, see use cases that are coming to the Kubernetes platform as the targets type of infrastructure. So that's really where we see Kubernetes at right now is the really, the preferred infrastructure for any type of workload. And I believe this trend going to to keep continuing to address any of the challenge that exists that prevents maybe part of the, a particular type of workload to address that within the platform and opens that to add to, to developers. Which means for the developers now, once you learn the platform you are really proficient in a, you have this skills for any type of application or any type of infrastructure because they're all standardized, regardless of what type of application or workloads or technology you're specialized in. They're all going to the exact same platform. So it's very standardized type of skills across organizations, different type of teams that they have. >> Awesome, great, thanks for sharing that insight and definition. You're like a walking dictionary today for our CUBE audience. Thank you for all this good stuff. Appreciate it. Final question for you is, what does it mean for developers that are using Jenkins or other cloud-based CI solutions like GitHub Actions? What, what's the impact to them with all this from a working standpoint? 'Cause obviously you've got to make it workable. >> Right, so it's CI/CD also like it's, it's it's great to see like with DevOps adoption, there are many organizations that already have processes in place. They have, they're already using a CI tool or a CD tool. They might be using Jenkins. A lot of organizations really use, use Jenkins even though it comes with challenges and you might be using public cloud services or cloud-based CI tools, like you have Actions, you have pipelines and so on. So we are very well aware of the existing investment that many organizational teams have made. And we make sure that OpenShift as a platform works really well alongside all these different types of CI and CD technology that exists. We want to make sure that for developers starting on OpenShift, they, they have a really solid Cloud Native foundation for CI/CD. They have of strategies included but replaceable type of strategies. So they, they have a supportive platform that is Cloud Native, that gives them capability that matches the type of Cloud Native workloads that they have on the platform but also integrate well with existing tooling that exists around CI/CD. So that they can match and choose if they want to replace a piece of that with an existing investment that they have done, integrated with the rest of the platform. >> Awesome, well, great to have you on. Having the principal product manager is awesome, to talk about the two new announcements here. OpenShift pipe, Pipelines, and OpenShift GitOps. Final, final question, bumper sticker this for the audience. What's the bottom line with OpenShift Pipelines and GitOps? What's the, what's the bottom line benefit for customers? >> It's a, so OpenShift Pipeline and OpenShift GitOps makes it really simple for customers to create Cloud Native Pipelines and GitOps model for delivering application. And also making cluster changes across a large range of clusters that they have, make it really simple to grow from that point to many, many clusters and still manage the complexity of this complex infrastructure that it will be growing into. >> All right, Siamak Sadeghianfar, Senior Principal Product Manager at Red Hat. Here for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Europe. CUBE conversation, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, thanks for having me. Okay, CUBE coverage continues. I'm John Farrow with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpenShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus bolted on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of three out of three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2021 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE'S coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021 Virtual, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests here, always great to talk to the KubeCon co-chairs and we have Stephen Augustus Head of Open Source at Cisco and also the KubeCon co-chair great to have you back. And Jasmine James Manager and Engineering Effectives at Twitter, the KubeCon co-chair, she's new on the job so we're not going to grill her too hard but she's excited to share her perspective, Jasmine, Stephen great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So obviously the co-chairs you guys see everything upfront Jasmine, you're going to learn that this is a really kind of key fun position because you've got to multiple hats you got to wear, you got to put a great program together, you got to entertain and surprise and delight the attendees and also can get the right trends, pick everything right and then keep that harmonious vibe going at CNCF and KubeCon is hard so it's a hard job. So I got to ask you out of the gate, what are the top trends that you guys have selected and are pushing forward this year that we're seeing evolve and unfold here at KubeCon? >> For sure yeah. So I'm excited to see, and I would say that some of the top trends for Cloud Native right now are just changes in the ecosystem, how we think about different use cases for Cloud Native technology. So you'll see lot's of talk about new architectures being introduced into Cloud Native technologies or things like WebAssembly. WebAssembly Wasm used cases and really starting to and again, I think I mentioned this every time, but like what are the customer used cases actually really thinking about how all of these building blocks connect and create a cohesive story. So I think a lot of it is enduring and will always be a part. My favorite thing to see is pretty much always maintainer and user stories, but yeah, but architecture is Wasm and security. Security is a huge focus and it's nice to see it comes to the forefront as we talked about having these like the security day, as well as all of the talk arounds, supply chain security, it has been a really, really, really big event (laughs) I'll say. >> Yeah. Well, great shot from last year we have been we're virtual again, but we're back in, the real world is coming back in the fall, so we hopefully in North America we'll be in person. Jasmine, you're new to the job. Tell us a little about you introduce yourself to the community and tell more about who you are and why you're so excited to be the co-chair with Stephen. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Jasmine James, I've been in the industry for the past five or six years previous at Delta Airlines, now at Twitter, as a part of my job at Delta we did a huge drive on adopting Kubernetes. So a lot of those experiences, I was very, very blessed to be a part of in making the adoption and really the cultural shift, easy for developers during my time there. I'm really excited to experience like Cloud Native from the co-chair perspective because historically I've been like on the consumer side going to talk, taking all those best practices, stealing everything I could into bring it back into my job. So make everyone's life easier. So it's really, really great to see all of the fantastic ideas that are being presented, all of the growth and maturity within the Cloud Native world. Similar to Stephen, I'm super excited to hear about the security stuff, especially as it relates to making it easy for developers to shift left on security versus it being such an afterthought and making it something that you don't really have to think about. Developer experience is huge for me which is why I took the job at Twitter six months ago, so I'm really excited to see what I can learn from the other co-chairs and to bring it back to my day-to-day. >> Yeah, Twitter's been very active in open source. Everyone knows that and it's a great chance to see you land there. One of the interesting trends is this year I'll see besides security is GitOps but the one that I think is relevant to your background so fresh is the end user contributions and involvement has been really exploding on the scene. It's always been there. We've covered, Envoy with Lyft but now enterprise is now mainstream enterprises have been kind of going to the open source well and bringing those goodies back to their camps and building out and bringing it back. So you starting to see that flywheel developing you've been on that side now here. Talk about that dynamic and how real that is an important and share some perspective of what's really going on around this explosion around more end user contribution, more end user involvement. >> Absolutely. So I really think that a lot of industry like players are starting to see the importance of contributing back to open source because historically we've done a lot of taking, utilizing these different components to drive the business logic and not really making an investment in the product itself. So it's really, really great to see large companies invest in open source, even have whole teams dedicated to open source and how it's consumed internally. So I really think it's going to be a big win for the companies and for the open source community because I really am a big believer in like giving back and making sure that you should give back as much as you're taking and by making it easy for companies to do the right thing and then even highlighting it as a part of CNCF, it'll be really, really great, just a drive for a great environment for everyone. So really excited to see that. >> That's really good. She has been awesome stuff. Great, great insight. Stephen, I just have you piggyback off that and comment on companies enterprises that want to get more involved with the Cloud Native community from their respective experiences, what's the playbook, is there a new on-ramps? Is there new things? Is there a best practice? What's your view? I mean, obviously everyone's growing and changing. You look at IT has changed. I mean, IT is evolving completely to CloudOps, SRE get ops day two operations. It's pretty much standard now but they need to learn and change. What's your take on this? >> Yeah, so I think that to Jasmine's point and I'm not sure how much we've discussed my background in the past, but I actually came from the corporate IT background, did Desktop Sr, Desktop helped us support all of that stuff up into operations, DevOps, SRE, production engineering. I was an SRE at a startup who used core West technologies and started using Kubernetes back when Kubernetes is that one, two, I think. And that was my first journey into Cloud Native. And I became core less is like only customer to employee convert, right? So I'm very much big on that end user story and figuring out how to get people involved because that was my story as well. So I think that, some of the work that we do or a lot of the work that we do in contributor strategy, the SIG CNCF St. Contributor Strategy is all around thinking through how to bring on new contributors to these various Cloud Native projects, Right? So we've had chats with container D and linker D and a bunch of other folks across the ecosystem, as well as the kind of that maintainer circle sessions that we hold which are kind of like a private, not recorded. So maintainers can kind of get raw and talk about what they're feeling, whether it be around bolstering contributions or whether it'd be like managing burnout, right? Or thinking about how you talk through the values and the principles for your projects. So I think that, part of that story is building for multiple use cases, right? You take Kubernetes for example, right? So Ameritas chair for sync PM over in Kubernetes, one of the sub project owners for the enhancements sub project which involves basically like figuring out how we intake new enhancements to the community but as well as like what the end user cases are all of the use cases for that, right? How do we make it easy to use the technology and how we make it more effective for people to have conversations about how they use technology, right? So I think it's kind of a continuing story and it's delightful to see all of the people getting involved in a SIG Contributor Strategy, because it means that they care about all of the folks that are coming into their projects and making it a more welcoming and easier to contribute place so. >> Yeah. That's great stuff. And one of the things you mentioned about IT in your background and the scale change from IT and just the operational change over is interesting. I was just talking with a friend and we were talking about, get Op and, SRAs and how, in colleges is that an engineering track or is it computer science and it's kind of a hybrid, right? So you're seeing essentially this new operational model at scale that's CloudOps. So you've got hybrid, you've got on-premise, you've got Cloud Native and now soon to be multi-cloud so new things come into play architecture, coding, and programmability. All these things are like projects now in CNCF. And that's a lot of vendors and contributors but as a company, the IT functions is changing fast. So that's going to require more training and more involvement and yet open source is filling the void if you look at some of the successes out there, it's interesting. Can you comment on the companies that are out there saying, "Hey, I know my IT department is going to be turning into essentially SRE operations or CloudOps at scale. How do they get there? How could they work with KubeCon and what's the key playbook? How would you answer that? >> Yeah, so I would say, first off the place to go is the one-on-one track. We specifically craft that one-on-one track to make sure that people who are new to Cloud Native get a very cohesive story around what they're trying to get into, right? At any one time. So head to the one-on-one track, please add to the one-on-one track, hang out, definitely check out all of the keynotes that again, the keynotes, we put a lot of work into making sure these keynotes tell a very nice story about all of the technology and the amount of work that our presenters put into it as well is phenomenal. It's top notch. It's top notch every time. So those will always be my suggestions. Actually go to the keynotes and definitely check out the one-on-one track. >> Awesome. Jasmine, I got to get your take on this now that you're on the KubeCon and you're co-chairing with Stephen, what's your story to the folks that are in the end user side out there that were in your old position that you were at Delta doing some great Kubernetes work but now it's going beyond Kubernetes. I was just talking with another participant in the KubeCon ecosystem is saying, "It's not just Kubernetes anymore. There's other systems that we're going to deploy our real-time metrics on and whatnot". So what's the story? What's the update? What do you see on the inside now now that you're on board and you're at a Hyperscale at Twitter, what's your advice? What's your commentary to your old friends and the end user world? >> Yeah. It's not an easy task. I think that was, you had mentioned about starting with the one-on-one is like super key. Like that's where you should start. There's so many great stories out there in previous KubeCon that have been told. I was listening to those stories and the great thing about our community is that it's authentic, right? We're telling like all of the ways we tripped up so we can prevent you from doing this same thing and having an easier path, which is really awesome. Another thing I would say is do not underestimate the cultural shift, right? There are so many tools and technologies out there, but there's also a cultural transformation that has to happen. You're shifting from, traditional IT roles to a really holistic like so many different things are changing about the way infrastructure was interacted with the way developers are developing. So don't underestimate the cultural shift and make sure you're bringing everyone to the party because there's a lot of perspectives from the development side that needs to be considered before you make the shift initially So that way you can make sure you're approaching the problem in the right way. So those would be my recommendation. >> Also, speaking of cultural shifts, Stephen I know this is a big passion of yours is diversity in the ecosystem. I think with COVID we've seen probably in the past two years a major cultural shifts on the personnel involved, the people participating, still a lot more work to get done. Where are we on diversity in the ecosystem? How would you rate the progress and the overall achievements? >> I would say doing better, but never stop what has happened in COVID I think, if you look across companies, if you look across the opportunities that have opened up for people in general, there have been plenty of doors that have shut, right? And doors that have really made the assumption that you need to be physical are in person to do good work. And I think that the Cloud Native ecosystem the work that the LF and CNCF do, and really the way that we interact in projects has kind of pushed towards this async first, this remote first work culture, right? So you see it in these large corporations that have had to change the travel policies because of COVID and really for someone who's coming off being like a field engineer and solutions architect, right? The bread and butter is hopping on and off a plane, shaking hands, going to dinner, doing the song and dance, right? With customers. And for that model to functionally shift, right? Having conversations in different ways, right? And yeah, sometimes it's a lot of Zoom calls, right? Zoom calls, webinars, all of these things but I think some of what has happened is, you take the release team, for example, the Kubernetes release team. This is our first cycle with Dave Vellante who's our 121 released team lead is based in India, right? And that's the first time that we've had APAC region release team lead and what that forced us to do, we were already working on it. But what that forced us to do is really focused on asynchronous communication. How can we get things done without having to have people in the room? And we were like, "With Dave Vellante in here, it either works or it doesn't like, we're either going to prove that what we've put in place works for asynchronous communication or it doesn't." And then, given that a project of this scale can operate just fine, right? Right just fine delivering a release with people all across the globe. It proves that we have a lot of flexibility in the way that we offer opportunities, both on the open source side, as well as on the company side. >> Yeah. And I got to say KubeCon has always been global from day one. I was in Shanghai and I was in hung, Jo, visiting Ali Baba. And who do I see in the lobby? The CNCF crew. And I'm like, "What are you guys doing here?" "Oh, we're here talking to the cloud with Alibaba." So global is huge. You guys have nailed that. So congratulations and keep that going. Jasmine, your perspective is women in tech. I mean, you're seeing more and more focus and some great doors opening. It's still not enough. We've been covering this for a long time. Still the numbers are down, but we had a great conference recently at Stanford Women in Data Science amazing conference, a lot of power players coming in, women in tech is evolving. What's your take on this still a lot more work to done. You're an inspiration. Share your story. >> Yeah. We have a long way to go. There's no question about it. I do think that there's a lot of great organizations CNCF being one of them, really doing a great job at sharing, networking opportunities, encouraging other women to contribute to open source and letting that be sort of the gateway into a tech career. My journey is starting as a systems engineer at Delta, working my way into leadership, somehow I'm not sure I ended up there but really sort of shifting and being able to lift other women up has been like so fortunate to be able to do that. Women who code being a mentor, things of that nature has been a great opportunity, but I do feel like the open source community has a long way go to be a more welcoming place for women contributors, things like code of conduct, that being very prevalent making sure that it's not daunting and scary, going into GitHub and starting to create a PR for out of fear of what someone might say about your contributions instead of it being sort of an educational experience. So I think there's a lot of opportunities but there's a lot of programs, networking opportunities out there, especially everyone being remote now that have presented themselves. So I'm very hopeful. And the CNCF, like I said is doing a great job at highlighting these women contributors that are making changes to CNCF projects in really making it something that is celebrated which is really great. >> Yeah. You know that I love Stephen and we thought this last time and the Clubhouse app has come online since we were last talking and it's all audio. So there's a lot of ideas and it's all open. So with a synchronous first you have more access but still context matters. So the language, so there's still more opportunities potentially to offend or get it right so this is now becoming a new cultural shift. You brought this up last time we chatted around the language, language is important. So I think this is something that we're keeping an eye on and trying to keep open dialogue around, "Hey it matters what you say, asynchronously or in texts." We all know that text moment where someone said, "I didn't really mean that." But it was offensive or- >> It's like you said it. (laughs) >> (murmurs) you passionate about this here. This is super important how we work. >> Yeah. So you mentioned Clubhouse and it's something that I don't like. (laughs) So no offense to anyone who is behind creating new technologies for sure. But I think that Clubhouse from, if you take platforms like that, let's generalize, you take platforms like that and you think about the unintentional exclusion that those platforms involve, right? If you think about folks with disabilities who are not necessarily able to hear a conversation, right? Or you don't provide opportunities to like caption your conversations, right? That either intentionally or unintentionally excludes a group of folks, right? So I've seen Cloud Native, I've seen Cloud Native things happen on a Clubhouse, on a Twitter Spaces. I won't personally be involved in them until I know that it's a platform that is not exclusive. So I think that it's great that we're having new opportunities to engage with folks that are not necessarily, you've got people prefer the Slack and discord vibe, you've got people who prefer the text over phone calls, so to speak thing, right? You've got people who prefer phone calls. So maybe like, maybe Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, insert new, I guess Disco is doing a thing too- >> They call it stages. Disco has stages, which is- >> Stages. They have stages. Okay. All right. So insert, Clubhouse clone here and- >> Kube House. We've got a Kube House come on in. >> Kube House. Kube House. >> Trivial (murmurs). >> So we've got great ways to engage there for people who prefer that type of engagement and something that is explicitly different from the I'm on a Zoom call all day kind of vibe enjoy yourselves, try to make it as engaging as possible, just realize what you may unintentionally be doing by creating a community that not everyone can be a part of. >> Yeah. Technical consequences. I mean, this is key language matters to how you get involved and how you support it. I mean, the accessibility piece, I never thought about that. If you can't listen, I mean, you can't there's no content there. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that's a huge part of the Cloud Native community, right? Thinking through accessibility, internationalization, localization, to make sure that our contributions are actually accessible, right? To folks who want to get involved and not just prioritizing, let's say the U.S. or our English speaking part of the world so. >> Awesome. Jasmine, what's your take? What can we do better in the world to make the diversity and inclusion not a conversation because when it's not a conversation, then it's solved. I mean, ultimately it's got a lot more work to do but you can't be exclusive. You got to be diverse more and more output happens. What's your take on this? >> Yeah. I feel like they'll always be work to do in this space because there's so many groups of people, right? That we have to take an account for. I think that thinking through inclusion in the onset of whatever you're doing is the best way to get ahead of it. There's so many different components of it and you want to make sure that you're making a space for everyone. I also think that making sure that you have a pipeline of a network of people that represent a good subset of the world is going to be very key for shaping any program or any sort of project that anyone does in the future. But I do think it's something that we have to consistently keep at the forefront of our mind always consider. It's great that it's in so many conversations right now. It really makes me happy especially being a mom with an eight year old girl who's into computer science as well. That there'll be better opportunities and hopefully more prevalent opportunities and representation for her by the time she grows up. So really, really great. >> Get her coding early, as I always say. Jasmine great to have you and Stephen as well. Good to see you. Final question. What do you hope people walk away with this year from KubeCon? What's the final kind of objective? Jasmine, we'll start with you. >> Wow. Final objective. I think that I would want people to walk away with a sense of community. I feel like the KubeCon CNCF world is a great place to get knowledge, but also an established sense of community not stopping at just the conference and taking part of the community, giving back, contributing would be a great thing for people to walk away with. >> Awesome. Stephen? >> I'm all about community as well. So I think that one of the fun things that we've been doing, is just engaging in different ways than we have normally across the kind of the KubeCon boundaries, right? So you take CNCF Twitch, you take some of the things that I can't mention yet, but are coming out you should see around and pose KubeCon week, the way that we're engaging with people is changing and it's needed to change because of how the world is right now. So I hope that to reinforce the community point, my favorite part of any conference is the hallway track. And I think I've mentioned this last time and we're trying our best. We're trying our best to create it. We've had lots of great feedback about, whether it be people playing among us on CNCF Twitch or hanging out on Slack silly early hours, just chatting it up. And are kind of like crafted hallway track. So I think that engage, don't be afraid to say hello. I know that it's new and scary sometimes and trust me, we've literally all been here. It's going to be okay, come in, have some fun, we're all pretty friendly. We're all pretty friendly and we know and understand that the only way to make this community survive and thrive is to bring on new contributors, is to get new perspectives and continue building awesome technology. So don't be afraid. >> I love it. You guys have a global diverse and knowledgeable and open community. Congratulations. Jasmine James, Stephen Augustus, co-chairs for KubeCon here on theCUBE breaking it down, I'm John Furrier for your host, thanks for watching. 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(soft music) >> Voice Over: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back everyone. To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years talking about data. Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. >> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. >> Yeah, love the progress, love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing, meets operating systems, meets modern applications at the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times and I love your favorite quote. There's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. So that still rings true today and it's just so evergreen and so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to. >> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here. There is no AI without IA, still true today. Meaning, customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, "Despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized." So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before, now we're doing it. It's things like Watson Orchestrate which is super powers in the hands of any business user, just to ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson Orchestrator will do that for you. It's Maximo Mbo. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people and users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not, that's what I'm really excited about. >> So one of the things that's coming out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon the SQL thing their. Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? >> Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%, that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation. Explicitly in Watson AIOps. Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps, then we did the acquisition of Instana, then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AIOps. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. >> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that when that announced. IBM buying into the Cloud and the Hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as Cloud and Data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture, as you'd said IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts? If you can explain that. >> Yeah, let's start with the basics. So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want, any public cloud,any private cloud. That assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are a hundred percent convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? To me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization. Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the Cloud? So those are the things we always talk about, automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the Cloud native kind of development pipeline. But speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this Dow Chemical. About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it. What is this? >> Let's start with the basics. So what is zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business, you have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about a line, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done that whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind, they're protecting data assets, they're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives which are the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way. >> That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always give great color commentary on the trends. Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? 'Cause coming out of post COVID, it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dow was one of them, you just commented on it but there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and envision on these trends? >> I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is, technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized. Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bringing everything to one place. Technology is decentralized and again, with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said, "120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps." What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation, we think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today and you may have seen the C QVS example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data. The classical problem, I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about the slow down because the data being collected is still multiplying 10 X every year and companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collected. So that's going to be a trend that continues. >> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations in theCUBE, people who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, with the pandemic what is the been the most compelling ways you seen people operate, create new expectations? Because new things are coming, new big things, and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? >> We've collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas, it's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So somewhere to customer care but how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AIOps, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year that's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, 12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind. >> So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share on things that you've seen evolve? Cause you're a year ahead of the business units of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM and you see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, "Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment or that's not going to be anymore." Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard, some got a tailwind, some had a headwind, some are retooling. What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples? >> Like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again, is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred it might've taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this. So it's great to see. >> Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds, what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and Think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they could walk away with? >> We have intentionally made this a very technology centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. >> All right. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud and Data platform. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> And, welcome back to theCube's coverage of Red Hat Summit, 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest Cube alumni, Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat. Darrell, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCube. >> Oh, it's been, it's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you today. >> Yeah, we're not in person, in real life's coming back soon. Although I hear Mobile World Congress, might be in person this year, looking like it's good. A lot of people are going to be virtual and activating I know. A lot to talk about. This is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about the edge. You're talking about 5G, talking about industrial benefits for business, because it's not just edge for connectivity access. We're talking about innovative things from self-driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer, it's really bringing that together. You guys are really leading with the cloud-native platform from REL, OpenShift managed services. Everything about the cloud-native underpinnings, you guys have been successful as a company. But now in your area, telco is being disrupted. You're leading the way >> Absolutely. Give us your take on this, this is super exciting. >> Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times. I've been in the industry for 30 years. I'm probably aging myself now, but in the telecommunications industry, this for me, is the most exciting. It's where, you know, technology is actually going to visibly change, the way, that everyone interacts with the network. And with the applications that are being developed out there on, on our platform. and, you know, as you mentioned, IoT, and a number of the other AI and ML innovations, that are occurring in the marketplace. We're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. >> What's the key delivery workload you're seeing, with 5G environment. Obviously it's not just, you know 5G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. It's not just that consumer, "Hey surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and, and communicate". It's bigger than that now. Can you tell us, where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? >> You, you hit the nail on the head. The, the, the, the killer application, isn't the user or the consumer and the way that we traditionally have known it. Because you might be able to download a video and that might take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around 5G, is the industrial applications. Things like connected car. You know automotive driving, factory floor automation. How you actually interface digitally with your bank. How we're doing all sorts of things, more intelligently at the edge of the network, using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience, for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. >> You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings, of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads, but there's kind of two big things going on with the edge and 5G. One is under the hood networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload, throughput, bandwidth, et cetera, and all that, that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data, where AI and machine learning have to kind of weave in. So let's take the first part, first. OpenShift is out there. Red Hat's got a lot of products, but you have to nail the networking requirements and cloud native with containerization, because at large scales, not just packets, it's all kinds of things going on, security, managing compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood, if you will, from a networking perspective. >> Could you share what Red Hat's doing in that area? >> Yep, so, so that's a very good question, in that we've been building on our experience with OpenStack and the last time I was on theCube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge, that we've learned from OpenStack and we're bringing that into the container based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets. We're looking at how we build cloud-native applications, on bare metal, in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do, the certification around these applications and services, because they may be sitting in different applets across the cloud. And in some instances running on multiple clouds, at the same time. So we're building on our experience from OpenStack. We're bringing all of that into OpenShift, our container based environment. With all of the tooling necessary to make that effective. >> It's interesting with all the automation going on and certainly with the edge developing nicely, the way you're describing it, it's certainly disrupting the telco cloud. You have an operator mindset a cloud-native operator thinking, kind of, I mean it's distributed computing. We know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here, that's just different. Could you just share quickly, before we move on to the next segment, what's different about this operating model, for the, these new kinds of operators. As, as you guys have been saying, the CIO is the new cloud operator. That's the skill set they have to be thinking. And certainly IT, to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator, what's your view? >> Exactly. They certainly do need to think like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions, because they're actually deployed in many different places, all at the same time. They have to live independently of each other, that's what cloud-native actually really is. So the whole, the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability, across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of OpenShift is one element of that, operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also provide as Red Hat, but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem, such as companies like Netcracker, for example, or IBM as another example. Or Ericsson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets, to that whole equation, to address exactly that problem. >> Yeah. You bring up the ecosystem and this is really an interesting point. I want to, just hit on that real quick, because it reminds me of the days, when we had this massive innovation wave in the nineties. During that era, the client server movement, really was about multi-vendor, right? And that, you start to see that now and where this ties into here I think, is and I want to get your reaction to this is that, you know, moving to the cloud was all about to 2015, moved to the cloud, move to the cloud, cloud-native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance, but you're going to have smaller footprints, with more security requirements, more net, enterprise requirements. This is now, it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complication go away. And now you have more people in the ecosystem, filling in these white spaces. So, you have to be performance and purpose built, if you will. I hate to use that word, but, or, or at least performing and agile, smaller footprint, greater security, enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reactions to that? >> Well, that's core of what we do at Red Hat. I mean, we take open source community software, into a hardened distribution, fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers, working with our ecosystem partners, to make sure that their application is services certified running on our platform. But also importantly, is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud-native applications that sit under the same cloud. So that, that is not trivial to achieve, in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of IT technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned, and we build with a lot of these traditional vendors as we bring that to the marketplace. >> You know, I've been saying on theCube, I think five years ago, I started talking about this and it was kind of a loose formulation. I want to get your reaction, because you brought up ecosystem. Now saying, you know, you're going to see the big clouds develop obviously Amazon and Microsoft came in after and now Google and others. And then I said, there's going to be a huge wave of, of what I call secondary clouds. And you see companies, like Snowflake building on top of Amazon. And so you start to see the power law, of new cloud service providers emerging, that can either sit and work with, across multiple clouds, either one cloud or others, that's now multi-cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new, more CSPs, more cloud service providers. This is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco, telco cloud, edge hits that. What is Red Hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them? If I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful? Because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? >> Well, we, we, we offer a, a platform called OpenShift which is our containerized based platform, but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing in and around it. So the, the concept that we have, is that you can bring those applications, develop them once, on one, one single platform, and run it on premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft's environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in Amazon's environment. You can run it natively in IBM's environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them, depending on what you want to achieve and who actually provides you the best zoning, the best terms and conditions, the best, the best tooling in terms of other services, such as an AI, associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once, but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developer ecosystem, to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. >> So the assumption there, is that's going to drive down costs. Can you tell me about why the benefits, the economics are there? Talk about the economics. >> Well, Yeah, so, so, A, it does drive down costs and that's an important aspect but more importantly, it drives up agility, so time to market advantage is actually attainable for you. So many of the telcos when they deploy a network service, traditionally it would take them literally, maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days, they have to do updates in real time, in day two operations, in literally minutes. So we were building the fabric necessary, in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private 5G networks, service providers or telcos, in this instance, will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge, into that private 5G environment and operate that, in conjunction with those enterprise clients. >> So OpenShift allows me if I get this right, from the CSP to run, have a horizontally scalable organization. Okay. And from a unification platform standpoint. Okay. Whether it's 5G and other functions, is that correct? >> Darrell: That's correct. >> Okay. So you've got that. Now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack with the other element that's been been a big conversation here at Red Hat Summit and in the industry. That is AI and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale, as well as the specialism of the data and have that domain expertise. You're in the industries for Red Hat. This is important because you're going to have, one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPIs. So you got to have that domain expertise, to enable the ability, to, to write the apps and also enable AI. Can you comment on how that works and what's Red Hat do in there? >> So, so, so, we, we're developing OpenShift and a number of our, other technologies, to be fit for the edge of the network, where a lot of these AI applications will reside, because you want them at the closest to the client or the, or the application itself, where it needs to reside. We're, we're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid cloud is really going to be, in my view at the edge. We're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that, but we're also igniting by industry. You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with MindSphere, we recently announced with Siemens, how they do at the edge of the network, factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real-time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor, in order to get a better quality result, with lower, lower levels of imperfections, as they run through that system. It's just one industry and they have, their own private and favorite AI platforms and data sets they want to work with. With their own data scientists who understand that, that, that ecosystem inherently. You can move that to healthcare. And you can imagine, you know, how you actually interface with your healthcare professionals here in North America, but also around the world. How those applications and services and what the AI needs to do, in terms of understanding x-rays and looking at, you know common errors associated with different x-rays, so, so our practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis, faster, saving money and potentially lives as well. So different, different vertical markets in this space, have different AI and ML requirements and needs, different data sciences and different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies, that are starting up there in that space, you know, we have Watson as part of IBM, but you have Perceptor Labs, you have H2O and a number of other, very very important AI based companies in that ecosystem. >> Yeah. And you've got the horizontal scalability of the control plane then in the platform, if you will, that gives us cross-organizational leverage and enable that, that vertical domain expertise. >> Exactly. And you'd want to build an AI application, that might run on a factory floor for certain reasons, it's location and what they're actually physically building. You might want to run that on premise. You might actually want to put it in the IBM cloud, or in Zuora or into AWS. You develop it once to OpenShift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service, sitting natively in those environments. >> Darrell, great chat. You got a lot going on. telco cloud, there is a lot of cloud-native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity. And some people have to be on the right side of history, on this one, if they're going to get it right. We'll know, and the scoreboard will be very clear, 'cause this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out, but I want to ask you two more areas that are hot here at Red Hat Summit 21, as well, again as well in the industry. I want to get your reaction and thoughts on. And they are DevSecOps and automation. Okay. Two areas everyone's talking about, DevOps, which we know is infrastructure as code, programmability, under the hood, modern application development, all good. You add the second there, security, DevSecOps, it's critical. Automation is continuing to be the benefits of cloud-native. So DevSecOps and automation, what's your take, and how's that impact the telco world and your world? >> You can't, you can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real-time critical And this is actually, even lifesaving or life threatening, if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that Red Hat recently made around StackRox, really helps us, make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking at about how we go about securing containers, in a cloud-native environment. As you can imagine, there'll be many many thousands, tens of thousands of containers running. If one is actually misbehaving for want of a better term, that creates a security risk and a security loophole. We're shoring that up. That's important for the deployment OpenShift in the telco domain and other domains. In terms of automation, if you can't do it at scale and if you look at 5G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're going to provision those services. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. So you have to automate a lot of those processes, otherwise you can't scale to meet the opportunity. You can't physically deploy. >> You know, Darrell this is a great conversation, you know as a student of history and Dave Vellante and I always kind of joke about that. And you've been in and around the industry for a long time. Telcos have been balancing this evolution of digital business for many, many decades. And now with cloud-native, it's finally a time where you're startin' to see, that it's just the same game, now, new infrastructure. You know, video, voice, text, data, all now happening, all transformed and going digital, all the way, all aspects of it. In your opinion, how should telcos be thinking about, as they put their plans in place for next generation? Because you know, the world is, is now cloud-native. There's a huge surface here of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships. The power dynamics are shifting. It's, it's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your, what's your view on on how the telco industry needs to Cloudify, and how to be positioned for success? >> So, so one of the things I, I truly believe very deeply, that the telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform, because innovation is going to sit elsewhere. Then you know, there might be a killer application that one telco might create, but in reality, most of those innovations, the most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that telco company. So you want to create an environment, where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools and versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 6G and beyond is going to actually provide you, or enable your business to drive. And you've really got to unlock that innovation. And you can only unlock it, in our view at Red Hat innovation, if you're open. You know, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source, is a method or a tool, that you guys, if you're a telco I would ask, you guys need to leverage and harness. >> Yeah. And there's a lot. And there's a lot of upside there if you get that right. >> Yes. >> There's plenty of upside. A lot of leverage, a lot of assets, take advantage of the whole offline, online, coming back together. We are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic. We've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight, on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down Darrell, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic. As folks start to come out of the pandemic, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. As we come out of this pandemic, companies want a growth strategy. Want to be positioned for success. What's your learning coming out of the pandemic? >> So from, from my perspective, which really kind of in one respect was, was very admirable, but, in another respect is actually deeply, a lot of gratitude, is the fact that the telecommunications companies, because of their carrier grade capabilities and their operational prowess, were able to keep their networks up and running and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas, because everyone was working from home. And in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely, extremely well. And their networks held up. I don't know, and maybe someone will correct me and email me, but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage, through this pandemic. And that kept us connected. It kept us working. And it also, what I also learned is, that in certain countries, particularly Latam, where they have a very large prepaid market. They were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down, because they felt that people would have less money to spend. And therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much. The opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow. And that really taught me, that, that connectivity is critical, in times of stress, that we are also, where everyone's going through. So, I think there were some key learnings there. >> Yeah, I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the FUD and said, you know, necessity's the mother of invention. And when you look at what happened and what had to happen, to survive in the pandemic and be functional, you're, you nailed it. The network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed, had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much a forcing function, for all the projects that are on the table, to know which ones to double down on. So, I think you pretty much nailed it. >> Thank you. Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for Red Hat, theCube alumni. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing. Great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. It's theCube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit '21 virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here with Kevin Martelli, Principal Software Engineer at KPMG, joining the conversation. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thanks a lot for having me. >> So obviously Red Hat, a lot of action, cloud native, part of IBM now. A lot of talk going on around this growth around cloud. Massive new opportunities, new modern applications being shaped in, super exciting opportunities. So first, before we get into all that, tell us about your role at KPMG. >> Sure John, thanks. So my role at KPMG, I'm one of our cloud leaders at KPMG where I really help both from an internal perspective, so helping our internal enablement and digitalization, as well as, more importantly, helping to deliver solutions and applications to our clients as they go through these digital journeys. And really focusing on containerization and enabling it through the cloud. >> John: You guys have done a lot of AI work, I know which is cutting edge, it's pretty much data-driven. I mean, AI is, what everyone talks about, but underlying AI is automation, data, machine learning, really dealing with kind of new types of datasets, not just dealing with existing structures. You have a new platform called Ignite. Tell us what that is. What do you guys solve? What was the problem statement? And what's going on with it? >> Yeah, John, thanks a lot for asking. So Ignite, it's something that we developed internally initially, and it really helped to solve our AI initiatives. We called it our AI platform, but it's moreso an ecosystem. And it solves not only our own internal needs and internal use cases, but also choose to help support and deliver these solutions to the clients. One of the foundational principles of our platform is it's built on top of containerization, which we know is a hot area now, today in the marketplace really gives you the ability for scalability, flexibility, security, et cetera, but more important, what we're seeing large scale of adoptions in our clients, is using this platform to really get value out of both unstructured and structured data in a way that they're able to do this in a secured fashion and then easily get it deployed. It's a pretty scalable platform, and something that we've just recently received the patent for it. >> So what was the internal conversation to put this together? Was it the fact that there was business needs? Cloud native gave you that scale advantage? What was some of the drivers behind Ignite? 'Cause this is like, was it IoT? Was it, take us through the mindset. What were some of the first principles around building this? >> Hey John nice, it's a good question. And actually to be fair, this was probably a little bit before the time of IoT and some of these newer technologies were coming up. At this time, we were really kind of scratching on the surface of data science and advanced analytics. And what really generated the need for this is as you could imagine, working in a consultancy firm and many of our clients deal with tons of contracts and the lightboard documents for financial services, there was much rich information, these unstructured data documents and we had no way to get this information out. So really it was generated out of the need to get information out of a lot of these contractual documents that we had and pinpoint specific information. So really taking it holistically on ingestion on transformations, running NLP, algorithms, it really evolved into a whole end to end complete platform, running on top of a containerized ecosystem, such as OpenShift. >> John: Yeah, I think just not to go on a tangent here but I think one of the conversations we've been having on all these events and certainly with COVID was the highlight of all these silos. And you know the old days was about break down the silos. But now with containers and cloud scale, you can extract out data, kind of create that horizontal data plane if you will, or view observation space, some call it. This just seems to be a huge trend you guys were on it early. How has that, what's your take on that? The silos used to be kind of like an advantage if you had a monolithic application but now you have a lot of diverse distributed databases. What's your take? >> Kevin: Yeah, it's, it's good. And how we are kind of coining. It is really through the power of, some of the toying in OpenShift that really gives organizations the ability to defer risk. In the sense that allows you to run certain types of workloads on-prem in a private cloud containerized way. It allows you to burst certain other types of workloads into the different CSP provider. So you can get advantage of their scale, their capacity without maybe moving some sensitive data and then another benefit is with some of that vendor lock-in it sometimes clients are concerned about is being able to kind of easily deploy your workloads and applications from one cloud provider to another. And I think as we look at this distributed processing no one client will totally be in one cloud provider. So having the ability to move workloads quickly and fastly where they make sense, where the security and risk is aligned is something that would what makes a successful use cases deployments. >> John: Just let me ask you another question. You guys, KPMG obviously have your own big data effort going on with analytics. You've got clients that you serve and ultimately they have customers as well. So you have that Red Hat equation. What are some of the advantages that you guys see as your firm and your clients with Red Hat analytics, 'cause this becomes ultimately the number one conversation. Like, okay, what's in it for me? >> Yeah. That's a good point. I would say we're seeing a few things. Some of them are highlighted. One is, as you're well aware, we chose Red Hat's OpenShift as one of our strategic options to deploy our platform. And whenever you're deploying these platforms it's very important that you have the flexibility the agility, and the ability to scale and Red Hat underneath the hood really helps take care of a lot of that, for you in a way that not only can you do it on your own as mentioned earlier, your private cloud but also onto the public CSPs and multiple CSPs. In addition, some of the other things I think that we saw that were very beneficial, a lot of times as an application user. So application users of ignite, the developers, the data scientists, the business users, the analysts, they all need to interact with the platform. They want to worry about getting the insights about getting the efficiencies in the platform. They don't want to worry about how the infrastructure's being put together, how the workloads are being moved how the scalability is occurring, et cetera and Red Hat really takes a lot of that away from you having to worry about it. And one of the other things that's also important is, is we have a strategic relationship with Red Hat. And as we look to help to enhance and develop these capabilities and experiences as our clients are doing private cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, we're really going to be able to let them take the power of open source, into their own control and how they want to deploy it in themselves. >> Well, got you on the topic there. I got to ask you the question. What would you say to the people out there that haven't really kicked the tires on Red Hat in a while? What's the modern update? How would you describe the current situation at Red Hat for people who are going to re-look and or bring the Red Hat conversation up a notch? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think we see this in any type of software in the industry today. There's so many choices and there's so many options out there. And how do you choose the right source for the right use case? For the right client, for the right company? And how we always like to talk with clients is that yes, there are a lot of choices in there and the orchestration for the standardization but when you're looking for something that's celebrated in the market that has the security built into it that many organizations are looking for that gives you the flexibility without having to do a lot of additional operational overhead of moving from on-prem into the cloud and the way that it can scale and kind of make the overall ecosystem operations and deployments easier, it's one of the benefits that we see have gone with a tool like Red Hat OpenShift. >> Well, Kevin, I really appreciate the comments there and on Red Hat, that's awesome. Red Hat Summit, honestly, a big event around Red Hat and future cloud and modern applications. So I got to ask you as a software engineering leader in the industry, you got to be pretty excited about artificial intelligence and machine learning as it relates to, what it can be doing for changing the software development paradigm. Obviously there's also the no code, low code, serverless. You've got cloud native, you've got containers you got all this new capability. So how does, how do you see those trends? What are the big trends around machine learning and AI as it relates to someone who's going to be building modern applications in the cloud. Because certainly there's a huge ups upside there. Some are saying that if you don't have AI that's going to be a table stakes and we'll lower the valuation of the software or the application. What's your take on all these big trends around AI? >> Yeah, I agree with that. We've actually done several studies. And what we're hearing industry leaders saying is it was quite a few things. One is, we at KPMG, COVID-19 whiplash. And really what that means is that the pace and acceleration of adoption in AI has been tremendous over the COVID 19 period of our pandemic period. And so much so that industry leaders are a little bit concerned about how fast this adoption is going. And is it going too fast? In addition, we recently published a study called Thriving In An AI world where we were able to identify that business leaders and insiders are really bullish on to your point of using AI and ML to make some poor, critical decisions. How can we make vaccines? What's the distribution process? Fraudulent analytics where financial services. However, what I will say is we're still seeing a lot, a lot of questions and challenges around AI. Its security, its ethics associated to it. How you keep managing governing your process then privacy associated to it. So there's a lot of points around those areas. I think that industries are still trying to struggle and figure out how to solve for. And one of the things that we are hearing is that what the new administration there's different think tanks and industry leaders that are feeling that the new administration, while open to a lot of these advanced techniques and technologies are going to put a little bit more rigor around and regulations around how AI can be used in the marketplace. So hopefully that would give some companies guidance around these security and privacy and ethics concerns. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking to a friend the other day who's a leader at a big company that's a customer of Red Hat and a lot of other clouds as well. And we were joking about the agility speed, oh, agility and speed. Of course, yeah, you get that with here but you got a lot of fast and loose situations going here. You got to know when to put the pedal to the metal. When there's a straight narrow, we can really kind of gas it with AI and machine learning and then know where the potential curves are. See, will use that metaphor because you can go fast but with speed comes dangerous new things for breakage. Is always, and you're seeing that all the time. You're seeing that, with software because you can push new update, but still, when you talk about operational integrity and security fast and loose, isn't always the best way to go. But if you know there's a straight and narrow, you can really push it. This was what we were saying, he's like, "Hey, we know when to go straight and narrow and go fast. And then when to slow it down, pull it back." What's your take on that? What's your assessment? >> No, I agree. I think you hit some valid points there. And sometimes what we do is we take some antiquated processes and we overlay them into these newer technologies and we try to think them as being the same way and they may not always hold true. But it's not only kind of the fast and narrow and then putting things in that maybe a little bit more simplistic, but it's also there's a whole change around how you productionalized. How do you get these things into deployment? How do you monitor these over time? So some of those biases or some of those privacy concerns don't end up creeping up into the algorithm over time. I still think that will work here and from industries. There are still struggles around that. There's still struggles around. There's a lot of technologies that can do a lot of these same things. Our business processes don't always align. And then how do we really take something from an innovation from a POC into production? Is there a fast track for something that is straightened narrow and something that has a little bit more complexity? But what we're seeing today, there's a lot sort of spout at the same road, which makes bringing more complex AI algorithms into production. Challenging. >> Yeah. And there's always that big trend of day two operations. Which is, hey, you deploy it's great. And then, okay, wait a minute stop, set in a break. We need better monitoring. We need better data analytics. What's instrumented. What's not. What services are being generated and terminated. These are all big cloud native kind of themes. With that, I got to ask you from a customer standpoint, these are new first-generation problems at scale that with this new cloud native environment, the pros and cons. How do you guys talk to customers? What are some of the things you're seeing around the challenges that they face with analytics? All these analytic activity? >> Kevin: Yeah. So I think one of the challenges and we've probably heard this year in year out is around data literacy. Like really having our folks understand the data and empowering them to be successful in the organization. And to be fair I would say data literacy was a little bit more narrowly focused in an organizations who needed it. I need some analysts to use it. I needed some data scientists and engineers, but what we're starting to see now is there's larger programs across the board where it's more holistic at an organizational level. Everyone should be involved in data. Everyone should be able to do their own reporting. So really data literacy and getting data kind of into the arms of the folks is important. Some of the other ones that we've also kind of talked to about it, and they kind of go hand in hand and maybe a little bit on our prior conversation was the technologies. Technology especially in open source is exploding. And as well as commercial. So how do you choose the right technologies the right tools? You don't have too many tools in your toolbox per se but use the ones that are really differentiating and try to standardize on the ones that are more standard. Finally it's bringing those processes and that wrapping them back into the technologies. Again, a little point we hit on earlier but what we're finding is as technology is rapidly increasing, you're able to use it for your analytics. Your processes are still antiquated and legacy processes which makes it a little bit harder for you to really take advantage of what you're trying to achieve in your organization from a digital transformation. And then one final one I would add in there is around the risk that organizations have. So there's a lot of concern about reputational risk. If they're doing these types of activities that people don't understand, the data they don't understand the algorithms. Are there some impacts that can be heard? And they're figuring out how to control that and then how not to. And then I think finally the workforce is, as we know, it's getting the workforce up to speed, retooling where need be and putting their people in the right place to be successful. >> Kevin that's great insight. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I got to ask you one final question. >> Go ahead. One more thing, you mentioned COVID whiplash means a lot of post COVID activity discussions going on. If you look at what's happened with COVID there's been an exposure of all the projects that need to be doubled down on, ones that may not be continuing. People working at home. Honestly, a change of the environment, you mentioned workforce is among others. What do you think the biggest conversation around your customer base or within KPMG right now around some of these growth strategies around post COVID? What are companies thinking around how to deploy the people, process and technology is a big part of this conversation. What is the post COVID general theme that you're seeing among large enterprises and businesses in general? >> I mean, that's a good question. So I think in general, we're seeing the acceleration of digital agendas that may have been pushed out for five years school moving closer. But one of the most interesting things I think that I've gathered out of working with the clients that we're working with is that before to get stuff into production, AI solutions even in any type of smaller production system that was taking months months, several months to get something in production. And it seemed to be once the COVID pandemic hit, organizations can accelerate that journey of the deployment of applications into production in very, very quick timeframes without hindering or impacting any types of control frameworks they have in place, but just working quicker. So I think some of the things I see as we move forward is that these digital channels are going to be push forward more quicker. The data list on POC is good our pilot's good, is long past. It's now they want to see the results in the outputs in the enterprise, in production. And I think they realize that they have the tools to do this in a period of time that is weeks versus months, and in some cases, years. >> So, would you agree then, just as a quick followup to that that obviously when we get back to real life, post COVID that the visibility and the economics and the productivity gains from this new environment is going to stay around longer and probably be permanent. What's your, do you agree with that statement? >> I hope it is. but we are creatures of habit. And sometimes you go back to back to the way that we had done things, but I'm hopeful that they were able to see to be successful in these types of environments and make these types of decisions that those processes that are evolving to take into consideration what we learned. One is terrible pandemic, and be able to apply that to the post pandemic. >> Yeah. Who would have known the word hybrid cloud actually means something more than just cloud technologies? Hybrid events, hybrid workforces, the word hybrid has been kicked around. Kevin, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE for Red Hat Summit coverage. Thanks for coming on. Great insight. >> Thank you, have a great day. >> Thanks. I'm John Farrow with theCUBE here for Red Hat Summit coverage, 2021 virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 Virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon 2021 CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual, I'm John Furrier your host, preview with Brian Gracely from Red Hat Senior Director Product Strategy Cloud Business Unit Brian Gracely great to see you. Former CUBE host CUBE alumni, big time strategist at Red Hat, great to see you, always great. And also the founder of Cloudcast which is an amazing podcast on cloud, part of the cloud (indistinct), great to see you Brian. Hope's all well. >> Great to see you too, you know for years, theCUBE was always sort of the ESPN of tech, I feel like, you know ESPN has become nothing but highlights. This is where all the good conversation is. It's theCUBE has become sort of the the clubhouse of tech, if you will. I know that's that's an area you're focused on, so yeah I'm excited to be back on and good to talk to you. >> It's funny you know, with all the events going away loved going out extracting the signal from the noise, you know, game day kind of vibe. CUBE Virtual has really expanded, so it's been so much more fun because we can get more people easy to dial in. So we're going to keep that feature post COVID. You're going to hear more about theCUBE Virtual hybrid events are going to be a big part of it, which is great because as you know and we've talked about communities and ecosystems are huge advantage right now it's been a big part of the Red Hat story. Now part of IBM bringing that mojo to the table the role of ecosystems with hybrid cloud is so critical. Can you share your thoughts on this? Because I know you study it, you have podcasts you've had one for many years, you understand that democratization and this new direct to audience kind of concept. Share your thoughts on this new ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think so, you know, we're sort of putting this in the context of what we all sort of familiarly call KubeCon but you know, if we think about it, it started as KubeCon it was sort of about this one technology but it's always been CloudNativeCon and we've sort of downplayed the cloud native part of it. But even if we think about it now, you know Kubernetes to a certain extent has kind of, you know there's this feeling around the community that, that piece of the puzzle is kind of boring. You know, it's 21 releases in, and there's lots of different offerings that you can get access to. There's still, you know, a lot of innovation but the rest of the ecosystem has just exploded. So it's, you know, there are ecosystem partners and companies that are working on edge and miniaturization. You know, we're seeing things like Kubernetes now getting into outer space and it's in the space station. We're seeing, you know, Linux get on Mars. But we're also seeing, you know, stuff on the other side of the spectrum. We're sort of seeing, you know awesome people doing database work and streaming and AI and ML on top of Kubernetes. So, you know, the ecosystem is doing what you'd expect it to do once one part of it gets stable. The innovation sort of builds on top of it. And, you know, even though we're virtual, we're still seeing just tons and tons of contributions, different companies different people stepping up and leading. So it's been really cool to watch the last few years. >> Yes, interesting point about the CloudNativeCon. That's an interesting insight, and I totally agree with you. And I think it's worth double clicking on. Let me just ask you, because when you look at like, say Kubernetes, okay, it's enabled a lot. Okay, it's been called the dial tone of Cloud native. I think Pat Gelsinger of VMware used that term. We call it the kind of the interoperability layer it enables more large scale deployments. So you're seeing a lot more Kubernetes enablement on clusters. Which is causing more hybrid cloud which means more Cloud native. So it actually is creating a network effect in and of itself with more Cloud native components and it's changing the development cycle. So the question I want to ask you is one how does a customer deal with that? Because people are saying, I like hybrid. I agree, Multicloud is coming around the corner. And of course, Multicloud is just a subsystem of resource underneath hybrid. How do I connect it all? Now I have multiple vendors, I have multiple clusters. I'm cross-cloud, I'm connecting multiple clouds multiple services, Kubernetes clusters, some get stood up some gets to down, it's very dynamic. >> Yeah, it's very dynamic. It's actually, you know, just coincidentally, you know, our lead architect, a guy named Clayton Coleman, who was one of the Kubernetes founders, is going to give a talk on sort of Kubernetes is this hybrid control plane. So we're already starting to see the tentacles come out of it. So you know how we do cross cloud networking how we do cross cloud provisioning of services. So like, how do I go discover what's in other clouds? You know and I think like you said, it took people a few years to figure out, like how do I use this new thing, this Kubernetes thing. How do I harness it. And, but the demand has since become "I have to do multi-cloud." And that means, you know, hey our company acquires companies, so you know, we don't necessarily know where that next company we acquire is going to run. Are they going to run on AWS? Are they going to, you know, run on Azure I've got to be able to run in multiple places. You know, we're seeing banking industries say, "hey, look cloud's now a viable target for you to put your applications, but you have to treat multiple clouds as if they're your backup domains." And so we're, you know, we're seeing both, you know the way business operates whether it's acquisitions or new things driving it. We're seeing regulations driving hybrid and multi-cloud and, even you know, even if the stalwart were to you know, set for a long time, well the world's only going to be public cloud and sort of you know, legacy data centers even those folks are now coming around to "I've got to bring hybrid to, to these places." So it's been more than just technology. It's been, you know, industries pushing it regulations pushing it, a lot of stuff. So, but like I said, we're going to be talking about kind of our future, our vision on that, our future on that. And, you know Red Hat everything we end up doing is a community activity. So we expect a lot of people will get on board with it >> You know, for all the old timers out there they can relate to this. But I remember in the 80's the OSI Open Systems Interconnect, and I was chatting with Paul Cormier about this because we were kind of grew up through that generation. That disrupted network protocols that were proprietary and that opened the door for massive, massive growth massive innovation around just getting that interoperability with TCP/IP, and then everything else happened. So Kubernetes does that, that's a phenomenal impact. So Cloud native to me is at that stage where it's totally next-gen and it's happening really fast. And a lot of people getting caught off guard, Brian. So you know, I got to to ask you as a product strategist, what's your, how would you give them the navigation of where that North star is? If I'm a customer, okay, I got to figure out where I got to navigate now. I know it's super volatile, changing super fast. What's your advice? >> I think it's a couple of pieces, you know we're seeing more and more that, you know, the technology decisions don't get driven out of sort of central IT as much anymore right? We sort of talk all the time that every business opportunity, every business project has a technology component to it. And I think what we're seeing is the companies that tend to be successful with it have built up the muscle, built up the skill set to say, okay, when this line of business says, I need to do something new and innovative I've got the capabilities to sort of stand behind that. They're not out trying to learn it new they're not chasing it. So that's a big piece of it, is letting the business drive your technology decisions as opposed to what happened for a long time which was we built out technology, we hope they would come. You know, the other piece of it is I think because we're seeing so much push from different directions. So we're seeing, you know people put technology out at the edge. We're able to do some, you know unique scalable things, you know in the cloud and so forth That, you know more and more companies are having to say, "hey, look, I'm not, I'm not in the pharmaceutical business. I'm not in the automotive business, I'm in software." And so, you know the companies that realize that faster, and then, you know once they sort of come to those realizations they realize, that's my new normal, those are the ones that are investing in software skills. And they're not afraid to say, look, you know even if my existing staff is, you know, 30 years of sort of history, I'm not afraid to bring in some folks that that'll break a few eggs and, you know, and use them as a lighthouse within their organization to retrain and sort of reset, you know, what's possible. So it's the business doesn't move. That's the the thing that drives all of them. And it's, if you embrace it, we see a lot of success. It's the ones that, that push back on it really hard. And, you know the market tends to sort of push back on them as well. >> Well we're previewing KubeCon CloudNativeCon. We'll amplify that it's CloudNativeCon as well. You guys bought StackRox, okay, so interesting company, not an open source company they have soon to be, I'm assuring, but Advanced Cluster Security, ACS, as it's known it's really been a key part of Red Hat. Can you give us the strategy behind that deal? What does that product, how does it fit in that's a lot of people are really talking about this acquisition. >> Yeah so here's the way we looked at it, is we've learned a couple of things over the last say five years that we've been really head down in Kubernetes, right? One is, we've always embedded a lot of security capabilities in the platform. So OpenShift being our core Kubernetes platform. And then what's happened over time is customers have said to us, "that's great, you've made the platform very secure" but the reality is, you know, our software supply chain. So the way that we build applications that, you know we need to secure that better. We need to deal with these more dynamic environments. And then once the applications are deployed they interact with various types of networks. I need to better secure those environments too. So we realized that we needed to expand our functionality beyond the core platform of OpenShift. And then the second thing that we've learned over the last number of years is to be successful in this space, it's really hard to take technology that wasn't designed for containers, or it wasn't designed for Kubernetes and kind of retrofit it back into that. And so when we were looking at potential acquisition targets, we really narrowed down to companies whose fundamental technologies were you know, Kubernetes-centric, you know having had to modify something to get to Kubernetes, and StackRox was really the leader in that space. They really, you know have been the leader in enterprise Kubernetes security. And the great thing about them was, you know not only did they have this Kubernetes expertise but on top of that, probably half of their customers were already OpenShift customers. And about 3/4 of their customers were using you know, native Kubernetes services and other clouds. So, you know, when we went and talked to them and said, "Hey we believe in Kubernetes, we believe in multi-cloud. We believe in open source," they said, "yeah, those are all the foundational things for us." And to your point about it, you know, maybe not being an open source company, they actually had a number of sort of ancillary projects that were open source. So they weren't unfamiliar to it. And then now that the acquisition's closed, we will do what we do with every piece of Red Hat technology. We'll make sure that within a reasonable period of time that it's made open source. And so you know, it's good for the community. It allows them to keep focusing on their innovation. >> Yeah you've got to get that code out there cool. Brian, I'm hearing about Platform Plus what is that about? Take us through that. >> Yeah, so you know, one of the things that our customers, you know, have come to us over time is it's you know, it's like, I've been saying kind of throughout this discussion, right? Kubernetes is foundational, but it's become pretty stable. The things that people are solving for now are like, you highlighted lots and lots of clusters, they're all over the place. That was something that our advanced cluster management capabilities were able to solve for people. Once you start getting into lots of places you've got to be able to secure things everywhere you go. And so OpenShift for us really allows us to bundle together, you know, sort of the complete set of the portfolio. So the platform, security management, and it also gives us the foundational pieces or it allows our customers to buy the foundational pieces that are going to help them do multi and hybrid cloud. And, you know, when we bundle that we can save them probably 25% in terms of sort of product acquisition. And then obviously the integration work we do you know, saves a ton on the operational side. So it's a new way for us to, to not only bundle the platform and the technologies but it gets customers in a mindset that says, "hey we've moved past sort of single environments to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. >> Awesome, well thanks for the update on that, appreciate it. One of the things going into KubeCon, and that we're watching closely is this Cloud native developer action. Certainly end users want to get that in a separate section with you but the end user contribution, which is like exploding. But on the developer side there's a real trend towards adding stronger consistency programmability support for more use cases okay. Where it's becoming more of a data platform as a requirement. >> Brian: Right. >> So how, so that's a trend so I'm kind of thinking, there's no disagreement on that. >> Brian: No, absolutely. >> What does that mean? Like I'm a customer, that sounds good. How do I make that happen? 'Cause that's the critical discussion right now in the DevOps, DevSecOps day, two operations. What you want to call it. This is the number one concern for developers and that solution architect, consistency, programmability more use cases with data as a platform. >> Yeah, I think, you know the way I kind of frame this up was you know, for any for any organization, the last thing you want to to do is sort of keep investing in lots of platforms, right? So platforms are great on their surface but once you're having to manage five and six and, you know 10 or however many you're managing, the economies of scale go away. And so what's been really interesting to watch with Kubernetes is, you know when we first got started everything was Cloud native application but that really was sort of, you know shorthand for stateless applications. We quickly saw a move to, you know, people that said, "Hey I can modernize something, you know, a Stateful application and we add that into Kubernetes, right? The community added the ability to do Stateful applications and that got people a certain amount of the way. And they sort of started saying, okay maybe Kubernetes can help me peel off some things of an existing platform. So I can peel off, you know Java workloads or I can peel off, what's been this explosion is the data community, if you will. So, you know, the TensorFlows the PItorches, you know, the Apache community with things like Couchbase and Kafka, TensorFlow, all these things that, you know maybe in the past didn't necessarily, had their own sort of underlying system are now defaulting to Kubernetes. And what we see because of that is, you know people now can say, okay, these data workloads these AI and ML workloads are so important to my business, right? Like I can directly point to cost savings. I can point to, you know, driving innovation and because Kubernetes is now their default sort of way of running, you know we're seeing just sort of what used to be, you know small islands of clusters become these enormous footprints whether they're in the cloud or in their data center. And that's almost become, you know, the most prevalent most widely used use case. And again, it makes total sense. It's exactly the trends that we've seen in our industry, even before Kubernetes. And now people are saying, okay, I can consolidate a lot of stuff on Kubernetes. I can get away from all those silos. So, you know, that's been a huge thing over the last probably year plus. And the cool thing is we've also seen, you know the hardware vendors. So whether it's Intel or Nvidia, especially around GPUs, really getting on board and trying to make that simpler. So it's not just the software ecosystem. It's also the hardware ecosystem, really getting on board. >> Awesome, Brian let me get your thoughts on the cloud versus the power dynamics between the cloud players and the open source software vendors. So what's the Red Hat relationship with the cloud players with the hybrid architecture, 'cause you want to set up the modern day developer environment, we get that right. And it's hybrid, what's the relationship with the cloud players? >> You know, I think so we we've always had two philosophies that haven't really changed. One is, we believe in open source and open licensing. So you haven't seen us look at the cloud as, a competitive threat, right? We didn't want to make our business, and the way we compete in business, you know change our philosophy in software. So we've always sort of maintained open licenses permissive licenses, but the second piece is you know, we've looked at the cloud providers as very much partners. And mostly because our customers look at them as partners. So, you know, if Delta Airlines or Deutsche Bank or somebody says, "hey that cloud provider is going to be our partner and we want you to be part of that journey, we need to be partners with that cloud as well." And you've seen that sort of manifest itself in terms of, you know, we haven't gone and set up new SaaS offerings that are Red Hat offerings. We've actually taken a different approach than a lot of the open source companies. And we've said we're going to embed our capabilities, especially, you know OpenShift into AWS, into Azure into IBM cloud working with Google cloud. So we'd look at them very much as a partner. I think it aligns to how Red Hat's done things in the past. And you know, we think, you know even though it maybe easy to sort of see a way of monetizing things you know, changing licensing, we've always found that, you've got to allow the ecosystem to compete. You've got to allow customers to go where they want to go. And we try and be there in the most consumable way possible. So that's worked out really well for us. >> So I got to bring up the end user participation component. That's a big theme here at KubeCon going into it and around the event is, and we've seen this trend happen. I mean, Envoy, Lyft the laying examples are out there. But they're more end-use enterprises coming in. So the enterprise class I call classic enterprise end user participation is at an all time high in opensource. You guys have the biggest portfolio of enterprises in the business. What's the trend that you're seeing because it used to be limited to the hyperscalers the Lyfts and the Facebooks and the big guys. Now you have, you know enterprises coming in the business model is working, can you just share your thoughts on CloudNativeCons participation for end users? >> Yeah, I think we're definitely seeing a blurring of lines between what used to be the Silicon Valley companies were the ones that would create innovation. So like you mentioned Lyft, or, you know LinkedIn doing Kafka or Twitter doing you know, whatever. But as we've seen more and more especially enterprises look at themselves as software companies right. So, you know if you talk about, you know, Ford or Volkswagen they think of themselves as a software company, almost more than they think about themselves as a car company, right. They're a sort of mobile transportation company you know, something like that. And so they look at themselves as I've got to I've got to have software as an expertise. I've got to compete for the best talent, no matter where that talent is, right? So it doesn't have to be in Detroit or in Germany or wherever I can go get that anywhere. And I think what they really, they look for us to do is you know, they've got great technology chops but they don't always understand kind of the the nuances and the dynamics of open-source right. They're used to having their own proprietary internal stuff. And so a lot of times they'll come to us, not you know, "Hey how do we work with the project?" But you know like here's new technology. But they'll come to us and they'll say "how do we be good, good stewards in this community? How do we make sure that we can set up our own internal open source office and have that group, work with communities?" And so the dynamics have really changed. I think a lot of them have, you know they've looked at Silicon Valley for years and now they're modeling it, but it's, you know, for us it's great because now we're talking the same language, you know we're able to share sort of experiences we're able to share best practices. So it is really, really interesting in terms of, you know, how far that whole sort of software is eating the world thing is materialized in sort of every industry. >> Yeah and it's the workloads of expanding Cloud native everywhere edge is blowing up big time. Brian, final question for you before we break. >> You bet. >> Thanks for coming on and always great to chat with you. It's always riffing and getting the data out too. What's your expectation for KubeCon CloudNativeCon this year? What are you expecting to see? What highlights do you expect will come out of CloudNativeCon KubeCon this year? >> Yeah, I think, you know like I said, I think it's going to be much more on the Cloud native side, you know we're seeing a ton of new communities come out. I think that's going to be the big headline is the number of new communities that are, you know have sort of built up a following. So whether it's Crossplane or whether it's, you know get-ops or whether it's, you know expanding around the work that's going on in operators we're going to see a whole bunch of projects around, you know, developer sort of frameworks and developer experience and so forth. So I think the big thing we're going to see is sort of this next stage of, you know a thousand flowers are blooming and we're going to see probably a half dozen or so new communities come out of this one really strong and you know the trends around those are going to accelerate. So I think that'll probably be the biggest takeaway. And then I think just the fact that the community is going to come out stronger after the pandemic than maybe it did before, because we're learning you know, new ways to work remotely, and that, that brings in a ton of new companies and contributors. So I think those two big things will be the headlines. And, you know, the state of the community is strong as they, as they like to say >> Yeah, love the ecosystem, I think the values are going to be network effect, ecosystems, integration standards evolving very quickly out in the open. Great to see Brian Gracely Senior Director Product Strategy at Red Hat for the cloud business unit, also podcasts are over a million episode downloads for the cloud cast podcast, thecloudcast.net. What's it Brian, what's the stats now. >> Yeah, I think we've, we've done over 500 shows. We're you know, about a million and a half listeners a year. So it's, you know again, it's great to have community followings and, you know, and meet people from around the world. So, you know, so many of these things intersect it's a real pleasure to work with everybody >> You're going to create a culture, well done. We're all been there, done that great job. >> Thank you >> Check out the cloud cast, of course, Red Hat's got the great OpenShift mojo going on into KubeCon. Brian, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. >> Okay so CUBE coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 Virtual, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back everyone to the Cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the cube. Got a great guest, Rick Smith, CTO of IBM Anthem client team. Rick. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to see you as well, virtually. >> First introduce yourself, what you do there, what's going on on your plate these days, honestly, COVID, we're coming out of it soon. Take a minute to introduce yourself. >> Yeah, so I've got about 15 years in the seat with Anthem. Previous to that I worked at Pretty university as the CTO in Indiana. So haven't really left, but started working with Anthem as a technical architect, eventually moved into the CTO role and have been part of, you know, a long journey with them that started at a managed services agreement in 2005. And here we are in 2021. So I've been through a lot of changes they've made to improve themselves and move into digitalization. And certainly the changes we've made too to accommodate that as we went through the years. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for that setup. I really want to dig into this expansion of project Sirius. You guys have had a multi decade partnership with IBM and then last year you launched this expansion, project Sirus. Can you describe this project? And what does it mean? And this new term I've heard, enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. Sounds very interesting. >> Yeah. So that's my term. I'm hoping you made it patent or something like that. But the reality is you hear our CEO talk and say that 75% of corporate workloads are not in the cloud yet. Right? And Anthem is no different, right? So they starting to go into cloud and those kinds of things. But they said to us, you know, "Hey, we've got a long series of excellence with you from a delivery perspective, reliability perspective is kind of the bedrock of what we do, but we don't want to be in the data center business, right? And we want to transform and move to cloud. We want to become a more of an AI company and these kinds of things. And we said, well, we think we can actually put together a program... Excuse me, program for you to allow you to do that, right? And so we formed something called project Sirius which is really an expansion of our partnership. So if I look back, John, we did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective. In other words, they did a few pieces and we said, we think we could improve that if we had the entire 100%. And so project Sirius was about, you know, extending from 80% to 100%. It was also about taking a series of applications that were important to them and actually say, we'll actually take them on and transform them 100% all the way to cloud and take advantage of new things. It was about a commitment to closing those data centers, right? So they have five strategic data centers. And about 24,000 hosts that we said we will actually commit to getting those, you know, getting you out of the data centers and moving those to either IBM cloud or close to IBM cloud if you will, I'll come back to that in a minute. And we'll also build something called ATEC, Anthem Technology Excellent Center, if you will. And that's near and dear to my heart because that's sort of my baby, right? So it's a transformation engine and we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But he said the key to this for us is that, if we look at our trend line, John, over the number of years with Anthem, when we started about 2007 looking at this data, we've grown the number of hosts. We've had to manage, over 600% during that time period. But we've driven down high priority incidents by over 90%. So think about that. You know, this is really important for them to have resiliency and stability in their organization. You know, huge acceleration number of hosts, but drive down the a P zero incidents, if you will. And they said, we need to maintain that and continue to improve upon that. Right? >> Yeah. >> So Sirius was a commitment to take that further, right? Start driving AAN, AI into the operations, if you will in everything that we do. So Anthem is transforming to do AI and machine learning for their members. We're committed to transforming and doing the same kind of thing on our operational side if you will. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And I think one of the things that's interesting that jumps out at me just as you're talking, first of all super exciting that project you got out there, a lot going on to unpack, but let's do that. I mean, what I hear you saying which is getting me kind of all triggered in a good way is you got transformation going on and innovation same time. You're innovating with this new enterprise hybrid clouds of service concept. You take in more efficiency, you're doing the classic transformational things, making things more efficient, all that good stuff for agility, but it's actually innovative. So this idea of an enterprise hybrid cloud as a service is pretty innovative because now you're talking about things with AI and scale that come into play, right? So you got the setup, you got it moving into being innovative but scales right there. What is this enterprise hybrid cloud as a service? Because is it just agility, is it the AI piece? Where do you see that going? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Right? And you're a great stuff, man, Johnson. (Smith laughs) So again, Anthem's not ready to move all of their workload to cloud, right? And we recognize (indistinct)is going to be out of the data center business. So how can we take non traditional workloads, right? Get them close to cloud, right? Get them very close to cloud, get us out of the managing the data center and actually allow us to move seamlessly from non traditional workloads into cloud. And so what we did was something we think is very innovative. This is the enterprise hybrid cloud piece for me, right? 'Cause normally hybrid cloud says, you have a client data center location and you have cloud. We marry the two together. We said, you're not going to have a data center location anymore. We're going to have our data centers, you know, IBM cloud. And we're actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet. And we're going to bring these non traditional workloads there, we're going to take the network operation brain and bring it there. And we're going to allow you then to basically be able to move seamlessly from that to directly into cloud and improve operations at the same time. There's other a side benefit to this too. The other unintended sort of benefit is that what any organization, right? That you find stuff in the data center that hasn't been looked at for a long period of time, right? Application teams haven't looked at it, et cetera, et cetera. We're literally touching every single host. Right? So this gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away. Right? And this is great because we're actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it. >> Yeah. I mean the operational model changes me. You mentioned that just that whole point about you're kind of doing some discovery on apps, this becomes kind of sets the table for AI ops which is just code word for day two operations or full cloud native environments, which now you're seeing cloud native include legacy. Yes. Because you can put containers into the mix and you can then create these integration points that you don't have to kind of get rid of the old to bring in the new. So the dimension of what's going on here is pretty interesting, right? When you start thinking about that, "Okay. I can modernize the same time as connect two existing systems." >> That's exactly right. And we put the things very close to one another. And if there's any concerns over data security compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place. Right? So that's what's beautiful about it, right? We can kind of hit every layer that's possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along. >> Well, you're definitely a pioneer. I love that enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. I think that's something that's relevant. We're living in a hybrid world. I mean, the cube, we used to go to events now it's virtual events, but when now the events come back, they're hybrid events. Every company is experiencing this phenomenon on hybrid something, not just technology. The ops got to adapt, so super cool. You mentioned something that was your baby. I want to get back to you. And you said you want to talk about, I want to just bring that up. This Anthem technology excellence center is your baby. ATech I think you said for short. >> Yeah. We call it Atech for short. And really, John, we said that it's got to be more than just taking that other 20% that we don't run today. And we're doing some very innovative things moving non-traditional workloads. Like I said, all that kind of stuff was very cool, right? But we need a transformation engine, right? And we need the ability to transform skills. Like upscale the people at Anthem as well as IBM, right there on the account team, it's a big account. We want to think of new ways to work together. Right? Traditional managed services is like, what? Someone cuts a ticket and says, "Give me X by her seat." Right? That's the traditional model. And we said, that's not good enough. We need to collaborate better together. And we are willing to redefining how we form our teams to work with Anthem. Right? So if we want to form, for example, a product ownership team that builds it, runs it, maintains it. And that team has Anthem plus IBM together. we're going to use ATEC as a vehicle to design that and drive it and make sure they have all the skills they need within that group to do that. Right? That's new ways of working together. And it's also to drive things like site reliability engineering, right? Cloud service management operations, make sure that Anthem has the right training, make sure we work together on these kinds of things. So it's really kind of an exciting thing. And it's intended to be a co-created model, right? So we actually work with the Anthem, we co-create using IBM garage methodologies and then the idea is to coast staff it, but it's tended to be a thin layer of world-class engineering. That's really the whole point of it. And yeah, I'm super excited about that. As you move forward, yeah. >> While you're speaking our language, the cube we'd love the co-creation we do with media. It's always fun to create content together. And sometimes in real time put it together like we're doing now. And it creates a bond. I mean, I got to bring this up because this is becoming more and more obvious. And now mainstream, the notion of co-creation, the notion of ecosystems and ecosystems really meaning network effect and integrating with other parties, right? Companies and our systems. If you look at the underlying business model as a systems management software bottle. Okay. So with that, these ecosystems, the network effect. If you build together, you stay together. I mean, this is a different mindset. It's different dynamic. It's a different relationship that companies are now looking for in what used to be called suppliers. Are you supplying something? Are you building together? Right. So this seems to be the theme. Can you expand on this new trend? >> Right. And get away from the strict racing, this person does, this person does that. Instead, we build a team together that has all the skills necessary and that team owns a product life cycle. They build it, run it and maintain it. And that's changing the way we deliver services from IBM perspective significantly, right? Because that's not our traditional model but that's what we're doing. So we're really out in the front end, on the front edge if you will. Changing that model completely. And it's one of the most exciting things for me, you know, as far as going forward. >> You know, this whole idea of partnerships has always kind of been there but now it gets modernized and uplifted if you will, to a new level. And it really is about watching each other's backs too when you have that kind of... 'Cause we're talking about like pushing the envelope on probably the biggest confluence of tech trends I've ever seen in my career. And I've seen many big waves, you know, from the different revolutions and inflection points. Now it's sort of all coming together, right? At scale too, it's happening very fast. I mean, the change over is happening in years that once you took decades before. So it's really is a team approach. >> Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And I see it every day in the work we're doing. And it's like, for example, at Atech where we're working with the data scientists at the Anthem, we're thinking of new ways to build things they've never done before. We're hoping to enable their science, enable the things they want to do for digitization standpoint, the same token I'm taking, you know, a data scientist and putting them on the operation side too. Right? So we're doing both these kinds of things together. And really I didn't say this before, but this whole thing is about driving automation, right? Driving down, no human touch, soft service, automation. That is kind of been the linchpin of this. And I also want to say John, that doing this all during a pandemic, you know, we signed our new agreement together with them at a quarter, at the end of March in 2020. And we went live in August 1st with all the changes, the extra 20% capacity to over 300 plus applications completely, started Atech from co-creation in a pandemic. And we both agreed as a company, I give great credit to our client and to the numbers involved that everyone set up front and during March. The pandemic's not an excuse to get anything done. So, we're going to go forward and make it happen. That's probably the thing I'm most proud about. That was just... It's crazy when you think of how big the project was and do pull it off during a pandemic. >> Yeah. There's going to be two sides of the street and this one, this pandemics over the ones who made it through and refactored and or innovated. Cause it's not just about being and having a tale, it's about taking advantage of the situation and the ones who didn't do anything. Whether they were in the cloud or not, that's not to me. That's not the issue of you're in the cloud you had an advantage. >> It's not. Right. >> But there's going to be two sides of the streets. And I think the one thing that the pandemic has shown us and I'd love to get your reaction as a final comment here is that when you pull back when the pandemic, it showed all the scabs, it shows everything. And you can see what's obvious and it becomes a forcing function. Necessity's the mother of all invention as expression goes so you can see what's worth doubling down on and you can see the productivity gains and that becomes clear. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's good and bad with everything, right? Pros and cons, like you said, and you know, one of the cons I think is the having to schedule all interactions is definitely a con, right? Because when you spend time not only with the client virtually but in person, you do get the advantage of having, you know, chalk talks and things like that. They're not scheduled. Right? So that's definitely one of the cons side, but one of the pro side is it did provide some focus, right? Kind of extreme focus and on what's important and allowed us to, you know, I think dove some bonds with the Anthem leadership team and the application teams doing it virtually over cameras like this that maybe happen at a larger scale than they might have normally been because the pandemic kind of allowed us to do that and made that happen. >> Great stuff, Rick, great insight. Great to have you on the cube as always. Great to talk tech, talk business, talk about the transformation and innovation and the cloud scale. Thanks for coming on Rick Smith, CTO of the IBM Anthem client team. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome. Thanks John. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John. For your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music) (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpeShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus built it on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of the outer three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>Hold on. Welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm John ferry, host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. Got a great deep dive conversation with multicloud, who we were featuring on our AWS showcase of cloud startups. Uh, Venkat Krista who's the CEO. And co-founder great to see you again and Candace Hendrix delivery architect at green pages, a partner customer. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on as always cube conversations are fun to get the deep dive. Good to see you. >>Oh, great to have, uh, have this opportunity, John. Thank you so much. Uh, Candace, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure work in pages, John, we're looking forward to this conversation today. >>Yeah. One of the things I'm really excited about that came out of our coupon cloud startups showcase was you guys talking about day two operations, which has been kicked around, but you guys drilled into it and put some quantification around the value proposition, but this is every company has a day to problem an opportunity and then usually our problems and most people see, but they're really opportunities to create this value proposition around something that's now going to be an operational, um, standard table-stakes. So let's get into it, take us through, uh, what you guys have with day two offers that, do a deep dive on this. Take, take it away. >>Thanks, John. Uh, John, we'll do a little bit of an involved conversation today. We'll switch between a little bit of a slide and, um, we are actually happy to show a quick demo as well. So our customers can, uh, what they see is what they get kind of demo. Um, so, uh, to give a quick background on context a day, two operations in the cloud are important for customers who are trying to get, uh, self-service provisioning, going standardization going, uh, have a way to help their developers move fast on the innovation. What we are experiencing now is developers are increasingly having a seat at the table and they would like their infrastructure architects and infrastructure solution providers to enable them to do things that they want to do with fewer friction points. What day two platform that we built does is it upskills our it teams so that they can deli work, uh, what the developers need so that the sandbox environments that they want comes to life quickly. >>And on top of that, developers can move fast with the innovation with guard rails that are in place, the guard rails that are it, administrators, it leaders are able to set for developers, include cost guard, rails, governance, guard, rails, security, and compliance guard rails, a, you know, bot based approach to getting out of the way of the developers so they can move fast while the, uh, technology provides them the Alcoa to go innovate without running into the common cloud problems, such as cost overruns or security or compliance challenges today, I'll go show and tell a little bit of all of this, and then we'll bring in partners or partner, canvas as well, so that she can talk about how we help the fortune 200, uh, innovate, uh, faster with our platform. >>Awesome. Well, let's get into it. I, you know, as you know, I, I think that day two operations is really a cloud, uh, lingua. Frank was going to be part of everyone's, uh, operational standard. And it's not just for making sure you've got cost-effectiveness, but innovation strategies that rely on cloud, they need to have new things in place. So take us through the show and tell. >>Great, well, let's switch to the slide deck here. So I'm going to give a quick background and then go from there. Great. So, um, uh, you know, Montclair is an intelligent cloud man and platform company. We help customers of all sizes. Uh, we are an AWS partner that is a cloud management tool, competency partner, super happy to be in a wedding on the AWS platform for AWS customers. Our platform is an autonomous cloud operations platform. What our mission is, we empower ID teams to go deliver to their developers and become cloud powerhouses. Uh, I'm going to go through a quick three sections of the Manticore platform that delivers value to our customers first with our platform without needing additional skillsets or hiring, uh, needing to hire, uh, you know, hard to find talent or having to use third party tools. Our customers can use AWS native solutions to achieve full visibility into their cloud environments. >>They can enable consistent self-service deployments and simplify them. They can also reduce the total cost of cloud operations, all in just a few clicks. Uh, I'm going to show and tell, uh, what customers get quickly moving into the slide where customers can get visibility into the footprint, a comprehensive security posture management and compliance posture management, click away and solve these problems. They can enable their innovation teams with operations ready environments that can provision anything from server-based workloads to serverless workloads, to containerized environments. All of that are available readily in the platform. And of course, uh, all of this can be done with a few clicks and no code. That's our platform. And a nutshell I'm happy to switch to a demo from here on John. How does that sound >>Great. Sounds awesome. Let's get the demo. Thanks for the overview. By the way, we cover that in a great video too, and a high level, um, in our new show startup showcase, people can check that out online, um, check it out, but let's get into the demo. >>Sounds good. So I'm going to switch to my laptop again here to show the browser window and go into the demo environment. Great. So this is Monte cloud.com. Uh, customers can go to app.monica.com. I'm going to move fast in a demo environment show and tell here, uh, customers split login, assuming they have signed up for the platform. It's free to sign up. Uh, the platform activates immediately. This is their full first run experience. Uh, customers can get started in about a couple of clicks. There's a welcome screen here. They can walk through this. What this provides is a way a guard had experience for customers to be able to gain visibility, security, compliance, and set up the cloud operations, uh, environment in just a couple of clicks. So in this case, customers can get continuous resource visibility. They click next from a security point of view, we'll assess about 2,220 plus security best practices and customers can select saying they would like to remediate the issues. >>We'll help do that. That's a bot based approach that does it click next compliance, a similar situation. We do compliance assessments in the platform. Customers can remediate it. Uh, click next. We have provisioning templates, John. We had a really good conversation yesterday about this, a whole set of, uh, well-architected, uh, templates that customers can click and provision anything from, uh, basic core networking, all the way up to high performance computing and minds that all is available in the platform. Again, click next to go select that customers can manage servers, windows, or Linux servers running on any cloud could be hybrid cloud, uh, Azure, AWS GCP. Again, we can manage them in a single interface and last but not the least application management, our ID operators and leaders want to have a position on how their cloud applications are performing. They want to react quickly to it best possible platform. Uh, that's it they've selected all the features. All the, which is free in the platform. Some features are available in the free trial. Customers can click and say they would like to try for 14 days. That's all. So click next platform sets itself up. This is how quick we can get to helping customers understanding what they need to do. I'm going to try and show you if I can go to the next screen here and say, this is my company name. >>So I'm going to enter some details here that, uh, helps, um, capture some basic information about, uh, our customers, uh, departments. Uh, let's say this is a demo account, or I'm going to say, um, HR, um, uh, account, let's say there's a human resources department that I'm trying to connect and manage their cloud environment, but click next >>And that's it. They connect to the AWS account. We now take our customers back to an AWS console where they're familiar interface. They're going to click next on this cloud formation stack here, which automatically starts creating what we need on the customer's account. And click, click a button here. It's going to run in the background, what my platform in this case, my view, the other view does is, uh, it instantly receives notification back from the customer's account. As you can see now, day two has recognized that, Hey, the customer is trying to connect the cloud account. It's a question. Do you want to manage these regions? We can manage 15 plus regions click next. Uh, that is pretty much it. Uh, I'm going to skip this one so that we can get to the dashboard. I'm going to skip this as well, because you can invite your team members. Uh, you can get weekly reports, uh, long story short, that's it about 10 clicks. We are already in, in a cloud environment where customers can begin to manage, operate and start taking control of the cloud footprint. >>Got it. And physical you, you skipped over the collaboration feature that's for what team members do. Kind of see the same dashboard. >>The great question. Uh, our customers can invite additional team members could be an educator who wants to look at the total cost of cloud operations. Uh, they could invite another team member who wants to be enabled only for certain parts of the platform. Very simple. We have SSO integration as well in the platform. So, uh, invite additional users start using day two in less than 10 minutes, no additional, uh, you know, configuration required. >>You know, Amazon's got that slogan always day one. You guys are always day to always go to >>About all about ensuring data was taken care of. >>Awesome. Great stuff. Candace, what's your take on this? How do you fit in here? Talk about what it's like to work with these guys. What's the, what's your perspective on this? A new multicloud day two operations dashboard. >>Hi, thank you, John. Hi, Ben Kat. Thank you very much for the introduction. Um, basically our interaction is collaborative and we're great team partners, and we work well with, with multicloud often and, and have been partners working together for quite some time and solutioning products for our clients. >>Great. Vinca you want to chime in as well and share some color commentary on, um, your partners value? >>Sure. Thanks Justin. So, uh, so green pages, uh, they offer cloud services and a whole suite of solutions to their customers. Some of the customers are ranging from fortune a hundred enterprises, uh, to a wide variety of customers. Perhaps we can actually switch over to a slide deck here, but Candace, if you're up for it, maybe we can walk through a liberal green pages and solutions that you've implemented. We can talk from the customer point of view, which we think would be more beneficial to our audience as well. >>Yes. Thank you. That's very helpful. Um, again, my name is Candice Hendrix and I'm a delivery architect here at green pages technology solutions. And what I'd like to do is share a few examples of collaboration that we have achieved through our partnership with Moni cloud first to give a better history of green pages we've been in business since 1992, we maintain a wide range of customer base, um, approximately 500 different, uh, customers and all different workflows from insurance to government to, um, um, manufacturing and the such. We've also made the CRN tech elite two 50 less for, uh, sense its inception in 2011. And basically what that is, is it's all of the companies and, or the top 250 companies in the U S and Canada, having the highest level of experience top of their game, maintaining the highest levels of training and certifications. We also offer managed services, support, professional services, cloud readiness assessments, and migrations, as well as growing a CSP or cloud service provider today, I would like to highlight a few innovative projects that we've executed with multicloud is our partner for AWS compliance needs as well as, um, AWS Dr. >>So this slide first outlines a business scenario that we dealt with with one of our clients to address cost security compliance standardization across a global AWS environment. And the challenge with this was that we experienced was the complexity of the cloud environment and the size of the environment and how can they stay compliant, optimize costs and scale the outcome with the teamwork of Mani cloud and green pages, we were able to achieve all the facets of the challenge, also enabling and, and creating what we coined it, the compliance bot and what that provided was a platform to easily parameterize some of the, um, options such as configurable schedules, configurable target servers, departments, um, options to choose between automated and manual remediation processes in compliance ability to choose whether that remediation process also, uh, auto reboots versus approval based reboots on, um, infrastructure or resources integrations into a Slack channel for manual remediation approval process, as well as daily noncompliance reporting the compliance bot also can ensure proper patching necessary agents required software versions and resources, um, that they maintain compliance through the use of tagging Lambda functions, AWS fleet manager, AWS config, and AWS CloudWatch. >>Uh, another, um, opportunity we've had to work with, um, Moni cloud in this use case, the scenario that the green pages customer needed to solve was the automation of Dr to address the requirement of an entire AWS regional failure within requirements was a RTO of four hours and an RPO of less than one minute uncertain ESE, two instances. So the challenge that we had was to develop this solution with only the use of AWS native services meeting the required RTO and RPO with no custom tooling integration. So with mighty clouds assistance and teamwork, what we were able to achieve is what we now refer to as the Dr. Bot, we solution the automation to replicate everything from their production, uh, environment in AWS to the Dr. Region in AWS, such as subnets, um, IP cider ranges, LAN IP addresses, security groups, load balancers, and all associated configuration settings. >>So with the pilot light scripting that runs daily through a Lambda function, we can manage those Delta copies into the Dr production or the Dr. Region from production and address any changes that may occur in the production environment to meet the RPO. What we used is cloud door, which is also a native AWS service. And we used AWS backup for the more static instances, we then created an integration to send any health alerts in the event of an AWS outage to their Slack channel. Then upon approval, um, they could kick off through a manual approval process. They could kick off and execute an end to end fail over from production to an AWS region and to their Dr. Region in AWS, both the compliance spot and the Dr. Bot automations can be ported and variabilize for any AWS environment. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this further and assist you in your cloud journey. I hope this explain some of the great innovation that we've been able to work with money cloud on. Thanks, Ben Capra, allowing me to speak and back to you. >>Thank you, Candace. This is fantastic. John Lassie Seesaw, right? The challenge with cloud operations is there's a lot of moving parts and, uh, visibility, compliance, security, uh, you know, all of that. Typically customers have to write custom code or integrate ten-plus tools, suddenly what, you know, customers we're seeing they're spinning up their own cloud operating teams. They're spinning up their own homegrown cloud operations model, which in invariably results in more attacks, symptoms of maintenance tasks, our platform can do all of this abstract, the complexity, and put this kind of automation within the reach of customers who are trying to transform their it departments by clicking away. That's the attack that we built on top. >>Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think Candace highlights some of the things we were talking about last time around intelligent applications, meeting, intelligent infrastructure, and to your point about operations, this comes up huge all the time in every conversation we're in and we're seeing it in the marketplace where there's a new operational model developing in real time. You're seeing people, um, homegrown ops, transforming ops. I mean, there's new roles and responsibilities are emerging and that's just the nature of the beast right now. This is kind of the new normal that it's not your traditional ops model. It's transitioning to a new, new way. This is a great example. Um, you see that the same way? >>Well, that's a, that's a great description, John you're right. That is the model that is evolving that, uh, once, um, that demands more from it teams and on the runway that is shrinking to transform and the cloud surface, it has grown how that's exactly where the becoming to help. And, uh, uh, we did do a little bit of a deep dive into what the platform does today to talk to our audience so that they can get this value. Thank you for that. Uh, you know, uh, depth in diving, happy to chat a little bit more if you'd like about, uh, where customers could go and that they can get started. >>Yeah. Looking forward to it. Vanco. Thanks for coming on, Candace. Thank you very much for sharing. Um, green pages. Congratulations. Love the Dr. Bot. That's phenomenal. I mean, I w I want a cube bottom. You're just doing these interviews is boss, but I'm looking forward to having a follow on conversation vanco. We're going to certainly see you out on the internet on Twitter. Um, maybe get you on our clubhouse, uh, chats, a lot of action out there. A lot of people talking about this, and you're seeing things from observability to new kinds of monitoring, to modern application development techniques that are just evolving in real time. So day two is here. Thanks for sharing. >>Looking forward, John, and, uh, where customers could go to is they could go to montclair.com today. They could get started in just a few place. We have a free version on the platform. They can activate this account in 10 months. They now have the power of the automation that we've built, and they can start taking control of the cloud operations in about 10 minutes. So we encourage persons to go find some free monitor.com and thank you candidates for taking the time, uh, uh, does it's fantastic that we'll be able to go solve some problems together. >>Mazi cloud turning teams into cloud powerhouses. That's their slogan. Check them out. I'm John Farrar with the cube. Thanks for watching.