>> Commentator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's the Cube. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux foundation, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Austin, Texas the Cube's exclusive coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, its third year, not even third year I think it's second year and not even three years old as a community, growing like crazy. Over 4500 people here. Combined the bulk of the shows it's double than it was before. I'm John Ferrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE. Stu Miniman, analysts here. Next is Gabe Monroy who was lead p.m. product manager for containers for Microsoft Azure, Gabe welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks, glad to be here. Big fan of the show. >> Great to have you on. I mean obviously container madness we've gotten past that now it's Kubernetes madness which really means that the evolution of the industry is really starting to get some clear lines of sight as a straight and narrow if you will people starting to see a path towards scale, developer acceleration, more developers coming in than ever before, this cloud native world. Microsoft's doing pretty well with the cloud right now. Numbers are great, hiring a bunch of people, give us a quick update big news what's going on? >> Yeah so you know a lot of things going on. I'm just excited to be here, I think for me, I'm new to Microsoft right. I came here about seven months ago by way of a Dais acquisition and I like to think of myself as kind of representing part of this new Microsoft trend. My career was built on open source. I started a company called Dais and we were focused on really Kubernetes based solutions and here at Microsoft I'm really doing a lot of the same thing but with Microsoft's Cloud as sort of the vehicle that we're trying to attract developers to. >> What news do you guys have here, some services? >> Yeah so we got a bunch of things, we're talking about so the first is something I'm especially excited about. So this is the virtual kubelet. Now, tell a little bit of story here, I think it's actually kind of fascinating, so back in July we launched this thing called Azure Container Instances and what ACI was first of its kind service containers in the cloud. Just run a container, runs in the cloud. It's micro build and it is invisible infrastructure, so part of the definition of serverless there. As part of that we want to make it clear that if you were going to do complex things with these containers you really need an orchestrator so we released this thing called the ACI Connector for Kubernetes along with it. And we were excited to see people just were so drawn its idea of serverless Kubernetes, Kubernetes that you know didn't have any VMs associated with it and folks at hyper.sh, who have a similar service container offering, they took our code base and forked it and did a version of theirs and you know Brent and I were thinking together when we were like "oh man there's something here, we should explore this" and so we got some engineers together, we put a lot of work together and we announced now, this in conjunction with hyper and others, this virtual kubelet that bridges the world of Kubernetes with the world of these new serverless container runtimes like ACI. >> Okay, can you explain that a little bit. >> Sure. >> People have been coming in saying wait does serverless replace, how does it work, is Kubernetes underneath still? >> Yeah so I think the best place to start is the definition of serverless and I think serverless is really the conflation of three things: it's invisible infrastructure, it is micro billing, and it is an event based programming model. It's sort of the classical definition right. Now what we did with ACI and serverless containers is we took that last one, the event based programming model, and we said look you don't need to do that. If you want to write a container, anything that runs in that container can work, not just functions and so that is I think a really important distinction that I believe it's really the best of serverless is you know that micro billing and invisible infrastructure. >> Well that's built in isn't it? >> Correct yeah. >> What are the biggest challenges of serverless because first of all its [Inaudible 00:03:58] in the mind of a developer who doesn't want to deal with plumbing. >> Yes. >> Meaning networking plumbing, storage, and a lot of the details around configurating, just program away, be creative, spend their time building. >> Yes. >> What is the big differences between that? What are the issues and challenges that service has for people adopting it or is it frictionless at this point? >> Well you know as far I mean it depends on what you're talking about right. So I think you know for functions you know it's very simple to you know get a function service and add your functions and deploy functions and start chaining those together and people are seeing rapid adoption and that's progressing nicely but there's also a contingent of folks who are represented here at the show who are really interested in containers as the primitive and not functions right. Containers are inclusive of lots of things, functions being one of them, betting on containers as like the compute artifact is actually a lot more flexible and solves a lot more use cases. So we're making sure that we can streamline ease of use for that while also bringing the benefits of serverless, really the way I think of this is marrying our AKS, our Managed Kubernetes Service with ACI, our you know serverless containers so you can get to a place where you can have a Kubernetes environment that has no VMs associated with it like literally zero VMs, you'd scale the thing down to zero and when you want to run a pod or container you just pay for a few seconds of time and then you kill it and you stop paying for it right. >> Alright so talk about customers. >> Yep. >> What's the customer experience you guys are going after, did you have any beta customers, who's adopting your approach, and can highlight some examples of some really cool and you don't have to name names or you can, anecdotal data will be good. >> Yeah well you know I think on the blog post announcement blog post page we have a really great video of Siemens Health and Years, I believe is the name, but basically a health care company that is looking, that is using Kubernetes on Azure, AKS specifically, to disrupt the health care market and to benefit real people and you know to me I think it's important that we remember that we're deep in this technology right but at the end of the day this is about helping developers who are in turn helping real world people and I think that video is a good example of that. >> An what was there impact, speed? Speed of developers? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's really the main thing is agility right, people want to move faster right and so that's the main benefit that we hear. I think cost is obviously a concern for folks but I think in practice the people cost of operating some of these systems is tends to be a lot higher than the infrastructure costs when you stack them up, so people are willing to pay a little bit of a premium to make it easier on people and we see that over and over again. >> Yeah Gabe, want you to speak to kind of the speed of company the size of Microsoft. So you know the Dais acquisition of course was already focused on Kubernetes before inside of Microsoft, see I mean big cloud companies moving really fast on Kubernetes. I've heard complaints from customers like "I can't get a good roadmap because it's moving so fast". >> You know I would say that was one of the biggest surprises for me joining Microsoft, is just how fast things move inside of Azure in particular. And I think it's terrific you know. I think that there's a really good focus of making sure that we're meeting customers where they are and building solutions that meet the market but also just executing and delivering and doing that with speed. One of the things that is most interesting to me is like the geographic spread. Microsoft is in so many different regions more than any other cloud. Compliance certification, we take to all that stuff really seriously and being able to do all those things, be the enterprise friendly cloud while also moving at this breakneck pace in terms of innovation, it's really spectacular to watch from the inside. >> A lot of people don't know that. When they think about Azure they think "oh they're copying Amazon" but Microsoft has tons of data centers. They've had browsers, they're all over the world, so it's not like they're foreign to region areas I mean they're everywhere. >> Microsoft is ever and not only is it not foreign but I mean you got to remember Microsoft is an enterprise software company at its core. We know developers, that is what we do and going into cloud in this way is just it's extremely natural for us. And I think that the same can't really be said for everyone who's trying to move into cloud. Like we've got history of working with developers, building platforms, we've entire division devoted to developer tooling right. >> I want to ask you about two things that comes up a lot, one is very trendy, one is kind of not so trendy but super important, one is AI. >> Yes. >> AI with software units impact disrupt storage and with virtual kubelets this is going to be changing storage game buts going to enhance the machine learning and AI capability. The other one is data warehousing or data analytics. Two very important trends, one is certainly a driver for growth and has a lot of sex appeal as the AI machine learning but all the analytics being done on cloud whether it's an IOT device, this is like a nice use case for containers and orchestration. Your comment and reaction for those two trends. >> Yeah and you know I think that AI and deep learning generally is something that we see driving a ton of demand for container orchestration. I've worked lots of customers including folks like OpenAI on there Kubernetes infrastructure running on a Azure today. Something that Elon Musk actually proudly mention, that was a good moment for the containers (chuckling) >> Get a free Tesla. Brokerage some Teslas and get that new one, goes from 0 to 100 and 4.5 seconds. >> Right yeah. >> So you got a good customer, OpenAI, what was the impact of them? What was the big? >> Well you know this is ultimately about empowering people, in this case they happen to be data scientists, to get their job done in a way where I mean I look at it has we're doing our jobs in the infrastructure space if the infrastructure disappears. The more conceptual overhead we're bringing to developers that means we're not doing our job. >> So question then specifically is deep learning in AI, is it enhanced by containers and Kubernetes? >> Absolutely. >> What order of magnitude? >> I don't know but in order of magnitude in enhancement I would argue. >> Just underlying that the really important piece is we're talking about data here >> Yes. >> and one of the things we've been kind of trying to tackle the last couple years of containers is you know storage and that's carried over to Kubernetes, how's Microsoft involved? What's you're you know prognosis as to where we go with cloud native storage? >> Yeah that's a fascinating question and I actually, so back in the early days when I was still contributing to Docker, I was one of the largest external contributors to the Docker Project earlier in my career. I actually wrote some of the storage stuff and so I've been going around Dockers inception 2013 saying don't run databases in containers. It's not cause you can't, right, you can, but just because you can doesn't mean you should (chuckling) >> Exactly. >> and I think that you know as somebody who has worked in my career as on the operation side things like an SLA mean a lot and so this leads me to another one of our announcements at the show which is the Open Service Broker for Azure. Now what we've done, thanks to the Cloud Foundry Foundation who basically took the service broker concept and spun it out, we now are able to take the world of Kubernetes and bridge it to the world of Azure services, data services being sort of some of the most interesting. Now the demo that I like to show this is WordPress which by the way sounds silly but WordPress powers tons of the web today still. WordPress is a PHP application and a MySQL database. Well if you're going to run WordPress at scale you're going to want to run that MySQL in a container? Probably not, you're probably going to want to use something like Azure database for MySQL which comes with an SLA, backup/restore, DR, ops team by Microsoft to manage the whole thing right. So but then the question is well I want to use Kubernetes right so how do I do that right, well with the Open Service Broker for Azure we actually shipped a helm chart. We can helm install Azure WordPress and it will install in Kubernetes the same way you would a container based system and behind the scenes it uses the broker to go spin up a Postgres, sorry a MySQL and dynamically attach it. Now the coolest thing to me about this yeah is the agility but I think that one of the underrated features is the security. The developer who does that doesn't ever touch credentials, the passwords are automatically generated and automatically injected into the application so you get to do things with rotations without ever touching the app. >> So we're at publisher we use WordPress, we'd love, will this help us with scale if we did Azure? >> Absolutely. After this is over we'll go set it up. (laughing) >> I love WordPress but when it breaks down well this is the whole point of where auto scaling shows a little bit of its capabilities in the world is that, PHP does you'd like to have more instances >> Yeah. >> that would be a use case. Okay Redshift in Amazon wasn't talking about much at re:Invent last week. We don't hear a lot of talk around the data warehouse which is a super important way to think about collecting data in cloud and is that going to be an enhanced feature because people want to do analytics. There's a huge analytics audience out there, they're moving off of tera-data. They're doing you guys have a lot of analytics at Microsoft. They might have moved from Hadoop or Hive or somewhere else so there's a lot of analytics workloads that would be prime or at least potentially prime for Kubernetes. >> Yeah I think >> Or is that not fully integrated. >> No I think it's interesting, I mean for us we look at, I personally think using something like the service broker, Open Service Broker API to bridge to something like a data lake or some of these other Azure hosted services is probably the better way of doing that because if you're going to run it on containers, these massive data warehouses, yes you can do it, but the operational burden is high, >> So your point about the >> its really high. >> database earlier. >> Yeah. Same general point there. Now can you do it? Do we see people doing it? Absolutely right. >> Yeah, they do you things sometimes that they shouldn't be doing. >> Yeah and of course back to the deep learning example those are typically big large training models that have similar characteristics. >> Alright as a newbie inside Azure, not new to the industry and the community, >> Yep. >> share some color. What's it like in there? Obviously a number two to Amazon, you guys have great geography presence, you're adding more and more services every day at Azure, what's the vibe, what's the mojo like over there, and share some inside baseball. >> Yeah I got to say so really I'm just saying it's a really exciting place to work. Things are moving so fast, we're growing so fast, customers really want what we're building. Honestly day to day I'm not spending a lot of time looking out I'm spending a lot of time dealing with enterprises who want to use our cloud products. >> And one of the top things that you have on your p.m. list that are the top stack ranked features people want? >> I think a lot of this comes down, in general I think this whole space is approaching a level of enterprise friendliness and enterprise hardening where we want to start adding governance, and adding security, and adding role based access controls across the board and really making this palatable to high trust environment. So I think a lot that's a lot of our focus. >> Stability, ease of use. >> Stability, ease of use are always there. I think the enterprise hardening and things like v-net support for all of our services, v-net service endpoints, those are some things that are high on the list. >> Gabe Monroy, lead product manager for containers at Microsoft Azure Cloud. Great to have you on and love to talk more about geographies and moving apps around the network and multi-cloud but another time, thanks for the time. >> Another time. >> It's the Cube live coverage I'm John Ferrier co-founder of [Inaudible 00:15:21]. Stu Miniman with Wikibon, back with more live coverage after this short break.