>> Announcer: It's theCUBE! Covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 brought to you by Vertica. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference. It was, of course, going to be in Boston at the Encore Hotel. Win big with big data with the new casino but obviously Coronavirus has changed all that. Our hearts go out and we are empathy to those people who are struggling. We are going to continue our wall-to-wall coverage of this conference and we're here with Larry Lancaster who's the founder and CTO of Zebrium. Larry, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So first question, why did you start Zebrium? >> You know, I've been dealing with machine data a long time. So for those of you who don't know what that is, if you can imagine servers or whatever goes on in a data center or in a SAS shop. There's data coming out of those servers, out of those applications and basically, you can build a lot of cool stuff on that. So there's a lot of metrics that come out and there's a lot of log files that come. And so, I've built this... Basically spent my career building that sort of thing. So tools on top of that or products on top of that. The problem is that since at least log files are completely unstructured, it's always doing the same thing over and over again, which is going in and understanding the data and extracting the data and all that stuff. It's very time consuming. If you've done it like five times you don't want to do it again. So really, my idea was at this point with machine learning where it's at there's got to be a better way. So Zebrium was founded on the notion that we can just do all that automatically. We can take a pile of machine data, we can turn it into a database, and we can build stuff on top of that. And so the company is really all about bringing that value to the market. >> That's cool. I want to get in to that, just better understand who you're disrupting and understand that opportunity better. But before I do, tell us a little bit about your background. You got kind of an interesting background. Lot of tech jobs. Give us some color there. >> Yeah, so I started in the Valley I guess 20 years ago and when my son was born I left grad school. I was in grad school over at Berkeley, Biophysics. And I realized I needed to go get a job so I ended up starting in software and I've been there ever since. I mean, I spent a lot of time at, I guess I cut my teeth at Nedap, which was a storage company. And then I co-founded a business called Glassbeam, which was kind of an ETL database company. And then after that I ended up at Nimble Storage. Another company, EMC, ended up buying the Glassbeam so I went over there and then after Nimble though, which where I build the InfoSight platform. That's where I kind of, after that I was able to step back and take a year and a half and just go into my basement, actually, this is my kind of workspace here, and come up with the technology and actually build it so that I could go raise money and get a team together to build Zebrium. So that's really my career in a nutshell. >> And you've got Hello Kitty over your right shoulder, which is kind of cool >> That's right. >> And then up to the left you got your monitor, right? >> Well, I had it. It's over here, yeah. >> But it was great! Pull it out, pull it out, let me see it. So, okay, so you got that. So what do you do? You just sit there and code all night or what? >> Yeah, that's right. So Hello Kitty's over here. I have a daughter and she setup my workspace here on this side with Hello Kitty and so on. And over on this side, I've got my recliner where I basically lay it all the way back and then I pivot this thing down over my face and put my keyboard on my lap and I can just sit there for like 20 hours. It's great. Completely comfortable. >> That's cool. All right, better put that monitor back or our guys will yell at me. But so, obviously, we're talking to somebody with serious coding chops and I'll also add that the Nimble InfoSight, I think it was one of the best pick ups that HP, HPE, has had in a while. And the thing that interested me about that, Larry, is the ability that the company was able to take that InfoSight and poured it very quickly across its product lines. So that says to me it was a modern, architecture, I'm sure API, microservices, and all those cool buzz words, but the proof is in their ability to bring that IP to other parts of the portfolio. So, well done. >> Yeah, well thanks. Appreciate that. I mean, they've got a fantastic team there. And the other thing that helps is when you have the notion that you don't just build on top of the data, you extract the data, you structure it, you put that in a database, we used Vertica there for that, and then you build on top of that. Taking the time to build that layer is what lets you build a scalable platform. >> Yeah, so, why Vertica? I mean, Vertica's been around for awhile. You remember you had the you had the old RDBMS, Oracles, Db2s, SQL Server, and then the database was kind of a boring market. And then, all of a sudden, you had all of these MPP companies came out, a spade of them. They all got acquired, including Vertica. And they've all sort of disappeared and morphed into different brands and Micro Focus has preserved the Vertica brand. But it seems like Vertica has been able to survive the transitions. Why Vertica? What was it about that platform that was unique and interested you? >> Well, I mean, so they're the first fund to build, what I would call a real column store that's kind of market capable, right? So there was the C-Store project at Berkeley, which Stonebreaker was involved in. And then that became sort of the seed from which Vertica was spawned. So you had this idea of, let's lay things out in a columnar way. And when I say columnar, I don't just mean that the data for every column is in a different set of files. What I mean by that is it takes full advantage of things like run length and coding, and L file and coding, and block--impression, and so you end up with these massive orders of magnitude savings in terms of the data that's being pulled off of storage as well as as it's moving through the pipeline internally in Vertica's query processing. So why am I saying all this? Because it's fundamentally, it was a fundamentally disruptive technology. I think column stores are ubiquitous now in analytics. And I think you could name maybe a couple of projects which are mostly open source who do something like Vertica does but name me another one that's actually capable of serving an enterprise as a relational database. I still think Vertica is unique in being that one. >> Well, it's interesting because you're a startup. And so a lot of startups would say, okay, we're going with a born-in-the-cloud database. Now Vertica touts that, well look, we've embraced cloud. You know, we have, we run in the cloud, we run on PRAM, all different optionality. And you hear a lot of vendors say that, but a lot of times they're just taking their stack and stuffing it into the cloud. But, so why didn't you go with a cloud-native database and is Vertica able to, I mean, obviously, that's why you chose it, but I'm interested from a technologist standpoint as to why you, again, made that choice given all these other choices around there. >> Right, I mean, again, I'm not, so... As I explained a column store, which I think is the appropriate definition, I'm not aware of another cloud-native-- >> Hm, okay. >> I'm aware of other cloud-native transactional databases, I'm not aware of one that has the analytics form it and I've tried some of them. So it was not like I didn't look. What I was actually impressed with and I think what let me move forward using Vertica in our stack is the fact that Eon really is built from the ground up to be cloud-native. And so we've been using Eon almost ever since we started the work that we're doing. So I've been really happy with the performance and with reliability of Eon. >> It's interesting. I've been saying for years that Vertica's a diamond in the rough and it's previous owner didn't know what to do with it because it got distracted and now Micro Focus seems to really see the value and is obviously putting some investments in there. >> Yeah >> Tell me more about your business. Who are you disrupting? Are you kind of disrupting the do-it-yourself? Or is there sort of a big whale out there that you're going to go after? Add some color to that. >> Yeah, so our broader market is monitoring software, that's kind of the high-level category. So you have a lot of people in that market right now. Some of them are entrenched in large players, like Datadog would be a great example. Some of them are smaller upstarts. It's a pretty, it's a pretty saturated market. But what's happened over the last, I'd say two years, is that there's been sort of a push towards what's called observability in terms of at least how some of the products are architected, like Honeycomb, and how some of them are messaged. Most of them are messaged these days. And what that really means is there's been sort of an understanding that's developed that that MTTR is really what people need to focus on to keep their customers happy. If you're a SAS company, MTTR is going to be your bread and butter. And it's still measured in hours and days. And the biggest reason for that is because of what's called unknown unknowns. Because of complexity. Now a days, things are, applications are ten times as complex as they used to be. And what you end up with is a situation where if something is new, if it's a known issue with a known symptom and a known root cause, then you can setup a automation for it. But the ones that really cost a lot of time in terms of service disruption are unknown unknowns. And now you got to go dig into this massive mass of data. So observability is about making tools to help you do that, but it's still going to take you hours. And so our contention is, you need to automate the eyeball. The bottleneck is now the eyeball. And so you have to get away from this notion of a person's going to be able to do it infinitely more efficient and recognize that you need automated help. When you get an alert agent, it shouldn't be that, "Hey, something weird's happening. Now go dig in." It should be, "Here's a root cause and a symptom." And that should be proposed to you by a system that actually does the observing. That actually does the watching. And that's what Zebrium does. >> Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, you're right. The last thing you want is just another alert and it say, "Go figure something out because there's a problem." So how does it work, Larry? In terms of what you built there. Can you take us inside the covers? >> Yeah, sure. So there's really, right now there's two kinds of data that we're ingesting. There's metrics and there's log files. Metrics, there's actually sort of a framework that's really popular in DevOp circles especially but it's becoming popular everywhere, which is called Prometheus. And it's a way of exporting metrics so that scrapers can collect them. And so if you go look at a typical stack, you'll find that most of the open source components and many of the closed source components are going to have exporters that export all their stacks to Prometheus. So by supporting that stack we can bring in all of those metrics. And then there's also the log files. And so you've got host log files in a containerized environment, you've got container logs, and you've got application-specific logs, perhaps living on a host mount. And you want to pull all those back and you want to be able to associate this log that I've collected here is associated with the same container on the same host that this metric is associated with. But now what? So once you've got that, you've got a pile of unstructured logs. So what we do is we take a look at those logs and we say, let's structure those into tables, right? So where I used to have a log message, if I look in my log file and I see it says something like, X happened five times, right? Well, that event types going to occur again and it'll say, X happened six times or X happened three times. So if I see that as a human being, I can say, "Oh clearly, that's the same thing." And what's interesting here is the times that X, that X happened, and that this number read... I may want to know when the numbers happened as a time series, the values of that column. And so you can imagine it as a table. So now I have table for that event type and every time it happens, I get a row. And then I have a column with that number in it. And so now I can do any kind of analytics I want almost instantly across my... If I have all my event types structured that way, every thing changes. You can do real anomaly detection and incident detection on top of that data. So that's really how we go about doing it. How we go about being able to do autonomous monitoring in a way that's effective. >> How do you handle doing that for, like the Spoke app? Do you have to, does somebody have to build a connector to those apps? How do you handle that? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. So you're right. So if I go and install a typical log manager, there'll be connectors for different apps and usually what that means is pulling in the stuff on the left, if you were to be looking at that log line, and it will be things like a time stamp, or a severity, or a function name, or various other things. And so the connector will know how to pull those apart and then the stuff to the right will be considered the message and that'll get indexed for search. And so our approach is we actually go in with machine learning and we structure that whole thing. So there's a table. And it's going to have a column called severity, and timestamp, and function name. And then it's going to have columns that correspond to the parameters that are in that event. And it'll have a name associated with the constant parts of that event. And so you end up with a situation where you've structured all of it automatically so we don't need collectors. It'll work just as well on your home-grown app that has no collectors or no parsers to find or anything. It'll work immediately just as well as it would work on anything else. And that's important, because you can't be asking people for connectors to their own applications. It just, it becomes now they've go to stop what they're doing and go write code for you, for your platform and they have to maintain it. It's just untenable. So you can be up and running with our service in three minutes. It'll just be monitoring those for you. >> That's awesome! I mean, that is really a breakthrough innovation. So, nice. Love to see that hittin' the market. Who do you sell to? Both types of companies and what role within the company? >> Well, definitely there's two main sort of pushes that we've seen, or I should say pulls. One is from DevOps folks, SRE folks. So these are people who are tasked with monitoring an environment, basically. And then you've got people who are in engineering and they have a staging environment. And what they actually find valuable is... Because when we find an incident in a staging environment, yeah, half the time it's because they're tearing everything up and it's not release ready, whatever's in stage. That's fine, they know that. But the other half the time it's new bugs, it's issues and they're finding issues. So it's kind of diverged. You have engineering users and they don't have titles like QA, they're Dev engineers or Dev managers that are really interested. And then you've got DevOps and SRE people there (mumbles). >> And how do I consume your product? Is the SAS... I sign up and you say within three minutes I'm up and running. I'm paying by the drink. >> Well, (laughs) right. So there's a couple ways. So, right. So the easiest way is if you use Kubernetes. So Kubernetes is what's called a container orchestrator. So these days, you know Docker and containers and all that, so now there's container orchestrators have become, I wouldn't say ubiquitous but they're very popular now. So it's kind of on that inflection curve. I'm not exactly sure the penetration but I'm going to say 30-40% probably of shops that were interested are using container orchestrators. So if you're using Kubernetes, basically you can install our Kubernetes chart, which basically means copying and pasting a URL and so on into your little admin panel there. And then it'll just start collecting all the logs and metrics and then you just login on the website. And the way you do that is just go to our website and it'll show you how to sign up for the service and you'll get your little API key and link to the chart and you're off and running. You don't have to do anything else. You can add rules, you can add stuff, but you don't have to. You shouldn't have to, right? You should never have to do any more work. >> That's great. So it's a SAS capability and I just pay for... How do you price it? >> Oh, right. So it's priced on volume, data volume. I don't want to go too much into it because I'm not the pricing guy. But what I'll say is that it's, as far as I know it's as cheap or cheaper than any other log manager or metrics product. It's in that same neighborhood as the very low priced ones. Because right now, we're not trying to optimize for take. We're trying to make a healthy margin and get the value of autonomous monitoring out there. Right now, that's our priority. >> And it's running in the cloud, is that right? AWB West-- >> Yeah, that right. Oh, I should've also pointed out that you can have a free account if it's less than some number of gigabytes a day we're not going to charge. Yeah, so we run in AWS. We have a multi-tenant instance in AWS. And we have a Vertica Eon cluster behind that. And it's been working out really well. >> And on your freemium, you have used the Vertica Community Edition? Because they don't charge you for that, right? So is that how you do it or... >> No, no. We're, no, no. So, I don't want to go into that because I'm not the bizdev guy. But what I'll say is that if you're doing something that winds up being OEM-ish, you can work out the particulars with Vertica. It's not like you're going to just go pay retail and they won't let you distinguish between tests, and prod, and paid, and all that. They'll work with you. Just call 'em up. >> Yeah, and that's why I brought it up because Vertica, they have a community edition, which is not neutered. It runs Eon, it's just there's limits on clusters and storage >> There's limits. >> But it's still fully functional though. >> So to your point, we want it multi-tenant. So it's big just because it's multi-tenant. We have hundred of users on that (audio cuts out). >> And then, what's your partnership with Vertica like? Can we close on that and just describe that a little bit? >> What's it like. I mean, it's pleasant. >> Yeah, I mean (mumbles). >> You know what, so the important thing... Here's what's important. What's important is that I don't have to worry about that layer of our stack. When it comes to being able to get the performance I need, being able to get the economy of scale that I need, being able to get the absolute scale that I need, I've not been disappointed ever with Vertica. And frankly, being able to have acid guarantees and everything else, like a normal mature database that can join lots of tables and still be fast, that's also necessary at scale. And so I feel like it was definitely the right choice to start with. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I remember in the early days of big data a lot of people said, "Who's going to need these acid properties and all this complexity of databases." And of course, acid properties and SQL became the killer features and functions of these databases. >> Who didn't see that one coming, right? >> Yeah, right. And then, so you guys have done a big seed round. You've raised a little over $6 million dollars and you got the product market fit down. You're ready to rock, right? >> Yeah, that's right. So we're doing a launch probably, well, when this airs it'll probably be the day before this airs. Basically, yeah. We've got people... Like literally in the last, I'd say, six to eight weeks, It's just been this sort of pique of interest. All of a sudden, everyone kind of gets what we're doing, realizes they need it, and we've got a solution that seems to meet expectations. So it's like... It's been an amazing... Let me just say this, it's been an amazing start to the year. I mean, at the same time, it's been really difficult for us but more difficult for some other people that haven't been able to go to work over the last couple of weeks and so on. But it's been a good start to the year, at least for our business. So... >> Well, Larry, congratulations on getting the company off the ground and thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and being part of the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Keep it right there. We're covering wall-to-wall Virtual Vertica BDC. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California. It's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're here in San Diego Convention Center for Cisco Live 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-hosts Dave volante. Lisa Martin's also been here for our three days, wall to wall coverage with about 28 to 30,000 here in attendance for the 30th anniversary of the user and partner show for Cisco. Happy to welcome to the program our first time guest, Jeff Scheaffer, who's Vice President of Product Management Strategy inside of Cisco. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, glad to be here. >> Alright, so Jeff DNA center, some of the environments that you have. There were some announcements on Monday, why don't we start there? Walk us through the updates to the product line. >> Thanks Stu. So we're really excited, right. >> So as you know, with Cisco, we're really building out the intent based network, in support of digital transformation for all of our customers. And one of the key aspects of the intent based network is that we have incredible programability in the network, all supported through the DNA see controller. And this week, we're really excited. We announced two new innovations in the controller. One was incorporating a new set of analytics and machine learning capabilities as part of our assurance package so that we can more quickly troubleshoot network issues. And the third is being able to connect together the multi dev environments. So how do we stitch together, the software defined access to the Software defined WAN, to the software defined data center so that we can lay digital services across the entire network. >> Stu: Yeah, it's a story we've been watching the last couple of years at Cisco is that this move to software in many ways as a unifying factor. >> Yes. >> Used to be I had all these product lines, and I need to learn the interfaces, as my friends that come to the show for many years, when you said single pane of glass, there's like, come on that's spelt P-A-I-N. Today's world, it's an API economy. And what's been really interesting to watch the last... Recently, a lot of times, it's that ml and AI underneath that spans and helps automate a lot of those pieces underneath the covers now. >> Yes, absolutely, it does. So the thing we're excited AI is a broad topic as you know. And underneath that umbrella we have built in new capabilities around the machine learning, the ability to do deep learning, as we look at anonymized data sets in the cloud on deduce patterns that people don't know yet. And then thirdly, we're looking at machine reasoning. So how do we take that the analytics to pinpoint or identify anomalies in the fabric of the network in these new IBM fabrics and then be able to couple that with a set of orchestrated automation so that we can we can emulate the behavior that a network engineer would normally do in order to troubleshoot and diagnose problems and so we're that much faster at identifying them, pinpointing the root cause and then actually being able to give recommendations if not automatically fixing it, the recommendations to resolve the issues. >> So the programability aspect, of course, we're here in the DevNet zone. So, can we dig into that a little bit? I mean I'm imagining by that, it allows me to provision, bandwidth performance, certain levels, all through API calls and it's through software. And I can set thresholds, I can talk more about what that does for me as a customer. >> Sure. So in general, within DNA center, we have a kind of very rich programability capability. It's very much an API first developed controller. So everything that we can do within the controller is a setup of published and curated API's. And those API's come in different categories. So we have API's that are around the automatic configuration and the provisioning of the network infrastructure. Very much, Dave as you're suggesting that you can run as a headless entity inside of a if somebody like a lot of service providers and partners are using this to offer a service to their end customers. And so they can automatically provision out the network and they can do that in support of new applications. We're really actually excited with that in our partnership with Red Hat, we just introduced a new set of answerable plugins as an example, to support a DevOps process by which software developers build new applications as part of that DevOps code pipeline. By using the answerable plugins, we can actually drive automation into the network to provision the networking in support of those apps. So a lot of capabilities there. >> So is the uniqueness of that you can actually do that or is the uniqueness that you're Cisco. >> I know. So to a large part of it... In terms of the way things have been done historically, and this is that most of the time, if you were to look at how do you configure a network, it was device by device and it was through command line interfaces. >> Right. >> And it's error prone, it's complex, it's cumbersome, it takes a lot of time. And so what we've done with the network controllers, is by moving above the top of the intent based network, we're actually able to automatically configure and provision either policy through policies, either QoS or segmentation for security and do that in a very automated way. And to be able to do it in a scalable way. So that is an amusing new kind of configuration mechanisms we're very proud of the work we're doing around NetComp and YANG Models and that's something that's very unique in the way we're approaching that in the market today. >> Yeah, Jeff, historically, one of the concerns was the network. It's tied to the application wasn't as tight there. It's like you talked about networking people, it's just the water that runs through the pipes that we watched with first with ACI now with intent based networking. We're getting closer and closer to that application, especially you talk about multi domain what's going on at ties right with the microservices architectures that are coming on there. So as the applications get more complicated, the network needs to be able to understand what's happening there and respond to what's needed and give back the services that they need. >> Yeah. So I think building on where you're taking that conversation, one of the really kind of key or anchor points of the whole idea around the multi domain integrations that we provided, when we bring together Software Defined access, the software defined when and the software defined data center. We're using the the rich API's that exists in all of our controllers, whether its DNA see for software defined access, whether it's vManaged for the software defined WAN, or whether it's ACI around the software defined data center. And we're integrating all three of these controllers so that they can do a couple of really important things for customers. So in the context of the application. So the very first thing is how do we provide for segmentation? So segmentation is about how do we provide access policy and drive that into the network so that the right users have access to the right applications and other people don't. And then being able to use the programability. If the user moves from say the campus to the branch, we can automatically have the policy follow the user. If the application moves from the data center to the cloud, We can have the policy automatically follow the application and that way we always ensure that the right people have access to the right applications at the right time. The other use case around the around the API's and the multi domain segmentation is that to the extent an application needs quality of service. We think about an 82% of the US we move forward in time or roughly 82% of the traffic on the internet is starting to become video on the networks and like an 8k video is 7.29 terabits per second. So how do you ensure that there's enough bandwidth and enough quality of service to ensure the latency of like virtual reality or augmented reality where latency matters. And so the other thing we're doing with policy is provisioning up the Qos, so that as you configure it in the data center, it's honored in the software defined WAN and it's honored it all the way to the end user in the software defined access. >> Stu you were saying earlier how traditional is like don't touch my network, right, okay. So Jeff, my question is if you look over the last 10 years, as you bring in the software design defined data center and infrastructure programmable and infrastructure, infrastructures code. How is that change? And is it changing the relationship between infrastructure pros and application developers and application development heads? >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So kind of comes from two different angles. So number one, from the extent that every software development organization becomes more and more of a DevOps organization and they want to be able to deliver value, the experience, the velocity around the applications to production, as they go through those code pipelines through the DevOps practices, they need to be able to automatically provision out test environments, they need to be able to automatically provision out the pre stage and then automatically promote the applications into production environments. And that's what why it's so important, for example, as we as we mentioned earlier about the answerable plugins that allow the configuration of the network in support of application DevOps teams. The second thing that we find with the network engineers themselves, to the extent we've defined everything as software defined. We have this rich set of digital services that we're starting to manage in these infrastructures and through the controller that programability, the controller, network engineers are having to evolve their capability. And so, you know, we're really excited that the show that Susie Wee, who leads our DevNet program introduced a whole new category of offerings in support of how you start to become both not only a network engineer, but also development aware through for example, the DevNet automation exchange, by making DevNet certifications available through Cisco certifications. And by hosting these curated communities, where we're able to contribute new applications that run on top of our controllers. We're able to contribute new integrations, new automation, logic, new AI, ml logic, everything that's possible. And by curating it, it means it's curated code, but then it's stored in very common repositories like GitHub. It's still really excited with everything she's doing. If Cisco is going to prime the pump with initially right with apps and code started-- >> We've been priming the pump. But we've actually over the last little bit, we've developed a number of partnerships. So we have over 25 partners that have built value added applications and integrations for example, DNA center, we have a number of partners that have actually taken DNA center and wrapped it with a new kind of a new service offering a solution offering to the network. I'll give you a great example. So one of our partner that Tall tale. So what they've done is they've taken DNA Center at the core and our ability to quickly provision wireless infrastructure. And they've wrapped it with a hook telling solution for Convention Center. So think about a convention center, you have a large space, multiple concurrent shows, every one of them setting up their own wireless network with their own SSID. And so the ability to set these up, tear these down, resolve problems quickly in these high density spaces. And they built out completely as a solution on top of the programability of DNA center and our IBM infrastructure. So it's a very exciting time. >> Alright, so Jeff, some new things announced but I also want you to touch on I believe, about a year ago, API and programability was launched. What lessons learned? What feedback from the customers? Give us the update. >> Yeah, so we launched the programability. And as we mentioned before, it's a kind of a very broad ecosystem of capability. Now, the first thing about, programability is really meant to do a couple of key things. One, and probably most important, is to enable all of our customers to be able to make sure that everything's fit for purpose. So how do we integrate into their existing enterprise ecosystems. And so we know we're API first, we have SDK sample apps, we have a bunch of out of the box integrations that use all these SDK for example, integrations with service now and others. And so that's new. The second thing that we're doing with all of the program abilities, we're using it to enable the community. So the challenges we all know, in technology spaces, is that the rate of innovation continues to expand. It's like innovation is on the sphere. You know, it's the surface area of the sphere. And as every year progresses, that surface area gets bigger. The rate of innovation gets bigger and the ability to keep up with that, exceeds the capacity of most organizations. So the best way to harness that is a community based approach. And if you don't have communities, if you don't have programability, if you don't take that strategic approach, it's very hard to stay current and relevant to the market of the future. So that's another big thing that we're really excited by is being able to track that community and then an ecosystem of partners in development. >> Great, Jeff, want to just give you the final word, a lot going on in your space, any final customer takeaways or things you want people to walk away from your team from Cisco Live 2019. >> Yeah, so the present thing that I'm most excited by is that as we look at the transformation of networks, from kind of the device centricity to how do we manage segmentation in these multi domain fabrics. And do that in support of ensuring quality of experience, so the bandwidth and the latency and support of the applications. Ensuring the segmentation and the secure, being able to minimize the attack surface on these new infrastructures by driving segmentation through the fabric. It really takes kind of a systems approach to this, which is how we bring the intent based network together with, for example, the new Cat9K family from Cisco and then bringing DNA centered the controller together. By bringing those two things together. We're really helping to change the entire architecture of the industry for the next 20 years. So very excited to be here. Thank you guys. >> Excellent. >> Dave: You are welcome. >> Well, Jeff Schafer, really appreciate all the updates. Congratulations on what's going there. For Dave volante, Dave, you have a final word to say. >> Well go Bruins is the only thing I can think about right now Stu. >> That's what I was expecting you to say. So Dave Volante I'm Stu Miniman. We back, getting towards the end of three days wall to wall coverage here from San Diego, for Cisco Live 2019. Thanks for watching the Cube (techy music)

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in Bahrain, for the exclusive CUBE coverage of AWS Summit here in the region. Obviously, huge news, Amazon's having a region here, a full region, that's going to create a lot of connections, new opportunities, and hopefully make the life easier for all the developers and whatnot. Great guest here, so we're just talking with Kim on camera, about all the exciting developments on Amazon. We've got Abdul Raman, who's the group EVP of tech, at the ATG, which is the Al Tayyar Travel Group, in Saudi Arabia. >> Yep. >> Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks a lot for having me. >> So, I'll quickly fast forward, you guys started in 2015, programming in the cloud, your like, we were late. I think that's actually a good time, 'cause Amazon had a lot of mature services ready. Went from zero to billions in revenue. >> Correct. >> Really big success story, that's large scale, all cloud based right? >> Yep, correct. >> Tell your story, what do you guys do, real quick, take a minute to explain your group, what you guys do, and then, what were the architectural things you decided, how did you get the growth? >> So, we are a 40 years old company, we started in 1979, we are the largest travel and tourism company in the Middle East. We went public, through our IPO in 2012. And 2015, our new board, and new management, including myself, we started building our ten-year strategy plan. And we said, we need to diversify our investment, so it mandated that we need to have an online presence. In 2015, we had a choice to build our online presence, which is very late, either on-premise using, building a data center, or we go to the cloud. We had multiple metrics including the cost efficiency, including scalability, security and so on, and all these metrics, when we compared on-premise versus cloud, cloud always win. And we selected Amazon to build our online presence. And beginning of 2015, we had zero presence, zero revenue. Our total revenue from the classic legacy systems, for the retail was almost two billion dollars. But we had zero revenue from the online. We were able, within six weeks, to build the proof of concept, and launch it immediately, and we started heavily investing in various components, from back-end, front-end, DevOps, and so on. And this year, we anticipate, we're going to be generating more than two billion riyal of revenue, that's about 450 >> Online >> Online only. >> Via cloud. >> Exactly, only on Amazon. And for us, that has been the best success story we had for years. >> It's an amazing success story actually. >> We look backward to our decision back then. >> I'll break for you, that's like actually really amazing. This is something that I think people don't really understand, what about the cloud, and certainly Amazon, and the kind of scale that you can get, if you get something right, both on the business model side and architecturally, you can be a unicorn. You're really a unicorn in revenue, that's the word that they hear in the startup world, unicorn, but mostly that's stock value, that's not actually real cash, in how many years? This is pretty phenomenal. This is the entrepreneurial dream, that is now a reality. >> Yep, that's correct. >> This is the story here. >> Exactly, and I'm happy that you mentioned that. We actually, when we started this venture, we said, to the founders, you guys are a startup. We rented out, in 2015, a garage, literally. >> Yeah, get out of the way. >> A house, A very old warehouse, we brought like, five guys, you are the core team, we told them, you are a startup, give us whatever you want to do. And it has been very successful since then. >> It's kind of like the Steve Jobs story, you got Apple, with the Mac II, and then the little group over here, you know, doing the Macintosh. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> That's your group, because you got to get out of their way, it's a mindset, I want to ask you that, that was one of my questions, but we got there a little early, but, this is a cultural shift. Cloud is a different mindset. >> Yep. >> It's not the old way of planning, team-building. >> Yep. >> It really is a different dynamic both execution wise, but team makeup. >> Correct. >> Can you share that piece of it? >> We gave our founders complete freedom, in how they're going to make up their management style. So we have a complete agile team, we have diverse geographical locations, we have people from India, developers in Egypt, in Dubai, in Saudi, and be all work and collaborate, using DevOp tools from Amazon, so we divide the work load, our product teams, weekly launch feature list. They tell us when they would like to launch every two weeks, or three weeks, a new version of the website, or the mobile apps. So, we have a completely agile development methodology, and we give our new venture a truly startup culture. >> And the key for you, if I get this right, is to have executive leadership say, we're doing this? >> Yep. >> Was that in place, did you drive that? >> Absolutely, so when our board said, told us, the new board in 2015, guys we don't have an online, go and get it, me and the CEO said, the best way to do it, is just spin off a completely different unit, completely independent, startup mentality, intro manuals, and told them, guys, sky is limit. We need to be the number one player in the Middle East. >> So, I got to dig deeper, 'cause I love, you know, it's all sexy, and great story when you say, this is how we started, and we finished strong, but as Andy Jassy would say, the CEO of AWS, the learning's in the middle, the ups and downs, as you figure things out, 'cause a lot of things about cloud, is iteration. >> Yep. >> 'Cause you have the ability to move very fast, and you get smart people together, so there's a glorious start and a glorious outcome, but in the middle is the experimentation, that's where the real work gets done. Can you share some of the learnings? Was it a technology selection? Did you really, do you have more queuing, more database, as you start to play with Amazon, this becomes, actually, a business process. >> Our biggest, yeah. >> Playing with the different pieces and which services are right for which process. Can you share something? >> Correct. So our biggest challenge was finding the right skillset, who are people who understand how Amazon, AWS, works. In the Middle East, we don't have that many skillset, or skillful people, so we had to wait, train the people, send them to Amazon workshops, be very patient with the mistakes, we don't mind people refactoring all the old code. Every month we start from scratch. We were very aware that this is, what we are doing, is never been done before in the Middle East. And what we have developed, in terms of, for example, the big data, the big data platform we build today, is one of the largest, we are processing terrabytes of data every week. It's one of the largest in the Middle East. The number of developers we have today, more than 500, working on AWS. I don't think any company in the Middle East, have that number of developers, working on this platform. So we're very proud that we gave our developers the trust and we are aware that you need to fail fast, learn, and quickly adapt. >> And it's a contagious mindset too, when you start seeing success. >> Yep. >> So talk about some of the architectural, talk about the stack that you're using. Obviously, you must be using a variety of the Amazon goodness, EC2, that's pretty obvious, are you guys using the queuing, are you using Kinesis? How you, can you talk about some of the architectural things, if you can? >> Yep, so we have, the front-end that we have today, is completely built on Node.js and AngularJS, so it's very fast, very agile. Our back end is built on Java, most of the code built on Java. We have multiple messaging buses, that asynchronous mode, so whenever there is something that needs to be given to a certain component, we don't have to wait for serial queuing. It's all parallel. At the same time, we have a lot of Auto Scaling components. One of the examples I gave earlier today, is that, we had, the beginning of this summer, we had so many marketing campaigns, and we were surprised by how successful these marketing campaigns. We have noticed, in one marketing campaign, that our demand, from our customer, have reached 300 percent, within 24 hours, and the Auto Scaling that we have in place, have been very successful. We were able to immediately meet that demand. >> Talk about how good the Auto Scaling is. Isn't that a relief? >> Absolutely. >> I mean, explain how it works because, essentially, when the demand comes in, explain how it works. >> Yep, so, just to give an example, if we had this infrastructure on-premise, we would have needed six weeks to procure a new infrastructure, install it, configure it, and we would have lost all this six weeks of revenue. >> And then, by the way, you would have lost the first 24 hour surge, then you'd go over-billed, and then wait around, and then not know if you over-provisioned. >> Absolutely. >> This is, the old way. The new way is, you configure Auto Scaling, based on policy, and then it just spins up. >> Absolutely. >> Resources. >> Absolutely. >> While you're sleeping. >> Exactly, so in a few seconds, the Auto Scaling fires up a lot of instances, and we immediately cope with the demand. >> You know, it's funny you mentioned that. One of the comments we have inside our company is, you know you're successful online, when you're making money while you're sleeping. And, you know, if you have Auto Scaling, and things of that nature, these things are programmatic, this is what elastic is all about, this is what coders, >> Yep. >> Not system administrators do >> True. >> And once they do it, they're highly motivated not to manage it again. >> Correct, absolutely. >> Again, this is back to the culture of DevOps. >> Yep, yep. >> How have you guys innovated on that piece, can you give some other examples? >> Yes, so today we have, our big data has feeds from all the buys from the big social networks, Twitter and Facebook, and also from Google, and we have all this analytical data, into our big data, and we analyze all our customer behavior, what they're looking for, what kind of destinations, holidays, business travel, and we try to adapt every two, three weeks, our product and services to meet our customer demand. Next year, we're going to be launching our machine learning, and AI infrastructure. This way, we'll be able to do real time, predictive analysis, and we will be able to serve each customer, unique, fully personalized, customized, web page and experience. We will be able to exceed our customer expectations, and we'll be able to give our customer exactly what they're looking for. >> Abdul, I got to ask you a personal question. >> Sure. >> What are you most proud of, of this success story? What are some of the things, that you look back and say, wow, we really knocked it out of the park, we did great on this, and then an example where you had a good learning experience. Maybe a trip and a fall, that was a learning opportunity. What are you most proud of? And areas that you learned the most about from, tripping and falling, and failure. >> Yep, so I think the most thing I'm proud of, is we have gathered great minds, and we have created great culture. I think great companies have great people behind them, and this, I've learned from reading the stories of Apple or Microsoft, or Google and so on. So, I think we've been very successful in this area, in the Middle East, where the resources are very scarce, and the ability to attract very smart people is very difficult, to bring them in the Middle East. And I think, we've been very successful in that regard, we've been able to gather a lot of smart people, and create great culture. >> You know, Marc Andreessen wrote that article, book about, or maybe it was a tweet, I can't even remember, the 10x engineer. >> Yep. >> And that concept is one engineer, that does cloud and DevOps right is worth ten engineers in the old world. And so, if you can collect, a selection of these 10x multipliers, that can do architecture. >> Correct. >> Now I personally believe that the full-stack developer, might be obsoleted with the cloud, or reduce the requirement for full-stack developer, but you'll still need full-stack developers for cloud, in general, but you don't need to stockpile full-stack developers. >> True, true, I agree. >> If you have good full-stack developers, you then can hire application developers >> True. >> Because the full-stack takes care of all the scale. >> Exactly, you can always repurpose those guys, and up-skill them to do something different. Instead of being a full-stack, you really want to focus on solution developer. >> Google's proven this with their SRE, if you've seen, they have operators, and developers. And this, as you scale, you're operating infrastructure, or you're writing code for applications. >> Correct. >> Alright, so what's the learnings that have been magnified for you? In the middle of the journey here, there's always the, you know, situation were, you know, you have to take care of personnel issue, or technology selection tweak or change, iteration, I won't say pivot, 'cause people don't pivot, when they're succeeding, it's just navigating through the journey. What was something that you've experienced that was magnified in the learnings, that have helped you get better? >> Yep, I believe that the multi-culture and the multi-nationalities and multi-discipline and people coming from different backgrounds. We have people from Asia, from Europe, from the U.S., in our company, and this helped having different backgrounds, different experiences, and this has helped us to build a nice, multi-dimensional solutions. And people have been able to share this experience, in a very nice way. >> That's great, Abdul, thanks so much for sharing, taking the time. >> Thank you. >> Here on theCUBE, and sharing your insight, and amazing success story, congratulations to you and your team, really love to hear these amazing success stories, essentially building from zero start, online, to billions in revenue, that's an amazing success story. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And it certainly is great. Exclusive coverage here, we are in Bahrain, this exclusive CUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @furrier, or just search my name, reach out to me, let me know what you think. Stay with us for more coverage, after this break. (techno music fades out)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas its theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage, exclusive coverage at NetApp Insight 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, with my co-host, Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Gabe Chapman, Senior Manager, NetApp HCI, and Sidney Sonnier, who's the IT consultant at 4th and Bailey, also a member of the A-Team, a highly regarded, top-credentialed expert. Welcome to theCUBE, guys. Good to see you. >> Hey >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So love the shirt, by the way, great logo, good font, good, comes up great on the camera. >> Thank you. >> We're talking about the rise of the cloud and everything in between, kind of the segment. As a NetApp, A-Team member, and customer. It's here, cloud's here. >> Sidney: Yes >> But it's not yet big in the minds of the Enterprise because they got, it's a path to get there. So, there's public cloud going on, >> Sidney: Right. >> Hybrid clouds, everyone gets that. >> Sidney: Right. >> There's a lot of work to do at home inside a data center. >> Yes, there is, there's an extreme amount of work. And, like you said, these are very exciting times, because we have a blend of all of the technologies and being at an event like this allows us to look at those technologies, look at that fabric, look at that platform, and how we can merge all of those things into an arena that can allow any customer to dynamically move on-prem, off-prem, public cloud, private cloud, but still be able to manage and securely keep all their data in one specific place. >> Gabe, I want to get your thoughts, as he brings up a good point. Architecture's king, it's the cloud architect. Devop has gone mainstream. Pretty much, we all kind of can look at that and say, okay QED, Don, and everyone else put their plans together, but the Enterprises and the folks doing cloud, cloud service providers and everyone else, they have issues, and their plates are full. They have an application development mandate. Get more developers, new kinds of developers, retrain, re-platforming, new onboarding, open source is booming. They have security departments that are unbundling from IT in a way and fully staffed, reporting to the board of directors, top security challenges, data coverage, and then over the top is IoT, industrial IoT. Man, their plate's full. >> Sidney: Right. >> So architecture's huge, and there's a lot of unknown things going on that need to be automated. So it's a real challenge for architects. What's your thoughts. >> So you know, my thoughts about that is, I like to make this joke that there's no book called, The Joy of Menial Tasks. And there are so many of those menial tasks that we do on a day-in and day-out basis, in terms of the Enterprise, whether it's storage, whether it's virtualization, whether it's, whatever it is, right? And I think we've seen this massive shift towards automation and orchestration, and fundamentally the technologies that we're provisioning in today. APIs are king, and they're going to be kind of the focal point, as we move forward. Everything has to have some form of API in it. We have to be making a shift in a transition towards infrastructure as code. At the end of the day the hardware has relevance. It still does, it always will. But the reality is to abstract away the need for that relevance and make it as simple as possible. That's where we have things like hyper converged infrastructure being so at the forefront for so many organizations, NetApp making a foray into this space, as well, is to push, to simplify as much as possible, the day-to-day minutiae, and the infrastructure provisioning. And then, transition those resources over towards getting those next-generation data center applications up, running, and functional. >> Old adage that's been in the industry around making things simple, as our cubbies like an aircraft carrier. But when you go below the water lines, everyone in little canoes paddling, bumping into each other. These silos, if you will. >> Gabe: Right. >> And this is really the dynamic around cloud architecture, is where the operating model's changing. So, you got to be prepared to handle things differently. And in storage, the old days, is, I won't say, easy, but you guys made it easy. A lot of great customers. NetApp has a long history of, but it's not the storage anymore. It's the data fabric as you guys are talking about. It's the developer enablement. It's getting these customers to drive for themselves. It's not about the engine anymore, although, you've got to have a good engine, call it tech, hardware, software together. But the ultimate outcome is the people driving the solutions are app guys. They're just the lines of businesses are under huge pressure and huge need. >> I think you can look at it this way. It's like we're kind of data-driven. You'll see Gene talk about that as part of our messaging. We can no longer be just a storage company. We need to be a data company and a data management organization as we start to have those conversations. Yes, you're going to go in there and talk to the storage administrations and storage teams, but there are 95% of the other people inside of the Enterprise, inside information technology, within different lines of business. They're the ones that we have the most relevant discussions with. That's where our message probably resonates more strongly in the data-driven aspect, or the management, or analytics, and all those other spaces. And I think that's the white space and growth area potential for NetApp, is the fact that we can go in there and have very authoritative discussions with customers around their data needs, and understanding governance. You have things like GPRD, and AMIA. That's a giant open ecosystem for, it has so many requirements and restrictions around it, and everybody's just now starting to wrap their head around it. So building a program around something like that, as well. So there's challenges for everybody. And there's even challenges for vendors like ourselves, because we had, we were mode one. Now we're mode two. So it's kind of like making that transition. And the old speeds, the speeds were always, hey, how fast can you go, what's the files look like, with replication, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got solid, solid state storage. You got SolidFire. Now people want outcomes as a service. Not outcomes anymore, like a cliché, things are happening very dynamically. And last week at Big Data NYC, our event, around the big data world, you couldn't get anymore clear that there's no more room for hype. They want real solutions now. Realtime is critical. And, now watching the keynotes here at NetApp, it's not speed that's featured, although there's a lot of work going on under the hood, it's really about competitive advantage. You're hearing words like data as a competitive advantage. >> Sidney: Yes. >> Sidney, you're in the field, you're in the front lines. Make sense of this. >> The sense that we have to make is, we made up some great points. >> Gabe: Yes. >> Getting the business engaged is one thing, because you still, with the cloud and the cloud architecture, you still have a lot of individuals who are not necessarily sold on it, all the way. So even from a technical perspective. So those guys that are down in the bottom of the boat, so to speak, you still have to kind of convince them because they feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. They have not all the way accepted it. The business is kind of accepted it in pockets. So being, having been on a customer's side and then going to more of a consulting side of things, you understand those pain points. So by getting those businesses engaged and then also engaging those guys to say, listen, it's freeing, the relevance of cloud architecture is not to eliminate a position, it's more to move the mundane tasks that you were more accustomed to using and move you closer to the business so that you can be more effective, and feel more of a participant, and have more value in that business. So that's-- >> So it's creating a value role for the-- >> Right, Right. >> The nondifferentiated tasks >> Absolutely. >> That were being mundane tasks, as you called them. >> Yes. >> You can then put that person now on, whether analytics or ... >> All those IoT things like you were mentioning on those advance projects, and use and leverage the dynamic capability of the cloud being able to go off-prem or on-prem. >> Alright, so what's the guiding principle for a cloud architecture? We'll have to get your thoughts on this because we talked about, in a segment earlier, with Josh, around a good devops person sees automation opportunities and they jump on it like a grenade. There it is, take care of that business and automate it. How do you know what to automate? How do you architect around the notion of we might be continually automating things to shift the people and the process to the value? >> I think what it boils down to is the good cloud architect looks and sees where there are redundancies, things that can be eliminated, things that can be minimized, and sees where complexity is, and focuses to simplify as much of it as possible, right? So my goal has always been to abstract away the complexity, understand that it's there and have the requirements and the teams that can functionally build those things, but then make it look to you as if it were your iPhone, right? I don't know how the app store works. I just download the apps and use it. A good cloud architect does the same thing for their customers. Internally and externally, as well. >> So where does NetApp fit in there, from a product perspective? As a cloud architect, you're always wondering what should I build versus what should I buy? When I look at the open source projects out there, I see a ton of them. Should I go out and dive head deep into one of these projects? Should I look towards a vendor like NetApp to bring to bear that simplified version? Where is the delineation for those? >> So the way we see it is traditionally, there's kind of four consumption models that exists. There's an as-a-service model, or just-in-time model. There are, we see converged, hyper converged as a consumption continuum that people leverage and utilize. There are best-of-breach solutions. Because if I want an object store, I want an object store, and I want it to do exactly what it does. That's an engineering solution. But then there's the as-a-service, I mean, I'm sorry, there's a software-defying component, as well. And those are the, kind of the four areas. If you look at the NetApp product lines, we have an ONTAP set of products, and we have an Element OS set of products, and we have solutions that fit into each one of those consumption continuums, based on what the customer's characteristics are like. You may have a customer that likes configurability. So they would look at a traditional FlexPod with a FAS and say that that's a great idea for me for, in terms of provisioning infrastructure. You may get other customers that are looking at, I want the next-generation data center. I want to provide block storage as a service. So they would look at something like SolidFire. Or, you have the generalist team that looks at simplicity as the key running factor, and time-to-value. And they look at hyper converged infrastructure. So there's a whole set. For me, when I have a conversation with a customer around build versus buy, I want to understand why they would like to build it versus buy it. Because I think that a lot of times, people think, oh, I just download the software and I put it on a box. I'm like, well, right, that's awesome. Now you're in the supply-chain management business. Is that your core competency? Because I don't think it is, right? And so there's a whole bunch of things. It's like firmware management and all these things. We abstract away all of that complexity. That's the reason we charge up for a product, Is the fact that we do all that heavy lifting for the customer. We provide them with an engineered solution. I saw a lot of that when we really focused significantly on the OpenStack space, where we would come up and compete against SEP. And I'm like, well how many engineers do you want to dedicate to keeping SEP up and running? I could give you a turnkey solution for a price premium, but you will never have to dedicate any engineers to it. So that's the trade-off. >> So on that point, I just want to followup. A followup to that is you vision OpenStack, which, big fans of, as you know, we love OpenStack. In the beginning, the challenge with the dupe in OpenStack early on, although that kind of solved, the industry's evolved, is that the early stage was the cost of ownership problem. Which means you had the early tire kickers. Early pioneers doing to work. And they iterated through it. So the question around modernization, which came up as a theme here, what are some modernization practices that I could take as a potential customer, or customer of NetApp, whether I'm an existing customer or a future customer, I want to modernize but I don't want to, I want to manage cost of ownership. And I want to have an architect that's going to allow me to manage my data for that competitive advantage. So I want the headroom of know that it's not just about putting a data link out there, I got to make data realtime, and I don't know when and where it's going to be available. So I need kind of like a fabric or a layer, but I got to have a modern infrastructure. What do I do, what's the playbook? >> So that's where that data fabric, again, comes in. It's like one of the keynotes we heard earlier in the General Session yesterday. We have customers now who are interested in buying infrastructure like we buy electricity. Or like we buy Internet service at home. So by us having this fabric, and it being associated with a brand like NetApp, we're, it's opening up to the point where, what do you really want to do? That's the question we come to you and ask. And if you're into the modernization, we can provide you all the modernization tools right within this fabric, and seamlessly transition from one provider to the next, or plug into another platform or the next, or even put it on-prem. Whatever you want to do. But this will allow the effective management of the entire platform in one location, where you don't have to worry about a big team. You can take your existing team, and that's where that internal support will come in and allow people to kind of concentrate and say, oh, this is some really interesting stuff. Coming from the engineering side of things, being on that customer side, and when you go into customers, you can connect with those guys and help them to leverage this knowledge that they already have because they're familiar with the products. They know the brand. So that makes it more palatable for them to accept. >> So from the cloud architect's perspective, as you look at it, you look at the data-driven fabric or data fabric, and you're like, wow, this is a great idea. Practically, where's the starting point? Is this a set of products? Is it an architecture? Where do I start to bite into this apple? >> So ultimately, I think, you look at it, and I approach it the same way, I would say, like, I can't just go and buy devops. >> Right. >> Right, but data fabric is still, it's a concept, but it's enabled by a suite of technology products. And we look at NetApp across our portfolio and see all the different products that we have. They all have a data fabric element to them, right? Whether it's a FAS, and Snapmirror and snapping to, and ONTAP cloud, it's running in AWS. Whether it's how we're going to integrate with Azure, now with our NFS service that we're providing in there, whether it's hyper converged infrastructure and the ability to move data off there. Our friend Dave McCrory talked about data having gravity, right, he coined that term. And it does, it does have gravity, and you need to be able to understand where it sits. We have analytics in place that help us craft that. We have a product called OCI that customers use. And what it does, it gives them actionable intelligence about where their data sits, where things may be inefficient. We have to start making that transition to, not just providing storage, but understanding what's in the storage, the value that it has, and using it more like currency. We heard George talk about data as currency, it really is kind of the currency, and information is power, right? >> Yeah, Gabe, I mean Gabe, this is right on the money. I mean cryptocurrency and blockchain is a tell sign of what's coming around the corner. A decentralized and distributed environment that's coming. That wave is way out there, but it's coming fast. So you, I want you to take a minute to talk about the cloud component. >> Sidney: Sure. >> Because you mentioned cloud. Talk about your relationship to the clouds, because multi cloud is coming, too. It's not yet there yet, but just because you have a cloud, something in every cloud means multi cloud in the sense of moving stuff around. And then talk about the customer perspective. Because if I'm a customer, I'm saying to myself, okay, I have NetApp, I got files everywhere, I've got ONTAP, they understand the management game, they know how to manage data on-prem, but now I got this cloud thing going on, and I got this shiny new toy start-up over there that's promised me the moon. But I got to make a decision. You're laughing, I know you're thinking about it. This is the dilemma. Do I stay with what I know? >> Right. >> And what I know, is that relevant for where I'm going? A lot of times start-ups will have that pitch. >> Oh, yeah. >> Right >> So address the cloud and then talk about the impact of the customer around the choice. >> Ultimately, it boils down to me in many respects. When I have a conversation with a customer, if I'm going to go for the bright and shiny, right, there has to be a very compelling business interest to do so. If I've built a set of tools and processes around data governance, management, implementation, movement, et cetera, around a bunch of on-premises technologies and I want that same effect or that same look and feel in the public cloud, then that's how we transition there. I want to make it look like I'm using it here locally but it's not on my site, it's somewhere else. It's being managed by somebody else, from a physical standpoint. I'm just consuming that information. But I also know I have to go back and retool everything I've spent in the last 15 and 20 years building because something new and neat comes along. If that new and neat thing comes along, it abstracts away, or it makes a significant cost reduction or something like that, then obviously, you're going to validate that or look at and vet that technology out. But reality is, is that we kind of have these-- >> Well, they don't want to recode, they don't want to retool, they'll rewrite code, but if you look at the clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google, top three in my mind, >> Sidney: Right. >> They all implement everything differently. They got S3 over there, they got it over here, so like, I got it resting on-prem but then I got to hire a devops team that's trained for Azure, Sidney, this is the reality. I mean, evolution might take care of this, but right now, customers have to know that. >> We're at a point right now where customers, businesses we go to, realtime is very important. Software as a service is the thing now. So if you have a customer who is just clicking on a button, and if they can't see that website or whatever your business is, that's a problem. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose customers, you're going to lose revenue. So what you have to do is, as a business, discover what you have internally. And once you discover that and really understand it as a business, not just the tech team, but the business actually understands that. Move that forward and then blend some cloud technology in that with a data fabric, because you're leveraging what you already have. Most of the time, they usually have some sort of NetApp appliance of some sort. And then some of the new appliances that we do have, you can either say, have a small spin, put it next to an old appliance, or use some of the OCI, or something of that nature, to help you migrate to a more dynamic, and the thing about it is, is to just make it more a fluid transition. That's what you're looking to do. Uptime is everything. >> Yeah. >> Totally. >> This fabric will allow you to have that uptime so that you can propel your business and sustain your business. Because you want to be able to still use what you have, and still get that ROI out of that technology, but at the same token, you want to be more dynamic than the competition, so that you can increase that business and still grow the business, but now lose any business. >> Sidney, you bring up a good point. In fact, we should do a followup segment on this, because, what I'm hearing you say, and I've heard this many times in theCUBE, but it's happening, and certainly, we're doing our part on theCUBE to help, but the tech guys, whether they're ops or devs, they're becoming more business savvy. They've got to get closer to the business. >> Sidney: You have to. >> But they don't want to get an MBA, per se, but they have to become street MBA. >> Sidney: Right. >> They got to get that business degree through scar tissue. >> Yes. You can't just be the tech anymore, you have to understand why your business is making this effort, why it's investing this technology, why they would look to go to the public cloud, if you can't deliver a service, and try to emulate that. We've seen that time and time again, the concept of shadow IT, and a shift away from resources. And if you want to be relevant longterm, and not just the guy that sits in the closet, and then plugs in the wires, start learning about your business. Learn about how the business is run and how it generates revenue and see what you can do to affect that. >> Yeah, and the jobs aren't going away. This nonsense about automation killing jobs. >> No, it's not. >> And they use the mainframe as an example, not really relevant, but kind of, but there are other jobs. I mean, look at cyber security, huge data aspect, impact story. >> Sure, it's huge. >> That paradigm is changing realtime. So good stuff, a lot of good business conferences we should do a followup on. I'll give you guys a final word in this segment. If you could each weigh in on what cloud architects should be doing right now. I mean, besides watching theCUBE, and watching you guys here. They got to have the 20-mile stare. They got to understand the systems that are in place. It's almost like an operating system model. They got to see the big picture. Architecting on paper seems easy, but right now it's hard. What's your advice for cloud architects? >> I mean, I say continue to follow the trends. Continue to expose yourself to new technologies. I mean, I'm really interested in things like serverless and those type technologies, and how we integrate our platforms into those types of solutions. Because, that's kind of the next wave of things that are coming along, as we become more of an API-driven ecosystem, right? So if it's infrastructure, if it's code, if it's everything is just in time instance of spin up, how do I have the communications between those technologies? You've just got to stay well ahead of the curve and, you know ... >> John: Sidney, your thoughts? >> My thoughts are along those lines. Not only from a technical perspective but also like you were talking about, that business perspective. Understand your business needs. Because even though, and be able to provide a portfolio, or a suite of tools that will help that business take that next step. And that's where that value. So it's kind of like a blend. You're more of a hybrid. Where you're coming in, not only as a technical person, but you're coming in to assist the business and develop it and help it take it's next step. >> John: And IT is not a department, anymore, it's everywhere. >> No it's not, not. >> It's integrated. >> It is the business. >> Yes. >> Guys, great conversation here on the future of the cloud architect, here inside theCUBE at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, theCUBE's coverage. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music) (fast and furious music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer and we're at VMworld 2017. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. The show's hashtag is #VMworld. There's also a lot of sub-hashtags, so if I was going to make this one the VMworld three word, it's developers, developers, developers. Happy to bring onto the program first time guest Byron Schaller, who is the DevOp's practice lead at RoundTower and Rebecca Fitzhugh, who's Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, Byron, I want to start with you. Both of you I've known through the community for a bunch of years but tell ya, how long have you called yourself a developer and, you know, tell us a little bit about what you do these days. >> These days I'm more of a friend to developers, I think, than an actual real developer myself but I started writing code professionally 20 years ago. I've been, kind of in an Ops role, and went back into Dev, and now try to help really bridge that gap and get Ops folks to write better code, and get Dev folks to have some more sympathy and empathy I guess for the Ops side as well. Try to get them to play nice together. >> Yep, but Byron, those of us who haven't been in tech in a while, last time I was coding we called it programming. (Byron laughing) So, I thought that shift happened like 15 years ago. But, Rebecca, tell us a little bit about your background, how you fit into the DevOps community. >> So I would say I am more of Dev adjacent. So I work in Technical Marketing as an Engineer at Rubrik, so while I do write some code and help with some of the integrations, I'm primarily public facing and helping evangelize our software, and work hand-in-hand with the developers as well. >> Absolutely, and maybe talk a little bit about that, you know, we know the Virtualization community, what's different about the developer community, and DevOps versus kind of the traditional administrators? >> One of the things that I've noticed that, in my opinion, is the difference between the events, like comparing VMworld to a DevOpsDay. VMworld is very technically focused, a lot of time. And when I go to DevOpsDays, I always notice they make an effort to show sessions on culture, and to talk a lot about culture of development, and what we can do better as a community. >> What's the connection here, between VMworld and the developer community, right? We're the VMworld has been, I dunno, how many VMworld's have there been Stu? We've been, there's been 15 of them or something? At least. So, very operationally focused, IT people who call themselves IT, operators maybe, even broader than that, Enterprise Architects, and now, we've been talking about DevOps for a few years. So, maybe, Byron, what's the relationship of DevOps to the VMware community? >> It really comes down to the API integration. And at what point do you stops being an Ops person if you're writing a bunch of API code, and you become a developer. That's become a lot fuzzier lately. >> Are you saying Ops people have to become developers? >> They don't have to, but a lot of them are going that way. There's API explorers now that make it really easy to write rest calls and things like that to kick off jobs, and it just makes their lives easier to adopt that trend. It's not that they have to, but if they want to, it's definitely there and moreso than it ever has been. >> Yeah, I definitely think that we're seeing more and more large enterprises, Microsoft, VMware and so on, moving away from kind of this proprietary model, and more into an open model where they want their APIs to be consumed, they want you to help improve their product, and they want you to write code that integrates with their software. >> I have another question about DevOps, right? So, developer plus operations, and breaking down that wall. Can you do DevOps if you don't Dev, right? There are IT shops that just consume packaged software, and they run them, and they do things in the cloud, and they do everything else, but that particular company doesn't make bespoke software, at least they don't think they do. So, can you do DevOps without Dev? >> No. >> Okay. >> So, it really comes down to the fact of most everyone writes code whether they think they do or not. They may not write core business apps, but they could write a lot of other integrations, or they have off-the-shelf software that they write customized reports for, whatever, but there is something going on, something is being created. And as long as you have that thing being created, you can have a DevOps model. But I think it's a lot broader than just in-house applications at this point. >> I mean even if you were writing a script, you're writing code, right? If you're creating Power Serialized scripts or PowerShell scripts to automate something in your environment, that's code. And that would absolutely fall into that DevOps mindset. >> Speaking of the show itself, I know a couple of years ago they had a little breakout with keynotes, and they've done some sessions, my understanding there isn't a dedicated developer track or mini Dev show inside of it. So what do the developers or people do in DevOps, what's attractive to them here at the show? >> There's always the hallway track, right? And then there's the side events like the vBrownBag, things like that where you see a lot people talking about Ansible and other things like that, that you won't see on the show floor itself. And I think with the hackathon tonight, and lots of stuff like that, there's a lot of adjacent activities that are very much worthwhile. >> You mentioned the hackathon, you participated last year, if I remember right, you won, your team won the hackathon. So, tell us a little bit about that experience, this is the third year they're doing it, so-- >> It was great, I mean it was just nice to see a lot of folks in the community come together to build interesting things out of nothing, in like three hours, and that's, doing that itself is just really kind of amazing to me, but then those projects, a lot of them have carried on and gotten adoption, and now there's going to be some things created long term, because of this one interaction. I think that's just really special. >> When I've loved to see the difference between last year and this years, I felt, while last year was amazing, and seeing the people write these scripts and these codes, it felt like it was a lot of shooting from the hip, and what I've noticed this year is that there's been a lot of pre-work done by these teams, these groups, that they've been talking and communicating for weeks, planning what they're going to code tonight. That's very exciting. >> The code program Code by VMware, I think they call it, it actually is expanding, they're doing a lot to touch both developers and kind of the API side of the IT, more traditional IT side. Rebecca, one way to characterize DevOps, or one element is I say part of DevOps would be time to value, right? Rapid time to value, we don't plan for a year, sit in a war room, and like hope we don't lose our jobs when we push the button to launch, you know, the next generation of whatever we're about to launch, right? We've recognized that's a hard way to go about launching something, so instead, we're more iterative, smaller bites, faster time to value. As you go out and talk with IT pros, like again, your commercial side, right? You have a product that has fast time to value, I mean, how much of a mindshift is having to happen inside IT where you can go, "Oh no, I could set this up in an afternoon, "and maybe I could write some code around it "over the next couple weeks," rather than, "I got to plan this out for a year "before I do anything." >> Yes, I mean I think we're definitely moving from kind of a bureaucratic type of development to more of an agile, where we have to iterate, and so, like in my experience, prior to joining Rubrik, I was very involved with VMware and did lots of virtualization stuff, and you would have like one major release a year. Right, and then a couple of updates, and there's a lot of planning that would go into it, and involved, and that gave a lot of lead time. And now, like working with Rubrik, we're on like a quarterly release cycle, and so we're just constantly, so I think a lot of its mindset. So, I don't want to say it's shooting from the hip because it's not, but it's just adapting and moving forward, and then getting ready for the next thing. There's not time to question and plan, it's we're doing this, and let's do it now. >> The thing I'd noticed is just in conversations and in the keynote, APIs were brought up more this year than I remember in previous years, you know you brought up the VMware Code Team, they've been doing the flings now for a couple years, so even if it might not be developer centric, it seems like they're adopting some of the things that you know, are attractive to what the developer community would do. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of really good marketing going on there too, especially around flings. Flings are great, and there are so many useful tools there, that people just don't know about until they get the press, and now that they're talking about it, there's a really great community built up around it, especially with VMware Code, I think is a great initiative, there's an awesome Slack channel that they have, and just getting the word out, more than word of mouth, and getting that stuff in the keynotes is so key to helping reach everybody else who's not already there. Word of mouth only goes so far when you have like the CEOs getting up there and talking about this as a core initiative, that's really important, we need to see more of that. >> Anything specific around the flings you could highlight, like you know, this one was really cool and it turned into something, or? >> The HTML5 client was a fling forever, and it was so much better than the actual web client. >> And now it's becoming the actual official supported client, and the older client is going away, finally. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's happy about that. >> It's very, there's stats feeder, is a super cool one that not many people know about but you can get all this information out of your vCenter, pump it into some kind of like noSQL database, and make these really creative reports, that just, there wasn't a way to do that before that existed, and something like that's really cool. >> Byron, as you go out and talk to IT pros and IT departments, you're trying to be a trusted adviser, you're bringing along a team from your company, are there elements of cultural change or kind of adaptability that when you go into a conference room and start giving your first presentations, and the questions that get asked, do you sometimes you go, what are the signs that you're going to go, "Oh this is going to go well," versus "Hoo boy, these folks are not ready yet." >> So we try to ask some probing questions to kind of pick a fight to be totally, not really pick a fight, but see who's going to take the bait, right? And then how communication resolves itself. And seeing that pattern happen, you know, okay, there's something missing or something as far as how the team constructed that leads to this animosity, right? Find that out as fast as possible, and then find a way to remediate that, is how you get that cultural change. But until you actually see it organically, it's hard to say well you know, just be more empathetic and hug it out, that all sounds nice, but you've got to really find what the dynamic is that's causing the tension or breakdown. >> John: Are there any particular signs that you could point to-- >> Yelling is a good one. (laughing) >> On a positive sign or a negative sign? >> Both sometimes. >> That group's not invited to this meeting, right? >> It's just a lot of finger pointing, it's a lot of you can tell they don't talk. And a lot of it starts with just having a conversation on a daily basis of what do you do, what's your job, how can I understand that, have that empathy, cause until you have that empathy, no one's going to care. And once you build up that, and get this understanding that, "Oh, what you do is valuable to the business as well," then people start to actually, you know, work, or I dunno, be friends or something at work, I don't know, it's really important to build that up. >> Byron, your title has DevOps in it, because you're addressing a function, but should there be people inside IT groups with a DevOps in their title, if you're here at VMware, and you're kind of coding, and you're a little bit interested in that, should you be looking for something, a title of DevOps? >> I think anybody can do DevOps. And I think that's something that we need to change our mindset on. I hear a lot of people say, "Why would I join the VMware Code community, "I don't write code," and it's, anybody can write code. It doesn't have to be the most beautiful elegant code in the world, you just creating a script, you've done it. Now contribute. Put your work on Github, let other people use it. You consume from other people, it's a community of sharing, share. >> That's great. >> It's all about contribution, right? It doesn't have to be code, you can write documentation, you can work on bug reports, there's so many things you can do that are not code related, that people can give back with. That's the important thing there. >> Reminds me a lot of just some of the discussion we've been having about community in general for a while. Rebecca, we're here at a big show, 20,000 plus people, do you spend all your time at meet-ups though, how do you deal with reaching kind of a broad community, or is it kind of smaller, more intimate things? >> I try and balance both, because I have obviously work obligations and I have speaking obligations, and then, but I do try and spend time one-on-one with people as well as at group functions, so I personally like to get out of my comfort zone, so like that was one of the big reasons I attend certain events, like the hackathon last year. My code is rudimentary. I don't want to pretend like I'm some amazing developer, but that was me getting out of my comfort zone and interacting with that community, because I knew that was a community I wanted to be more a part of. >> I guess the question is too, from like, your marketing role-- >> Mm-hmm. >> Do you have to go reach out to those thousands of meet-ups or, you know, how do you balance that kind of small versus large? >> So, yeah, I think like in a large group it becomes sort of an echo chamber in a way, where it's more of you talking at them than talking with them. I personally prefer to be in smaller type sessions, as well as one-on-one type discussions. I think we get more out of it that way. >> You mentioned DevOpsDays, that's a group independently organized, all over the world, kind of a meet-up user group on steroids all day, you've been to some of those as you said and that-- >> Yes, so one of the things I noticed from DevOpsDays that's different than a lot of user groups, is that a lot of user groups will jam pack the schedule, and you might have a 15 minute break there, and you have lunch, and that's it. Maybe a social hour afterwards. DevOpsDays, a lot of them create free spaces, of an hour, two hours, and sometimes, I think the one, I'm attending one in Detroit, in September, and I was looking at the schedule, and I think there's a three hour block of just talk to people, go and find your little community of people, talk to them, spend time with them, and then move onto another community and get to know each other. >> Byron, anything in open source community, and how it is different than, a little bit maybe, than this one here? >> The V community, if you want to call it that, it has been built up, is very unique, from an enterprise software standpoint, no other enterprise software company has what VMware has with that. It is a lot like the open source community, you go to something like OzCon or something, there's the same kind of interactions, the same kind of feel that we have here. >> John: Helping each other. >> Yes, I mean it's all about reaching out saying, "I don't know how to do this, someone help!" And, people saying, "Okay, this worked for me. "This hasn't." And just that feedback loop, and once you pay that forward to five more people, that's just really really great. You see it with the hang space here, the community, the sessions and things here, there are just so many people that want to volunteer and give back, there's not enough time to hear them all speak. And that's awesome. >> That's why we have things like vBrownBag. >> Yeah, right. >> Contribute there. >> There's so many different aspects of what's going on at the show, I'm curious if you have any, if you were talking to VMware and say, "Hey, next year, VMworld, you know, you should do this." Anything you'd like to add? >> Hmm. That's a really good question. >> That is a very good question. >> I mean firstly I'd love to see more developer track type items, especially as VMware is moving towards more consumable APIs in their platform, so I'd like to see more in that realm. >> Yeah, there could always be more work around that. I think I'd like to see more interaction, from the VMware Devs themselves. Talking about stuff going on, inside VMware, as much as they can I guess. That'd be super interesting, you don't see a lot of behind the curtains stuff here. And I think that'd be neat to see more of that. >> Yeah, I always love to look at the kind of similarities and differences between those communities. We do, we've done Red Hat Summit for a number of years, I'm going to be at the Open Source Summit, you know, coming up soon, we're at Amazon re:Invent, where the enterprise folks and the developers always argue about which keynote for them versus the other person, and striking that balance is always tough. Well, Byron, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us here, really appreciate your insights onto what's happening in the community, and thanks for all you're doing there. For John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we've got lots more coverage here in three days of theCUBE at VMworld 2017. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Silicon Angle Media's theCUBE, worldwide leader in live, enterprise tech coverage here at DockerCon 2017, Austin, Texas. Happy to have on the program, a guest that's been on before. Mazda Marvasti, he's the CEO of appLariat, and he's brought along a managed service provider of his, also a customer of his, Thomas Chamtie, who is the founder of KMicro Technologies. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you sir. >> Alright, so you're both from Orange County, come down here to Austin, I have some local friends of mine they're like, God all these tech conferences are coming down here. I'm like, this seems to be where open source kind of gathers. There's the OSCON coming in a couple weeks, I'll be back later this year for Cube-con, come there. First time for both of you. Just quick, how's the show been for you so far? >> It's been really well received in terms of our product announcement and our company, and not just open source, enterprise. Enterprise applications are all over the place. For us, doing a launch at DockerCon was very appropriate because our company is all about taking your existing applications, new applications and taking them through the journey of not just into the cloud, but into the container era, running on a modern container environment. So it's been well received so far. >> Mazda, it takes some really interesting stuff this week and even the last few months when I've been hearing the cloud space. We've been talking about micro services and cloud-native and everything like that. But customers have, you talk of the enterprise, they've got hundreds if not thousands of existing applications. Therefore, what about them? Ben Golub got on stage, said, "it's not a bimodal world, we need to give them platform, to be able to move forward." That ties into the vision of your company right? >> Oh absolutely. The real problems and the real opportunities are with the existing applications. How do you get those applications same kinds of capabilities that you're trying to give brand new applications being done with microservices. That's why Thomas with KMicro, they're a managed service provider that they're working with customers along the same journey. >> Thomas, before we get into the solution with appLariat, just give us the thumbnail, your background and your company. >> Basically, KMicro as a company is a three year old company, we do managed services for mid to large sized customers. I, myself have been doing IT for about 20 years. Not the fresh guy on the block. But we were introduced to appLariat, when we were looking to do a little project for a client of ours. They had a specific legacy application that they needed to modernize. We're looking for a solution for them that would help them modernize the application, at the same time stay up to date with the latest technologies. Docker seemed, in addition to containerizing, all their application was the solution, was the way to go for them. That's when we were introduced to appLariat and worked together on that project and we've been working with them since then. We love working with these guys, their solution seems to solve a huge issue for a lot of our clients and we look forward to actually doing that again and again for more clients. >> I mean, the challenge here is how does KMicro repeatably do that across customers? So you have consistency which is the same thing when you look at an enterprise. Yeah, I can hand craft an application so that it's containerized and I can deploy it. But how do I get repeatability and consistency across different teams across my applications? That's the scale issue, that you can't use muscle memory to move your applications into the cloud. >> Mazda you're totally right. I've watched the app modernization environment and when you go say, oh what's the killer app, what's the number one thing, it's custom. And that's not scalable, that's not repeatable. Maybe unpack for us a little bit about what you guys bring, that journey along there and how you fit in that spectrum. >> Again, the key is, not to be reliant upon software artists to sit there and script away per application, how does this thing get containerized? What you want to bring is automation and uniformity across these applications. So that you have the same type of consistency for the applications. Then not only that, but when you deploy it, how does the orchestrator manage those deployed containers? Because if you're not going to run it in on an orchestrator, it becomes really difficult to manage it. We use Kubernetes from the backend to actually orchestrate these containers but then you have to have a policy layer that manages that entire infrastructure. Kubernetes is great at knowing that to do, it just doesn't know when to do it. So we provide that when capability. Again, that's a solution that a managed service provider can essentially say okay, now I can repeatably do this across my customers and manage the environments in a similar manner. Versus having to do one-offs. That's what we're trying to get away from. >> Thomas, could you maybe, if it's possible, walk us through a little bit that project with the customer. How long it took, how many people were involved. Where some of the heavy lifting is there. Anything that you've done this, to say oh okay, here's what we've learned for the next time. >> So one of the clients is a GPS tracking company. And they have the DevOps team that were struggling maintaining their code. They have code all over the place. Mazda was more involved on this project than I might have been, so he'll chime in on that. But what we walked out at the end with this client, is that they had a platform that their DevOp could go to and test their code against without having to spend tremendous amount of time or effort into putting all the pieces together. The application will actually do all of that for you from A to Z. They didn't have to worry about storage or processing or memory or any of that stuff. It was just there for them to use. In a second, or a few seconds, they could just conduct an environment, test their code against it, and all was said, when they're done with it, it just shuts down. And it scales up as well, so if they needed to do some testing against an application or a code, they would do the test and then shut down the environment and they're ready to go. And move on. >> Right, the primary use case was that I'm spending way too much money on AWS for DevTest. Because developers would go spin up the VMs and use it to develop and do some unit testing and then the VMs will just live there. So ongoing, continuous basis. Once we put the AWS under a Kubernetes cluster, we're then able to manage the cluster size based on usage and availability, etc. Not only that but then the IT side of the house is able to govern that environment for the developers. The developers don't care to go provision machines or use iAds or anything like that. They just want to deploy their applications, be able to test it and go back and modify code. That's all they care about while IT cares about where does that code go, who looks at it, how does it get tested, what is the cost infrastructure for that. By using our product to manage that AWS cluster, they were able to save 50% on their AWS costs by just managing that DevTest environment. Now we're moving it into production. Those are the kinds of use cases that really you find containerization can bring. You talk about bringing new capabilities to the apps, but it also really goes to cost savings as well. And that was something that-- >> 50% probably conservative even, I would think. We had one of the keynotes case studies this morning, I think it was Visa, was like, 90% of my environment is being utilized less than 10%. >> Mazda: Underutilized, right. >> We know that, heck, I think back, we had server sprawl, we had vm sprawl, now we have cloud sprawl. Is it the whole API economy that allows your software to be able to plug into this, manage some of these environments? How much of it is just cloud, how much is it containers allowing us to do some of this-- >> So every layer we talk about is another layer of abstraction. Cloud is an abstraction, container is an abstraction. Orchestration is an abstraction. Every time you bring these abstractions, you're introducing inefficiency into the system. It brings efficiency in terms of how you develop, how much more secure your application is, how easily you can bring your applications up and down. It brings inefficiencies in terms of these things living on. In terms of sprawl along the cloud boundaries that your applications are running. We bring the efficiency in terms of policies. That says who gets to have what where? And when does it die? Because nothing should live forever. Unless it's your production app, it should not live forever. And when should it die? Expiring those applications and then reclaiming the environment to a smaller size so that your costs are lower or giving the resource to someone else who may need to use it. >> Mazda, Dockers made a real emphasis this week about the ecosystem. Can you talk about partnering with them, how easy it is to work with them, what you're seeing over the last year or so? >> Yeah, we're primarily using the open source Docker containerization mechanism. Because that's really prevalent in the marketplace. We found the same thing in terms of using Kubernetes. Customers are looking for having a degree of control. Close source at a level where your application is running at this point is becoming really difficult. For customers to be able to manage that ability to be able to say okay, I don't have control over this part of my environment, that doesn't make any sense to me. The open source community is really come along in terms of moving the enterprises into their direction. What we're doing is that we're leveraging those open source elements so at the end of the day, we are not in the interconnect between the customer and their applications. They can always go back to those open source tools to manage the applications however they want. We're providing the orchestration layer that sits on top of those open source tools, really unifying them and bringing them together. >> Thomas, what is this whole containerization, your partnership with appLariat mean to your business? How do you expect it to change what you guys are doing? >> There's a couple of things. One of them is modernizing the applications that we talked about a minute ago. But another thing that we wanted to bring on the table and use their solution for was disaster recovery. No one had thought of real time disaster recovery without the efforts of going through a whole bunch of configuration and maintaining, a whole bunch of things. Just to have disaster recovery for a company, no matter what cloud you're in, no matter what infrastructure you use, it doesn't matter. That's when appLariat, we think, is a really good platform that we're going to build on to actually provide what we call real time disaster recovery services for our clients. I think that'll take us, that'll be pretty good for our clients and it's going to help us grow our business as well. >> Yeah, that's another one of those areas where you see a lot of managed service providers providing disaster recovery services but what that means is that they'll provide you a location in the cloud for you to have your application and then services along the lines of people. In bringing those applications to run over there. Then when there is a disaster, have to go through a lot of manual effort to get that site up and running. So what we're talking about, is that if you have your applications already containerized, you can snap shot it anywhere. Once it's snap shotted, it can come up and go down very quickly. Having that ability in terms of being able to provide disaster recovery services on a containerized application is a whole new set of capabilities that now I think it's viable for our organizations. >> Let alone the cost savings as well. Like you were talking about. The cost savings are huge. I only need to speed up the environment when needed. It doesn't have to sit idle, sitting there, costing us money or costing the client money. >> Do you see passing that savings onto your customers? >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's one of the areas that was untapped in the past and with doctoring, containerizing applications technologies, this is the next thing. This is the future of doing disaster recovery. We see it that way. And then we look for-- >> Mazda, oh sorry. >> Yeah, no worries. >> Mazda, want to give you the final word. When people leave DockerCon 2017, what do you want them to know about appLariat and the solutions you're providing. >> What I want them to know is that you don't need to become a scripting ninja to be able to containerize our applications and bring cloud native capabilities to your existing applications. You don't need to become a scripting magician. You can take your existing applications through a very easy process, get them containerized, deploy it on Kubernetes without having to know anything about the underlying infrastructure that it actually takes for those platforms to run. On an ongoing basis, as newer technologies comes along, we'll be the abstraction layer in front of the application for those customers so that they don't need to bother. Do I need to make a bet on something? Do I need to learn new technologies, do I need to upgrade my people? Keep doing what you're doing, your existing CICD process stays as is, your existing developer work levels and skillset remains as is. Everything else should be abstracted and taken away from you. >> Mazda and Thomas, thank you so much for joining us, we'll be back with lots more programming, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for IBM InterConnect 2017 exclusive Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest Dr. Angel Diaz who is the vice president of developer technology. Also you know him from the open source world. Great to see you again. >> Nice to see you. Thanks for spending time with us. >> Thank you. >> Boy, Blockchain, open source, booming, cloud-native, booming, hybrid cloud, brute force but rolling strong. Enterprise strong, if you will, as your CEO Ginni Rometty started talking about yesterday. Give us the update on what's going on with the technology and developers because this is something that you guys, you personally, have been spending a lot of time with. Developer traction, what's the update? >> Well you know if you look at history there's been this democratization of technology. Right, everything from object oriented programming to the internet where we realize if we created open communities you can build more skill, more value, create more innovation. And each one of these layers you create abstractions. You reduce the concept count of what developers need to know to get work done and it's all about getting work done faster. So, you know, we've been systematically around cloud, data, and AI, working really hard to make sure that you have open source communities to support those. Whether it's in things like compute, storage, and network, platform as a service like say Cloud Foundry, what we're doing around the open container initiatives and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to all the things you see in the data space and everywhere else. So it's real exciting and it's real important for developers. >> So two hot trends that we're tracking obviously, one's pretty obvious. That's machine learning in cloud. Really hand and glove together. You see machine learning really powering the AI, hitting IOT all the way up to apps and wearables and what not, autonomous vehicles. Goes on and on. The other one is Kubernetes, and Kubernetes, the rise of Kubernetes has really brought the containers to a whole nother level around multi-cloud. People might not know it, but you are involved in the CNCF formation, which is Kubernetes movement, which was KubeCon, then it became part of the Linux Foundation. So, IBM has had their hand in these two trends pretty heavily. >> Angel: Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Give the perspective, because the Kubernetes one, in particular, we'll come back to the machine learning, but Kubernetes is powering a whole nother abstraction layer around helping containers go to the next level with microservices, where the develop equation has changed. It's not just the person writing code anymore, a person writing code throws off an application that has it's own life in relationship to other services in the community, which also has analytics tied to it. So, you're seeing a changing dynamic on this potential with Kubernetes. How important is Kubernetes, and what is the real impact? >> No, it is important. And what there actually is, there's a couple of, I think, application or architecture trends that are fundamentally changing how we build applications. So one of them I'll call, let's call it Code First. This is where you don't even think about the Kubernetes layer. All you do is you want to write your code and you want to deploy your code, and you want it to run. That's kind of the platform. Something like Cloud Foundry addresses the Code First approach. Then there's the whole event-drive architecture world. Serverless, right? Where it has a particular use case, event-driven, standing, stuff up and down, dealing with many types of inputs, running rules. Then you have, let's say the more transactional type applications. Microservices, right? These three thing, when combined allows you to kind of break the shackles of the monolith of old application architectures, and build things the way that best suit your application model, and then come together in much more coherent way. Specifically in Kubernetes, and that whole container stuff. You think think about it, initially, when, containers have been around a long time, as we all know, and Docker did a great job in making container accessible and easy, right? And we worked really closely with them to create some multisource activities around the base container definitions, the open container initiative in the Linux Foundation. But of course, that wasn't enough. We need to then start to build the management and the orchestration around that. So we teamed up with others and started to kind of build this Kubernetes-based community. You know, Docker just recently brought ContainerD into the CNCF, as well, as another layer. They are within the equation. But by building this, it's almost just Russian doll of capability, right, you know, you're able to go from one paradigm, whether it's a serverless paradigm running containers, or having your microservices become use in serverless or having Code First kick off something, you can have these things work well together. And I think that's the most exciting part of what we're doing at Kubernetes, what we're doing in serverless, and what we're doing, say, in this Code First world. >> So, development's always been kind of an art form. How is that art form evolving and changing as these trends that you're describing-- >> Oh, that's a great, I love that. 'Cause I always think of ourselves as computer science artists. You and I haven't spoken about that. That's awesome. Yeah, because, you know, it is an art form, right? Your screen is your canvas, right, and colors are the services that you can bring in to build, and the API calls, right? And what's great is that your canvas never ends, because you have, say, a cloud infrastructure, which is infinitely scalable or something, right? So, yeah. But the definition of the developer is changing because we're kind of in this next phase of lowering concept count. Remember I told you this lowering of concept count. You know, I love those O'Reilly books. The little cute animals. You know, as a developer today, you don't have to buy as many of those books, because a lot of it is done in the API calls that you've used. You don't write sorting algorithms anymore. Guess what, you don't need to do speech to text algorithms. You don't need to do some analysis algorithms. So the developer is becoming a cognitive developer and a data science developer, in addition to a application developer. And that is the future. And it's really important that folks skill up. Because the demand has increased dramatically in those areas, and the need has increased as well. So it's very exciting. >> So the thing about that, that point about cognitive developer, is that in the API calls, and the reason why we don't buy all those books is, the codes out there are already in open source and machine learning is a great example, if you look at what machine learning is doing. 'Cause now you have machine learning. It used to be an art and a science. You had to be a great computer scientist and understand algorithms, and almost have that artistic view. But now, as more and more machine learning comes out, you can still write custom machine learning, but still build on libraries that are already out there. >> Exactly. So what does that do? That reduces the time it takes to get something done. And it increases the quality of what you're building, right? Because, you know, this subroutine or this library has been used by thousands and thousands of other people, it's probably going to work pretty well for your use case, right? But I can stress the importance of this moment you brought up. The cognitive data application developer coming together. You know, when the Web happened, the development market blew up in orders of magnitude. Because everybody's is sort of learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, you know, J2E, whatever. All the things they needed to build, you know, Web Uize and transactional applications. Two phase commit apps in the back, right? Here we are again, and it's starting to explode with the microservices, et cetera, all the stuff you mentioned, but when you add cognitive and data to the equation, it's just going to be a bigger explosion than the Web days. >> So we were talking with some of the guys from IBM's GBS, the Global Business Services, and the GTS, Global Technology Services, and interesting things coming out. So if you take what you're saying forward, and you open innovation model, you got business model stacks and technology stacks. So process, stacks, you know, business process, and then technology, and they now have to go hand-in-hand. So if you take what you're saying about, you know, open source, open all of this innovation, and add say, Blockchain to it, you now have another developer type. So the cognitive piece is also contributing to what looks like to be a home run with Blockchain going open source, with the ledger. So now you have the process and the stacks coming together. So now, it's almost the Holy Grail. It used to be this, "Hey, those business processor guys, they did stuff, and then the guys coded it out, built stacks. Now they're interdependent a bit. >> Yeah. Well I mean, what's interesting to me about Blockchain, I always think of, at this point about business processes, you know, business processes have always been hard to change, right? You know, once you have partners in your ecosystem, it's hard to change. Things like APIs and all the technology allows it to be much quicker now. But with Blockchain, you don't need a human involved in the decision of who's in your partner network as long as they're trusted, right? I remember when Jerry Cuomo and Chris Ferris, in my team, he's the chairman of the Blockchain, of the hyperledger group, we're talking initially when we kind of brought it to the Linux Foundation. We were talking a lot about transactions, because you know, that was one of the initial use cases. But we always kind of new that there's a lot of other use cases for this, right, in addition to that. I mean, you know, the government of China is using Blockchain to deal with carbon emissions. And they have, essentially, an economy where folks can trade, essentially, carbon units to make sure that as an industry segment, they don't go over, as an example. So you can have people coming in and out of your business process in a much more fluid way. What fascinates me about Blockchain, and it's a great point, is it takes the whole ecosystem to another level because now that they've made Blockchain successful, ecosystem component's huge. That's a community model, that's just like open source. So now you've got the confluence of open source software, now with people in writing just software, and now microservices that interact with other microservices. Not agile within a company, agile within other developers. >> Angel: Right. >> So you have a data piece that ties that together, but you also have the process and potential business model disruption, a Blockchain. So those two things are interesting to me. But it's a community role. In your expert opinion on the community piece, how do you think the community will evolve to this new dynamic? Do you think it's going to take the same straight line growth of open source, do you think there's going to be a different twist to it? You mentioned this new persona is already developing with cognitive. How do you see that happening? >> Yes, I do. There's two, let's say three points. The first on circling the community, what we've been trying to do, architecturally, is build an open innovation platform. So all these elements that make up cloud, data, AI, are open so that people can innovate, skills can grow, anything, grow faster. So the communities are actually working together. So you see lots of intralocks and subcommittees and subgroups within teams, right? Just say this kind of nesting of technology. So I think that's one megatrend that will continue-- >> Integrated communities, basically. >> Integrated communities. They do their own thing. >> Yeah. >> But to your point earlier, they don't reinvent the wheel. If I'm in Cloud Foundry and I need a container model, why am I going to create my own? I'll just use the open compute initiative container model, you know what I'm saying? >> Dave: And the integration point is that collaboration-- >> Is that collaboration, right. And so we've started to see this a lot, and I think that's the next megatrend. The second is, we just look at developers. In all this conversation, we've been talking about the what? All the technology. But the most important thing, even more so than all of this stuff, is the how. How do I actually use the technology? What is the development methodology of how I add scale, build these applications? People call that DevOp, you know, that whole area. We at IBM announced about a year and a half ago, at Gene Kim's summit, he does DevOps, the garage method, and we open sourced it, which is a methodology of how you apply Agile and all the stuff we've learned in open source, to actually using this technology in a productive way at scale. Often times people talk about working in theses little squads and so forth, but once you hire, say you've got 10 people in San Francisco, and you're going to hire one in San Ramon, that person might as well be on Mars. Because if you're not on the team there, you're not in the decision process. Well, that's not reality. Open source is not that way, the world doesn't behave that way. So this is the methodology that we talked about. The how is really important. And then the third thing, is, if you can help developers, interlock communities, teach them about the how to do this effectively, then they want samples to fork and go. Technology journeys, physical code. So what you're start to see a lot of us in open source, and even IBM, is provide starters that show people how to use the technology, add the methodology, and then help them on their journey to get value. >> So at the base level, there's a whole new set of skills that are emerging. You mentioned the O'Reilly books before, it was sort of a sequential learning process, and it seems very nonlinear now, so what do you recommend for people, how do they go about capturing knowledge, where do they start? >> I think there's probably two or three places. The first one is directly in the open source communities. You go to any open source community and there's a plethora of information, but more so, if you hang out in the right places, you know, IRC channels or wherever, people are more than willing to help you. So you can get education for free if you participate and contribute and become a good member of a community. And, in fact, from a career perspective today, that's what developers want. They want that feeling of being part of something. They want the merit badge that you get for being a core committer, the pride that comes with that. And frankly, the marketability of yourself as a developer, so that's probably the first place. The second is, look, at IBM, we spend a huge amount of time trying to help developers be productive, especially in open source, as we started this conversation. So we have a place, developer.ibm.com. You go there and you can get links to all the relevant open source communities in this open innovation platform that I've talked about. You can see the methodologies that I spoke about that is open. And then you could also get these starter code journeys that I spoke about, to help you get started. So that's one place-- >> That's coming out in April, right? >> That's right. >> The journeys. >> Yeah, but you can go now and start looking at that, at developer.ibm.com, and not all of it is IBM content. This is not IBM propaganda here, right? It is-- >> John: Real world examples. >> Real world examples, it's real open source communities that either we've helped, we've shepherded along. And it is a great place, at least, to get your head around the space and then you can subset it, right? >> Yeah. So tell us about, at the last couple of minutes we have, what IBM's doing right now from a technology, and for developers, what are you guys doing to help developers today, give the message from what IBM's doing. What are you guys doing? What's your North Star? What's the vision and some of the things you're doing in the marketplace people can get involved in? You mentioned the garage as one. I'm sure there's others. >> Yeah, I mean look, we are m6anically focused on helping developers get value, get stuff done. That's what they want to do, that's what our clients want to do, and that's what turns us on. You build your art, you talk, you're going back to art, you build your drawing, you want to look at it. You want it to be beautiful. You want others to admire it, right? So if we could help you do that, you'll be better for it, and we will be better for it. >> As long as they don't eat their ear, then they're going to be fine. >> It's subjective, but give value of what they do. So how do they give value? They give value by open technologies and how we've built, essentially, cloud, data, AI, right? So art, arts technology adds value. We get value out of the methodology. We help them do this, it's around DevOps, tooling around it, and then these starters, these on-ramps, right, to getting started. >> I got to ask you my final question, a more personal one, and Dave and I talk about this all the time off camera, being an older guy, computer science guy, you're seeing stuff now that was once a major barrier, whether it's getting access to massive compute, machine learning, libraries, the composability of the building blocks that are out there, to create art, if you will, it's phenomenal. To me, it's just like the most amazing time to be be a computer scientist, or in tech, in general, building stuff. So I'm going to ask you, what are you jazzed up about? Looking back, in today's world, the young guns that are coming onto the scene not knowing that we walked barefoot in the snow to school, back in the old days. This is like, it's a pretty awesome environment right now. Give us personal color on your take on that, the change and the opportunity. >> Yeah, so first of all, when you mentioned older guys, you were referring to yourselves, right? Because this is my first year at IBM. I just graduated, there's nothing old here, guys. >> John: You could still go to, come on (laughs). >> What does that mean? Look you know, there's two things I'm going to say. Two sides of the equation. First of all, the fundamentals of computer science never go away. I still teach, undergrad seminars and so forth, and you have to know the fundamentals of computer science. That does not go away because you can write bad code. No matter what you're doing or how many abstractions you have, there are fundamental principles you need to understand. And that guides you in building better art, okay? Now putting that aside, there is less that you need to know all the time, to get your job done. And what excites me the most, so back when we worked on the Web in the early 90s, and the markup languages, right, and I see some in the audience there, Arno, hey, Arno, who helped author some of the original Web standards with me, and he was with the W3C. The use cases for math, for the Web, was to disseminate physics, that's why Tim did it, right? The use case for XML. I was co-chair of the mathematical markup language. That was a use case for XML. We had no idea that we would be using these same protocols, to power all the apps on your phone. I could not imagine that, okay? If I would have, trust me, I would have done something. We didn't know. So what excites me the most is not being able to imagine what people will be able to create. Because we are so much more advanced than we were there, in terms of levels of abstraction. That's what's, that's the exciting part. >> All right. Dr. Angel Diaz, great to have you on theCUBE. Great inspiration. Great time to be a developer. Great time to be building stuff. IOT, we didn't even get to IOT, I mean, the prospects of what's happening in industrialization, I mean, just pretty amazing. Augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, machine learning, really the perfect storm for innovation. Obviously, all in the open. >> Angel: Yes. Awesome stuff. Thanks for coming on the theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you guys, appreciate it. >> IBM, making it happen with developers. Always have been. Big open source proponents. And now they got the tools, they got the garages for building. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, there's some great interviews. Be right back with more after this short break. (tech music)