>> Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. The cloud-native computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. [Techno Music] >> Hey welcome back everyone. We're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It's theCUBE's three-days coverage live, I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Greg Muscurella who's the Vice President of products at Nutanix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me John. >> Good to see you. CUBE alumni. So you guys are doing Kubernetes. You're in the throws of all the enterprise. You've got the hyper converged action. A lot of that happening here. >> Yeah. >> So what's new, what's the update? What's going on with Kubernetes and CNCF? >> Well we're using this as an opportunity to talk about the cloud data stack that we've built on top of our core HCF platform. So all the goodness that you get with the easy management. You have storage availability etc. We've layered on top of that a couple things. Certainly, we have our own Kubernetes distribution called Karbon. Very easy to play. >> With a K. >> Karbon with a K. Of course we've got to keep with the theme, right? And, get a high availability production-ready cluster going in a matters of 10 minutes or so. Five minutes... Or two minutes to fill out the form and a few more minutes for it to deploy. That's the easy piece. But really we're designing this for enterprise applications. So it's about persistence as well. So we have our database management services, right? So Arrow which is the other product which manages everything from your oracle databases to MySQL post threads that you'd see more developers using to your object storage with our Buckets product. And then going on to our Epoch monitoring and management. >> You guys have had great success with the product. What's the use case? Why are customers looking for? What is the use case for your customers? Obviously, you got a great infrastructure positioning. You have network storage and compute all keys to the enterprise. Where's the Kubernetes fit into it? Developer? What's the use case? >> So first of all, Kubernetes and cloud-native is a mode of developing applications to create really scalable distributed systems. We are, I mean, at our core, we are distributed systems from compute and storage. This is a way of building on top of that. And letting enterprises really build out a cloud-native application using these new types of tooling. >> Yeah, Greg, one of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning is the stuff that they said that "40% of applications that are being run in "Kubernetes are statefull." Which I remember is one of those things we've struggled with for a bit and people are wondering oh where does state? >> Yeah >> Does it belong there or do I do something different with storage? I'm curious, what you're hearing from your customers and how that fits into what you're doing? >> Right. So Kubernetes and the ecosystem is evolving so quickly. If you look at where we are with Pet sets to Stateful sets to all the things you are going to do to actually manage or talk to storage underneath it, it's evolved very rapidly over the last couple years. So I think what we're seeing is people who are very comfortable running their compute inside and maybe still wanting to talk to storage outside. Whether it be object storage or database that lives outside maybe on virtual machines. We're seeing some of those services migrate to be more native within Kubernetes. So like using a CSI or something to talk to the storage. And now we have some customers that are putting databases inside as well, right? So it's a matter of how mature you are, how adventurous you are and how much you really need that reliability out of your database or whether you need the speeded deployment and ease. >> Yeah. So Greg we talked some at the dot net show in London just a couple of weeks ago. When you talk to your customers, how do they look at Kubernetes? Is this something that there's an oh well I'm going to be using Amazon and Microsoft and therefore it's there? How much does this fit into their hybrid cloud environment? I would think that would be a big piece of your story. >> It absolutely is. And there's obviously a lot of news around multi cloud and hybrid cloud and that's what's really special about Kubernetes and containers as well as the standard interfaces we have for storage and object and databases is that you now have this sort of portability. And so I can actually run the same thing in the Cloud. I can take that and run the exact same load down in my own data center without changing anything out. And the key to that is of course open and standard APIs, right? Of course my data has to be there as well and that can be difficult to move and migrate. But the same application structure, the same development and paradigm supply both in the Cloud and as well as on-prem. And that's what I'm seeing is a lot of excitement to be able to repurpose that as well as an answer to multi cloud or hybrid cloud. >> What's the workload means in terms of data? Because data becomes the critical asset in Cloud. Stateful data has been a big discussion. Where is that here in CNCF? What's your take on the status of how that's playing out? The need in the marketplace? Ready for primetime? What's the evolution of that piece in the Stateful applications? >> Yeah, I think that with the CSI and going GA and 1.13, I think we're seeing some maturity for that. Not everything will be... Not all storage will be addressed over HTTP. A lot of it is going to be through traditional storage implications or interfaces. And I think what's interesting is seeing the move to try to meet enterprise developers or application developers. Kind of where they are. Like if you have an existing app and you need to move it to containerized application, it's hard to eradicate NFS. It's hard to eradicate block storage and go to something complete out of that. And also I think there's some good reasons to use those types of things, especially if you're running a database itself. So if you want to run a database in Kubernetes you're going to need something more robust than object storage, right? So, that evolution, that maturity has been really fast and it's been interesting to see the Kubernetes community adopt that and then customers take advantage of it. >> It's been a top conversation. >> Greg, I wonder if we can sort of zoom out for a little bit here. >> Sure. >> We're talking about Kubernetes. What does cloud-native mean in the Nutanix context and what you're hearing from your customers? >> What does cloud-native mean? Well I don't think it's unique from our perspective. I think it, again, it comes back to for some people it's going to be a 12 factor application. It's going to be using very standard and open APIs to build those applications. And then being pretty smart about how you address things that might tie you into any particular or any particular operating procedure, right? So we see, for instance some good examples around pop-ups or streaming data. We see a lot of people are very rigorous about adopting Kafka, all right. They want to use Kafka APIs. Even though there's a whole bunch of other services that we use and their favorite cloud file or whatever because they are so interested in that multi cloud or hybrid cloud then they are going to chose their APIs pretty carefully. So I think that's maybe the only thing that's a little bit unique in terms of our customer base. Is it's not a lot of start ups that are like, "I don't care, I'm worried about survival. "It's all product market fix. Let me go fast "and if I get locked into any particular vendor, "that's fine, I don't care. "That's tomorrow's problem." Right? We are enterprises, right? And these are guys who are jaded, have experienced the contract renewals with some of their favorite vendors, right? And they don't want to relive those mistakes again. And so they are very interested in having a very open ecosystem to play in. And we support that fully. >> Yeah. >> And stability, too, with the workload. They want mission-critical workloads to run. >> Absolutely. >> Quickly. >> It's interesting. I hear you talk about APIs and we look at something might be good for a bit but we get a sprawl of every technology. >> Sure. >> We have server sprawl. We had VM sprawl. And many ways we get API sprawl. >> Absolutely. >> Every single environment I work into. What's Nutanix's position on how do you manage APIs? How do you make sure you're just not creating something completely separately? >> Well I think, first of all, we really focus on the core APIs, right? So there's certain things that you just have to get these primitives absolutely right. And I applaud the Kubecon community saying the similar thing. So we do that. Right? We've got to get identity right. You got to get your data access layers right. And you have to get a lot of your provisioning things right. Once you start getting beyond that, you're into more esoteric lands and things don't tend to be as tight in, so we can be a little bit more exploratory on other APIs that aren't as core to the surface. So that's the attitude we take, which I think is similar to what we see in the community as well. I mean if you look at how many projects we got over this morning in the keynotes, it's just like a... >> The CNCF is up to 35 projects, I'm told. So. >> Right, and then tons of things that are not in CNCF that are also being used. Right? So it's a proliferation of things that all hope to be successful and kind of become the standard. >> So what's the update with Nutanix? Give us a quick company overview. Get the plug-in. What's going on with Nutanix? What's the big focus? >> Well focus continues to be just modernizing the data center. Right? Making all these applications easier to run, easier to manage and easier to operate. And that's what we're built on, right? That's the core. Again, for us it's going up the stack. It's going into the networking layer. Making sure micro segmentation can happen quickly and easily. We're not needing a Phd. or heavy lifting of things without taking over your entire network. And going up the stack with our cloud-native application stack. >> One of the things that's been clear in the industry in the past six months, certainly hardcore, we saw it come in before with hybrid, the validation of the on-premises. Right? So on-premises had at least low latency, any mission-critical workloads, aren't always going to the Cloud that fast, so the on-premises and on Cloud dynamic is super important for enterprises that are big enterprises. Not like the small, medium sized enterprises. But like the big ones have legacy and containers are nice fit there. So kind of a nice situation for you guys. How does that all play out? Do you agree with that, or? >> Yeah, so I think there's a lot of work loads that are going to, if they're not already in the public Cloud, they're going to go back, they're going to be built in the public Cloud. I mean if I have a gaming application and world-wide customers, I need to be in a presences where they can get me quickly. But similarly there's a lot of applications that are best on-prem. Whether it be because I have regulatory constraints or just that's where my data is and that's where my systems kind of come back together. I need to build my application where my data is because it's a lot easier to move the app in many cases than to move the data. And a lot of people don't want to give up that ownership and that kind of control. They are uncomfortable with moving their data that's not in their four walls. And so we've seen if you look at the CNCF survey data and you look at where Kubernetes is actually being run you'll find that a lot of Kubernetes is being run on-prem. Like some 60% of respondents are actually running Kubernetes on-prem. Now 89% are running in the Cloud which makes sense. As you start looking at folks who are much more mature, so they've been running Kubernetes for a little bit longer, their fleet size is 1,000 machines or more, we actually see them increasing their running on-prem as well. So it's the idea of having the same workloads, the same APIs that can work, start developing in the Cloud, move that application or the exact same application on-prem, work with my on-prem data, I think is very attractive. >> It's interesting, too, we hear a lot of people talk, "Hey, I'm running Kubernetes." Well, great. That's cool. Like what are you running it for? >> Yeah. >> So this gets down to the what is Kubernetes good for? >> Right. >> You're thoughts. >> Yeah, I think it started where people are comfortable with are really Stateless applications. Right? So it's a lot of filter on a pipe. It's a lot of things that are going through a line of some sort. We certainly see a lot of our IoT applications being built on that which is essentially that, right? So there's some intelligence at the edge. We're gathering the data but we're doing some intelligent things with it. Doing some inference there. Filtering the data. Bring it back to the data center. And then doing additional things on that front. So there's both data gathering as well as execution happening on the edge. So that's a big piece of it in our market. And then back to pipeline just kind of core data services. >> We've been following you guys at Nutanix. You guys are doing great. A great product. Now cloud-native is here. What's on the portfolio roadmap for SaaS and cloud-native for you guys? What's the priorities? >> So continuing to fill out the portfolio so that customers can really easily run whatever application they want. So we want those primitives to be there for them. So database storage we've filled out. The monitoring piece and the observability piece is actually really interesting. And so we have a SaaS service that lets you monitor your clusters no matter where they may be. So if you're running them in your favorite cloud provider, fantastic. You can monitor those as well as what you might be running in whatever your on-prem data center is. We have plans to actually let that be run on-prem as well because again some of our customers, especially who are running dark sites, don't want to have any of there information, even observability data go out. So we are trying to serve that customer that has pretty robust needs both around their computer environemnet but also around their data and how they manage it and protect their data. And that's really our critical customer. >> Great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate the time and the insight. Nutanix here on theCUBE. John Furrier with Stu Minium. Three days of live coverage of KUBECON, and CloudNativeCon here in Seattle 2018. 8,000 people. Getting larger every time. It's a global conference. Back with more coverage after this short break. [Techno Music]

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix's .NEXT 2018 here in London, England. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Joep Piscaer. 3500 here in attendance. Actually in the closing keynote, we just listened to Dr. Jane Goodall talk about her life's work, her next, where she's going. Really powerful content here to help round out what we're doing. We're actually really thrilled to have as our penultimate guest to the program Chetan Conikee who is the founder and CTO of ShiftLeft.io, a customer of Nutanix based out in San Francisco. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me Stu and Joep, pleasure. >> So Chetan, ShiftLeft.io, tell us a little bit about that. We love to hear from founders. What was the why, what did you see out there? What were you looking to do and then we'll get into it from there. >> Absolutely. We founded ShiftLeft back in December 2016. ShiftLeft is a venture-backed application security company. I co-founded ShiftLeft with the Chief Products Officer of FireEye and one of the core architects at Google. So our reason and emphasis to build out the security company was to essentially make security relevant to what they call as cloud-native applications. So ShiftLeft by virtue of the word meaning shift security to the left is bring securities awareness to the early stages of the software development lifecycle. As engineers write code, we have built a system that in a matter of minutes converts code to a graph, a graph akin to a social network. Almost like a social network graph except that it's connecting all the functions and variables in your code that represent the application. Now using that graph, we extract vulnerabilities that might exist in the code. Now as we know, engineers are focused on velocity, developing software and servicing their customers. So often security gets left behind, which is why we have built this autonomous agent that takes the data that we extracted during coding and protect the application in Runtime from imminent threats. >> Okay, we could spend an hour talking about this. Security is one of the hottest spaces, one of the biggest challenges in kind of modernizing this multi-cloud era, cloud-native absolutely. Maybe you'll be at theCUBE Con show in a couple weeks. We can talk even more about that because oh boy, so much to go there but you're a startup and what brings you to Nutanix is I guess the question. Come on, cloud-native, you should be born in the cloud. You're venture-backed, they probably don't want you spending lots of money on infrastructure. So maybe connect the dots with us as to how you ended up with Nutanix. >> Absolutely. The core ethos of ShiftLeft is observing, observing threats in real time and observing vulnerabilities that might exist in code. Observing means we have to make sure that our own infrastructure is protected from threats and at the same time we provide a high accessibility to our customers. Which means that we have to observe our own infrastructure which is why we subscribed early on to a Nutanix product called Epoch. Because the core essence of Epoch is to provide observability to infrastructure. Our infrastructure is very complex because every time engineers write code and commit code into GitHub or any other so-called management system, we react to that and at the same time if any threats are applied, when they deploy that code in production, we react to that as well. So it is important for us to maintain our uptime which is why we use Epoch to continuously observe our system for faults or any threats applied upon our own system and Epoch provides us that service, that service because our infrastructure is very complex. It is comprised of at least about 80 to 100 micro-services deployed in a cloud-native infrastructure. Now all these micro-services are working in concert with each other every time it receives an event, an event of a code check-in from a customer's ecosystem or any threats applied to our customers' infrastructure deployed in their private data centers or their cloud infrastructures. >> So let me get this right. You're a Nutanix customer but I'm guessing you're not the typical customer, right? You are not running their appliance in the data center but you're using different products. So I hear you mentioned Epoch which is observability. So that gives you insight into the system you are running. But to clarify, you're not running Nutanix in your data center? >> Absolutely, we are a cloud-native company. Our infrastructure entirely runs on Masels and Kubernetes which is deployed on AWS, Azure and GCP. So we are a multi-hybrid cloud ecosystem and Nutanix Epoch product is agnostic of the servers because it's a software-defined product that enables us to place hooks in the appropriate places of our software-defined or our software stack and then provide us the necessary observability. Observability from the perspective of latency, throughput or essentially any impact induced upon our infrastructure. >> So you are using it to monitor the sort of applications you're running in micro-services. So this is not even about infrastructure monitoring. This is about your application, it's uptime, error rates, thresholds, stuff like that. >> Absolutely because our system is comprised of a dense micro-service mesh which means that if one micro-service is down, it impacts a set of other micro-services which in turn impacts the customer as well. So what we do is try to identify cause and effect, correlate events and understand this dense and complex infrastructure. Nutanix Epoch has this cloud map feature that enabled us to dynamically plot the entire map of our infrastructure. This is almost akin to Google Maps because you can plot a from and to destination but upon that you might have traffic contention, accidents, tolls and everything else you can think of. So this is a similar situation with very dense and complex infrastructure as well, meaning if one service is down, it has this ripple side effect on other services as well. >> Yeah, I'm actually glad we got to interview you towards the end of our coverage here because one of the things we've been looking at is Nutanix has gone from basically two products to now they have a much broader portfolio. Some of those have been organically and some have been through acquisition. So Epoch which I believe is now under the Xi family, so Xi Epoch, I interviewed back in New Orleans, it was Netsil, Netsil came in through the acquisition. So I believe you've been using it since it was Netsil. >> Absolutely. >> What have you seen? I love kinda your outside viewpoint as to what's that meant to the product? Besides being renamed, what's the same, what's different and how do you see that impacting Epoch going forward? >> Absolutely, great question. For the most part the core product hasn't changed as much. The vision has always been carried on from what it used to be to what it is today. But the product has improved significantly. The user experience has improved significantly and now what they have is the foundation of Nutanix which is critical because there are various other product lines in Nutanix that can serve us better as well along with Epoch and we are looking forward to understanding what Beam is, what X-Ray is and there are various other product lines along with what we are already using at this point. >> Great, so I'm curious your experience here at the show. What brought you to the show? What conversations have you been having with your peers? We talked to Nutanix about what they're doing with the developers and about the cloud native space. How are they doing? You live in that space. How has Nutanix positioned themselves? >> Absolutely, I've been tracking Dheeraj and his crew for quite some time. I think they're doing a phenomenal job moving up the stack because eventually, being cloud native is critical at this point given that the majority of the new SMBs and SMEs are deploying in the cloud. So if Nutanix joins that bandwagon, it makes it relatively easy for Enterprise customers who have deployed in their own private data centers to cloud burst into Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. So over the past two days, the energy has been amazing. I presented with the Epoch crew and we got an amazing response, got to listen to customers. Their curiosity to adopting Epoch, given that they have been using Nutanix and also bursting into cloud native ecosystems as well which is why they want to understand and observe how their workloads are performing in the cloud. So very excited and looking forward to the future for the most part. >> So looking at your product, you deliver it, as I said service. You have software developers that develop that software and based on the announcements Nutanix has made in the last couple of days with Carbon and being able to develop cloud native apps, will that impact how you develop software or how you look at Nutanix as a partner for your company? >> We are growing at a very steady state and given that our core focus is security, some of our customers are on Wall Street which means that they have to ensure that they are deploying or subscribing to a service that has guarantees of its uptime and also that data is effectively protected. So we have commenced our journey as a cloud native company but that shouldn't impede us from moving into a private data center as well because our software fabric can be deployed both in a cloud native ecosystem and also on a private DC as well. So we're looking forward to working with Nutanix as a partner in the future as well if the opportunity permits. >> Yeah, so with the little time we have left, I want to get your viewpoint, talk to us about the security environment today. I'm an infrastructure guy by background and lived through, you've talked about virtualization. Been watching the containerization space, IOT greater increasing the surface area of everything. I know serverless is a whole can of worms as to how that fits in. So as we look to 2019 and going forward, what excites you and what worries you about the security space? >> What excites me is that, you know the surface is essentially getting abstracted. Back almost two decades ago, we were dealing with deploying in physical data centers on physical hosts. That transcended to VMs and then moved to Docker Unikernels and now we are speaking serverless. So in relatively, maybe in a click of a button or a single script, someone can deploy an application and that application can be scaled in a matter of minutes or seconds. So that's very exciting but what worries me is also that with the velocity and complexity, the risk is also getting amplified which means that applications are the target du jour. Applications were always the target du jour and they will continue to be as well because as engineers code even more faster, they will essentially always leave security behind. So it is important to understand the attack surface of the application because if we examine most of the recent attacks like Struts Equifax, the application was compromised and then the attacker laterally moved from host to host until they acquired or hit that asset, which is the data. So it is important to write secure software from the get-go and at the same time it is important to observe how a threat imposed by an adversarial entity correlates to a vulnerability. Which means that we have to be upfront and always observe our security from the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. So it equally excites me and worries me, which is why we decided to found ShiftLeft. >> All right, really appreciate getting to hear about ShiftLeft and your journey and what you're doing with Epoch, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely. >> And thank you for joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here from Butanix .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (up tempo electronic tones) >> Hi I'm John Walls, I've been with theCUBE for a couple of years serving as a host here on our broadcast, our flagship broadcast on SiliconANGLE TV. I like to think about the how's and the why's and the what's of technology. How does it work, why does it matter? What is it doing for end users? When I think about what theCUBE does and what it means, to me it's an off the chart benefit. The value is just immense because when theCUBE shows up, it puts a stamp of approval on your event that says man, you've arrived. I know you can't be everywhere. You'd like to be but what theCUBE--

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .Next 2018 here in London, England. We're gonna be talking about developers in this segment. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, Bala Kuchibhotla is the General Manager of Nutanix Era, and sitting next to him is Greg Muscarella who recently joined Nutanix, is Vice President of Products at Nutanix. Both of you been up on stage, Greg was talking about Carbon and cloud native, and of course Era is the databases of service. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Alright, so look, developers. You know, we were thinking back, you know, I love the old meme, developers, developers, developers! Balmer had it right, and style might not have been there. Microsoft, company that does quite well with developers. You know, my background is in the enterprise space. I'm an infrastructure guy that goes to cloud, and the struggle I've had a little bit is, you know, developers really work from the application down. It's like that's where they live, and as an infrastructure guy, it's a little uncomfortable for me. So maybe to set that stage, because you know I look at Nutanix, you know, at it's core, infrastructure's a big piece of it, but its distributed architectures, it's built from the architecture from like really the hyper-scale type of environments. So help connect the dots as to where Nutanix plays with the developers, and then we'll get into your products and everything else after. Bala, you want to start? >> Cool, okay. So as you know, Nutanix is definitely addressing the IT ops market. We cannot simply its storage, compute, networking, and build the infrastructure as service. Obviously if you look at the private cloud, the IT operators are becoming the cloud operators and then giving them to the developers. We are basically trying to build a cloud for IT operators so they can present the cloud to developer. Now that we have this infrastructure pretty much there for quite some time, we're not expanding the services to other things, the platform, the platform as service. Now going back to the developer community, you will have the same kind of cloud-like consumption. That these cloud operators, the IT operators are providing the cloud for you. US developers get the same kind of public cloud consumption. They lack ability, that the ability you are trying to do, easy tools, (mumbling), and S3s, that kind of stuff, EBS, you have the same kind of APS for our Nutanix that you can spin up a VM, spin up a database, spin up a storage and then do what you want to do kind of stuff. So that's the natural journey for that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, Greg? >> Yeah, I have to agree. Look, the world has changed quite a bit for developers, and it's gotten a lot better. If you look at the tooling and what you can now do on your laptop and spinning up what would be a pretty complex environment from a three tier application with a robust database, an app tier, anything else you might have on the storage side, spin it up, break it down, and with your CICD pipeline you can have it deployed to production pretty rapidly. So we look at doing is, you know, recreating that experience that the cloud has really brought to those developers and having the same type of tooling for those enterprise-grade applications that are going to be deployed, you know, on that infrastructure that is needed in private data centers. >> So looking at, you know, one of the reasons why developers love cloud services so much, it's easy for them. They can just consume it, it's very low friction. They don't even really, you know, need to go through a purchasing process, other than credit card maybe paid for themselves in the beginning. So you know, low friction is really the key word here. So I'm wondering, you know, looking at the Nutanix, the IT ops perspective, how are you kinda bring that low friction into the developer world? >> Yeah, so I'll take the question. So essentially what I am seeing is the world in the enterprise world is very fragmented. People doing silos kind of stuff. As you rightly said, developers really want to be liberated from all this bureaucracy, right? So they really need a service kind of world where they can go click on it, they get their compute kind of stuff. There's a pressure on the IT ops to give that experience, otherwise people will flee to public a lot. As simple as that, right? So to me, the way I see is the IT ops, the DB ops, the traditional DB ops inner ring, they are understanding the need that, hey well, we gotta be service-ified. We want to provide that kind of service-like interface to our teams who are consuming that kinda stuff. So this software, Nutanix as the enterprise cloud software, lets them create their own private cloud and then give those services to the developers kinda stuff. So it's a natural transition as a company for us. We got to start from the cloud operators, now we're exposing the cloud services from the cloud operators to the cloud consumers. Essentially the developers. >> Greg, up on stage you talked about cloud native, and your premise is that cloud native is a term for a methodology, not necessarily that it's born in the cloud. Maybe help explain that a little bit, and you know, we think Nutanix is mostly in data centers today, so, you know, why isn't this just saying, "No, no, no, we can be cloud native, too." >> Fair point, and I think we're not alone in that as well, in being an enterprise infrastructure company that was looking at enabling cloud native applications, our cloud native architecture within the private data center Say look, really it's a form of doing distributed computing, right, and that's the core to it, right? So you have a stateless, ephemeral infrastructure. You're not upgrading things, you know, you're blowing it away and rebuilding it. There's some core things like that, that will move across whether it be in the cloud or on prem. And of course you need tooling for that, right, 'cause that's not the methodology most enterprise developers or operators are really going through, right, so everything's pets, not much cattle. We're really trying to change that quite a bit, and that's both enabling technology but it's also the practices that people will deploy. And we're seeing is, it's not so much us trying to sell this it's more like hey, we're used to this in the cloud, why can't we do this on prem in our private data center where we have all of our data, and the other services that we need to interact with, like, that's where the demand's really coming from. So it's that mass of data they want to interact with with the type of architecture that they've gotten used to for rapid development and deployment. >> So one other thing, you mentioned pets versus cattle. One of the things I've been seeing from, you know, an IT ops perspective is you need a good ecosystem of management products around your pets or your cattle to be able to make it cattle, right? If you don't have the tooling, you're gonna do manual interaction, and it's going to become pets. So I'm wondering, you know, in that cloud native space, how are you helping the IT ops to actually make it a cattle experience, and you know, towards management or monitoring, or backup stuff like that? >> So, you know, a lot of that is surrounded around Kubernetes, right, as a center of mass. So it's not just us doing it, it's us pulling in a lot of the support and ecosystem that is being built by the community for that and leveraging that piece. And then we have other things we'll either add onto that as it integrates with our platform and some of the capabilities there, or things that we may do, just again, pure open source. Give you a couple examples of that, so I mentioned Epoch on stage, right, so it's sort of something that brings additional metrics to Prometheus. So in addition to CPU and memory storage consumption, you're actually getting latency and other more business metrics that you might be using to trigger things in Kubernetes, like auto-scaling. I don't necessarily always scale on CPU or memory, maybe it's a customer experience that's difficult to measure The other thing is because we have the storage layer underneath, you know, we look at doing things like, again it's early in Kubernetes, but snapshotting from within Kubernetes. Right, so if we have a CSI provider, why not from within Kubernetes let an application or a container trigger a snapshot. Underneath our storage layer will take that snap and then it becomes an object that's available from within Kubernetes. So there's a whole lot of things happening. >> I just want to add a couple of comments to that. This pets versus cattle is standardization, right, like we're talking about it. In typical, old legacy enterprises there are let's take the example of databases. Like, every application team has their own databases they are trying to pass, they're all trying to do management around it kind of stuff. When we do a couple of servers, like we looked at around 2,400 databases for a typical company, they have 400 different configurations of the software. And so like this is one of the biggest companies that we talking about kind of stuff. With that kind of stuff they cannot manage cloud, obviously. This is not no more a cattle kind of stuff. But how do you bring that kind of standardization, right? That is where the Era as a product is actually coming into this. We are trying to standardize, but when you try to standardize these database environments for on premise enterprise cloud, you have to do it at their terms. What I meant to try to say is when you try to go for public cloud, you have this catalog 11204 pull the node to PSE5, you can only create databases with whatever the software the public cloud guys are doing it. But on premise needs are slightly different. So that is where Nutanix, Era, and this products will come into. We allow to people to create the cloud, and then we allow them to create their own catalog of software that they can standardize. So that is what I call standardization at their customer terms, that's what we're trying. >> And let me add to that, though. It also brings in this convenience, 'cause not only is it coming up with standardize, but we've made it even more convenient, right, because now a developer can go provision their own database, they're gonna get a standard configuration for what that is, and so you made it easier for developers and you're getting something that is more cattle-like. >> Bala, I think you're in a good seat to be able to actually give us a little bit of independent commentary, you know. The movement of databases is one of the hottest topics in the industry. I haven't seen whether Andy Jassy was sparing back with Larry Ellison, you know, at re:Invent this week, but you know, we've been watching the growth of things like Postgres, and lot of these changes, you know, Era sits clearly in that space. So what do you seeing from customers, you know, the modernization of applications is, you know, what I call the long pole in the tent. It's the toughest thing for me to be able to do. I said we usually want to first, you know, you modernize your platform, Nutanix helps with that, public cloud helps with that, and then I can modernize my application. You know, database tends to be, it's the stickiest application that we have in the industry. So what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so there are two class of applications that we see. This space is completely green field We are starting off completely. People love cloud-like experience and cloud native databases that's where the public cloud can kind of try to help them. But if you see 70 to 80% of the money still is with all the traditional apps. You're trying to now cloudify them. The cloud native stack that we talk about, the cloud native database, is not going to the game. Like you really need to think about how do you kind of take these big, giant databases that are there with Oracles, and DBTools, that kind of stuff but give the cloud-like experience, right? So the actually very difficult game for any public cloud, that's why you don't see rack provisioning and a dot list is still not there, or even if JCP natively. Oracle does that but little bit difficult. Data gravity forces people to come to on premise, that's my humble take on this, right. But how do you build, how do you make this gray area I call it a brown field, and convert them into more of a consumer-centered kind of stuff? That's where Era actually tries to play. It has two roles that, if you have existing databases, we turn to kind of convert them into more of a cloud-like databases for you, or if you have a green field then we can get you directly onto the cloud native experience. Or if you're trying to migrate from technology to other technology, definitely we would like to help. These are the three things that we try to do through Era kinda of stuff, yeah. >> So looking forward, you know, we're starting out with databases, you know, making that simple, making that small so that there's less friction in that. So maybe a question for Greg, so what's the future for Nutanix in, you know, enabling other services, other cloud-like services on a Nutanix platform going forward? >> In addition to databases. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so we're a big proponent of standard APIs, as I talked about, right, so we have that in storage for a long time, that makes things easy with databases. We have a standard client talking to standard database backends. As we see other core building blocks, those are the kind of things that we're gonna want to build and deliver as well. So S3 is a defacto standard for object storage, for instance, so people are following that. You'll get Pub/Sub with Kafka APIs, Druid. There's a whole bunch of things, especially from the Apache project, that have become sort of defacto standards, so really it's like, okay, well which building blocks are needed by developers to build these applications that they want, and how do we really work the the community to establish those as open standards. 'Cause we really want, you know, I talked about the portability quite a bit. So we don't want anyone locked into our stack or anyone else's stack, it's like hey, let's build with the best toolkits, let's use standard, open APIs, and then developers get what they need which is portability, or run the application where they want to run it. So that's our strategy of going forward. >> Into some-I-tab we have easy to equal end, which is AHV, we have EBS equal end, we have our called Acropolis Block Services. We have S3 equal end, which is called Buckets, we have database RDS equal end, we have Era, and now we are going with content as which we call Carbon. So we are trying to kind of look at those critical services for anyone, especially for developers, to say that man, it's all ecosystem, it's not like one piece, single piece It's not this compute, it's not this storage, but it is an ecosystem of services that we need to kind of predict. >> Want to just come back to what we were talking beginning, the relationship with developers. How much of what Nutanix does is really kind of the IT ops that then enables developers, and how much direct developer engagement is it? Like, you know, is there development activity here at the conference going on that we should know about? I know that Nutanix goes to a lot of the developer shows. But maybe if you could give us some commentary on that. >> Yeah, I can start that, it's a path, right? So currently we certainly have the bulk of our interactions are gonna be on the IT operations side, and so it's only through them, because their customers are the developers that we really interact primarily today. But you should see that changing quite a bit, and I think that you'll that with the tools that we're providing directly to developers to interact with you know, through the APIs like they have Era. So for instance, if IT has deployed Era internally, then if I want a database I can go straight to those APIs or command line to grab those things. And you'll see that continuously be a trend as we let developers interact directly with our products. >> Just to give you an example, right, within the company, within Nutanix, we are drinking our own champaign, right. So we are operating a private cloud and we are exposing our APIs to all our developers. Today, if someone wants a database in Nutanix, they go to a control plane and say I want a database. Right, that's the API. How the infrastructure is getting, it's a means to an end for them, right. That's where we are going with our customers, too, hey, here is how you build your private cloud, here is how you expose all your service end points for different services, and your developers just need to enjoy them. And then there's a building aspect of it, that's the nuance that private clouds need to deal with. How do they charge the developers, how do they charge meter, that kind of stuff that people will talk about today. >> You know, I definitely heard when I talked to all the product teams, especially everything in Zai cloud, you know, extensibility with APIs is built into everything you're doing. So we're going to have to leave it there. Greg, we're gonna be catching up with you and the Nutanix team in two weeks at the Cube-Con show in Seattle. So thanks so much for joining us. Bala, pleasure, thanks for giving us all the update. And thank you, we're gonna be back with more coverage here. From Nutanix .Next 2018 in London, I'm Stu Miniman and Joep Piscaer is my cohost. Going to be do a Dutch session in a second, so be sure to stay with that. First foreign language interview on theCUBE, and thank you for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from London, England, it's The Cube covering .NEXT conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. This is The Cube's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. 3,500 people gathered to listen to Sunil Potti. >> Thanks, Stu. >> For the keynote this morning, Sunil's the chief product and development officer with Nutanix. Glad we moved things around, Sunil, 'cause we know events, lots of things move, keynotes sometimes go long, but happy to have you back on the program. >> No, likewise, anytime. >> All right, so, I've been to a few of these and one of the things I hope you walk us through a little bit. So Nutanix, simplicity is always at its core. I have to say, it's taken me two or three times hearing the new, the broad portfolio, the spectrum, and then I've got the core, I've got essentials, I've got enterprise. I think it's starting to sink in for me, but it'll probably take people a little bit of time, so maybe let's start there. >> I mean, I think one of the biggest things that happened with mechanics is that we went from a few products just twelve months ago to over ten products within the span of a year. And both internally as well as externally, while the product values are obviously obvious, so it's more the consumption within our own sales teams, channel teams, as well as our customer base, needed to be codified into something that could be a journey of adoption. So we took it customer inwards, in about a journey that a customer goes through in adopting services in a world of multi-cloud, and before that, before you get to multi-cloud, you have to build a private cloud that is genuine, as we know. And before we do that, we have to re-platform your data center using HCI, so that's really if you work backwards to that, you start with core, which is your HCI platform for modernizing your data center and then you expand to a cloud platform for every workload, and then you can be in a position to actually leverage your multi-cloud services. >> Yeah, and I like that. I mean, start with the customer first, is where you have and I mean the challenge is, you know, every customer is a little bit different. You know, one of the biggest critiques of, you know, you say, okay, what is a private cloud? because they tend to be snowflakes. Every one's a little bit different and we have a little bit of trouble understanding where it is, or did it melt all over the floor. So give us a little bit of insight into that and help us through those stages, the dirty, the crawl-walk-run. >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing everyone has to understand here is that these are not discrete moving parts. Core is obviously your starting point of leveraging computer storage in a software defined way. The way that Amazon launched with EC2 and S3, right. But then, every service that you consume on top of public cloud still leverages computer storage. So in that sense, essentials is a bunch of additional services such as self-service, files, and so forth, but you still need the core to build on essential, to build a private cloud And then from there onwards, you can choose other services, but you're still leveraging the core constructs. So in that sense, I think, both architecturally as well as from a product perspective, as well as architecturally from a packaging perspective, that's why they're synergistic in the way that things have rolled out. >> Okay, so looking at that portfolio. A lot of the customers I work with now, they don't start out in a data center, they've already moved past that, right? So they are leveraging a partner, the public cloud, they might not even be running virtual machines at all anymore. How does that fit into your portfolio? >> Yeah, I mean, increasingly what we are realizing, and you know, we've done this over the last couple of years, is for example, with Calm, you can only use Calm to manage your public clouds without even managing your private cloud of Nutanix. Increasingly with every new service that we're building out, we're doing it so that people don't have to pay the strategy tax off the stack. It needs to be done by a desire of I want to do it versus I need to do it. So, with Frame, you can get going on AWS in any region in an instant or Azure. You don't need to use any Nutanix software. Same thing with Epoch, with Beam. So I think as a company, what we're essentially all about is about saying let us give you a cloud, service-like experience, maybe workload-centric. If it is desktops and so forth. Or if you are going to be at some point reaching a stage where you have to re-platform your data center to look like a public cloud, then we have the core, try and call it platform itself that'll help you get there as well. >> So, looking at re-platforming that data center. If I were to do that now for a customer I wouldn't be looking at virtual machines, storage, networking, I'd be looking at containers or serverless or you know, the new stuff. Again, what is Nutanix's answer to that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what we've found is that there's quite a bit of an option, obviously, of cloud-native ads, but when it comes to mainstream budget allocation, it's still a relative silo in terms of mainstream enterprise consumption. So what we're finding out is that if you could leverage your well-known cloud platform to not create another silo for Kubernetes, don't create another silo for Edge or whatever the new use-cases are, but treat them as an extension of your core platform. At least from a manageability perspective and an operations perspective, then the chances of you adopting or your enterprise adopting these new technologies becomes higher. So, for example, in Calm, we have this pseudonym called Kalm with a K, right. Which essentially allows Kubernetes containers to run natively inside a Calm blueprint, but coexist with your databases inside of EM because that's how we see the next-generation enterprise apps morphing, right. Nobody's going to rewrite my whole app. They're going to maybe start with the web tier and the app tier as containers, but my database tier, my message queue tier, is going to be as VMs. So, how does Calm help you abstract the combination of containers and VMs into a common blueprint is what we believe is the first step towards what we call a hybrid app. And when you get to hybrid apps, is when you can actually then get to eventually all of your time to native cloud apps. >> You know, one of the questions I was hearing from customers is, they were looking for some clarity as to the hybrid environments. You know, the last couple of shows, there was a big presence of Google at the show and while I didn't see Google here on the show floor, I know there was an update from kind of, GCP and AHV. Is Google less strategic now, or is it just taking a while to, you know, incubate? How do you feel about that? >> So the way that you'll see us evolve as we navigate the cloud partnerships is to actually find the sweet spot of product-market fit, with respect to where the product is ready and where the market really wants that. And some of it is going to be us doing, you know, a partnership by intent first and then as we execute, we try to land it with honest products. So, where we started off with Google, as you guys know, is to actually leverage the cloud platform side, core locator with Google data centers and then what we we've evolved to is the fact that our data centers can quote-unquote integrate with their data centers to have a common management interface, a common security interface and all, but we can still run as core-located ones. Where the real integration that has taken some time for us to get to is the fact that, look, in addition to Calm, in addition to GKE kind of things, is rather than run as some kind of power sucking alien on top of some Google hardware, true integration comes with us actually innovating on a stack that lands AH3 natively inside GCP and that's where nested virtualization comes in and we have to take that crawl-walk-run approach there because we didn't want to expose it to public customers what we didn't consume internally. So what we have with the new offering that now is called Test Drive is, essentially that. We've proven that AH3 can run a nested virtualization mode on GCP natively, you can core locate with the rest of GCP services, and we use it currently in our R&D environment for running thousands of nodes for pretty much everyday testing on a daily basis, right. And so, once customer interview expose that now as an environment for our end customers to actually test-drive Nutanix as a fully compatible stack though, on purpose, so you have Prism Central, the full CDP stack and so forth, then as that gets hardened over a period of time, we expose that into production and so forth. >> So there's one category of cloud I haven't heard yet, and that's the service providers. So Nutanix used to be a really good partner for service providers, you know, enabling them to deliver services locally to local geography, stuff like that, so what's the sense of Nutanix regarding these service providers currently? >> Yeah, I think that frankly, that's probably a 2019 material change to our roadmap. It's your, the analogy that I have is that when we first launched our operating system, we fist had to do it with an opinionated stack using Supermicro. Most importantly, from an end-customer perspective, they got a single throat to choke, but also equally importantly, it kept the engineering team honest because we knew what it means to do one pick-up page for the full stack. Similarly, when we launched Xi, we needed to make sure we knew what SREs do, right. That scale, and so that's why we started with our version of SMC on, you know, as you guys know with Additional Reality as well as partners like Xterra. But very soon you're going to see is, once we have cleared that opinionated stack, software-wise we're able to leverage it, just like we went from Supermicro to Dell and Lenovo and seven other partners, you're going to see us create a Xi partner network. Which essentially allows us to federate Xi as an OS into the service providers. And that's more a 2019 plus timeframe. >> Yeah, speaking along those lines, the keynote this morning, Karbon with a k talked about Kubernetti's. Talk about that, that's the substrate for Nutanix's push toward cloud natives, so-- >> Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to hear that in the day two keynote as well, is basically, customer's want, as I said, an operating system for containers that is based on well-known APIs like Kube Cattle from Kubernetes and all that, but at the same time, it is curated to support all of the enterprise services such as volumes, storage, security policies from Flow, and you know, the operational policies of containers shouldn't be any different from Vms. So think about it as the developers still a Kubernetes-like interface, they can still port their containers from Neutanix to any other environment, but from an IT ops side, it looks like Kubernetes, containers, and VMs are co-residing as a first-class option. >> Yeah, I feel like there had been a misperception about what Kubernetes is and how it fits, you know. My take has been, it's part of the platform so there's not going to be a battle for a distribution of Kubernetes because I'm going to choose a platform and it should have Kubernetes and it should be compatible with other Kubernetes out there. >> Yeah, I mean, it's going to be like a feature of Linux. See, in that sense, there's lots of Linux distros but the core capabilities of Linux are the same, right. So in that sense, Kubernetes is going to become a feature of Linux, or the cloud operating system, so that those least-common denominator features are going to be there in every cloud OS. >> Alright, so Kubernetes not differentiating just expand the platform >> Enabling >> Enabling peace. So, tell us what is differentiating today? You know, what are the areas where Nutanix stands alone as different from some of the other platform providers of today? >> I think that, I mean obviously, whatever we do, we are trying to do it thoughtfully from the operational, you know, simplicity as a first-class citizen. Like how many new screens do we add when we use new features? A simple example of that is when we did micro-segmentation. The part was to make sure you could go from choosing ten VMs to grouping them and putting a policy as soon as possible as little friction of adopting a new product. So, we didn't have to "virtualize" the network, you didn't need to have VX LANs to actually micro-segment, just like in public cloud, right. So I think we're taking the same thing into services up the stack. A good one to talk about is Error. Which is essentially looking at databases as the next complex beast of operational complexity, besides. Especially, Oracle Rack. And it's easier to manage postcrest and so forth, but what if you could simplify not just the open source management, but also the database side of it? So I would say that Error would be a good example of a strategic value proposition or what does it mean to create a one plus one equals three value proposition to database administrators? Just like we did that for VIR vetted administrators, we're now going after DBS. >> Alright, well, Sunil thank you so much. Wish we had another hour to go through it, but give you the final word, as people leave London this year, you know, what should they be taking away when they think about Nutanix? >> I think the platform continues to evolve, but the key takeaway is that it's a platform company. Not a product company. And with that comes the burden, as well as the promise of being an iconic company for the next, hopefully, decade or so. All right, thanks a lot. >> Well, it's been a pleasure to watch the continued progress, always a pleasure to chat. >> Thank you >> All right, for you Piskar, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Nutanix's .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)