(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and the ecosystem partners. >> Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, of course, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Miniman, and happy to welcome you back to the program. One of the keynote speakers is also a board member of the CNCF, Vijoy Pandey, who is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at Cisco. Vijoy, nice to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi there, Stu, so nice to see you again. It's a strange setting to be in, but as long as we are both healthy, everything's good. >> Yeah, we still get to be together a little bit even though while we're apart. We love the the engagement and interaction that we normally get to the community, but we just have to do it a little bit differently this year. So we're going to get to your keynote. We've had you on the program to talk about "Networking, Please Evolve". I've been watching that journey. But why don't we start at first, you've had a little bit of change in roles and responsibility. I know there's been some restructuring at Cisco since the last time we got together. So give us the update on your role. >> Yeah, so let's start there. So I've taken on a new responsibility. It's VP of Engineering and Research for a new group that's been formed at Cisco. It's called Emerging Tech and Incubation. Liz Centoni leads that and she reports on to Chuck. The charter for the team, this new team, is to incubate the next bets for Cisco. And if you can imagine, it's natural for Cisco to start with bets which are closer to its core business. But the charter for this group is to move further and further out from Cisco's core business and take Cisco into newer markets, into newer products, and newer businesses. I'm running the engineering and resource for that group. And again, the whole deal behind this is to be a little bit nimble, to be a little bit, to startupy in nature, where you bring ideas, you incubate them, you iterate pretty fast, and you throw out 80% of those, and concentrate on the 20% that makes sense to take forward as a venture. >> Interesting. So it reminds me a little bit but different, I remember John Chambers, a number of years back, talking about various adjacencies trying to grow those next multi-billion dollar businesses inside Cisco. In some ways, Vijoy, it reminds me a little bit of your previous company, very well known for driving innovation, giving engineers 20% of their time to work on things, maybe give us a little bit insight, what's kind of an example of a bet that you might be looking at in this space, bring us in tight a little bit. >> Well, that's actually a good question. And I think a little bit of that comparison is all those conversations are taking place within Cisco as well as to how far out from Cisco's core business do we want to get when we're incubating these bets? And yes, my previous employer, I mean, Google X actually goes pretty far out when it comes to incubations, the core business being primarily around ads, now Google Cloud as well. But you have things like Verily and Calico, and others, which are pretty far out from where Google started. And the way we're looking at the these things within Cisco is, it's a new muscle for Cisco, so we want to prove ourselves first. So the first few bets that we are betting upon are pretty close to Cisco's core but still not fitting into Cisco's BU when it comes to, go to market alignment or business alignment. So one of the first bets that we're taking into account is around API being the queen when it comes to the future of infrastructure, so to speak. So it's not just making our infrastructure consumable as infrastructure as code but also talking about developer relevance, talking about how developers are actually influencing infrastructure deployments. So if you think about the problem statement in that sense, then networking needs to evolve. And I've talked a lot about this in the past couple of keynotes, where Cisco's core business has been around connecting and securing physical endpoints, physical I/O endpoints, wherever they happen to be, of whatever type they happen to be. And one of the bets that we are, actually two of the bets, that we're going after is around connecting and securing API endpoints, wherever they happen to be, of whatever type they happen to be. And so API networking or app networking is one big bet that we're going after. Another big bet is around API security. And that has a bunch of other connotations to it, where we think about security moving from runtime security, where traditionally Cisco has played in that space, especially on the infrastructure side, but moving into API security, which is earlier in the development pipeline, and higher up in the stack. So those are two big bets that we're going after. And as you can see, they're pretty close to Cisco's core business, but also are very differentiated from where Cisco is today. And once you prove some of these bets out, you can walk further and further away, or a few degrees away from Cisco's core. >> All right, Vijoy, why don't you give us the update about how Cisco is leveraging and participating in open source? >> So I think we've been pretty, deeply involved in open source in our past. We've been deeply involved in Linux Foundation Networking. We've actually chartered FD.io as a project there and we still are. We've been involved in OpenStack, we have been supporters of OpenStack. We have a couple of products that are around the OpenStack offering. And as you all know, we've been involved in CNCF, right from the get-go, as a foundation member. We brought NSM as a project. I had Sandbox currently, but we're hoping to move it forward. But even beyond that, I mean, we are big users of open source, a lot of those has offerings that we have from Cisco, and you will not know this if you're not inside of Cisco. But Webex, for example, is a big, big user of Linkerd, right from the get-go, from version 1.0, but we don't talk about it, which is sad. I think, for example, we use Kubernetes pretty deeply in our DNAC platform on the enterprise side. We use Kubernetes very deeply in our security platforms. So we're pretty good, pretty deep users internally in our SaaS products. But we want to press the accelerator and accelerate this whole journey towards open source, quite a bit moving forward as part of ET&I, Emerging Tech and Incubation, as well. So you will see more of us in open source forums, not just CNCF, but very recently, we joined the Linux Foundation for Public Health as a premier foundational member. Dan Kohn, our old friend, is actually chartering that initiative, and we actually are big believers in handling data in ethical and privacy-preserving ways. So that's actually something that enticed us to join Linux Foundation for Public Health, and we will be working very closely with Dan and foundational companies that do not just bring open source but also evangelize and use what comes out of that forum. >> All right, well, Vijoy, I think it's time for us to dig into your keynote. We've we've spoken with you in previous KubeCons about the "Network, Please Evolve" theme that you've been driving on. And big focus you talked about was SD-WAN. Of course, anybody that's been watching the industry has watched the real ascension of SD-WAN. We've called it one of those just critical foundational pieces of companies enabling multi-cloud. So help explain to our audience a little bit, what do you mean when you talk about things like Cloud Native SD-WAN and how that helps people really enable their applications in the modern environment? >> Yes, well, I mean, we've been talking about SD-WAN for a while. I mean, it's one of the transformational technologies of our time where prior to SD-WAN existing, you had to stitch all of these MPLS labels and actually get your connectivity across to your enterprise or branch. And SD-WAN came in and changed the game there, but I think SD-WAN, as it exists today, is application-unaware. And that's one of the big things that I talk about in my keynote. Also, we've talked about how NSM, the other side of the spectrum, is how NSM or Network Service Mesh has actually helped us simplify operational complexities, simplify the ticketing and process health that any developer needs to go through just to get a multi-cloud, multi-cluster app up and running. So the keynote actually talked about bringing those two things together, where we've talked about using NSM in the past in chapter one and chapter two. And I know this is chapter three, and at some point, I would like to stop the chapters. I don't want this like an encyclopedia of "Networking, Please Evolve". But we are at chapter three, and we are talking about how you can take the same consumption models that I talked about in chapter two, which is just adding a simple annotation in your CRD, and extending that notion of multi-cloud, multi-cluster wires within the components of our application, but extending it all the way down to the user in an enterprise. And as we saw an example, Gavin Belson is trying to give a keynote holographically and he's suffering from SD-WAN being application-unaware. And using this construct of a simple annotation, we can actually make SD-WAN cloud native, we can make it application-aware, and we can guarantee the SLOs, that Gavin is looking for, in terms of 3D video, in terms of file access for audio, just to make sure that he's successful and Ross doesn't come in and take his place. >> Well, I expect Gavin will do something to mess things up on his own even if the technology works flawlessly. Vijoy, the modernization journey that customers are on is a never-ending story. I understand the chapters need to end on the current volume that you're working on, but we'd love to get your viewpoint. You talk about things like service mesh, it's definitely been a hot topic of conversation for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from your customers? What are some of the kind of real challenges but opportunities that they see in today's cloud native space? >> In general, service meshes are here to stay. In fact, they're here to proliferate to some degree, and we are seeing a lot of that happening, where not only are we seeing different service meshes coming into the picture through various open source mechanisms. You've got Istio there, you've Linkerd, you've got various proprietary notions around control planes like App Mesh, from Amazon, there's Consul, which is an open source project, but not part of CNCF today. So there's a whole bunch of service meshes in terms of control planes coming in. Envoy is becoming a de facto sidecar data plane, whatever you would like to call it, de facto standard there, which is good for the community, I would say. But this proliferation of control planes is actually a problem. And I see customers actually deploying a multitude of service meshes in their environment, and that's here to stay. In fact, we are seeing a whole bunch of things that we would use different tools for, like API gateways in the past, and those functions actually rolling into service meshes. And so I think service meshes are here to stay. I think the diversity of service meshes is here to stay. And so some work has to be done in bringing these things together. And that's something that we are trying to focus in on as well. Because that's something that our customers are asking for. >> Yeah, actually, you connected for me something I wanted to get your viewpoint on, go dial back, 10, 15 years ago, and everybody would say, "Oh, I really want to have a single pane of glass "to be able to manage everything." Cisco's partnering with all of the major cloud providers. I saw, not that long before this event, Google had their Google Cloud Show, talking about the partnership that you have with, Cisco with Google. They have Anthos, you look at Azure has Arc, VMware has Tanzu. Everybody's talking about really the kind of this multi-cluster management type of solution out there, and just want to get your viewpoint on this Vijoy as to how are we doing on the management plane, and what do you think we need to do as an industry as a whole to make things better for customers? >> Yeah, I think this is where I think we need to be careful as an industry, as a community and make things simpler for our customers. Because, like I said, the proliferation of all of these control planes begs the question, do we need to build something else to bring all these things together? I think the SMI proposal from Microsoft is bang on on that front, where you're trying to unify at least the consumption model around how you consume these service meshes. But it's not just a question of service meshes as you saw in the SD-WAN announcement back in the Google discussion that we just, Google conference that you just referred. It's also how SD-WANs are going to interoperate with the services that exist within these cloud silos to some degree. And how does that happen? And there was a teaser there that you saw earlier in the keynote where we are taking those constructs that we talked about in the Google conference and bringing it all the way to a cloud native environment in the keynote. But I think the bigger problem here is how do we manage this complexity of this pallet stacks? Whether it's service meshes, whether it's development stacks, or whether it's SD-WAN deployments, how do we manage that complexity? And single pane of glass is overloaded as a term, because it brings in these notions of big monolithic panes of glass. And I think that's not the way we should be solving it. We should be solving it towards using API simplicity and API interoperability. And I think that's where we as a community need to go. >> Absolutely. Well, Vijoy, as you said, the API economy should be able to help on these, the service architecture should allow things to be more flexible and give me the visibility I need without trying to have to build something that's completely monolithic. Vijoy, thanks so much for joining. Looking forward to hearing more about the big bets coming out of Cisco, and congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you, Stu. It was a pleasure to be here. >> All right, and stay tuned for lots more coverage of theCUBE at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)