>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of pager duty summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, today talking with Tammy Bryant is a cube alumna, the principal Site reliability engineer at Gremlin and the co-founder and CTO of the Girl Geek Academy. Tammy, it's great to have you on the program again. >> Hi Lisa, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to be here. >> So one of the things I saw in your background 10 plus years of technical expertise, and SRE, and chaos engineering, and I thought chaos engineering, I feel like I'm living in chaos right now. What is chaos engineering and why do you break things on purpose? >> Yep. So the idea of chaos engineering is that we're, breaking systems but in a thoughtful controlled way, to identify weaknesses in systems. So that's really what it's all about. The idea there is, you know, When you're doing really complicated work with technical systems, so like, for example, distributed systems and say, for example, you're working at a bank, it's tough to be able to pinpoint the exact failure mode that could cause a really large outage for your customers. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. you inject the failure proactively, to identify the issues and then you fix them before they actually cause really big problems for customers and you do it during the middle of the day, you know, when you're feeling great, instead of being paged in the middle of the night for an incident, that's actually like causing your customers pain, and making you lose a lot of money. So that's what chaos engineering really is. >> Are you seeing in the last six months since the world is so different, are you seeing an increase in customers? Now with, the for example, Brick and Mortars shut down and everything having to convert to digital if it wasn't already? Is there an increase in demand for chaos engineering services? >> Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people are asking what is chaos engineering, how can I use ,it will it help me reduce my incidents? and definitely because there are a lot of new services that have been rolled out recently, say, for example, curbside pickup. That's a whole new thing that had to be created really recently to be able to handle a large amount of load. And you know, people show up, they want to get their product really fast, 'cause they want to be able to just get back home quickly. And that's something that we've been working on with our customers is to make sure that curbside pickup experience is really great. The other interesting thing that we've been working on because of the pandemic is making sure that banks are really reliable, and that customers are able to get access to their money when they need it. And able to see that information too. And you can imagine that not as when you're in lockdown, and you only can leave your house for maybe an hour a day, you need to be able to quickly get access to your money to buy food, and we've seen some big incidents recently, where that hasn't been the case. Yeah. >> And I can imagine I mean, just thinking of what happened with, everything six months ago and how people were, we are just, demanding, right, consumers were demanding, we expect to get whatever we want, whether it's something we buy on Amazon, something that we stream on Netflix, or whatnot, we have this expectation that we can almost get it in real time. But there was a there was, you know what, there was a delay a few months ago, and there still is to some degree. But companies like Amazon and Netflix, I can imagine, really must have a big focus on chaos engineering, to test these things regularly. And now have proved, I would imagine to some degree that with chaos engineering that they have built, they're built to withstand that. >> Yes, exactly. So our founders at Gremlin came from Netflix and Amazon, our CEO had worked at both where he done chaos engineering, and that's actually why he decided to create Gremlin. It's the first company in the world to offer chaos engineering as a service. And you know, obviously, when you're working somewhere like Netflix, you know the whole product, you have to be able to get access to that movie, that TV show, right in that moment, and also customers expect to be able to see that on for example. There PlayStation in their living room and it should work and there paying for a subscription, So, to be able to keep them on that subscription, you need to offer a great service. Same thing with Amazon, you know, Amazon.com, they've done a lot of chaos engineering work over many years now to be able to make sure that everything is available. And it's not just that, the entire amazon.com is up and running. It's also for example, that when you go and look at a page that the recommendation service works toO and they're able to show you, hey, here's some other things that you might like to get to buy at this time. And I like as as a consumer, I love that 'cause it helps me save time and effort and even money as well 'cause it's giving you some good advice. So that's the type of statement we do. >> Exactly, So. when you're working with customers, I'd love to understand just a little bit from the, like the conversational standpoint is this now, is chaos engineering now, at kind of the sea level or is it still sort of in within the engineering folks 'cause looking at this as a make or break, knowing that for example, Netflix, there's Hulu, there's Disney Plus, there's Apple TV. Plus, if we don't get something that we're looking for right away, there's prime, we're going to go to another streaming service. So are you starting to see like an increase in demand from companies that no, we have competition right behind us, we've got to be able to set up the infrastructure and ensure that it is reliable. Now more than ever. >> Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important. I'm seeing a lot of executives. I mean, I've seen that since the beginning, really, since I first started working at Gremlin. I would often be invited by executives to come and give talks actually, within their company, to help the teams learn about chaos engineering, and I love doing that, It's really great. So I'd be invited by C levels, or VPs, from different departments. And I often get people adding me on LinkedIn from all over the world who are in leadership roles, because really, like, you know, they're responsible for making sure that their companies can hit those critical metrics and make sure that they're able to achieve their really, you know, demanding business goals, and then they're trying to help their teams be able to achieve that, too. So I've actually been so pleased to see that as well. Like it is really cool to have an executive reach out and say, hey, I'm thinking of helping my team, I'd like to get them introduced to you can you come and just teach them about this topic? And I love being able to do that it's really positive. And it's the right way to improve. >> It is, and I think nowadays, with reliability being more important than ever, you know, we talked to leaders from industry, from every industry. And there are certain things right now that are going to be shaping the winners and the losers of tomorrow. And it sounds to me like chaos engineering is one of those things that's going to be fundamental to any type of business to not just survive these times, but to thrive going forward. >> Yes, I definitely think so. I mean, obviously, people can easily just go to a different URL and try and use a different service. And you know, we're seeing now failure across so many different industries. We didn't see that before. But for example, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news or heard from friends and family about schools, now being completely online. And then kids can't actually access, their calls their resources, what they need to learn every day. So that really just shows you how much it's impacting us as a society, we really know that the internet is critical. It's amazing that we have the internet, like how lucky we are to have this, but it needs to work for us to actually be able to get value out of it. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. You know, were able to make sure that everything is reliable, so it's up and running. And we do that by looking at things like redundancy. So we'll do failover work where we completely shut down an application or service and make sure it gracefully fails over. We also do a lot of dependency failure work, where you're actually looking to say, this is the critical path of this service. And a lot of people don't think about this, but the critical path really starts at sign in. So you need to make sure that login and sign in works really well. It's not just about like the experience once you've signed in, that has to work well all the way through. So actually if you have a good understanding of user experience, it helps you create a much better pathway and understand those critical pieces that the customer needs to be able to do to have a great experience. And I care a lot about that. Like whenever I go and work somewhere, I always read customer tickets, I always try and understand what are the customer pain points. And I love listening to customers and then just solving their problems. The last thing I want them to do is, you know, be complaining or be really annoyed on Twitter because something just isn't working when they need it to be working. And it is really critical these days. It's a the internet is a really serious part of our day to day life. >> Oh, it's a lifeline. I mean, that's, some folks. It's the only way that they're connecting with the outside world, is through the internet. So when things aren't, I had a friend whose son first day of college couple weeks ago, freshman year, first class couldn't get into zoom. And that's a stressful situation. But I imagine too, though, that and I know you're going to be speaking at the pager duty summit that more folks need to understand what this is. And I can tell the you have a real authentic passion for it. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about at the pager duty summit. >> Sure thing, I'm really excited to be speaking at Pager Duty Summit very soon. My talk is called building, and scaling SRE teams, so site reliability engineering teams. And this is something that I've done previously. I've built out the SRE teams at Dropbox for both databases as well as storage. So block storage, and then I also lead the code workflows team. And that's for, you know, over 500 million users, people accessing the critical data that they store on Dropbox all the time. You know the way that folks use Dropbox is in so many different ways. Maybe it's like really famous music musicians who are trying to create an amazing new album that happens or maybe it's a lawyer preparing for a court case, and they need to be able to access their documents. So those are a lot of customer stories that would come up over time. And prior to that, I worked at the National Australia Bank as well leading teams too and obviously like people care about their money if they can't access their money. If there incorrect transactions, if there are missing transactions, you know, duplicate transactions, maybe people don't mind so much about it you get like a double deposit, but it's still not good from the bank's perspective. So there's all types of different chaos that can happen. And I found it to be really interesting to be able to dive into that and make sure that you can make improvements. And I love that it makes customers happier. And also, it helps you improve your company as a whole. So it's a really good thing to be able to do, And with my talk, I'm going to talk to folks about, you know, not only why it's important to build out a reliability practice at your organization, you know, back in the day, people used to go, why would you need a security team? You know, why would we need that? now everybody has a security team, everyone has a chief security officer as well. But why don't we focus on reliability, like we know that we see incidents out in the news all the time, but for some reason, we don't have the chief reliability officer. I think that's definitely going to be something that will appear in the future just like the chief security officer roll up. But that's what I'm going to talk about there. How you can find site reliability engineers, I'll share a few of my secrets. I won't give any spoilers out. But there's actually quite a few places that you can find amazing people. There's even a school that you can hire them from, which I've done in the past. And then I'll talk to you about how you can interview them to make sure that you get the best people on your team. There are a number of things that I think are very important to interview for. And then once you've got those folks on your team, I'll talk to you about how you can make sure that they're successful. How to set them up for success and make sure that they're aligned to not only your business goals, but also your core values as a company, which is really important too. >> Yeah, that's fantastic. It's very well rounded, I'm curious, what are some of the the characteristics that you think are really critical for someone to become a successful SRE? >> Yeah, so there's a few key things that I look for. One thing is that, somebody who is really good at troubleshooting, so they need to be able to be comfortable with complexity, ambiguity and open ended challenges and problems and also thrive in those types of environments. Because often you're seeing something that you've never seen happen before. And also you're working with really complicated systems. So you just need to be able to feel good in that moment. And you can test for that during an interview question on troubleshooting and debugging. So that's something that I'll go into in more detail. But that's definitely the first characteristic. The other thing, of course, is you want to have someone who is good at being able to build solutions. So they can code, they understand automation, they can figure out how can I take this pain point, this problem? And how can I automate it and then scale this out and make it available for everyone across my organization? So someone who has that mindset of building tools for others, and often they are internal tools, because maybe you're building a tool that helps everybody know, who's on call every single critical service at the company and also non critical service and they can identify that in a minute or less like maybe even just in a few seconds, and then they can quickly get that person involved, if anything need to escalate to them. Via for example, a tool like pager duty, that's really what you want. You want them to be able to think, how can I just make this efficient? How can I make sure that we can get really great results? And yeah, I think they also just need to be really personable too and work well in a really complicated organizational structure. Because usually they have to work with the engineering team, the finance team to understand the revenue impact. They need to be able to work with the PR team and the social media team, if they're incidents, and then they need to provide information about when this incident is going to be resolved, and how they can update VIP customers. They need to talk to the sales team, because what happens if you're giving a demonstration, and then somehow there's an issue, or failure that happens, an incident and then in the middle of your very important sales demo, you're not able to actually deliver it that can happen a lot too. So there are a lot of very important key skills. >> Sounds like it's a really cross functional role, pivotal to an organization, that needs to understand how these different functions not only operate, but also operate together, is that somebody that you think has certain types of previous work experience? Is this something that you talked to the Girl Geek Academy girls about? How did they get into? I'm curious, like what the career path is? >> Yeah, it's interesting, like I find a lot of SRE's often come from either a few different backgrounds. One is they came through the world of Linux and understanding systems, and just being really interested in that. Like deep diving into the kernel, understanding how to improve performance of systems. The other side is maybe they came from coding background where they were actually building applications and features. I started off actually on that side, but I also had a passion for Linux. And then I sort of spread over into the other side and was able to learn both. And then often you know, someone who's comfortable with being on call and handling incidents, but it is a lot of skills, like that's actually something that I often talk to folks about, and they asked me how can I become a great SRE? There's so many things I need to learn. And I just say, you know, take it slow, try and gradually increase your number of skills. People often say that there is like there's some curve for SRE's, where you have the operations side, on one side, and then the coding side on the other. And often like the best person sits right in the middle where they have both ops and engineering skills. But it's really hard to find those people. It's okay if you have someone that's like, really deep, has amazing knowledge of Linux and scaling systems and internet management, and then you can pair them up with a really amazing programmer who's great at software engineering and software architecture, that's okay, too. >> We've been hearing for a long time about this sort of negative unemployment with respect to cyber security professionals. Is that, are you guys falling into that same category as well with SRE? Or is it somehow different or you just know this is exactly what we're looking for? We want to go out there, and even in the Girl, Greek Academy, maybe help girls learn how to be able to find what I imagine are a lot of opportunities. >> Yeah, there are so many opportunities for this. So it's definitely an opportunity because what I see is there's not enough SRE's. So tons of companies all over the world will actually ping me and say, hey, Tommy, how do I hire SRE's, that's why I decided to give this talk because I wanted to package that up and just share that information as to how you can do it. And also, maybe you can't find the SRE's because they don't exist. But you can help retrain your team. So you can have an engineer learn the skills that are required to be an SRE, that's totally possible too, maybe move them over to become an SRE. With girl geek Academy, one of the things that I've done is run hackathons and workshops and just online training sessions to help girls learn these new skills. So that's exactly what our mission is, is to teach 1 million girls technical skills by 2025. And I love to do mentoring at scale, which is why it's been really cool to be able to do it online and through these like workshops and remote hackathons. And I definitely love to do something where else work with some of our customers actually, and run an event. I did one a while back, it was really cool, we were able to have all of the girls come in and be at the customer's office and actually learn skills with the customer, which was really fun. And it helps them actually think, hey, I could work one day that would be really amazing. And I'm going to do that again in November. And it's kind of fun too. We can do things like have like, you know, dad and mom and then daughter day, where you actually bring your daughter to work and help her learn technical skills. That's really fun because they get to see what you do and they understand it more and see how cool chaos engineering really is. Then they think oh, wow, you're so awesome, this is great. >> I love it, that's fantastic. Well it sounds like, like I said before your passion for it is really there. What, I think is really interesting is how you're talking about chaos engineering and just the word in and of itself chaos. But you painted in such a positive lights critical business critical, but also the all the opportunities there that businesses have to learn and fine tune so such an interesting conversation. Yeah, Tammy. We have you back on the program. But I thank you so much for joining me today. And for those folks that lucky enough that are attending the pager duty summit, they're going to get to learn a lot from you. Thank you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> For Tammy Bryant, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (upbeat music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, buddy. This is David Lantz. Welcome to this cube. Conversation with Dr Rico is the CMO of infinite out. It's still I still have a hard time saying that doctor or an engineer and I love having you on because we could talk storage. We could go deep and we could talk trends and marketing trends, too. But so welcome. Thanks for coming on my sled. So tell me what's new since the scale to win launch that you guys had. Tell me what you know. Is everything shipping Now What's the uptake been like with customers? And the reaction? Yeah, >> they're the reaction has been phenomenal. This, as you may recall, you were there. It was biggest launch in our history, which was fantastic. And the reaction has just been overwhelmingly positive, with customers with partners with analysts. Human scum cases with competitors is an interesting you know, we had a lot of things that were already shipping. They were an early customer release. There were a few things that we had started shipping in December on the things that we said we'd be coming in three Q. We G eight on time. So there, there now all generally available except the stuff that we talked about that would be available in 2020 which right now looks like it's on track. It's doing very, very well. >> So VM wear VM world eyes coming up later on this month, things are obviously changing. There was announcement recently that that VM wears gonna choir pivotal. So a little bit of financial engineering going on stock stock rose 77% on the day when the Dow dropped 800. So okay, the funny money. But things are changing in the V m where ecosystem you certainly saw we we This is our 10th year the M world. We go back and you hear Tod Nielsen back in the day, talk about for every dollar spent on a V M where lice and 15 was spent a Negro system, you know, we're kinda del izing vm wear now, which is sort of interesting, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing what that all means to you. I mean, still half a million 600,000 customers, you've got to be there you guys have great success at that show. So your thoughts what's going on? But VM world this year? Yeah, I >> kind of kind of loaded their first of all congratulations on the milestone. That's great. 10 years is super. Remember, probably seeing you with the 1st 1 there. Of course we knew each other longer. Uh, you know, and sure I get the incestuous, you know, money changing of hand there, I think I think it's it's good in one respect. You certainly CBM where, you know, making big inroads with VM wear on AWS. And this isn't now with Pivotal will be a good launching platform for Della's well, a svm where to be a little bit more in control of their own destiny. And it's certainly the way a lot of people are going. We're doing a lot of that ourselves. Not so much, in a sense. We don't have a cloud platform that we sell is a total encompassing platform. But of course, with new tricks cloud on big players and then certainly a large portion of our our customer base, our cloud service providers, they love our stuff. It helps them compete. It actually gives them in some respects, a competitive advantage, but VM world itself. Lots going on there. We have amplified our presence once again because VM where does represent a large portion of our customer base? So we're we're very proud of that. We're very proud to be a technology alliance partner of the M wears Andi. We're expecting to see a really good show in a really good cloud. A cloud crowd has they return back to their home base in San Francisco for us this year, it's It's gonna be a different experience. Were tellingme or of the software story, more of the portfolio story more about how you scare scale the win. We have a virtual presence this year, which is going to be very helpful in telling that story. Customers can come in and they can see more than just a ah box that in our world is really not important because it's for us. It's all about the software and stuff we do. We even in Booth Theater, we have some private meeting spaces well, to take people into a bigger, deeper drill down. But the virtual experience will allow them to touch and feel stuff that maybe they didn't get to do before, and that's gonna be kind of exciting as well. >> So you mentioned C S P s. We had Michael Gray thrive on a while back, and you know, he was saying that Look, he likes your product because it allows him to do other things. And don't worry about, you know, the old sort of tuning and managing and ableto re shift labor. I felt like that was an interesting discussion, primarily because you've got all these cloud service providers that everybody thought aws was just gonna kill. And if anything, it's elevated them. What are you seeing in the CSP space? Yeah, you know, >> Michael had a lot of interesting things to say that definitely love the fact that we enable multiple workloads without them having to do lots of cautious planning and re planning and shifting and shuffling. And we are seeing C S P is becoming more value. Add to a lot of businesses, especially the mid market and the smaller enterprise where people may want more than just infrastructure. You know, they don't they need that application level support and companies like thrive in some of our other really good customer, US signal and you know they're all capable of Flex Central's. Another one they're all capable of providing service is beyond the hardware they're capable of providing that application support the guidance and, in the case of Thrive, the cybersecurity guidance especial Really, which is really, really critical. So they're growing, and they're also, by the way, working with eight of us and Google and Azure to provide that capabilities well, when necessary. >> Well, that leads me to the sort of multi cloud discussion in our industry. We tend to have this alphabet soup of acronyms like another reason I like talking to you because we can kind of cut through that. And, you know, I love the marketing. I think marketing helps people understand what's going on differentiate. It gives you an indication of where the industry is going, and multi cloud is one of those things that I mean. I've kind of said it's a symptom of multi vendor and more so than a strategy. But increasingly it seems like it's becoming a strategy with customers, and you just gave an example of thrive working with multiple cloud vendors. Clearly, VM where wants to be in that business. What your thoughts on multi cloud and and hybrid. What does it mean for for infinite at What's your strategy there? You know, it's it's interesting because I >> just read an article the other day about you know, the definition of multi cloud on whether it's being abused and, you know, I I look at it as someone just trying to tell their story and give it. Give it some favor. I think at the end of the day, uh, every business is going to be talking to multiple platforms whether they want to or not. You know, there are many customers and companies out there, businesses who are in our customers who have gone the way of the cloud and repatriated. Certain things is they've they found that it it may work. It may not work, and there are many cloud providers who were trying to do things to accelerate migration of applications because they see that certain applications don't work. You know, we got one of the cloud providers buying Ah, now as provider, another one buying very recently, you know, an envy me based flash company to try to pick up those loose workloads where they might struggle today. But the end of the day everybody's going to be multiple. And whether it's because they're using cloud service is from from a software perspective or whether they just need to basically broker and maintain sort of that that independence so that they can maintain some cost control, availability, control, security, control and in some cases it will remain on premises. And some of things will be off just so they could get the applications closer to their end users. So you know what is multi Cloud? Multi Cloud really is just one of those terms that literally means what it says. It's your business running in multiple places. It doesn't have to necessarily be simultaneously by the same application. >> A big part of your value proposition is the simplicity. We've heard that from your customers, and you guys obviously push that out there. I want to ask you because you mentioned repatriation and you know, Cloud keeps growing like crazy. Sure, and the on prem not so much. You guys are smaller company. You're growing your stealing share, So yep. So maybe is that simplicity thing. Here's my question. So it's around automation. The cloud providers, generally an Amazon specifically have have driven automation. They've attacked the IittIe labor problem and they're able to charge for that on Dhe. So my question is, are you seeing that you're able to attack that labor problem in a similar sense and bring forth the value proposition to customers is Look, we can create a cloud like experience on Prem if you want MacLeod. Great. But if you want to stay on Prem, you're gonna get the benefit of being able to shift. Resource is two more strategic things and not have to worry about all this heavy, heavy lifting. You You seeing tangible evidence of that? >> We're seeing significant tangible evidence of that on and, you know, a couple of things. You know, you talk about growth, right? And I think when we did the launch, you know, only a few months ago we were at about 4.6 exabytes of capacity shipped. We just passed 5.1. That's some significant growth in in just a few months. It's like a 33% growth just from the same time last year, which is which is fairly significant. And of course, if you're familiar with the way we talk, you know you have an engineer is the head of marketing. We like to tell the truth. You know, we don't like to mask, do many things and confuse people. We don't like talking about effective storage because effective capacity doesn't really mean much to some people. So that's, you know, this is what we This is what we shipped and it's growing rapidly. And a lot of that is growing, in part because of the significance of the message and in part because of this need to control costs, contain costs and really operate in a more modern way. So get back to your comments about cloud and cloud operation. That's really what people want. People like the consumption model of cloud. They don't always like the cost on hidden costs. So simplifying that, but giving them the flexibility Thio have either an op X or cap ex that allows him to grow and shrink as they move workloads around. Because everybody grows even on Prem is growing. It's just, you know, it's the law of numbers, right? Cloud is growing, absolutely. But on Prem really is growing. And then the other thing I want is they want the operational flexibility. And that's what we talked about in our elastic data fabric. They don't like constantly having to re jigger and re balance workloads. Infinite box by itself. The platform of infinite Box takes away a lot of that mystery and magic, because it it kind of hides all of the complexity of that workload. And it, you know, we take the randomness out of the I o. I think maybe Craig Hibbert mentioned in his video is he was describing in detail how that happens. Remember Michael Gray talking about that as well, you know, So those those things come out in a single infinite box. But even if you said well, I still want to move my workload from, uh, you know this data center to an adjacent data center or perhaps a data center in another facility. Um, excuse me, Another city. So that's closer to the end user. Making that transparent to the applications is critically important. >> Yes, he talked about growth in about 1/2 a PETA bite. Sorry, half an exabyte in just a few months. A couple months? Really Right. That's that's growth. But I want to ask you about petabytes. Petabytes scales. Kind of key of companies that don't do that in a year day, eh? Exactly. So that's a petabytes scale. Is big party of marketing two questions? Why is that relevant? Or is that relevant to VM? Where customers? Why so and then, does it scare some people owe you? Asked a great question. >> It absolutely scared some people. And I know that there are some pundits out their industry pundits who who basically don't agree with our messaging. But this is this is the business problem that we we targeted the solve rate. Um, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they're petabytes scale yet because maybe they're individual applications aren't petabytes scale. But when you add it up, they get there and a lot of our customers are existing. Customers didn't start with infinite at at petabytes scale. They started a couple 100 terabytes, perhaps, but they're petabytes skill now. In fact, over 80% of the customers and systems that we have out there today or above the petty bite. We have customers that are in the tens of petabytes. We have customers that are in the hundreds of petabytes. They grow, they grow rapidly on. Why is that? Well, to two factors. Really. Number one, if you go back to. Probably when I first met you back when I had your hair, at least in quantity, way had way. Were kind of crusting that terabyte mark. Right? Right. And what was the problem? The problem was nobody could figure out how to deal with the performance. Nobody wanted to put that much risk on a single platform, so they couldn't deal with the availability. And they really didn't know how to deal with even the serviceability of that scale. So terabyte was a problem solved No, 25 years ago, and then things were rapidly from there. Now we're at the same juncture, just three orders of magnitude later. Right? >> Well, that's interesting, because, you know, you're right. People didn't want to put all all that capacity under an actuator that cost performance problems. They were concerned about, you know, just availability. And then two things happen so simultaneously, flash comes along. And, you know, you would say was put sort of a Band aid to some of the performance problems. Sure. And you guys came up with, like, this magic sauce to actually use spinning disc and get the same performance or better performance you would argue with flash. And so as a result, you were now able to do a lot Maur with the data, the concerns about that much date under the actuator somewhat attenuated because, I mean, you've got now so much data, you've got to do something that's almost that's flywheel effective. You've got tons of data machine intelligence and a I. Now, coming into the picture, you've got Cloud, which has been this huge tail when for the industry and for data creation in general. And so I see. You know, you see, like the I. D. C numbers and for forecasting growth of data and storage could be low. I mean, the curve could be bending, you know, kind of more than exponentially your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting observation. I think what it really comes down to is our storyline is math is greater than media, all right? And when you when you look at the flash being, you know, the panacea to performance it was just a step in the evolution, right? You go back and and say, spinning disc was the same solution to the performance problem 20 years ago. 25 years ago, even it was 5400 rpm discs and then very rapidly. Servers got faster. The interconnects got a little bit faster. They were still mostly differential. Scuzzy. There was 7200 rpm discs. And I promise you, by the way, that if you're running 5400 rpm desk, you install 7200 rpm. All yours performance problems will go away until the day you install it. And then it was 10,000 rpm discs and I was 15,000 rpm disc, and it still wasn't getting fast enough because, you know, you went to Fibre Channel One Gig Fibre channel and then to Geek Fibre, Channel four, Gig fibre, Channel eight, gig fibre channel. The unified connects got faster. The servers got faster. That was more cash on the servers. Then this thing came along, cuts called solid state disc. Right. And then it was it was SLC single layer cell technology. But don't worry about it's very expensive. Not a problem. You only need 4% of your application, right? Jerry? No, no, I'm sorry. percent. No, I'm sorry. 30%. What the heck? You know, M l c is now a little bit more reliable, so let's just make make it all slash. Right? So that was the end of the story, right? No. Servers continue to get faster. Uh, the media continue to get faster and denser, right? So now the interconnect isn't fast enough, So envy me. Is that the answer to life? The universe and everything? Well, wait. I got a better answer for your test. CIA storage class memory in parallel with that. By the way, there are some vendors out there who said that's still not fast enough. We want to put more d ram and the servers and do things in memory. We went in memory databases. I guarantee whatever you do from a media perspective on my personal guarantee to you, it's obsolete by the time you're up and running. By the time you get your applications migrated, configured and running with business value, it's already obsolete. Some vendors got something better coming out. The right answers. This stuff you talked about, the right answer is everything that you're doing for your business. APs. It's a it's a Mel. It's solving the problems in software and, you know, you said we use disc and make it fast. It's not despite itself, of course, right? It's D Bram. It's a lot of the Ram, which, by the way, is orders of magnitude faster than flash the NAND flash. And even if its ECM and still orders of magnitude faster than that, what we use the disk for today in the architecture is the cost factor. We take the random ization out in the flash and we take the >> end and in the in the diagram >> and we used the SAS in the back end to manage costs. But we use it in a way that it performs well, which is highly sequential, massively parallel. And we take full advantage of that Beck and Ben with to do that with that massive dear am front end. Our cash ratios are unparalleled in the industry and and we use it even more effectively that way. But if architecture already evolves, so if if SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that that S S D layer with the cm. And if you know, if the economics of Q L C or something beyond that. Come down will replace the back end with that, do you? Do >> you ever look at what you're doing today as sort of a modern day symmetric. So I mean, a lot of things you just said. I mean, you've got a lot of memory. You've got a massive back end. You know, those were two of the characteristics of symmetric snow. Of course. Fast forward. Whatever. 30 years, right. But a lot of it was sort of intelligence and understanding. Sure. So how data works, is it Is it a fair sort of, or is it radically different? Well, in terms of mindset, I mean, I know the implementation is >> right, right? >> Yeah. I mean, it's not an unfair comparison. I mean, tiered storage was around before some metrics. Right? So it's certainly existed existed then, too. It was just at the time. It was a significant innovation course to layer at the time, right? A big cash front, ending some slower media and then taking advantage of the media on the back end. The big difference today is that if you look at what some metrics became through its Evolution's DMX and V Max and now Power Max. It's still tiered storage, you know, you still have some cash. That's that's for unending some faster media with power. Max, you're you're dealing now with us with an SS a back end. But what happened with those types of architectures is the tearing became more automated. But you're still moving information around. You're still moving Information from one said it This to another set of this leader in the cycle. You're still trying to promote things you know, to to the cash up front. We're doing it in real time. We're >> doing it by analyzing >> the data on the way it comes in. We're reassembling it again, taking the random ization out we're reassembling it and storing it across multiple disks in a way that it it increases our probability of pulling that information associated information back when we need it later. So there's there's no movement. Once its place, we don't have to replace it. You know it's already associated with other data that makes sense, and that gives us a lot of value. >> And secret sauce is the outcome of the secret sauce is you're able to very efficiently. Well, historically, you haven't been able to do a lot of garbage collection, a lot of data movement, and that just kills performance. There's >> really no garbage collection necessary in our in our world way. Also use very modern data structures or patents. Ah, lot of them on our neural cash Deal with the fact that we use a try data structure. So we're not using old fashioned hash tables and you know, l are you algorithms, You know it Sze very, very rapid traverse a ll of these trees >> and you're taking advantage of machine intelligence inside the software architecture. That really is some of the new innovation that really wasn't around to be able to take advantage of that 20 years ago. Maybe it was it was just not cost effective. Do the math was there, put it that the math of the mouth was there and >> there there There's been lots of evolutions of that over the years, a swell, but we continue to evolve and innovate. And, you know, one of the one of the cool things I think about working infinite at is is the multiple multiple generations of engineer where you've got people who understand that math they understand the real nuances of what it means to operate in a world of storage, which is quite a bit different than operating, saying networks or proceed be used because data integrity is paramount. There's lots of lots of things that go on there as well. But we also have younger generations, generations who like new challenges and like to re invent things so they find newer and greater ways to do things. >> This is exciting. So systems, thinkers and I mean server thinkers. I mean, people who understand, you know, systems designed it all the way through and and, you know, newbies who are super smart like you say, wanna learn and solve problems? Go back to the petabytes scale discussion, >> solve problems at petabytes scale, right? Even if the customer doesn't need that necessarily to solve that problem is critically important because even if you look at Les, just take, you know NFS, for example, most NFS systems deal with thousands of objects. Hundreds to thousands of objects are an F s. Implementation deals with billions, right? Do you need billions? How many applications you know that have billions of objects, But being able to do that in a way where performance doesn't degrade over time and also do it in a way where we say our nlm implementation isn't impacted by any any type of service events, we can take a note out, and it doesn't impact in ln There's no no degradation and performance. There's no impact or outage in service. All that's important. Even when you're dealing with smaller application sizes because they add up, they really do add up. He also brought up the point about, you know, density and actually intensity. Great. You know, back 25 years ago, when we were dealing with, you know, the first terabyte storage system, you know, how much how much stories did you have on your laptop? How much you have today, right? You know, you're probably more than a terabyte. They were laughing about putting things terabyte on the floor. And now you get more than a terabyte on your laptop. Things changing? >> Yeah. Um, I wanna ask you where you see the competition. We talked about all flash. We've had a long conversation, long, many conversations in the past about this, But you really, you know, the all flashy kind of described it as a Band Aid, essentially my words, but it was sort of a step function. Okay, great. Um, you have one company, really us who achieve escape velocity in that business in terms of pure But is that where you see in competition and you're seeing it from, you know, the hyper scale er's where you Yeah, you know, >> it's interesting. You know, you look at companies like, you know, we admire what they dio, especially with regard to marketing. They do a really good job of that. They also, um I have some really interesting ideas innovating the media, which is which is great. It helps us in the long run as well. Um, we just look at it as a component of our system, not these system, which makes it different. We don't really see the A f a. You know, the small scale a FAA is are the majority of our competition. We do run into them, but typically it the lower end of the opportunity. Even within the bigger companies that have competitors to those products, we run into them and smaller opportunities, not bigger opportunities where we run into them where there's a significant performance advantage as long as you don't mind the scale out approach to solving the problem. Unfortunately, when you're using a phase two skill out, you know you're putting all of the intelligence requirements on some poor storage administrator or system administrator to figure out what those where right, we take all of that away. So once it starts to scale, that's where we come in a plan. We don't see tons of competition there. Certainly, we're seeing competition from the clouds. And the competition from the clouds is more born of customer mandates and company mandates. Sometimes they I'm not quite sure that everybody knows why there who think to the cloud and we're problem they're trying to solve. But once they start to see a story that says, Hey, if the reasons are and you do understand those reasons, if the reasons are agility and financial flexibility and operational agility not as well as his acquisition agility, you know, we have answers to that and it starts to become a little bit more interesting and compelling. >> All right. One of the highlights of the M world each year is your dinner. Your customer I crashed in a couple of years ago when there were no other analysts there. And then last year again, it was in Vegas. Shows a nice steak house. This year we're in San Francisco, but But I had some great conversations with customers. I remember speaking to one customer about juxtaposing the sand thio to infinite debts platform. And you know the difference. The Sands taken off doing really well, but But he helped me understand the thinking from their standpoint of how they're applying it to solve problems and why v san wasn't a good fit. Your system was, um that was just one of many conversations last year had again other great conversations with customers. What do you do in this year? You have a customer dinner. We are? Yeah. We love to have you in and gave the invitation there. Yeah, the invitation. Is that definitely there? You know, a couple of >> years ago we didn't invite analysts, and you know what it was? It was a mistake. We and we learned that lesson into a large part. We credit you for for showing us how wrong we are. Our customers are very loyal. They're some of the most loyal in the industry. Don't take my word for it going. The gardener Pierre Insights and and look at our numbers compared to everybody else's any pick. Pick a vendor. We're at the top of the list with regard to not only the ratings but, more importantly, the customers willingness to recommend in every category, too. By the way, it's It's not just product quality and performance, and it's it's service support. It's easy doing business. It's an entirely different experience. So we love having the customers there, and the customers love having you there, too. They love having you and your appears in the industry there because they love learning from you and they love answering the questions and getting new insights. And we'd love to have you there. We're gonna be in the Mint this year. San Francisco meant not the not the current one that that's pretty coins, but the original historical site on duh. You know we have. We have invitations out thio to about 130 people because there's only so much room we have it at the event, but we're looking forward to a great time and a great meal and good conversation. >> That's great. Well, VM World is obviously one of the marquee events in our industry. It's the It's the fat middle of where the IittIe pro goes on dhe We're excited. Used to be Labor Day started the fall season. Now it's VM world. Well, Doc will see you out there. Thanks very much for your good to see you. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is day Volonte in the Cube will see you next time we'll see you at the M World 2019.

(music) >> Live from Orlado, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. Happy hour has started. The crowd is roaring. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Thomas LaRock. >> He is the Head Geek at SolarWinds. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Great title: Head Geek >> Yes. >> So, tell our viewers a little bit about what - tell us about SolarWinds and also about what you do. >> SolarWinds is a company that offers about forty different products to help with your enterprise infrastructure monitoring. Really unify management of your systems. Been in the business for about twenty years and I've been with them for about eight now. Head Geek is really, uh, you can equate it to being a technical evangelist. >> Okay. So you're out there trying to win the hearts and minds, trying to tell everyone what you do. >> Yes, I need you all to love me. (laughing) and love my products. >> So, Thomas, and for those who don't already follow you on Twitter, you're a SQL rockstar. >> Yes, yes [Stu] - I need to say, "thank you," because you helped connect me with a lot of the community here, especially on the data side of the house. You and I have known each other for a bunch of years. You're a Microsoft MVP. So maybe give us a little bit of community aspect: what it means to be a Microsoft MVP for those who don't know. You're an evangelist in this space and you've been on this show many times. >> I usually don't talk about myself a lot, but sure. (Rebecca laughing) Let's go for it. I've been a Microsoft data platform MVP for about 10 year now. And it was intresting when you reached out, looking to get connected. I was kind of stunned by how many people I actually knew or knew how to get in touch with for you. I help you line up, I guess, a handful of people to be on the show because you were telling me you hadn't been here at Microsoft Ignite and I just thought, "well I know people," and they should know Stu, and we should get them connected so that you guys can have some good conversations. But, yeah, it's been a wild ride for me those ten years where Microsoft awards people MVP designation. It's kind of being an evangelist for Microsoft and some of the great stuff that they've been doing over the past ten years. >> It's a phenomenal program. Most people in the technology industry know the Microsoft MVP program. I was a Vmware expert for a number of years. Many of the things were patterned off of that. John Troyer is a friend of mine. He said that was one the things he looked at. Sytrics has programs like this. Many of the vendors here have evangelists or paragons showing that technology out here. Alight. So talk a little bit about community. Talk about database space. Data and databases have been going through such, you know, explosion of what's going on out there, right? SQL's still around. It's not all cosmos and, you know, microservices-based, cloud, native architecture. >> So the SQL Server box product is still around, but what I think is more amazing to me has been the evalution of...Let's take for example, one of the announcements today, the big data cluster. So, it's essentially a container that's going to run SQL servers, Spark and Hadoop, all in one. Basically, a pod that will get deployed by kubernetes. When you wrap all that together, what you start to realize is that the pattern that Microsoft has been doing for the past few years, which is, essentially, going to where the people are. What I mean is: you have in the open-source world, you have people and developers that have embraced things like DevOps much faster than what the Windows developers have been doing. So instead of taking your time trying to drag all these people where you want them to be, they've just start building all the cool stuff where all the cool kids already are, and everybody's just going to gravitate. Data has gravity, right? So, you're building these things, and people are going to follow it. Now, it's not that they're expecting to sell a billion dollars woth of licenses. No. They just need to be a part of the conversation. So if you're a company that's using those technologies, now all of a sudden, it's like, this is an option. Are you interested in it? Microsoft is the company that's best poised to bring enterprises to the cloud. Amazon has a huge share. We all know that, but Microsoft's already that platform of choice for these enterprises. Microsoft is going to be the one to help them get to the cloud. [Stu]- Thomas, Explain what you mean by that because the strength I look at Microsoft is look, they've got your application. Business productivity: that's where they are. Apologize for cutting you off there. Is that what you mean? The applications are changing and you trusted Microsoft and the application and therefore, that's a vendor of choice. >> Absolutely. If it's already your vendor of choice then, I don't want to say, "Lock in," but if it's already your preference and if they can help get to the cloud, or in the hybrid situation or just lift and shift and just get there, then that's the one you going to want to do it. Everything they're building and all the services they're providing... At the end of the day, they and Amazon, they're the new electric company. They want data. That's the electricity. They don't care how you get it, but between... even Vmware. Between Amazon, Vmware and Microsoft, they're going to be the ones to help... They're going to be your infrastructure companies. Microsoft-managed desktop now. We'll manage your laptop for you. >> Everything that they're doing essentially like, don't even need my own IT department. Microsoft's going to be the largest MSP in history, right? That's where they're headed. They're going to manage everything for you. The data part of it, of course for me, I just love talking about data. But the data part of it...Data is essential to everything we do. It's all about the data. They're doing their best to manage it and secure it. Security is a huge thing. There were some security announcements today as well, which were awesome. The advanced threat detection, the protection that they have. I'm always amazed when I walk through the offering they have for SQL injection protection. I try and ask people, "Who's right now monitoring for SQL injection?" And they're like, "We're not doing that." For fifteen dollars a month, you could do this for your servers. They're like, "that's amazing what they're offerening." Why wouldn't you want that as a service? Why wouldn't you sign-up tomorrow for this stuff? So, I get excited about it. I think all this stuff they're building is great. The announcements today were great. I think they have more coming out over the next couple days. Or at least in the sessions, we'll start seeing a lot of hands-on stuff. I'm excited for it. >> So when you were talking about Microsoft being the automatic vendor of choice. Why wouldn't you? You treated it as a no brainer. What does Microsoft need to do to make sure customers feel that way too? >> I think Microsoft is going to do that... How I would do that. A couple ways. One, at the end of the day, Microsoft wants what we all want, what I want, is they want happy customers. So they're going to do whatever it takes so their customers are happy. So one way you do that is you get a lot of valuable feedback from customers. So, one thing Microsoft has done in the past is they've increased the amount telemetry they're collecting from their products. So they know the usage. They know what the customers want. They know what the customers need. But they also collect simple voice to the customer. You're simply asking the customer, "What do you want?" And you're doing everything you can to keep them happy. And you're finding out where the struggles are. You're helping them solve those problems. How do you not earn trust as a result of all that, right? I think that's the avenue they've been doing for, at least, ten years. Well, let's say, eight years. That's the avenue and the approach they've been doing. I'd say it's been somewhat successful. >> Thomas, as our team was preparing for this show, we understand that Microsoft has a lot of strengths, but if I look at the AI space, Microsoft is not the clear leader today. Um, we think that some of the connections that Microsoft has, everything that you said, down to the desktop. Heck, even in the consumer space, they're down to the Xbox. There's a lot of reasons why Microsoft... You can say, "Here's a path of how Microsoft could become. You know number one, number two in the AI space over time. But, we're listening to things, like the Open Data Initiative that they announced today, which, obviously, Microsoft's working with a lot of partners out there, but it's a big ecosystem. Data plays everywhere. I mean, Google obviously has strong play in data. We've talked plenty about Amazon. What does Microsoft need to do to take the strength that they have in data move forward in AI and become even stronger player in the marketplace? >> So, AI, itself, is kind of that broad term. I mean, AI is a simple if-then statement. It doesn't really have to do anything, right? So let's talk about machine learning, predictive analytics, or even deep learning. That's really the are that we're talking about. What does Microsoft have to do? Well, they have to offer the services. But they don't have offer, say, new things. They just have to offer things that already exist. For example, the idea of, um, incorperating Jupiter notebooks into the Azure Data Studio. So if that could be achieved, you know, now you're bringing the workspaces people are using into the Microsoft platform a little bit, making it a little bit easier. So instead of these people in these enterprises... They already trust Microsoft. They already have the tools. But I got to go use these other things. Well, eventually, those other things come into the Microsoft tools, and now you don't have to use that other stuff either. I would talk about the ability to publish these models as a service. I've done the Academy program. I've earned a few certifications on some of this stuff. I was amazed at how easy it was with a few clicks, you know, published as a service as an API. It's sitting there. I sent in my data and I get back a result, a prediction. I was like, that was really easy. So I know they're not the leaders, but they're making it easy, especially for somebody like me who can start at zero and get to where I need to be. They made it incredibly easy and in some cases, it was intuative. I'm like, oh, I know what to do next with this widgit I'm building. I think it will take time for them to kind of get all that stuff in place. I don't know how long. But does Microsoft have to be the leader in AI? They have the Cognitive Toolkit. They have all that stuff with Cortana. They have the data. I think the customers are coming along. I think they get there just by attrition. I'm not sure there's something they're going to build where everybody just says, "There it is." Except there's the Quantum stuff. And last year's announcement of Quantum, I thought was one of the most stunning things. It just hit me. I had no idea working on it. So, who knows? A year from now there could be something similar to that type of announcement, where we're like, now I get it, now I got to go have this thing. I don't think we all need, you know, a hotdog not hotdog app, which seems to be the bulk of the examples out there. Some of the image classification stuff that you have out there is fabulous. There are a lot of use cases for it. Um, I'm not sure how they get there. But, I do think eventually over time, the platform that they offer, they do get just through attrition. >> One of the things you brought up earlier in this conversation was the Open Source Initiative and Stu, we had expressed a bit of skepticism that it's still going to take three to five years, for, really, customers to see the value of this. But once...The announcement was made today, so now we're going to go forward with this Initiative. What do you see as the future? >> Yeah, I was trying to, even, figure it out. So it sounds like the three companies are sharing data with each other. They pledged to be open. So if you buy one of their products, that data can seamlessly go into that other product is what it sounded like. And they were open, if I heard it right, they were open to partnering with other companies as well. >> Correct. >> Yes. Yes. >> Other vendors or customers, even that could tie in into these APIs, doing everything that they're doing. Open data models. >> Speaking as a data guy, that means if I trust one, I have to trust them all. (Stu Laughing) >> Right? So I don't know. I have trus&t issues. (Rebecca laughing) >> Clearly. >> I'm a DBA, by heart, so I have trust issues. I need to know a little more about it, but on the surface, just the words, "open data," sound great. I just don't know the practical, uh, practicality of it. It sounds like it's a way for people, or these companies, to partner with each other to get more of your data into their platform and their infrastructure. >> Yeah. I think next time we have Thomas on, we're going to spend some time talking about the dark side of data. >> Yes, indeed. >> We can talk dark data. Oh, sure. (Rebecca laughing) >> Well, Thomas, it was so much fun having you on this show and I should just plug your book. You are the author of "DBA Survivor." >> I am. Yes. It was a little book. So being a DBA, uh, I had some challenges in my role and I decided, as my friend Kevin Kline put it to me, he goes, "You should write the book you wish had written for you and handed to you on day zero of being a DBA." And I said, "Oh." It took m&e, I think, like, three weeks. It was just so easyto write all of that. >> It just flowed (laughing.) >> It was just stuff I had to say. But, yeah, thank you. >> Excellent. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (music playing)

>> Live, from San Francisco, it's The Cube! Covering DockerCon '18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube. We are live at DockerCon 2018 on a beautiful day in San Francisco. We're glad you're not playing hooky though if you're in the city because it's important to be here watching John Troyer and myself, Lisa Martin, talk to some awesome, inspiring guests. We're excited to welcome two Docker captains, that's right, to The Cube. We've got Nirmal Mehta, you are the chief technologist of Booz Allen. Welcome back to The Cube. And, we've got Bret Fisher, the author of Docker Mastery. Both of you, Docker captains. Can't wait to dig into that. But you're both speakers here at the fifth annual DockerCon. So Bret, let's talk, you just came off the stage basically. So, thank you for carving out some time for us. Talk to us about your session. What did you talk about? What was some of the interaction with the attendees? >> Well the focus is on Docker Swarm and I'm a assist admin at heart so I focus on ops more than developer but I spend my life helping developers get their stuff into production. And so, that talk centers around the challenges of going in and doing real work that's for a business with containers and how do you get what seems like an incredible amount of new stuff into production all at the same time on a container ecosystem. So, kind of helping them build the tools they need, and what we call a stack, a stack of tools, that ultimately create a full production solution. >> What were some of the commentary you heard from attendees in terms of... Were these mostly community members, were there users of container technology, what was sort of the dynamic like? >> Well you have, there's all sorts of dynamics, right? I mean you have startups, I think I took a survey in the room because it was packed and like 20% of the people in the room about were a solo DevOps admin. So they were the only person responsible for their infrastructure and their needs are way different than a team that has 20 or 30 people all serving that responsibility. So, the talk was a little bit about how do they handle their job and do this stuff. You know, all this latest technology without being overwhelmed and, then, how does it grow in complexity to a larger team and how do they sustain that. So, yeah. >> Bret, it's nice that the technology is mature enough now that people are in production, but what are some of the barriers that people hit when they try to go into production the first time? >> Yeah, great question. I think the biggest barrier is trying to do too much new at the same time. And, I don't know why we keep relearning this lesson in IT, right? We've had that problem for decades of projects being over cost, over budget, over timed, and I think with so much exciting new stuff in containers it's susceptible to that level of, we need all these new things, but you actually don't, right? You can actually get by with very small amounts of change, incrementally. So, we try to teach that pattern of growing over time, and, yeah. >> You mentioned like the one person team versus the multi-person team kind of DevOps organization. Does that same problem of boiling the ocean, do you see that in both groups? >> Yeah, I mean you have fundamentally the same needs, the same problem that you have to solve, but different levels of complexity is really all it has to do with and different levels of budget, obviously, right? So, usually the solo admin doesn't have the million dollar budget for all the tools and bells and whistles, so they might have to do more on their own, but, then, they also have less time so it's a tough row to hoe, you know, to deal with, because you've got those two different fundamental problems of time and money and people are using the most expensive thing. So, no matter what the tool is you're trying to buy, it's usually your time that's the most valuable thing. So how do we get more of our time back? And that's really what containers were all about originally was just getting more of our time back out of it and so we can put back into the business instead of focusing on the tech itself. >> Nirmal, your talk tomorrow is on empathy. >> Yes. >> Very provocative, dig into that for us. >> Sure, so it was actually inspired by a conversation I had with John a couple years ago on Geek Whisperers podcast and he asked the folks on that show, yourself included, asked if there was an event in my past that I kind of regret or taught me a lot. And it was about basically neglecting someone on my team and just kind of shoving them away. And, that moment was a big change in how I felt about the IT industry. And, what I had done was pushed someone who probably needed that help and built up a lot of courage to talk to me and I kind of just dismissed him too quickly. And, from there, I was thinking more and more about game theory and behavioral economics and seeing a lot of our clients and organizations struggle to go through a digital transformation, a DevOps transformation, a cultural transformation. So, to me, culture is kind of the core of what's happening in the industry. And so, the idea of my talk is a little bit of behavioral economics, a little bit of game theory, to kind of set the stage for where your IT organization is probably kind of is right now and how to use empathy to get your organization to that DevOps and to a more efficient place and resolve those conflicts that happen inherently. And, somehow tie that all together with Docker. So, that's kind of what my talk is all about. >> Nice, I mean what's interesting to me, Lisa, is that we do Cubes and there are many Cubes actually all across the country during conference season, right? And we talk to CEOs and VPs of very large companies and even today, at DockerCon, the word 'culture' and the talking about culture and process and people has come up every single interview. So, it's not just from the techies up that this conversation is going... this DevOps and empathy conversation is going on, it seems to be from the top down as well. Everyone seems to recognize that, if you really are going to get this productivity gain, it's not just about the tech, you gotta have culture. >> Absolutely, a successful transformation of an organization is both grassroots and top down. Can't have it without either. And, I think we inherently want to have a... Like, we want to take a pill to solve that problem and there's lots of pills: Docker or cloud or CICD or something. But, those tools are the foundational safety net for a cultural transformation, that's all that it is. So, if you're implementing Docker or Jenkins or some CICD pipeline or automation, that's a safety blanket for providing trust in an organization to allow that change in the culture to happen. But, you still need that cultural change. Just adopting Docker isn't going to make you automatically a more effective organization. Sorry, but it's just one piece and it's an important piece but you have to have that top down understanding of where you are now as an organization and where you want to be in the future. And understanding that this kind of legacy, siloed team mindset is no longer how you can achieve that. >> You talked about trust earlier from a thematic perspective as something that comes up. You know we were at SAP Sapphire last week and trust came up a lot as really paramount. And that was in the context of a vendor/customer relationship. But, to your point, it's imperative that it's actually coming from within organizations. We talk a lot about, well stuff today: multi-cloud--multi-cloud, silos-- but, there's also silos with people and without that cultural shift and probably that empathy, how successful, how big of an impact can a technology make? Are you talking with folks that are at the executive level as well as the developer level in terms of how they each have a stake and need to contribute to this empathy? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the talk I'm doing is basically the ammunition a lower level person would need to go up to management and say, hey, you know this is where the organization is, this is what the IT department kind of looks like, these are the conflicts, and we have to change in order to succeed. And a lot of folks don't. They see the technology changes that they need. You know, adopting the new javascript framework or the new UX pattern. But, they might not have the ammunition to understand the business strategy, the organizational issues. But, they still need that evidence to actually convince a CTO or a CEO or a COO for the need to change. So, I've talked to both groups. From the C-level side, I think it comes from the inherent speed of the industry, the competitive landscape, those are all the pressures that they see and the disruptions that they are tackling. Maybe it's incumbent disruption or new startups that they may have to compete with in the future. The need for constant innovation is kind of the driver. And, IT is kind of where all that is, these days. >> That's great. Building on the concept of trust and this morning at the keynote, Matt Mckesson where they talked about trusting Docker, trusting Docker the company, trusting Docker the technology. Almost the very first words out of Steve Singh's mouth this morning were about community. And, I think community is one of the big reasons people do trust Docker and one of the things that brings them along. You guys are both Docker captains, part of a program of advocacy, community programs. I don't know, Bret, can you tell us a little bit about the program and what's involved in it? >> Yeah, sure. So, it's been around over two years now and it actually spawned out of Docker's pre-existing programs were focusing on speakers and bloggers and supporting them as well as community leaders that run meetups. And they kind of figured out that a key set of people were kind of doing two or three of those things all at once. And so, they were sort of deciding how do we make like super-groups of these people and they came up with the term Docker captain It really just means you know something about Docker, you share it constantly, something about a Docker toolset, something about the container tools. And that you're sort of... And you don't work for Docker. You're a community person that is, maybe you're working for someone that is a partner of Docker or maybe you're just a meetup volunteer that also blogs a lot about patterns and practices of Docker or new Docker features. And so, they kind of use the engineering teams at Docker to kind of pick through people on the internet and the people they see in the community that are sort of rising out of all the noise out there. And they ask them to be a part of the program and then, of course, we get nice jackets and lots of training. And, it's really just a great group of people, we're about 70 people now around the world. >> And yeah, this is global as well, right? >> Oh yeah, yep. It's one of my favorite aspects is the international aspect. I work for Booz Allen which is a more US government focused and I don't get to interact with the global community much. But, through the Docker captain program got friendships and connections almost on every continent and a lot of locations. I just saw a post of a Docker meetup in like, I think it was like Tunisia. Very, very out there kind of places. There was a Cuban one, recently, in Havana. The best connections to a global community that I've ever seen. I think one of the biggest drivers is the rapid adoption and kind of industry trend of containerization and the Docker brand and what it is basically gave rise to a ton of folks just beginners, just wanting to know what it's all about. And, we've been identified as folks that are approachable and have kind of a mandate to be people that can help answer those initial questions, help align folks that have questions with the right resources, and also just make it like a soft, warm, fuzzy kind of introduction to the community. And engage on all kinds of levels, advanced to beginner levels. >> It was interesting, again, this morning, I think about half the people raised their hands to the question, "is it their first year?" So, it still seems like the Docker, the inbound people interested in Docker is still growing and millions of developers all over the world, right? I don't know, Bret, you have a course, Docker Mastery, you also do meetups, and so I'm curious like what is the common pathway or drivers for new folks coming in, that you see and talk with? >> Yeah, what's the pathways? >> Yeah, the pathway, what's driving them? What are they trying to do? Again, are they these solo folks? >> Yeah, it's sort of a little bit of everything. We're very lucky in the course. We actually just crossed 55,000 students worldwide, 161 countries on a course that is only a year old. So, it kind of speaks to the volume of people around the world that really want to learn containers and all the tools around them. I think that the common theme there is I think we had the early adopters, right, and that was the first three or four years of Docker was people that were Silicon Valley, startups, people who were already on the bleeding edge of technology, whether it was hobbyist or enterprise. It was all people, but it was sort of the Linux people. Now, what we're getting is the true enterprise admins and developers, right. And that means, Microsoft, IBM mainframes, .Net, Java, you're getting all of these sort of traditional enterprise technologies but they all have the same passion, they're just coming in a few years later. So, what's funny is, you're meetups don't really change. They're just growing. Like what you see worldwide, the trend is we're still on the up-climb of all the groups, we have over 200 meetups worldwide now that meet once a month about Docker. It's just a crazy time right now. Everything's growing and it's like you wonder if it's ever going to stop, right How big are we gonna get, gonna take over the world with containers? >> Yeah, about 60% or more of all our meetups are completely new to Docker. And, it ranges from, you know, my boss told me about it so I gotta learn it or I found it and I want to convince other people in my organization to use it so I need to learn it more so I can make that case or, it's immediately solving a problem but I don't know how to take it to the next level, don't know where it's going, all that. It's a lot of new people. >> I get students a lot, college students that want to be more aggressive when they get in the marketplace and they hear the word 'DevOps' a lot and they think DevOps is a thing I need to learn in order to get a job. They don't really know what that is. And, of course, we don't even. At this point, it's so watered down, I don't know if anyone really knows what it is. But eventually, they search that and they come up with sort of key terms and I think one of those the come up right away is Docker. And they don't know what that is. But, I get asked the question a lot, If I go to this workshop or if I go the meetup or whatever, can I put that on my resume so I can get my first job out of school? They're always looking for something else beyond their schooling to make them a better first resume. So, it's cool to see even the people just stepping into the job market getting their feet wet with Docker even when they don't even know why they need it. >> It sounds like a symbiotic thought leadership community that you guys are part of and it sounds like the momentum we heard this morning in the general session is really carried out through the Docker captains and the communities. So, Nirmal, Bret, thanks so much for stopping by bringing your snazzy sweatshirts and sharing what you guys are doing as Docker captains. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We're live at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.

(exciting upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> Okay, we're back in Las Vegas. This is VMworld 2017, and this is theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris, and this is the second segment with Chad Sakac who's the president of Dell EMC. We're going to dig into what the cloud looks like in the next decade, you know, 2022 time frame. Chad, again, welcome back. Thanks for spending some time. >> It's great to be back. No one's got a crystal ball a decade out, but I think we've got a pretty good idea of what we think the next five years look like. >> Well, you know, we do like at Wikibon to look further out, and say okay, what are your assumptions about how the business is going to evolve, knowing that any kind of ten year forecast is going to be wrong. But it does shape your thinking and your assumptions. >> Yep. >> So what's your vision? What's Dell EMC's vision for how the cloud is going to evolve and shape, and look like in the next five years? >> I think the following things are a near certainty and they're driving our strategy. Basically customers will consume platforms. They will pick the best platform on a temporal basis and on a space basis. So time and space (chuckles) right? So I'll give you an example. Today if you said, "What is the best place and time "to do AI and machine learning "for work that is against data that is not in-house?" The answer would be Google cloud platform in a heartbeat. Their core capabilities as a platform around AI and machine learning are head and shoulders above everything else. Right? >> Yep. >> That's a platform that people consume. Likewise, if you said, "Okay, what's the platform that I use for my "applications that basically need a little more "traditional care and feeding around them?" That's going to be an evolution of the VMware stack that the customers are using today. It powers 80% of what they do today. It's the platform that runs the core of their business today, and that platform, as you can see this week, is expanding and expanding and expanding. Now what'll happen over the next decade is that platform will be independent of place. So if you imagine what we're going to do with that capability now, it's not an announcement, it's a platform that customers can buy around VMware cloud on AWS, you can see that we just broke the "Is something on or off?" is now not the question. The question is what's the right platform and services to use for a given set of workloads? >> I want to build on that for a second Chad, if I can. So the vision that I think you articulated the core experience is Look that what you love about the cloud is you love the get in small, grow fast, or grow according to the workload needs, >> Chad: Yep, elasticity. >> Yeah, don't lock in a whole bunch of financial assets. Lower assets, specificity, be able to apply it to a lot of different things. You love that. But the problem is, the physical, legal, and IP realities of your business dictate that you're not going to put it all in there. So the common experience is, get that dependent upon the workload, and have it all run simply in a straightforward manner that serves the business. Right? >> Bingo. So the word platform is independent of space. >> Right? >> Right. The other thing that I think we'll see over the next decade is that any technologies that bind multiple platforms together are incredibly compelling. And you can actually see this driving both the R and D strategy and the M and A strategy of the leaders, right? So let me give you an example of things that bind together platforms, and themselves are platforms. Cloud Foundry is one of the best binders and spanners that exists. Because people use Cloud Foundry on Azure, on AWS, on their own private cloud all day long. In fact, it won the award for basically, at Microsoft Ignite, for the most popular used thing on Azure outside Microsoft's own core services. So it's a binder. It gives customers mobility and flexibility across these different platforms. Another example, we're going all in on Kubernetes. We think that Kubernetes as the container abstraction that spans these different clouds is in essence, game over of chaos, and game beginning of standardization and movement forward. I'll give you another example. I think that ten years from now the debates that we're having around SDN today will be so over, and everyone will go, "Of course you're going to have a software-defined "network that abstracts," because networking is something that needs to span platforms. So, core idea number one, people will make platform choices and there will be multiple platforms. Those platforms will be independent of on off prem, independent of Capex, Opex choices. Those platforms will exist in all of those modes. >> But be tied to the characteristics, the benefits that they provide to workloads. >> Bingo. The library of connectors, of things that span and bind these platforms, will grow in value and importance to the customers. I'll give you another example of a binding thing that links together multiple platforms. And you can see its success even today. ServiceNow is the thing that binds and connects at the ITSM layer, all of these different topologies. So it's not just things that are all just in our family (chuckles) right? But you can see these ideas continuing to march forward. The thing that I think you'll also see is the explosion of the edge is going to create this whole world that is the opposite pendulum swing of centralization that you can kind of already see happening. The number of edge devices that will exist, the amount of data that they're going to need to process locally, and the amount of data that they're going to need to process that's centralized in one of these platforms is going to be immense. >> So the edge, does the edge create a new cloud? >> Yes. You know, people are already talking about that like it's the fog or whatever. Again, buzz words can sometimes make people underestimate very important things that are actually happening in an industry right now. The last thing I'll say is, and this is a dream and an aspiration, and a vision, but a dream and an aspiration. There are amazing problems to crack in the domain of security. And that itself needs to become a core platform element that transits all of these other platforms. >> Peter: That's a key binder. >> It's a binding element that has to transit all these different platforms that people consume. And I think you can see the edges of the industry, us tackling these problems in new ways, and I'm very hopeful about that actually. >> So the infrastructure requirements of that new cloud, customers have to make bets. We were talking about that earlier. There's new stack choices that are emerging. What's your point of view there and how does it all relate to bring it back to how you get from point A to point B? >> There's a great risk in saying stuff on camera Dave. (men chuckle) But you know-- >> Peter: But take the risk Chad. >> But to hell with it (laughs). See it here on theCUBE first. >> So look, I think that we're entering into an era of stack wars. And that sounds too militaristic. That's not what I mean. >> Peter: Let's call it stack competition. >> I think that what is happening is that the need for customers to choose platforms and make platform level bets in exchange for simplification and speed is basically forcing them, and it's forcing the market and everyone in it, including us, to think, what is our opinionated stack? That doesn't mean closed, right? However, even though there's open connections all over the place, increasingly you're seeing people take the Lego components and go (makes building sounds) This works with this, which works with this, which works with this, and they're built all together. And the thing that I'm finding, and I don't know whether you guys see this in your customer conversation. It's weird, people are schizophrenic. They're really worried about what that means for them on premises. Because they're used to hand-assembling everything under the sun, and then are frustrated it doesn't all work together easily, right? And yet, they have no issue at all about saying "I'm putting everything in, you know, "in Office 365." I was talking with a customer, with the procurement person, and you can imagine the procurement person's reaction when I say, "I think that the world is moving "towards vertically integrated stacks." And there is decidedly an open ecosystem, but also an opinionated, pivotal, VMware, Dell, EMC stack. A Dell technology stack. The procurement guy lost his mind. He did not like to hear that from me. >> Of course. >> He started to get angry. >> Well, would you rather have what occurred with the Dupe? >> Yeah, and-- (Dave laughs) >> Well, what he wants is he is being told, "You got to take "five points off of every transaction." >> Yeah, of course. >> And he wants to see all these transactions be distinct, and what you're saying, Chad, is that we're moving where the transactions start to accrete value, accrete strategic importance, >> Yep. >> and accrete risk. And the procurement guy's looking at that saying (makes terrified sound) But it requires hard core, realistic vendor management that's well-defined and treated by the business as an asset. >> I think that we're entering into an era of consolidation. Customers are going to have to make platform bets that are business bets. >> For themselves. >> That's right. >> So bring it back to a topic that is more 2017, hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Chad: Yep. >> Is that the model for the future cloud? Or does it need to go beyond that? Beyond the virtual machine parlance that we tend to talk about? >> So, we have years of experience working with customers, trying to build clouds out of traditional infrastructure stacks. >> Dave: Right. >> And we're there as their partner to make it work. It is freaking hard! Frankly, nearly impossible. And again, they talk to vendor after vendor who's like, "Buy our new cloud management platform "and we'll be able to automate all of your crapola." >> Buy our hammer, and we'll fix all your cloud nails. >> And the reality of it is that every layer that you build one of these stacks on, the more variation that you have at this layer, it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And then the more variation you have at this layer, the more it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And that's what I mean about the stackification where the stacks are starting to bowl together. Driven not by vendor, but driven by customer need for simplification and speed. >> Peter: And workload. >> They're just not consciously making the connection yet that says it's time for me to make strategic choices. Right? So hyperconverge infrastructure has proven an ability. It's no longer in weirdo VDI only use cases (laughs). It is now proving itself to be a material simplification at the bottom layer of the stack. And it's not rocket science. It is basically the same lesson that hyperscalers and SASS startups realized, which is that you need to have something which is much more industry standard, much more software defined, much more rigid in a sense about how it's constructed so you actually life cycle it and make the next stack up simpler. >> All right, so we got to wrap. Let me summarize what I heard, and maybe you guys can fill in any gaps. So platforms essentially be products is what I heard. Those are my words not yours. >> Totally, yeah. >> And platforms will be place-independent, and a key value creator will be this binding platforms together. >> Chad: Yes. >> Which is going to become very very compelling. You gave the example of Cloud Foundry, Kubo, Kubernetes. >> I'll give you one more, Boomi. >> Boomi, and even SDN which is basically a fait de complis >> Yeah. >> is essentially what you're saying. An explosion at the edge will create a new cloud. The infrastructure requirements are going to evolve to support that cloud. And security is going to be a core platform element, a key binder as you said. Anything I missed? >> And that literally, customers have to be as simple as they can. And what they need to accept, and make choices, I'm not forcing them down the path with us or whomever. They need to accept that simplicity and speed means choosing platforms and platform partners. >> So here's what I'd add. 'Cause I think you're right Chad. I would add just a couple of refinements, that the quality of the platform is going to be a function of how well it binds. >> Chad: Yep. >> And that that security becomes a crucial binder. And the other thing that I'd say is that the edge, it's not so much a new cloud. I hate the term fog. >> Yeah. >> Because if there's anywhere where business is going to need clarity, it's going to be at the edge. >> I totally agree. >> That's a vendor way of looking at things. The customer way is, "I need clarity here you guys. "Don't talk to me about cloud." In fact, we like to say that when Andreessen said, "Software's going to eat the world," the right way of saying it, "Software's going to eat the edge." >> Right. >> That the edge is going to make a lot more of these choices clear. >> And just, again, I know we got to go but, It always sounds like hyperbole. The amount of stuff that we're doing around trying to make the edge clear, like basically the EdgeX Foundry, which is basically trying to standardize this mess of proprietary protocols and devices. That stuff is happening like now. The Pulse IoT stuff that we talked about, that's happening now. But those are just in early, early days. If you look out over a few years, that stuff will be a new platform. >> That's absolutely right. >> Yeah. And Dell hasn't fully played it's edge card, I suspect. >> We will see more there. >> Yeah. >> All right, Chad, first of all, awesome content. Peter, thank you very much. Virtual Geek is Chad's blog. If you're into this stuff, go subscribe to that. It's a fantastic resource. >> Thanks man. >> So thanks again. Really appreciate it. >> My pleasure guys. >> All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (electronic music)