(peaceful music) >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am delighted to welcome back to the cube, cube veteran, Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering from Google. Chen, welcome back to the cube. >> Hey Dave, super happy to be here. >> Absolutely delighted to have you here. Let's dive right into this conversation. There was a, there was a blog post this week, talking about Google Cloud putting a lot of weight behind this idea of principles for software development. What are those principles and why are they important? >> The three principles that we put in that blog post is open, easy, and transformative. And I think what's really important to recognize with the three principles that those are not new principles, not for Google Cloud, and definitely not for me. I joined Google about, a little bit over five years ago. Right when just Kubernetes started to lead Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes engine team. And we immediately recognized, the idea of open and the importance of flexibility and choice is a foundation to the idea of Kubernetes and portability workloads. But pretty early on, it was clear that it's not enough just to have portability and flexibility because it creates a lot of complexity. So how can we still have that without creating a trade-off or tension for our customers? So really making sure that everything is also easy. You know, and one of the things, I use, I like to say it's not just portability of workloads, but also portability of skills and you achieve that through consistent experience, right? A lot of automation. And when you bring all of those things together, what I love about Google Cloud is that, you know, I'm an infrastructure person. I've always been infrastructure person. And what excites me the most is seeing others take this innovation and, and really empowers developers to make amazing, or, you know, unique ideas, a reality. And that's really the foundation principles for Google Cloud. >> So how does that translate into, from a customer perspective? >> So I would just start with some customer examples, right? Starting from, their perspective. So when we think about open, this is actually part of the, our customers cloud strategy, right? You say cloud, you immediately think only about public cloud, but from our customer perspectives, right? They think about public clouds, right? Most of them have more than one cloud, but they also think about the private cloud, you know, IOT edge and having that openness and flexibility to choose where they can run their workload, is critical. It's critical for them. What I hear mostly is of course, innovation, managing costs, and also making sure that they are not locked out of innovation that happens for example, in any cloud or, or somewhere else. So that's a really a key consideration for our customers when they think about their cloud strategy. The second thing that open matters is that it's really hard to hire talent that is expert and has the right skills. And we see that by using a leveraging open source technologies, it actually makes it easier to our customers to hire the best talent there is in the industry. At one of the previous Google Cloud Next sessions, we had the Loblaw for example, which is the biggest grocery in Canada. And, you know, we were joking on stage, that even though at our hiring for grocery shop, they still can hire the best talent because they are using the best technologies out there in the industry. So that's one, if you think about the importance of easy, I would just call out Western Digital that we've just announced how they decided to standardize on Anthos for their cloud strategy, right? Both of course, Google cloud platform, but On Prem and the Edge. And for them what's important is that when they have all of their amazing developers and operators, how can they provide them reach experience, right. We don't want our developers or operators to spend time on things that can be automated or managed by others. So having a smooth, intuitive experience is really critical. And we we've been announcing some new stuff like a, a Google Cloud deploy and really integrating the entire experience, especially integration for managing, deploying directly to Google Kubernetes engine. And of course, one of my favorite is Jiechi autopilot, which really takes all the goodness with Kubernetes and automatically managing. And then transformative, this is like what I said before, unleashing innovation. And we see Wendy's, for example, right, they want to actually have AI machine learning at run time at their branches, which will allow them to create a new experience for their customers. So this is how we see customers really appreciate these three principles. >> So whenever the subject of Kubernetes and Google comes up, we have to talk Anthos. We're now into what year three of Anthos. How has adoption looked what's the latest on that front? >> That has been really great. We actually have been seeing a 500% growth on the end of Q2 of year over year. And it's important you know to mention that the journey with Anthos is not something new, but something that we have built with our customers when they really love the experience they have on GCP, but needed to innovate elsewhere and not just on Google Cloud. So we've been seeing that, you know, I mentioned the Western Digital, blah, blah, and Wendy's we also have customers like MLB, which is really exciting how they've changed their entire fans' experience using Anthos. And for them, again, it was both the easy part, right? How can I deal with that complexity of having compute and storage everywhere in every one of the stadiums, but also how can I use AI and machine learning, which is unique to Google Cloud in order to create unique experiences for the fans, at real time, of course. >> Yeah. Now you've, touched on this a bit already, if you had to, if you thought about someone reviewing Anthos, their Anthos experience, because we're in the midst of people adopting Anthos and becoming new to Anthos at this point. What does a delighted customers response sound like to you? What is that Yelp review that they would write? If they were telling people we, doubled down on Anthos and we are thrilled because, fill in the blank for a second. >> The first thing that comes to mind is that it works everywhere and the developer experience that comes with it, right? So we have, of course the platform and the infrastructure, but where Anthos really shine is that experience, on top of thinking about all developers and operators that can really work in every environment without paying too much attention to that. And just having that intuitive experience, right? If you go to the Google Cloud console, you see all your clusters, and now we're actually also going to add your VMs into that view, and you can use tools like Anthos config managers, and Anthos service mash to manage your security posture or the configuration in all of those environments. >> So we hear a lot about Multicloud. Multicloud is fantastic, but it sounds like, dealing with the complexity associated with Multicloud is something that Anthos definitely helps with. >> Yes, you know, Google is best with complexity at scale, we've been running containers and really large environments for many years. And some of those principles really, you know, have been fundamental to the way we've started with Kubernetes. So the idea of the declarative intent and automation is really critical in managing large environment and high complexity because in those environments, lots of things can change, but with the declarative approach, you don't have to anticipate everything that is going to change, but you need to know what is your desired state. And that's really one way that Anthos is leveraging the Kubernetes primitives and those ideas to manage different types of environments. In addition to that, it's actually really adding that layer that I talked about before, around the easy can I make sure that my tools, right, if it's, for example, a cloud hybrid build or cloud deploy or Anthos service manager, Anthos config manager, can I make sure that this UI, the CLI the API will be consistent in all of those environments? Can I view in one place, all of my clusters, all of my applications, and this is really where Anthos shines. >> So the cloud data foundation had a, had to get together at the same time as, Google Cloud Next. And there's been a lot of discussion around topics like security. I just like to get your thoughts on, you know, what what's at the forefront of your mind, working in engineering at Google, working in this world where people are deploying Anthos, working in a world where in a multi-cloud environment, you don't necessarily have control as vice president of engineering at Google over what's happening in these other clouds. So what are some of the things that are at the front of your mind is security one of them, what are your thoughts? >> Security is top of mine. Similar to all of our customers and definitely internally. And there are many things that we are very worried about or create some risks. You know, we've just started talking about the secure central supply chain, by building with open source, how can we make sure that everything is secure, right? Then we know what is the contribution that's from the software that we are delivering, how can we make sure that the security posture is portable, right? We talked about workloads portability. We talked about skills portability, and experience, but really I think the next phase for us as an industry is to think about security posture portability. Can I really apply the same policy everywhere and still make sure that I have the right controls in place, which will have to be different depending on the environment, and to make sure that that really is the case. So lots of work around that, and again, talking about the other things we talked about. We talked about open and flexibility, how can you make sure that it's easy? One of the areas that we are very excited about is really around binary authorization, for example. So when you use our tools like cloud build, cloud deploy, artifact, registry, you can get your container images automatically scanned for vulnerabilities and tools like onto service mesh, which allows you to actually manage your security posture, traffic management, who can access what without doing any changes to your applications. >> Fantastic stuff. As we, as we wrap up our time here, do you have any final thoughts on the direction of cloud where we are in the adoption curve? You know, by some estimates, something like 75% of IT is still happening on premises. There've been some announcements coming out of Cloud Next regarding the ability to run all sorts of Google goodness on premises. So we seem to all be acknowledging that we're going to be in a bit of a hybrid world, in addition to a multicloud world, moving forward. Do you want to place any bets on, on when we'll hit the 50, 50 mark or the 25% on premises, 75% cloud mark. What do you think? >> Yeah, I'm not the best gambler to be honest, but I do have a thought about that. I think what's interesting is that customers started to talk, you know, few years back, it was, hey, I have my on-prem environment and I have the cloud. How can they, these two work together. And now what we see our customers talking, you know, they're on premises, their edge is part of their cloud strategy. It's not separated. And I think this is what we'll see more and more of, right? Regardless if this is your private cloud or public cloud, your edge, we would like to have a cloud like experience in that environment and consistency. And of course, we would love to leverage all the goodness of the cloud. If it's like machine learning, AI, and other capabilities, automation, everywhere we go. So I think this is the biggest change we're starting to see. And in addition to that, I think we will see, today everybody are already multicloud cloud, right? If it's recquisitions and just by cause of bottom up culture, you know, people choose different services. And I expect we'll see more strategic thinking about our customers multicloud strategy. Where do I deploy my workloads? What are the benefits? If it's latency, if it's specific services that are available, maybe cost, we'll see the customers becoming more intentional about that and this is really exciting. >> Well Chen, amazing insights. It's obvious why you're a cube veteran. It's obviously why we seek you out for your counsel and guidance on a variety of subjects. Thank you so much for spending time with us today in this cube conversation. With that I'd like to thank you for joining us. Until next time, I'm Dave Nicholson, thanks for joining (peaceful music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next '21. I'm joined today by Sachin Gupta, General Manager and Vice President of Open Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Sachin, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks Dave, it's great to be here. >> So, you and I both know that the definition of what constitutes Cloud has been hotly contested by some over the last 20 years. But I think you and I both know that in some quarters there really has never been a debate. NIST, for example, the standard body that calls out what constitutes Cloud, has always considered Cloud an operational model, a set of capabilities, and it has never considered Cloud specifically tied to a location. With that in mind, how about if you share with us what was announced at Cloud Next '21 around Google Distributed Cloud? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. The power of Cloud in terms of automation, simplicity, observability, is undeniable, but our mission at Google Cloud is to ensure that we're meeting customers where they are, in their digital transformation journey. And so in talking to customers, we found that there are some reasons that could prevent them to move certain workloads to Cloud. And that could be because there's a low latency requirement. There is high amounts of data processing that needs to happen on-prem. So taking data from on-prem, moving into the Cloud to get it processed and all the way back may not be very efficient. There could be security, privacy, data residency, compliance requirements that they're dealing with. And then some industries, for some customers, there's some very strict data sovereignty requirements that don't allow them to move things into the public Cloud. And so when we talked to customers, we realized that we needed to extend the Cloud, and therefore we introduced Google Distributor Cloud at Next 2021. And what Google Distributed Cloud provides is all of that power of Cloud anywhere the customers need it. And this could be at a Google network edge, it could be at an operator or communication server provider edge as well. It could be at the customer edge, so right on-premise at their site, it could be in their data centers. And so a lot of flexibility in how you deploy three fully managed hardware and software solutions delivered through Google. >> Yeah it's interesting because often statistics are cited that somewhere near 75% of of what we do in IT, is still "on-premises." The reality is, however, that what's happening in those physical locations on the edge is looking a lot more Cloudy, isn't it. (laughs) >> Yes, and the customers are looking for that computational power, storage, automation, simplicity, in all of these locations. >> So what does this look like from an infrastructure stack perspective? Is there some secret sauce that you're layering into this that we should know about? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about it a little bit more. So we start off with third party hardware. So we're sourcing from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Nvidia, NetApp, bringing it together. We're using Anthos, you are hopefully familiar with Anthos, which is our hybrid multi-cloud software layer. And then on top of that, we use open source technologies. For example, built on Kubernetes. We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment, that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy, on top of this infrastructure. And so the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, and therefore customers can focus on applications, they can focus on business initiatives, and not worry about the infrastructure complexity. They can just leave that to us. >> So you mentioned both Kubernetes, thinking of containerization as Cloud native, you also said VMs. So this spans the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and say VM-ware style of virtual machines or other VMs? >> Yes, look, the majority of customers are looking to modernize and move to a containerized environment with Kubernetes, but there are some workloads that they may have that still require a VM-like environment, and having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud, built on Anthos, is extremely powerful for them. And so it goes back to our mission. We're going to meet customers where they are, and if they need VM support as well, we're providing it. >> So let's talk about initial implementations of this. What kind of scale are you anticipating that customers will deploy? >> The scale is going to vary based on use case. So it could be a very small, let's think about it as a single server type of scale, all the way to many, many dozens of racks that could be going in to support Google Distributed Cloud. And so, for example, from a communication service provider point of view, looking to modernize their 5G network, in the core it could be many, many racks with Google Distributed Cloud the edge product. And for their RAM solutions, it could be a much smaller form factor, as an example. And so depending on use case, you're going to find all kinds of different form factors. And I didn't mention this before, but we also, in addition to scale, we offer two operational modes. One is the edge product. So Google Distributed Cloud edge that is connected to the Cloud. And so it gets operational updates, et cetera, directly through the Cloud. And the second one is something we call the hosted mode, and in hosted mode, it's completely air-gapped. So this infrastructure, what is modernized and provides rich 1PN third party services, does not connect to the Cloud at all. And therefore, the organizations that have the strictest data latency sovereignty requirements, can benefit from a completely air-gapped solution as well. >> So I'm curious, let's say you started with an air-gapped model. Often our capabilities in Cloud exceed our customer's comfort level for a period of time. Can that air-gapped, initial implementation be connected to the Cloud in the future? >> The air-gap implementation, typically customers, the same customer, may have multiple deployments, where one will require the air-gap solution, and another could be the hosted solution, and the other could be the edge product, which is connected. And in both cases, the underlying stack is consistent. So, while I don't hear customers saying, "I want to start from air-gap and move," we are providing Google Distributed Cloud as one portfolio to customers so that we can address these different use cases. In the air-gap solution, the software updates obviously still come from Google, and customers need to move that across the air gap check signatures, check for vulnerability, load it in the system, and the system will then automatically update itself. And so the software we still provide, but in that case, there's additional checks that that customer will typically go through before enabling that software onto their system. >> Yeah, so you mentioned at the outset, some of the drivers, latency security, et cetera, but can you restate that? I'd like to hear what the thinking behind this was at Google when customers were presenting you with a variety of problems they needed solutions for. I think it bears recapping that. >> Right, so let me give you a few examples here. So one is, when you think about 5G, when you think about what 4G did for the industry in terms of enabling the gig economy, with 5G we can really enable richer experiences. And this could be highly immersive experiences, it could be augmented reality, it could be all kinds of technologies that require lower latency. And for this, you need to build out the 5G infrastructure on top of a modernized solution like Google Distributed Cloud. Let me just get into a few use cases though, to just bring some color here. For example, for a retailer, instead of worrying about IP and infrastructure in the store, the people in the store can focus on their customers, and they can implement solutions using Google Distributed Cloud for things like inventory management, asset protection, et cetera, in the store. Inside a manufacturing facility, once again, you can reduce incidents, you can reduce injuries, you can look at your robotic solutions that require low latency feedback, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of emerging applications through ISVs, that a rich, on-prem or anywhere you want it in the edge infrastructure, can enable a new suite of possibilities that weren't possible before. In some cases, customers say, "You know what, I want 5G. But I actually you want a private 5G deployment." And that becomes possible with the Google Distributed Cloud as well. >> So we talked a little bit about scale. What's the smallest increment that someone could deploy? You just gave an example of retail. Some retail outfits are small stores, without any IT staff at all. There's the concept of a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is something we love to come up with in our business terminology that makes no sense, single node cluster. The point is, these increments, especially in the containerized world, are getting smaller. What's the smallest increment that you can deliver, you're planning to deliver? >> I'll answer this two ways. First of all, we are planning to deliver a smallest increment, think of it as one server. We are planning to deliver that as well, all the way up to many, many racks. But in addition, there's something unique that I wanted to call out. Let's say you're in the medium or larger deployment in the racks, and you want to scale up, compute, and store it separately. That's something we enable as well, because we will work with customers in terms of what they need for their application, and then scale that hardware up and down based on their need. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that, but we will enable scale all the way down to a single server unit as well. >> So what is the feedback been from the partners that will be providing the hardware infrastructure, folks like Dell. What has their reaction been? >> I think that they're obviously very eager to work with us. We're happy to partner with them in order to provide customers flexibility, any kind of scale in any kind of location, different kind of hardware equipment that they need. But in addition to those partners on the hardware side, there are customers and partners as well who are enabling rich experiences and solutions for that retailer, for that manufacturer, for example. And so working with AT&T, we announced partnership on 5G and edge to enable experiences, especially in the areas of retail and manufacturing, like I talked about earlier, but then in Europe, we're partnering with OVHcloud, for example, in order to enable very strict data sovereignty requirements that are happening in that country. And so where there's many communication service providers, there's many partners trying to solve for different use cases for their end customers. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's pretend for a minute that you're getting Yelp reviews of this infrastructure that you're responsible for moving forward. What would a delighted customer's comments look like? >> I think a delighted customer's comments will be probably in two or three areas, all right? So first up will be, it's all about the applications and the end user experience that this can enable. And so the power of Google AI ML technology, third-party software as well, that can run consistently single operational model, build once, deploy anywhere, is extremely powerful. So I would say, the power of the applications and the simplicity that it enables is number one. I think number two is the scale of operations experience that Google has. They don't need to worry about, "do I have 5 sites or 500 sites or 5,000 sites?" It doesn't matter. The fleet operations, the scaled operations capability, the global network capability that Google has, all that experience in site reliability engineering, we can now bring to all of these vast amounts of edge locations, so they don't need to worry about scale at all. And then finally, they can be sort of rest assured that this is built on Anthos, it's built on Kubernetes, there's a lot of open source components here, they have flexibility, they have choice, they can run our one-piece services, they can run third-party services on this, and so we're going to preserve the flexibility in choice. I think these are the things that would likely get highlighted. >> So Sachin, you talk to customers around the world. Where do you see the mix between net-neu stuff going into infrastructure like this, versus modernized and migrated workloads into the solution? What does that mix look like? And I know it's a bit of speculation, but what are your thoughts? >> I think, Dave, that's a great question, I think it's a difficult one to answer because we find that those conversations happen together with the same customers. At least that's what I find. And so they are looking to modernize, create a much richer environment for their developers, so that they can innovate much more quickly, react to business needs much more quickly, to cater to their own end customers in a much better way, get business insights from the data that they have. They're looking to do all of this, but at the same time, they have, perhaps, legacy infrastructure or applications that they just can't easily migrate off of, that may still be in a VM environment, more traditional type of storage environment, and they need to be able to address both worlds. And so, yes, there are some who are so-called "born in the Cloud," everything is Cloud native, but the vast majority of customers that I talked to, are absolutely looking to modernize, like you don't find a customer that says, "Just help me lift and shift, I'm not looking to modernize." I don't quite see that. They are looking to modernize but they want to make sure that we have the options that they need to support different kinds of environment that they have today. >> And you mentioned insights. We should explore that a little further. Can you give us an example of artificial intelligence, machine learning being used now at the edge, where you're putting more compute power at the edge? Can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that that enables specifically? >> Yes, so when you think about video processing, for example, if I have a lot of video feeds and I'm looking based on that, I want to apply artificial intelligence, I'm trying to detect object inventory movement, people movement, et cetera. Again, adhering to all the privacy and local regulations. When I have that much data streaming in, if I have to take that out of my edge all the way across the WHEN network, into the Cloud for processing, and bring it all the way back and then make a decision, I'm just moving a lot of data up and down into the Cloud. And in this case, what you're able to do is say, no, you don't actually need to move it into the public Cloud. You can keep that data locally. You can have a Google Distributed Cloud edge instance there, you're going to run your AI application right there, achieve the insights and take an action very, very quickly. And so it saves you, from a latency point of view, significantly, and it saves you from a data transmission up and down into the Cloud significantly, which you sometimes, you know, you're not supposed to send that data up, that there's data residency requirements, and sometimes the cost of just moving it, it doesn't make sense. >> So do you have any final thoughts? What else should we know about this? Anything that we didn't touch on? >> I think we've touched on a lot of great things. I think I'm just going to reiterate, you started with a "what is the definition of Cloud itself" and our mission once again, is to really understand what customers are trying to do and meet them where they are. And we're finding that they're looking for Cloud solutions in a public region. We've announced a lot more regions. We continue to grow our footprint globally, but in addition, they want to be able to get that power of Google Cloud infrastructure and all the benefits that it provides in many different edge locations all the way on onto their premises. And I think one of the things we perhaps spent less time on is, we're also very unique that in our strategy, we're bringing in underlying third-party hardware, but it's a fully managed solution that can operate in that connected edge mode, as well as a disconnected hosted mode, which just enables pretty much all the use cases we've heard about from customers. So one portfolio that can address any kind of need that they have. >> Fantastic. Well, I said at the outset Sachin, before we got started, you and I could talk for hours on this subject. Sadly, we don't have hours. I'd like to thank you for joining us in theCube. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this Cube conversation, covering the events at Google Cloud NEXT 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston area studio, and really happy to welcome to the program to dig into some of the latest on what's going on in the multi-cloud ecosystem. First of all, coming back to the program, not too far from where I'm sitting, Joe CaraDonna. He is the Vice President of Engineering Technologies, with Dell Technologies, and joining him, someone he knows quite well, is Rich Sanzi, who's Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. >> Great to be here, Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right, so Joe, we've been watching Dell Technologies, how the cloud portfolio and solution has been maturing, and working with the ecosystem. Maybe set the table for us, what's Dell doing with cloud? Why are we sitting here with the ? >> Well, we're here to talk about our OneFS for Google Cloud offering. We did something really special with Google here. We brought together the power and scale of our OneFS file system, along with the economics and the simplicity of public cloud, and together, I think, what we did is define a new standard for scalable file in public cloud, where we have a game-changing performance and capacity. We have a full range of enterprise-grade data management capabilities, and we enable real hybrid cloud, and open up new use cases for our customers. >> Excellent, thanks Joe for setting the table on that. Rich, let's pull you into the conversation. Before we go into the Google thing, give us a little bit about your background. You've been in storage, as I hinted at. You worked with Joe before, and tell us about your role inside of Google. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Google a few years ago, responsible for storage, and storage for all of Google, in addition to Google Cloud. And then, you know, big company things. We've been growing rapidly, and an opportunity opened up where I could be much more engaged on the Compute side, and so I'm responsible for Compute, the IaaS infrastructure for Google Cloud Engine. So it's my pleasure to be here and support Joe and Dell Technologies in the launch of OneFS on Google Cloud. >> Yeah, Rich, I'd like to come back to you on something, 'cause when you look at cloud, for many years it was cloud versus, you know, taking over the world, destroying everything before it. And especially, you look at Compute, or storage specifically, people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around, where my application lives. Does it just live one place? Are my applications going a little bit hybrid there? I look back, you know the disclosure, I worked at EMP for years. You know that storage is complicated and diverse, that's why we have file, block, and object. We have lots of different types of solutions out there. There's never been a silver bullet that says, "Okay, 90% of the people can use this one thing "for everything." So Rich, let's start with you. Cloud definitely has changed the discussion of storage, but I feel like I've seen the enterprise solutions looking more like the hyperscalers, and the hyperscale solution blurring the lines with what was traditionally happening in the data center. Do you agree with some of that? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's really nice when you control the horizontal and the vertical, and you can adapt your application stack, but that's just not the reality where we are today. The reality is that a cloud vendor, working with customers who bring their workloads in the cloud, have to be able to support all of the best-in-class types of storage that people are using. You're absolutely right, we're using cloud, or sorry, we're using objects, we're using block, we're using file. One of the great pieces of this, is that in the file space, you really need scalable file to go along with your scalable compute. >> Excellent, so-- >> Yeah, and I'll just add-- >> Please, go ahead Joe. >> Yeah, I mean, our customers, for a long time, have been asking, our Isilon customers in particular, asking for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud. They want the scalability of the elastic compute in the GPUs. They also want the OpEx model, right? And they want to be able to bring the high performance compute workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand, and that's what we set out to solve for. >> Excellent, so Joe you mentioned that the Isilon piece. You know, we've watched what has happened with that. You know, Isilon has always been software at the core and highly scalable, so we'd like you both, Joe you teed it up there, but Rich, why is this important for Google Cloud customers, and how's it different from, maybe, how they were doing things in the past? >> Well, I think one of the things that I think I'm really excited about, is that this enables customers to leverage the cloud, and not make a ton of changes on their server side. So it really allows them to preserve their investment, and their applications, and the way that they think about storage, and the way they think about how that scales and performs. So that, for me, is a, let's make it easy for customers to consume cloud, rather than make it a hurdle, and that's my view. >> Yeah, and Joe, help frame this for us a bit. You know, we watched Dell Technologies recently had the Power Store announcement. A lot of discussion about cloud native architectures, moving to micro-services. Google's one of the earliest and most prominent examples of innerized architectures out there. So, where does the file solution fit in this whole discussion that customers have about modernization of their applications, and the journey that they're going on? >> Yeah, well, not all applications lend themselves well to object. They need file semantics, as well as the performance characteristics that come along with that, in terms of throughput and latencies. But even beyond that, what our customer's looking for is the data management capability, right? Whether it's snapshots, or the multi-protocol data access for NFS, or SMB, or even HDFS. And they're looking for replication, native replication, so they can have their Isilon systems in the data center, replicate their data directly into the file service of the cloud so they can actually operate on that data, and then there's things that we take for granted now, at least in the data center, of that high availability and that high durability, that storage arrays deliver. So, it's a combination of things that make it attractive for customers, that open up these new workloads, especially in terms of a high performance compute. >> Excellent, you talked a bit about some of the reasons why customers wouldn't want file. Of course, scale is one of those things we've been talking about for many years. Scale means different things to many people. There's few companies that know scale better than Google, so Rich, talk a little bit about scalability, performance, what these types of evolutions mean, and what you're hearing from customers. >> Certainly from a scale perspective, things like objects and object store is super scalable. It's also, you know, requires application changes, to really make use of. Customers are really looking for scalable solutions that enable them to bring their existing applications to cloud, and not have to make a ton of changes to it. That's one of the things I think is great about the Dell offering, is that it is a full-fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from their on-premise, and then when we wire that up with the Google network into our Google Cloud compute regions, we get very high performance, and very high fidelity, low latency as a result. We think that that removes potential headaches that customers may have when they bring big applications in the HBC space, and related high performance computing space in the cloud. >> Great, and Joe, is all this available now? Tell us a little bit about availability. What do you expect the demand to be for this solution? >> Well, I expect the demand to be great, right? The kind of workloads we're talking about here cut across a wide range of verticals. So everything from whether it's like sciences for genomics research, oil and gas for seismic data processing, media and entertainment for video editing and rendering, or even finishing, automotive telemetry data that requires processing and scale, and EDA. So, I think it hits upon a wide variety of use cases and verticals, and we've even structured our pricing and our tiers to make it more accessible for use cases from high performance, all the way down to even archival. >> So, maybe just to clarify, this is GA today? >> Yeah, yes, it is GA. (laughs) >> Okay, excellent. >> Beta is behind 'em. >> Appreciate that, and how does, you mentioned flexibility on pricing. How much of this is what's available from Google, what's available from Dell? How does that relationship and go-to-market work together? >> Yeah, well it's a native service in Google. You can provision directly from the Google Portal. You can manage your file systems directly from the Google Portal, and the billing is integrated. So you get one bill from Google, whether it's for our OneFS file service, or any of Google's native services. >> Excellent, Rich, we'd love to hear, talk about from the Google side, the ecosystem. I know last year, I was at the Google Next event, really saw strong demand from the partner community. They're looking to work with Google, many have worked with Google for many years. What kind of feedback have you been getting and how this fits into the overall solution? >> So, from a partner perspective, one of the things that we really want to enable our partners, is to bring their services onto our platform, and to integrate them tightly as if they were a Google offering, and that's so things like the integrated billing, the provisioning from the Google Portal, things like that are core tenets for us for helping our customers and our partners' customers easily consume services in the cloud. So, sort of one of the P-zero requirements, from my perspective, for our product offering here, was that in fact it was just integrated into the Google Cloud platform, and that it would be discoverable and easily usable by customers. So I think that enables partners to deliver a first-class service on our platform. >> Yeah, I mean, Rich, absolutely. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the ecosystem, is, how do they put it? They say, "Google kind of puts you through the ringer. "By the time you get through that, "it is going to work." And of course, we know, Google's doing that to make sure that there are good, reliable, strong services by the time the end customer gets them. All right, Joe-- >> Yes, and-- >> (laughs) Go ahead, yeah. >> I was going to say, you know, delivering these services, and delivering them reliably, it's a multi-company partnership, but we understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants to be assured that there is, they have one contact for problems with the service, and so that's where Google very much wants to be that primary contact, 'cause who knows where the issues could be. Are they in the data center, or are they in the network, or are they on the customer side? We feel responsibility to front (audio distorts). >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Joe, I guess, final thing for you. Talk about the Dell Technologies Google Cloud relationship, why that's important, what differentiates it from some of the many other partnerships that Dell has. >> Yeah, sure, before I touch on that, I want to talk about, you mentioned scale, and scale means different things to different people. And when we're talking about scale here, capacity's one element of that, and we certainly scale that way, but performance is the other way. And ESG did a performance study on the OneFS file service that we're offering, and they fired up the biozone benchmark, which fired up over 1000 cores in Google, running NFS load to the file system. They sized the file system at 2 petabytes, which seems large, and it is, but you can scale much larger than that with our service, and their results on throughput was 200 gigabytes per second on the read, and 100 gigabytes per second on the write. Now, these are game changing numbers, right? It's numbers like that that enable compute-intensive, high performance workloads in Google Cloud, and we're opening that up. And it's also important to note that this is a scalable file system, so if you want to double those throughput numbers, you just double the capacity of your file system. So that's the power of scale that we're delivering here. And our file system can scale up to 50 petabytes, so a lot of runway there. As far as the partnership with Google goes, I mean, Google's been great. Their infrastructure is amazing. In order to hit those kind of performance numbers, your head goes to compute and the file system, but there's also a network in there, and to hit those kind of numbers, Google had to supply a two terabyte per second network, and they were able to supply the compute and the network with ease, and without hiccup. So it's together that we're solving for the compute, network, and storage equation, and that we can deliver a holistic solution. And lastly, I would just point out, the engineering teams work great bringing that cloud native experience into that Google Portal, really simplifying user experience. So, they can provision and manage the systems directly from the Portal, as well as unifying the billing. So I think the partnership's been great, and it's going to be interesting to see how our customers use the service to accelerate their cloud journey. >> Well, Joe and Rich, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on GA of this, and definitely look forward to hearing the customer journeys as they go on. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, thank you. And Rich, thank you for your partnership. >> Yeah, your welcome, Joe. Thank you, as well. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage, the virtual events that we're participating, as well as the back catalog of interviews that we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio. We've got a great guest here from Google, Will Grannis, managing director, head of the office of the CTO with Google Cloud. Thanks for coming on, Will. Appreciate you spending some time with me. >> Oh, John, it's great to be with you. And as you said, in these times, more important than ever to stay connected. >> Yeah, and I'm really glad you came on because a couple of things. One, congratulations to Google Cloud for the success you guys had. Saw a lot of big wins under your belt, both on the momentum side, on the business side, but also on the technical side. Meet is available now for folks. Anthos is doing very, very well. Partner ecosystem's developing. Got some nice use cases in vertical markets, so I want to get in and unpack with you. But really, the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before it was ready for it. And that is the at-scale challenge that the COVID-19 has shown everyone. We're seeing the future has been pulled forward. We're living in a virtualized environment. It's funny to say that, virtualization (laughs). Server virtualization is a tech term, but that enabled a lot of things. We're living in a virtualized world now 'cause we have to, but this is going to set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many, many years. But now as a provider of Google Cloud, you guys have to operate at scale, you have. And now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal. And so you guys have had some successes. I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes. I mean, everyone's at home. That's a disruption that was unforecasted. Whether it's under-provisioning VPNs in IT to a surface area for security, to just work and play. And activities are now confined, so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I mean, to your point just now, the fact that we can have this conversation and we can have it fluidly from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we do today. And for Google Cloud, this is not a new thing. And for Google, this is not a new thing. For Google Cloud, we had a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments. And so many companies that we've been working with, they've already been on the path to operating in environments that are digital, that are fluid. And when you think about the cloud, that's one of the great benefits of cloud, is that scalability in common with the business demand. And it also helps the scale situation without having to do the typical, "Oh wait, "you need to find the procurement people. "We need to find the server vendors. "We need to get the storage lined up." It really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unforecasted situations. Whether that's customer demand or in this case a global pandemic. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get in with you on, you have explained what your job is there 'cause obviously Google's got a new CEO now for over a year. Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, knows the enterprise up and down. You had Diane Greene before that. Again, another enterprise leader. Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google Cloud to be very enterprise centric. You guys have great momentum, and this is a world where cloud-native is going to be required. I mean, everyone now sees it. The tide has been pulled out, everything's exposed, all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint is kind of exposed. And so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying, "Double down on that. "Let's kill that. "We don't want to pay that supplier. "They're not core to our business." This is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud-native reality, whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever are going to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweak to come out of this crisis. So it's going to be very cloud-native. This is a big deal. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And so as you pointed out, there are kind of two worlds that exist right now. Companies that are moving to become more digital and transform, and you mentioned the momentum in Google Cloud just over the last year, greater than 50% revenue growth. And in a greater than $10 billion run rate business and adding customers at a really quick clip, including just yesterday, Splunk, and along the way, Telecom Italia, Major League Baseball, Vodafone, Lowe's, Wayfair, Activision Blizzard. This transformation and this digitization is not just for a few or just for any one industry. It's happening across the board. And then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC, which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it already has a little bit of a headstart into this transformation. So you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation. And then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider. And Shopify is a really good example of how seeing drastic uptick in demand, they're able to respond and keep roughly half a million shops up and running during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or even get online. >> Well, what is your role at Google? Obviously, you're the managing director. Title is managing director, head of the office of the CTO. We've seen these roles before, head of the CTO, obviously a technical role. Is it partnering with the CEO on strategy? Is it you're tire kicking new things? Are you overseeing any strategic initiatives? What is your role? >> So a little bit of all of those things combined into one. So I spent the first couple of decades of my career on the other side of the fence in the non-tech community, both in the enterprise. But we were still building technology and we were still digitally minded. But not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley. And so spending a couple of decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem. And when I came to Google five years ago, selfishly, it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side. And I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted to leverage that technology for problems that I was solving. Whether it was aerospace, public sector, manufacturing, what have you. And so it's been great. It's the role of a lifetime. I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal. And we do two things. One is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path to cloud. And two, we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming. We learned so much, John, about what we need to build as an organization. So it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation. >> Yeah, and I can attest. I've been watching you guys from day one. Hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know. So you get in the enterprise chops and stuff and you've seen some progress. I have to ask you though, because first of all, big fan of Google at scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now. There was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers. It goes along the lines like this. "I want to be like Google," because you guys had a great network, you had large scale. You had all these things that were like awesome. And then they realized, "Well, we can't be like Google. "We don't have SREs. "We don't have large scale data centers." So there was a little bit of a translation, and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand, and you guys had since realized that it wasn't just people are going to bang at your doorstep and be adopting Google Cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google, then leveraging Google in their business as they transform. So as you guys have moved from that, what's changed? They still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security, got a great network, and you've got that scale. Enterprises are a little bit slower to adopt that, which you're focused on now. What is the story there? Because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing. Okay, Google now understands me. They know I'm not as fast as Google. They got super great people (laughs). We are training our people. We're retraining them. This is the transformation that they're going through. So you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly, but now they need to level up. How do you respond to that? >> Well, a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting over the last year plus. And it comes in kind of three very operational or tactical pillars that I think of. First, we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing teams. Three times what they were before because we need to be there. We need to be in those situations. We need to hear from the customer. We need to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. So we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem. We actually get very visceral understanding of what they're trying to solve. But you have to be there to gain that empathy and that understanding. And so one is showing up, and that has been mobilizing a much larger engine of customer facing personnel from Google. Second, it's also been really important that we evolve our own. Just as Google brought SRE principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out to the world, we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience. So you've seen that evolution under Thomas as well with cloud changing... Moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience, that white glove experience that our customers get and our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through. And then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across key priority industries for us. Again, that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industries and then developing the solutions that progress those companies. This isn't about taking a principle and trying to apply it blindly. This is about adding that connection, that really deep connection to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company to best support them over a long period of time. I mean, look at some of these deals we've been announcing. These are 10-year, five-year, multi-year strategic partnerships that go across the canvas of all of Google. And those are the really exciting scaled partnerships. But to your point, you can't just take SRE from Google and apply it to company X, but you can things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of SRE, and you can apply them over the course of developing technology, collaborating, innovating together. >> Yeah, and I think cloud-native is going to be a key thing. It's just my opinion, but I think one of those situations where the better mouse trap will win. If you're cloud-native and you have APIs and you have the kind of services, people will beat it to your doorstep. So I got to ask you, with Thomas Kurian on board, obviously, we've been following his career as well at Oracle. He knows what he's doing. Comes into Google, it's being built out. It's like a rocket ship at this point. What bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers? If you had to boil it down to Google Cloud's big bet, what is the bet on the technology side? And what's the bet on the business side? >> Sure. Well, I've already mentioned... I've already hinted at the big strategy that Thomas has brought in. And that's, again, those three pillars. Making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization. Again, making sure that we transition from a typical support mindset into more of a customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries. If I was to add more color to that, I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving is he's been converting us to a partner-led business and a partner-led organization. And this means a lot of investments in large global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. But this also means that... Like the Splunk announcement from yesterday, that isn't just a sell to. This is a partnership that goes deep across go-to market product and sell to. And then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a CETA or a Rackspace for migrations. And as a result, already, we're seeing really incredible lifts. So for example, nearly 200% year over year increase in partner influenced revenue in Google Cloud and almost like a 13X year over year increase in new customers won by partners. That's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper-scale business. >> Interesting you mentioned Splunk. I want to get to that in a second, but I also noticed there was a deal with TELUS Group on eSIM subscriptions, which kind of leads me into the edge piece. There's a real edge component here with Google Cloud, and I think I had a conversation with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago, really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google network. I mean, a lot of the scuttlebutt around the Valley and the industry is Google's got an amazing network. Software-defined networking is going to be a hot programmable area. So you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security. These are killer areas that need innovation. Could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree? Obviously, you have a killer network and you're leveraging it. Can you just give some insight into what's going on in those two areas? Network and then the edge. >> Yeah, I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of the progression of cloud generally. And what do I mean by that? It started out as like get everything to the data center. We kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and that we could redistribute out the results and drive the latency down over time so we can expand the portfolio of applications and services that would become relevant over time. And what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution to more of a layered architecture. And that layered architecture includes kind of core data centers. It includes CDN capacity, points of presence, it includes edge. And just in that list of customers over the last year I mentioned, there were at least three or four telcos in there. And you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from us in recent announcements. I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about, how can we take technology like Anthos, for example, and how could we orchestrate workloads, create a common control plane, manage services across those three shells, if you will, of the architecture? And that's a very strategic and important area for us. And I think generally for the cloud industry, is expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens. And you can look at Google Fi, you can look at Stadia. You can look at examples within Google that go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of criteria. >> All right, so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google, both groups and Microsoft as well, all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side. That's a tailwind, I get that. But as it continues, we're expecting post-COVID some redistribution of development dollars in projects. Whether it's IT going cloud-native or whatever new workloads. We are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge. And this is going to create some lifts. So I want to get your thoughts on you guys' strategy with go-to market, as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with AI and data. There seems to be a trend towards the verticalization of whether it's sales and go-to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct (chuckles) value in these verticals. So it's really seems to be... I won't say ratification, but in a way, that seems to be the norm. Whether you come into a market and you have specialization, but the data is there so apps can be more agile. Are you guys seeing that? And is that something that you guys are considering from an organization standpoint? And how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers? >> Yeah, I bring this to... And where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well. Which is we've moved from, "Here are storage offers for everybody, "and here's basic infrastructure for everybody." And now we've said, "How can we make sure "that we have solutions that are tailored "to the very specific problems that customers "are trying to solve?" And we're getting to the point now where performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to impose very specific solutions. And if you think about the substrate that has to be there, we mentioned you have to have some really great partners, and you have to have a roadmap that is focused on priority solution. So for example, at Google Cloud, we're very focused on six priority vertical areas. So retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and industrials, healthcare life sciences, public sector. And as a result of being very focused in those areas, we can make more targeted investments and also align our entire go-to market system and our entire partner ecosystem... Excuse me, ecosystem around those bare specific priority areas. So for example, we work with CETA and HDA Healthcare very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal for COVID-19. And that's to help better inform communities and hospitals. We can use Looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance nonprofit and that helps monitor patient symptoms and risk factors. So we're using a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem to develop very tailored solutions. You can also look at... I mentioned Shopify earlier. That's another great example of how in retail, they can use something like Google Meet, inherent reliability, scalability, security, to connect their employees during these interesting times. But then they can also use GCP, Google Cloud Platform to scale out. And as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers, for their shops, they can rapidly deploy, to your point. And those solutions and how the database performs and how those tiers perform, that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams. >> Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the COVID is that when the world gets back to normal, it'll be a hybrid. And it'll be a hybrid between reality, not physical and a hundred percent virtual, hybrid. And that's going to impact events too, media, to everything. Every vertical will be impacted. And I want to point out the Splunk deal and bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk deal in context to Splunk has a cloud. And they've got a great slogan, "Data for everywhere." "Data to everywhere," I think it is. But theCUBE, we have a cloud. Every company will have a cloud scale. At some level, we'll progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data. How are you guys powering those clouds? Because I think the Splunk deal is interesting. Their partner, their stock price was up out on the news of the deal. Nice bump there for Splunk, shout out to those guys. But they're a data company and now they're cross-platform. But they're not Google, but they have a cloud. So you know what I'm saying? So they need to play in all the clouds, but they need infrastructure (laughs), they need support. So how do you guys talk to that customer that says, "Hey, the next pandemic that comes, "the next crisis that's going to cause some "either social disruption or workflow disruption "or supply chain disruption. "I need to be agile. "I need to have full cloud scale. "And so I need to talk to Google." What do you say to them? What's the pitch? And does the Splunk deal mirror some of those capabilities? Or tie that together for us, the Splunk deal and how it relates to how to proof themselves for the future. Sorry. >> For example, with the Splunk cloud deal, if you take a look at what Google is already really good at, data processing at scale, log analytics, and you take a look at what Splunk is doing with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest, it's a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google Cloud, not only do they get highly performing infrastructure. But they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools, data analytics tools, machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhanced services. So not just about capacity going up and down through periods of demand, but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers. And we see that as a really big trend. And this gets at something, John, a little bit bigger, which is kind of the two views of the world. And we talked about very tailored, focused solutions. Splunk is an example of taking a very methodical approach to a partnership, building a solution specifically with partners. And in this case, Splunk on the security event management side. But we're always going to provide our data processing platform, our infrastructure for companies across many different industries. And I think that addresses one part of the topic, which is, how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing, and this goes back to the foundational elements of infrastructure as a service and elasticity. We're going to provide a platform and infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of... It's hard to forecast, and/or demand may rise and fall in very interesting ways. But then there's going to be times where we... Because we're not necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution. So for example, in the oil and gas industry, we don't develop custom AI, ML solutions that facilitate upstream extraction, for example. But what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out what I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and infrastructure. >> It's a classic enablement model where you're enabling your platform for your customers. Okay, so I've got to ask the question. I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon has their own SaaS stuff. But really more of end to end. The better product's usually on the ecosystem side. You guys have some killer SaaS. G Suite, we're a customer. We use the G Suite really deeply. We also use some Bigtable as well. I want to build a cloud, we have a cloud, CUBE cloud. But you guys have Meet. So I want to build my product on Google Cloud. How do I know you're not going to compete with me? Do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between the pure Google services, which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are going to be great markets, potentially huge markets that are out there. >> Well, this is the power of partnership. I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas has made has been developing a sense of partners. And it kind of blurs the line between traditional, what you would call a customer and what you would call a partner. And so having a really strong sense of which industries we're in, which we prioritize, plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where our customers and partners want to add that value. That's the foundational, that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned. And it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a, "Here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle." But one of the things Thomas has also done and a key strategy of his has been to make sure that the Google Cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google. And also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank, for example. >> Well, I've got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you got some other things going on. I really appreciate you taking the time, sharing this great insight and updates. As a builder, you've been on the other side of the table. Now you're at Google heading up the CTO. Also working with Thomas, understanding the go-to market across the board and the product mix. As you talk to customers and they're thinking... The good customers are thinking, "Hey, "I want to come out of this COVID on an upward trajectory "and I want to use this opportunity "to reset and realign for the future." What advice do you have for those enterprises? They could be small, medium-sized enterprises to the full large big guys. And obviously, cloud-native, we've talked some of that already, but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize, as some things are now exposed? The collaboration, the tooling, the scale, all these things are out there. What have you seen and what advice would you give a CXO or CSO or a leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing, how they should plan, execute, and move forward? >> Well, I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job, which is interacting with the C-suite and boards of companies and partners around the world. And they're obviously very interested to learn or get a data point from someone at Google. And the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions. One, collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is. And I think you're seeing this right now across every industry, and whether you're a small, medium-sized business or you're a large company, the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways, to share information rapidly, to do it securely with high reliability, that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to... Applications to build, services to enable, to actually succeed in production and over the long haul. Is that culture of innovation and collaboration. So absolutely number one is having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective and collaboration perspective and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else. Second piece of advice, especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty, is where can you buy down uncertainty with...? You can learn without a high penalty. This is why cloud I think is really, really finding super scale. It was already on the rise, but what you're seeing now as you've laid back to me during this conversation, we're seeing the same thing, which is a high increase in demand of, "Let's get this implemented now. "How can we do this more? "This is clearly one way to move through uncertainty." And so look for those opportunities. I'll give you a really good example. Mainframes, (chuckles) one of the classic workloads of the on-premise enterprise. There are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes. But a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java. Or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have a performant workload. Maybe you start chunking at art and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than just one thing. But there are a lot of years and investments in our workload that might run on a mainframe. And that's a perfect example of how biting off too much might be a little bit dangerous, but there is a path to... So for example, we brought in a company called Cornerstone to help with those migrations. But we also have partnerships with data center providers and others globally plus our own built infrastructure to allow even a smaller step per se for more close proximity location of the workload. >> It's great. Everything kind of has a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a internet, digitally connected world. We're living in the notion of a digital business, was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years. But I think now COVID-19, you're seeing the virtual or digital, it's really digital, but virtual reality, augmented reality is going to come fast too. Really get people to go, "Wow. "Virtualization of my business." So we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke, but it's really more about, okay, this is about a new world, new opportunity to think about when we come out of this, we're going to still go back to our physical world. Now, the hybrid now kicks in. This kind of connects all aspects of business in every vertical. It's not like, "Hey, I'm targeting this industry." So there might be unique solutions in those industries, but now the world is virtualized. It's connected, it's a digital environment. These are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a lunatic fringe idea, but now it's brought mainstream. This is going to be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and application software. This is going to be, we think, a big thing. What's your reaction to that? Based on your experience, what do you see happening? Do you agree with it? And do you have anything you might want to add to that? >> Maybe one kind of philosophical statement and then one more... I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration. First from a philosophical standpoint, the greater the crisis, the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get. And so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing with all of the customers that I work with directly, plus our partners, Googlers. Everybody is rallying together to think about this world differently. So to your point, a shift in mindset, there are very few moments where you get this pronounced change and everyone is going through it all at the same time. So that creates an opportunity, a scenario where you're bold thinking new strategies, creativity. Bringing people in in new ways, collaborating in new ways and offer a lot of benefits. More practically speaking and from my experience, building technology for a couple decades, it has an interesting parallel to building tightly coupled, really large maybe monoliths versus microservices and the debate around, "Do we build small things "that can be reconfigured and built out by others "or built upon by others more easily? "Or do we create a golden path and a more understood development environment?" And I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better because that's still a raging debate. But I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver to a customer, that one of our customers wants to deliver to their customer. And thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in, what are its core functions? And then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions. That's a real opportunity, and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where if you want to run across multiple clouds, this is the Anthos conversation were recently GA'ed. Global scale platform, multicloud platform, that's a pretty big moment in technology. And that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking an application service and making it real. >> Well, I think you're right on the money. I think philosophically, it's a flashpoints opportunity. I think that's going to prove to be accelerating and to see people win faster and lose faster. You're going to to see that quickly happen. But to your point about the monolith versus service or decoupled based systems, I think we now live in a world where it's a systems view now. You can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems. That's distributed computing. I think this is the trend, it's a system. It's not one thing or the other. So I think the debate will continue just like VI versus Emacs (chuckles). We don't know, right? People are going to have the debate, but if you think about it as a system, the use case defines your architecture. That's the beautiful thing about the cloud. So great insight, I really appreciate it. And how's everything going over there at Google Cloud? You've got Meet that's available. How's your staff? What's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google Cloud team? Tell us what's going on over there. People still working, working remote? How's everyone doing? >> Well, as you can tell from my scenario here, my backdrop, yes, still part at work. And we take this as a huge responsibility. These moments as a huge responsibility because there are educators, loved ones, medical professionals, critical life services that run on services that Google provides. And so I can tell you we're humbled by the opportunity to provide the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help. And I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investments technology to help form people that really gets at the root of who we are. So while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality, what really fires us up and what really charges us up is because this is a moment where what we do really well is very, very important for the world in every geo, in every vertical, in every use case, in every solution type. We're taking that responsibility very seriously. And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that all of our teams as well as all of the teams that we work with and our customers and partners are making it through the human moment, not just the technology moment. >> Well, congratulations and thanks for spending the time. Great insight, Will. Appreciate, Will Grannis, managing director, head of technology office of the CTO at Google Cloud. This certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time, which is DevOps, large scale, role of data and technology. Now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits. And thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers. So thank you so much for all that effort and thanks for spending the time here in theCUBE Conversation. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto studios for remote CUBE Conversation with Google Cloud, getting the update. Really looking at the future as it unfolds. We are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level, cloud-native and change not only the tech industry but society. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicone Valley Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Abby Kearns, the Executive Director of The Cloud Foundry Foundation, my cohost. With Blair Hanley Frank, Principal Analyst at ISG Insights. Blair, great to see you, former journalist at Venturebeat. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to have you on theCUBE finally. Yes, likewise. It's good to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. So, I'd love to start to find out what you're working on. You've been covering the tech sector as a journalist now, as an analyst. You've always done good work, I always admired what you've done. I'm sure you're digging into some really good stuff. What are you researching? What are some of the things you're finding around cloud? What the, what's the data tell us? >> Yeah, awesome. So we have a forthcoming cloud study where we talked to 300 enterprise IT decision makers and we asked them what they're doing today what they're looking to do in the future and how they're doing it. And we're taking all of that information and we're putting that together with the information that we have from ISG's advisor and practitioner community. And building an understanding of where the market is and where it should be. And that's what we have going on today. One of the things that we think is really important, is when we look and the data and we look what's going on in the market, what we find really important is that enterprises today are starting to move to the cloud. They have some workloads in SaaS. They have some workloads in a public cloud, IaaS or PaaS. And then they have a lot of stuff that's still on premises. And that exists in a wide variety of workloads. Whether that's on bare metal, whether that's virtualized whether that's some sort of cloud native or containerized application that's still running on prem all the way up until the cloud and what we see is that those different modes of operation are actually going to continue to exist throughout the enterprise. Even as we see more workloads shift into the public cloud. Enterprises aren't realistically going to be able to retire all of their on premises investments for the foreseeable future. >> Nor should they. >> Right And so what they-- >> Amazon confirmed that with Outposts. You saw Azure Stack, I mean that's total. I mean, first the VMware deal, the RDS on premises, and then you've got the Outpost which still hasn't, we haven't heard anything about that. That's validation, Amazon essentially saying, "I'm going to put cloud on premise." >> Yeah. >> Cloud Operations. So certainly that's validated. The question I want to ask you and Abby, get your thoughts too if you want to chime in over the top. But I've always been critical of the cloud market share game, right? Like, I've always been vocal on theCUBE. Because it's always been infrastructure service, platform service and then SAS is the application. Now Amazon has some SAS but most of their SAS is their customers. Google's got G Suite, they've got their own SAS. Microsoft's got Office 365. So when you start bundling SAS revenues into cloud market share and revenue projections. You start to see, you know, sandbagging of the numbers. I mean you can talk to sales forces today in a work day, they have clouds. So what's a cloud? What is cloud technologies? And, you know, Azure as that develops all the sudden has this massive market share. And it didn't really exist a few years ago. Where'd that come from? Is that just a shift of some sandbagging on the revenue side? Or is that actually real cloud? Or is it, so this is the game that the customer has to squint through. Now we in the industry know that okay, a little bit of Office 365. Okay, is that really cloud? >> Yeah, I mean, when you think about financials with cloud vendors. Everybody is playing a slightly different shell game. And generally speaking, you're not really going to get real numbers from anybody. Except possibly Amazon. And the reason why Amazon is able to do that is because the financial results for AWS look great. But everybody else is going to be masking. >> But they don't have a lot of SaaS though. The think about there, their SaaS number is their customer base. So I mean-- >> Yeah, but I would argue cloud is nothing but infrastructure with a SaaS on top of it. I mean, we talk about cloud as if there's some magic kind of thing happening over here. But it's basically a different kind of data center with a different kind of SaaS on top of it. And I think if I'm, if it's me reporting my numbers out. Well, I'm going to make them look as good as I possibly can. >> CUBE Cloud is coming out with great numbers. (laughing) >> I mean, look. You're going to make it look as great as you can. I mean, infrastructure is infrastructure is infrastructure. But now like, when you talk about SAS on top of that. Well, what's cloud? What's not? And it's super, it's a very fungible definition. >> Alright, I'm not disagreeing on that point. I see how that makes sense. The question for people who are making quote, "decisions" on the buyers side. They tend to think of things like "cloud supplier"? Is that really a word? Like what does that mean? So if you're going to say cloud's part of a workload is that actually even relevant. A "cloud supplier", I mean, I guess they're supplying cloud to you. But, so when you start to get into the vendors versus the buyers and the consuming of the technology. We get in that old school game of trying to put things into like market share, revenue. I mean, I see Amazon just kicking ass ten ways from Sunday. And I think Azure's certainly doing some good things there. Google, we're going to see what's going on with Google. They've got great direction. But, it's like apples, oranges and pears. Right, like are they all the same or different? And then throw Salesforce in there. This is where it muddies the water. >> And Alibaba. >> Alibaba! So, I mean, so it's hard to like figure this out. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you guys see that in the studies. Are customers confused? Do they have some visibility into what they want to do? What's out there in the data on this point. >> So, what I will say directionally speaking, SaaS is where the market is going. So when we asked our survey respondents for where are there applications today and where did they want to go? 90% of those people we surveyed, 90% of the 300 people we surveyed around the world said in 2019 we are primarily in a hybrid mode. Where our applications are on premises and in a public cloud. 5% of them said, the majority of our applications are in SaaS. Now when you look at 2021, 37% say that they expect to be in a hybrid mode. 61% expect that they are going to be majority SaaS for their workloads, in two years. >> So they're in build up mode, they're in shifting mode. >> They're shifting, and they're not just, they're planning to shift to SaaS. They're planning to, they want to get out of the business of running applications. And put some of that burden onto providers to say, "Okay, it's your job to run the application. We'll provide the data. We'll build our business processes but we don't want our job to be running those apps." And what we see is that when you look at total cost of ownership, our respondents found SaaS to be far more predictable in terms of TCO than IaaS and PaaS. And again, for those people who are are really paying attention. If you think about it, that doesn't. Like, that's not a surprise. But on the other hand, that's like, I think that's part of where the driver comes from. Is that when you're consuming a SaaS product, it's very understandable. It's very consumable. When you think about running application in an Iaas, PaaS environment. Maybe not so much. It's going to be, you're more in charge of that application. So-- >> And SaaS has got immediate gratification. >> Exactly. >> I mean, you see the benefits. >> Easy to consume. >> Is there revenue there, is it doing its objective? Why is the IAZ fuzzy? Just because it's a classic back office kind of mindset? Or is it more of maturity? It seems mature to me, I mean, I don't I think IAZ has been more mature than ever before right now. Now we kind of-- >> I think its been around awhile, I mean I'd love to hear your answer. I think it's, there's just, I feel it's a relic of the past. Whereas, it's not something we spend much time thinking about. Like, there's that old joke. You know, "Great job keeping the servers up" said no CEO ever. Right? (laughing) >> That's a good point. But now apart from the servers you've got SageMaker, you've seen what Amazon's moving with the Stack with SageMaker. Machine learning, all of this kind of SASification kind of platform creeping up to the top of the stack. It seems to be what everyone talks about. I'm sure Google next will hear all about AI and how Iot Edge or some focus around that piece. So, again I agree. It's the commoditization is just another distraction layer on top of it. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> We've seen that movie before. >> We're moving up the stack, we're just moving up the stack at a faster pace than we have in the last two decades. >> So bottom line, Blair. What's the survey, what's the net net telling us? What's coming out of it? >> So the net net here is really that enterprises need to have a strategy and an operating model in place for the long haul. When they think about their cloud strategy overall, this is something where they're not going to be able to snap their fingers and get to cloud-native nirvana overnight. Because that requires technical change, it requires culture change, it requires process change. There's a lot of very heavy lifting that takes place and not all of the applications that exist in an enterprise today really need that heavy lift. And so when you think about what the future holds for enterprises. They really need to build a model for how they are going to make that transition as smooth as possible. Take advantage of the new capabilities that are entering the market as quickly as possible to help advance their business. While at the same time having the opportunity to work across all of those different modes of operation and do so with high reliability, high customer satisfaction, high performance. All of the things that you need to succeed as a business in 2019. >> So I totally agree. This is a heavy lift to go kill the old and bring in the new. And one of the things that I've seen as a trend, and I'd love to get your guys' thoughts on this, as a reaction. Because I've seen the Kubernetes trend really let a lot of air out of that tension. Because it allows people to get in with containers to get in around some workloads and bring kind of baby steps into transitioning stuff. And I've seen people saying, "You know what. I like the idea of going cloud but I got this app that I really don't want to shut it down and have to rebuild it. But I could put some containers around things, run it on some Vms, use Kubernetes to orchestrate it." So I think this has been, I'm not sure if it's actually been deployed in massive production. But I've heard people say that. Is that hype or is that reality? Is it becoming a crutch, is it a short term transitional? >> I got to drag out my soap box for this 'cause I have a soap box for this. >> Okay, let's go. >> I'm not a big believer in lift and shift. I think there are times where it may be opportunistic. When you're like end of life-ing hardware or something like that. But I'm not a big believer that a cloud is a goal. Because cloud should not be your goal. If I'm a business, my goal should not be cloud. My goal should be, how do I write more applications more quickly? And maybe, how do I use infrastructure in better and more efficient ways? But cloud is not my goal. If that's my goal, then I'm going to be really sad at the end of the day. Because that hasn't made my business better. So I think, I feel like we've all over rotated-- >> You're saying it's not the outcome. The outcome is the app that benefits from doing that. >> The outcome, if you're a bank and you tell me your goal is to be on the cloud. Well, then I'm like, you've got the wrong goal. Your goal should be, how am I writing more applications and getting them out into the hands of my customer and changing my business faster? If the cloud gets me to that, great! But that may not be the answer for all of your workloads and you need to really think about that before you say "my goal is cloud". My goal is to write more applications faster. Period. And if that's on the cloud or if that's on prim or if that's on bare metal, what have you. But I need to really think about what my outcome is. And I feel like we've really focused on the cloud as the solution and that's not the solution. And if you're check boxing, you know, I'm done for the year because I moved a bunch of stuff to the cloud. Well you're, the works not done. The work is the culture part and the team part and really figuring out the applications I need to create And how do I iterate on those applications? The cloud is just, it's a bi product of that. >> It should be enabling the outcome they want. >> Right. >> That's a great soap box. Your thoughts on the overall lift and shift soap box rant by my cohost Abby here? >> Yeah, I think that the, the big opportunity is to do what's right for the business. That's ultimately what should be driving any sort of transformation. I had a conversation with a start up once. They were very focused on taking their monolithic application and going to microservices. And they were like, "we're going to go to microservices. That's what we want to do because that's the future. That's what a modern application looks like." And they started decomposing their application what I would call radically decomposing their application. Getting down to the atomic, you know, moment of how small can we make every single piece of this application. What they figured out was that it was a massive headache. And so they actually then, took it and sort of re-composed the application into not microservices but what they called mega-services. Where they-- >> And then they ended up writing a book and being famous and doing a speaking tour. But they didn't achieve the objective. >> And so, and that's exactly it. That they all of the sudden created this host of technical problems by pursuing an ideal that wasn't-- >> And this is the danger, the dogma. Danger of having the dogma of a certain trend. I remember during the big data days when we were covering the Duke movement around 2010, 2011, 2012. I would hear this all the time in side cloud era. "Man, I just set up an 18 note cluster. I'm so pumped!" Well, what are you doing with it? "Well, I just collect data." I'm like well, I get it, I get. And then what happened was, that was their end game. We see a lot of that with clouds, your point where, it's not about, it's what you're using it for. And then they had to make up the term data lake after that. So again, they just kept adding on more but they actually missed the entire boat because it was about making data addressable for apps. >> It used to make things useful. >> So this is the danger of the tech world. >> And making it useful. Yeah, I feel like we follow the shiny penny. As opposed to saying, "Actually is that actually even relevant for me?" You know, when Docker came out in 2014 and every conversation started with, that was the answer for everything. Whatever you wanted. Do you want toast for lunch? Docker? And I feel like that was the answer for everything. And I feel like, why? Like, one, why do you care about a container? And two, like why? >> Containers were pretty cool though. >> Sure, they're cool. But containers have been around since 1969. >> Summer of love. The containers, ya know? >> It was, but I feel like, ya know everyone's like "that's my answer" and you're like "Well, what's the question you're asking?" And I feel like we continue, we went from Docker to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And I feel like we're not pausing to say "actually what are we hoping to gain?" You're point. >> So Kubernetes, what do you think is Kubernetes a shiny penny or shiny new toy? Or does that have any relevance in your mind in your soap box? Where does Kubernetes fit into your, your view. >> I mean I think Kubernetes is an amazing technology that has done a lot for the way think about scheduling and container orchestration. But it is also become victim of the shiny penny and that everyone is like "Kubernetes!" And you know, two years ago everyone is like "Kubernetes!" It's like how many people were using it two years ago? Not that many. And so I think about it in this like, and I often ask, "Why do you care so much about a container orchestrator?" >> FTO sold almost 650 million or whatever the number. >> 515, I know the Vmware. >> Is it 515 was the number? >> 515. >> That's half a billion dollars. That's Kubernetes' ca ching. >> I lived my two years, my last two years wrong. That's what I did. (laughing) But that's a different story about all of my mistakes. >> You could have been the Kubernetes foundation. >> But I think-- >> CNCF is doing pretty well, I mean, that community is rallying. It feels like an Amazon alternative. They feel cloud, it's very cloud native. So I think Kubernetes has been a good rallying cry, for sure. >> It is but I think you're also, you know, what you see even in CNCF which has so many amazing technologies. I do not want to take away from that but you also see the shiny penny effect happening within that community. You know, when I went to CUBECON in December you know, what was the hot topic? It wasn't Kubernetes it was Istio. You heard Istio everywhere. And I've never seen this many people so excited about service mesh in my life. I'm like "Great! This is awesome!" >> We love it on theCUBE, it's great content. Service mesh is great. Who wouldn't want policy staple applications? Come on! >> Well, ultimately the like-- >> Hold on. (inhaling) >> Exactly >> Have some of that staple, I'm saying. Fantasyland. >> I'm excited about it. >> No, stakes hard. >> Well, and this is what I end up telling clients is you want to adopt the parts of the stack that are necessary for you to solve the problems that you have. Right? If you are in the position where you need a service mesh, you know because you are having problems that only a service mesh can solve. And if you aren't in that position then you get to be like the 60% of respondents in our survey who said that they are currently experimenting with a service mesh. Or, the 33% who say that they plan to use it in the future. >> 60% are experimenting with it? >> Yeah, well, probably-- >> That numbers way high. >> Well, it's probably somebody has it running on some VM somewhere. >> It seems really high. >> Well if you look at the success at CUBECON one of the things that, Envoy is a great example, and you talk about some of the challenges-- >> Envoys great. >> The challenges that enterprises have. If you look at the success of all the open source projects, the ones that have been super successful. It's the folks that had to build it for themselves. Envoy had a lift. And I think this is a challenge that I see. I haven't really figured it out in the enterprise yet, how that's going to play out. It generally seems to be that the enterprises don't necessarily want to be like them. But they want the same kind of control. "I want to roll out my own cloud." But they don't want to have an open stack problem. Meaning, they don't want to have something that's not supported. So you have this kind of new changeover vibe going. I really haven't put my finger on it but it's, it has that same vibe. >> Well, enterprises are more in control. And what we've seen in our research is that enterprises actually feel comfortable now. They no longer feel like they're in the fog of war like "I don't know what's goin on!" They're more like "Oh, we actually understand and we're on it." And they're being more thoughtful about the technologies that they use. And they are experimenting more. And they're feeling really confident. But you know, my caution is always, use the technology when it makes sense, as it makes sense. But at the end of the day as a business owner, your fundamental question is, does this serve my outcomes? Does this serve my business outcomes? And if the answer is, I don't know. Then really think about what you're investing in in terms of technology. I mean, I love all of these technologies. But I'm never going to recommend all of them if that's not actually going to be in your best interest. >> That's great stuff. Well, thanks for coming on Blair. Appreciate it. You going to be at Google next? Cloud Foundry in Philly? In April, first week of April? >> Unfortunately, I won't make it to the Cloud Foundry Summit. >> Google Next, next month? >> Sure will. >> Alright, We'll see you there. >> Abby, thanks for co hosting this segment with me. >> Any time, John. >> Sharing the data here with my cohost Abby and John here. Co hosting the first ever CUBE, What we'd call it? Cloud? >> Cloud CUBE. >> Cloud CUBE. >> Rebrand. >> TheCUBE, thanks for watching. (jazzy music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome everyone back to the Cube's live coverage. This is day three of Google Cloud Cube coverage here. Google Next 2018 #GoogleNext18. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick. Our next two guests kicking off day three, is Ed Anuff, the director of product management at Google Cloud, part of the Apigee acquisition, really part of the APIs and really a big part of the story here at Google Next, and Chuck Knostman, vice-president of IT at T-mobile customer. Ed, thanks for coming on. Chuck, thanks for coming on. So Apigee, a big part of the story at Google Next is, you know, the role of APIs and services. Huge, and I won't say nuanced. I mean, certainly Istio is new to a lot of people. Kubernetes, superly a very important piece of this new cloud service platform, as well as just running work loads, multicloud, etc. What's the focus, what's going on for you guys at the event. Take a minute to explain the announcements and what you guys did here at the show. >> Sure, so, APIs are how software talks to software. And what we announced this week at the show with Kubernetes and Istio are new ways for people to build software and deploy it, in new distributive fashions. And so that's creating new ways for tying your software together. Microservices, a lot of people are talking about now, are a key part of this. And so, from an Apigee perspective, you know, we're looking at facilitating how to make that communications happen, how to make it secure, how to make it efficient, how to monitor it. So what we announced was that Apigee is making it now possible for you to have all the tools that we've given you for managing your APIs, for, you know, getting your mobile apps to talk to your cloud services and all that, now is also going to apply to these new microservices that you're building. And so we think it's a pretty exciting thing. Lot of our customers have been asking for this, and obviously, uh, Chuck being one of them, and so, you know, that's what it's been all about for us this week. >> Chuck, obviously, APIs, key part of dev ops. You know, it first started with slinging some APIs around, stitching them together. Developers voted with their code, clearly APIs is the way that software's working. Microservices takes us to a whole nother level. Now, operationalizing APIs seems easy, but it's, you've got to start managing things differently. How are you guys taking that API and this new service management piece of it and kind of operationalizing APIs into T-Mobile? >> Yeah, we've been using Apigee for about four years now, and so over the time I think we were have 200 plus internal APIs, so we've over that time we've kind of learned how to operationalize that piece of it. Over the last couple of years we've really been focused on the microservice layers. Writing cloud-native applications, essentially. And that layer, and now with the Apigee hook into Istio, we're going to have a much better way to manage it. And it's really nice to see the platform starting to grow and mature along with us, so that's really great. >> I can only imagine how complicated it is to run real-time, cloud-native and have also legacy, and I think one of the things I'd like to get your thoughts on is, containers have become a nice piece of, not ripping and replacing to bring in the new. You don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And now with containers, Kubernetes, and microservices and Istio, you have an ability to kind of do both. Talk about how you guys do it, cause this is like a perfect storm, in a good way, for enterprises. >> Well yeah, and it's really good timing for us as well. We're just now starting our Kubernetes journey on premise, if you will. So we're a big cloud-foundry shop. We're starting to put our legacy applications into docker containers and moving them, we'll be moving them onto Kubernetes. And so you can see the whole, the containerization shift as we go, as we go through time. And it's really, for us, like you said, it's fortuitous that at this timing because now with Istio coming in and being able to control all that, that's a great thing for us. >> Ed, talk about, you give a lot of history. To use, as normal APIs, it's lingua franca, it's been around for a while, you've had a lot of experience in that. But a lot of the enterprises that we talk to are like, there's a lot of pressure in IT to do more now with cloud-native. And now with the new services that are out there, it kind of takes the pressure off IT because the pressure of, oh, I got to sunset that app or I don't know when to kill that workload. I know I want to maybe transform it, but I don't want to have to disrupt all this stuff. So talk about the importance of nondisruption, because this seems to be a conversation that's talked a lot in the hallways. >> That's exactly right. So, you know, what you see within enterprises is that there's a need to deliver a whole set of new applications, and a lot of these are connected to digital experiences. Basically everything that you experience on your mobile apps, every new form of engaging with your customer. That's where a lot of the business growth is that's bringing, you know, a lot of the funding for these new initiatives. But, a lot of the core data of the enterprise is locked up within systems that have been operating very efficiently, but siloed for many years. And so that's the part that we see the most, which is, you know, folks within IT come to us and say, "Look, you know, I've been building these legacy systems "for many years now, and I know that if I can just take "the data that's locked up in these and bring these "into these new ways of doing business, "that it's going to have a huge impact on my business." And that's, you know, that's where the question sits. And then the follow up on that is, "Hey, you know, we want to, "we want to make our businesses more like the way, you know, "you guys are doing it in Silicon Valley. "And we, we see what you're doing with containers, "and we see things like Kubernetes, and cloud-native, "and we know that's the right way to build things, "but there has to be a way for us to bring "all of these other assets that we've been building "for the last 30 years along for the ride." And in fact for most of these businesses, our response is, "Hey, it's not just a question "of building along for the ride. "That, that's your core, that's your, that is been "what you built your business on. "So don't even just think about it "as this thing that you somehow have to drag along. "Think about how you actually can amplify it "because it's been the source of your business for so long." >> Yeah, the other I would add to that is that it gives us scale and operation, a much better operational platform to work with. For us, we've grown tremendously, or our growth has been tremendous over the last five years. We've gone from I think 30 million customers to 73 million customers, and frankly, to scale those systems up, containerization is probably the only way we can go with it. And with, from an operational standpoint, having one platform like Kubernetes to have, to operate for all of this stuff just helps us out tremendously. >> We hear that all the time. I think that's the biggest story around containers outside of geeking out on the benefits of it is that it really allows a nice bridge to the future. You don't have to burn the boats, as they say, in Silicon Valley, you know. >> And you can pick your, you can pick on the applications you want to keep around, right. Then you refactor 'em to be cloud-native on the ones you don't. You don't have to go all the way, right, and so you can make it much better that way. >> Chuck, I'm curious to get your take on the changing competitive environment. Cause before, you know, you had these big complex systems and you wanted to keep them running. Now the pressure for more innovation, more applications, quicker applications, to leverage not only your inside stuff but outside stuff, and how some of these technologies are helping you deliver that to your customers or your internal development team. >> Yeah, like I said, scale is one aspect of it. Performance is another, and the ability to move those workloads close to the customer just like Google's trying to do with moving closer to the customer, we do the same thing. Right, and so the hybrid cloud is real for us. We run in almost all the clouds right now, and on premise we treat that as a cloud as well. But being able to do that can only happen when we containerize stuff and utilize similar platforms on all these places. >> Right, and then you'll have this huge transformational shift over the next several years with 5G right, that's coming-- >> Yeah, yeah, and we've been at it for a couple years now. >> For a couple years, so this is going to be another huge wave of change inside your infrastructure. >> Yeah, sounds fantastic. >> What attracted you to Google Cloud? Share, take a minute to explain. What was the interest in Google Cloud. Why Google Cloud for your guys? >> Well we're just getting started with it, but it's really, it's the partnership we've had with Apigee that's helped us kind of understand what's going on with Google Cloud, but then the open-source nature of it as well as the focus on AI and ML. That's why we're really taking a hard look at what's going on with Google Cloud, and the attitude towards enterprises is great as well. >> Culture's a good fit there. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of people are attracted by some of the speed. I mean, we've been hearing here at the show, you know, Google obviously has built their business on being fast. >> Yeah, well and having your own network is massive as well, right. >> And now you got the API. And what's the future look like for APIs and Apigee inside Google? Give us a little taste of what you guys are working on, some of the projects you guys are passionate about, and some of the successes you've had or any anecdotal use case studies. >> So definitely, so, you know, APIs carry our customers' most important data. And data's the basis for machine learning and AI, and so you're going to see a lot of product innovation for us about bringing, you know, AI to the point of these data conduits that are what APIs are all about. It's the natural place to couple it with every business process. So that's a big deal for us. I think that, you know, the security aspect, you heard a lot about security in the key notes. Again, you know, APIs are the conduit in many cases for, again, the enterprises most important data. To get outside of the perimeter of the enterprise, it has to be done in a secure way. You know, and then finally, being able to go and leverage the sort of collaborative nature, the stuff you see within open-source, the community around all of this, again, you know, most APIs are about bringing a lot more developers to, you know, build more applications in less time around these APIs and that is, that collaboration component is something that we see a ton of opportunities in terms of leveraging, you know, Google's unique know-how in terms of advancing and pushing this data that are in an API management. So I think you're going to see a lot of that from us. >> Chuck, I'd love to get your thoughts on how you in IT, obviously and IT's transforming, we talk about it all the time, how you keep track of what's good, right. It used to be in the old days the stack was pretty not that complex. And you go to Gartner or magic quadrant, oh they're a leader, I'll kick the tires, they come in, a vendor will come in, but some of the best cloud providers don't even show up on a magic quadrant because it's horizontally scalable. APIs changes the stack a little bit. A new modern middleware is emerging with Istio and new sets of business models and services are emerging. So a lot of people are like trying to be, how do you determine who's good. You know, in IT, because ou want to move the needle, you want to transform, you got a lot a build up. How do you kind of evaluate, is there any new ways, or is it gut instinct or specific things that you look at? >> Really good question. We look, we try to adopt the open-source stuff first. But we, from the company standpoint we also look at the company themselves and who's really vested in what's going on with it. Like, Apigee four years ago was really the only ones that were really only doing APIs, right. And their knowledge and the depth and their road map, that's what we really kind of look for. But to your point, things are changing so rapidly that you kind of have to go with the, watch the open-source community. Where are all the pull requests coming from, or what platforms are they going after? And then track that, and that's where, that's what we try to do. And so when we see Kubernetes and the explosion that's happening on that, the tooling that's coming around that, we know that's going to be good for enterprises going forward. So, we're going to be heavily investing in that platform. >> It's interesting, we always talk about developers, but what's interesting that's coming out of the show that we're observing is, it's always about developers do building apps. But the role of an operator inside IT, used to be an operator would, you know, maybe provision some storage and some servers. Now the role of what an operator, I mean, network op guys, now it's kind of like a more of a holistic view. Your thoughts on this. I know it's super early, but the emergence of these two personas in IT is super critical. >> Yeah, we look at it like it's automation, right. That's where it all comes to play. So if you've got a platform like a Kubernetes where you can have all this automation built around it, and you let the developers just do their thing and focus on the business logic, it's huge. So there is kind of two personalities, and the caring and feeding of that platform is just as important as the guys writing the applications across the top. >> Yeah, it's really a great environment. Final question for you guys. Observations on the show, Google Next. What's your observation, obviously you've got an API perspective, just globally looking down. If you kind of look, zoom out and look at, look down at the show, thoughts and commentary on what's happening here. >> You know, I think the scale of it has been amazing, you know, we became part of Google two years ago. We were here at the show last year, looking at it this year. And, the level of growth, the activity, attendees, the number of announcements, it's just been amazing. It's been very exciting for us to be a part of. >> Cool, Chuck your thoughts? >> Super impressed. This is our first one, really, that we've come to. We were even participating on the stage on the Knative, we wrote some applications to work with Knative. But, it's a, it's a very diverse crowd which is awesome. I think you really need that. Some of the others, I don't see as much. So I think what Google is doing, and again their approaches to enterprise, looking more at solutions, vertical solutions, very impressed with what's going on here. >> It's a really great time. Congratulations on all your success with the APIs. You guys have done the work, and open-source, it's where the, your employees want to work. They want to meet other people, and this is where the co-creation, that's where the assessments of the vendors happen. >> Opensource.T-Mobile.com, that's where we want to be. >> Alright, great. Well, Chuck, Ed, thanks so much. Really appreciate the time. It's the Cube live coverage here in San Francisco covering Google Cloud's conference, Next '18. We'll be right back with more day three coverage. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (light jazzy music plays)