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