>> 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 its ecoystem partners. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here live in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, breaking down all the content and the analysis, opinion, getting all the data, sharing that with you, three days of wall-to-wall coverage, we're in day three winding down, great event. Our next guest is one of the stars of the show here, original Kubernetes, a pioneer, Joe Beda, also the Kube founder at Heptio, recently sold to VMware in acquisition. Startup only what, two years old? >> Yeah, about two years. >> About two years. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Google. Great work you've done with Craig and with pioneering Kubernetes, Heptio startup. >> Yep, yep. >> Got taken off the table as you were ramping up. Congratulations! >> Thank you so much! It's been a little bit of a wild ride, I can tell you that. >> So first question for you is, I don't want to get into the whole VMware thing, we're going to hit that up in VMworld next year. But as you look at the ecosystem of Kubernetes, I mean, you've got to be looking at this sayin, "Hey, we knew this was going to be big." You guys have been running it with Borg and where that came from in the DNA. The magic wand almost was kind of passed out. Hey, this happened! It's kind of happening in a big way. What's your reaction? How do you feel at an emotional level? What's the vibe going on in your mind right now? >> I mean, I look at this and it blows my mind. I think we knew that we had a possibility with Kubernetes to do something big, we could feel it. I don't think we ever expected this, to be honest. The thing, though, that I think surprises me, and it was both about building startup and building a company, but also seeing the community grow, is that every time you hire a new person to do a startup, every time you have somebody join the community and start contributing, it's like it's another cylinder in the engine. And it really starts taking it in directions that you had no idea it was going to to go into. And so, I look around here and this is a product of a community. This is not a product of any single company, any single set of folks. I mean, you start things snowballing and interesting things happen, but it really is a group effort. >> It's so hard to do a startup. You know, I've done a lot of startups. We've done a lot of interviews with startups. It's hard. You got to start a company, you got to do all that legal work, then you've got to get the momentum, and it's capped off by the validation, certainly by VMware, who announced heavily at the VMworld, Pat Gelsinger said that Kubernetes is the dial tone. (laughs) And I'm like, okay, I guess. We were talking earlier, it's the ethernet. I've called it the TCP/IP. So, all the analogies come to this enabling kind of capability. And that's where we see a lot of the value. Where do you see the opportunities for the ecosystem to innovate. I mean, getting some clear visibility around the stability. But now value is starting to get created. What's your thoughts on value creation? Where are some areas that are ripe? >> Yeah, well, I think a couple of things. I think we're at the point now where it's about how do we bring these technologies to new people, to new audiences, to folks who might not have heard about it, don't quite get it. How do we make this stuff more relevant to them? So we're moving out of this technology-focus phase, into this phase that's focused on solution and value that's delivered. And this isn't always about innovation and building on top. Some of it is about different ways to do it, and also just, you know, having these ideas just permeate, right? And as technologists, we build on incredibly complicated technology. We look at, say, something like AWS. If you were to approach that brand new without any idea of the history there, it would be incredibly intimidating. But it's been around long enough, it's grown organically, that everyone's like, "Oh yeah, I totally understand all that stuff." It just takes time sometimes for these technologies to become understood, to become part of the fabric of what people assume the technical skill set is. And I think that's a big part of what we're seeing starting to happen now, too. >> Joe, I want to get your viewpoint. When I think about the last ten, fifteen years, the whole discussion of hybrid cloud, multicloud, portability, even thinking about things from a VMware context, or from a cloud-computing context, it seems like we have a lot of false starts and false expectations about, you know, we've listed Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy and others who talk about the three laws of the cloud. We're not changing physics. And Kubernetes is super-important for multicloud, but portability was kind of thrown out there. I want to get you to help us tease out what it is, what it isn't, and how do you see multicloud today? >> Yeah, so I mean, first, on the topic of false starts, there's this popular narrative that, oh, it's going to be this, now this is the hot thing, now it's this. And the reality is that main frames are still around. Technologies don't disappear, it's an additive type of thing. So it's not like, say for example, Kubernetes or Serverless or machine learning, right? It's all of those things working together and I think, if you look at it in that way, it doesn't feel like a false start. It just seems like we're adding more different techniques, more technologies onto the pile. In terms of where I see this stuff going, I think multicloud and compatibility do go hand-in-hand. From the very start, we never wanted to pretend that Kubernetes was going to be this magic layer that was going to make differences between different environments disappear. What we did want to do, though, was actually find the commonalities and minimize the extra differences that didn't need to be there. And so a lot of times, when I talked to customers, I don't say, "Hey, don't use this special service in this cloud." I don't tell them that. What I do say, though, is, "If you are going to start using those things, "do it in an eyes-open type of way. "Understand the trade-offs, "understand why you're doing it" versus just willy-nilly adopting technologies cuz they look nice and shiny, and that's what you want to do, right? So I think, whether you're adopting Kubernetes, whether you're adopting a specific cloud technology, whether you're moving to cloud versus actually building automatable infrastructure on prem, make sure that you're thoughtful about how you enter those types of decisions. >> The way the feedback we hear from people here on theCUBE this week and other places as well, is, pick a problem to solve. Don't boil all of the ocean, get in there, use Kubernetes for what you think you can nail a problem on, iterate from there. That's the common theme. Now as you guys pivot over to VMware, they've been investing a lot in their strategy also with AWS, RDS is now on VMware, they'd look at Kubernetes as a great opportunity to bridge on-premises and cloud. So it's clear to see why they like it. Explain for the folks watching who are fans of you and Craig and Heptio, what's next for you guys? You joined VMware, you just closed the deal, you're principal engineer at VM where you're in the business unit side, share some of the specifics that you can on what's going to happen next. >> Yeah, I think it's too early for me to speak on sort of a grand strategy across VMware. I think I'm still mapping things out and understanding things. What I can talk about is the way that we were thinking about the market from Heptio's point of view. And every indication that I've seen that this is actually very, very compatible for VMware. A lot of the keynotes that you saw here at KubeCon Show, that adoption curve, where we're in the early phase versus the early majority, that type of thing, and I think there's some truth to that. But I also think that there's an axis to that, that actually isn't shown up there, around the different personas that you see adopt different technologies inside of the enterprise organization. And so the strength of somebody like VMware, and I think the early adopters for things like Kubernetes, are that operator persona. And we're seeing an evolution of that persona as it starts to come to grips with the world of the cloud. We're moving from a place where things are ticket-based, human intensive, to how do we move to API-driven, policy-drive types of things, right? And so that's obviously where the cloud is. But how do we take those learnings, how do we take those lessons and actually apply those things on problems? And so our goal from Heptio's point of view, and I think it's incredibly well-aligned with VMware, and an enormous opportunity, is taking the VMware-faithful, the folks who do go to VMworld, that have built careers on that solution, how do we help them move their career forward, move their positioning forward in a way that doesn't eliminate their jobs, but actually helps them be smart in a modern world where cloud is actually part of the landscape. >> We had Aparna on from Google, and you know Aparna from your Google days, and she was making a comment about these new personas, new opportunities, new jobs that are opening up based on Kube. Okay, great, we see some of that. And then we've done rift on the idea that Kubernetes also is a uplift for existing roles: system architect, Network Guy, Server Guy, and then the VMware operator that had been wearing virtual machines, this is a lift for them. Talk about what specifically is going to get them jazzed up, is it the policy knobs on Kubernetes, what's going to really appeal to people below Kubernetes and what's really going to appeal to the developers above Kubernetes? >> Well, for centralized IT within an organization, cloud has been a challenge, right? If, I'm not thinking of a specific customer, but it's not insane to think about something like a developer who wants to write an app, they have to file a ticket, it can take anywhere from two weeks to three months to get stuff provisioned, right? And they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting to actually get that stuff ready. Meanwhile, they take their credit card, go to a cloud, get a machine up and running within 30 seconds, and get their app shipped. So while they're waiting on that ticket, they can get that app shipped, and then they dare their manager to deny the credit card charge when it comes due. That is a challenge for centralized IT which oftentimes has not had any competition. Now, all of a sudden, they find themselves in a situation where they're competing with cloud for the hearts and minds of their own customers, for their developers. And different organizations have reacted to this in different ways. Some of them had said, we're just going to explode out IT and actually say to different business units, "You own your own destiny." But, depending on the enterprise, depending on the goals, depending on their requirements around regulatory needs, around policy, around cost controls, around mobility of developer skills across the organization, that may or may not work for them. And so, for me, the bridge forward for that centralized IT, is really one of giving them the power tools so they can actually serve their customers better in a world where cloud exists. >> Yeah. Their jobs! That's their job to serve the business. >> Well, I mean, the bar has been raised, right? And so we want to help them meet that challenge. >> Awesome. >> Joe, I want to get your thoughts on this growing ecosystem. I said in our open this morning, we've been looking for the last five years or so. Where is that independent, cloud-computing show? And sitting here with 8 thousand people, and another 2 thousand people are in the hallways or on the wait list and things like that. It's here, and there's all of these projects into multiple communities come together. How does it feel that Kubernetes, was it kind of the first domino to help tip something broader with CloudNative? >> I mean it feels really good, to be honest. I think one of the things that we saw Heptio as, and I think VMware is actually in a great position also, is to be a neutral party that really is on the side of customers as they enter this complex world where they're dancing with elephants that are the big cloud providers. And I think that there is an enormous appetite for customers to actually have trusted partners in that world. Now, with respect to the conference, I think, what I love doing is I love being on the floor here, I love talking to people, I love going to the session tracks. That's where I think the heart of this conference is. Some of the contributor community days that happened on Monday that don't get a lot of coverage, the big headlines are one thing but there really is an undercurrent of community that's happening in this conference that is really something pretty special. >> I think that's a great point, and, at least what I've seen that's contributed, you know, the Envoy Group, tomorrow there's the Operators Group, this is not a monolithic community, it's not like, look, I've been at VMworld for years. It was about virtualization and primarily a single product from a single company and everything that wrapped around it. This is not a vendor doing it, there's all of these. I talked to the people that all they care about is Helm, we talked about all these different pieces, and many of them tie into what was going on at Kubernetes, but there's just so much diversity, and it's a common ground for everybody to work together. >> And I think, this is one of the things that I think has been interesting about the CNCF is that there is no, there is an idea that we want to create a set of projects that work well together, but there also is the realization that there is no one way to skin the cat, there is no one way to solve a problem. So there is room for projects to disagree, there's room for projects to experiment, there is room for folks to try and find their audience and be successful. >> That's the modern upgrade in my mind, to, not going against the open source ethos but also innovating with it, You're balancing commercial so you just, I think they've got to apply this upstream concept called CNCF where the downstream benefits for commercialization, you can still do the open source community thing while having an impact downstream to IT and just regular developers. This is the trend we see at Enterprise when we talk to the customers, we talk to other people, IT has been outsourced for decades. Now there has to be a competitive advantage, and we have the competition thing that you pointed out. And the smart CIO CX's are bringing developers in to create a competitive advantage, and it's a new reset. And, not throwing away networks, they're not throwing away compute and storage. They're going to change it. And I think this is where the real tailwind is. Do you agree with that or what's your thoughts? >> The way I like to think about it is that, and I'm using company names here as an example, but I think there is this race between Tesla learning how to become a car company versus, say, Ford or GM learning how to become a software company, right? And that dynamic is playing itself out across every single industry. And I think there is not a CEO or CIO or board out there that doesn't realize that the way for us to be relevant in the future is to turn software into, not just a cost-center and something we deal with, but something that becomes a fundamental advantage and driver of our business. >> Every industry: media, software! We're a software company that happens to do media, with theCUBE. You're totally right, it's just like-- >> Any industry. This is why Amazon's getting into grocery stores. >> It's integration. This is a completely new horizontal dynamic with a little bit of special machine learning at the outlay. >> We're moving into a software-defined world, for sure. >> Joe, been great to have your commentary here on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing. Congratulations on the acquisition. Super outcome, the numbers floating out there. It's pretty large, good deal. We have no comment. (laughs) >> Open source! >> Read DCSE C file. >> Open source business models are changing, but the value is still the same. Those who create the value can extract it. That's the ethos of open source, of course theCUBE as well. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live, from Austin, Texas, it's theCube, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Linux Foundation, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here. This is theCube's exclusive coverage, live in Austin, Texas for Cloud Native Con and KubeCon with The Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier, the founder. Silicon Angle Media, my cohost Stu Miniman, and next to us Joe Beda, who's the co-founder, co-founder and CTO of Heptio With Craig McLuckie, the famous startup that came out of the Google team, really one of the principal founders of Kubernetes with Craig and the team Brendon Burns and the like. Great to have you on theCube, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me, it's exciting. >> Good time, first time on theCube, glad to have you, we've been trying to get your perspective because obviously we're fans of the Kubernetes, I just had Lou Tucker on, we were talking interclouding and some orchestration opportunity. You guys had that vision and it's really important to tell the story, at the beginning with Kubernetes. You guys were sitting around, having a little beer, free food at the Google cafeteria, what was it like? What happened? How did it all come together? >> All right well, I started at Google probably 10, 12 years ago, did a whole bunch of stuff but eventually landed doing cloud. Craig and I started up a Google compute engine, VM as a service and the odd thing to recognize is that nobody who had been at Google for a long time thought that there was anything to this VM stuff. Because Google had been on containers for so long, that was their mindset, Borg was the way that stuff was actually deployed, so my boss at the time, who's now in Cloud Era booted up a VM for the first time, and anybody in the outside world would be like hey, that's really cool and his response was like, well now what? You're sitting at a prompt, that's not super interesting, how do I run my app? That's what everybody's been struggling with with Cloud, it's not how do I get a VM, how do I actually run my code? As Google got more and more serious about Cloud, every big company wants to dog food their products. How do we make the experience that folks inside of Google have, developers inside of Google have, match the experience that Cloud customers have? The choice there was either we make everybody inside of Google start using VM's which would have felt like that step backwards, or we teach the rest of the world about Borg. Now around the same time, docker started getting a lot of attention and we were like hey, those guys are onto something, they really found a good way to make this technology accessible to users on a single node level, but our experience at Google really taught us that that clusters you, how do you actually create this abstraction that a whole bunch of computers are one thing that you operate with? That was the thing that was going to be interesting and so out of that, we decided Kubernetes was going to be the thing or at least getting Borg out to the rest of the world, and we knew for it to be effective, it couldn't just be Google doing it alone, we had to do it in a way that would bring the rest of the industry with us. That's the motivation behind Kubernetes. It took us about another three months to convince all the folks at Google that this was a good idea, it was controversial, the open source projects at the time were things like, the biggest things would be like Chrome and Android. Those things were, the relationship with their community was very different from what we were aiming for with Kubernetes, they were much more consumer focused versus infrastructure focused. >> It was early too for Google to recognize the multi cloud world. >> I think some it wasn't so much multi cloud as much as developers have a really strong sense of where the lock in is, where the vendor lock in is, and we knew that if we wanted to win the hearts and minds of engineers and developers and folks that took this stuff seriously, as the underdog in the cloud world at the time, you had to really go out there and build something that was going to be widely applicable. Because you don't want to invest your time and energy into something that's super specialized to one cloud and I think the whole multi cloud thing, honestly I think it's engineers and developers and operations folks that had that sense from the get go, we were just reacting to that. >> Good instincts too. Kubernetes certainly working out today, state of the union, cause we're still only less than three years old as a community, seems like 20, but the momentum's been amazing, has been a lot of revision, a lot of people have their own versions of Kubernetes, yet there's a core, vanilla Kubernetes, but it's working. People have gotten around this. What is the big thing that has surprised you the most and where are you most excited right now, where Kubernetes is at? >> Okay surprise, there's 4100 people here at KubeCon, that's absolutely insane. I think we had this idea that it could be a thing and that, but I don't think that any of us imagined that within three years we'd be sitting here, doing this type of thing. That I think for me is the most surprising. It's a challenge to take these ideas that have been successful inside at Google and translate those to the rest of the world and it wasn't an easy or obvious thing, there were a lot of good ideas but figuring out how to get those out there, I think that really is due to the larger community. Folks like Clayton Pullman from Red Hat coming in early with a lot of that really brought a lot of that outside DNA necessary to bridge that gap. Surprising that we got here, but really it took the community to make that happen. In terms of what I'm most excited about right now, with the announcement of EKS from Amazon, it definitely feels like we're moving into a new phase of Kubernetes where folks are being much more focused on what do you do with Kubernetes versus how do you get Kubernetes running. Kelsey tweeted it the other day, but I think we've been saying for a while, Kubernetes at its heart is a platform for building platforms, really we viewed it from the start as a toolbox and I think we're only now starting to see, what other things are people going to be building with that toolbox and I think that's going to be that larger ecosystem, is going to be much larger than Kubernetes itself. >> Joe, coming into this show, there were so many announcements around Kubernetes, there's like 42 certified different versions out there. I think you could help explain a little bit because there's the big cloud guys, you mentioned Clayton who we had earlier from Red Hat, there's all these companies, oh well, Kubernetes is just like it's a piece and it's in there. Your company is around Kubernetes, so what does this mean that Kubernetes is, I guess we'd say commoditized across there, I think it's a good thing for the industry, but what does it mean, why is there a need for Heptio and what do you guys see as your role in the ecosystem? >> There's a bunch of folks that are really concentrating on how do I get Kubernetes up and running and that's one thing, and I think that landscape is going to be changing and evolving over time. We're definitely happy to help folks be successful with Kubernetes, it's one of those things we're going to do, we're going to do an open source project, services, support and training with that, but when we look forward, I think a big part of it is, how do we bridge the gap to integrate Kubernetes into businesses, how do we start building those next layer tools on top of it and to some degree, it's a wild west. There's those 42 companies, everybody's trying to actually find something that's going to be interesting, start solving problems, but the thing that's really encouraging to me is that Kubernetes is the base and we're doing work, both Heptio and the community around conformance to make sure that we actually have a solid base that folks can build on top of. Then everybody's focused on how can we actually capture the attention of developers, how can we actually deliver value there and so that's a really great dynamic, when everybody's like I want to do something really great that people are going to get a lot out of, only good things are going to come from that. >> Yeah and I liked, there was a concern some people had, oh last week AWS is now all in, they've got EKS, but you had an announcement about the Heptio authenticator open source authentication, a little bit of a partnership with AWS it looked like. Maybe explain, it sounds like one of the things you're building on top of this. >> Yeah exactly. Like everybody else, we had heard all the rumors, hey is Amazon going to do a Kubernetes offering or not. In our mind, there were two ways. >> Didn't they have to Joe? >> Well that's what I thought last year, but who knows, I think Amazon doesn't have to do anything but when we first started Kubernetes, we reached out to the folks at Amazon including Deepak and we're like hey, you guys are welcome, come join us here and they were like yeah, yeah, we'll join you when the customers are asking for it. Well it turns out the customers were asking for it, so here they are and I think it's a great thing. I think it could've gone two ways, they could have built in a bunch of integrations into Kubernetes that were only available through EKS that really made EKS a more integrated, better Kubernetes than running open source Kubernetes on top of Amazon, or they could've worked with the community, with upstream to try and make Kubernetes run great on Amazon, better on Amazon as is but then run even better when you're running it with EKS and they actually have the management on top of it. I think they decided to go that second route which is much more community friendly. A couple weeks before the announcement, they reached out to us, said hey, we noticed you had this project, it looks really interesting, we need a way to bridge IM to authenticate to Kubernetes and we like the approach that you're taking, can we work together to continue to develop this and that was the first signal to us that they wanted to really reach out and work with the community and so we're like hey, that sounds great, let's work together and get that stuff out there. It's still very early, I think EKS is GA next year, they set an aggressive goal for themselves, so I'm really looking forward to see where they take that and we're going to partner with them where it makes sense around things like authenticator. >> You mentioned we're going to a whole other level with Kubernetes and Amazon's announcement goes to the next level, you also mentioned you worked at Google Compute, Apple, all these other cool names with Google and you got Heptio, you're solving making interesting things happen with Kubernetes and you got a new class of developers coming in that have never heard of what a local director is. Infrastructure as code is happening, so you got the cloud game going on. I got to ask you, as Kubernetes starts to continue to take shape, a lot of people are trying to survive. In this technical architecture decisions, almost a tech chess game, which side of history will you be on thing going on and customers want more clarity. You have a lot of movement and customers want clarity. How do you see it continuing and what is the right path in your mind because it's looking good right now and commoditization as some say, I think is a good thing because value, there's value in interoperability, there's value in orchestration, there's value in a new class of web developer creating, solving problems with code, whether it's societal problems or other things, so there's a lot of big picture, wholistic things happening and Kubernetes kind of strikes at the heart of that. What's the right path in your mind, what's the vision you think Kubernetes should go into. >> Well I think first of all, I think change happens in the industry both fast and slow. It feels like it's been three years since Kubernetes, since we open sourced Kubernetes, and it's come a huge way since then. That happened really fast. You look at Enterprise, you look at Enterprise adoption cycles, I believe last I heard the mainframe division was a growing profit center for IBM. This stuff doesn't go away so as we see things like containers and Kubernetes and serverless and cloud, as we see these things come on the scene, it doesn't necessarily replace stuff, it augments and it adds over time so we see the mix of where people invest shift. In that way, things become established quickly, but old things go away slowly. I don't think it's going to be as quick of a shift as maybe it might seem at first. Now in terms of where the opportunities are moving forward and where we see this developing, the thing that's exciting for me is as we have, and this is something early on, talking with Brendon, he got super excited about, is as we provide new abstractions, as we provide a new toolbox, how do people start creating systems and applications that take advantage of that. I'll give you an example, distributed systems, pre-systems like Kubernetes were very difficult because not only did you have to do the thing that you wanted to do, you had to build all of this plumbing to actually get your things to talk to each other, the finds, the secure, all that stuff had to be created from scratch and those systems were rare and hard to manage and few and far between. Now with things like Kubernetes, there's a whole set of problems that you actually don't have to solve. The floor that you need, the floor is that much higher for building these systems so I think we're going to see a shift not just to cloud native, but I also think we're going to see a set of applications that are Kubernetes native. These are applications that assume that Kubernetes is the substrate that they're running on, and they take special advantage of it and I think we're going to see amazing thing happens when we really democratize the plumbing for building distributed systems. >> And that's the key, make that frictionless so if people want to go Kubernetes native, they're taking advantage, that's cool. I want to get to, to take that to the next level, as the world of IOT comes down, you can almost look at the world now as all IOT. There's no on prem and there's no cloud. If you believe this service mission unpluggable architectures, you could argue that a data center is a network point, it's an attached device to a myriad things, so you're going to need policy, the light bulb has a process in it, the wifi has wifis everywhere, so in a way, this is all going to be a grid if you will, it's going to be kind of a mesh. This is the right direction don't you think, the more services that come online, you just want to connect to them. That's the nirvana right? Are we smoking the peace pipe here too much? >> I think there's a bunch of trends that we're seeing happen there. I think with IOT, we see also a move towards edge computing, this idea of, we're going to see much more stuff happening in a more distributed manner. Whether that edge happens to be in your house or whether it's in a telecom cabinet or whether it's just mini data centers that are dropped in to parking lots here and there. That introduces a whole bunch of new problems in terms of how do you manage that stuff at scale. One of the things that I see is that we're seeing an interesting overlap between CDM providers and cloud providers, so you have cloud flare introducing their cloud workers, where you can start running actual code in their CDM nodes and that's the culmination of CDM providers over time fighting with each other to drive more and more customization. On the other hand, you have Amazon taking lambda, finding ways to actually use lambda and push that out to the edge, even into devices that are doing local machine learning. There's this overlap between these two different worlds. Then also, as we move stuff closer out to the clouds, the political situations that people deal with become that much more complex. As you start running compute in all these different countries, all of a sudden you can't necessarily go to one provider to actually deal with all of that. We're moving from this world where, when you're centered around data which is the traditional cloud, when you want to put it all in one big pile with compute around the edges, that's kind of like the traditional data center. Going with a few large providers makes a ton of sense. As we move towards a much more distributed world, it becomes a more distributed problem both in terms of how do you manage the compute, but how do you manage the relationships and how do you actually understand what's happening across all that and I think Kubernetes can be a part of that puzzle for sure, but it's not the end of the answer, there's still a lot of problems to be solved there. >> No but you get the first mile post. You can say hey, I can start orchestrating workloads and have endpoints that have services that talk to each other as the first step. >> Joe, one thing I wanted to ask you, what are the stumbling blocks? What do people need to look out for? Because most companies out there aren't Google. >> This morning at today's keynote and you can find it online, there's that cloud native road map that Dan was showing. That is an interesting thing that cuts both ways. On the one hand, it shows an enormous amount of innovation, it shows that we're seeing this explosion of interest in this world and it's really invigorating. That's from an entrepreneur's view and a technologist's view. If I'm a customer, that thing's kind of horrifying. I look at that and I say wow, I really have to understand all of this stuff to get ahead? I think the biggest stumbling block is really being able to make sense of all the noise out there. I think that noise is part and parcel of an active, innovative, chaotic ecosystem, but I think it's one of those things that makes it that much harder for enterprises and for more mainstream developers to adopt. Tim, we've been saying this for a while, for Kubernetes to be successful, we had to make it boring. That's Tim Hawkin, I think maybe was the first one to say that, but we not only had to make Kubernetes boring, we had to make that entire stack boring, we had to make cloud native boring. That's when it will have succeeded. I don't know what this conference will look like when cloud native is boring, but it'll probably be very different than. >> It'll certainly create some excitement, boring is reliable, boring is safe, boring is secure, boring is comfortable. Mark Zuckerberg once said move fast, break stuff, then he revised it to move fast and be 100% reliable. That's boring. >> Did he actually say that? >> I don't know, he shifted his narrative because that was the maverick early days when he started running at five nines it's like a whole nother ball game. >> Actually that matters. >> Joe, great to have you on theCube, thanks for sharing your awesome insight into the dynamics of the computing industry that's going cloud native, going KubeCon, and certainly Kubernetes that you helped put together with the team, it's certainly taken on a life of its own, last minute, take a minute to talk about Heptio, what you guys are working on, get the plug in. >> Yeah Heptio, we have services, support and training that we're offering to make customers successful with Kubernetes today and that's been invigorating, really getting out there and talking with folks, seeing the problems that they're hitting now versus where we want it to go. We're doing a bunch of work around open source projects, we have Heptio Arc which is a backup disaster recovery project open source, we have Sona Boy, which is a diagnostic project for running the conformance tests and it underpins the Kubernetes conformance effort. We have K Sonic which helps you configure applications and then we also have Contour, which is an ingress controller building on top of Envoy and other CNCF project and then into 2018, we're going to be offering more products and projects and services that really start targeting the special needs of larger and larger enterprises and that's where our focus is going to shift over time. >> You guys are certainly helping customers who are under pressure to add more services, including what Amazon's doing, more pronouncements, there are little announcements, some big some little, but still, the cadence of new things happening is fast at all times right now. >> I can't keep up either, nobody else can. >> We try. Two and a half hour keynote, it's ridiculous. Joe Beda here inside theCube, cofounder CTO of Heptio a hot startup, making Kubernetes interesting and exciting and reliable and boring. Not boring, we should say that. >> Oh boring's good. >> Infrastructure's good, it's theCube, bringing you all the live action from Austin, Texas, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, KubeCon and Cloud Native Con, we'll be right back after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. (tech music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in San Francisco, for theCUBE's exclusive two-day coverage of Cisco system's new inaugural event called DevNet Create. An extension and an augmentation of DevNet. Their classic Cisco Developer Program. Again, augmenting and creating some intelligence that's AI augmented intelligence. I'm John Furrier. Peter Burris bringing a lot of intelligence here. With Craig McLuckie who's the founder and CEO of Heptio. Cube alumni. Been on many times. Guru in the cloud. Great the see you Craig. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks so much for having me back on. >> Thanks for coming in. More importantly about this event is really the community extension for Cisco. Cisco ingratiating into the community of open source and developers in a big way. But not like brute force. It's a very humble event. Small event in San Francisco. Really you see the connection of app dynamics with the networking. And again, developers want DevOps. They want infrastructure as code. They want the scale of the internet. That's the purpose, your thoughts on this event? >> Yeah, so far I've been very impressed. It feels like a pretty authentic developer orientated event. The sessions so far have been quite accessible. And generally pretty well thought through. I think Cisco is doing a very great job of actually doing exactly what you're saying. Which is creating an event that's relevant to the developer that isn't necessarily tied to Cisco's interest. And establishing themselves in terms of thought leadership and actually creating a narrative that works with the community. >> Yea. One of the thoughts that we're talking about in conversations that we're seeing on the Cube. Especially this year. Is really the two waves that are clearly emerging in the digital transformation is cloud and data. And cloud being, you know, public cloud. Private cloud, hybrid. Essentially large scale resource data creating value. And the application developers really taking advantage of that. And you can't look further than containers and Kubernetes. As a key thread to bridging these two worlds of pretty much unlimited capacity in terms of compute. Obviously pricing. Business models and operational models are different by vendor. But the emergence of multi cloud points to, to me. The future. I personally don't think it's ready for primetime. But certainly I would say directionally correct. But hybrid clouds is a reality. So developers are going to have on prim and off prim. But how do they connect it all? How do you orchestrate it all? This is a core channel and I know your working on a FDO. And it's near and dear to your heart. You thought of the state of the industry with respect that Kubernetes, containers. And how app developers can get that freedom without being a networking guru. Really truly getting infrastructures code without a lot of, well I got to run this with that. I just want seamless cross connection between applications. >> Yeah, I think we're definately... You know a couple of things are true. One is, it's been spectacular to see the amount of progress we've made in this community in the past three years. Going from a situation where we're just seeing the spark of awareness around containers. As a frameworks packaging deploy applications. You know, into an environment to become rarely something that most every organization out there is looking at. To solve both difficult longstanding challenges in the active space. But also to open up this wall of multi cloud. To create opportunities for people to move their compute around. In this increasingly androgynous world. And its been interesting, you know, last year. To see a growing awareness of the importance of multi cloud. I think there's two things that have been really motivating that from my side. You know, one is being and understanding that it really isn't a one horse race anymore. We're really starting to see a surge in effort from both Microsoft and Google. And that's generating a lot of relevance for folks who want to run in this multi cloud world. And the second thing we start to see is a legitimate interest in this edge computing phenomenon. As organizations are aware of the implications of increasing volumes of data showing up in their networks. Showing up on premises. Showing up in these environments. Having the flexibility to move compute into those. Cause as you can see it's huge. And so obviously I'm a little bit bias. I think Kubernetes and containers are an amazing platform. I rarely, you know, tap into both of these growing sort of four points awareness. One is being able to create a natural compute fabric that decouples your applications and services from the cloud provider. That allows you to look at the cloud provider as both an infrastructure offering. But also to judiciously pull through services that are special that you might need. But then also having the flexibility to offer up your own services and then move that around from environment to environment. It's been quite wonderful the watch that start to take shape. >> Craig you've also got some good insight into architecture. You actually know the cloud game. You worked at Google. And Google's got some great stuff. Got Tensorflow coming out. You're seeing kind of that going on. And I would agree with you. It's not a one horse race anymore. Absolutely. However there's a lot of pressure on the businesses. The customer impact to deploy in this digital transformation. Is, pressure cooker's hotter than ever. >> Absolutely. >> I mean Ford just fired its CEO. Stocks down 39%. He's two years into his transformation. How the hell does a CXO transform their business if they've got a gun to their head? What's your advice for the guys out there that don't want to be the next Mark Field's? Who have to essentially run as fast as they can without disrupting operations and also try to perform top line revenue. Which is isn't easy apps. I mean it's a tough spot. Your thoughts? >> No, it is really interesting. You know, I tend to think about IT as this kind of rarely interesting optimization problem. The thing you try to maximize is velocity. You have to be able to use technology to solve core organizational problems. You have to be able to point technology to business. You have to be able to move from this world. Where technology was being delivered in a traditional products fashion. To the world where technology is being delivered as a service. If you look at Tesla. Tesla's no longer a car that is just a standard car. It's actually almost a service. Like the technology that's being deployed into the Tesla evolves day to day. The car's becoming better and richer and more amazing. And so CIO's have to start looking at this as an optimization problem. Where you want to optimize for velocity. You have to maintain an effective posture around risk management. And then, inside that you want to achieve an acceptable SLA. This is the really interesting thing is that a lot of folks are looking for like four nines, five nines, six nines, whatever crazy availability you're looking at. Except that the higher you're pushing your availability. The further back you have to pull on your velocity. And so for me, the most exciting thing. In terms of... I have these conversations with CIO's that are looking to make transform into this new world. It's helping them understand this balance between code velocity and availability, reliability. The underlying systems. Understand the role that some of these modern automated orchestration systems are playing. As a way to drive up your ability to move far. So without necessarily driving down your general service availability. And then, looking at ways to transform the organization itself. From being a technology organization that is throwing tech over the fence. To a much more nimble sort of smaller teams that are delivering up technology as a sort of services. It's an amazing time to be a part of this transformation. >> So we think... You've done a lot of research on this. Let's see if I can find your statements in there and just get a sense of how you think about these things. Is that at the end of the day. A business institutionalizer's work around the assets that are core to its mission. And John and I were talking about this before hand. In the old days, the biggest asset, most important asset. Was the hardware. So you institutionalize the work around the hardware. And then it became your application portfolio. Whether it was SCP or something else. And you institutionalize work around that. Today, our observation. Here's the test. Is that the asset that's most important is your data. And you're going to reinstitutionalize work around the data. And how you use that data and imply that data to a lot of different business activities. What do you think about that? Is data becoming that kind of central asset around which IT and hopefully even the digital business gets reinstitutionalized along the lines of what you're saying? >> Yes, absolutely. I think it's really important to understand that. There's really two components to this. You know, IT is information technology. It is literally just the process of making sense of data and information. >> Right. >> And presenting it in a way that you can make effective business decisions. >> So we're going back to our roots in many respects. >> Right. >> DP, data processing. (laughing) >> But it's also... It's also about experience. >> It's what? >> It's also about creating an experience. >> Right. >> For the customers. So I think at the heart of it this IT transformation is around two things. It's allowing modern businesses to generate a better understanding of the customer. Though the leverage use of data. >> Based on customer created data. >> Based on customer created data and observable information about the customers. And then it's based on experience. It's using that the create in crafts a richer, more satisfying better experience for the underlying customer. And obviously data is central to both of those. But the experiential side of it has a lot more than. You can't look at that purely as a data processing thing. There's a sort of mechanism that you need to do to create those wonderful experiences. And you can start leaning into things like artificial intelligence as a way to drive and prove experiences. You can lean into U Form Factors and sort of new ways to connect customers with their businesses. As a way to try that experience. And you know, the products themselves are becoming increasingly evolved. Like, I've certainly seen recently and talking to auto manufacturers. Is owning awareness that the car itself has to be creating a ongoing and sort of richer and more interesting experience. It has to be more interestingly tied to the customer. >> So software and data are connecting? >> So software and data are coming together. And software's allowing businesses to gain insight. And then you know, the data is allowing the software to create a more relevant experiences. You can't really separate those two things. >> Well software is data. At the end of the day software is data. (laughing) You go back to Yobach Deterian, that's what he said many years ago. But bring us back to Heptio for a second. So if you take a look at Kubernetes. And we agree Kubernetes. You know, in the last three months the Cube's had what, fifty thousand shows or something like that. (laughing) And we got a lot of very, very bright guests on it. >> Feels like it. >> And we've had... And Kubernetes has been a consistent theme. Containers are important. These technologies from managing and orchestrating these containers is going to be especially important. And Kubernetes is right in the mix. But Kubernetes kind of looks like an infrastructure almost a... I don't want to say a nerd. But you know what I mean? It's just not.. Heptio is taking it.. Is how you use that a little bit better. And what should you do with some of these concepts of design? Which is the one thing you didn't mention when you started talking about this stuff. How does design? Experience plus design come into play here? Especially through a tool set like Heptio? >> Oh, it's interesting. You know, at the end of the day I think there's two components to the design. There's designing for the users. You know, honestly I want Kubernetes to be the most boring thing in the world. At the end of the day I want a business to not think about their infrastructure. Like it just needs to fade into the background and become this invisible substrate around which they live. >> Yeah-- >> The water in which they swim. >> I've said for years that the value of infrastructures immensely inversely proportional to the reach to which anybody know anything about it. >> Yes. Absolutely and so. For me, you know, my interest in Kubernetes. I don't want to necessarily show up and fade into the full brain of the developers who are using the technology. I want to fend in the background. I want them to be focused on the design activities that are helping them do their work and sort of succeed and create great outcomes. And so if I had one complaint about Kubernetes right now. It's too interesting. >> Too interesting? >> It's too interesting. We need to make it... >> Boring. >> Boring. (laughing) >> We need to like... >> Ubiquitous. Well no, I think a lot of people are working on it. Cause I think they've identified it as an opportunity to connect things and make it easier. So there's work being done. People are funding companies. >> Absolutely. >> So exciting is a relative term. >> So no, there's a lot of work to be done. >> What's the biggest challenges technically Kubernetes has? If it's going to be boring, what has to happen to make it boring? >> So it's interesting. You know, I think there's a number of things that need to be done. You know, one of which is that. When we were building Kubernetes we created this configuration sintex. Which is sort of Yaumul. It's effectively a simple seralisation of the underlying Kubernetes API's. And for new users of the system. The first thing they encounters is what we call the wall of Yaumul. Where all the Yaumul's ahead. Like it's a very daunting experience. And so we're thinking hard about ways to change that. So you create a much ore elegant experience. Have much better tooling. Have the experience of editing that sort of fade into the background of the developers functions. And then, to your earlier point about design. You know, making it really easy to use some additional concepts that other people have put forward. Creating higher degrees of usability and discoverabililty for other pieces. Through projects like what Microsoft's been doing with the Helm project is really important as well. So you can expect to see us make a significant down payment on trying to... You know Heptio make a significant down payment on trying to address the problem. >> Well, I'm certainly going to be following you. We got a lot of the Lennox Foundation. The CNCF's got out there. Final question for you is. Thoughts on multi cloud? What's your definition of multi cloud? What does it mean? We kind of commented earlier because certainly there's not a winner take all cloud game. There's going to be multiple cloud players. There might be even specialty clouds. As things get boring in that abstractional layer gets simplified with developer friendly interfaces. Clouds will emerge as resource pools. But what I multi cloud mean for you? What's the customer... How should they look at what multi cloud is and what is the path to multi cloud? >> Right. So you know, multi cloud. It's starts with nutragenetity. It starts with the ability to run your workloads in a variety of environments. So nutragenetity, first of all, surrounds the physical infrastructure provider. Not being tied into a single provider model. No one necessarily wants to move back to the wall of IBM circuit 1985. Where you're locked into a single provider and hopefully nobody gets fired for buying that provider. But the problem with it is it rarely softens the amount of intervention in a sea around that. You have these single points of intervention. The second thing that I think about is nutragenetity in terms of locality. The ability to create something that runs both at the network edge. It will perform for the computing sort of realm as Cisco has coined the term. In a data center location that is a potential customer. Sort of in one of their localities. Or in a public cloud. It's going to be about multi-regional support. Being able to pull an application that you can run in the US geography and then in other regions that have regulated requirements around data mobility. So we have to handle all of those things. And inside that, I think there's kind of three key attributes of evolving sophistication that people need to think about. The first is the cloud is just solving an infrastructure outsourcing problem. And that's the most sort of simplistic way of looking at it. Second thing about cloud is. It's a way to consume a broad array of interesting technologies as a service. Right. So, it could be a simple BM but it could also be a database or something else. It's moving the wall from this situation where that thing that you can see as a service is being provisioned by a ticket. Where there's an operator at the end of it. To a world where it's being provisioned by an API. And the final piece of it is being able to move your own infrastructure to that services realm. Your own technologies. The things that are running your business. And deliver them as a service into your own wall. And so for me, multi cloud means hitting that level of nutragenetity and then being able to provision arbitrary services at the end of the API. And then deliver your own sort of services in the same fabric. >> Craig McLuckie, founder and CEO of Heptio. Former Google Cloud leader. Certainly subject matter expert. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you again. >> Thank you for your time. >> I appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. Cube alumni. Always laying down the epic knowledge here inside the Cube. Bringing you the inaugural coverage of Cisco's DevNetCreate. Developer conference as they go out into the open source community. With the full force of Cisco. Of course the Cube's here. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (tech music) >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco DevNet.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next '17. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Google Next 2017, 10,000 people are in San Francisco, SiliconANGLE media, we've got reporters there, as well as the Wikibon analysts. I've been up there for the analyst's event, some of the keynotes, and we're getting thought leaders, partners, really getting lots of viewpoints as to what's happening, not just in the Google Cloud, but really the multi-Cloud world. And that's why I'm really excited to bring back a guest that we've had on the program before, Craig Mcluckie, who, four months ago, was with Google, but he's now the CEO of Heptio, and he's also one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, which anybody that's watching the event, definitely has been hearing, plenty about Kubernete so, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Yeah, absolutely, I know you were part of, a little event that kind of went before the Google Cloud event, brought in some people in the Cloud ecosystem, talk about a lot was going on. Maybe start us off with, what led you to kind of pop out of Google, what is Heptio, and how does that kind of extend what you're doing with Kubernetes when you're at Google? >> Certainly. So Heptio is a company that has been created, by my co-founder Joe and myself, to bring Kubernetes-- >> Stu: That's Joe Beda. >> Joe Beda. >> Stu: Yeah. To bring Kubernetes to enterprises, and the thing that really motivated me to start this company was the sense that there was not a unfettered Kubernetes company in existence. I spoke to a lot of organizations, that were having tremendous success with Kubernetes. It was transforming the way they approached infrastructure management. It created new levels of portability for their workloads. But they wanted to use Kubernetes on their own terms, in ways that made sense to them. And, most every other organization that is creating a Kubernetes distro, has attached it to other technologies. It's either attached to an opinionated operating system, or it's attached to a specific cloud environment, or it's attached to a Paas, and it just didn't meet the way that most of the customers I saw wanted to use the technology. I felt that a key missing part of this ecosystem, was a company that would meet the open source community where it is and help customers that just needed a little bit more help. A little more help with training, bit of documentation support, and the tools they needed to make themselves successful in the environments that they wanted to operate in. And that's what motivated Joe and I to start this company. >> Yeah, and it's interesting, cause you look at the biggest contributors, Google's there, you've got Red Hat, you've got, as you said, people that have their viewpoint as to where that fits. I think that that helps the development overall, but maybe you can help us unpack there. Why do you want, is it separate? Is there that opinionated-ness? What's inherently sub-optimal about that? (laughing) >> I think part of the key value in Kubernetes is the fact that it supports a common framework in a highly heterogonous world. Meaning you can mix together a broad variety of things, to your needs. So you could mix together, the right operating system, in the right hosting environment, with the right networking stack. And you could run general applications that are then managed and performed in a very efficient and easy to use way. And, one of the things that I think is really important, is this idea that customers should have choice, they should be picking the infrastructure based on the merits of the infrastructure. They should pick the OS that works for them, and they should be able to put together a system that operates tremendously well. And, I think it's particularly critical, at this juncture, that a layer emerges that allows customers, and service providers, to mix together the sort of things that they want to use, and consume, in a way that's agnostic to the infrastructure and the operating environment. I see the mainstream cloud providers, taking us in some ways back to the world of the mainframe. If you think about what we're starting to see, with companies like Amazon, who are spectacularly successful in the market, is this world where you have this deeply vertically integrated service provider, that provides not only the compute, but also the set of core services, and almost everything else that you need to run. And, at the end of the day, it's getting to a point where, a customer has to kind of pick their service provider. And, you know, for using IBM, but it was also sub-optimal from an ecosystem perspective. It inhibited innovation in many ways. And it was the emergence of Wintel, that sort of Windows and Intel ecosystem that really opened up the vendor ecosystem, and drove a tremendous amount of innovation and advancement. And, you know, when I think about what enterprise customers want and need today, they want that abstraction. They want a safe way to separate out the set of services that run their business, the set of technologies that they build and maintain, from the underlying infrastructure. And I think that's what driving a lot of the popularity of Kubernetes, is this idea that it is a logical infrastructure abstraction, that lets you pick the environment that you operate in, purely based on the merits of the environment. >> Yeah, it's been a struggle, I mean, I know through my entire career in IT, we've had that discussion of "do I just standardize on what we have? Cause, the enterprise today, absolutely. Every time I put a new technology in, it doesn't displace, it adds to it. So, I talked to lots of customers, still using mainframe. They're using the Wintel stuff, they using public cloud, they're using, you know, yes and and and, and therefore, managing it, orchestrating it, doing all those pieces that are difficult. The challenge when I put an abstraction layer in, and one of the big challenges is, how to really get the full value out of the pieces that I had. Sam Ramji said that, when he was at Cloud Foundry, they were trying to make it so that you really don't care which cloud, whether it's on premises or public cloud environments. And he said one of the reasons he joined Google was because he felt you couldn't make, if you went least common denominator or something, there was things Google was doing that nobody else can do. So there's always that balance of, "can I put an abstraction layer or virtualize something, and take advantage of it?" Or "do I just go all in with one vendor?" I mean, IBM back in the day, did lots of great things to make it simple, and cloud is trying to make it simple, lots of things, Amazon of course, no doubt that they're trying to vertically integrate everything they would like to do. You know, all your services. So, where do you see that balance? And, it's interesting, does it solve customers the best to be able to say "okay, you can take your mess that you have", and therefore, is this a silver bullet to help them solve it? >> I think it's a really good point. And, consistently, as I look through history, a lot of the platforms that people have pursued, that created this sort of complete decoupling, introduced this lowest common denominator problem, where you had to trade off a set of things that you really wanted with the capabilities of the platform. And, you know, I think that absolutely, in some cases, it makes a tremendous amount of sense, to invest in a vendor specific technology. So let's take an example out of Google, Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner has, it's literally the only, globally consistent, well right now it's regionally consistent, but it's literally the only globally consistent relational store available. There is nothing like it. The CockroachDB folks are building something that emulates some of the behavior, but without the true time API, that sort of atomic clock, you know, crazy infrastructure that Google's built. It adds very little utility. And so, in certain applications and certain workloads, if what you really want is a globally replicated, highly consistent relational data store, there is literally only one provider on the planet that would deliver it, which is Google. However, you might look at, you know, something that Amazon provides, and they may have some other service. Perhaps you've already built something on RedShift, and you want to be able to use that. Or Microsoft might offer up some other technologies that make sense to you. And, I think it's really important for enterprises to have the option. There's times when, for a given workload, it makes tremendous amount of sense, to put on a vendor, if you're looking to run something that has, deep machine learning hooks, or needs some other science fiction technology that Google's bringing to the world. It makes sense to run that on Google. For applications that are potentially integrated into a productivity suite, if you're an Office 365 user, it probably makes sense to host it on Microsoft. And then, perhaps there's some other pieces that you run on Amazon. And I don't think it's going to be pick one cloud provider and live in the static world forever. I think the landscape is constantly evolving and shifting. And, one of the things technologies like Kubernetes provide is an option. An option to move, an option to decide which specific services you want to pull through and use in which application. Recognizing that those are going to bind you to that cloud provider in perpetuity, but not necessarily pulling the entirety of your IT structure through. >> Yeah, Craig, I'm curious. When I look out as to kind of the people that commentate on this space, one of the things they say "Kubernetes is interesting, but this whole hybrid cloud thing, kill all the on premises stuff, public cloud's really where it's at." I know when I talk to most companies, they got plenty of on premises stuff, most infrastructure that is bought is still, there's a lot of it going on premises. So companies are sorting out what applications go where, what data goes where. Diane Green, suddenly 5% of the world's data really is in the public cloud today. What's your view on kind of that on premises, public cloud piece, and Kubernetes' role there? >> Yeah, I think it's a great question. And I have had some really interesting conversations with CIOS in the past. I remember in my very earliest days, pooh-poohing the idea of the private cloud, and having a really intense CIO look across the thing and he was like "you will pry my data centers from my cold, dead hands". (Stu laughing) He literally said that to me. And so, there's certainly a lot of passion in this space, and I think, at the end of the day, one has to be pragmatic. You know, first of all, one has to recognize that, if you're an organization that has bought significant data center footprint, you're probably going to want to continue to use that asset that you've acquired, and that's, you're going to want to use that in perpetuity. If you're a company, and most large companies are also naturally heterogonous, meaning as you go through an acquisition, the acquired portion of your company may have a profoundly different IT portfolio. You know, may have a different set of environments. And so, I think the world certainly benefits from an abstraction layer that allows you to train your engineers with a certain set of skills, and then be highly decoupled from the infrastructure environment you run in. And I think, again, Kubernetes is delivering some of that promise in a way that I think really resonates with customers. >> Absolutely, and even, we've been telling people for years "stop building data centers"? You know, there's very few companies that want to build data centers even, yes Google talks about their data centers, but Amazon? Gets their data center space from lots of other players there. But, if I stop building data centers today, I'm going to have em for another 25 30 years, and even it, what am I going to owe myself? I talked to plenty of the big financial guys, they're not going to move all of their information. They want to have it under their control, whether it's their own data center, a hosted managed environment there. So, we're going to be living with this multi-cloud thing for a long time. >> There is another thing that I don't think people have fully internalized yet, which is in many ways, the way that cloud provider data centers are structured is around power sources. At the end of the day, it's around cheap power and cooling. As you start looking at the dynamics of what's happening to our energy grid, it's no longer being quite as centralized as it was. And, it starts to beg the question "does it make sense to think about smaller units that are more distributed? Does it make sense to start really thinking about Edge compute capacity?" The option to deploy something really close to your customers if you need low latency and attainment scenarios. Or, the option to push a lot of capacity into your distribution center, if you're running high, heavy IoT workloads, where you just don't want to put all that data on the network. And so I think that, again, certainly, I think that people underestimate the power of the Amazon, Microsoft and Google. People that are still building data centers today, don't realize quite how remarkable the vendors at that scale are, in terms of their ability to build and run these things. But I do think that there are some interesting options, in terms of regional locality, data sovereignty, Edge latency, that legitimize, other types of deployment. >> Yeah, and you talked about IoT, Edge computing absolutely is something that comes up a lot there. At AWS Re:Invent last year, Amazon put their serverless solution using Greengrass, out at the Edge because there's tons of centers that I might not have the networking, or I can't have the latency I need to do the compute there. How does things like serverless at the Edge, and IoT play into the discussion of Kubernetes? >> I think it plays really well, insofar as, Kubernetes, it's not intrinsically magic. What it has done is created a relatively simple, and turns out, pretty reusable abstraction that lets you run a broad array of workloads. I wouldn't say it's exactly cracked the serverless paradigm in terms of event-driven, low cost of activation computing, but that's something that can certainly be built on top of it. The thing that it does do, is it provides you the ability to manage an application as if it were software as a service, in a location that is remote from you, by providing you a very principled, automated framework for operations. >> Alright, Craig, last thing I want you to do is give us an update on Heptio. How many people do you have? How are you engaging with customers? What's the business model look like for that? What can you share? >> So, we're currently 13 people. We've been in business for four months, and we've been able to hire some really amazing folks, out of the distributed systems communities. We are at a point where we're starting to provide our first supported configurations of Kubernetes. We don't position ourselves as a distribution provider, we rather like to think of ourselves as an organization that's invested in helping users get the most of the Upstream community. Right now, our focus is on training, support, and services, and over time, if we do that really well, we do aspire to provide a more robust set of product capabilities that help organizations succeed. For now, the thing that we focus most relentlessly on is helping customers manage down the cost of supporting a cluster. How do we create a better way for folks to understand what a configuration should look like? When are they likely to encounter issues? And if they do encounter those issues, helping them resolve them in the lowest friction and least painful way possible. >> Alright, and any relationships with the public cloud guys? Or what do you work with when you talk about OpenStack, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, what's the relationship and how do those work? >> So we announced the first joint quick start for Kubernetes with the Amazon folks last Tuesday. And that's been going pretty well. We're getting a lot of positive feedback around that. And we're now starting to think more broadly in terms of providing supported configurations on premises and then on Microsoft. So Amazon, for us, was the obvious starting point. It felt like an under-supported community from a Kubernetes perspective, insofar as, Microsoft had our friend Brenda Burns, who helped us build communities in the first place. And he's been doing some great work to bring Kubernetes to the Azure container service. What we really wanted to do was to make sure that Kubernetes runs well on Amazon, and that it is naturally integrated into the Amazon operating model, so cloud formation templates, and we have a really principled way to manage, maintain, upgrade and support those clusters. >> Alright, Craig Mcluckie, co-creator of Kubernetes, and CEO of Heptio. Really appreciate you coming here to our Palo Alto studio, helping us as we get towards the end of two days of live coverage of Google Cloud Next 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back, everyone. theCube's live coverage. Day two here at VMware Explore. Our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference formally called Vmworld, now it's VMware Explore. Exploring new frontiers multi-cloud and also bearing some of the fruit from all the investments in cloud native Tanzu and others. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We have the man who's in charge of a lot of that business and a lot of stuff coming out of the oven and hitting the market. Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager of the modern applications and management group at VMware, basically the modern apps. >> Absolutely. >> That's Tanzu. All the good stuff. >> And Aria now. >> And Aria, the management platform, which got social graph and all kinds of graph databases. Welcome back. >> Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you in person, been since 2019 when you were on. So, a lot's happened since 2019 in your area. Again, things get, the way VMware does it as we all know, they announce something and then you build it and then you ship it and then you announce it. >> I don't think that's true, but okay. (laughs) >> You guys had announced a lot of cool stuff. You bought Heptio, we saw that Kubernetes investment and all the cloud native goodness around it. Bearing fruit now, what's the status? Give us the update on the modern applications of the management, obviously the areas, the big announcement here on the management side, but in general holistically, what's the update? >> I think the first update is just the speed and momentum that containers and Kubernetes are getting in the marketplace. So if you take the market context, over 70% of organizations now have Kubernetes in production, not one or two clusters, but hundreds of clusters, sometimes tens of clusters. So, to me, that is a market opportunity that's coming to fruition. Sometimes people will come and say, Ajay, aren't you late to the market? I say, no, I'm just perfectly timing it. 'Cause where does our value come in? It's enterprise readiness. We're the company that people look to when you have complexity, you have scale, you need performance, you need security, you need the robustness. And so, Tanzu is really about making modern applications real, helping you design, develop, build and run these applications. And with Aria, we're fundamentally changing the game around multicloud management. So the one-two punch of Tanzu and Aria is I'm most excited about. >> Isn't it true that most of the Kubernetes, you know, today is people pulling down open source and banging away. And now, they're looking for, you know, like you say, more of a robust management capability. >> You know, last two years when I would go to many of the largest customers, like, you know, we're doing good. We've got a DIY platform, we're building this. And then you go to the customer a year later, he's got knocked 30, 40 teams and he has Log4j happen. And all of a sudden he is like, oh, I don't want to be in the business of patching this thing or updating it. And, you know, when's the next shoe going to fall? So, that maturity curve is what I was talking about. >> Yeah. Free like a puppy. >> Ajay, you know, mentioned readiness, enterprise readiness and the timing's perfect. You kind of included, not your exact words, but I'm paraphrasing. That's a lot to do with what's going on. I mean, I'll say Cloud Native, IWS, think of the hyper scale partner, big partner and Google and even Google said it today. You know, the market world's spinning in their direction. Especially with respect to VMware. You get the relationship with the hyperscalers. Cloud's been on everyone's agenda for a long time. So, it's always been ready. But enterprise, you are customer base at VMware, very cloud savvy in the sense they know it's there, there's some dabbling, there's some endeavors in the cloud, no problem. But from a business perspective and truly transforming the VMware value proposition, is already, they're ready and it's already time now for them, like, you can see the movement. And so, can you explain the timing of that? I mean, I get enterprise readiness, so we're ready to scale all that good stuff. But the timing of product market fit is important here. >> I think when Raghu talks about that cloud first to cloud chaos, to cloud smart, that's the transition we're seeing. And what I mean by that is, they're hitting that inflection point where it's not just about a single team. One of the guys, basically I talked to the CIO, he was like, look, let's assume hypothetically I have thousand developers. Hundred can talk about microservices, maybe 50 has built a microservice and three are really good at it. So how do I get my thousand developers productive? Right? And the other CIO says, this team comes to me and says, I should be able develop directly to the public cloud. And he goes, absolutely you can do that. You don't have to come through IT. But here's the book of security and compliance that you need to enforce to get that thing in production. >> Go for it. >> Go for it. >> Good luck with that. >> So that reality of how do I scale my dev developers is turning into a developer experience problem. We now have titles which says, head of developer experience. Imagine that two years ago. We didn't talk about it. People start, hey, containers Kubernetes. I'm good to go. I can go get all the open source technology you talked about. And now they're saying no. >> And also software supply chains, another board that you're think. This is a symptom of the growth. I mean, open source is the software industry. That is, I don't think debatable. >> Right. >> Okay. That's cool. But now integration becomes vetting, trust, trusting codes. It's very interesting software time right now. >> That's right. >> And how is that impacting the cloud native momentum in your mind? Accelerating it? What inning are we in? How would you peg the progress? >> You know, on that scale of 1 to 10, I think we're halfway marked now. And that moved pretty quickly. >> It really did. >> And if you sit back today, the kinds of applications we're involved in, I have a Chicago wealth management company. We're building the next generation wealth management application. It's a fundamental refactoring of the legacy application. If you go to a prescription company, they're building a brand new prescription platform. These are not just trivial. What they're learning is the lift and shift. Doesn't work for these major applications. They're having to refactor them which is the modernization. >> So how specifically, are they putting some kind of abstraction layer on that? Are they actually gutting it and rewriting it? >> There's always going to be brownfield. Remember the old days of SOA? >> Yeah, yeah. >> They are putting APIs in front of their main systems. They're not rewriting the core banking or the core platform, but the user experience, the business logic, the AIML capability to bring intelligence in the platform. It's surrounding the capability to make it much more intuitive, much more usable, much more declarative. That's where things are going. And so I'm seeing this mix of integration all over again. Showing my age now. But, you know, the new EAI so is now microservices and messaging and events with the same patterns. But again, being much more accelerated with cloud native services. >> And it is to the point, it's accelerated today. They're not having to freeze the code for six months or nine months and that which would kill the whole recipe for failure. So they're able to now to fast track their modernization. They have to prioritize 'cause they got limited resources. But how are you guys coming up to that? >> But the practice is changing as well, right? Well, the old days, it was 12, 18 months cycle or anything software. If you heard the CVS CIO, Rohan. >> Yeah. >> Three months where they started to engage with us in getting an app in production, right? If you look at the COVID, 10 days to get kind of a new application for getting small loans going with Pfizer, right? These are dramatically short term, but it's not rewriting the entire app. It's just putting these newer experiences, newer capability in front with newer modern developer practices. And they're saying, I need to do it not just once, but for 100, 200, 5,000 members. JPMC has 50,000 developers. Fifty thousand. They're not a bank anymore. >> We just have thousands of apps. >> Exactly. >> Ajay, I want to get your thoughts on something that we've been talking about on our super cloud event. I know we had an event a couple weeks ago, you guys were one of our sponsors, VMware was. It was called super cloud where we're defining that this next gen environment's a super cloud and every company will have a super cloud capability. And underneath that is cross cloud capabilities. So, super cloud is like a super set on top of a multi-cloud. And little word play or play on words is, ecosystem partners versus partners in the ecosystem. Because if you're coming down to the integration side of things, it's about knowing what goes what, it's almost like building an OS if you're a coder or an operating systems person. You got to put the pieces together right, not just go to the directory and say, okay, who's got the cheapest price in DR or air gaping or something or some solution. So ecosystem partners are truly partners. Partners in the ecosystem are a bunch of people out on a list. How do you see that? Because the trend we're seeing is, the development process includes partners at day one. >> That's right. Not bolt-on. >> Completely agree. >> Share your thoughts on that. >> So let's look at that. The first thing I'm hearing from my customers is, they're trying to use all the public clouds as a new IS. That's the first API or contract infrastructures code IS. From then on they're saying, I want more and more portable services. And if you see the success of some of the data vendors and the messaging vendors, you're starting to see best of breed becoming part of the platform. So you are to identify which of these are truly, you know, getting market momentum and are becoming kind of defacto leaders. So, Kafka goes hand in hand with streaming. RabbitMQ from my portfolio goes with messaging. Postgres for database. So these are the, in your definition, ecosystem partners, they're foundational. In the security space, you know, Snyk is a common player in terms of scanning or Aqua and Prisma even though we have Carbon Black. Those become partners from a container security perspective. So, what's happening is the industry stabilizing a handful of critical players that are becoming multi-cloud preference of choice in this. And our job is to bring it all together in a all coordinated, orchestrated manner to give them a platform. >> I mean, you guys always had ecosystem, but I think that priority more than ever. It wasn't really your job at VMware, even, Dave, 10 years ago to say, hey, this is the strategic role that you might play one partner. It was pretty much the partners all kind of fed off the momentum of VMware. Virtualization. And there's not a lot of nuance there. There's pretty much they plug in and you got. >> So what we're doing here is, since we're not the center of the universe, unfortunately, for the application world, things like Backstage is a developer portal from Spotify that became open source. That's becoming the place where everyone wants to provide a plugin. And so we took Backstage, we said, let's provide enterprise support for Backstage. If you take a technology like, you know, what we have with Spring. Every job where developer uses Spring, how do we make it modern with Spring cloud. We work with Microsoft to launch a service with Azure Spring Enterprise for Spring. So you're starting to see us taking communities where they have momentum and bringing the ecosystem around those technologies. Cluster API for Kubernetes, for have you managed stuff. >> Yeah. >> So it's about standard. >> Because the developers are voting with their clicks and their code repos. And so you're identifying the patterns that they like. >> That's right. >> And aligning with them and connecting with them rather than trying to sell against it. >> Exactly. It's the end story with everyone. I say stop competing. So people used to think Tanzu is Kubernetes. It's really Tanzu is the modern application platform that runs on any Kubernetes. So I've changed the narrative. When Heptio was here, we were trying to be a Kubernetes player. I'm like, Kubernetes is just another dial tone. You can use mine, you can use OpenShift. So this week we announced support for OpenShift by Tanzu application platform. The values moving up, it's around outcomes. So industry standards, taking lead and solving the problem. >> You know, we had a panel at super cloud. Dave, I know you got a question. I'll get to you in a second. But the panel was the innovator's dilemma. And then during the event, one of the panelists, Chris Hoff knows VMware very well, Beaker on Twitter, said it should be called the integrators dilemma. Because the innovations here, >> How do you put it all together? >> But the integration of the, putting the piece parts together, building the thing is the innovation. >> And we come back and say, it's a secure software supply chain. It starts with great content. Did you know, I published most of the open source content on every hyperscaler through my Bitnami acquisition. So I start with great content that's curated. Then I allow you to create your own golden images. Then I have a build service that secures and so on and so forth and we bring the part. So, that opinionated solution, but batteries included but you can change it is been one of our key differentiator. We recognize the roles is going to be modular, come back and solve for it. >> So I want to understand sort of relationship Tanzu and Aria, John was talking about, you know, super cloud before we had our event. We had an earlier session where we help people understand that Aria was not, you know, vRealize renamed. >> It's rebranded. >> And reason I bring that up is because we had said it around super cloud, that one of the defining characteristics was, sorry, super PaaS, which is a specific purpose built PaaS layer designed to support your objective for multi-cloud. And speaking to a lot of people this week, there's a federated architecture, there's graph relationships, there's real time ability to ingest and analyze. That's unique. And that's IP that is purpose built for what you're doing. >> Absolutely. When I think what came out of all that learning is after 20 years of Pivotal and BA and what we learned that you still need some abstraction layer. Kubernetes is too low level. So what are the developer problems? What are the delivery problems? What are the operations and management problems? Aria solves all the operations and management problem. Tanzu solves a super PaaS problems. >> Yes. Right. >> Of providing a consistent way to build great software and the secure software supply chain to run on any infrastructure. So the combination of Tanzu and Aria complete the value chain. >> And it's different. Again, we get a lot of heat for this, but we're saying, look, we're trying to describe, it's not just IAS, PaaS, and SaaS of last decade. There's something new that's happening. And we chose the name super cloud. >> And what's the difference? It's modular. It's pluggable. It fits into the way you operate. >> Whereas PaaS was very prescriptive. If you couldn't fit, you couldn't jump down to the next level. This is very much, you can stay at the abstraction level or go lower level. >> Oh, we got to add that to the attribute. >> We're recruiting him right now. (laughs) >> We'll give you credit. >> I mean, funny all the web service's background. Look at an app server. You well knew all about app servers. Basically the company is an app. So, if you believe that, say, Capital One is an application as a company and Amazon's providing all the CapEx, >> That's it. >> Okay. And they run all their quote, old IT spend millions, billions of dollars on operating expenses that's going to translate to the top line called the income statement. So, Dave always says, oh, it's on the balance sheet, but now they're going to go to the top line. So we're seeing dynamic. Ajay, I want to get your reaction to this where the business model shift if everything's tech enabled, the company is like an app server. >> Correct. >> So therefore, the revenue that's generated from the technology, making the app work has to get recognized in the income. Okay. But Amazon's doing all, or the cloud hyperscale is doing all the heavy lifting on the CapEx. So technically it's the cloud on top of a cloud. >> Yes and no. The way I look at it, >> I call that a super cloud. >> So I like the idea of super cloud, but I think we're mixing two different constructs. One is, the cloud is a new hardware, right? In terms of dynamic, elastic, always available, et cetera. And I believe when more and more customer I talk about, there's a service catalog of infrastructure services. That's emerging. This super cloud is the next set of PaaS super PaaS services. And the management service is to use the cloud. We spend so much time as VMware building clouds, the problem seems, how do you effectively use the cloud? What problems do we solve around digital where every company is a digital company and the product is this application, as you said. So everything starts with an application. And you look at from the lens of how you run the application, what it costs the application, what impact it's driving. And I think that's the change. So I agree with you in some way. That is a digital strategy. >> And that's the company. >> That's the company. The application is the company. >> That's the t-shirt. >> And API is the currency. >> So, Ajay, first of all, we love having you in theCube 'cause you're like a masterclass in multiple dimensions. So, I want to get your thoughts on the abstraction layer. 'Cause we were also talking earlier in theCube here as well as before. But abstraction layers happen when you have major movements in markets that are game changing or major inflection points because you've reached a complexity point where it's working so great, this new thing, that's too complex to reign it in. And we were quoting Andy Grove by saying, "let chaos reign then reign in the chaos". So, all major industry moments go back 30, 40 years happen with abstractions. So the question is is that, you can't be a vendor, we've observed you can't be a vendor and be the abstraction. Like, if Cisco's running routers, they can't be the abstraction layer. They have to be the benefit of the abstraction layer. And if you're on the other side of the abstraction layer, you can't be running that either. >> I like the way you're thinking about it. Yeah. Do you agree? >> I completely agree. And, you know, I'm an old middleware guy. And when I used to say this to my CEO, he's like, no, it's not middleware, it's just a new middleware. And what's middleware, right? It's a thing between app and infrastructure. You could define it whatever we want, right? And so this is the new distributed middleware. >> It's a metaphor and it's a good one because it does a purpose. >> It's a purpose. >> It creates a separation but then you have, it's like a DMZ zone or whatever you want to call it. It's an area that things happen. >> But the difference before last time was, you could always deploy it to a thing. The thing is now the cloud. The thing is a set of services. So now it's as much of a networking problem at the application layer is as much as security problem. It's how you build software, how we design. So APIs, become part of your development. You can't think of APIs after the fact, right? When you build an API, you got to publish API because the minute you publish it and if you change it, the API's out of. So you can't have it as a documentation process. So, the way you build software, you use software consume is all about it. So to me, digital product with an API as a currency is where we're headed towards. >> Yeah, that's a great observation. Want to make a mental note of that and make that a clip. I want to get your thoughts on software development. You mentioned that, obviously software development life cycles are changing. I'll say open sources now. I mean, it's unlimited codes, supply chain issue. What's in the code, I get that verified codes going to happen. Is software development coding as much or is coding changing the notion of writing code? Or is it more glue layer you're writing. >> I think you're onto something. I call software developments composition now. My son's at Facebook or Google. They have so many libraries. So you don't no longer start with the very similar primitive, you start with building blocks, components, services, libraries, open source technology. What are you really doing? You're composing these things from multiple artifacts. And how do you make sure those artifacts are good artifacts? So someone's not sticking in security in a vulnerability into it. So, the world is moving towards composition and there are few experts who build the core components. Most of the time we're just using those to build solutions. And so, the art here is, how do you provide that set of best practices? We call them patterns or building blocks or services that you can compose to build these next generation (indistinct) >> It's interesting. >> Cooking meals. >> I agree with you a hundred percent what you're thinking. I agree about that worldview. Here's a dilemma that I'm seeing. In the security world, you've got zero trust. You know, Which is, I don't know you, I don't trust you at all. And if you're going to go down this composed, we're going to have an orchestra of players with instruments, say to speak, Dave, metaphor. That's trust involved. >> Yes. >> So you have two spectrums of issues. >> Yes. >> If software's going trust and you're seeing Docker containers getting more verifications, software supply chain, and then you got hardware I call network guys, love zero trust. Where's the balance? How do you reconcile that? Is it just decoupled? Nuance? I mean, what's the point? >> No, no. I think it all comes together. And what I mean by that is, it starts with left shifting it all the way to hands of the developers, right? So, are you starting with good content? You have providence of the stuff you're using. Are you building it correctly? So you're not introducing bad things like solar winds along the process. Are you testing it along the way of the development process? And then once in production, do you know, half the time it's configurations of where you're running the stuff versus the software itself. So you can think of the two coming together. And the network security is protecting people from going laterally once they've got in there. So, a whole security solution requires all of the above, a secure software supply chain, the way to kind of monitor and look at configuration, we call posture management or workload management and the network security of SaaS-e for zero trust. That's a hard thing. And the boundary is the application. >> All right. >> So is it earned trust model sort of over time? >> No, it's designed in, it's been a thing. >> Okay. So it's not a, >> Because it developed. >> You can bolt in afterwards. >> Because the developers are driving it. They got to know what they're doing. >> And it's changing every week. If I'm putting a new code out every week. You can't, it can be changed to something else. >> Well, you guys got guardrails. The guardrails constant is a good example. >> It stops on the configuration side, but I also need the software. So, Tanzu is all about, the secure chain is about the development side of the house. Guardrails are on the operational side of the house. >> To make sure the developers don't stop. >> That's right. >> Things will always get out there. And I find out there's a CV that I use a library, I found after the fact. >> Okay. So again, while I got here again, this is great. I want to get test this thesis. So, we've been saying on theCube, talking about the new ops, the new kind of ops that emerging. DevOps, which we believe is cloud native. So DevOps moving infrastructure's code, that's happened, it's all good. Open source is growing. DevOps is done deal. It's done deal. Developers are doing that. That ops was IT. Then don't need the server, clouds my hardware. Check. That balances. The new ops is data and security which has to match up to the velocity of the developers. Do you believe that? >> Completely. That's why we call it DevSecOps. And the Sec is where all the action is. >> And data. And data too. >> And data is about making the data available where the app meets. So the problem was, you know, we had to move the logic to where the data is or you're going to move the data where the logic is. So data fabrics are going to become more and more interesting. I'll give you a simple example. I publish content today in a service catalog. My customer's saying, but my content catalog needs to be in 300 locations. How do I get the content to each of the repos that are running in 300 location? So I have a content distribution problem. So you call it a data problem. Yes, it's about getting the right data. Whether it's simple as even content, images available for use for deployment. >> So you think when I think about the application development stack and the analytics stack, the data stack, if I can call it that, they're separate, right? Are those worlds, I mean, people say, I want to inject data and AI intelligence into apps. Those worlds have deployment? I think about the insight from the historical being projected in the operational versus they all coming together. I have a Greenplum platform, it's a great analytics platform. I have a transactional platform. Do my customers buy the same? No, they're different buyers, they're different users. But the insight from that is being now plugged in so that at real time I can ask the question. So even this information is being made available on demand. So that's where I see it. And that's most coming together, but the insight is being incorporated in the operational use. So I can say, do I give the risk score? Do I give you credit? It's based on a whole bunch of historical analytics done. And at the real time, processing is happening, but the intelligence is behind it. >> It's a mind shift for sure because the old model was, I have a database, we're good. Now you have time series database, you got graphs. Each one has a role in the overall construct of the new thing. >> But it's about at the end. How do I make use of it? Someone built a smart AI model. I don't know how it was built, but I want to apply it for that particular purpose. >> Okay. So the final question for you, at least from my standpoint is, here at VMware Explore, you have a lot of the customers and so new people coming in that we've heard about, what's their core order of operations right now? Get on the bandwagon for modern apps. How do you see their world unfolding as they go back to the ranch, their places, and go back to their boss? Okay. We got the modern application. We're on the right track boss, full steam ahead. Or what change do they make? >> I think the biggest thing I saw was with some of the branding changes well and some of the new offerings. The same leader had two teams, the VMware team and the public cloud team. And they're saying, hey, maybe VMware's going to be the answer for both. And that's the world model. That's the biggest change I'm seeing. They were only thinking of us on the left column. Now they see us as a unifying player to play across cloud native and VMware, the uniquely set up to bring it all together. That's been really exciting this week. >> All right, Ajay, great to have you on. Great perspective. Worthy of great stuff. Congratulations on the success of all that investment coming to bear. >> Thank you. >> And on the new management platform. >> Yeah. Thank you. And thanks always for giving us all the support we need. It's always great. >> All right Cube coverage here. Getting all the data, getting inside the heads, getting all the specifics and all the new trends and actually connecting the dots here on theCube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more coverage from day two. Two sets, three days, Cube at VMware Explore. We'll be right back. (gentle music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the words of my colleague CTO David Nicholson, Broadcom buys old cars, not to restore them to their original luster and beauty. Nope. They buy classic cars to extract the platinum that's inside the catalytic converter and monetize that. Broadcom's planned 61 billion acquisition of VMware will mark yet another new era and chapter for the virtualization pioneer, a mere seven months after finally getting spun out as an independent company by Dell. For VMware, this means a dramatically different operating model with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps the sole agenda item. For customers, it will mean a more focused portfolio, less aspirational vision pitches, and most certainly higher prices. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll share data, opinions and customer insights about this blockbuster deal and forecast the future of VMware, Broadcom and the broader ecosystem. Let's first look at the key deal points, it's been well covered in the press. But just for the record, $61 billion in a 50/50 cash and stock deal, resulting in a blended price of $138 per share, which is a 44% premium to the unaffected price, i.e. prior to the news breaking. Broadcom will assume 8 billion of VMware debt and promises that the acquisition will be immediately accretive and will generate 8.5 billion in EBITDA by year three. That's more than 4 billion in EBITDA relative to VMware's current performance today. In a classic Broadcom M&A approach, the company promises to dilever debt and maintain investment grade ratings. They will rebrand their software business as VMware, which will now comprise about 50% of revenues. There's a 40 day go shop and importantly, Broadcom promises to continue to return 60% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to get to the money slide literally in a moment that Broadcom shared on its investor call. Broadcom has more than 20 business units. It's CEO Hock Tan makes it really easy for his business unit managers to understand. Rule number one, you agreed to an operating plan with targets for revenue, growth, EBITDA, et cetera, hit your numbers consistently and we're good. You'll be very well compensated and life will be wonderful for you and your family. Miss the number, and we're going to have a frank and uncomfortable bottom line discussion. You'll four, perhaps five quarters to turn your business around, if you don't, we'll kill it or sell it if we can. Rule number two, refer to rule number one. Hello, VMware, here's the money slide. I'll interpret the bullet points on the left for clarity. Your fiscal year 2022 EBITDA was 4.7 billion. By year three, it will be 8.5 billion. And we Broadcom have four knobs to turn with you, VMware to help you get there. First knob, if it ain't recurring revenue with rubber stamp renewals, we're going to convert that revenue or kill it. Knob number two, we're going to focus R&D in the most profitable areas of the business. AKA expect the R&D budget to be cut. Number three, we're going to spend less on sales and marketing by focusing on existing customers. We're not going to lose money today and try to make it up many years down the road. And number four, we run Broadcom with 1% GNA. You will too. Any questions? Good. Now, just to give you a little sense of how Broadcom runs its business and how well run a company it is, let's do a little simple comparison with this financial snapshot. All we're doing here is taking the most recent quarterly earnings reports from Broadcom and VMware respectively. We take the quarterly revenue and multiply by four X to get the revenue run rate and then we calculate the ratios off of the most recent quarters revenue. It's worth spending some time on this to get a sense of how profitable the Broadcom business actually is and what the spreadsheet gurus at Broadcom are seeing with respect to the possibilities for VMware. So combined, we're talking about a 40 plus billion dollar company. Broadcom is growing at more than 20% per year. Whereas VMware's latest quarter showed a very disappointing 3% growth. Broadcom is mostly a hardware company, but its gross margin is in the high seventies. As a software company of course VMware has higher gross margins, but FYI, Broadcom's software business, the remains of Symantec and what they purchased as CA has 90% gross margin. But the I popper is operating margin. This is all non gap. So it excludes things like stock based compensation, but Broadcom had 61% operating margin last quarter. This is insanely off the charts compared to VMware's 25%. Oracle's non gap operating margin is 47% and Oracle is an incredibly profitable company. Now the red box is where the cuts are going to take place. Broadcom doesn't spend much on marketing. It doesn't have to. It's SG&A is 3% of revenue versus 18% for VMware and R&D spend is almost certainly going to get cut. The other eye popper is free cash flow as a percentage of revenue at 51% for Broadcom and 29% for VMware. 51%. That's incredible. And that my dear friends is why Broadcom a company with just under 30 billion in revenue has a market cap of 230 billion. Let's dig into the VMware portfolio a bit more and identify the possible areas that will be placed under the microscope by Hock Tan and his managers. The data from ETR's latest survey shows the net score or spending momentum across VMware's portfolio in this chart, net score essentially measures the net percent of customers that are spending more on a specific product or vendor. The yellow bar is the most recent survey and compares the April 22 survey data to April 21 and January of 22. Everything is down in the yellow from January, not surprising given the economic outlook and the change in spending patterns that we've reported. VMware Cloud on AWS remains the product in the ETR survey with the most momentum. It's the only offering in the portfolio with spending momentum above the 40% line, a level that we consider highly elevated. Unified Endpoint Management looks more than respectable, but that business is a rock fight with Microsoft. VMware Cloud is things like VMware Cloud foundation, VCF and VMware's cross cloud offerings. NSX came from the Nicira acquisition. Tanzu is not yet pervasive and one wonders if VMware is making any money there. Server is ESX and vSphere and is the bread and butter. That is where Broadcom is going to focus. It's going to look at VSAN and NSX, which is software probably profitable. And of course the other products and see if the investments are paying off, if they are Broadcom will keep, if they are not, you can bet your socks, they will be sold off or killed. Carbon Black is at the far right. VMware paid $2.1 billion for Carbon Black. And it's the lowest performer on this list in terms of net score or spending momentum. And that doesn't mean it's not profitable. It just doesn't have the momentum you'd like to see, so you can bet that is going to get scrutiny. Remember VMware's growth has been under pressure for the last several years. So it's been buying companies, dozens of them. It bought AirWatch, bought Heptio, Carbon Black, Nicira, SaltStack, Datrium, Versedo, Bitnami, and on and on and on. Many of these were to pick up engineering teams. Some of them were to drive new revenue. Now this is definitely going to be scrutinized by Broadcom. So that helps explain why Michael Dell would sell VMware. And where does VMware go from here? It's got great core product. It's an iconic name. It's got an awesome ecosystem, fantastic distribution channel, but its growth is slowing. It's got limited developer chops in a world that developers and cloud native is all the rage. It's got a far flung R&D agenda going at war with a lot of different places. And it's increasingly fighting this multi front war with cloud companies, companies like Cisco, IBM Red Hat, et cetera. VMware's kind of becoming a heavy lift. It's a perfect acquisition target for Broadcom and why the street loves this deal. And we titled this Breaking Analysis taming the VMware beast because VMware is a beast. It's ubiquitous. It's an epic software platform. EMC couldn't control it. Dell used it as a piggy bank, but really didn't change its operating model. Broadcom 100% will. Now one of the things that we get excited about is the future of systems architectures. We published a breaking analysis about a year ago, talking about AWS's secret weapon with Nitro and it's Annapurna custom Silicon efforts. Remember it acquired Annapurna for a measly $350 million. And we talked about how there's a new architecture and a new price performance curve emerging in the enterprise, driven by AWS and being followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, a trend toward custom Silicon with the arm based Nitro and which is AWS's hypervisor and Nick strategy, enabling processor diversity with things like Graviton and Trainium and other diverse processors, really diversifying away from x86 and how this leads to much faster product cycles, faster tape out, lower costs. And our premise was that everyone in the data center is going to competes, is going to need a Nitro to be competitive long term. And customers are going to gravitate toward the most economically favorable platform. And as we describe the landscape with this chart, we've updated this for this Breaking Analysis and we'll come back to nitro in a moment. This is a two dimensional graphic with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap formally known as market share or presence within the survey, pervasiveness that's on the horizontal axis. And we plot various companies and products and we've inserted VMware's net score breakdown. The granularity in those colored bars on the bottom right. Net score is essentially the green minus the red and a couple points on that. VMware in the latest survey has 6% new adoption. That's that lime green. It's interesting. The question Broadcom is going to ask is, how much does it cost you to acquire that 6% new. 32% of VMware customers in the survey are increasing spending, meaning they're increasing spending by 6% or more. That's the forest green. And the question Broadcom will dig into is what percent of that increased spend (chuckles) you're capturing is profitable spend? Whatever isn't profitable is going to be cut. Now that 52% gray area flat spending that is ripe for the Broadcom picking, that is the fat middle, and those customers are locked and loaded for future rent extraction via perpetual renewals and price increases. Only 8% of customers are spending less, that's the pinkish color and only 3% are defecting, that's the bright red. So very, very sticky profile. Perfect for Broadcom. Now the rest of the chart lays out some of the other competitor names and we've plotted many of the VMware products so you can see where they fit. They're all pretty respectable on the vertical axis, that's spending momentum. But what Broadcom wants is that core ESX vSphere base where we've superimposed the Broadcom logo. Broadcom doesn't care so much about spending momentum. It cares about profitability potential and then momentum. AWS and Azure, they're setting the pace in this business, in the upper right corner. Cisco very huge presence in the data center, as does Intel, they're not in the ETR survey, but we've superimposed them. Now, Intel of course, is in a dog fight within Nvidia, the Arm ecosystem, AMD, don't forget China. You see a Google cloud platform is in there. Oracle is also on the chart as well, somewhat lower on the vertical axis, but it doesn't have that spending momentum, but it has a big presence. And it owns a cloud as we've talked about many times and it's highly differentiated. It's got a strategy that allows it to differentiate from the pack. It's very financially driven. It knows how to extract lifetime value. Safra Catz operates in many ways, similar to what we're seeing from Hock Tan and company, different from a portfolio standpoint. Oracle's got the full stack, et cetera. So it's a different strategy. But very, very financially savvy. You could see IBM and IBM Red Hat in the mix and then Dell and HP. I want to come back to that momentarily to talk about where value is flowing. And then we plotted Nutanix, which with Acropolis could suck up some V tax avoidance business. Now notice Symantec and CA, relatively speaking in the ETR survey, they have horrible spending momentum. As we said, Broadcom doesn't care. Hock Tan is not going for growth at the expense of profitability. So we fully expect VMware to come down on the vertical axis over time and go up on the profit scale. Of course, ETR doesn't measure the profitability here. Now back to Nitro, VMware has this thing called Project Monterey. It's essentially their version of Nitro and will serve as their future architecture diversifying off x86 and accommodating alternative processors. And a much more efficient performance, price in energy consumption curve. Now, one of the things that we've advocated for, we said this about Dell and others, including VMware to take a page out of AWS and start developing custom Silicon to better integrate hardware and software and accelerate multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. That layer above the cloud, not just running on individual clouds. So this is all about efficiency and simplicity to own this space. And we've challenged organizations to do that because otherwise we feel like the cloud guys are just going to have consistently better costs, not necessarily price, but better cost structures, but it begs the question. What happens to Project Monterey? Hock Tan and Broadcom, they don't invest in something that is unproven and doesn't throw off free cash flow. If it's not going to pay off for years to come, they're probably not going to invest in it. And yet Project Monterey could help secure VMware's future in not only the data center, but at the edge and compete more effectively with cloud economics. So we think either Project Monterey is toast or the VMware team will knock on the door of one of Broadcom's 20 plus business units and say, guys, what if we work together with you to develop a version of Monterey that we can use and sell to everyone, it'd be the arms dealer to everyone and be competitive with the cloud and other players out there and create the de facto standard for data center performance and supercloud. I mean, it's not outrageously expensive to develop custom Silicon. Tesla is doing it for example. And Broadcom obviously is capable of doing it. It's got good relationships with semiconductor fabs. But I think this is going to be a tough sell to Broadcom, unless VMware can hide this in plain site and make it profitable fast, like AWS most likely has with Nitro and Graviton. Then Project Monterey and our pipe dream of alternatives to Nitro in the data center could happen but if it can't, it's going to be toast. Or maybe Intel or Nvidia will take it over or maybe the Monterey team will spin out a VMware and do a Pensando like deal and demonstrate the viability of this concept and then Broadcom will buy it back in 10 years. Here's a double click on that previous data that we put in tabular form. It's how the data on that previous slide was plotted. I just want to give you the background data here. So net score spending momentum is the sorted on the left. So it's sorted by net score in the left hand chart, that was the y-axis in the previous data set and then shared and or presence in the data set is the right hand chart. In other words, it's sorted on the right hand chart, right hand table. That right most column is shared and you can see it's sorted top to bottom, and that was the x-axis on the previous chart. The point is not many on the left hand side are above the 40% line. VMware Cloud on AWS is, it's expensive, so it's probably profitable and it's probably a keeper. We'll see about the rest of VMware's portfolio. Like what happens to Tanzu for example. On the right, we drew a red line, just arbitrarily at those companies and products with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, everything but Tanzu from VMware makes that cut. Again, this is no indication of profitability here, and that's what's going to matter to Broadcom. Now let's take a moment to address the question of Broadcom as a software company. What the heck do they know about software, right. Well, they're not dumb over there and they know how to run a business, but there is a strategic rationale to this move beyond just doing portfolios and extracting rents and cutting R&D, et cetera, et cetera. Why, for example, isn't Broadcom going after coming back to Dell or HPE, it could pick up for a lot less than VMware, and they got way more revenue than VMware. Well, it's obvious, software's more profitable of course, and Broadcom wants to move up the stack, but there's a trend going on, which Broadcom is very much in touch with. First, it sells to Dell and HPE and Cisco and all the OEM. so it's not going to disrupt that. But this chart shows that the value is flowing away from traditional servers and storage and networking to two places, merchant Silicon, which itself is morphing. Broadcom... We focus on the left hand side of this chart. Broadcom correctly believes that the world is shifting from a CPU centric center of gravity to a connectivity centric world. We've talked about this on theCUBE a lot. You should listen to Broadcom COO Charlie Kawwas speak about this. It's all that supporting infrastructure around the CPU where value is flowing, including of course, alternative GPUs and XPUs, and NPUs et cetera, that are sucking the value out of the traditional x86 architecture, offloading some of the security and networking and storage functions that traditionally have been done in x86 which are part of the waste right now in the data center. This is that shifting dynamic of Moore's law. Moore's law, not keeping pace. It's slowing down. It's slower relative to some of the combinatorial factors. When you add up in all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators, et cetera. So we've talked about this a lot in Breaking Analysis episodes. So the value is shifting left within that middle circle. And it's shifting left within that left circle toward components, other than CPU, many of which Broadcom supplies. And then you go back to the middle, value is shifting from that middle section, that traditional data center up into hyperscale clouds, and then to the right toward infrastructure software to manage all that equipment in the data center and across clouds. And look Broadcom is an arms dealer. They simply sell to everyone, locking up key vectors of the value chain, cutting costs and raising prices. It's a pretty straightforward strategy, but not for the fate of heart. And Broadcom has become pretty good at it. Let's close with the customer feedback. I spoke with ETRs Eric Bradley this morning. He and I both reached out to VMware customers that we know and got their input. And here's a little snapshot of what they said. I'll just read this. Broadcom will be looking to invest in the core and divest of any underperforming assets, right on. It's just what we were saying. This doesn't bode well for future innovation, this is a CTO at a large travel company. Next comment, we're a Carbon Black customer. VMware didn't seem to interfere with Carbon Black, but now that we're concerned about short term disruption to their tech roadmap and long term, are they going to split and be sold off like Symantec was, this is a CISO at a large hospitality organization. Third comment, I got directly from a VMware practitioner, an IT director at a manufacturing firm. This individual said, moving off VMware would be very difficult for us. We have over 500 applications running on VMware, and it's really easy to manage. We're not going to move those into the cloud and we're worried Broadcom will raise prices and just extract rents. Last comment, we'll share as, Broadcom sees the cloud data center and IoT is their next revenue source. The VMware acquisition provides them immediate virtualization capabilities to support a lightweight IoT offering. Big concern for customers is what technology they will invest in and innovate, and which will be stripped off and sold. Interesting. I asked David Floyer to give me a back of napkin estimate for the following question. I said, David, if you're running mission critical applications on VMware, how much would it increase your operating cost moving those applications into the cloud? Or how much would it save? And he said, Dave, VMware's really easy to run. It can run any application pretty much anywhere, and you don't need an army of people to manage it. All your processes are tied to VMware, you're locked and loaded. Move that into the cloud and your operating cost would double by his estimates. Well, there you have it. Broadcom will pinpoint the optimal profit maximization strategy and raise prices to the point where customers say, you know what, we're still better off staying with VMware. And sadly, for many practitioners there aren't a lot of choices. You could move to the cloud and increase your cost for a lot of your applications. You could do it yourself with say Zen or OpenStack. Good luck with that. You could tap Nutanix. That will definitely work for some applications, but are you going to move your entire estate, your application portfolio to Nutanix? It's not likely. So you're going to pay more for VMware and that's the price you're going to pay for two decades of better IT. So our advice is get out ahead of this, do an application portfolio assessment. If you can move apps to the cloud for less, and you haven't yet, do it, start immediately. Definitely give Nutanix a call, but going to have to be selective as to what you actually can move, forget porting to OpenStack, or do it yourself Hypervisor, don't even go there. And start building new cloud native apps where it makes sense and let the VMware stuff go into manage decline. Let certain apps just die through attrition, shift your development resources to innovation in the cloud and build a brick wall around the stable apps with VMware. As Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware said, "We are building the software mainframe". Now marketing guys got a hold of that and said, Paul, stop saying that, but it's true. And with Broadcom's help that day we'll soon be here. That's it for today. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who helps research our topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson does the production and he also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and thanks to Rob Hof, who was our editor in chief at siliconangle.com. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETRs website at etr.ai for all the survey action. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with James Watters, CTO of Modern Applications at VMware here to talk about the big Tanzu cloud native application wave, the modernization's here. James, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey John, great to have you back on. And really excited about re:Invent this year. And I've been watching your coverage of it. There's lots of exciting stuff going on in this space. >> Awesome. Well, James, you've been riding the wave of, I would call cloud 1.0, 2.0 what do you want to call it, the initial wave of cloud where the advent of replatforming is there. You know all these benefits and things are moving fast. Things are being developed. A lot of endeavors, things are tracking. Some are kicking, Kubernetes kicks in, and now the big story is over the past year and a half. Certainly the pandemic highlighted is this big wave that's hitting now, which is the real, the modernization of the enterprise, the modernization of software development. And even Amazon was saying that in one of our talks that the sovereign life cycles over it should be completely put away to bed. And that DevOps is truly here. And you add security, you got DevSecOps. So an entirely new, large scale, heavy use of data, new methodologies are all hitting right now. And if you're not on that wave your driftwood, what's your take? >> Oh, I think you're dead right, John, and you know, kind of the first 10 years of working on this for sort of proving that the microservices, the container, the declared of automation, the DevOps patterns were the future. And I think everyone's agreed now. And I think DevSecOps and the trends around app modernization are really around bringing that to scale for enterprises. So the conversations I tend to be having are, Hey, you've done a little Kubernetes. You've done some modern apps and APIs, but how do you really scale this across your enterprise? That's what I think is exciting today. And that's what we're talking about. Some of the tools we're bringing to Amazon to help people achieve faster, consumption, better scale, more security. >> You know, one of the things about VMware that's been impressive over the years is that on the wave of IT, they already had great operational install base. They did a deal with Amazon Ragu did that. I think 2016, that kind of cleared the air. They're not going to do their own cloud or they have cloud efforts kind of solidifies that. And then incomes, Kubernetes, and then you saw a completely different cloud native wave coming in with the Tanzu, the Heptio acquisition. And since then a lot's been done. Can you just take us through the Tanzu evolution because I think this is a cornerstone of what's happening right now. >> Yeah, that's a great question, John. I think that the emergence of Kubernetes as a common set of APIs that every cloud and almost every infrastructure agrees on was a huge one. And the way I talked to our clients about is that VMware is doing a couple of things in this space. The first is that we're recognizing that as an infrastructure or baking Kubernetes into every vSphere, be it vSphere on-prem, be it VMC on Amazon. You're just going to find Kubernetes is a big part of each year. So that's kind of a big step one, but it's in some ways the same way that Amazon is doing with EKS and Azure is doing with AKS, but like every infrastructure provider is bringing Kubernetes everywhere. And then that kind of unleashes this really exciting moment where you've got this global control plane that you can program to be your DevSecOps platform. And Kubernetes has this incredible model of extensibility where you can add CRDs and program, right against the Kubernetes APIs with your additional features and functions you want your DevSecOps pipeline. And so it's created this opportunity for Tanzu to kind of have then a global control plane, which we call Tanzu Mission Control to bring all of those Kubernetes running on different clouds together. And then the last thing that we'll talk about a little bit more is this Tanzu Application Platform, which is bringing a developer experience to Kubernetes. So that you're not always starting with what I like to say, like, oh, I have Git, I have Kubernetes, am I done? There's a lot more to the story than that. >> I want to get to this Tanzu Application Platform on EKS. I think that's a big story at VMware. We've seen that, but before we do that for the folks out there watching who are like, I'm now seeing this, whether they're young, new to the industry or enterprises who have replatforming or refactoring, trying to understand what is a modern application. So give us the definition in your words, what is a modern application? >> You know, John, it's a great question. And I tend to start with why and like, hey, how did we get here? And you, you and I both, I think, used to work for the bigger iron vendors back in the day. And we've seen the age of the big box Silicon Valley. I don't know, I worked at Sun just across the aisle here and basically we'd sell you a big box and then once or twice a year, you'd change the software on it. And so in a sense, like there was no chance to do user-oriented design or any of these things. Like you kind of got what you got and you hope to scale it. And then modern applications have been much more of the age of like what you might say, like Instagram or some of these modern apps that are very user-oriented and how you're changing that user interface that user design might change every week based on user feedback. And you're constantly using big data to adjust that modern app experience. And so modern apps to me are inherently iterative and inherently scalable and amenable to change. And that's where the 12 factor application manifesto was written, a blog was written a decade ago, basically saying here's how you can start to design apps to be constantly upgradable. So to me, modern apps, 12 of factors, one of them Kubernetes compatible, but the real point is that they should be flexible to be constantly iterated on maybe at least once a week at a minimum and designed and engineered to do that. And that takes them away from the old vertically scaled apps that kind of ran on 172 processors that you would infrequently update in the past. Those are what you might call like cloud apps. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, totally helpful. And by the way, those old iron vendors, they're now called the on-premise vendors and, you know, HPE, Dell and whatnot, IBM. But the thing about the cloud is, is that you have the true infrastructure as code happening. It's happened, it's happening, but faster and better and greater the goodness there. So you got DevSecOps, which is just DevOps with security. So DevSecOps is the standard now that everyone's shooting for. So what that means is I'm a developer, I just want to write code, the infrastructure got to work for me. So things like Lambda functions are all great things. So assuming that there's going to be this now programmable layer for developers just to do stuff. What is, in context to that need, what is the Tanzu Application Platform about and how does it work? >> Yeah, that's a great question, John. So once you have Kubernetes, you have this abundance of programmable, inner infrastructure resources. You can do almost anything with it, right? Like you can run machine learning workflows, you can run microservices, you can build APIs, you can import legacy apps to it, but it doesn't come out of the box with a set of application patterns and a set of controllers that are built for just, you know, modern apps. It comes with sort of a lot of flexibility and it expects you to understand a pretty broad surface area of APIs. So what we're doing is we're following in the footsteps of companies like Netflix and Uber, et cetera, all of which built kind of a developer platform on top of their Kubernetes infrastructure to say, here's your more templatized path to production. So you don't have to configure everything. You're just changing the right parts of the application. And we kind of go through three steps. The first is an application template that says, here's how to build a streaming app on Kubernetes, click here, and you'll get in your version control and we'll build a Kubernetes manifest for it. Two, is an automated containerization, which is we'll take your app and auto create a container for it so that we know it's secure and you can't make a mistake. And then three is that it will auto detect your application and build a Kubernetes deployment for it so that you can deploy it to Kubernetes in a reliable way. We're basically trying to reduce the burden on the developer from having to understand everything about Kubernetes, to really understanding their domain of the application. Does that make sense? >> Yeah, and this kind of is inline, you mentioned Netflix early on. They were one of the pioneers in inside AWS, but they had the full hyperscaler developers. They had those early hardcore devs that are like unicorns. No, you can't hire these people. They're just not many enough in the world. So the world's becoming, I won't say democratization, that's an overused word, but what we're getting to is if I get this right, you're saying you're going to eliminate the heavy lifting, the boring mundane stuff. >> Yeah, even at Netflix as is great of a developers they have, they still built kind of a microservices or an application platform on top of AWS. And I think that's true of Kubernetes today, which if you go to a Kubernetes conference, you'll often see, don't expose Kubernetes to developers. So tons of application platforms starts to really solve that question. What do you expose to a developer when they want to consume Kubernetes? >> So let's ask you, I know you do a lot of customer visits, that's one of the jobs that make you go out in the field which you like doing and working backwards on the customers has been in the DNA of VMware for years. What is the big narrative with the customers? What's their pain point? How else has the pandemics shown them projects that are working and not working, and they want to come out of it with a growth strategy. VMware is now an independent company. You guys got the platform, what are the customers doing with it? >> Well, I'll give you one example. You know, I went out and I was chatting with the retailer, had seen their online sales goes from one billion to like three billion during the pandemic. And they had been using kind of packaged shopping cart software before like a basic online store that they bought and configured. And they realized they needed to get great at modern apps to keep up with customer demand. And so I would say in general, we've seen the drive, the need for modern apps and digital transformation is just really skyrocketing and everyone's paying attention to it. And then I think they're looking for a trusted partner and they're debating, do we build it all in-house or do we turn to a partner that can help us build this above the cloud? And I think for the people that want an enterprise trusted brand, they'll have a lot of engineering talent behind it. There's been strong interest in Tanzu. And I think the big message we're trying to get out is that Tanzu can not only help you in your on-prem infrastructure, but it can also really help you on public cloud. And I think people are surprised by just how much. >> It's just in the common thread. I see that it's that point is right on is that these companies that don't digitize their business and build an application for their customer are going to get taken away by a startup. I mean, we've seen, it's so easy if you don't have an app for that, you're out of business. I mean, this is like, no, no, it's not like maybe we should do the cloud, let's get proactive. Pretty much it's critical path now for companies. So I'm sure you agree with that, but what's the progress of most of the enterprises? What percentage do you think are having this realization? >> I would say at least 70, 80%, if not more, are there now, and 10 years ago, I used to kind of have to tell stories, like, you know, some startups going to come along and they might disrupt you and people kind of give you that like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I get it. And now it's sort of like, hey, someone's already in our market with an API. Tell me how to build API first apps we need to compete. And that's the difference in the strategic conversation kind of post pandemic and post, you know, the last 10 years. >> All right, final question for you 'cause this is right great thread. I've seen having a web interface it's not good enough, to your point. You got to have an application that they're engaging with, with all the modern capabilities, because the needs there, the expectation for the customers there. What new things are you seeing beyond mobile that are coming around the pike for enterprises, obviously web to mobile, mobile to what? What's next? >> I think the thing that's interesting is there is a bigger push to say more and more of what we do should be an API both internally, like, hey, other teams might want to consume some of these services as a well-formed API. I call it kind of like Stripe MB. Like you look at all these companies, they're like, Hey, stripes worth a hundred billion dollars now because they built a great API. What about us? And so I've seen a lot of industries from automotive to of course financial services and others that are saying, what if we gave our developers internally great APIs? And what if we also expose those APIs externally, we could get a lot, a more rat, fast moving business than the traditional model we might've had in the past. >> It's interesting, you know, commoditizing and automating a way infrastructure or software or capable workflows is actually normal. And if you can unify that in a way that's just better I mean, you have a lower cost structure, but the value doesn't go away, right? So I think a lot of this comes down to, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. I mean, that's how DevSecOps works. I mean, it's agile, it's faster, but you still have to achieve the value of the net is lower cost. What's your take on that? >> Well, I think you're dead right, John. And I think this is what was surprising about Stripe is it was possible before Stripe to go out as a developer and kind of pulled together a backend that did payments, but boy, it was hard. And I think that's the same thing with kind of this tons of application platform and the developer experience focus is people are realizing they can't hire enough developers. So this is the other thing that's happened during the pandemic and the great resignation, if you will, the war for talent is on. And you know, when I talked to a customer, like we might be able to help you, even 30% with your developer productivity, there's like one out of four developers. You might not have to be able to have to recruit they're all in. And so I think that API first model and the developer experience model are the same thing, which is like, it doesn't have to just be possible. It should be excellent. >> Well, great insight learning a lot. Of course, we should move to theCube API and we'll plug into your applications. We're here in the studio with our API, James. Great to have you on. Final word, what's your take this, the big story for re:Invent. If you had to summarize this year's re:Invent going in to 2022, what would you say is happening in this industry right now? >> You know, I'm just super excited about the EKS market and how fast it's growing. We're seeing EKS in a lot of places. We're super excited about helping EKS customers scale. And I think it's great to see Amazon adopting that standard API from Kubernetes. And I think that's going to be, just awesome to watch the creativity the industry is going to have around it. >> Well, great insight, thanks for coming on. And again, we'll work on that Cube API for you. The virtualization of theCUBE is here. We're virtual, which we could be in-person and hope to see you in-person soon. Thanks for coming on. >> You too John, thank you. >> Okay, Cube's coverage of alias re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with James Watters, CTO of Modern Applications at VMware here to talk about the big Tanzu cloud native application wave, the modernization's here. James, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey John, great to have you back on. And really excited about re:Invent this year. And I've been watching your coverage of it. There's lots of exciting stuff going on in this space. >> Awesome. Well, James, you've been riding the wave of, I would call cloud 1.0, 2.0 what do you want to call it, the initial wave of cloud where the advent of replatforming is there. You know all these benefits and things are moving fast. Things are being developed. A lot of endeavors, things are tracking. Some are kicking, Kubernetes kicks in, and now the big story is over the past year and a half. Certainly the pandemic highlighted is this big wave that's hitting now, which is the real, the modernization of the enterprise, the modernization of software development. And even Amazon was saying that in one of our talks that the sovereign life cycles over it should be completely put away to bed. And that DevOps is truly here. And you add security, you got DevSecOps. So an entirely new, large scale, heavy use of data, new methodologies are all hitting right now. And if you're not on that wave your driftwood, what's your take? >> Oh, I think you're dead John, and you know, kind of the first 10 years of working on this for sort of proving that the microservices, the container, the declared of automation, the DevOps patterns were the future. And I think everyone's agreed now. And I think DevSecOps and the trends around app modernization are really around bringing that to scale for enterprises. So the conversations I tend to be having are, Hey, you've done a little Kubernetes. You've done some modern apps and APIs, but how do you really scale this across your enterprise? That's what I think is excited today. And that's what we're talking about. Some of the tools we're bringing to Amazon to help people achieve faster, consumption, better scale, more security. >> You know, one of the things about VMware that's been impressive over the years is that on the wave of IT, they already had great operational install base. They did a deal with Amazon Ragu did that. I think 2016, that kind of cleared the air. They're not going to do their own cloud or they have cloud efforts kind of solidifies that. And then incomes, Kubernetes, and then you saw a completely different cloud native wave coming in with the Tanzu, the Heptio acquisition. And since then a lot's been done. Can you just take us through the Tanzu evolution because I think this is a cornerstone of what's happening right now. >> Yeah, that's a great question, John. I think that the emergence of Kubernetes as a common set of APIs that every cloud and almost every infrastructure agrees on was a huge one. And the way I talked to our clients about is that VMware is doing a couple of things in this space. The first is that we're recognizing that as an infrastructure or baking Kubernetes into every vSphere, be it vSphere on-prem, be it BMC on Amazon. You're just going to find Kubernetes is a big part of each year. So that's kind of a big step one, but it's in some ways the same way that Amazon is doing with EKS and Azure EKS, but like every infrastructure provider is bringing Kubernetes everywhere. And then that kind of unleashes this really exciting moment where you've got this global control plane that you can program to be your DevSecOps platform. And Kubernetes has this incredible model of extensibility where you can add CRDs and program, right against the Kubernetes APIs with your additional features and functions you want your DevSecOps pipeline. And so it's created this opportunity for Tanzu to kind of have then a global control plan, which we call Tanzu Mission Control to bring all of those Kubernetes running in different clouds together. And then the last thing that we'll talk about a little bit more is this Tanzu Application Platform, which is bringing a developer experience to Kubernetes. So that you're not always starting with what I like to say, like, oh, I have Kubernetes, am I done? There's a lot more to the story than that. >> I want to get to this Tanzu Application Platform on EKS. I think that's a big story at VMware. We've seen that, but before we do that for the folks out there watching who are like, I'm now seeing this, whether they're young, new to the industry or enterprises who have replatforming or refactoring, trying to understand what is a modern application. So give us the definition in your words, what is a modern application? >> You know, John, it's a great question. And I tend to start with why and like, hey, how did we get here? And you, you and I both, I think, used to work for the bigger iron vendors back in the day. And we've seen the age of the big box Silicon Valley. I don't know, I worked at Sun just across the aisle here and basically we'd sell you a big box and then once or twice a year, you'd change the software on it. And so in a sense, like there was no chance to do user-oriented design or any of these things. Like you kind of got what you got and you hope to scale it. And then modern applications have been much more of the age of like what you might say, like Instagram or some of these modern apps that are very user-oriented and how you're changing that user interface that user design might change every week based on user feedback. And you're constantly using big data to adjust that modern app experience. And so modern apps to me are inherently iterative and inherently scalable and amenable to change. And that's where the 12 factor application manifesto was written, a blog was written a decade ago, basically saying here's how you can start to design apps to be constantly upgradable. So to me, modern apps, 12 of factors, one of them Kubernetes compatible, but the real point is that they should be flexible to be constantly iterated on maybe at least once a week at a minimum and designed and engineered to do that. And that takes them away from the old vertically scaled apps that kind of ran on 172 processors that you would infrequently update in the past. Those are what you might call like cloud apps. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, totally helpful. And by the way, those old iron vendors, they're now called the on-premise vendors and, you know, HPE, Dell and whatnot, IBM. But the thing about the cloud is, is that you have the true infrastructure as code happening. It's happened, it's happening, but faster and better and greater the goodness there. So you got DevSecOps, which is just DevOps with security. So DevSecOps is the standard now that everyone's shooting for. So what that means is I'm a developer, I just want to write code, the infrastructure got to work for me. So things like Lambda functions are all great things. So assuming that there's going to be this now programmable layer for developers just to do stuff. What is, in context to that need, what is the Tanzu Application Platform about and how does it work? >> Yeah, that's a great question, John. So once you have Kubernetes, you have this abundance of programmable, inner infrastructure resources. You can do almost anything with it, right? Like you can run machine learning workflows, you can run microservices, you can build APIs, you can import legacy apps to it, but it doesn't come out of the box with a set of application patterns and a set of controllers that are built for just, you know, modern apps. It comes with sort of a lot of flexibility and it expects you to understand a pretty broad surface area of APIs. So what we're doing is we're following in the footsteps of companies like Netflix and Uber, et cetera, all of which built kind of a developer platform on top of their Kubernetes infrastructure to say, here's your more templatized path to production. So you don't have to configure everything. You're just changing the right parts of the application. And we kind of go through three steps. The first is an application template that says, here's how to build a streaming app on Kubernetes, click here, and you'll get in your version control and we'll build a Kubernetes manifest for it. Two, is an automated containerization, which is we'll take your app and auto create a container for it so that we know it's secure and you can't make a mistake. And then three is that it will auto detect your application and build a Kubernetes deployment for it so that you can deploy it to Kubernetes in a reliable way. We're basically trying to reduce the burden on the developer from having to understand everything about Kubernetes, to really understanding their domain of the application. Does that make sense? >> Yeah, and this kind of is inline, you mentioned Netflix early on. They were one of the pioneers in inside AWS, but they had the full hyperscaler developers. They had those early hardcore devs that are like unicorns. No, you can't hire these people. They're just not many enough in the world. So the world's becoming, I won't say democratization, that's an overused word, but what we're getting to is if I get this right, you're saying you're going to eliminate the heavy lifting, the boring mundane stuff. >> Yeah, even at Netflix as is great of a developers they have, they still built kind of a microservices or an application platform on top of AWS. And I think that's true of Kubernetes today, which if you go to a Kubernetes conference, you'll often see, don't expose Kubernetes to developers. So tons of application platforms starts to really solve that question. What do you expose to a developer when they want to consume Kubernetes? >> So let's ask you, I know you do a lot of customer visits, that's one of the jobs that make you go out in the field which you like doing and working backwards on the customers has been in the DNA of VMware for years. What is the big narrative with the customers? What's their pain point? How else has the pandemics shown them projects that are working and not working, and they want to come out of it with a growth strategy. VMware is now an independent company. You guys got the platform, what are the customers doing with it? >> Well, I'll give you one example. You know, I went out and I was chatting with the retailer, had seen their online sales goes from one billion to like three billion during the pandemic. And they had been using kind of packaged shopping cart software before like a basic online store that they bought and configured. And they realized they needed to get great at modern apps to keep up with customer demand. And so I would say in general, we've seen the drive, the need for modern apps and digital transformation is just really skyrocketing and everyone's paying attention to it. And then I think they're looking for a trusted partner and they're debating, do we build it all in-house or do we turn to a partner that can help us build this above the cloud? And I think for the people that want an enterprise trusted brand, they'll have a lot of engineering talent behind it. There's been strong interest in Tanzu. And I think the big message we're trying to get out is that Tanzu can not only help you in your on-prem infrastructure, but it can also really help you on public cloud. And I think people are surprised by just how much. >> It's just in the common thread. I see that it's that point is right on is that these companies that don't digitize their business and build an application for their customer are going to get taken away by a startup. I mean, we've seen, it's so easy if you don't have an app for that, you're out of business. I mean, this is like, no, no, it's not like maybe we should do the cloud, let's get proactive. Pretty much it's critical path now for companies. So I'm sure you agree with that, but what's the progress of most of the enterprises? What percentage do you think are having this realization? >> I would say at least 70, 80%, if not more, are there now, and 10 years ago, I used to kind of have to tell stories, like, you know, some startups going to come along and they might disrupt you and people kind of give you that like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I get it. And now it's sort of like, hey, someone's already in our market with an API. Tell me how to build API first apps we need to compete. And that's the difference in the strategic conversation kind of post pandemic and post, you know, the last 10 years. >> All right, final question for you 'cause this is right great thread. I've seen having a web interface it's not good enough, to your point. You got to have an application that they're engaging with, with all the modern capabilities, because the needs there, the expectation for the customers there. What new things are you seeing beyond mobile that are coming around the pike for enterprises, obviously web to mobile, mobile to what? What's next? >> I think the thing that's interesting is there is a bigger push to say more and more of what we do should be an API both internally, like, hey, other teams might want to consume some of these services as a well-formed API. I call it kind of like Stripe MB. Like you look at all these companies, they're like, Hey, stripes worth a hundred billion dollars now because they built a great API. What about us? And so I've seen a lot of industries from automotive to of course financial services and others that are saying, what if we gave our developers internally great APIs? And what if we also expose those APIs externally, we could get a lot, a more rat, fast moving business than the traditional model we might've had in the past. >> It's interesting, you know, commoditizing and automating a way infrastructure or software or capable workflows is actually normal. And if you can unify that in a way that's just better I mean, you have a lower cost structure, but the value doesn't go away, right? So I think a lot of this comes down to, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. I mean, that's how DevSecOps works. I mean, it's agile, it's faster, but you still have to achieve the value of the net is lower cost. What's your take on that? >> Well, I think you're dead right, John. And I think this is what was surprising about Stripe is it was possible before Stripe to go out as a developer and kind of pulled together a backend that did payments, but boy, it was hard. And I think that's the same thing with kind of this tons of application platform and the developer experience focus is people are realizing they can't hire enough developers. So this is the other thing that's happened during the pandemic and the great resignation, if you will, the war for talent is on. And you know, when I talked to a customer, like we might be able to help you, even 30% with your developer productivity, there's like one out of four developers. You might not have to be able to have to recruit they're all in. And so I think that API first model and the developer experience model are the same thing, which is like, it doesn't have to just be possible. It should be excellent. >> Well, great insight learning a lot. Of course, we should move to theCube API and we'll plug into your applications. We're here in the studio with our API, James. Great to have you on. Final word, what's your take this, the big story for re:Invent. If you had to summarize this year's re:Invent going in to 2022, what would you say is happening in this industry right now? >> You know, I'm just super excited about the EKS market and how fast it's growing. We're seeing EKS in a lot of places. We're super excited about helping EKS customers scale. And I think it's great to see Amazon adopting that standard API from Kubernetes. And I think that's going to be, just awesome to watch the creativity the industry is going to have around it. >> Well, great insight, thanks for coming on. And again, we'll work on that Cube API for you. The virtualization of theCUBE is here. We're virtual, which we could be in-person and hope to see you in-person soon. Thanks for coming on. >> You too John, thank you. >> Okay, Cube's coverage of alias re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay Jenny, great to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> James Governor, nail on the Keynote there. Chat was phenomenal. That was pre-recorded but James is also in the chat stream. A lot of good conversations. That hit home for me that keynote. One, because memory lane was going down right into the 80s when it was a revolution. And we got him in the green room here. James Governor, welcome. >> James is here, hi James. >> Here we go. >> Fresh off the keynote. >> It's always a revolution. (John laughs) >> Well, in the 80s, I used to love your talk. A couple of key points I want to share and get your thoughts on was just to some highlights for the crowd is one, you walk through. Some of the key inflection points that I think were instrumental and probably some other ones depending on your perspective of where you were in the industry at that time. Whether you were a systems programmer or a networking guy, there was a proprietary world and it was a revolution back then. And UNIX was owned by AT&T if no one remembers. You couldn't even use the word. You had to trade market. So we actually had to call it XINU which is UNIX spelled backwards in all the text and whatnot. And even open source software freeware was kind of illegal. MIT did some work, Northeastern and Berkeley and other schools. It was radical back then so-- >> Yeah, we've come a long way for sure. I think that for me that was one of the things that I wanted to really point to in the keynote was that yes we have definitely come a long way and development culture is about open culture. >> I think the thing that I like to point out especially hate to sound like I'm old but I am. But I lived through that and the younger generation coming and have all these new tools. And I got to say not that I walked through to school in the snow with no shoes on but it's a pretty cool developer environment now. But remember things were proprietary back then. If you start to see the tea leaves now, I look at the world, you see these silos. You see silos that's kind of, they're not nestle proprietary but they might necessarily be open. So you kind of have a glimpse of open source on these projects and these companies. Whether they're tech companies, it feels open but it might not be. It could be walled garden. It could be data being hoarded. So as data opens up, this is interesting to me because I want to get your thoughts on this because in a way it feels proprietary but technically it's not proprietary. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is going to be the next 20 years of evolution. What's your thoughts? >> I think the productivity wins. Whoever packages technology in a way that makes it most productive for people. That's what wins. And open source, what's productive. It is very accessible. It enabled new waves. Get installed and you've got a package from... You got access to just a world of open-source. A world of software that was a big revolution. And I guess the cloud sort of came next and I think that's been one of the big shifts. You talk about proprietary. What matters is how easy you make things to people to do their work. And in that regard, obviously Amazon is in fact a bigger distribution network. Makes technology super consumable by so many people. I guess I would say that open is good and important but it's not the only thing. As you say, data is a lock-in and it's right and people are choosing services that make them productive. Nobody worries about whether Amazon Lambda is proprietary. They just know that they can build companies or businesses or business processes on it. >> You know it's interesting back in the day just to kind of segue with the next topic. We were fighting proprietary operating systems, UNIX and others. We're also fighting for proprietary Network protocol stacks. SNA was owned by IBM. DECnet was digital, the number one network. And then TCP/IP and OpenSan's interconnect came out. That's the OSI model for us old ones. That set the table. That changed the face of everything. It really enabled a lot. So when I see containers, what Docker did early on the pioneering phases of Docker containers, it unleashed a new reality of coolness and scale and capabilities. And then in comes Kubernetes and in comes micro services. So this path is showing some real strength for new kinds of capabilities. So how does a developer navigate all this because data lock-in does it a data plane seems to be a control point. What are we fighting now in your opinion? shouldn't say we're fighting but what are we trying to avoid if operating systems was for closing opportunities and network protocol stacks before closing in the past? What do you see as barriers that need to be broken down in the open source world around going down this great path of micro services, decomposed applications, highly cohesive architectures? >> Honestly there's enough work to be getting on with without like fighting someone in that regard. I mean we're fighting against technical debt. I just don't think that people are serrated about fighting against proprietary anymore. I think that's less than a concern. Open-source technology is great. It's how most work gets done in our industry today. So you mentioned Kubernetes and certainly Docker. Though we did a phenomenal job of packaging up and experience that map to see CICD. That map to the developer workplace people like do. Phenomenal job and I think that for me at least when I look at where we are as an industry, it's all about productivity. So there are plenty of interesting new platforms. I think in my keynote, that's my question. I'm less interested in microservices than I am in distributed work. I'm interested in one of the tools that are going to enable us to become more productive, solve more problems, build more applications and get better at building software. So I think that's my sort of focus. There will always be lock-in. And I think you will also have technologies mitigate against that. I mean clear messages today from Docker about supporting multiple clouds. For a while at least multiclouds seem like something only the kind waivers were interested in but increasingly we're seeing organizations where that is definitely part of how they're using the cloud. And again I think very often it's within specific areas. And so we see organizations that are using particular clouds for different things. And we'll see more of that. >> And the productivity. I love the passion, love that in the keynote. That was loud and clear. Two key points I want to get your reaction on that. You mentioned one was inclusion. Including more people, not seeing news. It's kind of imperative. And also virtual work environments, virtual events. You kind of made a highlight there. So again people are distributed remote first. It's an opportunity to be productive. Can you share your thoughts on those two points? One is, as we're distributed, that's going to open the aperture of more engagement. More people coming in. So code of conduct not as a file you must read or some rule. Culturally embracing a code of conduct. And then also, virtual events, virtual groups convening like we're doing here. >> Yeah I mean for me at least Allison McMillan from github and she just gave such a great demo at the recent sunlight event where she finished and she was like, it was all about, I want to be able to put the kids to bed for a nap and then go code. And I think that's sort of thinking people band around the phrase ruling this together but I mean certainly parenting is a team sport. But I think it's interesting we're not welcome. It was interesting that was looking at the chat, going through, I was being accused of being woke. I was being accused of being a social justice warrior. But look at the math. The graph is pretty clear. Women are not welcomed in tech. And that means we're wasting 50% of available resource to us. And we're treating people like shit. So I thought I underplayed that in the talk actually. Something like, "Oh, why is he complaining about Linus?" Well, the fact is that Linus himself admitted he needed to change his persona in order to just be more modern and welcoming in terms of building software and building communities. So look we've got people from around the world. Different cultural norms. All of the women I know who work in tech suffer so much from effectively daily harassment. Their bonafides are challenged. These are things that we need to change because women are brilliant. I'm not letting you signaling or maybe I am. The fact is that women are amazing at software and we do a terrible job of supporting them. So women of other nationalities, we're not going to be traveling as much. I think you can also grow. No we can't keep flying around as much. Make an industry where single parents can participate more effectively. Where we could take advantage of that. There're 200 million people in Nigeria. That hunger to engage. We won't even give them a visa and then we may not be treating them right. I just think we need an industry reset. I think from a we need to travel less. We need to do better work. And we need to be more welcoming in order that that could be the case. >> Yeah, there's no doubt a reset is here and you look at the COVID crisis is forcing that function there because one, people are resetting and reinventing and trying to figure out a growth strategy. Whether it's a business or teams. And what's interesting is new roles and new responsibilities is going to emerge and I think you're right about the women in tech. I completely agree and have evidence myself and reported on it ad nauseam. But the thing is data trumps opinion. And the data is clear on this issue. So if anyone will call you a social justice warrior I just say pound sand and tell them that go on their way. And just look at the data and clear. And also the field is getting wider. When I was in computer science major back in the day, it was male-dominated yes but it was very narrow. Wasn't as broad as it is now. You can do things so much more and in fact in Kelsey Hightower's talk, he talks to persona developers. The ones that love to learn and ones that don't want to learn anything. Just want to code and do their thing. And ones that care about just app development and ones that just want to get in and sling k-8 around like it's nobody's business or work with APIs, work with infrastructure. Some just want to write code. So there's more and more surface area in computer science and coding. Or not even computer science, it's just coding, developing. >> Well, I mean it's a bigger industry. We've got clearly all sorts of challenges that need to be solved. And the services that we've got available are incredible. I mean if you look at the work of companies like Netlify in terms of developer experience. You look at the emergence of JamStack and the productivity that we're seeing there, it's a really exciting time in the industry. >> No doubt about that. >> And as I say I mean it's an exciting time. It's a scary time. But I think that we're moving to a world of more distributed work. And that's my point about open source and working on code bases from different places and what the CapCloud can enable. We can work in a different way and we don't all need to be in San Francisco, London, or Berlin as I said in the Keynote. >> I love the vision there and the passion. I totally agree with it. I think that's a whole another distributed paradigm that's going to move up the stack if you will and software. I think it's going to be codified in cloud native and cloud scale creates new services. I mean it's the virtual world. You mentioned virtual events. Groups convening like the 67,000 people coming together virtually here at DockerCon. Large, small one-on-ones group dynamics are a piece of it. So share your thoughts on virtual events and certainly it's people are now just kicking the tires, learning. You do a zoom, you do a livestream. You do some chat. It's going to evolve and I think it's going to look more like a CICD pipeline and anything else. As you start to bring media together, we get 43 sessions here. Why not make it a hundred sessions? So I think this is going to be one of those learning environments where it's not linear, it's different. What's your vision of all this if you had to give advice for the folks out there? Not event plans, with people who want to gather groups and be productive. What's your thinking on this? >> Well, it sort of has to happen. I mean there are a lot of people doing good work in this regard. Patrick Dubois, founder of DevOps days. He's doing some brilliant work delineating. Just what are all the different platforms? What does the streaming platform look like that you can use? Obviously you've got one here with theCUBE. Yeah, I mean I think the numbers are pretty clear. I mean Microsoft Build had 245,000 registered attendees and I think something that might have been to begin. The patterns are slightly different. It's not like they're going to be there the whole time but the opportunity to meet people where they are, I think is something that we shouldn't ignore. Particularly in a world not everyone again has the privilege of being able to travel. You're in a different country or as I say perhaps your life circumstances mean you can't travel. From an accessibility perspective, clearly virtual events offer an opportunity that we haven't fully nailed. I think Microsoft performance in this regard has been super interesting. They were already moving that way and Kobe just slammed it up to another level. What they did with Build recently was actually, I mean they're a media company, right? But certainly developed a focused media company. So I think you'll be okay. You're about the business of software John. Don't worry Microsoft don't give you some space there. (John and James laughing) We're under the radar at theCUBE 365 for the folks who are watching this. This is our site that we built with our software. So we're open and Docker was instrumental and I think the Docker captains were also very instrumental and trying to help us figure out the best way to preserve the content value. I personally think we're in this early stage of, content and community are clearly go hand in hand and I think as you look at the chat, some of the names that are on there. Some of the comments, really there's a new flywheel of production and this to me is the ultimate collaboration when you have these distinct groups coming together. And I think it's going to just be a data dream where people aren't the product, they're actually a contributor. And I think this open source framework that you're talking about is going to be certainly just going to evolve rapidly. I think it's just not even scratching the surface. I just think this is going to be pretty massive. And services whatever you want to define that. It could be an API to anything. It's going to be essentially the scale point. I mean why have a monolith piece of software running something. Something Microsoft teams will work well here. Zoom will work well there but ultimately what's in it for me the person? This is the key question. Developers just want to develop. You're going to hear that throughout the day. Kelsey Hightower brings up some great points in his session and Amanda silver at Microsoft, she had a quote on one of her videos. She said, "App developers are the first responders "in this crisis." And that's the first time I've heard someone say that out loud and that hits home for me because it's true. And right now app developers are one of the front lines. They're providing the app support. They're providing to the practitioners in the field. This is something that's not really written about in the press. What's your reaction to app developers are the first responders in this crisis. >> Well I mean first I think it's important to pay tribute to people that actually are first responders. Writing code can make us responsive but let's not forget there are people that are lacking PPE and they are on the frontline. So not precise manner but I might frame it slightly differently. But certainly what the current situation has shown us is productivity is super important. Target has made huge investments in building out its own software development capabilities. So they used to be like 70% external 30% internal and they turn that round to like 80% internal 20 external. And they've been turning on a dime and well there's so much going on at the moment. I'm like talking about target then I'm remembering what's happening in Minneapolis today. But anyway we'll talk about that. But yeah organizations are responding quickly. Look at the numbers that Shopify is happening because all sorts of business is something like we need to be an online business. What's the quickest way to do that. And Shopify was able to package something up in a way that they they could respond to challenges. Huge social challenges. I'm a big believer the future's unwritten at this point and I think there's a lot of problems out there you point out and the first responders are there I agree. I'm just thinking that there's got to be a better path for all of us. And this brings up the whole new roles and responsibilities around this new environment and I know you're doing a lot of research. Can you share some thoughts on what you're kind of working on now James? That's important, I'll see what's trending here at DockerCon is. Compose the relationship with Microsoft, we've got security, Dockers now, multicloud approach, making it easier, that's their bread and butter. That's what they're known for. They kind of going back to that roots of why they pioneered in the first place. So as that continues ease-of-use, what's your focus area right now that you're researching that you could share with the audience? >> Well, I mean I'd say this year for me I've got probably three key areas. One is what's called GitOps. So it's the notion that you're using Git as a system of record. So that started off randomly making changes, you have an audit trail. You begin to have some sort of sense of compliance in software changes. I think the idea of everything has to be by a sort of a pull request. That automation model is super thing to me. So I've been looking at that. A lot of development teams are using those approaches. Observability is a huge trend. We're moving to the idea of testing and production. The kind of stuff that's been evangelized so successfully by charity majors honeycomb. It's super exciting to me and it's true because in effect, you're always testing in production, your dev environment. I mean we used to have this idea that you'd have a Dev and a Dev stage. You're have a staging environment. The only environment that really matters is where the rubber meets the road. And that is deployment. So I think that having having better tools for that is one of the areas I'm looking at. So how are tools innovating that area? And it won't be the thing that this is my own personal thing. I've been talking about progressive delivery which is asking a question about reducing risk by really understanding the blast radius of the service to be able to roll it out to specific use of populations first. Understanding who they are and enrolling it up so it's the idea that like maybe you brought something out to your employees first. Maybe you are in California and you roll something out in Tokyo knowing that not many people are using that service. It is a live environment but people are not going to be adversely affected if it happens. So Canary's Blue-Green deployments and also experimentation. This is sort of one of the areas I'm being sort of pulled towards. It's sort of product management and how that's really converging with software development. I feel like that's one of the things I haven't fully, I mean I think it's when they have research focused but you have to respond to new information. Anyhow, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the world of product management. It's those companies to be most respect in terms of companies that are crushing it in the digital economy. They have such a strong product management focused. Everything is driven by product managers that understand technology and that's an exciting shift. The one that I'm paying greater attention. >> You do some great work and I love the focus on productivity software development. Getting those app developers out there and it's interesting. I just think that it's such an exciting time. It's almost intoxicating. Some people drinking on Twitter online and having beers because they're in different time zone. But if you look up and down the action that's going on, you got at the application developers side, all the things you were mentioning services. But when you look at the cloud side, you got almost this operating system reset. It's a systems architecture. So you have the hall and that's up and down. The middle of the stack to the bottom, you have this operating systems thinking and evolution. And then you got at the top, the pure software developers. And this is again to me the big aha moment. For the industry there's a true opportunity to scale that in unbelievable ways. And you don't have to pick a side. You can do a top of the stack bottom stack. So I think kubernetes and micro services really bring this whole enablement piece to the table. And that fascinates me and I think that's going to change what the apps will look like. It'll give more productivity and then making the internet programmable unit, that's new systems. So that seems to be the trend. You're a systems guy, your girl or you're a developer. How do you see that evolving? Do you get to that level? >> Developer experience is not necessarily the key value of Kubernetes. It's supremely flexible sort of system. It does offer you that portability. But I think what I'm seeing now is how people are taking Kubernetes and kind of thinking, so you've got VMware, acquires Heptio, brings Pivotal into the fold, starting about what that platform looks like. I think Pivotal with cloud foundry did a great job of thinking through operator experience. Operator experience is not the same as developer experience. I think we're going to see a bit more specialization of roles. Meanwhile at that point, you've got the cloud players all doing pretty awesome job supporting Kubernetes. But it gives that portability promise. So I think for me, one of the things is not expecting everyone to do everything. It's like Kelsey said, some people just want to come into work and do their job and they're super important. And so VMware I think a history of certification of application environments. So of them it's sort of quite--and certification of humans. It's quite natural that they would be somebody that would think about how do we make Kurbenetes more consumable and packaged in a way that more people take advantage of it. Docker was such a phenomenon and now seeing how that sort of evolving into that promise of portability is beginning to be realized. So I think the specialization, the pendulum is going to swing back just a little bit. >> I think it's just great timing and congratulations on all the work and thanks for taking the time for participating in DockerCon with the Keynote. Taking time out of your day and coming in and doing this live interview. The chat looks good. Hit some great, get some fans in there. It's a great opportunity and I think Docker as the pioneers, pivoting in a new direction, it's all about developer productivity and James you've been on it. @monkchips is his Twitter handle, follow him, hit him up. I'm John Furrier here in the studio for DockerCon 2020. Ginebra CEO and you got Brett Fisher on the captain's channel. If you go to the site, you'll see the calendar. Jump into any session you want. They'll be live on the time or on-demand instantly. TheCUBE track has a series of enemies. You've got Amazon, we got Microsoft, get some great guests, great practitioners that are literally having an impact on society. So thanks for watching. James, thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you very much John. >> Okay James Governor, founder of Monkchips, great firm, great person-- >> RedMonk, RedMonk is the company. Monkchips is the Twitter. >> Redmonk, Monkchips. RedMonk, RedMonk. >> RedMonk is the company. >> RedMonk, RedMonk. >> @monkchips is his Twitter handle and RedMonk is the firm, thank you for the correction. Okay more coverage DockerCon after this short break. Stay with us. The next segment is coming up. Stay with us here at theCUBE DockerCon. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special Cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere seven dot O. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focus on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and VMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that VMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special CUBE conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere 7.0. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at >> Already? what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focused on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity / challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third cohost, but he is also the Principal CTO Advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> It's a pleasure to have you. So, you come to a lot of these shows, I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. >> So, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT pitch, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite where the breadth of content is so wide, and the conversation, so wide and, surprisingly, deep. This is been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. >> Talk about the content, you're absolutely right, we had so many product announcements, it felt like an Amazon Show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the Comms Team, so, does this feel like a different era for the company itself? >> You know what, Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over billion dollar evaluation. Microsoft wildly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation, they're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then, they just happen to announce that, oh, yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then, there's still the Teams announcements. The amount of content and the areas that Microsoft is going in, just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data, one of the jobs is replicate data, and they said they'll replicate data to AWS Cloud. Microsoft, great position. >> Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from Teams, that we're hearing a bunch about, to, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go SaaS-ify as many of your applications as you will, and Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application specific view of Kubernetes, we know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but, I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about, here's the IAS that it might live on. But, when you talk about Arc, they're talking about it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And this is a view for Microsoft, but, if you want to go do open shift, if you want to do spring with a Pivotal VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option but would love your view point so far as your Arc and where Microsoft sits in this broader ecosystem today. >> So, I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armor, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan, for some of the very reasons that you mentioned. It's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer focused company, so when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure stack, it makes the provisioning, the storage networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle added and you're doing the whiz bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z, more importantly, can I use it to build applications is Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in the Arc and how they approach it in the Azure stack. >> Absolutely, and you're talking, right now, about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella, yesterday, talking about democratizing computing, anyone can do it, AI for all, too. What are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? >> So, I just talked to a professional services architect, or an architect for professional services, one of the global big four's, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users, so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers, it is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisors that their future of enterprise IT is that companies, like Microsoft, then, will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. There's just not enough of Keiths and Stus in the world to do this by hand. So, great vision. >> And Keith, you brought up the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with Cloud and AI, the biggest guys, rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud and AI, Cloud, specifically, was supposed to be cheap and easy and we know it's neither of those two things. So, if you look at Cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with and I would love a little compare and contrast to the Vmwares and AWSs of the world. >> So, if you look, let's take a look at VMware, I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware VAR, or you're in VMware period, if you go outside of your lane, that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the CloudHealth, the Heptio, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the Pivotals of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversation with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers. And then, they also have Microsoft Dynamics, we ran into a customer, who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see Dynamic experts, and I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE this week, at Ignite, is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft, it seems like one that is, not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying, "whatever you want, "we're meeting you where you are." Have you found that, and is that striking to you, based on the Microsoft of Yore, which was more proprietary about where it's customers went for it's technology. >> So, we mainly cover enterprise tech, but, I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an arm based device, that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning talks, Microsoft Lightning talk, on a completely different topic, and at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, three of the, I think, leaders in a space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone on with these companies, and their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So, Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. I think the AWS, the example for Arc, replicating to AWS, customers have AWS, they're the biggest Cloud provider, Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. >> Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the key note yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was you're going to buy my OS, and my apps, and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. We talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft. When I talked to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft. Compare that to some others out there in the industry, and the big Hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious about, from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? >> So, some of the conversation on Twitter, just remotely, people not here, this is the best Ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some hold out, some people who remember this sting of forced to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But, as that sting starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say, "Microsoft is a different company." This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. >> What's driving it though? This is something we're seeing in the technology industry at large, this understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best in breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? >> I think it's the democratization of technology via Cloud. I talked to a just regular, small business owner. She runs a trucking business, she uses her computer as a tool, it was a five year old device, she really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked a business challenge that she was having, and I described Cloud in general and she never even considered Cloud as a thing. She just said, "you know what, "I want this solution and if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it, or even VM Works." She didn't care, she wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP, these are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached with, whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors, and they're being advised to adopt these technologies, regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Whether it was IBM blue or Microsoft blue. I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERP providers had a 100 million dollar failure, and the company just decided, you know what, we're not going to go with just one provider anymore, we're just going to go with best of breed across these business processes. >> So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we talked a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two. Well, Microsoft won a 10 billion dollar JEDI contract from the US. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, is that one billion dollars over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that impact Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft, I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a book seller. So, to say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS is a very, very short view of the landscape. >> We're just scratching the surface when it comes to Cloud. >> Keith, what other thing have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed the show three years ago so what are some of things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there, there are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here, would love your comment on that and any other takeaways. >> So, someone pointed out to me that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it, was that there is a lot of women at this show, and I looked up and I'm like wow, the lines for men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing because I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and age groups. There's Millennials all the way up to Boomers, and the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations, to deep and dirty, you know what these are the Cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky, and that conversation's all around best. Infrastructure, application, business, and then even social, I had that social conversation about diversity, and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. >> You know, that's a really good point, and even just even here, I mean, I know you made the schedule, which I salute you, because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. >> And it's easier at this show than it is at most, as opposed to please find me some more underrepresented or diversity there. And luckily, there is a lot of options at a show like this. >> Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally, I can usually say at a show, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and this show is not that case. >> No, there's more, there's more, exactly. >> Well, Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend, you are watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back, everyone. Live CUBE coverage here at VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, hosts of theCUBE here in two sets. We're on the main set. The set over there, Dave Vellante's hosting. This morning, we have two great guests here. Bob Ganley, who's Cloud Marketing at Dell EMC. John Allwright, Director of Product Marketing at Pivotal. We got operators, we got development experts here. Guys, thanks for joining us. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, excited to be here. >> John: Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So the show, VMworld, we're obviously an operators' show, one of the things that's really interesting is the Dell EMC equation of VMware on Dell EMC. You're seeing the piece parts coming together. The Pivotal acquisition, you're in Product Marketing over there, so I'm sure you got to perspective on the dots that connect there, even though the acquisition's a couple days old. Let's start with Dell EMC. Michael was on yesterday. I said, "You guys were number one in all the metric quadrants." You know, this, that, servers. As you've got to pull that together on-premises, where the Data Center is nearly going away and the Edge has emerged, you got to have an operating model that's got to be cloud. And that's really seems to be the focus, clearly. >> Yeah, absolutely. What we see is that customers today are trying to deliver value through applications. And it's all about apps, because apps is where that value gets delivered to the customer. So, as organizations are trying to deliver those applications, the question becomes what's the best place to put the app. So right workload, right cloud is a big thing for us. Clearly, organizations have been adopting public cloud in droves. What we see is that they're trying to figure out how do they get that public cloud infrastructure to work with what they're doing on-prem. What we're bringing to the table, is a solution called Dell Technologies Cloud. We're super-excited about bringing together private and public in a hybrid cloud solution in a way that provides consistent infrastructure and consistent operations. As you guys have seen, everybody's excited about next-generation apps, right? So now, where are we going with next generation apps? That's really what this show is all about. >> Bob, I'm so glad you brought up the apps. Because we often, my background's infrastructure, and we get down in the weeds as to what's doing, and, like, oh we architected this better and chipsets and all these things there. But it's that modernization that customers are going through. Can you pick us through, what are the patterns you're seeing? One term I'd used for a while is, modernize the platform and then modernize the apps. Is that it? Containerization, where do all these pieces fit, again, when they're talking about their application development? >> It's interesting because every customer's on an application journey. We all started in physical, right? I was a software developer right out of college. Working with physical infrastructure is where it's at. Organizations have clearly adopted virtualization. And most organizations are now trying to pivot toward how do I get more efficiency, more agility, for my virtualized applications. That's really where infrastructure as a service, and IT as a service is adding a lot of value today. So, the question becomes, as I'm working with my existing virtualized applications, and now looking at next generation apps and developing those, how am I going to bring that along? We see this physical to virtual to infrastructure as a service, to container as a service, as being a very logical progression for customers. >> Well, certainly it's absolutely standardized now. Containers, since Docker hit the scene. Containers had been around for a while. You talk to anyone with development, oh, containers, put a wrapper around things, it's kind of a known concept. John, I want to get your thoughts, because one of the things about Dev Ops in the Cloud 1.0 was, clearly the cloud native world was obvious. If you were a startup, you were born in the cloud, it was all goodness. You didn't have on-premise to deal with. You just did everything. The operator was the developer, right? So, Cloud 2.0 is a little bit more complicated. And we're seeing that the trend where the infrastructure has to be enabling for the developer, and that has been a key thing. But what's interesting is, in Cloud 2.0, as we're calling it, the world is flipped upside down. It used to be the infrastructure would dictate what the application developers could do, based upon what the capabilities were, to now the application developers dictating resources below them to be on demand, or elastic, or one cloud, two clouds. So the application's dictating configuration and architecture, either dynamically or specifically. Not limited to what is rolled out. So this relationship between infrastructure and developers is evolving very quickly. I would love to get your thoughts on how you see it. You've been around the block on this point. >> I mean, Pat had a great slide in the Keynote, which kind of put Kubernetes as in between developers and operators. I think the way that is evidenced itself is that Kubernetes has been something that's been driven down from developers. They're saying, this is the infrastructure that we want to run our applications. Working at the levels that typically infrastructure is provided. There's too much work for them to do. So in some cases, they were packaging up Kubernetes with their applications and saying to the infrastructure folks, hey, deploy this. I think we've now kind of crossed the point where Infrastructure go, well this is a thing and I need to provide that. So things like Project Pacific, or a recognition that, yeah, why not bake that into the infrastructure? So Kubernetes is kind of Dev Ops, materialized in a product. >> Yeah, it was interesting. I had an interview yesterday. We've been watching Kubernetes since the beginning. But the way they described it is, Kubernetes is really the new server. It's like I can spin up that environment in a much shorter period of time. Which, of course, was part of the value proposition of going to containerization. Project Pacific is, you're going to take your install base of VMs and give them that bridge to the future. Pivotal also, if I wanted to just do it in the public cloud, you've got the options there. Correct? What I'd love, John, if you can help tease us out the Kubernetes message. If I take VMware plus Pivotal and Heptio and all the pieces, help us sort through the fog a little bit. >> The thing that's become very clear to us at Pivotal and, I think, in the industry is that Kubernetes is now becoming an expected default. Whereas maybe before it was VMs, that's the basic foundation that I'm going to build my workers, my applications on. Now it's Kubernetes. And whether I'm building custom applications or a vendor is supplying me with something as a container images in a pod, that's kind of the default. So the big thing about the announcers from the Keynote was that's really what we're working to. In something like Tanzu Mission Control, now distracts you away from necessarily where those Kubernetes are appearing, whether that is on-prem or in the public cloud. Let's you work across a foundation that actually appears in a lot of different places. >> The impact of Mission Control. Just drill down on that for a second, because that demo was pretty sweet. Just take a minute to explain the relevance of having the view of all those Kubernetes clusters across the cloud and what it means to the operator. Because that was an interesting demo. >> Yeah, so the analogy I use, and it doesn't fit exactly, but it's kind of like power stations in a grid. With a lot of products, things like SoS with PKS, have been creating the power stations that let you run Kubernetes, but the power is really in having the grid. So Mission Control gives you the grid. It lets you do operations across Kubernetes wherever they are. But also do things like migrations. We talk about Enterprise PKS being a really good start point of getting into this new world of Pacific and everything. And it's actually Tanzu Mission Control that enables that. It's like VMotion for containers, almost. >> It is such an important piece, because every platform is going to have Kubernetes, and while VMware is going to have some Kubernetes, it's not going to have all Kubernetes. So if I've got some in Amazon, and I'm using Anthos over here, we'd love to have that management platform that gives me visibility. Bob, I just want to bring it back to you here. In the industry, we've had time and time again where we want to manage a heterogeneous environment. It's been Don Quixote chasing after that dream. Tell us how do we pull that together and where do we live? >> I think you guys were talking about the fact that developers expect this Kubernetes dial tone today, and that's driving infrastructure choices. One of the things that we need to do as infrastructure people is make that real. In other words, it's all well and good to develop an application on a Kubernetes infrastructure, but now how do I turn that into a production service that is helping me drive revenue, for example. What we need to do is operationalize that, in a way that can bring that to life, and bring that to life in a production way. That's really where we're going with PKS, on VCF, on VxRail. So PKS on VCF allows organizations to actually automated fashion deploy a Kubernetes cluster. So what that does is allow organizations to now suddenly bring their investment in what they've been doing in virtualization today, and bring that toward this next generation containerized-based applications. This is key because in order to, for example, stand up a Kubternetes cluster, and then make that into a production service, there's just tons of moving parts. So why not automate that in a fashion that essentially takes all of the stress out of that Day Zero. And then, furthermore, when it comes to Day Two, and making sure that's up to date, making sure that you can patch that. For example, if there's a critical bug, you want to be able to do that in an automated fashion as well, because there's just so many moving parts that it's impossible to keep track of all this stuff manually. >> Bob, there's so many changes that go through when we're moving to that environment where it's going to change a lot more. We think about management. It used to be, oh, okay, I know where the server lives. Wait, VMs fly all over the place with VMotion of containers, by the time you go looking for it, it feels like it's trying to measure the speed and direction of an atom. You can't pin it down. But the one I want to get you, from a customer along that journey, the consumption model has to be something that is changing along the lines. How does the infrastructure, how do we make sure it can scale like the cloud, and how can I pay for it like that, that flexible model? >> That's pretty interesting, because we see a couple of things. Organizations come to us and say, I'm all in uncloud. Okay, what do you mean you're all in uncloud? Well, there's two things that come out, right? One is elastic capacity, the ability to expand as needed. The other one is metered use. In other words, I only want to pay for this stuff when I'm actually using it. We're providing a couple of ways to get there today with Dell Technologies Cloud. One is this Data Center as a Service offering that we've been discussing, which is VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. The other one is flex on demand, and flex on demand is an offer that we'll bringing to the table for traditional customer-managed infrastructure that allows organizations to essentially only pay for the nodes that they're using in their on-premises cluster. We believe that being able to deliver that, whether it's on-prem with traditional infrastructure, or in a public cloud environment, which organizations clearly have voted with their dollars on, is key. So that's what we're bringing to the table with Dell Tech Cloud. >> It's clear you guys are building that out and running as fast as you can (laughing) to get it done. The final thought I want to get your guys to weight in on, the show this week. What's the big takeaway from your perspective? Obviously Pivotal is big news into the fold with VMware is going to be a really strategic opportunity for VMware to go that next level with developers and then figuring out, connecting the dots there. What's the top stories that you're seeing, that people, that you're walking away with from the show this week? >> For me, it's really you don't have to choose. In other words, organizations are looking at containerization and saying, wow, next generation applications are going there. Maybe I should be shifting everything over there. And yet they're saying, gosh, I've got all this existing infrastructure, what am I going to do? So really, PKS on VCF is allowing organizations to say, I can have existing virtualized apps living right next to my emerging containerized applications, and use existing infrastructure, existing skills in order to get there. And I think really you don't have to choose. You've got a path forward from where you are today, into this next generation of cloud-native applications is really exciting, and that's what we're >> John, your thoughts. >> bringing to the table. >> I think organizations, customer organizations, need to re-evaluate who VMware is, and what they can do for them. Pivotal's always been about business outcomes for our customers, and those outcomes come through developing software to drive the business. VMware has reached out to developers in the past, but that's really on steroids now. >> They've really had a ton of success there because they're operators. But they've always been a software company. VMware is, at heart, a software company. >> Right, but I always think of marketing as save money, make money (laughing) but go faster. VMware's been amazing at helping folks to save money, go faster. >> I think the Pivotal relationship's going to be really important for VMware. I think it's going to completely change the game. We'll be tracking the progress. Thanks for sharing, thanks for coming on. Thanks for the insight, here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, and more of the live coverage from Vmworld 2019 after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Bought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at Vmworld 2019, San Francisco, California. We're in Moscone North Lobby. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years of covering VMworld. This is our 10th year. Pat, you've been on every year since 2010. We have photos. >> That's sort of scary. >> You had a goatee back then. (Pat laughs) We've heard your rap going way back. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Oh man, scary. You guys probably got some dirt on me. Boy, I better be careful. >> John: Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on this evening. >> Oh, always a pleasure to be on with you guys, love it. >> Don't end up as driftwood. Security is a do over. We're going to talk about all that. >> We're going to spend the entire segment just talking about Pat Gelsinger's predictions. We'll recycle some of them, but let's get into the core news here, VMworld. You've done such an amazing job. We've given you a lot of props on theCUBE over the years, but still continuing, even in the market climate that's swinging up and down right now, VMware still producing great results. The team is executing. Their transition since October 2016 when you kind of made that move, cloud is it, clear vision, a lot's been falling into place. Pivotal has dropped on your lap, and you got the engineering stuff coming out on top of vSphere and a bunch of other things. Great stuff, I mean, you must be geeking out. >> Well, thank you. At the US gymnastics finals, Simone Biles did a triple double. First time ever in competition. And I think of our last week as a triple double, right, two major acquisitions, an earnings call, and now VMworld and all the announcements as part of it. It's like wow. >> John: You stick the landing, you stick the landing. >> That's right, we did yesterday morning. We stuck the landing and Ray did that today as well. So super proud of the team in bringing these across the line. And I think certainly meeting with many of the customers and the partners here everybody's sort of going wow. And I was excited about VMware before I got here. Now I'm just euphoric, and it's really-- >> I'm told Ray did an exceptional job. I'm going to talk to him later today on theCUBE. Today in his keynote he was great. He repeated the messages over and over again, but he nailed the tech piece. I got to ask you, as the engine of VMware is continuing to be put together and expand it's like a new turbo engine gets pulled in here. There's a lot of really good engineering going on. What are you most excited about? How would you describe all the action going on? If someone says, "Pat, what's the underlying engine here?" What's being built? What's going to be the outcome of all this? >> Well, I think it sort of boils down to, right, these two phrases that you heard from me yesterday. We're going to engineer for good, the tech for good stuff, we're going to do good engineering. And doing both of those is just okay. And you sort of say, "Hmm, we got vSAN," right? We're not being able to optimize the performance because big blocks, little blocks, latency, buffer size, all this other kind of stuff, so now we're doing Magna, right? And when you see that demonstration there, it's like we're going to do it automatically for you to be a fine-grain optimizing your storage. Wow, that's pretty cool, and it's intelligence, right? It's sort of saying, "Wow, this is really cool." So let's go automatically produce an understanding of the underlying network, understand what's going on, give you the rules that we recommend, and allow you to simulate them, which is super cool, right? Within minutes, we will give the network engineer more understanding of what's really going on in our applications, and then allow them to see it in real time and then apply it. Every one of these, and it's just 10 or 15 tremendous engineers who are doing these little innovations that are fundamentally changing the industries that they're in, in addition to the big stuff. It's just thrilling. >> Dave did a survey before coming into VMworld with customers with a panel. 41% said they're not going to change their spending habits with VMware so creating the-- >> Dave: They said they're going to increase-- >> Increase. >> In the second half, only 7% said they're going to decrease. >> So great customer loyalty, and remember, VMware's moving so fast and transit. Customers aren't moving as fast as you guys are, and you've talked about that before. What are you hearing from customers as they look at it and say, "Wow, is it too much new stuff?" 'Cause they want to continue to operate, but they also want to enable the developer piece. Because remember, DevOps means dev and ops. You guys got the ops piece down. You're adding stuff to it. There's always concerns there making sure it's smooth and you guys work on that. The dev piece becomes super critical. That's where Amazon really shined with public cloud. So hybrid cloud's here. What is the DevOps equation for hybrid? I mean Kubernetes is a good start. Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, and that's really the center. To me, that is the most important news of VMworld this year is the entire Tanzu message, the coming together of Pivotal, the coming together of Pacific, coming together with Mission Control, so really leveraging VMware in the run layer, leveraging Pivotal in the build, and Heptio in the manage, right, and those coming together into Tanzu. I think that's the most important thing that we're doing. And I think for operators, which is really the center of our audience here at VMworld, they've always struggled with those crazy developers. They do this cool new stuff. It's not operational, it's not secure. But in bringing those together, the magic formula for that is Kubernetes. And that's why we're making these big bets. The move with Pivotal, obviously the Heptio guys, I mean Joe Beda and Craig, they're just the rock stars of that community because they really are solving in an industry-consensual standard way. That's really the magic of Kubernetes. This ain't a VMware thing, this is an industry thing. >> Is Kubernetes the technology enabler? I mean, TCP/IP was that in the old networking days. It enabled a lot of shifts in the industry. You were part of that wave. Is Kubernetes that disruptive enabler? >> Yeah, I really see it as one of those key transition points in the industry. And as I sort of joked, if my name was Scott, and we were 20 years ago, I'd be banging the table calling it Java. And Java defined enterprise software development for two decades. By the way, Scott's my neighbor. He's down the hill, so I look down on Mr. McNealy. I always sort of like that. (everybody laughs) >> He looks up to you. >> But it changed how people did enterprise software development for the last two decades. And Kubernetes has that same kind of transformative effect, but maybe even more important, it's not just development but also operations. And I think that's what we're uniquely bringing together with Project Pacific, really being able to bridge those two worlds together. And if we deliver on this, I think the next decade or two will be the center of innovation for us, how we bridge those two roles together and really give developers what they need and make it operator friendly out of the box, cross the history to the future. This is pretty powerful. >> So that does lead to the big question. You just mentioned developers. And when you look out the VMworld audience, it's not comprised of huge developers. I know you're thinking about this, so what's your plan to attract those developers? You're giving them platform now, and the technologies. but those builders, what are you going to do for them? Is it build community, more events, more training? What's the plan there? >> Yeah, and I'd say I think about it in a couple of different context. One is if we were here six years ago, and you would have asked me about open source, right? I mean, VMware's reputation in the open source community wasn't good, right? We hired Dirk, we started to build momentum, make contributions. One of the litmus tests for Joe and Craig on Heptio, 'cause remember, a lot of people could have bought Heptio. Because some was who's going to be the buyer, but also will they be a willing seller. And their litmus test was are you really serious about open source, right? Are you really committed to the open source, Kubernetes tree and development and cloud-native computing foundation? Are you really there? 'Cause they were also looking do I want to be bought by you? Do I want to be part of the VMware family? And we passed the test. That's why Heptio's part of the team. Clearly, this has been central to Pivotal and their views. So we have to be open-source credible. We also have to be developer credible, and those two are tightly linked. And that's why we noted on stage Pivotal, particularly the Java community, is three-plus million developers. Bitnami is two million-ish developers. We now have high volume connections to the developer community, and you're going to see us show up in dramatically more profound ways at places like Kubicon and SpringOne is coming up, just start to be in the developer spaces. And ultimately, you got to do stuff that they care about. At the end of the day, winning developers has nothing to do with great marketing, even though that's important. You have to do great code, right, and bring them value to their development assignments. And we think with the assets that we're lining up, that's why we did Pivotal, Bitnami, Heptio, some of our organic things, Dirk's leadership here. I believe that a year or two from now VMware could be seen as the most developer and open source enterprise company in the industry. And that's the goal that I'm on. >> Well, I have an idea for you. Allocate 1,000 engineers to open source and start having them build new applications, new workloads, give it away to the open source community, and then sell your products and services to them. That would get you in fast. >> Well, by the way, we now have hundreds of engineers who are committed to open source, who their full-time job is open source contributions. So I'm not to 1,000 yet, but I'm now several hundred that their day job, night job, weekend job is open source contribution. So we're becoming very credible, and as you heard me say in the keynote, we are now top three contributor to Kubernetes. This is big, and some areas like the networking area we're clearly the leader in a number of the key networking open source technologies, and you'll see us do more of those kind of projects. >> One of the things you mentioned, I mean you mentioned about open source six years ago, you might have rolled your eyes, or you might not have had an opinion on it 'cause the timing of where VMware was. But one thing you've been banging the drum on since 2012 is hybrid cloud. And so you see certain things early. You see those waves. That's what you're known for, in my opinion. You're really good about it. You see blockchain as a great wave, but as a headline I'm reading on Fortune it says, "VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, "Bitcoin is bad for humanity." >> Sold all my bitcoin (laughs). >> Okay, so now are you implying then, and blockchain is a lot of open source components there. It's evolving, you've a lot of blockchain projects. So is that an indictment on the unregulated currency market or is it the underlying infrastructure? And are you excited about blockchain as an underlying? Is it one of those hybrid cloud moments for you, or is it more of we'll see how it develops? What's your thoughts? And explain the bitcoin comment too. >> Yeah, the idea of distributed ledger technology, immutable distributed trust, I've said I think of that and blockchain as the underlying technology as almost like public private key encryption, right? If we go back 40 years before RSA or Vashumi and Ari, it's that important. This is breakthrough, innovative technology in how you do distributed secure trust. That's powerful, so we are huge believers, strongly committed to blockchain and distributed leverager technology. Now, why do I make my comments like I do on bitcoin? So bitcoin, as it's implemented, and implementation of blockchain and distributed ledger, I assert is bad. It's bad for two reasons. One is it's an environmental crisis, right? A single ledger, if you and I transacted a penny, right, I would consume enough energy to power your house for half a day. I mean, it's incredible, and I mean, that's why you have these crazy bitfarms being built and people finding GPUs. >> So you think from a sustainability standpoint. >> Absolutely. >> That's where you came from. >> Climate sustainability, right, this is a terrible implementation of blockchain. Secondly, the way it's also done as well in this totally unregulated environment, almost all of its uses are for illicit and criminal purposes. That's who's trading in bitcoin as well. So its purpose is almost all illicit, right, and it's environmental crisis. I say bad. Now, I'm not saying that blockchain is bad. I think this is revolutionizing. >> I want to make sure we clarify that because obviously unregulated outside the United States has been a big problem. We see it in the SEC crackdown, and results are-- >> Studies have shown over 95% of the use of bitcoin is criminal, so say bad. Let's go make it good, and that's what I mean these two phrases, do good engineering, and engineer for good. How do we make blockchain, and this is part of the reason, we had just announced on Sunday a partnership with Australian Stock Exchange and Data Asset, that they're leveraging the VMware distributed ledger technology, right, as part of their go-forward strategy for the stock exchange of Australia. Well, that's good, right? We're making it suitable for enterprises, meeting the regulatory requirements and-- >> John: Are you happy with the progress of where the blockchain is for you guys? >> Absolutely, and we're order-plus magnitude better in terms of performance and energy consumption. So yeah, and we're just getting started. >> And it's consensus-based, which is great. A quick question for you on multicloud. So hybrid cloud you said in 2012, I challenged you on it, and you've been banging the drum since 2012. It's a couple years into it, and hybrid cloud is pretty much standard. People see it, recognize it as the cloud 2.0. Multicloud is all the buzz and all the rage. I hear it everywhere. What does it actually mean is a different debate, so I want to get your thoughts on defining what multicloud is and is it going to have that same gestation period of the same kind of years? 'Cause if it's seven years to get or six years to get hybrid cloud mainstream, is multicloud going to have a similar trajectory? >> Yeah, so let's try to be very crisp with the definition. Multicloud is simply that. Customers using multiple clouds for different business purposes. And what we said is is that we're going to help them manage. That's the center point of cloud health, right? Help customers manage, cost optimize, secure in a multicloud environment where the underlying infrastructure is dissimilar, not compatible, right? And in that sense, you sort of say you can have consistent operations if we do our job well with cloud health, but you're not going to have consistent infrastructure, meaning I can't VMotion between these things, I can't have higher these things. So that's the multicloud. Now a proper subset of multicloud is hybrid cloud. And hybrid cloud is where you have both consistent operations and consistent infrastructure. And that's when we can do things like you saw on the demo today, right? We're running a VMware stack on Azure. We're moving Azure running workloads in real time, right, without stunning them, pausing them, to an Amazon VMC instead of moving workloads from Amazon VMC onto an Azure instance. That's the hybrid cloud, and that's the power at work, from private data centers to multiple different targets in the public cloud where you can be optimizing the location of work nodes based on the proper business requirements. And that might be governance. That might be performance. It might be latency. It might be the time of the day of the week when you have capacity available, right? And that's really what we're saying. Consistent operations and consistent infrastructure, proper subset of multicloud. >> I have a question on something you said yesterday. You said, "Strength lies in differences not similarities." True, I buy that. There's a number of difference between you and your preferred public cloud partner. AWS doesn't use the term multicloud. They say you shouldn't say security's not broken. And there are a number. You want to be the best infrastructure and developer software company. They want to be that platform. They want to be the security cloud, on and on and on. So I see this impending collision course, maybe not tomorrow, but what are your thoughts on the differences and the good or bad that does for the industry? >> Yeah, well, we appreciate Amazon, the investments that we're making. We've both bet big with each other, and they've been a great partner. And in fact, I'm going to talk to Andy before the end of the week, update some of the announcements and some of the things. Great partner, we have regular cadence of our activities with each other. And as we said, they're our preferred public cloud partner. And with it, it's preferred in two senses. It's a go to market and how we position that, but it's also an R&D statement, right? This is where we're doing a lot of core engineering, and that will flow into private cloud embodiments, flow into our other public cloud and our cloud-verified partners. But that's the point of the arrow in terms of the innovations, the go to market, and the R&D aspects of the partnership. And I expect we're going to be here five years from now and we're going to have this conversation, and I'm going to answer it exactly the same way. >> That'll be our CUBE's 15th anniversary, and so we'll be excited for that. It's our 10 year, so I want to last question put you on the spot, looking back over 10 years, pick the moments that you think were key inflection points. What were key notable good things that happened, bad things that happened, or things that didn't happen, right? And then going forward 10 years, you laid out a few of them with Kubernetes. Just past 10 years, could be CUBE memories, but in VMware's world, you were at EMC first, then became CEO, a lot's changed. Paul Maritz laid out the original vision. And where we are today, what's your key moments? >> Yeah, well, I think if you go all the way back, obviously, hey when the first WSX, right, people could run Linux and Windows on their client. Wow, right? The first VMotion, right, oh my gosh, and that sort of ushered in ESX. Obviously the transition from Diane to Paul, the public offering, boy, that was a pretty tumultuous time. And from Paul to Pat was very much we lay it out pretty much this any cloud vision, and that model, it was formative and we're sort of bringing it together. It was get rid of some assets, bring together, so sort of that transition was challenging for the company. But then we've started to sort of systematically say build from the core. What do we have? What do we need as we started to build these layers in the concentric circles? The Nicira acquisition, boom, that was the shot that changed the world of networking. And obviously, that doesn't change quickly, but we have a multibillion dollar networking business, Avi Networks, VeloCloud, we're building that set of assets. >> Software-defined data centers. The Core engine, that was a key point. >> Dave: That was a total game changer. >> You cannot build a software-defined data center if you don't address the networking. It's just that simple, and that's why I was so passionate about that. Obviously, the HCI move with vSAN. Joe Tucci was so pissed off at me, right? (everybody laugh) What are you doing? It's operative. It's part of the ingredients of the data center, Joe. I got to do it, wait. >> John: Just being a software company. >> Yeah, yeah, right, so that was a pretty tense moment. The period of the Dell EMC merger, a tough period, right, as well, and just where the company's going to go. And within a week, right, I'm going to be fired. I'm going to be spun out, right? I'm going to be the new CEO of Dell, right? I mean, it was going to be HP. >> John: All the rumor. >> Stock is 40, obviously the Amazon moment, when we did that partnership. vCloud Air, hey, we had the right idea. We didn't implement it properly, and then we did it right with the Amazon partnership, and that just changed the cloud industry. And I think we're going to look at today, this week, and the moves with Heptio, Kubernetes, Pivotal, those pieces coming together, and to this audience Project Pacific, right, it's just like okay, wow, everyone of them will become Kubernetes enabled. 20,000 selfies with Joe Beda, right, have now been ushered because it is that game changing, we believe. This is the biggest free architecture of the Core platform in a decade, so. >> My favorite quote from you was if you're not out on that next wave, you're driftwood. You said that on the QA, I forget which year it was. >> And mine's security's the do over. (Pat laughs) >> You're doing it over, you're doing it, Mr. Gelsinger. >> Next 10 years, what's the big wave everyone should be on? What's the wave that you identify? You've seen many waves, you've created waves, you've been part of waves. What's the wave for the next 10 years that people should pay attention to, that they need to be on? >> Well, if they're not on the networking wave, get on it, right? They got to be on this multicloud hybrid wave. Could it be louder? The Kubernetes one is the one, right? That's the one I'm going to put at the front of the list. And this move in security, I am just passionate about this, and as I've said to my team, if this is the last thing I do in my career is I want to change security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms if they can't-- >> John: National defense issues, huge problems. >> It was just terrible. And I said if it kills me, right, I'm going to get this done. And they says, "It might kill you, Pat." >> Mount Kilimanjaro right there. Pat, thank you for all your commentary, and great look back 10 years. You've been one of our favorite guests coming on theCUBE, bringing A game, you're bringing the tech chops, the historian aspect, also you're running one of the most valuable open source companies in the cloud. (Pat and John laugh) >> Love you guys, thanks so much. >> Thanks, Pat. Pat Gelsinger here inside theCUBE. Our 10th year, VM's looking good off the tee right now, middle of the fairway, as they say, for the next 10 years. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vallante, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(funky music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's "theCUBE" covering Vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners >> John: Hey welcome back everyone its "theCUBE" live coverage here of VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our tenth year covering VMworlds. The last show that's still around since "theCUBE" started. EMC World's now a part of Dell Technology World so VMworld was our first show of "theCUBE" in 2010 and we're here with then the Senior Director now the CMO of VMware Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for coming. 10 years ago we were across the street at the South. The first ever "CUBE", now 10 years later, what a run. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Robin: Well how 'about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me so I think we're on, like, number 16 or so for VMworld so, yeah, we've driving been this ship for a while and it's still going strong. >> John: And, you know, when you came in the studio we did a little preview video and one of the things we talked about and you jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year I thought really used some of his primetime real estate to highlight Tech for Good and really some of the efforts around that so 1. Shareholder value, you guys have been doing great. Stock prices up. But in this era of, you know, corporate responsibility and accountability, this Tech for Good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's the real deal and it was a big part of the keynote. >> Robin: It was. In fact, it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean, I think when it's in our DNA, and that is consistent with our values, and we've been at that for some time. We have values that are all about, you know, customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value but that isn't enough. You know, I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take. And it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Callum Eade swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose. He raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that so I think, we think it's a really important topic, we tried to give it a lot of air time, and give a way for the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. >> John: And also, you guys are also voted one of the best places to work. Your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful and it is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive and had Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment he's like, "You know, I've been at VMware "for many, many years", now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital, and Carl said, "You know, everyone's been "trying to kill VMware. This is going to VMware, "that's going to kill virtuals." The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers, the attendees are excited by it, the numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. >> Robin: Yeah, I mean I think, you know resiliency is in the fabric of VMware but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce and we know in Silicon Valley you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of, left out and, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disrupters. I mean some of the big acquisitions that we announced just last Thursday at earnings that we are educating folks here about, the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we will acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. >> Dave: We were talking in "theCUBE" earlier, Robin, about how now it's a post-virtual machine world and if we go back to 2009, which was my first VMworld as well, Paul Maritz at the time said we're building this software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing but (laughs) so well done but you kind of evolved the software-defined data center vision. But one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app , which was kind of the vision back then and now in a cloud which the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint you've really, the vision has been consistent but now with all these acquisitions you're making you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. >> Robin: To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now, I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is we deliver on that vision 'cause, you know, a vision it's not all perfect, we don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers and I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's the Carbon Black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. >> Dave: Well and the gauntlet that you lay down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay. That kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners so. >> Robin: Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark it's like, lean into this opportunity. Betting on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. >> Dave: And there's diversity in the messages, you know, all the major cloud players say, "Well no. Just our cloud." You guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? >> Robin: Our strategy has always been about choice, you know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them and we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS, some are leaning into Azure, some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction, efficiently, and operate those workloads in any of those environments. >> John: Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging channel that's in and of itself but still containers seems to be that next step function with Kubernetes that VM's brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops that's where it starts to get magical when the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme. cloud-Native. All this enablement's coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? >> Robin: Well it is an evolving journey, if you will, and yes but it's still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here, there's a mobility crowd here, there's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that dev/ops community and we do have shifts in that but I would say that's part of the value as we bring Pivotal into the family, we can now merge these audiences and, I think, do a much formidable job at that. >> John: It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well >> Robin: Yeah. >> John: A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. >> Robin: Without a doubt, I mean, the whole Edge and Telco clouds are really opening up new entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and Enterprise so we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. >> John: You mentioned Pivotal, I think that's more of they were already in the fold, now they're officially in the fold with Dell Technologies but your other acquisitions, there's a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them into the fold so is there the marketing playbook do you have an off-site meeting and you just give them the playbook? How do you handle all the integrations? 'Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration, again it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition but >> Yeah. >> John: What's your strategy to integrate all these companies? >> Robin: Well, you know, any time you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions you definitely have to think very strategically about integration and then sometimes you want to integrate fully, right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be stand-alone for a little while. Got to get used to the culture a bit-- >> John: Like Velocloud? >> Robin: Velocloud is kind of independent-- >> John: They've got their own building. >> Robin: within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring 'em right into the family, you just merge 'em in, it just depends on the size, the scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Depends on the circumstances. >> Dave: So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware and take the Carbon Black example for instance you talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with AppDefense but from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part. It was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes but when you think about the vision do you look at it and say, "Okay this plugs nicely into the vision "and so here's what I'm going to do?" How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? >> Robin: Well, you know, I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family. I mean, how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands and that is a journey that we're going to be on. We'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important that the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy, you know, if it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand that's okay, we can work on that over time but as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that journey. >> John: Yeah. I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do. Unlike others like IBM which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM, you guys are a little bit different, You'll play with whatever the market will give you. That's pretty much what I hear you're saying. >> Robin: Well for example, Carbon Black, experts in security, you know. I think we want to capitalize on that expertise. We want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with AppDefense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is >> Right. >> Robin: consuming the other (laughing) so our strategy is let's combine AppDefense with Carbon Black and then start working with Patrick and Carbon Black to merge that into the-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: Organizationally, I think that's, at least what I read >> Yeah. >> Dave: was you can set up essentially a cloud security division, right, that Patrick is going to >> That Patrick is going to run. >> Dave: run, so >> That's right. >> John: Okay so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. This is Moscone North, nice build-out, always good build-outs here. Moscone, we're back in from Vegas but what's going on? Labs, activities-- >> Robin: We've got it >> Give the-- >> Robin: all, John >> Give us the highlights. >> Dave: Klingons >> That's right. >> Robin: First of all you've got two great days of keynotes, right, those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things, demo, technical, deep dive. Great guest celebrity speakers, right, We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vonn and Steve Young. But here for the program we have the Hands-On Labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday so I know they've been really well-attended and consumed. We have over 600 break-outs, so many it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the Solutions Exchange and that's probably a place where you can go not just to get the VMware stuff but get that good exposure and lay of the land of the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new, what's the latest. So I think those give people a really good quick snapshot in one week, you can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. >> John: Are there any must-sees in your opinion? >> Robin: (breathing in) Oh-- >> John: Or that people are talking about? >> Robin: I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu, what's Tanzu Mission Control, what are we doing with the Heptio acquisition, what is PKS evolution happening, I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific work, Kubernetes in vSphere, tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot happening in the networking space, right. Pat was pretty bold up there about, you know, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now so I think you've really got to get into that from the data center to the Edge to the cloud. Network transformation's hot. And then of course I think the cloud and I think we're really clear on hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how, if you're architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about, what are we doing across multi-cloud, and, you know, I think all that hybrid-cloud stuff, it's all there. >> Dave: As we move to this, you know, this post-VMworld, VMware world how do you-- >> Robin: Is there a post-VMware world? >> Dave: What role, post-virtual-- >> John: Oh look at that, there we go. (laughing) >> Robin: I don't think there's a post-VMware world. >> Dave: Post-VM. I mean virtual machines. >> Robin: Virtualization. >> John: Are you changing the name to container world? >> Robin: No. (laughing) >> Dave: Right, exactly. So what (laughing) yeah what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructures of code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes, you know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where you know, guys learn how to program in Python or, you know, whatever it is >> Right. >> Dave: Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event or? >> Robin: Well that's part of what all this content is about, I mean, you know, 600 break-out sessions aren't about, you know, compute virtualization. You can find those but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on, it's about meet the experts, it's about sessions, it's about the ecosystem, it's about having that all at your disposal in one week. >> You forgot something. >> Oh did I? >> The parties. >> The party? >> Everyone >> Well that's not helping your technical-- >> Everyone >> Aptitude >> Everyone knows VMworld has great parties at night and that's where all the action, you guys work hard/play hard one of the ethos of VMware culture. >> Robin: That's right, that's right. Well, we do work hard/play hard because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days and so we got to let off a little steam and OneRepublic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time. But I do think it's on the back drop of them here they are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. >> John: My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote, around the tech industry good, bad, and Pat says neutral, it's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and a strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change for good. So I got to ask you about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around companies always try to market around trust. Now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that a marketer and what's the conscience of VMware because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. >> Robin: Yeah, well first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return and if you earn trust you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven, you know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate >> Yeah >> Robin: why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers and, at the end of the day, probably more authentic. >> John: Yeah, and I think people, yeah that tends to be the track record of people who say it maybe haven't earned it, right, earning it's the better marketing strategy-- Yeah, I think these 20,000 (laughing) people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today. Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, there'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over 100 customers in these sessions here and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. >> John: Well they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey hey did, just published it yesterday, the spend is not going down. I mean the cloud impacts your business, you're getting into the cloud so that's pretty obvious but just overall the business is healthy >> Oh very >> John: for VMware (laughing) >> Robin: Very healthy. And you know we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value but it's about tech as a force for good, we're passionate about that and ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors, and I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. >> John: Well, Robin, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years. Continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust, certainly the proof is in the results, and, you know, it is what it is, and the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation so congratulations. >> Robin: Well if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. >> John: Thanks, yeah. (laughing) >> Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. >> John: Alright, Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here inside "theCUBE" for our 10th year but also as VMware goes to the next level step function with virtualization to containers, Kubernetes, big theme here, I'm John with Dave Vallente, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (funky music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman and we're going to take a look back at ten years of theCUBE at VMworld and look forward to see what's coming next. So, as I say, this is theCUBE's 10th year at VMworld, that's VMworld, of course 2019. And Stu, if you think about the VMware of 2010, when we first started, it's a dramatically different VMware today. Let's look back at 2010. Paul Maritz was running VMware, he set forth the vision of the software mainframe last decade, well, what does that mean, software mainframe? Highly integrated hardware and software that can run any workload, any application. That is the gauntlet that Tucci and Maritz laid down. A lot of people were skeptical. Fast forward 10 years, they've actually achieved that, I mean, essentially, it is the standard operating system, if you will, in the data center, but there's a lot more to the story. But you remember, at the time, Stu, it was a very complex environment. When something went wrong, you needed guys with lab coats to come in a figure out, you know, what was going on, the I/O blender problem, storage was a real bottleneck. So let's talk about that. >> Yeah, Dave, so much. First of all, hard to believe, 10 years, you know, think back to 2010, it was my first time being at VMworld, even though I started working with VMware back in 2002 when it was like, you know, 100, 150 person company. Remember when vMotion first launched. But that first show that we went to, Dave, was in San Francisco, and most people didn't know theCUBE, heck, we were still figuring out exactly what theCUBE will be, and we brought in a bunch of our friends that were doing the CloudCamps in Silicon Valley, and we were talking about cloud. And there was this gap that we saw between, as you said, the challenges we were solving with VMware, which was fixing infrastructure, storage and networking had been broken, and how were we going to make sure that that worked in a virtual environment even better? But there were the early thought leaders that were talking about that future of cloud computing, which, today in 2019, looks like we had a good prediction. And, of course, where VMware is today, we're talking all about cloud. So, so many different eras and pieces and research that we did, you know, hundreds and hundreds of interviews that we've done at that show, it's definitely been one of our flagship shows and one of our favorite for guests and ecosystems and so much that we got to dig into at that event. >> So Tod Nielsen, who was the President and probably COO at the time, talked about the ecosystem. For every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 was spent on the ecosystem. VMware was a very, even though they were owned by EMC, they were very, sort of, neutral to the ecosystem. You had what we called the storage cartel. It was certainly EMC, you know, but NetApp was right there, IBM, HP, you know, Dell had purchased EqualLogic, HDS was kind of there as well. These companies were the first to get the APIs, you remember, the VASA VAAI. So, we pushed VMware at the time, saying, "Look, you guys got a storage problem." And they said, "Well, we don't have a lot of resources, "we're going to let the ecosystem solve the problem, "here's an API, you guys figure it out." Which they largely did, but it took a long time. The other big thing you had in that 2010 timeframe was storage consolidation. You had the bidding war between Dell and HP, which, ultimately, HP, under Donatelli's leadership, won that bidding war and acquired 3PAR >> Bought 3PAR >> for 2.4, 2.5 billion, it forced Dell to buy Compellent. Subsequently, Isilon was acquired, Data Domain was acquired by EMC. So you had this consolidation of the early 2000s storage startups and then, still, storage was a major problem back then. But the big sea change was, two things happened in 2012. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO, and VMware acquired Nicira, beat Cisco to the punch. Why did that change everything? >> Yeah, Dave, we talked a lot about storage, and how, you know, the ecosystem was changing this. Nicira, we knew it was a big deal. When I, you know, I talked to my friends that were deep in networking and I talked with Nicira and was majorly impressed with what they were doing. But this heterogeneous, and what now is the multi-cloud environment, networking needs to play a critical role. You see, you know, Cisco has clearly targeted that environment and Nicira had some really smart people and some really fundamental technology underneath that would allow networking to go just beyond the virtual machine where it was before, the vSwitch. So, you know, that expansion, and actually, it took a little while for, you know, the Nicira acquisition to run into NSX and that product to gain maturity, and to gain adoption, but as Pat Gelsinger has said more recently, it is one of the key drivers for VMware, getting them beyond just the hypervisor itself. So, so much is happening, I mean, Dave, I look at the swings as, you know, you said, VMware didn't have enough resources, they were going to let the ecosystem do it. In the early days, it was, I chose a server provider, and, oh yeah, VMware kind of plays in it. So VMware really grew how much control and how much power they had in buying decisions, and we're going through more of that change now, as to, as they're partnering we're going to talk about AWS and Microsoft and Google as those pieces. And Pat driving that ship. The analogy we gave is, could Pat do for VMware what Intel had done for a long time, which is, you have a big ecosystem, and you slowly start eating away at some of that other functionality without alienating that ecosystem. And to Pat's credit, it's actually something that he's done quite well. There's been some ebbs and flows, there's pushback in the community. Those that remember things like the "vTax," when they rolled that out. You know, there's certain features that the rolled into the hypervisor that have had parts of the ecosystem gripe a little bit, but for the most part, VMware is still playing well with the ecosystem, even though, after the Dell acquisition of EMC, you know, we'll talk about this some more, that relationship between Dell and VMware is tighter than it ever was in the EMC days. >> So that led to the Software-Defined Data Center, which was the big, sort of, vision. VMware wanted to do to storage and networking what it had done to compute. And this started to set up the tension between with VMware and Cisco, which, you know, lives on today. The other big mega trend, of course, was flash storage, which was coming into play. In many ways, that whole API gymnastics was a Band-Aid. But the other big piece if it is Pat Gelsinger was much more willing to integrate, you know, some of the EMC technologies, and now Dell technologies, into the VMware sort of stack. >> Right, so Dave, you talked about all of those APIs, Vvols was a huge multi-year initiative that VMware worked on and all of the big storage players were talking about how that would allow them to deeply integrate and make it virtualization-aware storage your so tense we come out on their own and try to do that. But if you look at it, VVols was also what enabled VMware to do vSAN, and that is a little bit of how they can try to erode in some of the storage piece, because vSAN today has the most customers in the hyperconverged infrastructure space, and is keeping to grow, but they still have those storage partnerships. It didn't eliminate it, but it definitely adds some tension. >> Well it is important, because under EMC's ownership it was sort of a let 1,000 flowers bloom sort of strategy, and today you see Jeff Clarke coming in and consolidating the portfolios, saying, "Look, let's let VMware go hard with vSAN." So you're seeing a different type of governance structure, we'll talk about that. 2013 was a big year. That's the year they brought in Sanjay Poonen, they did the AirWatch acquisition, they took on what the industry called VDI, what VMware called EUC, End-User Computing. Citrix was the dominant player in that space, VMware was fumbling, frankly. Sanjay Poonen came in, the AirWatch acquisition, now, VMware is a leader in that space, so that was big. The other big thing in 2013 was, you know, the famous comment by Carl Eschenbach about, you know, if we lose to the book seller, we'll all lose. VMware came out with it's cloud strategy, vCloud Air. I was there with the Wall Street analyst that day listening to Pat explain that and we were talking afterwards to a number of the Wall Street analysts saying, "This really doesn't make a lot of sense." And then they sort of retreated on that, saying that it was going to be an accelerant, and it just was basically a failed cloud strategy. >> And Dave, that 2013 is also when they spun out Cloud Foundry and founded Pivital. So, you know, this is where they took some of the pieces from EMC, the Greenplum, and they took some of the pieces from VMware, Spring and the Cloud Foundation, and put those together. As we speak right now, there was just an SEC Filing that VMware might suck them back in. Where I look at that, back in 2013, there was a huge gap between what VMware was doing on the infrastructure side and what Cloud Foundry was doing on the application modernization standpoint, they had bought the Pivotal Labs piece to help people understand new programming models and everything along those lines. Today, in 2019, if you look at where VMware is going, the changes happening in containerization, the changes happening from the application down, they need to come together. The Achilles heel that I have seen from VMware for a long time is that VMware doesn't have enough a tie to or help build the applications. Microsoft owns the applications, Oracle owns the applications. You know, there are all the ISVs that own the applications, and Pivotal, if they bring that back into VMware it can help, but it made sense at the time to kind of spin that out because it wasn't synergies between them. >> It was what I called at the time a bunch of misfit toys. And so it was largely David Goulden's engineering of what they called The Federation. And now you're seeing some more engineering, financial engineering, of having VMware essentially buy another, you know, Dell Silver Lake asset, which, you know, drove the stock price up 77% in a day that the Dow dropped 800 points. So I guess that works, kind of funny money. The other big trend sort of in that mid-part of this decade, hyperconverged, you know, really hit. Nutanix, who was at one point a strong partner of both VMware and Dell, was sort of hitting its groove swing. Fast forward to 2019, different situation, Nutanix really doesn't have a presence there. You know, people are looking at going beyond hyperconverged. So there's sort of the VMware ecosystem, sort of friendly posture has changed, they point fingers at each other. VMware says, "Well, it's Nutanix's fault." Nutanix will say it's VMware's fault. >> Right, so Dave, I pointed out, the Achilles heel for VMware might be that they don't have the closest tie to the application, but their greatest strength is, really, they are really the data center operating system, if you will. When we wrote out our research on Server SAN was before vSAN had gotten launched. It was where Nutanix, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, you know, Pivot3, and a few others were early in that space, but we stated in our research, if Microsoft and VMware get serious about that space, they can dominate. And we've seen, VMware came in strong, they do work with their partnerships. Of course, Dell, with the VxRail is their largest solution, but all of the other server providers, you know, have offerings and can put those together. And Microsoft, just last year, they kind of rebranded some of the Azure Stack as HCI and they're going strong in that space. So, absolutely, you know, strong presence in the data center platform, and that's what they're extending into their hybrid and multi-cloud offering, the VMware Cloud Solutions. >> So I want to get to some of the trends today, but just real quick, let's go through some of this. So 2015 was the big announcement in the fall where Dell was acquiring EMC, so we entered, really, the Dell era of VMware ownership in 2016. And the other piece that happened, really 2016 in the fall, but it went GA 2017, was the announcement AWS and VMware as the preferred partnership. Yes, AWS had a partnership with IBM, they've subsequently >> VMware had a partnership >> Yeah, sorry, VMware has a partnership with IBM for their cloud, subsequently VMware has done deals with Google and Microsoft, so there's, we now have entered the multi-cloud hybrid world. VMware capitulated on cloud, smart move, cleaned up its cloud strategy, cleaned that AirWatch mess. AWS also capitulated on hybrid. It's a term that they would never use, they don't use it necessarily a lot today, but they recognize that On Prem is a viable portion of the marketplace. And so now we've entered this new era of cloud, hybrid cloud, containers is the other big trend. People said, "Containers are going to really hurt VMware." You know, the jury's still out on that, VMware sort of pushes back on that. >> And Dave, just to put a point on that, you know, everybody, including us, spent a lot of time looking at this VMware Cloud on AWS partnership, and what does it mean, especially, to the parent, you know, Dell? How do they make that environment? And you've pointed out, Dave, that while VMware gets in those environments and gives themselves a very strong cloud strategy, AWS is the key partner, but of course, as you said, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and all the server providers, we have a number of them including CenturyLink and Rackspace that they're partnering with, but we have to wait a little while before Amazon, when they announced their outpost solutions, VMware is a critical software piece, and you've got two flavors of the hardware. You can run the full AWS Stack, just like what they're running in their data center, but the alternative, of course, is VMware software running on Dell hardware. And we think that if VMware hadn't come in with a strong position with Amazon and their 600,000 customers, we're not sure that Amazon would have said, "Oh yeah, hey, you can run that same software stack "that you're running, but run some different hardware." So that's a good place for Dell to get in the environment, it helps kind of close out that story of VMware, Dell, and AWS and how the pieces fit together. >> Yeah, well so, by the way, earlier this week I privately mentioned to a Dell executive that one of the things I thought they should do was fold Pivotal into VMware. By the way, I think they should go further. I think they should look at RSA and Dell Boomi and SecureWorks, make VMware the mothership of software, and then really tie in Dell's hardware to VMware. That seems to me, Stu, the direction that they're going to try to gain an advantage on the balance of the ecosystem. I think VMware now is in a position of strength with, what, 5 or 600,000 customers. It feels like it's less ecosystem friendly than it used to be. >> Yeah, Dave, there's no doubt about it. HPE and IBM, who were two of the main companies that helped with VMware's ascendancy, do a lot of other things beyond VMware. Of course, IBM bought Red Hat, it is a key counterbalance to what VMware is doing in the multi-cloud. And Dave, to your point, absolutely, if you look at Dell's cloud strategy, they're number one offering is VMware, VMware cloud on Dell. Dell as the project dimension piece. All of these pieces do line up. I'll say, some of those pieces, absolutely, I would say, make sense to kind of pull in and shell together. I know one of the reasons they keep the security pieces at arm's length is just, you know, when something goes wrong in the security space, and it's not of the question of if, it's a question of when, they do have that arm's length to be able to keep that out and be able to remediate a little bit when something happens. >> So let's look at some of the things that we're following today. I think one of the big ones is, how will containers effect customer spending on VMware? We know people are concerned about the vTax. We also know that they're concerned about lock-in. And so, containers are this major force. Can VMware make containers a tailwind, or is it a headwind for them? >> So you look at all the acquisitions that they've made lately, Dave, CloudHealth is, from a management standpoint, in the public cloud. Heptio and Bitnami, targeting that cloud native space. Pair that with Cloud Foundry and you see, VMware and Pivotal together trying to go all-in on Kubernetes. So those 600,000 customers, VMware wants to be the group that educates you on containerization, Kubernetes, you know, how to build these new environments. For, you know, a lot of customers, it's attractive for them to just stay. "I have a relationship, "I have an enterprise licensing agreement, "I'm going to stay along with that." The question I would have is, if I want to do something in a modern way, is VMware really the best partner to choose from? Do they have the cost structure? A lot of these environments set up, you know, it's open source base, or I can work with my public cloud providers there, so why would I partner with VMware? Sure, they have a lot of smart people and they have expertise and we have a relationship, but what differentiates VMware, and is it worth paying for that licensing that they have, or will I look at alternatives? But as VMware grows their hybrid and multi-cloud deployments they absolutely are on the short list of, you know, strategic partners for most customers. >> The other big thing that we're watching is multi-cloud. I have said over and over that multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor. It's not necessarily, to date anyway, been a strategy of customers. Having said that, issues around security, governance, compliance have forced organizations and boards to say, "You know what, we need IT more involved, "let's make multi-cloud part of our strategy, "not only for governance and compliance "and making sure it adheres to the corporate edicts, "but also to put the right workload on the right cloud." So having some kind of strategy there is important. Who are the players there? Obviously VMware, I would say, right now, is the favorite because it's coming from a position of strength in the data center. Microsoft with it's software state, Cisco coming at it from a standpoint of network strength. Google, with Anthos, that announcement earlier this year, and, of course, Red Hat with IBM. Who's the company that I didn't mention in that list? >> Well, of course, you can't talk about cloud, Dave, without talking about AWS. So, as you stated before, they don't really want to talk about hybrid, hey, come on, multi-cloud, why would you do this? But any customer that has a multi-cloud environment, they've got AWS. And the VMware-AWS partnership is really interesting to watch. It will be, you know, where will Amazon grow in this environment as they find their customers are using multiple solutions? Amazon has lots of offerings to allow you leverage Kubernetes, but, for the most part, the messaging is still, "We are the best place for you, "if you do everything on us, "you're going to get better pricing "and all of these environments." But as you've said, Dave, we never get down to that homogeneous, you know, one vendor solution. It tends to be, you know, IT has always been this heterogeneous mess and you have different groups that purchase different things for different reasons, and we have not seen, yet, public cloud solving that for a lot of customers. If anything we often have many more silos in the clouds than we had in the data center before. >> Okay. Another big story that we're following, big trend, is the battle for networking. NSX, the software networking component, and then Cisco, who's got a combination of, obviously, hardware and software with ACI. You know, Stu, I got to say, Cisco a very impressive company. You know, 60+% market share, being able to hold that share for a long time. I've seen a lot of companies try to go up against Cisco. You know, the industry's littered with failures. It feels, however, like NSX is a disruptive force that's very hard for Cisco to deal with in a number of dimensions. We talked about multi-cloud, but networking in general. Cisco's still a major player, still, you know, owns the hardware infrastructure, obviously layering in its own software-defined strategy. But that seems to be a source of tension between the two companies. What's the customer perspective? >> Yeah, so first of all, Dave, Cisco, from a hardware perspective, is still going strong. There are some big competitors. Arista has been doing quite well into getting in, especially, a high performance, high speed environments, you know, Jayshree Ullal and that team, you know, very impressive public company that's doing quite well. >> Service providers that do really well there. >> Absolutely, but, absolutely, software is eating the world and it is impacting networking. Even when you look at Cisco's overall strategy, it is in the future. Cisco is not a networking company, they are a software company. The whole DevNet, you know, group that they have there is helping customers modernize, what we were talking about with Pivotal. Cisco is going there and helping customers create those new environments. But from a customer standpoint, they want simplicity. If my VMware is a big piece of my environment, I've probably started using NSX, NSX-T, some of these environments. As I go to my service providers, as I go to multi-cloud, that NSX piece inside my VMware cloud foundation starts to grow. I remember, Dave, a few years back, you know, Pat Gelsinger got up on a stage and was like, "This is the biggest collection of network administrators that we've ever seen!" And everybody's looking around and they're like, "Where? "We're virtualization people. "Oh, wait, just because we've got vNICs and vSwitches "and things like that." It still is a gap between kind of a hardcore networking people and the software state. But just like we see on storage, Dave, it's not like vSAN, despite it's thousands and thousands of customers, it is not the dominant player in storage. It's a big player, it's a great revenue stream, and it is expanding VMware beyond their core vSphere solutions. >> Back to Cisco real quickly. One of the things I'm very impressed with Cisco is the way in which they've developed infrastructures. Code with the DevNet group, how CCIEs are learning Python, and that's a very powerful sort of trend to watch. The other thing we're watching is VMware-AWS. How will it affect spending, you know, near-term, mid-term, long-term? Clearly it's been a momentum, you know, tailwind, for VMware today, but the questions remains, long-term, where will customers place their bets? Where will the spending be? We know that cloud is growing dramatically faster than On Prem, but it appears, at least in the near- to mid-term, for one, two, maybe three more cycles, maybe indefinitely, that the VMware-AWS relationship has been a real positive for VMware. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you stated it really well. When I talked to customers, they were a bit frozen a couple of years ago. "Ah, I know I need to do more in cloud, "but I have this environment, what do I do? "Do I stay with VMware, do I have to make a big change." And what VMware did, is they really opened things up and said, "Look, no, you can embrace cloud, and we're there for you. "We will be there to help be that bridge to the future, "if you will, so take your VMware environment, "do VMware cloud in lots of places, "and we will enable that." What we know today, the stat that we hear all the time, the old 80/20 we used to talk about was 80% keeping the lights on, now the 80% we hear about is, there's only 20% of workloads that are in public cloud today. It doesn't mean that that other 80% is going to flip overnight, but if you look over the next five to ten years, it could be a flip from 80/20 to 20/80. And as that shift happens, how much of that estate will stay under VMware licenses? Because the day after AWS made the announcement of VMware cloud on AWS, they offered some migration services. So if you just want to go on natively on the public cloud, you can do that. And Microsoft, Google, everybody has migration services, so use VMware for what I need to, but I might go more native cloud for some of those other environments. So we know it is going to continue to be a mix. Multi-cloud is what customers are doing today, and multi- and hybrid-cloud is what customers will be doing five years from now. >> The other big question we're watching is Outposts. Will VMware and Outposts get a larger share of wallet as a result of that partnership at the expense of other vendors? And so, remains to be seen, Outposts grabbed a lot of attention, that whole notion of same control plane, same hardware, same software, same data plane On Prem as in the Data Center, kind of like Oracle's same-same approach, but it's seemingly a logical one. Others are responding. Your thoughts on whether or not these two companies will dominate or the industry will respond or an equilibrium. >> Right, so first of all, right, that full same-same full stack has been something we've been talking about now, feels like for 10 years, Dave, with Oracle, IBM had a strategy on that, and you see that, but one of the things with VMware has strong strength. What they have over two decades of experiences on is making sure that I can have a software stack that can actually live in heterogeneous environments. So in the future, if we talk about if Kubernetes allows me to live in a multi-cloud environment, VMware might be able to give me some flexibility so that I can move from one hardware stack to another as I move from data centers to service providers to public clouds. So, absolutely, you know, one to watch. And VMware is smart. Amazon might be their number one partner, but they're lining up everywhere. When you see Sanjay Poonen up on stage with Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud talking about how Anthos in your data center very much requires VMware. You see Sachi Nodella up on stage talking about these kind of VMware partnerships. VMware is going to make sure that they live in all of these environments, just like they lived on all of the servers in the data center in the past. >> The other last two pieces that I want to touch on, and they're related is, as a result of Dell's ownership of VMware, are customers going to spend more with Dell? And it's clear that Dell is architecting a very tight relationship. You can see, first of all, Michael Dell putting Jeff Clarke in charge of everything Dell was brilliant, because, in a way, you know, Pat was kind of elevated as this superstar. And Michael Dell is the founder, and he's the leader of the company. So basically what he's created is this team of rivals. Now, you know, Jeff and Pat, they've worked together for decades, but very interesting. We saw them up on stage together, you know, last year, well I guess at Dell Technologies World, it was kind of awkward, but so, I love it. I love that tension of, It's very clear to me that Dell wants to integrate more tightly with VMware. It's the clear strategy, and they don't really care at this point if it's at the expense of the ecosystem. Let the ecosystem figure it out themselves. So that's one thing we're watching. Related to that is long-term, are customers going to spend more of their VMware dollars in the public cloud? Come back to Dell for a second. To me, AWS is by far the number one competitor of Dell, you know, that shift to the cloud. Clearly they've got other competitors, you know, NetApp, Huawei, you know, on and on and on, but AWS is the big one. How will cloud spending effect both Dell and AWS long-term? The numbers right now suggest that cloud's going to keep growing, $35, $40 billion run-rate company growing at 40% a year, whereas On Prem stuff's growing, you know, at best, single digits. So that trend really does favor the cloud guys. I talked to a Gartner analyst who tracks all this stuff. I said, "Can AWS continue to grow? It's so big." He said, "There's no reason, they can't stop. "The market's enormous." I tend to agree, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all, on the AWS, absolutely, I agree, Dave. They are still, if you look at the overall IT spend, AWS is still a small piece. They have, that lever that they have and the influence they have on the marketplace greatly outweighs the, you know, $30, $31 billion that they're at today, and absolutely they can keep growing. The one point, I think, what we've seen, the best success that Dell is having, it is the Dell and VMware really coming together, product development, go to market, the field is tightly, tightly, tightly alligned. The VxRail was the first real big push, and if they can do the same thing with the vCloud foundation, you know, VMware cloud on Dell hardware, that could be a real tailwind for Dell to try to grow faster as an infrastructure company, to grow more like the software companies or even the cloud companies will. Because we know, when we've run the numbers, Dave, private cloud is going to get a lot of dollars, even as public cloud continues its growth. >> I think the answer comes down to a couple things. Because right now we know that 80% of the spend and stall base is On Prem, 20% in the cloud. We're entering now the cloud 2.0, which introduces hybrid-cloud, On Prem, you know, connecting to clouds, multi-cloud, Kubernetes. So what it comes down to, to me Stu, is to what degree can Dell, VMware, and the ecosystem create that cloud experience in a hybrid world, number one? And number two, how will they be able to compete from a cost-structure standpoint? Dell's cost-structure is better than anybody else's in the On Prem world. I would argue that AWS's cost-structure is better, you know, relative to Dell, but remains to be seen. But really those two things, the cloud experience and the cost-structure, can they hold on, and how long can they hold on to that 80%? >> All right, so Dave here's the question I have for you. What are we talking about when we're talking about Dell plus VMware and even add in Pivotal? It's primarily hardware plus software. Who's the biggest in that multi-cloud space? It's IBM plus Red Hat, which you've stated emphatically, "This is a services play, and IBM has, you know, "just got, you know, services in their DNA, "and that could help supercharge where Red Hat's going "and the modernization." So is that a danger for Dell? If they bring in Pivotal, do they need to really ramp up that services? How do they do that? >> Yeah, I don't think it's a zero sum game, but I also don't think there's, it's five winners. I think that the leader, VMware right now would be my favorite, I think it's going to do very well. I think Red Hat has got, you know, a lot of good market momentum, I think they've got a captive install base, you know, with IBM and its large outsourcing business, and I think they can do pretty well, and I think number three could do okay. I think the other guys struggle. But it's so early, right now, in the hybrid-cloud world and the multi-cloud world, that if I were any one of those five I'd be going hard after it. We know Google's got the dollars, we know Microsoft has the software state, so I can see Microsoft actually doing quite well in that business, and could emerge as the, maybe they're not a long-shot right now, but they could be a, you know, three to one, four to one leader that comes out as the favorite. So, all right, we got to go. Stu, thanks very much for your insights. And thank you for watching and listening. We will be at VMworld 2019. Three days of coverage on theCUBE. Thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> In mid-2014, announced the world, coming out of Google led by Joe Beda, sitting to my right, Brendan Burges and Craig McLucky, all Kube alumni. Kubernetes, which is the Greek for governor helmsman or captain and here we are, five years later at the show. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon here in Barcelona, Spain. Joe you've got your title today is that you're a principal engineer at VMware of course, by way of acquisition through Heptio, but you are one of the people who helped start this journey that we are all on Kubernetes, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thank you so much for having me. >> Alright, so, the cake and the candles and the singing we'll hold for the parties later. We have Fippy and the gang have been watching our whole thing, for people who don't know there's a whole cartoon, books and stuffed animals and everything like that. Joe, when you started this merchandising, that was what you were starting, no. In all seriousness though, bring us back a little bit give us a little bit of historical context as to we've had you on the program a few times but yeah, here we are five years later was this what you were expecting? >> I mean when I remember Craig and Bren and I sitting around and we're like hey, we should do this as an open source project This is before we got approvals and got the whole thing started. And I think there was, like an idea in the back of our head, of like, this could be a big deal. You dream big a lot of times and you know that there's a reality and that it's not always going to end up being this. And so, I don't think anybody involved with Kubernetes in the early days really thought it was going to turn into what it has turned into. >> Yeah, so when we look at open source projects, I remember back a few years back, it was like to succeed you must have a phoenetical dictator that will make sure the community does this or wait we don't want too much vendor we're just going to let the user community take over and there's all these extremes out there, but these are complicated pieces. The keynote this morning the discussion was Kubernetes is a platform of platforms it's like I've got all of these APIs and by itself, Kubernetes doesn't do a lot. It is, what it enables and what things put together, so walk us through a little bit of that the mission, how it changed a bit and a little bit of the community and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, I think so early on one of the goals with Kubernetes from Google's point of view was to essentially take a lot of the ideas that had been incubated over about a decade, with respect to Borg and other things and so, a lot of the early folks who got involved in the project and worked on those systems and really bring that to the outside world as a way to actually start bridging the gap between what Googlers did and what the rest of the world did. We had a really good idea of what we were looking to get out of this system and that was widely shared based on experience across a bunch of relatively senior engineers. We brought in some of the Red Hat folks early on Clayton Coleman and some of the other folks who are still super involved in the project. I think there was enough of an understanding that we looked and said okay we got a lot of work to do let's just get this done. So, we didn't really need sort of the benevolent dictator because there was a shared understanding and we had senior engineers that were willing to make trade-offs to be able to go and move forward. So that I think was a key bit of the success early on. >> Alright, so you talked, it was pulling in some other vendor community there. Talk a little bit about how that ecosystem grew and when was user feedback part of that discussion? >> Yeah, I mean, when you say we pulled in the vendor we pulled in people who worked for vendors but we never really viewed it as, there was really from the beginning this idea of well what's good for the project? What's going to actually create sustainability and for the project, sort of project over vendor is really something that we wanted to establish. And that even came down to the name, right? Like, when we named the project, we could have called it Google XYZ or some sort of XYZ but we didn't want to do that because we wanted to establish it as an independent thing with a life of its own. And so, yeah, so we wanted to bring in those external ideas and I think early on, we did have some early users, we did listen to them but it really resonated with folks who could actually see where we were going. I think it took time for the rest of the world to really catch on with what the vision was. >> OK, when we look at today, there's a lot at the show that is on top of or next to or with Kubernetes it's not all about that piece. How do you balance what goes in it versus what goes with it? One of my favorite lines last year overall, was from you, saying Kubernetes is not a magic player it is not the be all and end all it is set with very specific guidelines. How do you avoid scope creep? As engineers it's always like, I don't know, we know how to do that piece of it better. >> So when we started out the project we didn't actually have a governance model. It was just a bunch of engineers that sort of worked well together. Over time and as the project grew, we knew that we needed to actually get some sort of structure in place. And so a bunch of us who had been there from the start got together, formed a steering committee, held elections. There's a secret architecture that we formed and these are the places where we can actually say what is Kubernetes what is Kubernetes not how do we actually maintain sort of good taste with how we actually approach this stuff and that's one of the ways that we try to contain scope creep. But also, I think everybody realizes that a thriving ecosystem whether officially part of the CNCF or adjacent to it, is good for everybody. Trying to hold on too tight is not going to be good for the project. >> So, Joe, tremendous progress in five years. Look forward for us a little bit. What does Kubernetes 2024 look like for us? >> Well a lot of folks like to say that in five years, Kubernetes is going to disappear. And sometimes they come at this from this sort of snarky angle. (chuckles) But other times, I think it's going to disappear in terms of like it's going to be so boring, so solid, so assumed that people don't talk about it anymore. I mean, we're here, at something that the CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation, which is great. But how often do people really focus on the Linux kernel these days? It is so boring, so solid, there's new stuff going on, but clearly, all the exciting stuff all the action, all the innovation is happening at higher layers. I think we're going to see something similar happen with Kubernetes over time. >> Yeah, that being said the reach of Kubernetes is further than ever. I was talking to this special interest group looking at edge computing and IoT people making the micro-cage version of this stuff when the team first got together, I mean, is you must look at and said there were many fathers, many parents of this solution, but, could you imagine the kind of the family and ecosystem that would have grown out of it? >> I think we knew that it could go there I mean, Google had some experience with this, I mean When Google bought YouTube, they had a problem where they had to essentially build out something that looked a little bit like a CDN. And so there were some examples of sort of like, how does technology, like Boar, adapt to an Edge type of situation. So, there was some experience to borrow we definitely knew that we wanted this thing to scale up and down. But I think that's a hallmark of these successful technologies is that they can be used in ways and in places that you really never thought about when you got started. So that's definitely true. >> Alright, Joe, want to give you the final word the contributors, the users, the ecosystem community, what do you say with five years of Kubernetes now in the books? >> I just want to send a huge thank you to everybody who made it happen. This is, it was started by Google it was started by a few of us early on. But, we really want to make it so that everybody feels like it's theirs. A lot of times Brendan Burns and me and Kelsey wrote a book together and I'll do signing and a lot of times I'll sign that and I'll say thank you for being a part of Kubernetes. Because I really feel like every user everybody who bets on it, everybody who shares their knowledge, they're really a big part of it. And so thank you to everybody who's a big part of Kubernetes. >> All right, well, Joe, thank you as always for sharing your knowledge with our community >> Thank you so much. >> We've been happy to be a small part in helping to spread the knowledge and everything going on here, so congratulations to the community on five years of Kubernetes and we'll be back with more coverage here from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)