>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage day three here, theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, and Justin Warren here to break down the action. Justin Warren, as you know, is Guest Analyst for us at many events, Chief Analyst at PivotNine, coming all back over here again, to break it down. So we're going to dissect what's going on here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This is, some say, me, the last stand to stop Amazon. Justin, good to see you. >> Good to see you as well, man. Stu, my first question is, as the show winds down, day three, a lot of people have left, all the big execs are gone, it's kind of last day, people coming together, party was last night, so we kind of see all the action, we kind of fished this pond dry, in theCUBE here, the last couple of days. The themes are starting to emerge. What are you seeing, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, John, 8,000 people, this is, you know, geeks that are really excited, and I mean that in the best of ways, of course. There's actually, there were people here before the show started, doing lightning talks and full day sessions. Tomorrow, there's an operative session that another 250 or 300 people will be doing Friday, so, you know, and people want to just suck the marrow out of the bone that is everything going on here, just get every ounce of knowledge here, and they are deep into this session, so, this is a great community. The question I want to ask you guys is you were at Amazon re:Invent two weeks ago. We've watched that show. I want the compare and contrast of this ecosystem and show, not just compare it to like, say, open stack, which we've been teasing apart all week, and I think there are some things we need to worry about, but a lot of good differences. But compare against the big one in the room, which is Amazon, and a big difference is Amazon is here, and they have a seat at the table, because they have to, and customers will force them there, but you know, should this worry Amazon, and how does this ecosystem compare with the Amazon ecosystem. The big thing for me is, I understand how people make money in the ecosystem of Amazon. I'm still trying to figure that out here. >> Yeah, eh, it is a different ecosystem. It does have a bit of a vibe of it could be the new re:Invent. We've had conversations over the last couple of days about-- >> Or is this the independent cloud, >> Exactly. >> You know, open ecosystem. >> It is the independent show that we've been waiting for, that we've wanted since COMDEX and Interop kind of went away, and it's all been vendor shows, and now we have an independent show where all the vendors can come and have kind of a neutral meeting place, and we can all gather together and have some common ground, which is like, that's what Kubernetes is. I've been saying over the last couple of days, Kubernetes is like the ethernet of cloud, so it's something which is an agreed standard and we can all collaborate on, and then, you never bet against ethernet. So know you can build all these other things on top of that platform, yeah. >> Just a quick note on that, right, that's Interop, and networking was at the core of that. It was basically everybody, oh, it's the chance of if we give true interoperability, maybe we can do multi-vendor and it won't all be Cisco, who dominated that market. Amazon's the same. >> Stu, this is to me, ethernet's a great example. I say TCPIP as well. Both are enabling technologies that are standardized, or actually started as de facto standards. They weren't necessarily bona fide standards. They emerged when people rallied around them. Those de facto standards, emerge and become a catalyst point for people to build on top of and around. Remember, there's still a lower level below the stack on ethernet. So you had, you know, physical data link layer in the OSI model, the grandfather of all stacks. That really changed, I think, 20 years of growth and innovation. I think Kubernetes is, exactly right, Justin, it's exactly your point. I see that as well, that it's not so much Kubernetes is going to be the be all end all. It's what it enables, and I think the innovations on top of Kubernetes, and underneath Kubernetes, take the holy trinity, I've been saying this on theCUBE now for the past year, the holy trinity of infrastructure and IT is storage compute networking, and those things are now being repurposed in a way that is highly scalable, dynamic, and resourceful for a lot of things. AI is a great example, everyone talks about AI, but storage policy, the knobs in Kubernetes can manage, and Google saying the guys of Kubernetes. That's one of the most underutilized aspects of Kubernetes, is the networking guys managing the knobs from below, and then app guys with servers messing maybe on the top. This is just an absolute growth engine, and the comparison to Amazon is similar, because Andy Jassy talks about builders, the right tool for the job. This is essentially the same mantra. I mean, this is tools, platforms. >> It's very similar, but with one very important difference, and around the money side of things. You don't have this massive behemoth which is going to come in, and one year you're on the keynote, and the next year we just announced a product, which completely killed your business. It's open source. That's not really going to happen. So you've got that common core of things, where there's no real competitive advantage on this stuff. So that's, you know, Linux, where's the competitive advantage on a kernel? There isn't one. So open source makes great sense for that kind of core of things that you then build upon, and then all the money is in all the innovation, all the value add that goes on top of that, and that makes a huge amount of sense to have an open source show for that. >> And I think, Stu, one of the things that we always talk about, networking in cloud, I think the concept of cloud is going to be old hat. You heard it here first on theCUBE. Because cloud is Amazon, cloud is a set of resources. When we start thinking about IoT at the edge, when you talk about moving compute to the edge, you're going to start to see mesh networks, peer to peer, and add a new kind of platform configurations that isn't necessarily cloud. It's a new thing. It's a platform, open platform, and there's going to be some incentives that are going to be designed for startups, that's economically beneficial to the new kinds of things, versus the economic incentives that Amazon might not have, to do things. So I think we're going to see emergence of new stuff. I would still say that cloud is a state of mind, it's not a location. And we here, it's CloudNativeCon. It's not just KubeCon. It's about doing things in a cloud native way, and that, like you say, it doesn't matter where it is or how it communicates together, but it's the way you operate it, it's the way it actually works in practice. It's not so much of, oh, we're going to build it here and we're going to put it in that cloud, or that cloud, or that cloud. >> And I think we've had some real clarity as to what that future of multi cloud looks like, 'cause it's not one massive cloud everywhere, it's not, oh, my applications spanning all over the place. It's we're working to solve that really tough problem of distributed architectures, and giving us ways that I shouldn't have to think about where I am spinning that up, or if I need to change vendor, not necessarily portability, you still do have some lock in, because Kubernetes is not the full stack, it's a piece of the overall platform, and while there's 75 different versions here that are all compliant, I should be able to move between them, but the devil's in the details, and there's lots of stuff that goes on top. >> Let's talk about multi cloud for a second. 'Cause you mentioned COMDEX, you talked about ethernet. At that time, during those big revolutions, the word multi-vendor was a big buzz word. Multi-vendor was like the basis of COMDEX. We all got to play together. Multi-vendor meant choice. Today, multi cloud is just a modern version of multi-vendor. >> Exactly, it's multi-vendor, and that's what enterprises want. Enterprises are a bit wary now. We hear lots of conversation about lock in, and that comes up a lot, and it's a real thing. Enterprises are concerned, they don't want to bet on one company, and then find out that actually, it's technology, it changes, things need to be moved around. We don't want to wake up in five, six years, and then suddenly find, oh my god, I can't change anything because I'm locked into this one vendor. >> So, Justin, they say they want multi-vendor. When it came to networking, I spent years working on interoperability, and plug tests, and all these things, and at the end of the day, it was way better to get my standards plus with a single vendor than it was to try to loop them together, and then, oh, when I changed something, so hopefully the difference here is actually, we have loosely coupled services, we have APIs, so can we actually do multi-vendor, multi-cloud that doesn't stress out my team, and have, every time I want to make a change, or they make a change, it moves. The new cloud world should be, things change, you know, it changes upstream, and downstream, I get to use them. So, once again, we talk about the shiny nirvana of, oh, you know, it's serverless, and the old trinity of computer storage. I don't even need to worry about that, 'cause it'll just work, but wait, if something goes wrong, I've been talking to a bunch of vendors here, that actually, how do I get observability, and manageability, to be able to drill down, because things could still go wrong. >> Well, you heard Bloomberg, we had an end user come on, it's a very interesting point, and Dan Khan, from the executive director, well, Bloomberg's kind of a different case, but look at what Bloomberg does. The guy said to us, "I actually don't want to buy "these products and services. "I just want to pay them money "to be available to support me "when I need support." 'Cause Bloomberg has fully integrated all their support internally. I think that's a trend that we're going to see in the enterprise, where CIOs start building teams, real software chops. It might not be as big as Bloomberg, but the notion of, we're going to run our own stuff. We'll use management services where appropriate, but we're going to have a core software build strategy, and I can't wait. An SLA of four hour response time. I need like, minutes. >> And that's how, I think, where we don't have the answers yet. There are still a lot of questions that enterprises are trying to work out about how do I actually do that. So you mentioned Bloomberg, and I interviewed them a few months ago, wrote something in Forbes about them. They are a special case in that they have chosen that we're going to invest in this technology so that we have people on staff, in our company, who understand Kubernetes. Now, that's not a choice that every enterprise is going to make, but they decided that actually, this technology, this software is so important to our business, to where we get all the value for our business that we need to invest in that technology. And I think a lot of enterprises are realizing that, actually, outsourcing everything to one vendor, and then giving all of your innovation engine to someone else, and they're realizing that was a mistake. Now, they're trying to figure out, okay, what do we bring in house, what do we do ourselves, what do we get vendors to do, which technologies do we use for what particular value creation, and that complexity, that decision making process, that's what we haven't quite worked out yet, and that's where I think there's a lot of value in the ecosystem, with service providers who can provide advice on here is how you should do it, based on what you need to do. >> That's a great point. Stu, I want you to comment on that. Let's refine this for a second, 'cause the people who actually spend the money, or the people re-imagining IT infrastructure, IT applications. The CIO, I've interviewed the VP of Advanced Technology at Proctor and Gamble, and he told me, when he came in, he came from Coca Cola, he's been an old IT guy, he says, look, we outsourced everything to the point where we're anemic. We got a couple of storage guys, they're pushing buttons, they're jumping on, calling the vendors, they outsource everything. He says they had no ability to create a competitive advantage for the business, and what they moved quickly to was to bring talent in to be builders, to be in house. So now you have that trend happening in the modern CIO, CXO kind of roles. Now you have to say, okay, I got teams here. How do I get the investments deployed, how do I go to this ecosystem here with all these tools, all these capabilities, how do I invest, how do I build out. >> Look, I think Kelsey Hightower had a great point when we interviewed him this week. It is a huge opportunity for managed services, because like we talked about, the Amazon, or even the ecosystem, how do I keep up with all of this, and the answer is, you don't. You need to be able to have people, whether it's system integrators, or partners that are going to help that. You know, look, Amazon gets criticized for not being deeper in open source. Well, they use a lot of open source and they deliver those services, and they make it easy. Frictionless is something we talked about for many years as being the thing. The enterprise wants to be able to spend money and just go do it, because they don't have a team to pitch these. Even somebody like Bloomberg, or some of these really big companies I love, talking, you've got Apple, and Nordstrom, and some really interesting, oh, by the way, and they're all hiring. Whether or not they're actually using Kubernetes, they cannot confirm or deny, but you know, we know how that goes. >> Hold on, first, let's unpack the end user piece here, okay? Amazon is pushing 5,000 reference-able customers. Okay, it's not about the Amazon question. End users here, how many reference-able customers are here? What are they actually, Uber's here, they're hiring. They might have some Kubernetes stuff in the background. Sure, they probably do. But actually, what does the end user adoption really look like? I mean... >> It's still early, but again, a difference between this show and Amazon re:Invent. How many end customers have a booth at re:Invent? Compared to here, where we have people, end customers who are here mostly to try to hire talent. They have booths. >> Kudos to the CNCF. They've got 80 end users participating. There are a lot of users here. This is not the vendor fest that we see at some shows when they get big. I hear they're not seeking the vendors. The vendors that I talked to were happy because they are the users here, and they're excited. Before we go, John, there's a couple kinks in the armors and things we need to worry about. The two, if I look at service meshes, and I look at serverless as a huge threat. One of the things I wanted to look at coming in was I'd heard a lot of talk about Knative, and I think Knative is great, but it is not, you know, Lambda is the defacto standard, just like S3 was before. Lambda is this, and Knative has absolutely nothing to do with Lambda and does not connect with it. It is the difference between serverless and functions, and so, all the AWS functions and all the Azure functions have nothing to do with Knative. For the people that looked at OpenWhisk and all these other options, Knative seems a good way to pull, they've done a re-spin of what's happening there, and it's moving things down the line. Once again, as Kelsey said, if we look at serverless as a spectrum, which many of the hardcore serverless people will debate and argue, and be like, that's not real, serverless, well, just like we said, there is only one real cloud, and it was Amazon. We know that's not the case. It will be a spectrum, we want to meet customers where they are. So, Knative, good news, but the elephant in the room is that AWS and Azure are where all of the serverless really happens, and therefore, there is a big air gap between them. Justin, service mesh is something I know you've been looking at. Give it to us the good, bad, and the ugly. >> Service mesh is really, really early. So, we're at that part where there's a diversity of innovation going on. There's about 12, or at least 12 different companies here at the show, who are all doing something with service mesh. They're all trying to sell you a different solution. This is what happens with technology. A new technology gets created, and we have this flurry of all these startups, who are all trying different things. And this is the destructive force of capitalism. Not all of them are going to succeed, but we have to have them all out there in the market, because at the moment, it's too early to figure out, okay, well, it's definitely going to be that one. If we knew that one, then I'd be putting all of my money behind that one company today. >> Last year, Justin, all the talk was about SDO. I've heard a lot of talk about SDO, but it hasn't all been good. >> No, that's the thing. So we've had a year now, and last year was definitely, hey, SDO is like, the service mesh. Like, not so much. Envoy seems to be the common ground that people are actively using. That's what most people are building on top of. So it looks like Envoy's going to be that underlayer of everything else. But in terms of how you actually use service mesh, it's still very early, and people are trying to figure out how to do I use this quite complex technology in practice? And as people use it more, as we get more adoption, then we'll start to see that one or two of the methods and the approaches will win out over all of the others, and that's where we can expect to see, well, I have an anointed winner. That will then win out, because it's useful, because it's functional, because end users want to do it that way. >> And Envoy, by the way, had traction. They had a sold out EnvoyCon. On the first day, 350 people, Lyft is driving that, and they're just heads down, solving problems. I think that seems to be the formula for some of the successful products, where you take away all the window dressing and the hype. It comes down to who's solving what problems. >> And that's the thing with open source. You can't just throw a whole bunch of marketing dollars at it to make it succeed. If end users don't like the code, and they don't use it, then it won't work. >> John, I want you to give us the word on the open source business model. We watched in the last year, Red Hat bought CoreOS for 250 million, then they were acquired by IBM for 34 billion, pending final, and all that stuff and everything, and then, reading through the VMware, SCC filing $550 million for Heptio. You know, big, big dollars, so, is open source just getting a lot of customers, and they get acquired by the big guys? What's the take? >> I think it's interesting. First of all, Red Hat might not like what I'm about to say, but I'll just say it. I think there was a steal with CoreOS. If you look at what Heptio got for valuation, CoreOS was an absolute steal. The team was phenomenal, they were doing some amazing work. At that time of the acquisition, the debate of how to make money dominated versus just getting behind the technology, and I think CoreOS was a fantastic team, and they had the right tracking. You can see what's happening now with now part of the Red Hat. So, Red Hat got a massive lift on that, so I think, kudos to Red Hat for taking that up the table at that time. Great acquisition, I think that helped them propel, and now show that to IBM that there's real value there. Now, I think open source as a business model is interesting because it's changing, right? You now have a new generation of builders and developers coming in. Open source has to evolve, and I think the CNCF I think is a cutting edge experiment or Petri dish of how to stay true to open source principles, and still nurture and enable a downstream impact for the commercialization. I think it's an opportunity, but it's also one of their biggest challenges, because if this is COMDEX, COMDEX is an open source. It's hawking wares, right? So it's a different business model. So, this is going to be a very interesting test in the industry to see how the current open source momentum, which is looking really strong right now, how that can interplay with commercialization, because certainly, the money's there, the value's there, and if we can get these value spots identified, the white spaces for startups, and let the big guys also play as well, it's going to be a very interesting landscape, it's certainly dynamic. I don't have the answers, but my gut's telling me that a whole new level of sets of services and platforms are going to be composed around these services, and I think it's all going to be driven by open source, that's clear. How it shapes out, valuations and the talent buys, the momentum, market buy, we'll be watching, I don't know. >> Yeah, it's exciting times. We're here at the beginnings of what I hope is going to be this massive new ecosystem, and we get to watch it grow, we get to watch it change. It's a great place to be. >> All I can say, Stu, is I wish I was 25 years old again, right now, because for young entrepreneurs, and young tech folks, this is probably one of the most exciting times, because you have real computer science, and dormant computer science, now re-energized with cloud computing scale. It's just like-- >> John, they don't appreciate what they had, you know. They don't know what it was like to have a computer that wasn't actually connected to things, let alone what we had. >> I used to build my own graphics libraries, I used to walk to school in bare feet in the snow. It's so hard. It's so easy now. >> Creating ones and zeroes-- >> Where's my token ring? >> Creating ones and zeroes by banging rocks together. >> It's so easy now. You guys got it made. You have no idea. Great stuff, Stu, this is great analysis, and I think, again, KubeCon is the beginning, with Cloud Native, this is just a small signal, I think. I think there's going to be a COMDEX moment soon, unless this thing just blows up, which I don't think is going to happen. >> I mean, look, last thing, John, I want to big thank to the Linux Foundation, CNCF, for working with us. We've been neighbors in the early days, great partnership, this community. They've got a great media section. All of friends over here, that are creating a lot of con, working really hard. The amount of work that goes through, and as we had the people from CNCF talking. They've got a core team, but it's people that volunteer, and we were a community too, and all our sponsors, John. >> Yeah, thanks to the community, and again, one more final point is that, this market, Justin, as you know, we all cover it, is in a learning mode. There's a lot of education oriented stuff that people are interested in. You've got Alex Williams over at New Stack, DevOps.com, TFiR over there, everyone's up in media out there. There is a thirst for content, there's a thirst for community learning. The sessions are packed. I mean, the hallways are interesting. You see people huddling, and I overhear the conversations. They're not talking about what party to go to, they're talking about how to implement a Kubernetes cluster, so this, really people working on and off the court here, so to speak. So, it's been great coverage. So, day three, breaking it down. I'm John Furrier, Justin Warren, Stu Miniman, back with more coverage, day three, after the short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (bubbly music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to the live coverage, here with theCUBE, here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman, for the next three days of wall-to-wall live coverage. We have the co-founders of the Network Collective here Eyvonne Sharp and Jordan Martin, thanks for joining us today, Network Collective. Sounds great, sounds like it's a collection of networks, so what's goin' on, what do you guys do? First let's talk about what you guys do, obviously you guys do a lot of podcasting, a lot of diggin' into the tech, what is Network Collective? >> Network Collective is a video podcast that Jordan and I started. We really felt like there was a need to build community around network engineers, and that really a lot of network engineers are very isolated in their job, there's only a couple people where they work, they know what they know, and they don't have a lot of peers. And so we see Network Collective as a way to bring network engineers together to learn about their craft, and also share with one another in a community that's more than a once-a-year conference like Cisco Live. >> That's awesome, I love the video podcasting, more than ever now the need for kind of peer review, conversations around learning because the world's shifting. In the keynote today the CEO of Cisco talked about the old way, and the new networks that are coming. We've been talking about no perimeters for years, but now security threats are real, gotta keep that strain solid, keep managing that, but also bring in a new kind of a cloud-hybrid, multi-cloud world, requires real skill adoption, new things. What're you guys seeing, what's your thoughts, and what's some of the things that you guys are exploring on your video podcast around these trends? >> You wanna take that Jordan? >> Sure. So, I think the rate of change of networking is faster than it's been in a very long time, so we've, we've had to, we've kinda not had a whole lotta churn in the things we've had to learn, I mean it's been complex and difficult, and there's been challenges in getting up to speed, but, with the transition to more developer-focused, and developer-centric model of deploying equipment, it is--and the integration of cloud into what is essentially our infrastructure. It's changing so much, that it's good to get together and have those conversations because it's very difficult to navigate this by yourself, it's, you know, it's a lot to learn. >> You know, I wanna push back little bit on that 'cause, you know, I've been in networking my whole career. When I used to, I used to speak at Interop, and I'd put down, you know, here's the rate of change, and here are the decades. And it's like, you know, okay 10 gig, here's where the standards are, here's where the first pieces are, it's gonna take years for us to deploy this. I don't disagree that change is happening overall faster, but how are people keeping up with it? Are the enterprises that the networking people work for allowing them to roll out some of these changes a little faster? So, give us a little insight as to what you're hearing from the community? >> I think, I mean technology, I mean, we've got Moore's law, right? I mean technology has always been changing rapidly, I think the thing that is different is the way network engineers need to interact with their environment. Five to 10 years ago, you could still operate in an environment where you still did a lot of static routing, for example. Now, with the cloud, with workloads moving around, there is no way to run a multi-cloud enterprise network without some serious dynamic routing chops, whether that's BGP, or EIGRP, or OSPF, or all of the above, and a lot of network engineers are still catching up with some of those technologies, they're used to being able to do things the way that they've always done them. And I think there needs to be a mind shift where we start thinking about things dynamically, in that, you know, an IP address may not live in the same geography, it may move from on-premises to the cloud to another cloud, and we have to be able to build networks that are resilient enough, and flexible enough, to be able to support that kind of mobility. >> Yeah, I love that Eyvonne. Right, you talked about the multi-cloud world. Jordan, a follow up question I have for you, how does the networking person look at things when there's a lot of the networking that are really outside of their control when you talk about really, the cloud world today. >> Sure, and before we jump there, I wanna say, the change that we're talking about though, is a bit different than what's happened. So, what we've seen traditionally would be speeds and feeds, but what's changing is the way we operate networks, and that hasn't changed a lot. Now, as for, you know, how do you view it when you don't-- well that's a challenge that everyone is facing. We see networking getting further and closer to the host. And, when we see networking inside of VMware, I mean this has been something that's been around for, you know, a while now, but, we're just getting comfortable with the idea of hypervisor, and now we've got, you know, we've got containers, and we've got networking in third party services that we don't necessarily have access to, we don't have full control over, and it's a completely different nomenclature we have to relearn all the terms because of course, no one reused the stuff we were familiar with, because this all started from a developer mindset. It all makes sense where it came from, but now we're catching up. And so it's, the challenge is not only understanding what needs to be done in all these different environments, but also understanding, just the terminology, and what is means. What is a VPC? Well VPC means something completely different to a networker that has never touched Amazon, than it does to somebody who has worked at Amazon completely there's overlapping terms and confusion around that and it's just a matter of, I think you need some broader coordination. There's been discussion about something like a full stack engineer, I think that's a pretty rare thing, I don't know how, how likely it is that you're gonna be expert level in all different disciplines, but you do need, you do need cross-team collaboration more than you have traditionally. We've had these silos, those no longer work in a multi-cloud world, it just doesn't, just doesn't work anymore. >> One of the things that came out with the keynote was, the networks next act was the main theme, as they talked about this new way, I mean, they use secure, intelligent platform, you know, for digital business, you know, level one marketing there, more complex than a few years ago and then the onslaught of new things coming, AI, augmented reality, machine learning, and I'd put blockchain in there, I thought they would put blockchain in the keynote to hype it up a bit, but, then they introduced the multi-cloud concept at that point. So in the keynote, multi-cloud didn't come up until the next act came up, so obviously that is a key part of what we're seeing, we saw Google clouds CEO Diane Greene come on. How are network engineers looking at the multi-cloud? 'Cause, I mean, how are they, toe in the water, are they puttin' the tow in the water? (chuckles) What is multi-cloud to them? Because, I mean, we talk about Kubernetes all the time, from an app standpoint, but, networks have been locked down for many, many years, you talked about some of the chops they need, what are those next chops for a network engineer when it comes to taking the road to multi-cloud? >> Sure, I mean I think if you're going to do any kind of multi-cloud interconnect, you've gotta know VGP. But at the same time, you need to understand some of those fundamental concepts that, the reason developers are pushing to the cloud, is not cost, although I've heard that a lot, that you know this cloud thing can't be cheaper, but it's really about enabling the business to move faster, and so we need to start thinking that way as network engineers more too. We have I think historically, our mentality, we've even trained our network engineers to go slow, to be very deliberate, to plan out your changes, to have these really complex change windows, and we need to start thinking differently, we need to think about how to make modular changes, and to be able to allow our workloads to move and shift in ways that don't provide a lot of risk, and I think that's a new way of thinking for networking engineers. >> Yeah. >> Well, we're sitting here in the DevNet zone, and that was one of the highlights in the keynote, talking that there are over 500 thousand developers now registered on this platform that they've built here. Bring us inside a little bit, you know, is it, what was it, John, DevNet sec? There's all of these acronyms as to, you know, how developers-- >> Yeah, NetApp was their big thing. >> how the network and the operations go together. What are you seeing, what's working, what's some of the challenges? >> I think this is a shift of necessity. As we see more problems solved in the network, we're adding complexity at that layer that hasn't been seen before, before it was routing, we just had to get traffic from one place to another, then we added security, so okay we have security, but we, we create these choke points in security where we can send all the traffic through this place and just like, we can use filtering, or some sort of identification there. Well then we start moving to cloud and we talk about dynamic workloads, and we talk about things that could just shift anywhere in the world, well now our choke point is gone, and so now we have to manage all the pieces, all the solutions, all the things we're putting into the network, but we've gotta manage it in a distributed way. And so that's where I think the automation's, why it's such a big push right now is because, we have to do it that way, there's no way to manually put these features in the network and be able to manage them at any type of scale without automating that process, and that's why, I think, we see the growth of DevNet, I mean, if you've been here the past few years, it's gone from a little thing to a much, much bigger thing, there's a lot of people looking at automation specifically, that 500 thousand number is, rather large. Really impressive that there's that many people looking at networks from a programmatic way. But in the meantime, I think that there's also, a bit of a divide here, 'cause I think that there's, a lot of people are looking this way, but I think there's, we talk about this on the show pretty often, there's really two types of networks. There's the networks at companies where, it really is, they see their network as a competitive advantage, and those places are definitely looking at automation, and they're looking at multi-cloud. But we also see another trend in networking, and that is to, I want some simple, push button, just put it out, get packets A to B, and I don't wanna mess with it, I don't want expensive engineers on staff, I don't want-- So I feel like the industry's almost coming to a divide. That we're gonna have two different types of networks, we're gonna have the network for the place that the just want packets going A to B, and they really don't want much, and the other side of that divide is gonna be very complex networks that have to be managed with automation. >> Talk about that other divide, it's between, I mean, I love that conversation, because, that almost kinda comes into like the notion of networks as a service. Because if you wanna have less expensive people there, but yet have the reliability, how do those companies grow and maintain the robust resiliency of these networks, and have the high performance, take advantage of the goodness, well what does it matter? I mean, how are they, how is the demographic of the network evolving, 'cause, either they're stunted for growth, or they have an enabler. How do you view that, how do you take that apart? >> I think we have to, we have to look at our business needs, and evaluate the technologies that we use appropriate to that. There are times for complexity, I think we've pushed, as Jordan very eloquently described, a lot of complexity down into the network, and we're working, I think, now, as the entire industry to maybe back some of that out. But one of the things that I hear a lot when we talk about automation and things like DevNet and developers is, I believe a lot of network engineers are afraid their jobs are going away, but if you look at what's going on, we have more connected devices than we've ever had before, and that's not gonna stop, and all of those connected devices need networks. And so really what's happened is we've reached a complexity inflection point, which means we have to have better tools, and I think that's really what we're talking about is, is how do we, instead of doing everything manually, how do we look at the network as a system, and manage it as a system, with tools to manage it that way. >> Your point about that jobs going away, I love that comment because, that's a sunk fallacy because, there's so much other stuff happening, talk about security, so the basic question, I mean first of all, guys your job's not goin' away! (laughs) Check! It's only a, well, kind of, you don't stay current, so it's all the learning issues, the progression for learning. But really it's the role of the network engineers and the people running the networks, I mean, I remember back in, the old way, the network guys were the top dogs, they were kickin' butt, takin' names, they ran the show, a lot was riding on the network. But as we go into this new dynamic environment, what are the roles of the network? Is it security? I mean, what are some of the things that people are pivoting to, or laddering up to from a roles standpoint that you see, in terms of a progression of new discovery, new skills. Is there a path, have you seen any patterns, for the growth of the person? >> I really think network engineers need to at least understand what the cloud is and why it exists. And they need to understand more about the applications and what they mean to the business. I think we have created a divide sometimes where, you know, my job is just to get packets from point A to B, and I don't really need to understand what we do as an organization, and I think that those days are going to be behind us, we need to understand, you know, what applications are critical, why do we need to build the systems the way that we need to build them and use that information from the business? So I think for network engineers, I think cloud security, understanding applications, and learning the business and being able to talk that language is what's gonna be most valuable to them in their career in the future. >> Yeah, we've heard the term many times, I'm a plumber! Well, I mean, implying that moving packets from A to B. It gets interesting with containers. Policy-based stuff has been known concept in networking, QOS, these are things that are well known, but when we start lookin' at the trends up the stack, we're seeing that kinda thing goin' on, service meshes for instance, they talk about services from a policy standpoint, up the stack. That's always been the challenge for the Ciscos over the past 20 years is, how to move up the stack, should they move up the stack, but I think now seems to be a good time. Your reaction guys, to that notion of moving up the stack while maintaining the purity and the goodness of good networking. (laughing) >> I think that's the big challenge right now, right? The more we mesh it all together and we don't, we don't really define the layers that we've traditionally used, the more challenging it is to have experts in that domain, because the domain just grows so incredibly large. And so there's gotta be a balance here, and I think we're trying to find that, I don't know that we've hit that yet, you know where, where we understand where networking fits into all these pieces, how far into the host, or how far into the application does networking go, we've seen certain applications not using the host TCP/IP stack, right, just to find some sort of performance benefit and it, to me that seems like we're pushing really far into this idea of, you know, well if we don't have standards and define places where these things exist, it's gonna be very much the wild, wild west for a while, until we figure out where everything's going to be. And so I think it just presents challenges and opportunities I don't know that we have the answer about how far it goes yet. >> Well let me ask you a question, a good point by the way, we agree, it's evolving, it's a moving train as they say. But as, people that might be watching that might be a Cisco customer or someone deploying a lot of Cisco networks and products in his portfolio, what's your advice to them, what're you hearing that's a good first three steps to take today? Obviously the show's goin' on here, multi-cloud is in center of the focus, this new network age is here for the CEO. What are some things that people can do now that are safe and good first steps to continue on the journey to whatever this evolves into. >> Well I think as you're building your network you need to think about modularization, you need to think about how to build it in small, manageable pieces, and, even if you're not ready to take the automation step today, you need to think about what that's gonna look like in the future, so, if you really want to automate your network you have to have consistency, consistent policy, consistent configuration across your environment, and it's never too late to start that, or too early to start that, right? And so you can think about, if I wanted to take these 10 sites and I wanted to manage them as one, how would I build it? And you can use that kind of mental framework to help guide the decisions you make, even if you're not ready to jump into a full scale automation from soup to nuts. And also I think, it's important to start playing around with automation technology, there are all kinds of tools to do that, and you can start in an are that's either dev, or QA, that's not gonna be production impacting, but you really need to get your, wrap your hands around some of the tools that exist to automate, and start playing with those. >> Stay where you're comfortable, get in, learn, get hands on. Jordan, your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I was just over here like nodding my head furiously, 'cause everything she said, I 100% agree with. >> Ditto. (laughing) >> Yes, ditto, exactly. The only thing I would add is that we think about automation a lot in the method of config push. Right, the idea of configuring a device in an automated way, but that's not the only avenue for automation. Start by pulling information from your devices, it is really, really low risk way to start looking at your network programmatically, is to be able to go out to all of your switches, all of your routers, all of your networking devices and pull the same information and correlate that data and get yourself some information that's with a broader view. Does nothing to effect the change or state of your network, but you are now starting to look at your network that way. And I will reiterate Eyvonne's point, you cannot automate a network if it's not repeatable. If every design, every topology, every location is a special snowflake, you will never be able to automate anything because you're gonna have a hundred unique automation scripts to run a hundred unique sites. >> You'd be chasin' your tail big time. >> You'd be chasin' your tail, and so it is critical, if you're not in that state now, what you need to do is start looking how to modularize, and make repeatable config blocks in your network. >> Well guys, thanks for comin' on, Eyvonne, Jordan, thanks for comin' on, appreciate you taking the time. Final question for ya, I know it's day one, we got two more days of live coverage here, but, if you can kinda project, and in your minds eye see the development of the show, what's bubbling up as the most important story that's gonna come out of Cisco Live if you had to look at some early indications from the keynotes and some of the conversations in the hallway, what do you think is the biggest story this year for Cisco Live? >> I think for me personally, I wanna understand what Cisco's cloud strategy looks like, to know where they're going with the cloud and how they're going to help stitch together all the different services that we have. The clouds are becoming their own monolith, they each do things their own way, and still the network is what is stitching all those services together to provide access. And so I think it's important to understand that strategy, and where Cisco's goin'. >> Jordan, your thoughts? >> My, what I'm really looking for from the show this year is how Cisco is gonna make orchestration approachable. We've seen this process of automation where only the hardcore programmers could do it, then we got some tools. And these tools, as we watch as more of Cisco's product platforms start to integrate with each other I think the key piece for enterprise shops that don't have that type of resource on staff is what tools are they gonna give them to make this orchestration, between the way in and the enterprise campus, and into the cloud and in the data center, how do we tie all that together and make that to like a nice, seamless way to operate your network? >> Hey, what a great opportunity to have another podcast called under the hood, see what's goin' on, lot of chops needed, thanks for comin' on, give a quick plug for the address for your podcast, where do we find it, what's the site, Network Collective, obviously you guys are doing great things. Share the coordinates. >> Sure, you can find us at thenetworkcollective.com we usually use the hashtag: #NetworkCollective I'm on Twitter @SharpNetwork. Jordan, you wanna tell people where to find you? >> Sure, @bcjordo on Twitter, and obviously if you wanna interact with Network Collective, @NetCollectivePC on Twitter as well. >> Alright, thanks so much for the commentary, great to have a little shared, little podcast here, live on theCUBE, here in Orlando, I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman for our coverage at Cisco Live 2018, stay with us for more, we've got two more days of this, got day one just gettin' started, be right back after this short break. (bubbly music)

>> (Narrator) Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer and you're watching The Cube, worldwide leader in tech coverage, and this is OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest Melvin Hillsman, who's the governance board member of OpenLab, which we got to hear about in the keynote on Monday. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Melvin, we were given, start us off with a little bit about your background, what brought you to the OpenStack community, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, yeah, so my background is in Linux system administration and my getting involved in OpenStack was more or less seeing the writing on the wall as it relates to virtualization and wanting to get an early start in understanding how things would pan out over the course of some years. So I probably started OpenStack maybe three or four so years ago. I was probably later to the party than I wanted to be, but through that process, started working at Rackspace first and that's how I really got more involved into OpenStack in particular. >> Yeah, you made a comment, though. The writing on the wall for virtualization. Explained that for a sec. >> So for me, I was at a shared hosting company and we weren't virtualizin' anything. We were using traditional servers, dedicated servers, installing hundreds of customers on those servers. And so, at one point, what we started doing was we would take a dedicated server, we would create a virtual machine on it, but we would use most of the resources of that dedicated server, and so what allowed that shared hosting was to tear stuff down and recreate it, but it was very manual process and so, of course, the infrastructure service and orchestration around that OpenStack was becoming the de facto standard and way of doing it, and so I didn't want to try to learn manually, or fix something up internally, I wanted to go where OpenStack was being highly developed a lot and people working on it in their day to day jobs, which is why I went to Rackspace. >> Okay, one of the things we look at, this is a community here, so it takes people from lots of different backgrounds, and some of them do it on their spare time, some of them are paid by larger companies to participate, so to tell us about OpenLab, itself, and how your company participates there. >> Sure, so I started, well I'm at Huawei now, but I was at Rackspace and that's kind of how I got more involved in the community and there I started working on testing things above the OpenStack ecosystem, so things that people want to build on top of OpenStack and during that process Huawei reached out to me and was like hey you know you're doing a great job here, and I was like yeah I would love to come and explore more of how we can increase this activity in the community at large. And so Oakland Lab was essentially born out of that, which the OpenStack community, they deliver the OpenStack API's, and they kind of stop there, you know. Everything above that is, you do that on your own, more or less, and so also, as a chair of the user committee, again, just being more concerned about the people who are using stuff, OpenLab was able, was available to facilitate me having access to hardware and access to people who are using things outside OverStack in use cases, et cetera, where we want to test out more integrated tools working with OpenStack and different versions of OpenStack. And so that's essentially what OpenLab is-- >> So in OpenLab, projects come together and it's basically, it's an Interop, boy, in the networking world, they've had the Interop plug and plug fest for a long time, but, in essence, projects come together and you integrate them and start, you invite them in and they integrate and start to test them. Starting with, I mean, I see, for this release, Terraform and Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so a lot of people want to to use Kubernetes, right? And as an OpenStack operator you essentially, you don't really want to go and learn all the bits of Kubernetes, necessarily, and so, but you want to use Kubernetes and you want to work seamlessly with OpenStack and you want to use the API's that you're used to using with OpenStack and so we work very heavily on the external cloud provider for OpenStack, enabling Cinder V3 for containers that you're spinning up in Kubernetes, so that they have seamless integration, you don't have to try to attach your volumes, they are automatically attached. You don't have to figure out what your load balancing is going to to look like. You use Octavia, which is load balancing service for OpenStack, very tightly integrated and things, you know, as you spin things up, they work as you as you would expect and so then all the other legacy applications and all the things you're used to doing with OpenStack, you bring on Kubernetes and you essentially do things the way you've been doing them before, with just an additional layer. >> Yeah, now I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the providers and the users, you know how do they get engaged, to and give us a little flavor around those. >> Yeah, so you get engaged, you go to OpenLabtesting.org and there's two options. One, is you can test out your applications and tools, by clicking get started, you fill that out. And what's great about open lab is that we actually reach out and we talk with you, we consult with you, per se, because we have a lot of variation in hardware that's available to us and so we want to figure out the right hardware that you need in order to do the tests that you want, so that we can get the output as it relates to that integration that will, of course, educate and inform the community at large of whether or not it's working and been validated. And, again, so as a person who wants to support OpenLab or for a provider, for example, who wants to support OpenLab, you click on the support OpenLab link, you fill out a form and you tell us you know, do you want to provide more infrastructure, do you want to talk with us about how clouds are being architected, integrations are being architected, things that you're seeing in the open source use cases that may not be getting the testing that they need and you're willing to work with engineers from other companies around that, so individual testers and then companies who may bring a number of testers together around a particular use case. >> Now, you're starting to publish some of the results of Interop testing and things like that. How is open lab, how does it produce its results, is it eventually going to be producing white papers and things like that or dashboards or what's your vision there? >> Yeah, so we produce a very archaic dashboard right now, but we're working with the CNCF to, if you go to CNCF.CI, and they have a very nice dashboard that kind of shows you a number of projects and whether or not they work together. And so it's open source, so what we want to do is work with that team to figure out how do we change the logos and the git repos, to how to driving those red and green, success or failure icons that are there, but they're relevant to the test that we're doing in OpenLab, so yeah. So we definitely want to have a dashboard that's very easy to decipher what tests are failing in or passing. >> Looking forward, what kinds of projects are you most interested in getting involved? >> Right now, very much Kubernetes, of course. We're really focusing on multi architecture, again, as a result of our work with Kubernetes and driving full conformance and multi architecture. That's kind of the wheelhouse at this time. We're open for folks to give us a lot of different use cases, like we were starting to look at some edge stuff, how can we participate there, we're starting looking at FPGA's and GPU's, so a lot different, we don't have a full integration in a lot of different areas, just yet, but we are having those conversations. >> So, actually, I spent a bunch of years, when I worked on the vendor side, living in an Interrupt lab, and the most valuable things were not figuring out what worked, but what broke, so what kind of things, you know, as you're working through this, what learnings back do you share with the community, both the providers and users? Big stumbling blocks that you can help people, give a red flag, or say you know, avoid these type of things. >> Yeah, exactly what you just said. You know, what's good is some of our stuff is geographically dispersed, so we can start to talk about if, what's the latency look like? You may, within that few square miles that you're operating and doing things, it works great, but when I'm sending something across the water how, is your product still moving quickly, is the latency too bad that we can't, I can't create a container over here because it takes too long, so one example of looking at something fail as it relates to that is we're talking with Octavia folks to see, if I spin up a lot of containers am I going to therefore create a lot of load balancers and if I create a lot of load balancers I'm creating a lot of VM's, or am I creating a lot of containers or are things breaking apart, so we need to dig a little bit further to understand what is and is not working with the integrations we're currently working on and then again we're exploring GPV, GPUs just landed more or less, that was a part of the keynote as well, and so now we're talking about, well, let's do some of that testing. The software, the code, is there but is it usable? And so that's one area we want to start playing around with. >> Okay, one of the other things in the keynote's got mentioned was Zul, the CIDT tool, how's that fitting into the OpenLab? >> Yeah, we use Zul as our gating, so what's great about Zul is that you can interac6t with projects from different SCM's, so we have some projects that live in github, some that utilize Garrote, some that utilize gitlab, and Zul has applicability where it can talk to different, it can talk across these different SCM's, and if you have a patch that depends on a patch in another another pod, so a patch on one project in one SCM can depend on a patch in another project, in a different SCM, and so what's great about Zul is that you can say, hey I'm depending on th6at, so before this patch lands, check to make sure this stuff works over there, so if it succeeds there and it's a dependency then you basically confirm that succeeds there and then now I can run the test here, and it passes here as well, so you know that you can use both of those projects together again, in an integration. Does it makes sense? Hopefully I'm making it very clear, the power there with the cross SCM integration. >> Yeah, Melvin, you've had a busy week, here, at the show. Any, you know, interesting things you learned this week or something that you heard from a customer that you thought, oh boy we got to, you know, get this into our lab or a road map or, you know-- >> The ARM story, the multi architecture is, I feel like that's really taking off. We've had discussions with quite a few folks around that, so yeah, that for me, that's the next thing that I think we're really going to concentrate a little bit harder on is, again, figuring out if there are some problems, because mostly it's been just x86, but we need to start exploring what's breaking as we add more to multi architecture. >> Melvin, no shortage of new things to test and play with, and every customer always brings some unique spins on things, so appreciate you giving us the update on OpenLab, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're Welcome. Thanks for having me. >> From John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (funky techno music) >> Welcome back to our live coverage here of Google Next 2017, an event that last year was focused only on Google Cloud. They've actually expanded a bit, they're talking about G Suite, talking about some of the devices, and they bring in a really broad and diverse community, so when I talk to the Google people, it's not one show, it's a handful of shows. I went to the analyst event. My guest for this segment is Chris Wahl, who came in through the community event. So, excited to get that angle. Chris, thanks so much for doing the drive with me from San Francisco down to Palo Alto. For those of us not in the area, it's a 45 minute drive, it's not too bad. It's a beautiful, sunny day. It's great to catch up with you and thanks for coming. >> Always glad to be on, love being a CUBE Alumni, so, I think it's my third time. >> Wow, a three-time Alumni. It's like if you've been a host of Saturday Night Live for like seven times, you know you get the special jacket. - Automatically. >> Things like that. You're getting up there. Three times. It's like, you're not quite in Pak Elsinger area, but you have passed, you've been on more than Andy Jassey now. >> Wow, cool. >> I think that that's pretty impressive. >> Bucket list, accomplished. >> Exactly, so, what brings you to the Google event and tell us a little bit about the community event. >> Yeah, to be honest, I thought it was a spam email at first. I just got an invite saying, hey, we have this Google event going on, and I'm not really plugged in to the Google Universe too much. So I said, cool, I'm interested, I'll take a look. Got invited out by Sarah Novotny to a community focus day. >> Host: Sarah's awesome. Also a CUBE Alum, of course. >> Yeah, Alum, and ran OSCON I think, as a boarder or some kind of management facility for quite a while. So yeah, the Google Cloud Next is this week but on Tuesday. They actually had a bunch of influencers, evangelists, community members, out to spend time with all sorts of Google-y Google-ers, talking around what their vision is around kind of bridging the gap to the enterprise, what their thought around Kubernetes, and just really the community in general were. Which was kind of cool because it was all fresh and clean and new for me. So, it was really great to taste the Kool-Aid, and see how delicious it could be. >> Yeah, so I'm curious what your take is. I remember I did a panel at Interop a couple of years ago, and it was like, basically, hyper-scale, you're-not-Google, so what do you need to do, how do you do it, do you just use Google stuff, can you code like Google, can you act like Google, or are you just an enterprise and you're forced to live in the past. >> I think over the last couple of years, the idea of the Sight Reliability Engineers come out and been more focused on the enterprise and kind of dovetailed into the Dev-Op story. So, it was really interesting to hear, not only trying to talk to the enterprise, but also how they're trying to get the enterprise to kind of stop being the traditional enterprise that it's been. Which I think entirely, it's something that we practitioners have always been trying to do. No one wants to be on-call all the time and fixing these flaming disasters and things like that. But at the same time, you have to recognize that moving that much intrinsic culture poison from one side to the next is hard. They're admitting that too, it's like, we wold love for you guys to be more Google-y, and to use the tools that we have here, but we're not sure you even know what the tools are or how to use them, or what kind of documentation is necessary, or what meet-ups we can go to find my people, you know, the practitioners. >> I want to channel our friends, the Geek Whisperers, and alright Chris, so how did you transition out of being a VMware guy to someone that does cool and interesting things now, because VMware is no longer the coolness. >> That's been the vibe, yeah. It's something I personally have been trying to, I don't think in any technology you want to be that technology specific. VMware, love it, have been doing it for 12 something years, but you don't just want to be pigeon-holed in that kind of silo. Which is actually why I wanted to come out and talk with the folks at Google around what they're doing to build a community. I think it was Sam something-or-other-- >> Host: Sam Ramji. >> Sam Ramji actually came up and said, you know, as long as we're going to exist as a company, we're going to have this community day. It's the first one they've done, and they plan to do it basically infinitely forever, because they realized they had the analysts, and things like that out there, they had all the engineers and developers, but what were they missing? The folk in the trenches that are trying to adopt and use this sort of technology. I like that aspect of it. There weren't any huge, mind-shattering results that were out there, except for I think, me personally, I like that Google kind of admitted that yeah, they hadn't been doing the best job around interfacing with the community and getting IT practitioners and operation-centric folks into the fold, welcoming into the bosom of Google, and that they were trying to work on that. And it's like, okay, awesome. Let's have a conversation, which the other half of the day was an un-conference, where we literally broke up into groups, that we decided ourselves as like a democracy of Google decision-making. We formed eight different groups. Some focused on containers, I actually sat in in a two hour session where we just kind of riffed on abstraction layers and where we should we start working. Is it at the container level, is it at the hypervisor level, is it at the virtual machine level? And it was neat because everyone had a completely different idea and background around that. I felt like I was an alien in that conversation for a lot of it 'cause they're working on solving problems that are totally alien to my world. So I liked all that. >> It's an interesting crowd when the server-less stuff got talked about in the keynote today-- >> Yes! >> There was a big clap and I loved Brian Stevens. He's like, functions are just fragments of code, and they get applause, you know, he's kind of like-- (Chris laughs) >> It's like either remark, I got applause for that. >> Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. But you know, that's the kind of people that come to this show, right? So, you checked out a thing called, what was it, Code Labs or something like that? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, yeah, there was, I had some notes there that I'd written down. Certification in Code Labs, specifically. So Code Labs was interesting 'cause it's a place that you can, you have to book it in advance, like a day in advance, and from about 11 to seven each day, they just have Google-y Google-ers, you know, very Google-y people out there that say alright, here's all our various APIs, such as the new one where you can query a video and say I'm looking for, I think in the keynote, they had "find me baseball" in this video, and it actually shows you in the timeline where baseball occurs. There's also things to do image tagging and things like that. And, I don't know, it might be difficult to grasp that API interaction at first. And so you can sit down, and they'll show you how to write code in the languages of your choice. Obviously Go is very prominent. I'm a PowerShell developer, so it's like, alright, how would you write that in Curl, and that's maybe our bridge to one another, since I don't know Go and they don't know PowerShell, or the person I was working with. So that was cool, to hear how they approach those things, because I've typically done it as an Ops person. I'm typically looking at it from the perspective of I'm trying to automate some task and feed it into an orchestration engine. And I'm not super deep on APIs in general, I like them, but ... That was cool, I liked that you're basically getting to meet with really, really awesome engineers and SREs to pick their brain and their vast decades of experience on writing code. To work with APIs and things that are Google-centric. So that was awesome. >> So it sounds like you didn't feel like this was a marketing show, right, - [Chris] No! >> that they bring in the engineers, the technical people, I mean it's not far being from San Franscisco from the Google-Plex, the Mothership is nearby. >> Thats's a good point because a lot of these shows have just become a sales pitch in a wolf's clothing or a conference clothing, and this was ... I've never met so many really, really talented engineers all concentrated in one spot. I mean, you've got the rock stars that I think everybody knows, like Sarah, and Kelsey, that are very available and personable, but you also have a whole army of people that have a huge amount of passion around writing code and understand what your problems are and wanting to talk to you. I felt like a person, which I've been a Google customer since, I guess, Google came out, you know, Google apps and things like that. This is really the first time I really started putting faces to the technical practitioners that work there, and they're really interested and excited with what my mundane kind of problems. So, that's kind of cool. >> Yeah, I found they're definitely, they're listening, they're talking, it's really good, because right, we at our firm, we've used Google for a while and it's like, oh wait I have a challenge. Who do I call, who do I email? Nope, you should just watch the YouTube video and use it. C'mon, aren't you smart enough to use these things right? You know, was kind of how we all felt for a while. Interesting. Kinder, gentler Google than we've knew in the past? >> They had the Google leaders circle and the various groups that you could join online, but it was just, you can't fake that kind of raw passion, and I sat down with some of the SREs at the community day, and it was really just, talk to me about what you do, and why, and what tools you use, and what can we do to be better? More specifically, the Dev Rel, the developer relations folks were just awesome. And they're like, is our title threatening? What meet-up should we go to? What can we do to make your life better? And I just kind of, at first, said a few comments and realized, no, this is real. They want to know my day one and day two operations, so that they can find the right tools, or if there isn't one, build one. And I don't know, that's great. I've never seen that at a conference before. So I'm hooked. I definitely plan to go again. >> Alright, so anything you didn't see that you were hoping to see, follow-up that you want to have, other cool stuff going on that you want to share? >> I almost want to do like a plea to Google that throughout the community today and at the conference, there's been a lot of commentary and some, kind of some references to, oh we don't want to tell you how to do things, we don't want to tell you how to build architecture in a certain way. Please do tell me how to do those things. At least give me a reference architecture, or some example environments, because I feel like a lot of it is just, here's some cool things you can do, kind of in isolation. Or here are some things with Kubernetes that kind of exist outside of reality. I'm looking for, alright, I don't have any of that stuff, how do I onboard into that? Here's a white paper, and that kind of jazz. >> Yeah, and we saw, you know, I hate to always bring up AWS, but AWS went from here's this giant toolbox with all these things to right, here's some services, here are some tracks, here are some, not wizards, but you know, templates you can follow for certain things. Here are people that are probably similar to you and, boy, with Google with their AI and ML and all their things that they can do to help us sort out all the TLAs that they've got to. (Chris laughs) You know, they should be able to help going forward because, yeah, Google should be able to personalize all that to be able to work a little bit better for us as opposed to us having to just kind of figure it out a little bit. I know you played with the Google Cloud a little bit yourself-- - Yeah. >> And it wasn't as simple as you were hoping, right? >> It was hard. (both laugh) I mean-- >> Host: C'mon, if you can't figure it out, you know-- >> I don't feel like I'm the sharpest tool in the shed, but I was like, I'm kind of the representative layman ops person, and it felt very convoluted, complex, the documentation was fragmented. I'm like, just give me the wizard so that I can start fishing for myself. I just do that first hit for free, and then I'll take care of it beyond that. So, that would be my one ask to Google as a whole, but otherwise I think the tooling and the people, and the culture are all there, it's just build a few more things and I think we've got some interesting entanglements at the enterprise level once that's done. >> Okay, want to give me the final word, what's going on with you other than, your hometown, your new hometown of Austin, Texas. South By coming, so I know there's a lot of music and fun going on but, what's happening in your world, what's happening with Rubrik? >> Oh yeah, I'll mention South By, definitely will be there, I will not be available online or anything. I'm going to be going into sequester mode and just listen to music with my co-host actually. If you listen to the Datanauts podcast, with Ethan Banks, he's going to come by. So, we'll be at the show I guess if you want to hang out with us, hit us up. Otherwise, Rubrik's been awesome. It's definitely a rocket ship ride and it was actually dove-tailed into quite a few conversations I had while at Google Next. Because movement of data into and around clouds is non-trivial, so that's where the Cloud Data Management world that we're in, kind of fits into that equation, and why I personally wanted to go to this show, but also professionally I thought that there'd be some inroads there to discuss with the other practitioners. >> Absolutely, the whole infrastructure side and how that plays in the public cloud, how it plays with Sass, there's a lot of those discussions going on. Congrats, you guys have been growing some good buzz. You guys have been hiring, too, so check Chris out for all that. We'll be back, lots more coverage here of the Google Cloud Next 2017, you're watching theCUBE. (funky techno music)