(techno music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here at Barcelona, Spain of Cisco LIVE! Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman, and Dave Vellante here this week covering all the action in cloud, data center, multi-cloud. Our next is Jim Frey who's the Vice President's alliances at Kentik Technologies. Groundbreaking report that came of the Amazon Reinvent Conference. A lot of customers. Part of the multi-cloud discussion. Jim, great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. It's Frye by the way. >> Frye. I'm sorry. >> Okay. No worries. No worries. >> Multi-cloud, your report has some interesting data. Talk about the survey, the results. What is is telling us? >> Yeah, we've been working hard at Kentik on extending our solution to start covering the cloud, multi-cloud server hybrid environments. And so we were at the AWS re:Invent show and we decided to take the opportunity to talk to some of the attendees and just sort of get their view of what some of the challenges are. So we talked to a little over 300 of em and we asked them a few questions not a, you know, rigorous thing, you're doing it on the show floor, right? But we found some really interesting things out of that. So the first thing is is that it really is a multi-cloud world already. More so even in hybrid. And so we had nearly 60 percent. 58 percent of the people who we talked to had more than just one of the cloud in play. They almost all had AWS of course cause it was an AWS event, but not all, of which is really interesting. But, you know, they either had AWS plus Google or plus Azure or plus some other cloud. More so than even hybrid. And so we also asked, are you using AWS in conjunction with you know, your own private data center or a third party host to go low center. Only 33 percent were doing that. So, we were surprised. And the reason that that is really significant is monitoring in management of these environments is much more complex in a, well. It's complex in a hybrid environment. It's even more complex in a multi-cloud environment. So it sounds like there's some real need for some help there. >> What are the challenges and what are the some of the complexities? What are the challenges in the monitoring? >> Well, so that was the next question. What's the key challenge, ya know? And usually whenever you ask someone about the challenges, the number one answer is always, oh, security is my biggest concern. That did not turn out to be the case here. The biggest overriding concern across all the different sort of levels of people we talked to was actually cost management. And cost management is, it was a bit surprising. You know, but, usually, you hear security, security, security and then something else. This was cost management either number one or number two. And number one for most of the constituencies. And in some of the subgroups, like VP level, SVP level, architect level, it was overwhelmingly the first choice. 40 and 50 percent of them are saying yeah, cost control is their biggest issue. Even ahead of other things like performance, like visibility, like actual, you know, control of the environment. You know, its cost was really the biggest concern. That's the big issue. >> Jim, something we've been tracking especially at shows like this, at the Cisco show is the challenges I used to understand kind of the stuff I had in my data center. I could get my arms around it. I might not love the management tools that I have. I might complain about some of the cost. But, it's all very well understand. It's bought most of the cap and freight. When you get to the public cloud, like totally understand what you are saying. multi-cloud. Now I've got all these different pieces and how will I have them defined. There's different skill sets between them. >> Right >> And when it comes to cost, right, the big unknown is oh wait, am I getting surprised by what happens, in that environment and across all them, I mean, I've talked to plenty of companies that will dedicate an engineering resource just to manage cloud or >> Right. >> I have many friends in the industry that are helping you know, cost optimization is something that is, you know, software consulting, there's huge business in that because we're still early in this getting to the steady stage. Help us connect the dots. Where does Kentik play into this then. So you talk to all these customers. >> Thank you. Our viewpoint is network and we're trying to give a viewpoint of what's happening in this environment by watching the network. And that's always super valueable because it helps you localize where things are, you know, what activity's happening and it helps you see, you know, which workloads are talking to which workloads. And that reveals sometimes things you don't expect. And this is where the cost control come in because you know, the cloud environment, you have to pay for certain network traffic. Especially between availability zones or when you're shipping it out of the cloud back to your other, you know, your home environment. And we have talked to a lot of customers who have said, hey, end of the month comes around, I get my bill and there's this big number there for data, you know, transfer. I don't know what drove that. And why am I being surprised time and time again by this. Well then there were viewpoints really awesome for seeing that. And if you can do it with a monitoring system that's watching for that all the time, the good news is that you can catch it, figure it out if it's real or not, needed or not, and fix it before 20 days later you get a big, fat bill. >> What does fixing it mean, does it mean like keeping it contained in the cloud, or on frame, or managing what's moving around? >> Could be combination of things, one of the things that we've seen in some of our earlier deployments are someone moved a workload into a different availability zone. Well, there was an application dependency they didn't recognize. And, you know, that workload was talking to, you know, home datacenter, or the another availability zone, and creating traffic across there and just running up the meter on the network costs. So if you can see that and it becomes very obvious to watch the traffic patterns. You can at least have someone go say, Hmm, okay, that's a surprise. They had a big rise to my zone to zone traffic or my, you know, cloud to home traffic. Let's just take a look to who's driving that and whether something that should be or shouldn't be. >> One of the interesting trends we've been watching on scene with cloud and hybrid cloud is kind of the consumption and deployments of cloud and hybrid's interesting because hybrid's with a cloud operation on premise. Which is been slowest to deploy. WikiBound's done a lot of research on private cloud and why that's happening. But it seems that clouds sprawl on the public side has been there. So yeah, I've got some Amazon, easy to stand up. I've got some Azure and now Google. So it's probably easier to get stuff in the clouds and then now they've got repurpose on premise to kind of have this seamless cloud native environment and Cisco's announcements, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah >> So as that's happened, what have you guys learned and scene in terms of the customer behavior. They wake up obviously, the bills are higher, so makes sense that the cloud is higher than hybrid and the cost containment is a concern. How did they get there? What are you seeing? And what's the psychology the customer just share some insight into the customer behavior. >> Well. >> Oh shoot, I got to unwind this, do I double down? What's going on? >> I think it really depends a lot on what the projects are, what the objectives are and what the skillset is. But one of the things that we found in this survey is that, network viewpoint that helps you understand what's really happening in the production environment is often being underutilized or underappreciated in the cloud environments, in the cloud, you know, deployments in cloud infrastructure. So one of the things we asked about was, how many of you folks at this event are actually taking advantage of, for instance, VPC Flow Logs, which can tell you exactly what's happening with an AWS, and between the availability zones. And it was surprising, they've been around, VPC Flow Logs have been around for years as a technology and as an additional service available. But, only about a third of the response were actually using them. So they weren't taking advantage of this important insight and viewpoint ceilometery set. About a third kind of knew about em, but wasn't using em yet. And then another third didn't even know what they were. >> Yeah. >> So I think there's still some maturity happening some maturation happening in terms of understanding what can I do about this? How can I get ahead of this? What's at my disposal? So part of the challenge of course then is that I have that piece covered, but as you said now, how do I cover my home, you know, home front? And where do I find, you know, some sort of tools that can be put these things together so I can see it all as one. >> That's where you guys fit in. >> That's where we fit in, yeah. >> So let me get some anecdotes from you. One it's clear that's a, there's a pain point. Take the aspirin. Understand what's going on, contain the bills. Is, give a scenario of what they're doing to contain the, you mentioned a few of them, but also to give an example of where they're using the data to be proactive, so there's the vitamin side of it. The vitamin, aspirin, whatever metaphor. So, you know, I've got contain my cost, I get that. How are people using the data to be more proactive in either architecting or deploying? >> So I think the, I don't know that anyone's being proactive yet. That is certainly the promise and the opportunity. Most organizations are simply want to be more aware of what happened. Or more affectively reactive and you start there. And once you start to realize, hey, I can do this then you can start turning toward being more proactive. So, for instance our solution was built to allow you to trigger corrective actions back to the environment. We don't take the actions, but we can trigger the systems that would change configurations or change policy and then form those systems of, you know, what's happening and what sort of parameters can we recognize that indicated and issue? So we believe that in especially watching the change in patterns of activity, noticing the anomalies. Anomaly detection often times used around security use cases. We do that. But also, it should be applied to operational use cases. When does a new workload pop up or a new, you know, volume of traffic show up that they didn't expect? And if it's something that I recognize happens at a regular basis and I know the answer, let's automate the corrective response. So that's kind of our theory of provide you the understanding of what's happening then with the tools to trigger and automatic corrective action. >> Alright, so Jim, we're talking a lot about multi-cloud this week with Cisco. Of course, you know, Cisco dominant in the networking space. Really feeling out where they live in multi-cloud, how networking plays across all of them. What's the relationship between Kentik and Cisco? How does that work? >> Thanks, so we're a member of CSPP Program. We are a partner. We joined because we manage a lot of Cisco gear. (laugh) So, a lot of our customers have Cisco. A lot of our use cases, historically, have been at the edge of the network, in particular the service providers. So, those that are delivering internet services or using the internet to reach their customers in some way. So, what's really different about us is we do a really deep and detailed approach of integrating a path, BGP path data, PGP rev data and correlating that with the traffic. As well with other enhancements, and augmentations of the data that give business and service context to the network traffic. Makes it more actionable. >> Yes, and what are you doing in the container space? You mentioned edge computing got some interesting use cases maybe explain a little bit where you play there? >> So when I say edge, I'm saying internet edge, not EDGE computing, although we're fascinated by what EDGE computing represents and the new challenges that's going to bring. Now when it comes to containers, actually we're very fascinated working in that area too, because, Jon, as you mentioned, moving and implementation of new cloud workloads is cloud native, using Kubernetes, using things like Gist T O, you know, that changes the environment once again. So, we've actually built a connector into Kubernetes so that we can use that to pull service information, you know, in terms of what workloads, what containers are out there. What are they doing? What's there purpose? So when we show you activity map of, you know, site to site communications we can say, here are the actual, you know, services that are being, participating in this activity. Its G was another place where we're really interested in to look at the service mesh, you know, that's being set up to run and operate communication between containers. Cause that's a new sort of virtual cloud network. It's a way that these containers are communicating. and again, the more you understand about the communication patterns, the better you can recognize problems, the better you can balance and plan, the better you really get a handle on what's really happening. >> Jim, I want to get your thoughts on since you brought up edge of the internet, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, data moves around, certainly brings up the question of which routes the packets are moving around? There's always been debates but SL lays around, you know, direct connection versus go through the internet? Is China looking at it? So, there's a security kind of concern. >> Yep. >> What's the trend that you're seeing with respect to say either direct connects, cause I'm a company that I have multiple clouds. I have the connections in there. I'm concerned about latency, certainly cost, you know, whether it's cat videos or whatever, or application too. It still costs money. >> Yep. >> So latency's important so each cloud is its own kind of latency issues. What have you seen? >> Well, getting to the cloud and then within the cloud. >> Yeah, exactly. So it's complicated. So, this is a new dynamic, but it's similar concept. Is there standard latencies? Is it getting better? What's the trend look like? >> That's a great question, and I honestly don't have a good answer for you. But I recognize and agree that those are common concerns that we hear. And the best thing at least for what Kentik is doing is to provide the means to measure and understand that. So you can compare what's working. You can, you know, document a baseline, your different options and your different paths, and recognize when there's a real problem occurring. When you start to see latencies spike to any particular cloud service or location or zone so that you can try and get on top of it and figure it. >> That's a classic case of evolution. Get it instrumented. >> Yeah. >> Get the providers, get better what there services. That's the out of, really out of your hands. >> Yeah. >> That's not really. Okay, so, getting back to the survey kind of wrap things up. Interesting it said Amazon the biggest cloud show Azure pops up on the list as pretty high. >> It sure does. >> Makes sense Microsoft's got great performance. I mean Azure's kind of like, they move a lot of stuff into Azure preexisting Microsoft stuff plus they're investing. What's the bottom line summary as you kind of, you know, the aroma of the rapport. What's coming out of the rapport? What's the key insights that you can glean out of this? >> So I think it indicates normal pattern of adoption, and sort of we're growing into this marketplace. It's evolving as we go, you know. We saw big early-end option hopping in like lift and ship approaches to just move stuff into the cloud. Throw it in the cloud. It's going to be cheaper. It doesn't turn out to be cheaper. It can be. Then you've got another, you know, set of organizations that are born in the cloud, right? And they've started out from the beginning. So those two early approaches are merging into how do we really use this as a true, strategic approach to I.T.? What are the real world complexities we're going to deal with? And how are we going to deal with those? It's really no different from the way that technology has evolved within traditional data centers. And why, the way virtualization came in and changed the way we build and architect datacenters. It's awesome. It's great. It save you money in one area, but then it created huge blindspots, cause you couldn't tell what was going on in those virtualization layers, so we had to adapt our operational monitoring, and operational practices to accommodate the new technology. I think we're going through the same thing now with cloud. People recognize that they don't necessarily want to be holded to a single cloud provider. They want alternatives. They want, you know, cost competitiveness. They want redundancy. And so multi-cloud, I think, is becoming more and more real in part because people don't want to put all of their eggs in that one basket. >> And cost certainly looks good on paper at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> But then as you said, there's side effects. It's a system so there's consequences to the system. >> Yes, absolutely. >> When you start growing or whatever. And that's just where people have to work it better. Right? >> Yep. >> That's pretty much the operational. >> I mean, let's apply the same rigor that we used to apply to traditional data center environments. And let's start embracing the cloud, right? >> So, Jim, you've talked about the multi-cloud bid. Why don't you put a fine point on it. There's a reason why you jump from being an analyst into the vendor world. Some people on the outside will be like, well, you know, cloud's been going on for ten years, seems we understand where this is going. But, tell us why, you know, now is so important for this multi-cloud environment and the opportunity that you see again. >> Sure. >> In this ecosystem. >> Kentik in particular what we're starting to hear, very loud and clear amongst the what. Our traditional an initial base of customers was facilities based, service providers and digital enterprise that managed big routed networks and needed to understand better control their relationship with the internet and delivery across the internet. There coming to us and saying, hey look. We're splitting. We're adding cloud workloads. So, we're moving our content that we're serving up into the cloud, you know, more and more of our systems are moving into the cloud and we rely on you for this visibility in our production environment. We need you to add this. So, we saw a demand from our customers to, you know, accommodate this and in parallel we're just really inspired by this next generation of cloud native application development. It seems to be starting to reach that point where's it's becoming reality and it's becoming mature, and it's becoming a reliable approach to I.T. That now's the time to really get serious about bringing these other best practices for the traditional world, and applying them there. >> And the survey data has created proved multi-cloud and hybrid all here, costs can run out of control. You've got to work. You've got to operationalize cloud. And same rigor. I love that. Great insights, Jim. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Sure. >> Live CUBE coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! Europe 2019. It's theCUBE. Day three, or three days of coverage. We'll be back with more, after this short break. (techno music)