>>Welcome back to super cloud 22, our inaugural event. It's a pilot event here in the cube studios we're live and streaming virtually until we do it in person. Maybe next year. I'm John fury, host of the cube with Dave Lon two great guests, distinguished engineers managers, CTOs investors. Mariana Tessel is a CTO of Intuit ins Ray founder of vertex ventures. Both have a lot of DNA. Founder allow cloud here with mark Andre and Ben Horowitz, a variety of other great ventures you've done. And now you're an investor. Yep. Maria, you've been a seasoned CTO, VP of engineering, VMware Docker Intuit. Now thanks for joining us. >>Absolutely. >>So super cloud is a, is a thing. And apparently it's got a lot of momentum and you guys got stats over there at, at Intuit in, so you're investing and we were challenged on super cloud. Our initial thesis was you build on the clouds, get all that leverage like snowflake, you get a good differentiation and then you compete and then move to other clouds. Now it's becoming a thing where I can do this. Every enterprise could possibly do it. So I want to get your guys thoughts on what you think of super cloud concept and where are the holes in it, what needs to be defined. And so we'll start with you. You've done a lot of cloud things in your day. What >>Do you think? Yeah, it's the whole cloud journey started with a desire to consolidate and desire to actually provide uniformity and, and standards driven ways of doing things. And I think Amazon was a leader there. They helped kind of teach everybody else. You know, when I was in loud cloud, we were trying to do it with proprietary stacks just wouldn't work. But once everyone standardized upon Unix and you know, the chip sets no longer became as relevant. They did a lot of good things there, but what's happened since then is now you've got competing standards at the API layer at the interface layer no longer at the chip set layer, no longer at the operating system layer. Right? So the evolution of the, the, the battles are still there. When you talk about multicloud and super cloud, though, like one of the big things you have to keep in mind is latency is not free. Latency is very expensive and it's getting even more expensive now with, with multi-cloud. So you have to really understand where the separations of boundaries are between your data, your compute, and, and the network is just there as a facilitator to help binding compute and data. Right? And I think there's a lot of bets being made across different vendors like CloudFlare Akamai, as well as Amazon Google Microsoft in terms of how they think we should take computing either to the edge, from the core or back and forth. >>These, this is structural change. I mean, this is structural, >>It's desired by incumbents, but it's not something that I'm seeing from the consumption. I'd love to hear, hear from our end's per perspective, from a consumption point of view, like how much edge computing really matters. Right. >>Mario. >>So I think there's like, there's kind of a, a story of like two, like it's kind of, you can cut it for both edges. No, no pun intended on one end. It is really simplifying to actually go into like a single cloud and standardize on it and just have everything there. But I think what over time companies find is that they end up in multiple clouds, whether like, you know, through acquisitions or through like needing to use a service in another cloud. So you do find yourself in a situation where you have multi multi-cloud and you have to kind of work through it and understand how to make it all like work and latency is an issue, but also for many, many workloads, you can work around it and you can make it work where you have workloads that actually span multiple vendors and clouds. You know, again, having said that, I would say the world is such, that is still a simplifying assumption. When if you go to a single cloud, it's much easier to just go and, and bet on that >>Easier in terms of everything's integrated, IAS works with SAS, they solve a lot of problems. >>Correct. And you can do like for your developers, you can actually provide an environment that's super homogenous, simple. You can use services easily up and down the stack. And, you know, we, we actually made that deliberate decision. When we started migrating to the cloud at the beginning, it was like, oh, let's do like hybrid we'll, you know, make it, so it work anywhere. It was so complicated. It was not worth it. >>When was the, when did you give up, what was the moment? Was there a flash point where you said, oh, this is terrible. This is >>Dead. Yeah. When, when we started to try to make it interoperable and you just see what it requires to do that and the complexity of the architecture that it just became not worth it for the gains you have. >>So speaking obviously as a SAS provider, right. So it just doesn't, it didn't make business case sense for you guys to do that. So it was super cloud. Then an infrastructure thing we just heard from Ben wa deja VI that they're not, they're going beyond instantiating their, their data cloud. They're actually running, you know, their own little snow grid. They called it. And, and then when I asked him, well, what about latency? He said, well, we copied data over, you know, so, okay. That's you have to do, but that's a singular experience with the same governance or the same security. Just wasn't worth it for you guys is what I'm hearing. >>Correct. But again, like for some workload or for some services that we want to use, we are gonna go there and we are gonna then figure out what is the work around the latency issue, whether it's like copy or, you know, redundancy. >>Well, the question I have Dave on snowflake is maybe the question for you and in the panel is snowflake a tan expansion opportunity, or is there a technical reason to go to other clouds? >>I think they wanted to leverage the hyperscale infrastructure globally. And they said that they're out there, it's a free gift. We're gonna go take it. I, I think it started with we're on AWS. Do you think? And then we're on Azure and then we're on Google. And then they said, why don't we just connect all these and make it a singular experience? And yeah, I guess it's a TA expansion as a differentiator and it's, it adds value. Right. If I can share data across that global network, >>We have customers on Azure now, >>Right? Yeah. Yeah. Of course. >>You guys don't need to go CP. What do you think about that? >>Well, I think Snowflake's in a good position cuz they work mostly with analytical workloads and you have capacity. That's always gonna increase like no one subtracts, their analytical workload like ever, right. So there was just compounded growth is like 50% or 80% for, you know, many enterprises despite their best intentions, not to collect more data, they just can't stop doing it. So it's different than if you're like an Oracle or a transactional database where you don't have those, you know, like kind of infinite growth paths. So Snowflake's gonna continue to expand footprint their customers. They don't mind as long as you, they can figure out the, the lowest cost on denominator for, for that. >>Yeah. So it makes sense to be in all the clouds >>For them, for, for them, for sure. Yeah. >>But, but, but Oracle just announced with Microsoft what I would call super cloud, a, a cross cloud database service running on OCI and Azure with very low latency and a database that looks like a, the singular experience. Yeah. With, with a PAs layers >>That lost me after OCI that's >>Okay. You know, but that's the, that's the, the BS answer for all U VCs. The do nobody develops on Oracle? Well, it's a 240 billion market cap company. Show me who you all want be. >>We're gonna talk about SRDF and em C next, you >>All want Oracle. So there we go. You throw that into, you all want Oracle to buy your companies, your funding, you know, cause, cause we all wanna be like Oracle with that kinda cash flow. But, but anyway, >>Here's, here's one thing that I'm noticing that is gonna be really practical. I think for companies that do run SA is because like, you know, you have all these solutions, whether it's like analytics or like monitoring or logging or whatever. And each one of them is very data hungry and all of them have like SAS solutions that end up copy the data, moving data to their cloud, and then they might charge you by the size of your data. It does become kind of overwhelming for companies to use that many tools and basically maybe have that data kind of charge for it, multiple places because you use it for different purposes or just in general, if you have a lot of data, you know, that that is becoming an issue. So that's something that I've noticed in our, in our own kind of, you know, a world, but it's just something that I think companies need to think about how they solve because eventually a lot of companies will say, I cannot have all these solutions, so there's no way I'm gonna be willing to have so many copies of the data and actually pay for that. >>So many times, just something to think about. >>But one of the criticisms of the super cloud concept is that it's just SAS. If I'm running workload on prem and I, and I've got, you know, a connection to the cloud, which you probably do, that's, that's SAS, what's, what's the big deal and that's not anything new or different. So I'd love to get your thoughts on that. But Goldman Sachs, for instance, just announced the service last reinvent with AWS, connecting their tools, their data, and their software from on-prem to AWS, they're offering it as a service. I'm like, Hmm. Kind of looking like Supercloud, but maybe it's just SAS. >>It could be. And like, what I'm talking about is not so much like, you know, like what you wanna connect your data. But the idea is like a lot of the providers of different services, like in the past and, and like higher layer, they're actually COPI the data. They need the data in their cloud or their solution. And it just becomes complicated and expensive is, is kind of like my point. So yes, connecting it like for you to have the data in one place and then be able to connect to it. I think that is a valid, if, if that's kinda what you think about as a super cloud, that is a valid need, I think that companies will >>Have where developers actually want access to tools that might exist. >>Also the key is developers, right? Yeah. Developers decide all decisions, not database on administrators, not, you know, a hundred percent security engineers, not admins. So what's really interesting is where are the developers going next? If you look at the current winners in the current ecosystem, companies like MongoDB, I mean, they capture the minds of yeah. The JavaScript, you know, no JS developers absolutely very early on. And I started catch base and I could tell you like the difference was that capture motion was so important. So developers are basically used to this game-like experience now where they want to see tools that are free, whether it's open source or not, they actually don't care. They just want, and they want it SAS. They want it SAS delivered on demand. Right. And pay as you go. And so there's a lot of these different frameworks coming out next generation, no code, low code, whether it's Java, JavaScript, rust, you know, whatever, you know, go Lang. And there's a lot of people fighting religious wars about how to develop the next kind of modern pattern design pattern. Okay. And that's where a lot of excitement is how we look at like investment opportunities. Like where are those big bets who are, you know, frustrated developers, who are they frustrated, what's wrong with their current environment? You know, do they really enjoy using Kubernetes or trying to use Kubernetes? Yeah. Right. Like developers have a very different view than operator, >>But you mentioned couch base. I mean, I look at couch base what they're doing with Capellas as a form of Supercloud. I mean, I think that's an excellent, they're bringing that out to the edge. We're gonna hear later on from someone from couch base. That's gonna talk about that now. It's kind of a lightweight, you know, sort of, it's gonna be a, a synchronization, but it's the beginning >>A cool new venture deal that I'm not in, but was like duck DB. I'm like, what's duck DB like, well, it's an Emory database that has like this like remote store thing. I'm like, okay, that sounds interesting. Like let's call Mike Olson cuz that sounds like sleepy cat redone red distributed world. But like it's, it's like there's a lot of people refactoring design patterns that we're all grew up with since the popup days of, you know, typical round. Right? >>Yeah. That's the refactory I think that's the big pattern. So I have to ask you guys, what are you guys investing in? We've got a couple minutes left to chat about that. What are you investing at into it from a, from a, a CTO engineering perspective and what are you investing in that feels super cloud like to you? >>Well, the, the thing that like I'm focused on is to make sure that we have absolutely best in the world development environment for our engineers, where it's modern, it's easy to use and it incorporates as many things as we can into that environment. So the engineers don't have to think about it. Like one big example would be security and how we incorporated that into development environment. So again, the engineers don't have to bother with trying to think through how they secure their workloads and every step of the way their other things that we incorporated, whether it's like rollbacks or monitoring or, you know, like baly enough other things. But I think that's really an investment that has panned off for us. We actually started investing in development environment several years ago. We started measure our development velocity and we, it actually went up by six X justly investing. So >>User experience, developer experience and productivity pretty much right. >>Yeah. AB absolutely. Yeah. That's like a big investment area for us that, you know, cloud cloud >>Sounds like super cloudlike factor and I'm assuming it's you're on AWS. >>We are mostly on AWS. Yes. >>And so what are you investing in that from a VC money doling out standpoint? That feels super cloudlike >>So very similar to what we just touched on a lot of developer tool experiences. We have a company that we've invested in called ops level that the service catalogs it's, it's helping, you know, understand your, where your services live and how they could be accessed and, and you know, enterprise kind of that come with that. And then we have a company called Lugo that helps you do serverless debugging container debugging, cuz it turns out debugging distributed, you know, applications is a real problem right now just you can only do so much by log tracing, right? We have a company haven't announced yet that's in the web assembly space. So we're looking at modernizing the next generation past stack and throwing everything out the window, including Java and all of the, you know, current prebuilt components because turns out 90% of enterprise workloads are actually not used. They're they're just policy code. You compiled with they're sitting there as vulnerabilities that no one's actually accessing, but you still have to compile with all of it. So we have a lot of bloatware happening in the enterprise. So we're thinking about how do you skinny that up with the next generation paths that's enterprise capable with security context and frameworks >>Super pass. >>Well, yeah, super pass. That's a kind of good way to, well, is >>It, is it a consistent developer experience across clouds? >>It is. And, and, and, and web assembly is a very raw standard if you can call it that. I mean it's, but it's supported by every modern browser, every major platform, vendor cloud, and Adobe and others, and are using it for their uses. And it's not just about your edge browser compute. It's really, you can take the same framework and compile it down to server side as well as client site, just like JavaScript was a client side tool before it became node. Right. Right. So we're looking at that as a very interesting opportunity. It's very nascent. Yeah. >>Great patterns. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for spending the time outta your busy day. Ariana. Thanks for your commentary. Appreciate your coming on the cubes first in IGUR super cloud event, pilot. Thanks for, for sharing. Thanks for having, thanks for having us. Okay. More coverage here. Super cloud 2022. I'm Jeff David Alane stay with us. We got our cloud ARA panel coming up next.

(soft music) >> Welcome back everyone, is Supercloud 22 live in the Palo Alto office. Our stage performance we're streaming virtually it's our pilot event, our inaugural event, Supercloud 22. I'm John fury, with my coach Dave Vellante. Got a featured Keynote conversation with Kit Colbert. Who's the CTO of VMware, got to delay it all out. Break it down, Kit, great to see you. Thanks for joining us for Supercloud 22 our inaugural event. >> Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So we had great distinguished panels coming up through. We heard Victoria earlier to the Keynote. There's a shift happening. The shift has happened that's called cloud. You just published a white paper that kind of brings out these new challenges around the complexity of how companies want to run their business. >> Yep. >> It's not born in the cloud, it's cloud everywhere. Seems to be the theme. What's your take on Supercloud? what's the roadmap for multicloud? >> Yeah, well, the reason that we got interested in this was just talking to our customers and the reality is everybody is using multiple clouds today, multiple public clouds, they got things on-prem, they got stuff at the edge. And so their applications are essentially distributed everywhere. And the challenges they start running into there is that there's just a lot of heterogeneity there. There's like different APIs, different capabilities, inconsistencies, incompatibility, in terms of workload, placement, data, migration, security, as we just heard about, et cetera. And so I think everyone's struggling with trying to figure out how do I drive consistency across all that diversity and what sort of consistency do I want? And one of the things that became really interesting in our conversations with customers is that there is no one size fits all that different folks are in different places. And the types of consistency that they want to prioritize will be different based on their individual business requirements. And so this started forming a picture for us saying, okay, what we need are a set of capabilities of multi-cloud cross cloud services that deliver that consistency across all the different environments where applications may be running. And that is what formed the early thinking and sort of the paper that we wrote on it, as well as some of the work and that I think eventually leads to this vision of Supercloud, right? 'Cause I think you guys have the right idea, which is, hey, how does all this stuff come together? And what does that bigger picture look like? And so I think between the sort of the native services that are there individually for each cloud that offer great value by the way, and people definitely should be taking advantage of in addition to another set of services, which are multi-cloud that go across clouds and provide that consistency, looking at that together. That's my picture where super cloud is. >> So the paper's called, the era of multi-cloud services arrive, VMware executive outlook for IT, leaders and decision makers, I'm sure you can get on your website. >> Yep. >> And in there, you talked about, well, first of all, I think you would agree that multicloud has fundamentally been a symptom of multi-vendor or M&A, I mean, you talked about that in the paper, right? >> Yeah. >> It was never really a strategy. It was just like, hey, we woke up in the 2020s and here we are with multiple clouds, right? >> Yeah, it was one of those situations where most folks that we talked to didn't plan to be multi-cloud now that's changed a little bit in the past year or two. >> Sure. >> But certainly in the earlier days of cloud, people would go all in saying, hey, I'm going to go all in on one, one of the major hyperscalers and go for it there. And that's great and offers a lot of advantages, right? There is internal consistency there. There's usually pretty good integration between their services so on and so forth. The problem though that you start facing is that to your point, acquisitions, you acquire companies using a different cloud. Okay, now I got two different clouds or sometimes you have the phenomenon of shadow IT, still happening where some random line of business is going to go off and use a different cloud for whatever reason. The other thing that we've seen is that over time that you may have standardized on one, but then over time technology changes, another cloud makes major advancements in the state of the art, or let's say in machine learning and you say, hey, I want to go to this other cloud for that. So what we start to see is that people now are choosing public clouds based on best of breed service capabilities, and that they're going to make those decisions that fairly fine grained manner, right? Sometimes down to the team, the line of business, et cetera. And so this is where customers and companies find themselves. Now it's like, oh boy, now have all these clouds. And what's happened is that they kind of dealt with it in an ad hoc manner. They would spin up individual operations teams, security teams, et cetera, that specialized in each of the clouds. They had knowledge about how to do that. But now people found that, okay, I'm duplicating all this. There's not really consistency in my approach here. Is there a better way? And I think this is, again, the advent of a lot of the thinking of multi-cloud services and Supercloud. >> And I think one of the things too, in listening to you talk is that the old model used to be, solve complexity with more complexity. Okay, and customers don't want that from what we're observing. And what you're saying is they've seen the benefits of DevOps, DevSecOps. So they know the value. >> Yep. >> 'Cause they've been on, say one native cloud. Now they say, okay, I'm on premise and we heard from Victoria said, there's a lot of private cloud going on, but essentially makes that another cloud, out by default as well. So hybrid is multicloud. >> Hybrid is a subset, yeah. Hybrid is like, we kind of had this evolution of thinking, right? Where you kind of had all the sort of different locations. And then I think hybrid was attempt to say, okay, let's try to connect one location or a set of locations on premises with a public cloud and have some level of consistency there. But really what we look at here with multicloud or Supercloud is that that's really a generalization of that. And we're not talking about one or two locations on prem in one cloud. We're talking about everything now. And moreover, I think hybrid cloud tended to focus a lot on sort of core infrastructure and management. This looks across the board, we're talking about security, we're talking about application development, talking about end user experience. Things like Zero Trust. We're talking about infrastructure, data. So it goes much, much broader, I think than when we talked about hybrid cloud a few years ago. >> So in your paper you've essentially, Kit, laid out an early framework. >> Yep. >> Let's call it for what we call Supercloud, what you call cross cloud services. So what do you see as the technical enablers that are, the salient aspects of again multi-cloud or Supercloud? >> Yep. Well, so for me it comes down to, so, okay, taking a step back. So we have this problem, right? Where you have a lot of diversity across different clouds and customers are looking for some levels of consistency. But as I said, rarely do I see two customers that want exactly the same types of consistency. And so what we're trying to do is step back. And first of all, establish a taxonomy and by that I mean, one of the different types of consistency that you might want. And so there's things around infrastructure consistency, security consistency, software supply chain security is probably the top of mind one that I hear from customers. Application and application services of things like databases, messaging streaming services, AIML services, et cetera, and user capabilities and then of course, data as well. And so in the paper we say, okay, here's these kind of five areas of consistency. And that's the first piece, the second one then turns more to an architectural question of what exactly is a multi-cloud service. What does that mean for a cloud service to be multi-cloud and what are the properties there? So essentially we said, okay, we see three different types of those. There's one where that service could run on a single cloud, but could support multiple clouds. So think about for instance, a service that does cost analysis. Now it may have maybe executing on AWS let's say, but it could do cost analysis for Azure or Google or AWS or anybody, right? So that's the first type. The second type is a bit more advanced where now you're saying, I can actually instantiate that same service into multiple clouds. And we see that oftentimes with things like databases that have a lot of performance latency, et cetera, requirements, and that you can't be accessing that database remotely, that doesn't, from a different cloud, that's going to be too slow. You have it on the same cloud that you're in. And so again, you see various vendors out there, implementing that, where that database can be instantiated wherever you'd like. And then the third one would be going even further. And this is where we really get into some of the much more difficult use cases where customers want a workload to be on prem. And sometimes, especially for those that are very regulatory compliant, they may need even in an air gap or disconnected environment. So there, can you take that same service, but now run it without your operators, being able to manage it 24/7. So those are the three categories. So are a single cloud supporting, single cloud instance supporting multiple clouds, multi-cloud instance, multi-cloud instance disconnected. >> So you're abstracting you as the the R&D arm you're abstracting that complexity. How do you handle this problem where you've got one cloud maybe has a better service than the other clouds? Do you have to devolve to the lowest common denominator or? How do you mask that? >> Well, so that's a really good question and we've debated it and there's been a lot of thought on it. Our current point of view is that we really want to leave it, up to the company themselves to make that decision. Again, cause we see different use cases. So for instance, I talk to customers in the defense sector and they are like, hey, if a foreign adversary is attacking one of these public cloud that we're in, we got to be able to evacuate our applications from there, sometimes in minutes, right? In order to maintain our operational capabilities. And so there, there does need to be at least common denominator approach just because of that requirement. I see other folks, you look at the financial banking industries they're also regulated. I think for them, it's oftentimes 90 days to get out of the cloud, so they can do a little bit of re-architecture. You got times rolled the sleeves and change some things. So maybe it's not quite as strict. Whereas other companies say, you know what? I want to take advantage of these best of breed services native to the clouds. So we don't try to prescribe a certain approach there, but we say, you got to align it with what your business requirements are. >> How about the APIs layer? So one of the things we've said is that we felt like a super pass was a requirement of the Supercloud because it's a purpose built pass that helps you with that objective, whatever that is. And you say in the paper for developers each cloud provider has unique infrastructure interfaces and APIs that add work and slow the pace of their releases for operators. Each additional cloud increases the complexity of their architecture, fragmenting security, performance optimization and cost management. So are you building a super pass? What's your philosophy? Victoria said, we want to have our cake, we want to eat at two and we want to lose weight. So how do you do that? >> Yeah, so I think it's, so first things first, what the paper is trying to present in the end is really sort of an architectural point of view on how to approach this, right? And then, yeah, we at VMware, we've got a lot of solutions, towards some of those things, but we also realize we can't do everything ourselves, right? The space is too large. So it's very much a partner strategy there. Now that being said, on things like on the past side, we are doing a lot for instance around Tanzu, which is our modern apps portfolio products. And the focus there really is to, yes, provide some of that consistency across different clouds, enabling customers to take advantage of either cross cloud paths type services or cloud native or native cloud services, I should say. And so we really give customers that choice. And I think that's for us where it's at, because again, we don't see it as a one size fits for all. >> So there's your cake at edit to too. So you're saying the developer experience can be identical across clouds. >> Yep. >> Unless the developers don't want it to be. >> Yeah, and maybe the team makes that decision. Look there's a lot of reasons why you may want to make that or may not. The reality is that these native cloud services do add a lot of value and oftentimes are very easy to consume, to get started with, to get going. And so trade off you got to think about, and I don't think there's a right answer. >> So Kit, I got to ask on you. You said you can't do it alone. >> Yeah. >> VMware, I know for a fact, you guys have been working on this for many, many years. >> Yep. >> (indistinct) remember, I interviewed him in 2016 when he did the deal with AWS with Andy Jassy that really moved the needle. Things got really great from there with VMware. So would you be open to a consortium to oversee cause you guys have a lot of investment in this as a company, but I also don't hear you trying to do the lock in thing. So yeah, would you guys be open to a consortium to kind of try to figure out what these buildings blocks look like? Or is it a bag of Legos what people want? >> Absolutely, and you know what we offer in the paper is really just a starting point. It's pretty simple, we're trying to define a few basic of the taxonomy and some outlines sketches if you will, of what that architectural picture might look like. But it's very much that like just a starting point, and this is not something we can do alone. This is something that we really need the entire industry to rally around. Cause again, I think what's important here are standards. >> Yeah. >> That there's got to be, this sort of decomposition of functionality, breakdown in the different, sort of logical layers of functionality. What do those APIs or interfaces look like? How do we ensure interoperability? Because we do want people to be able to get the best of breed, to be able to bring together different vendor solutions to enable that. >> And I was watching, it was had a Silicon a day just last week, talking about their advances in Silicon. What's you guys position on that because you're seeing the (indistinct) as players, almost getting more niche and more better at the hardware matters more, Silicon speed, latency GPUs, So that seems to me be an enabler opportunity for the ecosystem to innovate at the past and SAS relationship. Where do you guys see? Where are you guys strong and where do you need work to do on? If you had to say there was some white space at VMware like say, hey, we own this area. We we're solid here. Here's some white spaces that VMware could use some help with. >> Yeah, well I think the infrastructure space, you just mentioned is clearly one that we've been focused on for a long time. We're expanding into the modern app space, expanding into security. We've been strong and end user for a while. So a lot of the different multi-cloud capabilities we've actually been to your point developing for a while. And I think that's exactly, again, what went into this like what we started noticing was all of our different product teams were reacting to the same thing and we weren't necessarily talking about it together yet. >> Like what? >> Well, this whole challenge of multiple clouds of dealing with that heterogeneity of wanting choice and flexibility into where to place a workload or where to place a virtual desktop or whatever it might be. And so each of the teams was responding individually to that customer feedback. And so I think what we recognized was like, hey, let's up level this, and what's the bigger picture. And what's the sort of common architecture across all of it, right? So I think that's what the really interesting aspect here was is that this is very much driven by what we're hearing directly from customers. >> You kind of implied just recently that the paper was pretty straightforward, pretty basic, early days, but it's well thought out. And one of the things you talked about was the type of multi-cloud services. >> Yep. >> You had data plan and user services, security infrastructure, which is your wheelhouse and application services. >> Yep. >> And you sort of went to detail defining those where is management and all that. So these are the ones you're going after. What about management? What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question we debated this for a long time. Does management actually get a separate sort of layer that we could add a six one perhaps, or is it sort of baked in to the different ones? And we kind of went with the ladder where it sort of baked in there's infrastructure management, there's modern app management, there's management and users. It's kind of management for each security obviously. So we see a lot of different management plans, control plans across each of those different layers. Now does there need to be a separate one that has its own layer? Arguably yes, I mean, I think there are good arguments for that, and this is exactly why we put this out there though, is to like get people to read it, people to give give us feedback. And going back to the consortium idea, let's come together as a group of practitioners across the industry to really figure out an industry viewpoint on this. >> So what are the trade offs there? So what would be the benefit of having that separate layer? I presume it's simpler to do it the way you've done it, but what would be the benefit of having a separate. >> Yeah, I think it was probably more about simplicity to start with, like you could imagine like 20 different layers. and maybe that's where it's going to go, but also I think it's how do you define the layer? And for us it was more around sort of some of these functional aspects as an infrastructure versus application level versus end user and management is more of a commonality across those. But again, I could see our arguments be made. >> Logical place to start. >> Yeah. >> The other thing you said in here multi-cloud application services can route request for a particular service such as a database and deploy the service on the correct individual cloud, using the most appropriate technology for the use case, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yep. >> That to me, sounds like a metadata problem. And so can you talk about how you you've approach that? You mentioned AWS RDS, great examples as your sequel on Oracle Database, et cetera, et cetera and multiple endpoint. How do you approach that? >> Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of different approaches there. And so again, so the idea is that, and I know there's been reference to sort of like the operating system for Supercloud. What does that look like, right? But I think it totally, we don't actually use that term, but I do like the concept of an operating system. 'Cause a lot of things you just talk about there, these are things operating systems. Do you got to have a scheduler? And so you look across many different clouds and you got to figure out, okay, where do I actually want in this case, let's say a database instance to go and be provisioned. And then really it's up to, I think the vendor or in this case, the multi-cloud service creator to define how they want to want to do that. They could leverage the native cloud services or they could build their own technology. Which a lot of the vendors are doing. And so the point though, is that really you get this night from a end user standpoint, it goes back to your complexity, simplicity question, you get the simplicity of a single API that the implementation you don't really need to deal with. 'Cause you're like, I'm getting a service and I need the database and has certain properties and I want it here versus there versus wherever. But it's up to that multi-cloud service to figure out a lot of those implementation specifics. >> So are you the Supercloud OS? >> I think it is VMware's goal to become the Supercloud OS for sure. But like any good operating system, as we said, like it's all about applications, right? So you have a platform point of view, but you got to partner widely. >> And you got to get the hardware relationship. >> Yes. >> The Silicon chips. >> Yep. >> Right. >> Yeah, and actually that was a good point. I want to go back to that one. 'Cause you mentioned that earlier, the innovation that we're seeing, things like arm processors and like graviton and a lot of these things happening. And so I think that's another really interesting area where you're seeing tremendous innovation there in the public cloud. One of the challenges though for public cloud is actually at scale and that it takes longer to release newer hardware at that scale. So in some cases, if you want bleeding edge stuff, you can't go with public cloud 'cause it's just not there yet, right? So that's again, another interesting thing where you... >> Well, some will say that they launch 5,000 new services, every year at AWS. >> No, but I'm talking, >> They have some bleeding edge stuff. >> Well, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, let me clarify, let me clarify. I'm not talking about the software, I'm talking about the hardware side. >> Okay, got it, okay. >> Like the Silicon? >> Yeah, like the latest and greatest GPU, FBGA. >> Why can't they? >> 'Cause cause they do like tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them. >> Oh just because it's just so many. >> It's a scale. Yeah, that's the point, right? >> Right. >> And it's fundamental to the model in terms of how big they are. And so that's why we do see some customers who need, who have very specialized hardware requirements, need to do it in the private cloud, right on prem or possibly a colo. >> Or edge. >> Or edge. >> Edge is a great example of... >> But we often see, again, people like the latest bleeding edge GPUs, whatever they are, even something a bit more experimental that they're going to go on on prem for that. >> Yeah. >> And so look, do not want to disparage the public cloud, please don't take that away. It's just an artifact when it gets to heart, like software they can scale and they do (indistinct). >> Well it's context of the OS conversation, OS has to right to hardware and enable applications. >> Where I was getting caught up in that is Kit, is they're all developing their own Silicon and they're developing it, most of it's arm based and they're developing at a much, much faster cycle. They can go from design to tape out much faster than Intel historically has. And you're seeing it. >> Intel just posted along. >> Yeah, I think if you look at the overall system, you're absolutely right. >> Yeah, but it's the deployment because of the scale 'cause at one availability zone and another and another region and that's. >> Well, yeah, but so counter point to what I just said would be, hey, like they have very well controlled environments, very well controled system. So they don't need to support a million different configuration settings or whatever they've got theirs that they use, right? So from a system standpoint and so forth. Yeah, I agree that there's a lot they can do there. I was speaking specifically, to different types of hardware accelerators being a bit of a (indistinct). >> If it's not in the 5,000 services that they offer, you can't get it, whereas on-prem you can say, I want that, here it is. >> I'm not saying that on-prem is necessarily fundamentally better in any way. I'm just saying for this particular area >> It's use case driven. >> It is use, and that's the whole point of all this, right? Like and I know a lot of people in their heads associate VMware with on-prem, but we are not dogmatic at all. And you know, as you guys know, but many people may not like we partner with all the public cloud hyperscalers. And so our point of view is very much, much more nuance saying, look, we're happy to run workloads wherever you want to. In fact, that's what we hear from customers. They want to run them everywhere, but it's about finding the right tool for the right job. And that's what really what this multi-cloud approach. >> Yeah, and I think the structural change of the virtualization hypervisor this new shift to V2 Supercloud, this something happening fundamentally that's use case driven, it's not about dogma, whatever. I mean, cloud's great. But native clouds have the pros and cons. >> And I would say that Supercloud, prerequisite for Supercloud has got to be running in a public cloud. But I'd say it also has to be inclusive of on-prem data. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And you're not going to just move all that data into prem, maybe in the fullness of time, but I don't personally believe that, but you look at what Goldman Sachs has done with AWS they've got their on-prem data and they're connecting to the AWS cloud. >> Yep. >> What Walmart's doing with Azure and that's going to happen in a lot of different industries. >> Yeah. >> Well I think security will drive that too. We had that conversation because no one wants to increase the surface area. Number one, they want complexity to be reduced and they want economic benefits. That's the super cloud kind of (indistinct). >> It's a security but it's also differentiatable advantage that you actually have on prem that you don't necessarily. >> Right, well, we're going to debate this now, Kit, thank you for coming on and giving that Keynote, we're going to have a panel to debate and discuss the blockers that enablers to Supercloud. And there are some enablers and potentially blockers. >> Yep, absolutely. >> So we'll get, into that, okay, up next, the panel to discuss, blockers and enablers are Supercloud after this quick break. (soft music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around. We have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, you know, falling from, from the non hyperscalers where they like the value propers, you know, technology. And I want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle on the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm <affirmative> would be looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data center? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it tributed computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's <inaudible> right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big end happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own dumps. They want, uh, uh, a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contains architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated world on website. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economics, multi vendor ecosystem, open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux. Uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, uh, you large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 25. >>You know, we've Al we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation, because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work and what starts with networking lay what they did kind of with the, in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are the concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of now is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of Dell in all this? You guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what do you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our vision has been primarily to bridge the cap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the stents and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable, open source NA, which is hardened supported and backed by industry leader and open networking that has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we CU the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, a predictable software and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can average, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetric capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called manage framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your environment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening from the non hyperscaler awards. And, uh, we've made significant in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of code what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to absorb this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual to MOS. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better of it with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell, how supply chain was really part of their advantage. Um, and this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but you look back back then it was a of systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around the system and with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here and comput as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and open source growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we Dell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customers. Now, it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about out, you know, protocol stacks, or, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's, it's with software, right? Sonic being open software. There's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. You know, we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their applications and get better at monitoring, get better at you managing that entire CIC CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructure today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the customers. >>It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, urine in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of it and the role of data, uh, and also application developers all in the partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of plays mm-hmm, <affirmative> in providing a best in class service because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, there's a ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered on protocol stack, right? So it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity, and based on these needs, we've built up, uh, portfolio with, with plethora of options, for, uh, you know, integrations into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, apps are Juniper. Um, Okta, there are crews that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the broader, the, the tier two cloud of this point is the large enterprises also want, you know, based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. We have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into open source marketing tools like Telegraph or far and Promeus, and then we continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on easy integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring the choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kabar, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change the, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on. Find final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start off a journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on a networking happening with Sonic so much. This, this technology has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop and microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature additions, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, brings Sonic to the wider market. So, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the so journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking networking's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here at Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around, we have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it, the better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. And, and it has >>Go ahead, continue. >>Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, of, you know, falling from, from the non-hyper killers where they like the value propers of technology and they want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle in the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm, <affirmative> what we looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data centers? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it distributing computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's ion, right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big 10 happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own terms. They want a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contain architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the, the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and, and, you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated to the world on the server side. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economic, multi vendor ecosystem open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux, uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, you know, large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 2025. >>You know, we've, we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work, Amazon what starts with networking lay, what they did kind of with in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of out is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of the Dell and all this, you guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what are you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our, our vision has been primarily to bridge the gap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the strengths and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable opensource NA, which is hard and supported and backed by industry leader in open networking. That has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we cus the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, predictable, soft, and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide at extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can leverage, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetry capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called management framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your employment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening the non hyperscale awards. And, uh, we made significant contributions in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of court, what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to, of this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual demos. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers, and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better with, with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell house supply chain was really part of their advantage. And this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but look back back then it was a systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around this system. And with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here in computing as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and openside growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we tell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customer is now it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about, you know, protocol stacks that, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's it's software, right? Sonic being open software, there's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. We know we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their app applications and get better at monitoring, get better at, you know, managing that entire C I CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructures today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the >>Customers. It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, you're in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of, and the role of data and also application developers all in play. The partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of ways in providing a best in class service, because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, the ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered around protocol Sachs. It it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity. And based on these needs, we built up portfolio with, with plethora of options for, uh, you know, into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, abstract, Juniper, um, Okta, and are crew that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the product, the, the tier two cloud at this point is the large enterprises also want based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. So we have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into opensource modeling tools like Telegraph or FA and pros. And then we are continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on these integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring that choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage the, the inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kalo, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change their, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start of our journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on and networking happening with Sonic. There's so much this, this has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop around microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature addition, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the com community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, bring Sonic to the wider market. So, uh, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the Sonic journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking, networking it's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back to the doctor khan cube conversation. Dr khan 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube of mulch, Donny co founder and CTO and see so for accurate hot startup hot company. Uh, thanks for coming on the cube for dr continent and talking cybersecurity and cloud native. Super important. Thanks for coming on, >>appreciate john. Thanks for having me. >>So here dr khan. Obviously the conversations around developer experience, um, making things more productive. Obviously cloud scale cloud native with docker containers with kubernetes all lining up right in line with the trend that's now going mainstream and all commercial enterprises. I mean developer productivity security is a huge times thing if you don't get it right. So, you know, shifting left is that everyone's talking about, but this is a huge challenge. Can you, can you talk about what you guys do at your company and specifically why it relates to this conversation for developers at dr khan. >>Sure. Um, so john as we understand today, there are millions of uh, you know, code comments that are happening in cloud native environments on daily basis. Um, you know, in a recent report, Airbnb reported, they've checked in 125,000 plus times ham charts in an ear. And what that means is that, you know, the guitars revolution is here. Uh, and that also means that, well, you got your kubernetes clusters sinking up with infrastructure as code, such as ham chart customized and yarrow files right almost several times a day now, what that also means is that the opportunity to make sure that your clusters are being deployed securely by these infrastructure as code templates and deployment has called template is available before the deployment happens and not after the deployment. Also, in order to reduce the cost or detecting security challenges. The best option and opportunity is during the development time and during the deployment time, which is the pipeline time and that's what we offer. We shift your cloud, native security posture detection to left. We detect all your security posture related issues while the code is in development in the design phase as well as while it is about to get deployed, that is within the guitars pipelines or your traditional develops pipelines and not only with detect where we sell feel the code as well, specifically infrastructure as code. So we detect the problems and we fix the problem by generating the remediation code which we like to call it as remediation is called. The detection mechanisms like all this policy is called. That's the primary use case that we offer. We help developers reduce the cost of remediation and also meantime to the mediations for security problems >>and actually see them a boatload of hassle to going back and figure out how they wrote the code at that time. And kind of what happened always is a problem. Um, I gotta Okay, so I'm gonna get into this policy is code. You mentioned that also you mentioned Getafe's revolution. Let's get to that in a second. But first I want you to explain to the folks what is cloud native security and what does that mean? And what kind of attacks emerge as that surface area becomes apparent? >>Absolutely. So cloud native security is a very interesting new paradigm. Uh it's not just related with one single control pain like take, for example, Cuban haters, it's not just that, it's also the supply chain elements that go into the deployment of your cloud native clusters. Like see if kubernetes cluster you need to secure not just the application code which is running inside your container images, but also the container image itself, then the pod, then the name space, then the cluster. And also you need to do all the other cyber hygienic, high generated things that we were doing previously. So it's so much of complexity because availability of different control planes, you need to be able to make sure that you are doing security, not just right, but at a very, very cost effective in a very, very cost effective manner. And the kind of attacks that we are predicting we're going to see in cloud native world are going to be very different from what we have seen so far. Especially there's a new attack type that I am have coined. I call that as cloud native waterhole attack. What it means is that imagine that most of the cloud native infrastructures are developed out of a lot of different open source components and pieces. So imagine you're pulling up a container image from a open source container agency and that continued which contains a man there container image can directly land into your cluster and not only can enter into your so called secure cluster environment. Usually the cluster control planes are not exposed to internet but deployment of one supply chain element like a Mallory's container image and exposed to an entire cluster. And that's what is waterhole attack when it comes to chlorinated water hole attacks to supply chains. So these are some very innovative and noble attacks that you know, we Uh you know, predict are going to come to our weigh in next 12-18 months. >>So you say it's a waterhole attack. That's the that's the coin term that you've made. So basically what you're saying is the container could be infected with all the properties that is containing into a secure cluster. It's almost been penetrated like malware would or spear phishing attack, it targets the cluster and then infects it. >>So not only that because your continuing images that you're pulling in um from your registries registries can be located anywhere right? If you do not do proper sanitization and checking off your supply chain components such as a continuing image, it can land insecure zones like this. So not only in a cluster, it can become part of a system named space very soon and and that's where the risks are that, you know, you had a parameter, you know, at least of some sort when it was non cloud native environments. And now you have a kind of false sense of security that I have equivalent is cluster, which sort of air gap in one way like there's no exposure to internet of the control plane control being a P. I. Is not supposed to Internet, that doesn't mean anything. A container enters into your cluster can take over the entire cluster. >>All right, so that's cool. So I love that attacks kind of attack. So back to cloud native security definition. So you're defining cloud native security as cloud native clusters. Is it specific around kubernetes or what specifically the cloud native security? What's the category? If the if water holds the attack vector, what's cloud native security means? >>So what it means is that you need to worry about multiple different control planes in a cloud native environment. It's not just a single control pain that you have to worry about. You have to worry about your uh as I said, kubernetes control plane, you have service measures on top of it, You could have server less layers on top of it and when you have to worry about so many different control pains, but it also means is that the security needs to become part of and has to get baked into the entire process of building cloud native environment, not afterthought or it shouldn't happen after the fact. >>See the containers for containers that watch the containers security for the security to watch the security. So you get so let's get we'll get to that. I want to get back to the solution, but one more thing. Um this one piece. So your c so um there you have a lot of shops in there from your background, I know that. Um So if if people out there, other Csos are looking at expanding, You know, day one day 2 ongoing, you know, ai ops get upstate to operate what everyone call it cloud native environments. How do they consider figuring out how to deploy and understand cloud need to secure? What do they have to do if you're a c So knowing what, you know, what steps are you taking? >>Yeah, it's funny that, you know, there's a big silo today between the sea, so organizations and the devops and get ops teams. Uh so the number one priority, in my opinion, that the sea so s uh you know, have to really follow is having visibility into the uh developers. So developers who are developing not just code but also infrastructure as code. So there is a slight difference between writing python code versus writing uh say ham charts or customized templates. Right? So you need as a see saw, you know, see so our needs to have full visibility into Okay, out of 100 developers, how many do I have who are writing deployment as code? And then how many of them are continuously checking in code and introducing security issues? Those issues have to be visualized while the issues are written in code and as they are getting checked into the repositories, so catch the security issues while the code is getting checked into the repository. And the next best stages catch the issues while the pipelines are picking up the code from the repository. So sisters needs to have visibility into this. I call it as shift left visibility for CSOS. So sisters need to know, okay, what are my top 10 developers who are writing infrastructure as code? How many of those developers are committing wonderful code. How many of these pull requests which have been raised have got security violations? How many of them have been fixed and how many have not been fixed? That's what is the visibility that can uh you know, provide opportunities to seize organizations to >>react and more things to put KPI S around two to understand where the gaps are and where the potential blind spots are. Okay, shift left visibility to see. So if you've got the get ups revolution, you got the waterhole attacks. You have multiple control planes obviously complex. The benefits of cloud native though are significant and people doing modern applications are seeing that. So clearly this is direction that everyone's going. The consensus is clear. So how do you solve this? You mentioned policy as code. I'm kind of connecting the dots here. If I'm going to understand what's going on in real time as the code is in flight as it's checking in. For instance, this is kind of in the pipeline as you say. So this has to be solved. What is the answer to this? Because it's clearly the way people want it. No one wants to come back and say we got hacked or development being pulled off task to figure out what they fixed or didn't do what's the policy is code angle? >>So um you know, of course, you know, there could be more than one ways to solve this problem. The way we are solving this problem is that first thing we are bringing all top type of infrastructure as code and the control planes into a single uniform format, which we like to call it as cloud, as code. The reason why we do that so that we can normalize the representation of these different data sets in one single normalized format. And then we apply open policy agent which is a C N C F uh graduated project, which is kind of the de facto standard to do any kind of policy is called use cases in the cloud native world today. So we apply open policy agent to this middleware that we create, which basically brings all these different control plane data, all the different infrastructures code into anomalous format. We apply O P A and we use policies to apply uh Opie on this data this way. What happens is that we write, for example, we want to write a policy, you don't want certain parts to be exposed to Internet in a given name space. You can write such a policy. This policy, you can run on life cluster as well as on the hand charts, which is your development side of the artifact. Right. Because we're bringing both these datasets into middleware. So in short, one of the solutions that we are proposing is that different control planes, different infrastructures, code has to be brought into a normalized format. And then you apply frameworks like Opie a open policy agent to achieve your policy is called use cases. >>What is the attraction for this direction? O. P. A. In particular obviously controlled planes. I get that. I can see the benefit of having this abstraction away with the normalization. I think that would enable a lot of innovation on top of it. Um Makes a lot of sense, totally cool. What's the attraction? What's the vibe? Are people reacting to this? Uh Some people might say whoa hold on, you're taking on too much uh your eyes are bigger than your stomach. You're taking on too much territory. Whoa, slow down. I can I I want to own that control plane. There's a lot of people trying to own the control plane. So again it's a little bit of politics here. What's your what's your thoughts on the momentum? What's the support, what's it look like? >>Yeah, I think you are getting it right, the political side of things. So, um, you know, one responses that, look, we have launched our open source project contour a scan uh last year and uh you know, we're doing pretty well. It's a full opium based uh in a project which allows you to do policies code on not only new cloud control planes, like, you know, kubernetes and others, but also the traditional control planes provided by CSP s like cloud security, cloud service providers. So parents can can be used not just for hand charts and customized, but also for terra form. What we are uh promoting is open culture. With scan. We want community to contribute, become part of it. Um yes, we are promoting a middleware here uh but we want to do it with the help of the community and our reaction what we're getting is very very good. We are in our commercial offering also we use opa we have good adoption going on right now. We believe will be able to uh you know with the developer community, you have this thing going for us. >>I love cloud as code. It's so much more broader than infrastructure as code and I'll see the control plane benefits. You know when I talk to customers, I want to get your reaction to this because I really appreciate your experience and and leadership here. I talked to customers all the time and I wont say name, I won't name names but they're big, big and fintech and you'll big and life sciences in other areas. They all say we want to bring best to breed together but it's too hard to make it all work. We can get it done, but it's a lot of energy. So obviously building code and getting into production that is just brute force. Anyway, they got to get that done and they're working on their pipe lining. But getting other best of breed stuff together and making it work is really hard. Does this solve that? Do you, are you helping solve that problem? Is this an integration opportunity? >>Yes, that and that is true and we have realized it, you know, uh long back. So that's why we do not introduce any new tooling into the existing developer workflows, no new tool whatsoever. We integrate with all existing developer workflows. So if you are a, you know, modern uh, you know, get off shop and you're using flux or Argo, we integrate terrace can seamlessly integrated flux in Argo, you don't even get to know that you already have what policy is called enabled if you're using flux Argo or any equivalent, you know, getups, toolkit. Likewise, if you are using any kind of uh, you know, say existing developer pipeline or workflows such as, you know, the pipelines available on guitar, get lab, you know, get bucket and other pipelines. We seamlessly integrate our motor is very, very simple. We don't want to introduce one more two for developers, we want to introduce one more per security. We want to get good old days, >>no one wants another tool in the tool shed. I mean it's like, it's like really like the tool shit, they get all these tools laying around. But everyone again, this is back to the platform wars in the old days when I was younger. Breaking into the early days of the web platforms were everything you have to build your own proprietary platform Wasn't some open source being used, but mostly it was full stack. Now platforms are inter operating with hybrid and now Edge. So I want to get your thoughts on and I'm just really a little bit off topic. But it's kind of related. How should companies think about platform engineering? Because you now have the cloud scale, which in a way is half a stack. You don't really if you're gonna have horizontal scalability and you're gonna have these kind of unified control planes and infrastructure as code. Then in a way you don't really need that full stack developer. I mean I could program the network. I don't need to get into the weeds on that. I got now open policy agent on with terrorists. Can I really can focus on developing this is kind of like an OS concept. So how should companies think about platforms and hiring platform engineers and and something that will scale and have automation and all the benefits and goodness of the cloud scale. >>Yeah, I mean you actually nailed it when you began uh we've been experienced since we've been experiencing now since last at least 18 months that and if I were specifically also, I'll touch based on the security side of things as well. But platform engineering and platforms, especially now everything is about interoperability and uh, what we have started experiencing is that it has to be open. The credibility any platform can gain is only through openness interoperability and also neutrality. If these three elements are missing, it's very hard to push and capture the mind share of the users to adopt the platform. And why do you want to build a platform to actually attract partners who can build integrations and also to build apps on top of it or plug ins on top of it? And that can only be encouraged if there is, you know, totally openness, key components have to be open source, especially in security. I can give you several examples. The future of security is absolutely open source, the credibility cannot be gained without that. A quick example of that is cystic. I mean, who thought they were gonna be pulling such a huge, you know, funding round, of course that all is on the background of Falco, Right? So what I'm trying to play and sing and same for psyllium, Right? So what I'm clearly able to see is the science are that especially in cybersecurity community, you are delivering open source based platforms, you will have the credibility because that's where you will get the mindshare developers will come and you know, and work with you of course, you know, I have no shame naming fellow vendors right, who are doing this right and this is the right way to do it. >>Yeah. And I think it's it's totally true and you see the validation on that just to verify your point out that we have a little love fest here on open source, it's pretty obvious the the end user communities are controlled not the hard core and users like the hyper scholars, you know, classic enterprises are are starting not only contribute participate but add value more than they've ever have. The question I want to ask you is okay. I totally agree on open as data becomes super important because remember data is only as good as what you have and the more data the better the machine learning the better the data scale, um, sharing is important. So open sharing kind of ties into open source. What's your thoughts on data? Data policy, is this going to extend out into data control planes? What's your thoughts there? I'd love to get your input. >>We are a little little bit early in that thought. I think it's gonna take a little while uh for you know, the uh for the industry bosses to come to terms to that uh data lakes and uh you know, data control planes eventually will open up. But you know, I I see there is resistance in that space today uh but eventually it's gonna come around. You know, that has because that would be the next level of openness, you know, once the platforms uh in a mature as an example right today. Um you want to write uh you know, any kind of say policies for your same products, right. Uh you have the option available to write policies and customized, you know, languages. But then many platforms are coming up which are supporting policy is developed in in languages which are open and that's data which is going to open up, you know very soon. So you will not be measured in terms of how many policies you have as a product, but you will be measured. Can you consume? Open policies are not so i that it is going to go there, it's going to take a little while, but I think he is going to move that. >>It makes sense. Get the apparatus built on the infrastructure side. Once you have some open policy capability that's going to build an abstraction on top of it, then you can program data to be more policy driven or dynamic based upon contextual behavioural dynamics. So it makes a lot of sense. Oh, great insight here, love the conversation, Congratulations on your success. Love the vision. Love the openness. I'll see. We think uh data as code is big too. Obviously media's data where CUBA is open. We have we have the same philosophy. So thanks for sharing. Love the vision. Take a minute to plug the company. What are you guys looking to do? Uh you guys hiring, take a minute to put the plug out for the for the company? >>Absolutely. We are absolutely hiring great ingenious, you know, a great startup mind folks who want to come and work for a very, very innovative environment. Uh we are very research and development, you know driven and have brought various positions available today. Um we are trying to do something which has not been attempted before. Our focus is 100% on reducing the cost of security. And uh you know, in order to do that, you really have to do things that previously were not in development environments. And that's where we're going. We're open source uh, you know, open source initiatives, big open source lovers and we welcome people come in and apply our positions, >>reduce the cost of security, do the heavy lifting for the customer with code and have great performance, that's the ultimate goal. Great stuff. Cloud need security, threat modeling, deV stickups, shifting left in real time. You guys got a lot of hard problems you're attacking? >>Um well, you know, some of the good things uh that we're doing is also because of the team that we have right. Most of our co team comes from very heavy threat modeling, threat analysis and third intelligence background. So we have we're blending a very unique perspective of allowing developers to tackle the threats, which they're not supposed to even understand how they work. We do the heavy lifting from threat intelligence point of view, we just let the developers work on the code that we generate for them to fix those threats. So we're shipping threat intelligence and threat modeling also to left. Uh we're one of the first companies to create threat models just out of infrastructure is called, we read your infrastructure as code and we create a digital twin of your cloud late at one time, even before it has been actually built. So we do some of those things which we like to call it just advanced bridge card prediction where we can predict whether you have reach parts a lot in your runtime environment that would have been committed. >>And then the Holy Grail obviously the automation and self healing um is really kind of where you've got to get to. Right, that's the whole that's the whole ballgame, right? They're making that productive. Oh, thank you for coming on a cube here. Dr khan 2021 sharing your insights, co founder and CTO and see so. Oh much Danny. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it, >>monsieur john thank you for having >>Okay Cube coverage of Dr Khan 2021. Um your host, John Fury? The Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>>Welcome welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john for a host of the cube. We're here to talk about observe ability in the enterprise, enabling developers. Fabian lang VP of engineering and co founder of Istana, now part of IBM. Fabian, Congratulations on everything and great to have you on the cube here for dr gone. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So I'm in Palo Alto, you're in Germany were doing the remote thing obviously virtual second year in a row for dr khan. Soon real life is coming back. Uh no real impact of developers as they continue to be more productive than ever. The hottest conversation topic being discussed, being funded by venture capitalists and private equity is observe ability. This is an area you guys are playing in aggressively and you got some product observe ability. What's the big deal about Docker con Docker containers observe ability kubernetes, Why is observe ability at the center of all these conversations and the center of the value. >>So observe ability basically means you understand what's going on and today it's more important than ever to understand what's going on because there is so much more going on. If you think back five years maybe before Dr even was featured prominently, you had very little things that you needed to control that you need to understand and then micro service and coordinative became more popular and became really more important to understand what all those moving parts are doing. And that's where observe ability was born out of what we have been doing before at that time it was called application performance monitoring A PM. It's now called observe ability. It's really understanding all those parts of your architecture, of your stack of the application and in the end of the end user experience, you want to know if a user is experiencing a slow service and what's the reason for that? Because today, so many things are moving so many things that maybe even outsourced into cloud providers, it's more important than ever to know what's going on. >>Well we're here at Dunkirk on 2021 virtual. I want to get you to take a minute if you don't mind explaining to the folks why Dr and Dr Khan is important to Astana. >>So I, I said we were founded like six years ago and at that time Doctor was the rising star. It was promoting a lot of new technology. It was giving developers new abilities to develop applications in a very agile away. Microservices were enabled by Doctor before you had to deploy those things somehow it was a city Rome and then you needed to install >>debian >>package but with microservices you have so many more things to install. So it was really, I would say instrumental to the success of microservices to have a platform like docker that was really the next gen of technology that helped to enable those applications. And for us it was really an important driver to understand the whole stack, the traditional tools where eyes are oriented to infrastructure monitoring. So you understand the quality of your host if it's running slow or to look into application of an application was throwing errors but everything was disconnected and unique functionality of Astana is to connect all those bits and pieces of the application together and for that containers. And now kubernetes is a really important part to understand because it is part of this whole picture. >>Did you talk about the problem that you guys solve? Um obviously with those availability, I mean the general concept, we kind of get that great, great overview on your part, but when you start to get into devoPS teams, you start looking at def sec off, start looking at cloud native applications. I see Docker containers provides all that goodness and kubernetes, orchestration, etcetera. What problem do you guys solve? And um what's the benefit? >>The main problem that in stana solves is getting all this understanding that I said is required to provide a good experience of to your users, to your end customers uh without requiring you to do all the instrumentation work or the capture and configuration work because in stana is very automatic, it automatically sees all the works lords that are running in your communities, for example, that are running in Dr containers, but it also connects to legacy databases, fully automatic. So no configuration required also means that with a high rate of change that some of those applications hard have is that we will see all those change happening in real time. And you can't forget to make a configuration to enable your observe ability. So it's really return of investment on the viability solution that we provide and we provide a lot of this insight uh that you can get and that enables you to provide better service for your users. >>So you guys aren't just a doctor monitoring service and company, you guys actually run on Docker. Right, is that true? >>That's correct. So we are not only monitoring doctor and all these things connected to applications, but we are running on a doctor or platform as a service. SaAS software as a service. We run for you so you don't need to operate and stana, we are running it on managed kubernetes clusters and uh, IBM cloud and amazon cloud in google cloud. We have all that and it's it's all running on docker containers and that gives us so many features that are really great with DACA. So all the configuration that specific to microservices are being baked into the images and you can just roll it out, especially for monitoring products that is dependent on the data, that the performance depends on the data our customers send. Um, these ease of scalability with doctor is just so much bigger than it would be with a traditional deployment type. We can just add worker notes to our cluster and have ports auto scale to new notes and this is functionality that wasn't there before and that's great and that's important, essential for our business. >>You know, one of the conversations that's being talked about here at dr khan and in the industry at large is this idea of happy developers and everyone wants to keep developers happy. I've been hearing that conversation, have many chats with folks, you know, productivity and innovation, um but productivity and happy developers of the concept, but also, you know, on the, on the business side or on the developer side, it's more accelerated pipeline. Right? So, so how do you manage to flow, keep that productivity going, But also enabling happy developers, what do you guys do to help there? I mean what if someone asks you, hey, how do you make my developers happier and accelerate my pipeline? >>Well, that's really dependent on what makes the developers happy. I think most developers really want to get their functionality. They are working on their passionate about into production into the hands of end users. So um, skipping out a lot of the manual configuration work that's boring and not really appealing to develop us, helps everything is pre packaged and configured automatically. So that's a big, big plus. And the standard monitoring as I said, uh, is also automatic. So you don't need to configure it, your, your application on how to monitor it. So developers can just focus on delivering features and whenever there is something we will tell them, I think they enjoy that >>innovations creates great, that's a benefit. Can you talk about the on prem version of installing a, that's something that you guys are talking about and featuring um what is that about? Can you take a minute to explain beyond prem version of in Astana for dr containers? >>Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting topic, especially at the conference like dr khan, where it's all about virtualization, container realization and going into the cloud, that there are still companies, enterprises government mental entity that are very heavily invested on an on premise solution. They want to have control or are legally required to have control over what they have been deployed. So we knew when we founded in Astana that our solution, unlike our competitors, can't be only software as a service. We want to have a fantastic software as a service product and experience, but it should be equally good on premises as well. And when we were looking at ways how to actually do it, how to deliver an architecture that a little bit complicated to on premises customers to have themselves as the solution. We saw that doctor solves a lot of problems for us. We don't need to manually petra around operating system that customers, we don't have different versions of packages installed. It's all the same and actually it's not only all the same for all the deployment of all our customers, but it's also the same technology that we run as a software. As a service customers can run it now on their own. So we have feature parity, it's not lagging behind and this is also ease of support for us. >>So why was it, what was the motivation behind that was just customer demand? Um, more efficiency? What was the motivation behind moving on, supporting the on prem version? >>Uh, so for a start up, it's all about addressing the market share. Right? So you wanna have everything you can get, you don't want to spend any extra money on it. And as I said, the enterprise market is big. There are still many players that want to have the data in house. This is potentially sensitive data that's being tracked. So an on premise solution having, it was really instrumental to the success of in Stana because we were able to target and help those customers even in a fully adapt scenario, for example where they don't even have internet access. >>Take me through the process of DACA rising the product sitting on prime product that you get the thing going on there, like okay, let's do this. What does that look like? How did that work out? >>So as I said, we looked at this from the beginning and we picked DACA as a technology from the beginning, so there wasn't really like a shift and left type of scenario that other customers might be having. We were doing it from the beginning and we were aligning our architecture so that there are no fundamental differences between an on premise solution and anti size solution. That's of course configuration, that's different. But that configuration we just put into a single configuration file and that turned out to be a great idea because this is how you nowadays configure your application kubernetes, you'll make a customer resource for example, and then have an operator run the product, any kind of product, but also in stana, you run on premises with an operator that just works on the single configuration that you give it. And this is actually great because our customers are used to operating products like that, their own software, everything customers are running in dhaka in kubernetes, they are used to operating it that way. And that helped us because our customers now get the same functionality that we offer as a, as a service on premises very easily very quickly. And that make them happier. We talked about developer happiness that makes them happy because now they are not lagging behind but it also enables us to give better quality support, lot fixes faster and helps us to no longer support very old presence because they don't exist. They are frequently updated. I think this is really a benefit of container realization is also how easy it is to upgrade because you just stop apart and start a part in the new version and then you have a new verse. >>That's also great insights may be great to chat with you on that. I got to ask you on a personal note, you've been in the industry for a while and your leader, um you know, that's a performance geek, you'll have to build fast code. I was been chatting with other VPs of engineering and we were talking about the shift in engineering and with devops you've got kind of s our reaction, you have some just straight up application coding, just modernize that cloud native applications and you've got a kind of under the devoPS as the world's shifts. It seems like there's more of an architectural systems engineering approach or a systems mindset and that seems to be changing the mindset of a developer from Iterate fast. And then the line I heard was you can iterate and pump out code fast, but it might not be good, might be crap. So, so this notion of iterating code and crafting good product because with now this module Ization with containers, you're doing a lot more design work. So craft seems to be coming back to coding. Uh, I don't think it's coming back, it's been there, but it just seems more of like, hey, let's do this, right? And it's not just ship code. What's your take on that? >>So I think this always was there. It's just that traditionally companies approached software engineering similar to how companies approach manufacturing. So somebody writing a designs back and somebody verifying it and then it's going onto the line to mass production. But software doesn't work that way. We make way more changes, it's way harder to understand it up front. So the developed the iterative and exile development that has been ongoing is really, is really what people want and develops well. There is this notion of being a being waking up in the middle of the night and that's what developers don't want. So you need to prepare your application, you need to make it resilient against that. And developers are very eager to build in functionality that helps them to troubleshoot to make their application available. With a high rate of change. There is a high rate of risk as you said and I think the ability to deploy 1000 times per day is great but you don't necessarily need to do that. I think it's also important for your users that you find the right pace of when you deliver functionality and when you deliver fixes. >>I was just talking to a friend the other day and we were just talking about organizations and teams and yeah, we always riff on the the two pizza team or having more agility and you have this democratization because of the agility is also a benefit for any developer to add value if they have the right perspective or creativity. But it kind of disrupts the kind of the old way of thinking. I'm the principal engineer is my job. No, I'm the chief architect. So you have these titles and you have roles, the roles are changing and sometimes just the arguments. Oh wait, that's my job is that I'm this kind of changes. What's your thoughts on, how do you manage that dynamic? Because as you have more, uh, I won't say surface here more democratized engineering with virtual teams and whatnot You have compose ability with, with with code. You have more of a systems are a lot more going on. It's not your standard engineering mindset. What's your thinking on this as a leader in engineering and visionary? >>Well as we know the architecture of a software full of the organization that the company has. That creates. All right. So I think what you want when you want to have a micro service architecture, you want to have a micro service teams. You want to have teams, we call him at and standard delivery teams that work more or less independently on a certain set of features and are responsible for them and to end. So my engineers, they are talking to our customers figuring out how to make a feature better. They are then designing this with our user designers and then they are developing and deploying it and this really entry and responsibility. And we don't really have those titles like architect anymore. I think those roles are still there but it's more like a shared responsibility. So you of course want an architecture, you want to have your components talk to each other in an efficient way and it's more really communities of practice that are establishing. So you will find out that you have people and your teams who have specific skills who like to work on architecture. Some of them like to work on continuous delivery systems And then you you form those cross functional teams dynamically and when it's no longer hit this bands. And I think that's a major difference to assigning a person to a road. >>Yeah and and also that with you have new trends like observe ability, enterprise observe ability you know new things are happening um And new net new things like new architecture and also new roles and responsibilities. I'll see new patterns to with the data you have services being stood up and turned down all the time. You have a lot of dynamic environment. So you know having a happy developers one eliminate the manual work what you do but also giving them good work assignments to work on some good hard problems. So what is what are those hard problems that engineers like to work on these days? Is it like design? Is it coding? I mean I know it depends as you mentioned on the personalities but generally speaking as dev ops def sec Ops becomes much more of an agile edge hybrid play. What's the hard problem? >>I think big data is not really a new term but I think this is still a very interesting territory because you can apply various aspects to it. You have this data science aspect to it to understand how to detect pattern in it. And then automation is actually artificial intelligence. Right? So you automate data science and that's very interesting because those are large scale problems and new problems and new solutions. So yes there are existing frameworks but there's so much innovation to be found and making this work efficiently is another dimension of the same problem. That's also not easy and challenging problems. Make developers happy and then you can even have people think about the financial aspects. So it should also be cheap Big data and AI is usually very expensive because it requires so much hardware. So not only tried to make it fast but maybe even make it efficient. So this whole domain is very appealing. There is new technology to be invented, tough problems and I think that's really exciting to developed. >>Fabian Lang, vice president of engineering co founder and stand a great to have you on the q Great insight. Thank you for sharing that knowledge there. And the overview of installing here at dr khan observe ability very relevant for next gen next level solutions. Thanks for coming on the cube. Right, okay. I'm john Fury with the queue here. Dr khan 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching. Mm.

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the Cubes Coverage Cube Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 which is also virtual. We're not in person this year. We're doing the remote interviews. But of course, getting all the stories, of course, reinvented, full of partnerships full of news. And we've got a great segment here with Salesforce and AWS. Eileen Schneider Win, who is the senior vice president of strategic partnerships, and Maureen Lundergan, director of worldwide training and certification address. Maureen Eileen. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. And nice keynote. What's up with the partnership? Give us a quick over your lien. What's what's the Salesforce? A day was partnership. Take a minute to explain it. >>Sure, thank you. I think I'll start out by talking about how sales were thinks about strategic partnerships. So for us, it's really it starts with the customer and being where they want us to be. And we've been so fortunate to be in this relationship with AWS for over five years now. It really started out as an infrastructure based partnership as we were seeing customers start their digital transformation journeys and moved to the cloud. But what has been really exciting as we've spent more time working together and working with our customers, we have now started to move into emotion of really bringing some differentiated solutions between the number one CRM and the most broadly adopted cloud platform to market for customers, uh, in areas like productivity, security and training and certification which will talk more about in a bit Onda. Specifically, some of those solutions are service Cloud Voice Product, which we launched this summer, announced last fall, a dream force as well as our private connect product which creates great security between the AWS platform and Salesforce. >>What? Some of the impact area is actually the two clouds you mentioned CRM and Amazon. We're seeing data obviously being a part of the equation ai machine learning. Um, what's been the impact I lean to your customer specifically >>Yeah, so specifically I'd call out to areas what one is really that foundation of security. Specifically, as government regulations and data security has become more critical, we've really been able to partner together there and and that's been crucial for certain customers in certain regions as well a certain industries like government. Uh, in addition, I would call out again that service cloud voice partnership, a zoo. We see the world moving more digital. This really allows customers to go quickly and, uh, turn on. There are solutions from anywhere at any time. >>You know, I love that any time, anywhere kind of philosophy. Now more than ever. With the pandemic collaborations required more than ever, and some people are used to it. You know, I've seen more technical developers have used to working at home, but not everyone else. The workforce still needs to get the job done. So this idea of collaboration, what is the impact in for your customers and how are you guys helping them? Because I think this is a big theme of this year That's gonna not only carry over, even when the pandemics over this idea of anywhere is all about collaboration. >>Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the exciting thing about the partnership is we've been talking digital transformation with customers for years, but I think what we saw at the beginning of this year, as we were all thrown home and forced Thio, you know, fire up our jobs from our bedrooms or our garages. It really came down to our ability to work quickly and turn on our solutions. It's and these unprecedented times, while we're going through this now, everything we're building really is the future. So it's not just the tools and technology, it's also the processes and how work is getting done that's really come into play. But again, I'll anchor back to that service blood voice solution. So for us, call centers were completely disrupted. You think of call centers and you know, pre 2020 everyone sitting in a room together, agent side by side managers, having the ability to pop over and assist with a call or managing escalation. Now that's been completely disrupted. And it's been very exciting for us to work with our customers, to reimagine what that looks like again both from a technology perspective but also from a process perspective. And along with that, you had to reimagine how employees are learning these solutions and being trained. So we're very grateful for the partnership with AWS, and we're doing some really amazing things together. >>You know this is one of my favorite things about the enablement of Cloud. But in Salesforce has been a pioneer. As you pointed out, this connectedness feature has always been there. Now more than ever, it's highlighted with call centers, not the call center more. It's the connected center. People are connecting. And I think, Maureen, I think last time you're in the Cube. A few years ago, we were talking about virtual training online, and that was pre pet pandemic. Now you're seeing surge of online training not only because people's jobs are changing and being displaced or even shut down. New roles are emerging, right? So the virtual space Virtual world digital world, there's everyone's getting more digital faster now. How has the cove in 19 changed the landscape for training and skills demand? From your perspective, I >>mean at AWS, we've been working on our virtual capabilities for a while, so we had a digital platform out. We had a great partnership, have a great partnership with Salesforce and putting content on trailhead. We had to pivot very rapidly to virtual instructor led training and also our certifications right. We were lucky that our vendors partnered with us rapidly to pivot certification toe proctor environment. And this actually has helped to expand our ability to deliver the both training and certification in locations that we may not have been able to do before. And we have seen while it slowed. Initially, we have seen such an uptake and training over the last, um, 6 to 8 months. It's been incredible. We've been working with our customers. We've been working with our partnerships like Salesforce. We've been pushing more content out. I think customers and partners air really looking for how toe upscale their employees, uh, in a in a way, that is easy for them. And so it's actually been a great surprise to see the adoption of all of our curriculum over the last couple months. >>Well, congratulations knows a lot more work to do. It's gonna get more engaging, more virtual, more rich media. But this idea of connecting lean I wanna get back to the your your thoughts earlier, um, mentioned trailhead. Maury mentioned trailhead. You guys were doing some work with the virtual training there. What? Can you tell us more about that? And how that's going so far? >>Sounds great. So trailhead is our free online learning platform. And it really started because we have a commitment to democratizing anyone's ability to enter our industry s so you could go there and both online or with our trail head go app and experience what we call trails, which our paths for learning again on different areas of knowledge and skills and technology. And late last year, we announced an incredible partnership with AWS, where we're bringing the AWS learning content and certification to trailhead. And this is really again driven by our customers to are asking us to do our part in bringing mawr of these skilled resource is into the ecosystem. But something I also wanna highlight is I feel like this moment that we're in right now has also forced everyone to reimagine how they're doing learning even businesses, how they're training their employees and again having this free platform. And the partnership with AWS has really helped us go very quickly and create a lot of impact with customers. >>I just want to say I love the trailhead metaphor because, you know, learnings nonlinear. It's asynchronous. You've got digital. So you want to take a shortcut? You gotta know the maps And I think that's, you know, people wanna learn versus the linear, you know, tracks on. And I think that's how people have been learning online. And AWS has got a data driven strategy. Marine, I want to get your take on this because as you bring content on the trailhead, can you talk about how that works? And how you working with Railhead? >>Yeah. I mean, we started conversations a couple of years ago, and I think the interesting thing is that Salesforce and AWS have a very similar philosophy about bringing education to anybody who wants it. You'll hear me talk a lot about that in my leadership talk at reinvent, but, um, we really believe that we wanna provide content where learners learn and salesforce and trailhead have this amazing captured audience. And, um, you know, we're really looking at exploring. How do we bring education to people that might not otherwise have access to it? On DSO, we started with really foundational level content, a ws Cloud, Practitioner Essentials and AWS Cloud for technical professionals. And the interesting thing is, both of those courses have been consumed. ITT's not enough to just put it out there you want people to complete the trails and we've seen such an amazing uptake on the courses with, like 85% completion rate on one of the trails and 95% completion rate on the other one. And to keep customers engage is really a credit toe. How trailhead is designed. >>You know, it's interesting. The certification people don't lose sight of the fact that that's kind of the in the end state. Then you start a new trail. I mean, this >>is >>the this is really what it's all about. Can you just share some observations that you've seen for people that are coming into this now to say, Hey, okay, what do I expect? And what are some of the outcomes? >>Yeah, I mean, first, what we're seeing is our customers are being very clear that they need more of these skills. So we're also seeing the need for Salesforce administrators out in our ecosystem. And I think with everything going on this year, it's also an opportunity for people who are looking to pivot. Their careers were moving to tech and again, this free learning platform and the content that we're bringing has been really powerful and again for us. The need for salesforce administrators and cloud practitioners out in our ecosystem are in more demand than ever. >>Maureen. From your perspective on AWS, you see a lot of the new new jobs cybersecurity, Brazilian openings. Where do you see the most needs on for training and certification? Can you highlight some of the areas that are emerging and trending, if you will? >>I would say it's interesting because what we're seeing is is both ends of the spectrum. People that are really trying to just really understand who cloud is, whether it's, ah, business leader within an organization, a finance person, a marketing person. So cloud practitioner, you know, we're seeing huge adoption and consumption on both our platform in on Salesforce. But also some other areas are security and machine learning machine learning. We have five learning paths on our digital platform. We've also extended that content out to other platforms and the consumption rate is significant. And so, you know, I think we're seeing, uh, customers consume that. But the other thing that we're doing is we're really focused on looking at who doesn't have access to education and making sure that's available. So I think the large adoption of Cloud Practitioner in Practitioner is is largely due to the other things that we're doing with programs like Restart our academic programs >>to close it out, Alina want to get your thoughts and final thoughts on the relationship and how people can find more information about this partnership and what it means. Take, take it home. >>Thank you for asking. So just like everything else we've been talking about today, we've had to reimagine how we're showing up at this event together and very exciting thing that my team has created is the AWS Virtual Park. And anyone can access that at salesforce dot com slash aws. So please go check it out. You can experience our products here from our experts and experience its innovation on your own. >>Great insight. Thanks for coming on and participating. Really appreciate Salesforce and AWS two big winning leading clouds working together Trail had great great offering. Thanks for coming on sharing the news. Appreciate >>it. Thank you. >>It's the Cube virtual covering. It was reinvent virtual. Of course. Check out all the information here All three weeks. Walter Wall coverage. I'm John Fury with the Cube. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by: AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Well, welcome back to the Sands Expo. Here we are in Las Vegas in re:Invent with just about 50 000 of our closest friends. Big AWS community gathering here all week long and it's a pleasure to be here with you on the CUBE, along with Keith Townsend. I'm John Walls and we're now joined by Peter Smails, who is the vice president of marketing and business developing at Datos IO. Peter, good to see ya. >> Thanks for having me and glad to be back. I love being on the CUBE. >> You were just last week, right? >> Keith: Yeah. >> CUBE conversations with John Fury or so we're going to have to start charging you rent. (laughs) >> I only have two numbers in my head right now: 18 billion, 40% CAGR. Those are the only two numbers I have in my head right now. For those of you not in the know, those are the numbers that AWS was talking about in terms of revenue and growth. Crazy times, crazy show, good stuff. >> This show really does embody that. It certainly illustrates that. We've only been here for... the doors have been open for about a half hour or so. Already wall-to-wall traffic. >> People were queuing up to get into the expo floor, which I don't think I've seen that. >> I swung by our booth, 2825. I swung by there at 11:20 and it was standing room only. It's great. I mean, the buzz, you can feel it. If you're not down on the floor, come down to the floor, cause you can just feel the energy. >> And even still, just walking up here, if you've been here to the Sands, you've got these giant hallways. I was here probably two hours ago and it was already wall-to-wall people and it was just packed. I was really impressed. >> The conference started in full tilt at seven o'clock this morning. People were just out and just engaging. >> So you guys, you're here, your relationship obviously at AWS, we're gonna get into that >> Yeah. You got the booth here, 2825? >> 2825. Yes sir. >> So let's talk about, first off, about your presence here. >> Peter: Yeah >> What brings you into this community? You've been here for a while now. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And maybe the evolution of that from the three or four years-- >> Sure. back to where you are now. Yeah, so our view of the world aligns incredibly well with AWS. The whole notion of the world's moving to the cloud. We've been in business since 2014. We are a cloud data management company with primary use cases around backup and recovery. There's all those things like data mobility and essentially our view of the world and our strategy is that as the world moves to the cloud, organizations are building net new applications. They're building modern applications that they're running on hybrid cloud environments. Those applications need a fundamentally new approach to data management. That's what we do. About 50% of our customers run natively on AWS. So this is a very logical show for us. We've got customers building these new modern applications. They're hosting them natively in AWS. They need backup and recovery. They need data mobility. That's what we do. It's just a perfect fit for us. >> So Peter, let's talk a little bit about data mobility. You guys are unapologetically cloud first. We've had this conversation in the past just offline. Talk to me about that conversation with customers. How that's evolved from three, four years ago to now. >> (chuckles) I'll use another quote from Andy, from earlier this week, or I guess this is from Jeff Basil, so theoretically it's the whole thing about they're willing to be misunderstood for a while. You go back four years, early days, yeah, we were doing cloud first, backup and recovery for modern applications built on the MongoDB's, the Cassandra's, the non relational databases. It's going to a non relational world. In the early days people would laugh and they'd be like, "Why you doing that?" We were steadfastly believing then, as we do now, that the world is moving to the cloud. The world is moving largely to a non relational world and so there's going to be a huge opportunity to provide data management solutions. Data aware, data management solutions for that. So we've stuck to that. We've been steadfast in that. But your point about maturity, what's been really exciting for us as an organization is that, I go back even a year, and you talk about, so what do you do? And you give 'em the pitch and there was a fair amount of nuance to it and they'd be like (garbles). They'd sort of give you the "hmm". They'd kind of ask questions or whatever and then once you talk through it, maybe it was a 10 minute elevator pitch, if you will. You had to go like 20 floors. They got it but it was a little bit more nuanced. Now it's, okay great, are you moving to the cloud? No brainer. Are you building modern applications? Are you importing your old applications, building these new modern applications in a non relational world. Absolutely. Are they running a production? Yes. How are you protecting those applications? We have no idea, kinda thing or we're using native tools or we're scripting or we're not doing anything. So it varied to your point. The conversation has become much less, it's not even nuanced anymore. The qualifying questions are incredibly simple and our value proposition is incredibly easy. If you're running applications, if you've built net new modern applications running in the cloud, or on-prem that you want to back up to the cloud, you need modern data protection. That's what we do. >> Let's talk about this hybrid IT scenario. I was at dinner last night with a couple Fortune 500 AWS customers and I was talking to them about the excitement of this whole category, data protection. They were like, backup? How is that sexy at at all? Then we got into this use case of data mobility, of I've built something really big on-prem and I need John Hastings term: "I need a multi-cloud strategy." >> Yeah, John's not a huge multi... He pressed me last week on the whole multi-cloud. >> Kevin: Fourier is-- Yeah, oh yeah, sorry (laughs) >> John: I don't want you to reach over and back slap me here. >> Peter: So you're all in on multi-cloud. It's Fourier we gotta worry about. >> John: My whole life. >> Talk to us about the importance of using what we would have traditionally called backup as a data mobility strategy. >> Cool. Absolutely. It all kinda comes down to for us, being data aware. If you think about it, we're a cloud data management company. Our number one use case is backup and recovery because the first thing you have to do is you gotta capture the data, you've gotta. >> Backup recovery of my VMs right? >> Good question. We are unlike traditional backup and recovery. We're not infrastructure-centric. We're application-centric. We're actually agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. So if you're running bare metal on-prem, if you're running on EC2, if you're leveraging S3, wherever you're running, we're fine because we integrated the application level, the database level. Hence our focus on non relational. Our number one use case is protecting that data. Because we are application aware, because we're data aware and we integrated the database level, we understand the underlying scheme. We are aware of the data structures within the databases that people are protecting first and foremost. But in the context of data mobility to your point, the number two use case for us is that organizations want to protect their data but then they want to do things like, I wanna spin up copies or sub-copies of my data, of my backup copies for test F, for QA, for performance testing, for cloud instantiation, for archiving, for BI, for whatever I want to do. The key is, we're not a migration company. AWS has migration services. If you need to move two petabytes of data from on-prem and you're now gonna host it in the cloud, that's not us, but if you built these new applications and you want to basically intelligently use subsets of your data for those workloads I was talking about, we enable you to be incredibly intelligent about only recovering if you will or only moving the data that you need. For example, simple things like, with our RecoverX 2.5 that we just announced. We do something called quierably recovery. What that means is, I can do everything from star dot Peter star or I can pick individual rows and columns. >> John: Just pick and choose? >> I can pick and choose based upon my database scheme. I can mast columns of data if I have to do GDPR compliance or PII. So from a used case standpoint, it's all about being aware of the data that you actually in the first place you're backing up, but then what data you wanna move so that you can be incredibly intelligent and efficient about the data that you're moving. >> So in traditional systems, I can encrypt data at rest. I can back it up. My tapes can be encrypted. My discs that's holding that back up data can be encrypted. When I think about that, when it comes to backing up object storing into the cloud, how do I do that with...? >> Great question. Again, because we're not infrastructure based, we're not LUN based, we're not block based, we integrate at the database level. We're completely transparent to encryption. We work perfectly fine with encrypted data. We work perfectly fine with compressed data. We invented something called semantic de-duplication. If you're familiar with traditional de-duplication. >> Keith: Right. >> It works in a block level. Fixture varying length block. In a clustered database environment or in a compressed or encrypted data environment, it kinda throws the capabilities of traditional de-dup out the window. Semantic de-duplication understands the scheme of the underlying database. We are highly efficient de-duplication for encrypted data, for compressed data. We're transparent to that, if you will. So again, back to our cloud first model, we built that in from day one. It's a fundament, our underlying architecture, the platform that we've built is fundamentally unlike anything else from a traditional backup and recovery or data management platform. >> So make sure I get it right before we say good-bye. Datos IO 2825? >> 2825, correct. www.DatosIO If you are running applications in the cloud and need to protect those apps, please talk to us. We'd love to help you out. If you're looking for data mobility solutions, come talk to us. >> John: There's the pitch. >> Love to chat. >> Peter, thanks for being with us. Next week you're off, all right? >> We'll have to cancel that one because I'm back next week. >> John: Back to back cupers, but maybe we'll give you a week off. >> Thanks for having me, always like being here. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for being with us. Back for more here at re:Invent. We're in Las Vegas live here on the CUBE. Back with more right after this.