>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018. Brought to you by RedHat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and Cloud Native Con. I'm John Furrier your host, Stu Miniman from Wikibon here. Next guests Anthony Lye, whose the senior vice president general manager of Cloud Data Services at NetApp, and Jonsi Stergesson, CTO and VP of Cloud Services. Great to have you guys on, great to see you again Anthony. >> As always thank you. >> So first I want to get out there we talked lots in the Kube lounge just to reset. The value parsons of NetApp have significantly been enhanced with the cloud. What is that value proposition? What have you guys seen the explosive headroom for value creation that you guys are enabling with NetApp and the cloud? >> You know what I think NetApp has done over now, probably five years, is really pushed itself to embrace the cloud. To recognize that the cloud is a very important part of everybody's IT infrastructure whether it's an extension of the existing IT infrastructure for things like DR or backup or whether it's the primary platform for legacy workloads or, as we're all here to do, to discuss the refactoring and rebuilding of applications around microservices. I think NetApp chose, unlike all of the traditional storage vendors, to see the cloud as an opportunity and I think it's helped the company and it's helped our customers to operate in what is, I think, is by default now, the end state for many companies is hybrid cloud. >> You guys also made some good moves early on with the cloud. We've documented certainly on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE early on. And then as flash comes in for performance, now you've got compute, storage and networking all being optimized in the cloud, creates app developers an environment where it's programmable infrastructure finally. I mean dev ops is happening, this is where services and notion of compute has gone from standing something up in seconds on the cloud to with functions milliseconds. This is changing the dynamic of applications but you've still got to store the data. Talk about, Jonsi, the impact of the services in piece to the developer, storage, services, provisioning, all that and it covers. >> We are taking, I mean all of our services that are running in all the hyperskills in Google and Azure and AWS and more and even on premise. Our view is our role is always to find the best home for any workload at any given time. Even though it's in public cloud or on premise. However storage has always been sort of left aside, it's always been living in this propietary chunk that is hard to move and the weight of the data is actually quite heavy. So we actually want to use Kubernetes and microservices and resistant volume claims by taking that data and making that very easily migratable replicated between locations, between hyperscalers and sort of adopt a true multi cloud strategy. With data with it not only moving those workloads or applications but the data is key, data is key. >> Sometimes, you know, you want to move the data to a compute and sometimes you want to move compute to the data. >> And that's been validated by Amazon's RDS announcement on VMware, Amazon announced outposting on premises, and the number one thing was latency, work was not yet moving. This is exactly to what you guys have been doing and implementing, today, this is like real product. >> I think the reality of the world is, you know, while there is a ton of innovation that exists in public cloud there are well documented use cases that struggle with a cloud only environment. I think NetApp has chosen to make each one of those three potential persistent stores equal to one another. So whether that's in a traditional on premise and upgrading on premise environments to get better price performance characteristics, embracing the public cloud or combining public and private cloud. >> While it's not trivial NetApp, at it's core, always was software so moving it from a hardware appliance, I mean, back in the day Network Appliance was the original name of the company to a software defined solution to being multi-cloud, you can kind of see that genesis where it can go. A lot of times the tougher part is from the customer standpoint. You know, the traditional person that bought and managed this was a storage administrator and getting them to understand cloud native applications and dev ops and all those things, those are pretty challenging moves so how much of it is education? How much of it is new buying centers inside the company or new clients, help us walk through that. >> Yeah I would make two points in maybe answering to you. So I think NetApp's history, actually 25 years ago, NetApp started off as selling into the developers who were running SUN workstations, who wanted shared everything and NetApp actually you know went around IT and put those appliances into the developers. We built a SaaN business, a very successful SaaN business, with the IT people. Now you're absolutely right, the people around here fall into the, sort of, the modern day dev ops characters. What Google calls the SREs the Site Reliability Engineers. And they're a new breed, they're young, they're doing more and more CICD. Storage is an integral part of what they do but maybe not a primary part. They expect storage to work. We are really lucky you know, a little company called Microsoft and another little company called Google sell our stuff so we get introduced into all of those cloud first, cloud only sort of use cases. Not just of refactoring of primary but building. So we're actually, in many cases now, very relevant to those people but we've been fortunate enough to leverage the big public clouds together. >> So you have a relationship with AWS, Google and Microsoft, Microsoft and Google, which you've just mentioned. You mentioned SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, this is a new persona that's clearly emerging and it has a focus around operations, now IT operations has been around for a long time, dev is changing too but this is, if they sell your stuff, their customers need to operate at scale. This is a big point, can you elaborate on the importance of this and what you guys are doing specifically to help that. >> So the Site Reliability Engineer, he is not doing operations. He is actually in charge of running the workload or the development or the application or the product that comes from development. They have to abide by specific rules that are actually set by the SRE. And to your point, because you were talking about different selling motions and not selling into the storage admin or not selling to traditional IT. This is actually what has actually been really surprising and showcases the power of Kubernetes and how widely adopted it has been, both on premise and in the public cloud because customers are actually coming to us and saying, "Hey we had no idea NetApp was actually "doing all of this in the public cloud. "We had no idea that you had your own Kubernetes services "that actually help solve one of the biggest problems "which is persistent volume claims and application of data." So it's actually coming, and you sort of see how important CNCF is, because they're actually educating the market and educating the enterprise space just as well as the new up and coming development team like I've traditionally come from. So I'm actually seeing that it's easier than I would have sort of thought in the beginning. So they're actually becoming more educated about microservices, more educated about how to run their, actually everybody almost in any company that I go into now, they have the SRE playbook somewhere in their meeting room somewhere and everybody sort of getting educated on how they need to, sort of, elevate themselves from being traditional system administrators into that SRE or dev op role. >> And it's also a cultural thing too, they have to develop, not just the playbook, but have some experience in economies of scale, managing it, and certainly it's a tail wind for you guys, storage because, again, it's also a lot of coating involved they need a pool of resources, storage being one of them. But the other thing that's interesting, those are single clouds, Amazon, Google, multi cloud is really where the action is, right? So multi cloud to me is just, to me, a modern version of multi vendor, which basically is about choice. Choice is critical, but having choice around the app, it becomes the value creator. So if you guys can scale with the app development environments that seems to be a sweet spot. How are you guys talking about that particular point because this becomes an under the covers, a new kind of operations, a new kind of scale, pushing code, not just you know stacking interacting boxes but, like, really making things, patching security things or could have been head of security things so doing things in a really really automated way. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing I'm most proud of at my time at NetApp and what the team does and what the team continues to do is we took a very, very, I think, deliberate perspective that we would deliver storage, but we would do it in a very unique way. That my background was from Saas, I spent my entire career building applications, and when you build an application, you run the application, there is nothing you give the customer and say, "Here, administer it." When you look at a lot of the infrastructure services, they make the customer do a lot of work. So what we did at NetApp was we decided that we ourselves would almost create like an always available protocol that people could just ask for it and it would be there. There was no concept of setting it up or patching it or upgrading it. And that's really I think we have set a bar now on the public clouds that, I think, even the public clouds themselves have not done, and giving those developers that I asked for a storage through an API and all I need to do is ask for capacity and throughput. Nothing else, that's something to a developer they're like, "So now I don't even have to ask "anybody with storage skills. "I can tell my application to ask for it's own storage." >> It's interesting you're living in a new world where you need the scale of a system but the functionality of like an app server. I feel like we're living in that app server days where that middle ground and app development was the key focus, you've got to have both now. You need scalable systems but really application performance. >> And then you add an additional layer because now everybody wants to be able to use the same deployment script, the same configuration management system, Terraform, whatever they're actually using to deploy it on premise or in a public cloud but it needs to be done in a unified manner. This is why it's so important to be upstream compatible and there's a lot of companies out there that are actually destroying that model and not following the true cloud concept. >> Yes give them a slap on the wrist, get in line, fix it! >> If you are going to play in this space with the CNCF and with Kubenetes, you better play by the rules and do the open standards. And so you're actually compatible no matter where your workload resides. >> We've been monitoring how storage is maturing in this whole cloud native Kubenetes ecosystem here. A year ago there were a lot of backroom arguments over what were the right architectures, a few sub projects working through here, it actually blew me away in the keynote this morning to hear that 40% of all applications that are deployed in Kubernetes are stateful. So where are we? What's working? What's good for customers? And what do we still need to work on to kind of solidify the storage data piece of this? >> I think it's interesting, 'cause I think we, sort of, ourselves now consider NetApp to be a data company. Storage is an enabler but what's interesting, everyone talks about their Saas strategy, their PaaS strategy their IaaS strategies. I always ask people, "What's your data strategy?" and that's something I think the CNCF Kubernetes, themselves, recognize that they've done a lot of really great things for compute around the microservices themselves but the storage piece has always been something of a challenge. And we said, about solving that problem, we have an open source project called Trident, that essentially enables people to make persistent volume claims and if the container dies, they can essentially start a new container and pick up the storage exactly where they left off. So we really believe that stateful is an ever increasing percentage of the overall application model. Databases are important things, people need them. >> I would agree with that and that's developing too, it's early on. All right so I want to ask you guys a question, kind of outside the box. Multi cloud certainly is part of a hybrid, what they call a hybrid today, it's really a choice, multi cloud will be a future reality, no matter what anyone says, I believe that. How is multi cloud changing IT investments? Business investments, technical investments or both, what's your guys thoughts on how multi cloud is driving and changing IT investments? >> Well I actually think it offers you the opportunity to have like placement policy algorithms that fit your workload at any given time. For example, if this particular application is latency sensitive, and I created an application that all of a sudden became really popular in Mexico, then I should be able to see which one of the hyperscalers actually has a presence in Mexico City, deploy it there. If I'm under utilizing my private cloud and I have a lot of space on it and there is no specific requirements, it gives you that flexibility to, like I said, always find the best home for your workload at any given time. >> Dynamic policy based stuff? >> Yeah, precisely. And it allows you also, I mean, you can choose to do it whether its based on workload requirements or you can start doing it in a least cost effective route, I mean least cost routing. So it actually impacts both from a technical and a business sense in my opinion. >> I think you know you cannot help but get excited every day with what one cloud delivers over another cloud, and we're seeing something not unlike the arms race, you know, Google does this, then Amazon does this, then Microsoft does this. As developers we're very keen to take advantage of all these capabilities and we want to, in many cases, let the application itself make the decision. >> So yeah Amazons got there, everyone's catching up. Competitions good. All right, final question. Predictions for multi cloud in 2019. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a loud bang? Is there going to be a crash? Is it going to be fruit on the trees? What's the state of the multi cloud predictions for 2019? >> Well I actually believe it's going to become a standard. Nobody should be locked into any region or any one provider, I don't even care if it's on premise or NetOps specific, you should be able to... I mean, I think it's just going to become standard. Everybody has to have a multi cloud strategy and you can see that, like the IDC report that 86% of Fortune 500 companies are adopting multi cloud. And I think I'm actually quite fed up of this hyper cloud stuff because, in my opinion, on premise is just the fourth or the fifth hyperscaler and should be treated as such. So if you actually have that true cloud concept, you should be able to deploy that using the same script, the same APIs to deploy it everywhere. >> As I said in theCube the data center and non print, they're just an edge, a big edge. If it's an operating mall? >> My prediction? Your prediction. >> 2019 is the year of Istio. I think we've become enamored with Kubernetes, I think what Istio brings significantly advances Kubernetes, and we barely scratched the surface, I think, with the service mesh and all of the enhancements and all the contributions that will go into that. I think, you know, that 2019 will probably see as many vendors here next year with Istio credentials and STO capabilities as we see today with Kubernetes. >> Anthony, Jonsi, thanks for coming on, great insights, smart commentary, appreciate it. We should get in the studio and dig into this a little bit deeper. Really a great example of an incumbent, large company, NetApp, really getting a tailwind from the cloud, good smart bets you guys made, programmable infrastructure, dynamic policy routing, all kinds of under the covers goodness from smart cloud deployments. This is where software drives the data. >> Yep data is the new oil, that's what they say right? If you don't have a data set you're not very competitive. >> Thanks for coming on I appreciate it. More Kube coverage here, getting all the breakdown here, the impact of cloud computing at scale, the role of data software, all happening here at the CNCF. This is the KubeCon, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break.