(electronica music) >> Hello everybody. This is Dave Volante and we are covering HPE's big GreenLake announcements. We've got wall-to-wall coverage, a ton of content. We've been watching GreenLake since the beginning. And of one of the things we said early on was let's watch and see how frequently, what the cadence of innovations that HPE brings to the market. Because that's what a cloud company does. So, we're here to welcome you. Keith White is here as the Senior Vice President General Manager of GreenLake cloud services. He runs the commercial business. Keith, thanks for coming on. Help me kick off. >> Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. >> So you guys got some momentum orders, 40% growth a year to year on year. You got a lot of momentum, customer growth. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. It's 46%. >> Kyle, thank you for that clarification. And in 46. Big different from 40 to 46. >> No, I think what we're seeing is we're seeing the momentum happen in the marketplace, right? We have a scenario where we're bringing the cloud experience to the customer on their premises. They get to have it automated. Self-serve, easy to consume. They pay for what they use. They can have it in their data center. They can have it at the edge. They can have it at the colo, and, we can manage it all for them. And so they're really getting that true cloud experience and we're seeing it manifest itself in a variety of different customer scenarios. You know, we talked about at Discover, a lot of work that we're doing on the hybrid cloud side of the house, and a lot of work that we're doing on the edge side of things with our partners. But you know, it's exciting to see the explosion of data and how now we're providing this data capability for our customers. >> What are the big trends you're hearing from customers? And how is that informing what you're doing with Green? I mean, I feel like in a lot of ways, Keith, what happened last year, you guys were, were in a better position maybe than most. But what are you hearing and how is that informing your go forward? >> Yeah, I think it's really three things with customers, right? First off, Hey, we're trying to accelerate our digital transformation and it's all becoming about the data. So help us monetize the data, help us protect that data. Help us analyze it to make decisions. And so, you know, number one, it's all about data. Number two is wow, this pandemic, you know, we need to look for cost savings. So, we still need to move our business forward. We've got to accelerate our business, but help me find some cost savings with respect to what I can do. And third, what we're hearing is, hey, we're in a situation, where there's a lot of different capabilities happening with our workforce. They're working from home. They're working hybrid. Help us make sure that we can stay connected to those folks, but also in a secure way, making sure that they have all the tools and resources they need. So those are sort of three of the big themes that we're seeing that GreenLake really helps manifest itself, with the data we're doing now. With all the hybrid cloud capabilities. With the cost savings that we get with respect to our platform, as well as with solutions such as VDI or workforce enablements that we've, we create from a solution standpoint. . >> So, what's the customer reaction, I mean, I mean, everybody now, who's has a big on-premise state, has an as a service capability. A customer saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, how do you make it not me too? In the customer conversations? >> Yeah. I think it turns into, you know, you have to bring the holistic solution to the customer. So yes, there's technology there and we're hearing from, you know, some of the competitors out there. Yeah, we're doing as a service as well, but maybe it's a little bit of storage here. Maybe it's a little bit of networking there. Customers need that end to end solution. And so as you've seen us announce over time, we've got the building blocks, of course, compute storage and networking, but everything runs in a virtual machine. Everything runs in a container or everything runs on the bare metal itself. And that package that we've created for customers means that they can do whatever solution, or whatever workload they want So, if you're a hospital and you're running Epic for your electronic medical records, you can go that route. If you're upgrading SAP and you're using virtual machines at a very large scale, you can use this, use a GreenLake for that as well. So, as you go down the list, there's just so many opportunities with respect to bring those solutions to our customers. And then you bring in our point-next capabilities to support that. You bring in our advisory and professional services, along with our ecosystem to help enable that. You bring in our HPE financial services to help fund that digital transformation. And you've got the complete package. And that's why customers are saying, hey, you guys are now partners of us. You're not just a hardware provider, you're a partner you're helping us solve our business problems and helping us accelerate our business. >> So what should people expect today? You guys got some announcements. What should people look for? >> Well, I think this is, as we've talked about, you know, now we're sort of providing much more capabilities around the data side of the house. Because data is so such, it's the gold, if you will, of a customer's environment. So first off we want to do analytics. So we want an open platform that provides really a unified set of analytics capabilities. And this is where we have a real strong, sweet spot with respect to some of the, the software that we've built around Esperal. But also with the hardware capabilities. As you know, we have all the way up to the Cray supercomputers that, that are doing all of the analytics for whether this or, or financial data that. So, I think that's one of the key things. The second is you got to protect that data. And, and so if it's going to be on prem, I want to know that it's protected and secured. So how do I back it up? How do I have a disaster recovery plan? How do I watch out for ransomware attacks, as well? So we're providing some capabilities there. And then I'd say, lastly, because of all the experience we have with our customers now implementing these hybrid solutions, they're saying, hey, help me with this edge to cloud framework and how do I go and implement that on my own? And so we've taken all the experience and we've bucketed that into our edge to cloud adoption framework to provide that capability for our customers. So we, you know, we're really excited about, again, talking about solutions, talking about accelerating your business, not just talking about technology. >> I said up the top, Keith, that one of the ways I was evaluating you as the pace and the cadence of the innovations. And, and is that, is that fair? How do you guys think about that internally? Are you, you know, you're pushing yourself to go faster, I'm sure you are, but what's that conversation like? >> I think it's a great question because in essence, we're now pivoting the company holistically to being a cloud services and a software company. And that's really exciting and we're seeing that happen internally. But this pace of innovation is really built on what customers are asking us for us. So now that we've grown over 1200 customers worldwide. You know, over $5 billion of total contract value. You know, signing some, some large deals in a variety of solutions and workloads and verticals, et cetera. What we're now seeing is, hey, this is what we need. Help me with my internal IT out to my business groups. Help me with my edge strategy as I build the factory of the future, or, you know, help me with my data and analytics that I'm trying to accomplish for my, you know, diagnosis of, of x-rays and, and capabilities such as Carestream, if you will. So it's, it's exciting to see them come to us and say, this is the capabilities that we're requiring, and we've got our foot on the gas to provide that innovation. And we're miles ahead of the competition. >> All right, we've got an exciting day ahead. We got all kinds of technology discussions, solution discussions. We got, we got, we're going to hear from the analyst community. Really bringing you the, the full package of announcements here. Keith, thanks for helping me set this up. >> Always. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. >> I look forward today. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Tons of content coming your way. You're watching The Cubes coverage of HP's big GreenLake announcement. Right back. (electronica music)

>>mhm >>mm >>Hello and welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and we're going to dig into H P E. Green Lake, we've heard a lot about this, we want to find out how real it is and test a little bit of how how can help solve your business problems. We also want to understand Green Lake relative to the competition. HPV was the first, as you probably know to declare it all in with an as a service model and virtually every major infrastructure player has now followed suit. So we want to hear from HP directly how it's different from the competition, where it's innovating and that means we're gonna poke a little bit of customer examples and how the partner ecosystem is adopting and responding to Green Lake and with me is the right person to do this is keith White, who is the senior Vice President General Manager of the Green Lake cloud services business unit at HP, keith, great to see you, thanks for coming back to the cube. >>Okay, fantastic to see you as always. So thanks so much for having me. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. So look, we're hearing a lot leading up to discover and at this event about Green Lake you got momentum now, everybody's excited about it. What's driving demand? Where's the excitement coming from? >>No, it's a great question. And you know, the reality is customers are expecting this cloud experience, right? So they they've been using the public cloud, they've been engaging on that front and this cloud experience is really driven, a pretty high amount of customer expectations, make itself served, make it automated, make it easy to consume, only want to pay for what I'm using and then manage it all for me on the back end. But 60 to 70% of apps and data will stay on prem per Gardner and I D. C. And so give me that experience on prem. And so that's why I think Green Lake has gotten so much interest, so much positive growth and momentum is because we're bringing that cloud experience to our customers in their data center, in their Coehlo or at the edge and that's where they want to see it just as much. And so since the world is now hybrid, we have a fantastic solution for folks. >>So you, you were first in this game and so you took some arrows and I'm interested in how Green Lake has evolved, Take us through the journey maybe what were some of the bumps in the road that you had to overcome? Maybe how it compares with the competition. Maybe some of the things that they're going to have to go through as well to get to the point where you are. >>No, it's true. And you know, the great thing is HP as a company is really moving to be much more of a cloud services and software company. And you know, we're seeing this from our competition, as you mentioned, have followed suit. But in essence, you know, you have to move from just sort of providing lease type financing type scenarios for our customers into truly delivering that cloud experience. And that's what's been so exciting over this last year is we've gone from just the basic cloud services, compute storage, networking and VMS to really providing containers as a service, bare metal as a service. Uh, machine learning ops, S. A P V. D I. You know, we've now created a set of workloads and as you heard it discover we're now delivering industry solutions, so electronic medical records for hospitals or high delivery payment transaction processing for, for financial, so that the challenge of moving from just sort of leasing basic capabilities to a true cloud experience that again pay as I go, fully automated self serve, all managed for me has really been a challenge and it's exciting, it's exciting to see customers jump on and really sort of lean in and see the business value that comes from having that level of solution >>keith, am I correct in that pretty much every large tech company has a services arm and they could, they could sort of brute force, some kind of cloud like experience and that's kind of what people have done historically the layer in a financial like leasing financial as you said and and but every situation was unique, it was kind of a snowflake if you will and you guys are probably there a few years ago as well and so I'm interested in sort of how you evolved beyond that. Was it a mindset was a technology, was it sort of cultural? You know, it came from the top as well, but maybe you could describe that a little bit. >>Yeah, the ship comes from our customers because what's happening is customers no longer trying to buy component parts. They're saying it's really about Tesla's like, hey, I want you to deliver this for me. In essence, we're running the data center for them now. We're running their machine learning operations environment for them. Now, you know, we're migrating their mainframe over now. And so what's happening is these sls are really, what matters to customers like that? It's not so much about, hey, what are the speeds and feeds and this and that? And so yes, you can sort of brute force that piece of it. But what you really are having to do is create this deep partnership and relationship with your customer to truly understand their business challenges and then provide them with that capability. Now I think the things that's exciting is yes, the public cloud gives you some some significant benefits for certain workloads and certain capabilities. But what we're hearing from customers is hey, I want to have much more control over my data center. I want to ensure that it has the security required. I want to make sure that I can make the adjustments necessary and so you're doing all that at a lower cost with open platform that I can use a variety of tools and other applications just makes it that much more powerful. So I think that's what we're seeing is we're getting into what our customers really requiring and then you know the most interesting thing is how do you make it work with my entire environment because I am running Azure and I am running A W. S. And I am running google and I'm running some other things. And so how does this cloud really helped me bring all those together to really govern that hybrid estate? And that's where I think Green Lake has really shine. >>So it kind of part of the secret sauce is automation because you've got to be, you still have, you have to be competitive, you know, at least within reason to cloud cost, sometimes it's going to be less expensive, maybe sometimes it can be more expensive. You've got some advantages in certain cases where, you know, there's government governance things and and you know, we don't have to go through all that, but there's the automation but you've got to be profitable at this too. So there's the automation, there's the tooling, there's the openness. So, so that was really a key part of it. Is it not that sort of automating? >>That's right. Automation is key as is really understanding what that customer environment is and optimizing for that piece of it. And so as you heard, we're really excited to announce our Green Lake Lighthouse, which is really providing workload optimized systems that are fully managed for them that provide that capability to run multiple workloads for that customer. But at the same time, to your point, there's a lot of charges that happened on the public cloud side. So, you know, data is the new, you know, gold if you will right, everyone's trying to monetize their data, trying to use it to make decisions and really understand what's happening across their environment and in the cloud. You know, if you put it up in the cloud, you have to pay to get it out. The egress charges can be significant and it's also a bit slower at times because of the latency that happens across that that that connection. And so we are now in a situation where we're seeing a lot of customers that are really trying to analyze their data, leveraging our HPC systems, leveraging our machine learning operation systems in order to really get that data happening, Getting the dancers out much, much faster and a much lower cost than what it would cost them to do that in the cloud. >>So you have some experience at this now. I wonder if we could dig into the customers how customers are using Green Lake. Maybe you can give some examples of success. >>Yeah. Yeah, no. You know it's exciting because you know first off everyone's looking at their digital transformation and that means something different for every single customer, so really understanding what they're trying to do from a transformation standpoint and then saying, okay, well how can we bring a solution to help accelerate that? To help be uh, you know, more connected to your customers to help improve your product delivery. We went to Lyondellbasell for example, one of the largest manufacturers in the world. And you know, they said, hey look, we don't want to run our data center anymore. Most most customers are trying to get out of the data center management business and they're saying, hey, run this for me, uh let me free up resources to go focus on things that really can drive additional value for our customers instead of keeping the lights on patching, blah blah blah. So we have taken their entire environment and moved it to a Coehlo and we're managing it now for them. And so in essence we freed up not just a ton of resources, but they have also been able to drop their carbon footprint, which is also this whole sustainability push is significant as well. And then you look at a customer like care stream, one of the largest medical diagnostic companies in the world, saying hey we gotta be able to allow our doctors to be able to um analyze and diagnose things much much faster through our X ray systems and through our diagnostic machines. And so they have implemented our machine learning operations scenario to dramatically speed up those types of capabilities. So as you go down the list and you start to see these customers really um leveraging technology to meet that digital transformation, saving costs, moving their business forward, creating new business models. It's just, it's really exciting. >>What about partners keith? How how have they responded? I mean, on the one hand, you know, that's great opportunities for them, you know, they're they're transforming their own business model. On the other hand, you know, maybe they were comfortable with the old model, they got a big house, nice, nice boat, you >>know? >>But how are they changing their their their business and how are they leaning in >>similar to what we're seeing? The opportunity for partners is dramatic, right? Because what happens is you have to have a very different relationship with your customer to truly understand their digital transformation. Their business challenges the problems that they're having to address. And so where we're seeing partners really, really sort of the opportunity is where there's the services and that sort of deeper relationship piece of it. So in essence, it's creating much more opportunity because the white spaces dramatic we're seeing, I want to say it's in the 30 to $40 billion worth of market opportunity as we move into an as a service on prem world. So they're seeing that opportunity. They're seeing the ability to add services on top of that and deepen the relationship with our customers. And you know, it's it's from my SVS. We're working closely with S. A. P. For example, to deliver their new rise private cloud customer edition. We're working closely with loosest, for example, who is doing a lot of payment processing type scenarios Nutanix and their database as a service scenario and Splunk because again, we went back to the data piece and these guys are doing so much big data type implementations for risk analytics and and regulatory type scenarios. It's just significant. And so because there's such a push to keep things on prem to have the security to reduce the latency to get rid of the egress charges and everything else. There's just a significant white space for both our partners and then from our distributors and resellers, they're getting to change their business model again, to get much deeper in that relationship with our customers >>to be Green Lake is, I mean it's H. P. E. As a service, it's your platform. And so I wonder if you can think about how you're thinking about uh, share with us, How you think about platform innovation? Um, you've got the pricing model, you know, flex up, flex down. Is there other technology we should know about and other things that are going to move you forward in this battle for the next great hybrid cloud and edge platform? >>Yeah, it's a great push because if you think about it, we are Green Lake is the edge to cloud platform And in essence because we have such a strong edge capability with the arab acquisition we made a few years back. That's really significant momentum with the Silver Peak acquisition to give us SD when you've got that edge connectivity all the way up to our high performance computing. And so you'll see us deliver high performance computing as a service. We're announcing that here at discover um you'll see us announced, you know, machine learning ops I mentioned ASAP, but also a virtual desktops. I think the pandemic has brought a lot more work from home type scenarios and customers really want to have that secure desktop. And so, working with partners like Citrix and Nutanix and and VM ware and Crew were able to provide that again, unique scenario for our customers. And so, um, yeah, the innovation is going to keep coming. You know, I mentioned bare metal as a service because many people are starting to really leverage the metal that's out there. You're seeing us also engaged with folks like intel on our silicon on demand. So this is a really exciting technology because what it allows us to do is turn on cores when we need them. So hey, I need additional capacity. I need some power. Let's turn on some cores. But then I turn off those cores when I'm not using them. You go to a software core based software pricing model, like an oracle or a sequel server. I'm saving dramatic cost now because I don't have to pay for all the cores that are on the system. I'm only paying the licenses for the ones that I use. And so that should bring dramatic cost savings to our customers as well. So we're looking from the silicon all the way up. Uh you know, you hear us talk about project Aurora, which is our security capability. We're looking at the silicon level, but we're also looking at the the container and bare metal and then obviously the workloads in the industry solution. So we're sprinting forward. We're listening to our customers were taking their feedback. We're seeing what they're prioritizing and because we have that tight relationship with them as we help move them to the direction they want to go, it's giving us a ton of fantastic inside information for what really matters. >>Right, Thank you for that. So, I want to ask you about data. A lot of organizations are kind of rethinking their ideal data architecture, their organization. They're they're they're seeing the amount of data that is potentially going to be created at the edge, thinking about ai inference and influencing at the edge and maybe reimagining their data organization in this age of insight. I wonder how Green Lake fits into that. How are you thinking about the new era of data and specifically Green Lakes role? >>Yeah, you mentioned the age of insights and and it really is right. So we've moved sort of as the next phase of digital transformation is basically saying, hey look, I've got all this data. I've got to first get my arms around my data estate because in essence it's in all these different pockets around. And so Green Lake gives you that ability to really get that data estate established. Then I want to take and get the answers in the analytics out of it. And then I want to monetize that data either out to my customer set or out to my industry or out to other scenarios as well. And so as we start to deliver our develops capability, our ai and analytics capabilities through HPC. And it's an open platform. So it allows data scientists to easy boot up easily boot up a cluster with which to do their models and their training and their algorithms. But we can also then use and Estancia at that into the business decisions that our customers are trying to make again without the significant cost that they're seeing on that on the public cloud side and in a very secure way because they have the data exactly where they need it. You'll see us continue to do sort of disaster recovery and data protection and those types of scenarios both with our partners and from H P E. So it's exciting to just understand that now you're going to have the tools and resources so you can actually focus on those business outcomes versus how do I protect the data? Where do I start, how do I get my model set up, etcetera. All that becomes automated and self service. You mentioned earlier >>When you talk to customers Keith one of the big sort of challenges that you're addressing. What's the typical, there was no typical but the but the real nuts that they're trying to crack is it financial? We want to move from Capex to opec's is that hey we want this cloud model but we can't do it in the public cloud for a variety of reasons, edicts, organization leaders or we want to modernize our our state. What are the real sort of sticking points that you're addressing with Green Lake? >>Yeah, I think it's threefold and you sort of touched on those. So one is, it really does start with modernization. Hey, you know, we've got to take costs out of the equation. We've got to reduce our carbon footprint. We've got to automate these things because we have limited resources and how do we maximize the ones that we have? And so I mentioned earlier, getting out of the data center, modernizing our apps, really monetizing our data. So I think that's number one. Number two is what you said as well, which is, hey look, I don't need to have all these capital assets. I don't want to be in charge of managing all all these assets. I just want the capability and so being able to sell them that service that says, hey, we can, we can do X number of desktops for your V. D. I. We can run your S. A. P. Environment or we can make sure that you have the, the analytics structure set up to be able to run your models that becomes super compelling and it frees up a lot of resources in cash on that front as well. And then I think the third thing is what you said, which is the world is hybrid. And so I need to find out what's going to run best in my on prem environment and what's going to run best up in the cloud. And I want to be able to optimize that so that I'm not wasting costs in one place or the other, and I want to be able to govern and govern that holistically. So I have the ability to see what's happening end to end across that so I can manage my business most effectively. So I think those are the three big things that people are really excited about with Green Lake as they enable those things. Um and you know, the reality is that it also means that they have a new partner to help them really think through how can they move forward? So it's not them by themselves. Uh It's really in a one plus one equals three type scenario and then you bring the ecosystem in and now you've got, you know, things working really well. So, >>so big enterprise tech, it's like, it's like the NFL is a sort of a copycat league. And so what, you know what I'm saying? But you guys all got >>big, yeah, >>you've got great resources, hey, this West Coast office exactly is gonna work. We're gonna get a short passing game going. And so that happened. So I feel like, okay, you've raised the bar now on as a service and that's gonna become table stakes. Um you know, it's got a lot of work to get there. I know, and it's a it's a journey, but but when you think about the future uh for H. P. E. Uh what's exciting you the most? >>I think what's exciting me the most is this the reaction that we're seeing with customers because in essence it gets them out of the bits and bytes and speeds and feeds and you know, um >>you >>know, component goo and really gets into business value, business outcomes sls and, and that's what they're looking for because what they're trying to do is break out of, you know that day to day and be able to really focus on the future and where they're going. So I think that's one, I think the second big thing is as you see all these things come together, um you know, we're able to basically provide customers with, I would say a mindset that's like, hey, I can do this holistically, but I can always pick and choose the best that I want and if I ramp up, I have capacity. If I ramp down, I don't have to pay for first scenarios. And so I'm getting the best of both worlds across that piece of it. And then third is I mentioned it earlier. But this whole relationship thing is so important because you know, this isn't about technology anymore. As much as it it is about what's the value that you're going to get out of that technology. And how does that help us move the company and the world forward? Like I love the fact that H. P. E. Was so involved in this pandemic. >>You know, >>with our systems were able to actually uh to run a set of of algorithms and analysis on how to, you know, find a vaccine on how to how to address the things that are going forward. You've seen us now up in space and as we, we broaden our frontier and so as a company you're seeing technology turned into things that are truly helping the world go forward. I think that's exciting as well. >>Yeah. Space. It's like the ultimate edge. >>I >>like you said to me if I take it, it's not not about ports and Mick, nips and gigabytes anymore. It's about the outcome. You mentioned before the S L. A. Um, you know, the thing about, you know, think about virtual, it's great. We have to get in the plane. Its downside. We all know we can't hang out, you know, afterwards, you know, have a drink or you know, chit chat about what's going on in the world, but we can't reach a lot more people. But the other downside of virtual is, you know, you don't have the hallway track. It's not like, hey, did you check out that, that demo on IOT? It's really cool. Where is that? So give us the hallway track. How can folks learn more about discover where would you direct folks? >>You bet. You know, I'm doing a full spot. Obviously let me start with at the top right Antonio Neri our ceo he's going to lay out the whole strategy and then I'll have a spotlight. It's about a 30 minute deep dive on all of these things that that you and I just talked about and then we've got a bunch of breakout sessions were doing some with our partners like Nutanix and others, um, Microsoft as well as we talk about, we didn't really touch on that, but you know, we have a strong partnership with the hyper scholars with Microsoft and with others because in essence customers are expecting an integrated solution that's hybrid. And so, you know, we're showcasing all of that with the with the discover breakouts as well and they're available on demand. We have a huge opportunity with respect to that, so really excited and you know, frankly we're here to help, like I hope people understand this is our opportunity to help you be successful and so please know that our ears are wide open to hear what the challenges are and we're ready to help customers as they needed. >>I'm glad you mentioned the partnership with Microsoft and other hyper skills. I feel like keith, the the Hyper scale is giving us a gift. They've spent last year they spent over $100 billion on Capex build out. That is like, it's like the internet. Thank you. >>Now we're gonna build on >>top of it, we're gonna build an abstraction layer that hides all that underlying complexity. We're gonna connect things and and that's really your job. That's really kind of what you're bringing to the table I think with Green Lake and some of these innovations. So >>I really >>appreciate it. Go ahead please. >>I appreciate the time as well. It's always a pleasure and it's always exciting to get a chance to share with you and and as always, any time you don't want me back, I'm happy to happy to join. Alright, >>would love to do that. So appreciate that. And thank you for spending some time with us. Stay tuned for more great coverage from HPD discovered 21 everything is available on demand as well as the that is the other good thing about virtually go back and watch all this content. This is Dave Volonte for the cube the leader in enterprise tech coverage. Be right back

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. These are cloud native insights. Hi, I'm stew Minimum and the host of Cloud Native Insights. And the threat that we've been pulling on with Cloud Native is that we needed to be able to take advantage of the innovation and agility that cloud in the ecosystem around it can bring, not just the location. It's It's not just the journey, but how do I take advantage of something today and keep being able to move for Happy to welcome back to the program one of our regulars and someone that I've had lots of discussion about? Cloud Cloud. Native Serverless So Cory Quinn, the Keith Cloud economists at the Duck Bill Group. Corey, always good to see you. Thanks for joining us. >>It is great to see me. And I always love having the opportunity to share my terrible opinions with people who then find themselves tarred by the mere association. And there's certainly no exception to use, too. Thanks for having me back. Although I question your judgment. >>Yeah, you know, what was that? Pandora's box. I open when I was like Hey, Corey, let's try you on video so much. And if people go out, they can look at your feet and you've spent lots of money on equipment. You have a nice looking set up. I guess you missed that one window of opportunity to get your hair cut in San Francisco during the pandemic. But be doesn't may Corey, why don't you give our audience just the update You went from a solo or mentor of the cloud? First you have a partner and a few other people, and you're now you've got economists. >>Yes, it comes down to separating out. What I'm doing with my nonsense from other people's other people's careers might very well be impacted by it considered tweet of mine. When you start having other clouds, economists and realize, okay, this is no longer just me we're talking about here. It forces a few changes. I was told one day that I would not be the chief economist. I smile drug put on a backlog item to order a new business cards because it's not like we're going to a lot of events these days, and from my perspective, things continue mostly a base. The back. To pretend people now means that there's things that my company does that I'm no longer directly involved with, which is a relief, that absolutely, ever. But it's been an interesting right. It's always strange. Is the number one thing that people who start businesses say is that if they knew what they were getting into, they'd never do it again. I'm starting to understand that. >>Yeah, well, Corey, as I mentioned you, and I have had lots of discussions about Cloud about multi Cloud server. Listen, like when you wrote an article talking about multi cloud is a worse practice. One of the things underneath is when I'm using cloud. I should really be able to leverage that cloud. One of the concerns that when you and I did a cube con and cloud native con is does multi cloud become a least common denominator? And a comment that I heard you say was if I'm just using cloud and the very basic services of it, you know, why don't I go to an AWS or an azure which have hundreds of services? Maybe I could just find something that is, you know, less expensive because I'm basically thinking of it as my server somewhere else. Which, of course, cloud is much more than so you do with a lot of very large companies that help them with their bills. What difference there differentiates the companies that get advantage from the cloud versus those that just kind of fit in another location, >>largely the stories that they tell themselves internally and how they wind up adapting to cloud. If the reason I got into my whole feel about why multi cloud is a worst practice is that of you best practices a sensible defaults, I view multi cloud as a ridiculous default. Sure, there are cases where it's important, and so I don't say I'm not suggesting for a second that those people who are deciding to go down that are necessarily making wrong decisions. But when you're building something from scratch with this idea toward taking a single workload and deploying it anywhere in almost every case, it's the wrong decision. Yes, there are going to be some workloads that are better suited. Other places. If we're talking about SAS, including that in the giant wrapper of cloud definition in terms of what was then, sure you would be nuts to wind of running on AWS and then decide you're also going to go with codecommit instead of git Hub. That's not something sensible people to use get up or got sick. But when I am suggesting, is that the idea of building absolutely every piece of infrastructure in a way that avoids any of the differentiated offerings that your primary cloud provider uses is just generally not a great occasionally you need to. But that's not the common case, and people are believing that it is >>well, and I'd like to dig a little deeper. Some of those differentiated services out there there are concerned, but some that said, You know, I think back to the past model. I want to build something. I can have it live ever anywhere. But those differentiated services are something that I should be able to get value out of it. So do you have any examples, or are there certain services that you have his favorites that you've seen customers use? And they say, Wow, it's it's something that is effective. It's something that is affordable, and I can get great value out of this because I didn't have to build it. And all of these hyper scaler have lots of engineers built, building lots of cool things. And I want to take advantage of that innovation. >>Sure, that's most of them. If we're being perfectly honest, there are remarkably few services that have no valid use cases for no customer anywhere. A lot of these solve an awful lot of pain that customers have. Dynamodb is a good example of this Is that one a lot of folks can relate to. It's super fast, charges you for what you use, and that is generally yet or a provision Great. But you don't have to worry about instances. You have to worry about scaling up or scaling down in the traditional sense. And that's great. The problem is, is great. How do I migrate off of this on to something else? Well, that's a good question. And if that is something that you need to at least have a theoretical exodus for, maybe Dynamo DV is the wrong service for you to pick your data store personally. If I have to build for a migration in mind on no sequel basis, I'll pick mongo DB every time, not because it's any easier to move it, but because it's so good at losing data, that'll have remarkably little bit left. Migrate. >>Yeah, Corey, of course. One of the things that you help customers with quite a bit is on the financial side of it. And one of the challenges if I moved from my environment and I move to the public cloud, is how do I take advantage not only of the capability to the cloud but the finances of the cloud. I've talked to many customers that when you modernize your pull things apart, maybe you start leveraging serverless capabilities. And if I tune things properly, I can have a much more affordable solution versus that. I just took my stuff and just shoved it all in the cloud kind of a traditional lift and shift. I might not have good economics. When I get to the cloud. What do you see along those lines? >>I'd say you're absolutely right with that assessment. If you are looking at hitting break even on your cloud migration in anything less than five years, it's probably wrong. The reason to go to Cloud is not to save money. There are edge cases where it makes sense, Sure, but by and large you're going to wind up spending longer in the in between state that you would believe eventually you're going to give up and call it hybrid game over. And at some point, if you stall long enough, you'll find that the cloud talent starts reaching out of your company. At which point that Okay, great. Now we're stuck in this scenario because no one wants to come in and finish the job is harder than we thought we landed. But it becomes this story of not being able to forecast what the economics are going to look like in advanced, largely because people don't understand where their workloads start and stop what the failure modes look like and how that's going to manifest itself in a cloud provider environment. That's why lift and shift is popular. People hate, lift and ship. It's a terrible direction to go in. Yeah, so are all the directions you can go in as far as migrating, short of burning it to the ground for insurance money and starting over, you've gotta have a way to get from where you are, where you're going. Otherwise, migration to be super simple. People with five weeks of experience and a certification consult that problem. It's but how do you take what's existing migrated end without causing massive outages or cost of fronts? It's harder than it looks. >>Well, okay, I remember Corey a few years ago when I talk to customers that were using AWS. Ah, common complaint was we had to dedicate an engineer just to look at the finances of what's happening. One of the early episodes I did of Cloud Native Insights talked to a company that was embracing this term called Been Ops. We have the finance team and the engineering team, not just looking back at the last quarter, but planning understanding what the engineering impacts were going forward so that the developers, while they don't need tohave all the spreadsheets and everything else, they understand what they architect and what the impact will be on the finance side. What are you hearing from your customers out there? What guidance do you give from an organizational standpoint as to how they make sure that their bill doesn't get ridiculous? >>Well, the term fin ops is a bit of a red herring in there because people immediately equate it back to cloud ability before their app. Geo acquisitions where the fin ops foundation vendors are not allowed to join except us, and it became effectively a marketing exercise that was incredibly poorly executed in sort of poisoned the well. Now the finance foundations been handed off to the Cloud Native Beauty Foundation slash Lennox Foundation. Maybe that's going to be rehabilitated, but we'll have to find out. One argument I made for a while was that developers do not need to know what the economic model in the cloud is going to be. As a general rule, I would stand by that. Now someone at your company needs to be able to have those conversations of understanding the ins and outs of various costs models. At some point you hit a point of complexity we're bringing in. Experts solve specific problems because it makes sense. But every developer you have does not need to sit with 3 to 5 days course understanding the economics of the cloud. Most of what they need to know if it's on a business card, it's on an index card or something small that is carplay and consult business and other index ramos. But the point is, is great. Big things cost more than small things. You're not charged for what you use your charger for. What you forget to turn off and being able to predict your usage model in advance is important and save money. Data transfers Weird. There are a bunch of edge cases, little slice it and ribbons, but inbound data transfer is generally free. Outbound, generally Austin arm and a leg and architect accordingly. But by and large for most development product teams, it's built something and see if it works first. We can always come back later and optimize costs as you wind up maturing the product offering. >>Yeah, Cory, it's some of those sharp edges I've love learning about in your newsletter or some of your online activities there, such as you talked about those egress fees. I know you've got a nice diagram that helps explain if you do this, it costs a lot of money. If you do this, it's gonna cost you. It cost you a lot less money. Um, you know, even something like serverless is something that in general looks like. It should be relatively expensive, but if you do something wrong, it could all of a sudden cost you a lot of money. You feel that companies are having a better understanding so that they don't just one month say, Oh my God, the CFO called us up because it was a big mistake or, you know, where are we along that maturation of cloud being a little bit more predictable? >>Unfortunately, no. Where near I'd like us to be it. The story that I think gets missed is that when you're month over, month span is 20% higher. Finance has a bunch of questions, but if they were somehow 20% lower, they have those same questions. They're trying to build out predictive models that align. They're not saying you're spending too much money, although by the time the issues of the game, yeah, it's instead help us understand and predict what's happening now. Server less is a great story around that, because you can tie charges back to individual transactions and that's great. Except find me a company that's doing that where the resulting bill isn't hilariously inconsequential. A cloud guru Before they bought Lennox, I can't get on stage and talk about this. It serverless kind of every year, but how? They're spending $600 a month in Lambda, and they have now well, over 100 employees. Yeah, no one cares about that money. You can trace the flow of capital all you want, but it grounds up to No one cares at some point that changes. But there's usually going to be far bigger fish to front with their case, I would imagine, given, you know, stream video, they're probably gonna have some data transfer questions that come into play long before we talk about their compute. >>Yeah, um, what else? Cory, when you look at the innovation in the cloud, are there things that common patterns that you see that customers are missing? Some of the opportunities there? How does the customers that you talk to, you know, other than reading your newsletter, talking Teoh their systems integrator or partner? How are they doing it? Keeping up with just the massive amount of change that happens out >>there. Get customers. AWS employees follow the newsletter specifically to figure out what's going on. We've long since passed a Rubicon where I can talk incredibly convincingly about services that don't really exist. And Amazon employees won't call me out on the joke that I've worked in there because what the world could ever say that and then single. It's well beyond any one person's ability to keep it all in their head. So what? We're increasingly seeing even one provider, let alone the rest. Their events are outpacing them and no one is keeping up. And now there's the persistent, never growing worry that there's something that just came out that could absolutely change your business for the better. And you'll never know about it because you're too busy trying to keep up with all the other number. Every release the cloud provider does is important to someone but none of its important everyone. >>Yeah, Corey, that's such a good point. When you've been using tools where you understand a certain way of doing things, how do you know that there's not a much better way of doing it? So, yeah, I guess the question is, you know, there's so much out there. How do people make sure that they're not getting left behind or, you know, keep their their their understanding of what might be able to be used >>the right answer. There, frankly, is to pick a direction and go in it. You can wind up in analysis paralysis issues very easily. And if you talk about what you've done on the Internet, the number one responsible to get immediately is someone suggesting an alternate approach you could have taken on day one. There is no one path forward for any six, and you can second guess yourself that the problem is that you have to pick a direction and go in it. Make sure it makes sense. Make sure the lines talk to people who know what's going on in the space and validate it out. But you're going to come up with a plan right head in that direction, I assure you, you are probably not the only person doing it unless you're using. Route 53 is a database. >>You know, it's an interesting thing. Corey used to be said that the best time to start a project was a year ago. But you can't turn back time, so you should start it now. I've been saying for the last few years the best time to start something would be a year from now, so you can take advantage of the latest things, but you can't wait a year, so you need to start now. So how how do you make sure you maintain flexibility but can keep moving projects moving forward? E think you touched on that with some of the analysis paralysis, Anything else as to just how do you make sure you're actually making the right bets and not going down? Some, you know, odd tangent that ends up being a debt. >>In my experience, the biggest problem people have with getting there is that they don't stop first to figure out alright a year from now. If this project has succeeded or failed, how will we know they wind up building these things and keeping them in place forever, despite the fact that cost more money to run than they bring in? In many cases, it's figure out what success looks like. Figure out what failure looks like. And if it isn't working, cut it. Otherwise, you're gonna wind up, went into this thing that you've got to support in perpetuity. One example of that one extreme is AWS. They famously never turn anything off. Google on the other spectrum turns things off as a core competence. Most folks wind up somewhere in the middle, but understand that right now between what? The day I start building this today and the time that this one's of working down the road. Well, great. There's a lot that needs to happen to make sure this is a viable business, and none of that is going to come down to, you know, build it on top of kubernetes. It's going to come down. Is its solving a problem for your customers? Are people they're people in to pay for the enhancement. Anytime you say yes to that project, you're saying no to a bunch of others. Opportunity Cost is a huge thing. >>Yeah, so it's such an important point, Cory. It's so fundamental when you look at what what cloud should enable is, I should be able to try more things. I should be able to fail fast on, and I shouldn't have to think about, you know, some cost nearly as much as I would in the past. We want to give you the final word as you look out in the cloud. Any you know, practices, guidelines, you can give practitioners out there as to make sure that they are taking advantage of the innovation that's available out there on being able to move their company just a little bit faster. >>Sure, by and large, for the practitioners out there, if you're rolling something out that you do not understand, that's usually a red flag. That's been my problem, to be blunt with kubernetes or an awful lot of the use cases that people effectively shove it into. What are you doing? What if the business problem you're trying to solve and you understand all of its different ways that it can fail in the ways that will help you succeed? In many cases, it is stupendous overkill for the scale of problem most people are throwing. It is not a multi cloud answer. It is not the way that everyone is going to be doing it or they'll make fun of you under resume. Remember, you just assume your own ego. In this sense, you need to deliver an outcome. You don't need to improve your own resume at the expense of your employer's business. One would hope, >>Well, Cory, always a pleasure catching up with you. Thanks so much for joining me on the cloud. Native insights. Thank you. Alright. Be sure to check out silicon angle dot com if you click on the cloud. There's a whole second for cloud Native insights on your host to minimum. And I look forward to hearing more from you and your cloud Native insights Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.