>>Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of the cube coverage here at VMware VMware Explorer, not world 12 years. The Cube's been covering VMware is end user conference this year. It's called explore previously world. We got two great guests, friends of the cube friend, cube, alumni and cloud rod, Keith Townson, principal CTO advisor, air streaming his way into world this year in a big way. Congratulations. And course James Erhard principal technology, a at tan zoo cloud ARA. He's been in cloud game for a long time. We've known each other for a long, long time, even before cloud was cloud. So great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Ah, it's a pleasure, always happy to >>Be here. So day threes are kind of like riff. I'll throw out super cloud. You guys will, will trash it. We'll debate. It'll be controversial and say this damage done by the over rotation of developer experience. We'll defend Tansu, but really the end of the game is, is that guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time. We're we're totally into it. And we've been saying infrastructure is code as the end state. We want to get there. Right? DevOps and infrastructure is code has always been the, the, the underlying fire burning in, in all the innovation, but it's now getting legitimately enterprised it's adopted in, in, in large scale, Amazon web services. We saw that rise. It feels we're in another level right now. And I think we're looking at this new wave coming. And I gotta say, you know, the Broadcom thing has put like an electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem cuz they don't know what's gonna happen next. So as a result, everyone's kind of gotta spring in their step a little, whether it's nervous, energy or excitement around something happening, it's all cloud native. So, you know, as VMware's got such a great investment in cloud native, but yet multi cloud's the story. Right? So, so messaging's okay. So what's happening here? Like guys let's, let's break it down. You're on the show floor of the Airstream you're on the inside, but with the seeing the industry, James will start with you what's happening this year with cloud next level and VMware's future. >>Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is that we are beginning to see the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption in computing. And what I mean by that is the, the abstractions that sort of bled between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have sort of become separated much better. And I think Kubernetes is, is the strong evidence of that. But also all of the public cloud APIs are strong evidence of that. And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that we're strong evidence of that. So I think what's, what's starting to happen now then is, is developers have really kind of pulled very far away from, from anything other than saying, I need compute, I need network. I need storage. And so now you're seeing the technologies that say, well, we've figured out how to do that at a team level, like one team can automate an application to an environment, but another team will, you know, other teams, if I have hundreds of teams or, or thousands of applications, how do I handle that? And that's what the excitement I think is right >>Now. I mean the, the developer we talking, we're going on camera before you came on camera Keith around, you know, your contr statement around the developer experience. Now we, I mean, I believe that the cloud native development environment is doing extremely well right now. You talk to, you know, look around the industry. It's, it's at an all time high and relative to euphoria, you know, sit on the beach with sunglasses. You couldn't be better if you were a developer open source, booming, everything's driving to their doorstep, self service. They're at the center of the security conversation, which shift left. Yeah. There's some things there, but it's, it's a good time. If you're a developer now is VMware gonna be changing that and, and you know, are they gonna meet the developers where they are? Are they gonna try to bring something new? So these are conversations that are super important. Now VMware has a great install base and there's developers there too. So I think I see their point, but, but you have a take on this, Keith, what's your, what's your position on this? How do the developer experience core and tangential played? >>Yeah, we're I think we're doing a disservice to the industry and I think it's hurting and, or D I think I'm gonna stand by my statement. It's damaging the in industry to, to an extent VMware >>What's damaging to the >>Industry. The focusing over focusing on developer experience developer experience is super important, but we're focusing on developer experience the, the detriment of infrastructure, the infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry isn't there. So we're asking VMware, who's a infrastructure company at core to meet the developer where the developer, the developer is at today with an infrastructure that's not ready to deliver on the promise. So when we're, when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations, like adding block storage to VMC on AWS, we collectively yawn. It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well, what does that mean for the developer down the road? >>It should mean nothing because if it's infrastructure's code, it should just work, right. >>It should just work, but it doesn't. Okay. >>I see the damage there. The, >>The, when you're thinking, oh, well I should be able to just simply provide Dr. Service for my on-prem service to this new block level stores, because I can do that in a enterprise today. Non-cloud, we're not there. We're not at a point where we can just write code infrastructure code and that happens. VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap and we're, you know, and then I think we, we, when buyers look at what we say, and we, we say VMware, isn't meeting developers where they're at, but they're doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds. I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John, the, the, the, the unicorn we all talk about. And at the end I tried to wrap up and he said, no, no, no way. I gotta talk about vRealize. Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about vRealize and, and the importance of normalizing that underlay. And we just don't give these companies in this space, the right >>Latitude. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to rock a little bit what you're saying. So from my standpoint, generically speaking, okay. If I'm a, if the developers are key to the, to the cloud native role, which I, I would say they are, then if I'm a developer and I want, and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood, I'm not getting the weeds in which some lot people love to do. I wanna just make things work. So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service, I don't care about locking someone else should figure that problem out, but I'm gonna just accelerate my velocity, making sure it's secure. And I'm moving on being creative and doing my thing, building apps. Okay. That's the kind of the generic, generic statement. So what has to happen in your mind to >>Get there? Yeah. Someone, someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move as 400, still propagate the data center. They're still H P X running SAP, E there's still, you know, 75% of the world's transactions happen through SAP. And most of that happens on bare metal. Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that infrastructure's cold world. Yeah. Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do Dr. Between my on premises edge solution and the public cloud, someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes, the, the Kubernetes consuming that, that work isn't done. Yeah. It >>Is. It's an >>Opportunity. It's on paper. >>It's an opportunity though. It's not, I mean, we're not in a bad spot. So I mean, I think what you're getting at is that there's a lot of fix a lot of gaps. All right. I want Jay, I wanna bring you in, because we had a panel at super cloud event. Chris Hoff, you know, beaker was on here. Yeah. He's always snarky, but he's building, he's been building clouds lately. So he's been getting his, his hands dirty, rolling up his sleeves. The title of panel was originally called the innovators dilemma with a question, mark, you know, haha you know, innovators, dilemma, little goof on that. Cuz you know, there's challenges and trade offs like, like he's talking about, he says we should call it the integrator's dilemma because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay, it's not as seamless as it can be or should be in the Nirvana state. >>But there's a lot of integration going on. A lot of APIs are, are key to this API security. One of the most talked about things. I mean I interviewed six companies on API security in the past couple months. So yeah. I mean I never talked to anybody about API security before this year. Yeah. APIs are critical. So these key things of cloud are being attacked. And so there's more complexity as we're getting more successful. And so, so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations, what's your read on this to make the complexity go away. You guys have the, the chaos rain here, which I actually like that Dave does too, but you know, Andy Grove once said let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. So we're in that reign in the chaos mode. Now what's your take on what Keith was saying around. Yeah. >>So I think that the one piece of the puzzle that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative that I think is important is it's really not just infrastructure and developers. Right? It's it's there's in fact, and, and I, I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, right? There's there's really sort of three layers of operations that come out of the cloud model in long term and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and in the middle is platform and services. And so I think one of the, this is where VMware is making its play right now is in terms of providing the platform and service capability that does that integration at a lower level works with VMs works with bare metal, works with the public cloud services that are available, makes it easy to access things like database services and messaging services and things along those lines. >>It makes it easy to turn code that you write into a service that can be consumed by other applications, but ultimately creates an in environment that begins to pull away from having to know, to write code about infrastructure. Right. And so infrastructure's, code's great. But if you have a right platform, you don't have to write code about infrastructure. You can actually D declare what basic needs of the application are. And then that platform will say, okay, well I will interpret that. And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is. Yeah. And that's what VMware's taking advantage of with what we're doing >>With. Yeah. I remember when we first Lou Tucker and I, and I think you might have been in the room during those OpenStack days and when Kubernetes was just starting and literally just happened, the paper was written, gonna go out and a couple companies formed around it. We said that could be the interoperability layer between clouds and our, our dream at that time was Hey. And, and we, we mentioned and Stratus in our, our super cloud, but the days of spanning clouds, a dream, we thought that now look at Kubernetes. Now it's kind of become that defacto rallying moment for, I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've been talking about allows for right once run anywhere. I think to me, that's not nowhere in the market today. Nobody has that. Nobody has anything that could write once, read one, write once and then run on multiple clouds. >>It's more true than ever. We had one customer that just was, was using AKs for a while and then decided to try the application on EKS. And they said it took them a couple of hours to, to get through the few issues they ran into. >>Yeah. I talked to a customer who who's going from, who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle cloud on Oracle cloud's VMware solution. And he raved about now he has a inherent backup Dr. For his O CVS solution because there's a shim between the two. And >>How did he do >>That? The, there there's a solution. And this is where the white space is. James talked about in the past exists. When, when I go to a conference like Cuban, the cube will be there in, in Detroit, in, in, in about 45 days or so. I talk to platform group at the platform group. That's doing the work that VMware red had hash Corp all should be doing. I shouldn't have to build that shim while we rave and, and talk about the power Kubernetes. That's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60 to 65% of their, for the platform right now there's groups of developers within that sit in between infrastructure and sit in between application development that all they do is build platforms. There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform. VMware announced tap one, 1.3. And the thing that I'm surprised, the one on Twitter is talking about is this API discovery piece. If you've ever had to use an API and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever, and now it, it just magically happens. The marketing at the end of developing the application. Think if you're in you're, you're in a shop that develops hundreds of applications, there's thousands or tens of thousands of APIs that have to be documented. That's beating the developer where it's at and it's also infrastructure. >>Well guys, thanks for coming on the cube. I really appreciate we're on a time deadline, which we're gonna do more. We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explorer. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. No problem. See you pleasure. Yeah. Okay. We'll be back with more live coverage. You, after this short break, stay with us.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome to Las Vegas. It's the cube live on the show floor at HPE discover 2022, the first in person discover in three years, there are about 8,000 people here. The keynote was standing room only Lisa Martin here. I got a powerhouse group joining me for this keynote analysis. Dave ante joins us, Keith Townsend, John farrier, guys. Lot of news. It's all about HPE GreenLake. What were some of the things Dave, that stuck out to you? >>Well, I'll tell you right now, I gotta just quote, Antonio OIR said, Neri said four years ago, I declared that the enterprise of the future would be edge centric, cloud enabled and data driven. As a result, we launched HPE GreenLake. It kind of declared victory. Now I would say that what they're talking about and what they announced, I would consider table stakes. You know, I wish it started in 2014. I wish Antonio took over in 2015 instead of 2018, but I have to give credit, he's brought a focus and uh, and a, he think he's amped it up, John. I mean, if he's really prioritizing, uh, the, as a service they're going on in all in they're burning the boats, uh, and it's good. They got a lot of work to do. They >>Got a lot of work to do three years ago, John Antonio stood on this very stage saying we, and by 2022, we're gonna be delivering our entire portfolio as a service here we are with GreenLake. What I wanna get your thoughts on Keith's as well. >>Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that the crowded house was, uh, and a sign of people wanna come back together. So it's, to me, that was the first good news I saw, which was the HP community, their customer base. They're all here. They're glad to be back and forth. So it shows that they, their customer base it's resonating their value proposition of annual recurring revenue as a service plus the contract values with GreenLake are up. So this resonance with the customers, Dave, on the new operating model, that's a great check the box there. Um, I would say that I don't think HP's, as far along as Antonio had hopes, he'd be the pandemic was a setback. Um, but GreenLake is a real shining star. It's, uh, it's producing some green if you will money for them in terms of contracts, but they still got a lot more work to do because they're in a really interesting zone, Dave, because edge the cloud, although relevant and accurate where the, the shift is going, are they really there with, with the goods? And to me, I'm looking forward to seeing this discover if they have it or not. Certainly the messaging's good, but we're gonna UN UN unpeel that onion back and look at it. But >>Keith they're on the curve, right? At least they're on the cloud curve. >>They're absolutely on the curve. They have APIs, they have consistent developer experience. They announced the developer portal. They're developer centric. You can now consume your three par storage array services via a Terraform, uh, provider. They speak the language of cloud practitioners. You might struggle a little bit if I'm a small startup, you know, why would I look towards HPE? They kind of answered that a little bit. They had evil genius as a customer on stage, not a huge organization. A lot of the pushback they've been given is that if I may startup, I can simply go to a AWS portal, launch, a free trial service and run it. HPE kind of buried the lead. They now have, at least they announced preannounced the capability to, to trial GreenLake. So they're moving in the right direction. But you know, it's, it's it's table states. Well, >>Here's the thing. Here's the dynamic day that's going on. This is something that we've got got we're first of we've been covering HPE HP for now 11 years with the cube and look at Amazon's success and look at where Amazon's struggling. If you can say that they're having crossed overs to the enterprise, uh, cuz the enterprises are now just getting up to speed. You're seeing the rise of lack of talent. It certainly changing, uh, cyber security. You can't find talent. Kubernetes, good luck with that. Try to find someone. So you're seeing the enterprise aren't really geared up or staffed up for doing what I call, you know, high end cloud. So the rise of managed services is, is what we're seeing out there right now. You want Kubernetes clusters is a great set of managed services. You want other services? So that's the tell sign that the enterprises H HP's customers are now walking before they can run. They're crawling, they're now they're walking. So it's they have time to get in the Amazon lane in my opinion. Well, you >>Think about the hallmarks of cloud, obviously there's as a service, there's consumption based pricing. There's a developer, you know, friendliness, uh, there's ecosystem, which is really, really important. I think today, a lot of the ecosystem is partners, resellers and managed service providers. And to your point, Keith table stakes are things like single sign on being able to have, you know, a console being able to do it from a, from a URL to your point about startups is really interesting because that's one of the other hallmarks of cloud is you attract startups. And Lisa, we were at the snowflake summit and I asked the same question, can snowflake attract startups with their own super cloud. And what you saw was ecosystem partners developing in the snowflake cloud and monetizing. And that's something that we're waiting to see here. And I, I think they know >>You're suggesting way you suggesting that HP's gonna attract startups. >>Well, >>I, I think that's a sign if they can do that. That's a sign. And, and right now, I mean, you heard the example that Keith Keith gave. Uh, but, but not, not many. >>Yeah. I'm hoping that H I don't think HP is gonna ever attract startups, but I think the opportunity GreenLake affords the ecosystem is build clouds or purpose driven clouds around GreenLake. Mm-hmm <affirmative> whether it's the agreement with Equinix or all the cos and semi clouds, I think GreenLake gets most small CSPs, a leg up or 80% of the way there, where they can add that 20% of the IP and build services around GreenLake. And then that can attract the, the startup >>Or entrepreneurs. So the, the big question is, okay, where are these developers gonna come from? They could come from incumbents inside of companies. You know, the, the, the DevOps crowd from the enterprise, the really ops dev crowd. Right? I mean, yeah, don't you see that as a sort of a form of innovation startup, even though it's not a true startup. >>Yeah. Even though it's not, >>So Todd's making faces over there, we <laugh> >>Look, it, look it, they have >>Listen, if they don't, if they can't >>Do that, no, this is their focus is not startups. I agree with Keith on this one, they have to take care of business, home Depot. They have big customers and they have a lot of SMBs as well. They've got a great channel. H HP's got amazing infrastructure and, and client action going on. They gotta get the operating model, right job one as a service ARR, and then contract value and, and nail that with GreenLake. >>Who's their ideal customer profile. >>Their ideal is their install base. Look what Microsoft did with 365, they were going down. Their stock price was 26. At one point go to the, they went to the cloud 365, moved everything to the cloud and look at the success they're having. HP has the same kind of installed base. They gotta bring them along. They gotta get the operating model, right. And the developers that they're targeting are the ones inside the company and, or manage services that they're gonna go to the ecosystem for. That's where the cloud native comes in. That's where thing kind of comes together. So to me, I'm bullish on the operating model, but I'm skeptical that HP can get that cloud native developer. I haven't seen it yet. I'm looking for it. We're gonna look for it here. >>A key to that is going to be consistently. I, the, one of the things I'm looking for on the tech side, I, I hate to compare what HPE is doing to what VMware did with vCloud error years ago, but vCloud error on the outside looked >>Wonderful. Yes, >>It did. Once you tried to use it, it was just flaky underneath. And that's the part I'm looking to see customers pounding on it and saying, you know what API call after API I call, can I, uh, provision 10,000 pods a day? Does it scale down? Does it scale? And is it consistent? Is it >>Fragile Al roo she's co seasoned veteran? Uh, she was at V VMware cloud. She saw that movie. She gets a Mulligan, Dave. So I think her leadership is impressive. And I think she could bring a lot to the table to your point about don't make that same mistake and they gotta get this architecture, right. If they get the operating model right with GreenLake, they can double down on that and enable the developers that are driving the digital transformation. That to me is the, the key positions that they have to nail. And they do that. The rest is just fringe work. In my opinion, >>The reason why Alma was brought in, sorry, Lisa, it was, and then you gotta chime in here was to really build out that platform so that internal people at HPE can actually build value on top of it and the ecosystem that's her priority. >>We're gonna hear a lot from the ecosystem in the next couple of days, but I wanna get your perspective on, you've been following HPE a long time, all three of you. What are some of the things that you're hearing right now that are differentiators? We were just at Dell technologies. We talking about apex. We saw the big announcement they had with snowflake. We were at snowflake two weeks ago. I wanna get all three of your opinions on what are you seeing? Where is HP leading? >>I mean, HPE and Dell will, both with Dell, with apex are go, they're both gonna differentiate with their strengths. And, you know, for Dell, that's their breadth and their, their portfolio. And for, for HPE, that's their sort of open posture. I mean, John, you, you know this well, uh, that's their, their ecosystem, which I know has to evolve. And to me, their focus, you know, Antonio laid out some of the key differentiators. I, I, I think some of them were kind of, you know, pushing the envelope a little bit. Uh, but, but I think they're focus on as a service burning the, the, the boats telling wall street, this is our business. I think that's their differentiator. Is that they're, they're all in. >>Yeah. I, I think they, they try to highlight it by re announcing their private cloud service. I don't even know why they needed to announce that they have a private cloud. GreenLake is a cloud it's is a private cloud >>With block storage, hit disaster recovery. It's like good >>With like everything you get. But I think the, the key is, is that all of that is available today and you can get it in all kinds of frame of, of formats and, and frames specifically, if I'm a customer and I wanna get outta the data center and you, you know, Dave, we go back and forth about this all the time, and I wanna repatriate some workloads to Kubernetes on prem. I don't need to spend up another data center. I can go to Equinix, get GreenLake min IO, object storage on the back end, HPE lighthouse, all those services that I need for Kubernetes and repatriate my workloads without buying a new data center. And I get it as a service. I can get that Dave from HPE GreenLake, Dell apex is on the way. The >>Other thing they're differentiating with Aruba, that's something that Dell doesn't have. Yeah. And, and that is their edge play, I think is stronger than >>Of the others. Mean the, to me, the differentiator for HP is their, their history. Their channel's amazing. They got great Salesforce and they have serious customers and they have serious customers that have serious problems, uh, cyber security, uh, infrastructure, the security paradigm's changed. Uh, the deployment is changed how they deploy applications in their customer base. So they gotta step up to that challenge. And I think their differentiator is gonna be their size, their field and their ability to bring that operating model. And the hybrid model is a steady state. That's clear multi-cloud is just hybrids stitched together, but hybrid cloud, which is basically on premises and cloud to edge operating model is the number one thing that they need to nail. And if they nail that right, they will have a poll position that they could accelerate on. And again, I'm really gonna be watching how well they could enable cloud native developers, okay. To build modern agile applications while solving those serious problems with those serious customers. So again, I think hybrids spun in their direction. I'm not gonna say they got lucky, cuz they've always been on the hybrid bandwagon since we've been covering them. But I thought they'd be for a long day, but they're lucky to have hybrid. That's good for them. And I think do what Microsoft did convert their customers over and they do that, right? >>I think the key to that is gonna be ecosystem. Again, the developers need to see, especially the data piece, they talk about the cloud operating model. I think they're really moving that direction. The data piece to me is the weakest. Like they'll, they'll make claims that we can do anything that the cloud can do. You can't run snowflake, can't run data bricks, can't run Mongo Atlas. So they gotta figure out that data layer and that's optionality of, of data stores. And they don't have that today. >>Yeah. They, they, they have an announcement coming and I can't pre-announce it, but they're, they've, I've deemed them against it. They have the vision, Emeral data services, their data fabric multi-protocol access is a great start. They need the data network behind it. They need the ability to build a super cloud, a across multiple cloud providers, bringing some Google infos love inside of, uh, right next to your data. They have the hardware, they have the infrastructure, but they don't have the services. >>That's a key thing. I think one, you just brought up great point, Keith, and that is, is that at the end of the day, Dave, we're in a market now where agility and speed can be accomplished by startups or any company and HP's customers. Okay. Can move fast too. Okay. And so whoever can extend that value. If HPE can enable value creation for their customers, that's gonna be truly their, their task at hand, they got the channel, they got some leverage, but at the end of the day, the customers have alternatives now and they can move faster to get the value that they need to solve their serious problems. Uh, like cyber, like scalable infrastructure, like infrastructures code, like data ops, like AI ops, it's all here. And it's all coming really fast. Can GreenLake carry the day. And >>By the way, everything we just said about GreenLake in terms of table stakes and everything else, it applies for Dell. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>No question. It does guys. We have, and jam packed three days. We're gonna be talking with the ecosystem. We're gonna be talking with HPE leaders with customers. You're gonna hear all of these, uh, all this information unpacked over the next three days. We will be right back with our first guest for Dave ante, Keith Townson and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. Our first guest joins us momentarily.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my cohot Paul Gillon, who's been putting in some pretty good work talking to incredible people. And we have, I don't wanna call, heard the face of CNCF, but you kind of introduced me to, you don't know this, but you know, charmer executive director of CNCF. You introduced me to Kuan at Cuan San Diego's my one of my first CU coupons. And I was trying to get my bearings about me and you're on stage and I'm like, okay. Uh, she looks like a reasonable person. This might be a reasonable place to learn about cloud native. Welcome to the show. >>Thank you so much for having me. And that's so nice to hear >><laugh> it is an amazing show, roughly 7,500 people. >>Yes, that's right. Sold out >>Sold. That's a big show. And with that comes, you know, uh, so someone told me, uh, CNCF is an outstanding organization, which it, which it is you're the executive director. And I told them, you know what, that's like being the president of the United States without having air force one. <laugh> like you get home. I dunno >>About that. You >>Get, no, you get all of the, I mean, 7,500 people from across, literally across the world. That's true at Europe. We're in Europe, we're in, we're coming out of times that have been, you know, it can't be overstated. It, this, this is unlike any other times. >>Yes, absolutely >>Difficult decisions. There was a whole co uh, uh, I don't know the term, uh, uh, cuffa uh, or blow up about mask versus no mask. How do you manage just, just the diversity of the community. >>That is such a great question, because I, as I mentioned in my keynote a little bit, right? At this point, we're a community of what, 7.1 million developers. That's a really big group. And so when we think about how should we manage the diversity, the way I see it, it's essential to treat each other with kindness, professionalism, and respect. Now that's easy to say, right. Because it sounds great. Right. Old paper is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Great >>Concept. 0.1 million people later. >><laugh> exactly. And so, uh, this is why like, uh, I phoned a friend on stage and, um, van Jones came and spoke with us. Who's the renowned CNN contributor, uh, commentator, sorry. And his advice was very much that in such a diverse community, there's always gonna be lots of perspectives, lots opinions. And we need to a always bring the version of ourselves, which we think will empower this ecosystem, BEC what are, what we are doing. If everybody did that, is that gonna be a good thing or a bad thing? And the other is we need to give each other space and grace, um, space to do what we need to do. Grace. If there are mistakes, if there are challenges. And so those are, those are some good principles for us to live by. And I think that in terms of how CNCF tries to enable the diversity, it's by really trying to hear from everybody possible, the vocal loud voices, as well as the folks who you need to reach out a little bit, pull in a little bit. So it's an ongoing, it's an ongoing challenge that we do our best with. >>How do you balance? And I've been to a lot of trade shows and conferences over the years, their trade organizers are very coin operated. You know, they're there, they're there for the money. Yeah. <laugh> and you have traditional trade shows and you have a situation here where an open source community that is motivated by very different, um, principles, but you need to make money. You need the show to be profitable. Uh, you need to sell some sponsorships, but you also need to keep it available and open to the people who, who don't have the big budgets. How are you balancing that? >>So I would actually like to, uh, share something that may not be obvious, which is that we don't actually do the shows to make money. We, um, as you said, like, uh, a lot of trade shows are coin up and the goal there is like, um, well actually they're different kinds of, I think if it's an independent event organization, it can be like, Hey, let's make as much revenue as possible. If it's part of a large, um, large company, like, like cloud provider, et cetera, the events tend to be lost leaders because they're like lead gen, I think, >>But they're, they're lost leaders, but they're profit makers ultimately >>Long term. Yeah. Yeah. It's like top of the funnel. I, I guess for us, we are only doing the events to enable the community and bring people from different companies together. So our goal is to try and break even <laugh> >>Well, that's, that's laudable. Um, the, how big does it get though? I mean, you're at the point with 7,500 attendees here where you're on the cusp of being a really big event, uh, would you limit it size eventually? Or are you just gonna let this thing run? Its course. >>So our inherent belief is that we want to be accessible and open to more and more and more people because the mission is to make cloud native ubiquitous. Right. Uh, and so that means we are excited about growth. We are excited about opening the doors for as everyone, but I think actually the one, one good thing that came out of this pandemic is that we've become a lot more comfortable with hybrid. So we have a virtual component and an in-person component. So combining that, I think makes it well, it's very challenging cause like running to events, but it's also like, it can scale a little bit better. And then if the numbers increase from like, if they double, for example, we're still, I think we're still not in the realm of south by Southwest, which, which feels like, oh, that's the step function difference. So linear increases in number of attendees, I think is a good thing. If, and when we get to the point where it's, um, you know, exponential growth at that point, we have to think about, um, a completely different event really. Right, >>Right. So 7 billion people in the world approaching 8 billion, 7.1 members in the community. Technology is obviously an enabler where I it's enabled me to, to be here and Licia Spain experiencing this beautiful city. There's so much work to be done. What mm-hmm <affirmative> what is the role of CNCF in providing access to education and technology for the rest of the world? >>Absolutely. So, you know, one of the key, uh, areas we focus on is learning and development in supporting the ecosystem in learners beginners to start their cloud native journey or expand their cloud native journey with training certifications, and actually shared this in the keynote every year. Uh, the increase in number of people taking certifications grows by 216% year over year growth. It's a lot, right? And every week about a thousand people are taking a certification exam. So, and we set that up primarily to bring people in and that's one of our more successful initiatives, but we do so many, we do mentorship programs, internship programs. We, uh, a lot of diversity scholarships, these events, it all kind of comes together to support the ecosystem, to grow >>The turning away from the events, uh, toward just toward the CNCF Brit large, you have a growing number of projects. The, the number of projects within CNCF is becoming kind of overwhelming. Is there an upper threshold at which you would, do you tighten the, the limits on, on what projects you will incubate or how big does that tent become? >>Right. I think, you know, when we had 50 projects, we were feeling overwhelmed then too, but we seem to have cop just fine. And there's a reason for that. The reason is that cloud native has been growing so fast with the world. It's a representative of what's going on in our world over the course of the pandemic. As you know, every company became a technology company. People had to like double their engineering staffs over without anybody ever having met in person mm-hmm <affirmative> right. And when that kind of change is going around the world cloud needing be being the scaffolding of how people build and deploy modern software just grew really with it. And the use cases we needed to support grew. That's why the types of projects and kinds of projects is growing. So there's a method. There's a reason to the madness I should say. And I think, um, as the world and, uh, the landscape of technology evolves cloud native will, will evolve and keep developing in either into new projects or consolidation of projects and everything is on the table. >>So I think one of these perceptions Riley Arone is that CNCF is kind of where the big people go to play. If you're a small project and you're looking at CNCF, you're thinking one day I'll get big enough. Like how should small project leaders or leaders of small projects, how should they engage CNCF? >>Totally. And, you know, I want to really change this narrative because, um, in CNCF we have three tiers of projects. There's the graduated ones, which are at the top. These are the most mature ones we really believe and put our sand behind them. They, uh, then there's the incubating projects, which are pretty solid technologies with good usage that are getting there. And then there's the sandbox, which is literally a sandbox and op open ground for innovation. And the bar to entry is low in that it's, uh, easy to apply. There's a mass boat to get you in. And once you're in, you have a neutral IP zone created by being a CNCF project that you can attract more maintainers, more companies can start collaborating. So we, we become an enabler for the small projects, so everybody should know that >>FYI. Yeah. So I won't be interested to know how that, so I have an idea. So let's say I don't have an idea, but let's say that idea have, >>I'm sure you have an idea. <laugh>, I'm >>Sure I have idea. And, and I just don't have the infrastructure to run a project. I need help, but I think it it's going to solve a pro problem. Yeah. What's that application process like, >>So, okay. So you apply after you already have let's a GitHub repo. Okay. Yeah. >>So you, I have a GI help repo. >>Yeah. As in like your pro you've started the project, you started the coding, you've like, put it out there on GitHub, you have something going. And so it's not at just ideal level. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's at like early stage of execution level. Um, and so, and then your question was, how do you apply? >>Yeah. So how do I, so I have, let's say that, uh, let, let's talk about something I'm thinking about doing, and I actually do, is that we're thinking about doing a open store, a cloud native framework for people migrating to the public cloud, to, or to cloud native. There's just not enough public information about that. And I'm like, you know what? I wanna contribute what I know to it. So that's a project in itself, not necessarily a software project, but a IP project, or let's say I have a tool to do that migration. And I put that up on my GitHub report. I want people to iterate on that tool. >>Right. So it would be a simple process of literally there is when you go to, um, our, uh, online, uh, materials, there's a simple process for sandbox where you fill a Google form, where you put in your URL, explain what you're doing, or some basic information hit submit. And we batch process these, um, about every once a month, I think. And, uh, the TC looks at the, what you've filled in, takes a group vote and goes from there. >>When about your operating model, I mean, do, do you, you mentioned you don't look to make a profit in this show. Do you look, and I wanna be sure CNCF is a non-profit, is that correct? Correct. Do you look, what models do you look at in determining your own governance? Do you look at a commercial business? Do you look at a nonprofit? Um, like of ourselves? Yeah. What's your model for how you run CNCF. >>Oh, okay. So it's a nonprofit, as I said, and our model is very simple. We want to raise the funds that we are able to raise in order to then invest them into community initiatives that play the supporter enabler role to all these projects we just talked about. We're not, we are never the project. We are the top cheerleader of the project. Think of us like that. And in terms of, um, but interestingly, unlike, I, I mean, I don't know much about other found, uh, nonprofit session compare, but interestingly, the donating companies are relevant, not just because of their cash that they have put in, but because those companies are part of this ecosystem and they need to, um, them being in this ecosystem, they help create content around cloud native. They, they do more than give us money. And that's why we really like our members, uh, they'll provide contributing engineers to projects. They will help us with marketing with case studies and interviews and all of that. And so it, it becomes this like healthy cycle of it starts with someone donating to become a member, but they end up doing so many different things. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and ultimately the goal is make cloud native ubiquitous and all this goes towards >>That. So talk to me about conflict resolution, because there's some really big projects in CNC, but only some stuff that is changed, literally changing the world, but there's competing interest between some of the projects. I mean, you, you, there there's, if you look at service mesh, there's a lot of service mesh solutions Uhhuh. Yes. And there's just different visions. Where's the CNCF and, and kind of just making sure the community aspect is thought across all of the different or considered across all the different projects as they have the let's say inevitably bump heads. >>Yeah. So by design CNCF was never meant to be a king maker where you picked one project. Right. And I think that's been working out really well because, um, one is when you accept a project, you're not a hundred percent sure that specific one is gonna take over that technology space. Right. So we're leaving it open to see who works it out. The second is that as every company is becoming a technology company, use cases are different. So a service mesh service mesh a might work really well for my company, but it really may not be a fit for your code base. And so the diversity of options is actually a really good thing. >>So talk to me about, uh, saw an interesting note coming out of the keynote yesterday, 65% of the participants here at CU con are new to Kuan. I'm like, oh, I'm a, I'm a vet. You are, I went to two or three before this. So O GE yeah, OG actually, that's what I tweeted OG of Kuan, but, uh, who, who are they like, what's making up? Are they developers? Are they traditional enterprises? Are they contributing companies? Who's the 65%, >>Um, who's the 65%, >>Right? The new, new, >>Well, it's all kinds of C companies sending their developers, right? It's sometimes there's a lot of them are end users. I think at least half or a third, at least of attendees are end user companies. And, uh, then there is also like the new startups around town. And then there is like the, every big company or small has been hiring developers as fast as possible. And even if they've always been a player in cloud native, they need to send all these people to this ecosystem to start building the relationships start like learning the technology. So it's all kinds of folks are collecting to that here. >>As I, as I think about people starting to learn the technologies, learn the communities, the one thing the market change for this coupon for me over others is the number of customers, sharing stories, end user organizations. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm, <affirmative> much of the cuon that I've been through many of the open source conferences. It's always been like vendors pushing their message, et cetera. What talk, tell me about that. C change. >>One thing that's like just immediate, um, and the case right now is that all the co-chairs for the event who are in charge of designing the agenda are end users. So we have Emily Fox from apple. We have Jasmine James from Twitter, and we have Ricardo Roka from se. So they're all end users. So naturally they're like, you know, picking talks that they're like, well, this is very relevant. Imma go for that and I'm here for it. Right? So that's one thing that's just happening. The other though is a greater trend, which is, as I was saying in the pandemic, so many companies has to get going and quickly that they have built expertise and users are no longer the passive recipients of information. They're equal contributors. They know what they need, what they want, they have experiences to share. And you're seeing that reflected in the conference. >>One thing I've seen at other conferences in the past that started out really for practitioners, uh, is that invariably, they want to go upscale and they wanna draw the CIOs and the, oh yeah. The, uh, you know, the executive, the top executives. Is that an objective, uh, for you or, or do you really want to keep this kind of a, a t-shirt crowd for the long term? >>Hey, everyone's welcome. That's really important, you know? Right. And, um, so we, and that's why we are trying to expand. It's like, you know, middle out as they had in the Silicon valley show the idea being, sorry, I just meant this a little. Okay. So the idea being that we've had the core developer crews, developer, DevOps, SRE crowd, right op over the course of the last virtual events, we actually expanded in the other direction. We put in a business value track, which was more for like people in the business, but not in as a developer or DevOps engineer. We also had a student thing where it's like, you're trying to get all the university crowd people, and it's been working phenomen phenomenally. And then actually this, this event, we went, uh, in the other direction as well. We hosted our inaugural CTO summit, which is for senior leadership and end user companies. And the idea is they're discussing topics of technology that are business relevant. So our topic this time was resiliency in multi-cloud and we're producing a research paper about it. That's gonna come out in some weeks. So BA so with, for us, it's about getting everybody under this tent. Right. And, but it will never mean that we deprioritize what we started with, which is the engineering crowd. It's just an expansion >>Stay true to your roots. >>Yes. Well, Prianca, we're going to talk to a lot of those startup communities tomorrow. Ah, tomorrow's coverage. It's all about startups. Why should CTOs, uh, new startups talk to these upstarts of as opposed to some of the bigger players here on the show floor, over 170 sponsoring companies, the show floor has been vibrant engaging. Yes. And we're going to get into that community tomorrow's coverage on the cube from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the cube, the leader and high tech coverage.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain in Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host, Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture at Silicon angle. We are continuing the conversation here at KU con cloud native con around security app defense. Paul, were you aware it was this many security challenges and, and that were native to like cloud native >>Well there's security challenges with every new technology. And as we heard, uh, today from our, some of our earlier guests, uh, containers and Kubernetes naturally introduce new variables in the landscape and that creates the potential vulnerabilities. So there's a whole industry that's evolving around that. And what we've been looking at today, yesterday, we talked very much about managing Kubernetes today. We're talking about many of the nuances of building a, a Kubernetes based environment and security is clearly one of them. >>So welcome our guests on Garrett, head of products. >>Thank >>You and community at deep fence. You know what I'm going. I'm going to start out the question with a pretty interesting security at scale is one of your taglines. >>Absolutely. >>What does that mean? Exactly. >>So Kubernetes is all about scale securing applications and Kubernetes is a completely different game to securing your traditional monolithic legacy enterprise applications. Kubernetes grows it scales it's elastic, and the perimeter around a Kubernetes application is very, very porous. There are lots of entry points. So you can't think about securing a cloud native application. The way that you might have secured a monolith securing a monolith is like securing a castle. You build a wall around it. You put guards on the gate. You control, who comes in and out, and job is more or less done securing a cloud native application. It's like securing a city. People are roaming through the city without checks and balances. There are lots of services in the city that you've got to check and monitor. It's extremely porous. So sec, all of the security problems in Kubernetes with cloud native applications, they're amplified by scale, the size of the application, the number of nodes and the complexity of the application and the way that it's built and delivered. >>That's, uh, kind of a chilling phrase. The perimeter is porous. Uh, yeah, companies are adopting Kubernetes right now. Evidently bringing in all of these new, these new, uh, vulnerability points. Do they know what they're getting into >>Many don't, there's, there's a huge amount of work around trying to help organizations make the transition from thinking about applications as single components to thinking about them as microservices with multiple little, little components, it's a really essential step because that's what allows businesses to evolve, to digitize, to deliver services, using APIs, mobile, mobile apps. So it's a necessary technical change, but it brings with it. Lots of challenges and security is one of those biggest challenges. >>So as I'm thinking about that poorest nature, I can't help, but think, you know, if I have my, my traditional IPS does a really great job of blocking that centralized data center and access to that centralized data center. As I think about that city example that you gave me, I'm thinking, you know what? I have intruders or not even intruders. I have bad actors within my city. You >>Do you, how >>Do, how does deep defense help protect me from those bad actors that are inside or roaming the city? >>So this is the wonderful, unique technology we have within deep fence. So we install little sensors, little lightweight sensors on each host. That's running your application on Kubernetes nodes as a Damon set against Fargate instances on Docker hosts on bare metal. And those sensors install little taps into the network using E B P F and they monitor the workloads. So it's a little bit like having CCTV cameras throughout your city tracking what's happening. There are a lot of solutions which we'll look at what happens on a workload traditional XDR solutions that look for things like process changes or file system changes. And we gather those signals indicators of compromise, but those alone are too little too late. They tell you that a breach has probably already happened. What deep defense does is we also look at the network. We gather network signals. We can see someone using a, a reconnaissance tool roaming through your application, sending probe traffic to try and find weak points. >>We can see them then elevating the level of attack and trying to weaponize a particular exploit that they might have find, or vulnerability that they find. We can see everything that comes into each of the components, not just at the perimeter, but right inside your application. We see what happens in those components process file, integrity, changes. And we see what comes out, attempt exfiltrate, something that looks like a database file or et cetera password. And we put all of these little subtle signals, the indicators of attack, the network based signals and the indicators of compromise. We put those together and we build a picture of the threats against each of the workloads in your cloud, native application. There's lots and lots of background, recon traffic. We see that you generally don't need to worry about that. It's just noise. But as that elevates and you see evidence of exploits and later spread, we identify that we'll let you know, or we can step in and we can proactively block the behavior that's causing those problems. So we can stop someone from accessing a component, or if a component's compromised, we can, we can freeze it and restart it. And this is a key part of the technology within our threat striker security observability platform, >>Uh, false alerts are the bane of the security ministry's existence. What do you do to protect against those? >>So we use a range of heuristics and a degree, a small degree of machine learning to try and piece together. What's happening. It's a complicated picture. So some of your viewers will have heard of a might attack matrix. So a dictionary of techniques and tactics and, and protocols that attackers might use in order to attack an infrastructure. So we gather the signals, those TTPs, and we then build a model to try and understand how those little signals pieced together. So maybe there's, you know, there's a guy with a striped striped vest that is trying the doors in your city, you know, a low level criminal who isn't getting anywhere. We'll pick that up and that's low risk. But then if we see that person infiltrate a building, because they find an open door, then that raises the level of risk. So we monitor the growing level of risk against each workload. >>And once it hits a level of concern, then we let you know, but you can then forensically go back in time and look at all of the signals that surround that. So we don't just tell you, there was an alert and a file was compromised in your workload, do something about it. We tell you the file was compromised. And prior to that, there were these events, process failures. Those could have been caused by network events that are correlated to a vulnerability that we know. And those in, in turn could have been discovered by recon traffic. So we help you build that entire active picture up. Every application's different. You need to have the context to understand and interpret signals that a solution like threat striker gives you, and we give you that context. >>So I would push back. If I'm a platform team, say, you know what? I have a service mesh. I, I have trusted traffic going to trucked traffic going from trusted sources. I'm, I'm cutting off the problem even before it happens. Why should I use, uh, deep fix? >>So a service mesh won't cut off the problem. It'll just hide the problem because a service mesh will just encrypt the traffic between each of the components. It doesn't stop the bad traffic flowing. If a component is compromised, people can still talk to another component and the service mesh happily encrypts it and hides it. What we do. We love service meshes because we can decrypt the traffic or we can inspect the individual application components before they talk to the mesh side car. So we can pull out and see the plane, text traffic. We can identify things that other tools wouldn't have a hope of, of identifying. >>So, you know, you, you just, uh, triggered something. >>Yeah. >>A lot of companies do not like decrypting that traffic after it's been sent, they don't want anyone else, including security tools to see it. Yeah. How do you ensure, how do you serve those clients? >>So we serve those clients by having an architecture that sits entirely on premise in their infrastructure. Their sensitive data never leaves their network, their VPCs, their, their boundary. They install a threat striker console. So this is the tool that does all of the analysis and make the protection decisions. They run that themselves. They deploy the threat, striker sensors in their production environment. They talk over secure links, authenticated to the console. So everything sits within their power view, their level of their degree of control. >>So if, if they're building a, a, a cloud application though, or, or a hybrid cloud application, how do you connect? How do you deal with the cloud side? >>So whether their production environments are next to the threat striker console, whether they're running on remote clouds, our sensors will run in all of those environments and the console will manage a complex hybrid environment. It will show you traffic running in your Kubernetes cluster and AWS traffic Mon running on your VMs on Google traffic, running in your 4g instances on again, on AWS and on your on-prem instances, it gathers that data securely from each of those remote places, sends it to the console that you own and operate securely. So you have full control over what is captured. It's encrypted, it's authenticated, it's streamed back. So it never leaves your level of control. >>Talk to me about the overhead. How is this deployed and managed with MI environment? >>So there are two components, as we've learned, we have the console. All of the work is done on the console, the any necessary decryption, all the calculation that runs on a Kubernetes cluster, that, that you would deploy, that you would scale. So that's fully in your control. Then you need to install little sensors on each of your production environments to bring the data back to the console. >>Now those on pots, or are those in running inside of, uh, containers themselves. >>So they are container based. They're typically deployed as a demon set. So one instance per node in your Kubernetes cluster, they are, we have put a lot of engineering work into making those as lightweight as possible. They do very little analysis themselves. They do a little bit of pre-filtering of network traffic to reduce the bandwidth, and then they pass the packets back to the management console. So our goal is to have the minimal impact on customers, production environments, so that they can scale and operate without an impact on the performance or availability of their applications. And we have customers who are monitoring services running on literally thousands of Kubernetes nodes and streaming the data back to their management console and using that to analyze from a single point of control what's going on in their applications. >>So we hear time and again, CIOs complaining that they have too many point security products. Yes, I think average of 87 in, in, in the enterprise, according to, to one survey, aren't you just another, >>And that is the big challenge with security. There is no silver bullet product that will secure everything that you have. You have your, the what, you're the, what you're securing scales over space from your infrastructure to the containers and the workloads and the application code. It scales over time. Are you secure? Are you putting security measures in, at shift left development when you deploy or are you securing production? And it scales over the environments. There is no silver bullet that will provide best to breed security across that entire set of dimensions. There are large organizations that will present you with holistic solutions, which are a bunch of different solutions with the same logo on them, bundle together under the same umbrella. Those don't necessarily solve the problem. You need to understand the risks that your organization is faced. And then what are the best to breed solutions for each of those risks and for the life cycle of your application at deep fence, we are about securing your production environment. >>Your developers have built applications. They've secured those applications using tools like SNCC, and they've ticked and signed off saying with this list of documented vulnerabilities, my application is secure. It's now ready to go into production. But when I talk to, to application security people to ops people, and I say, are the applications in your Kubernetes environment? Are they secure? They say, look, honestly, I don't know, the developers have signed off something, but that's not what I'm running. I've had to inject things into the application. So it's different. There could have been issues that were, that were discovered after the developers signed it off. The developers made exceptions, but also 60, 80% of the code I'm running in production. Didn't come from my development team. It's infrastructure, it's third party modules. So when you look at security as a whole, you realize there are so many ax axis that you have to consider. There are so many points along these, a axis, and you need to figure out in a kind of a van diagram fashion, how are you going to address security issues at each of those points? So when it comes to production security, if you want a best breed solution for finding vulnerabilities in your production environment, threat map, open source, we'll do that. And then for monitoring attack behavior threat striker enterprise will do that. Then deep defense is a great set of solutions to look at. >>So on. Thanks for stopping by security at layers is a repetitive thing that we hear security experts talk about. Not one solution will solve every problem when it comes to security from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the Q the leader in high tech coverage.

>>The queue presents Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Licia Spain, a Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. Paul, we're gonna talk to some amazing people this week. Coon, what the energy here, what, what, what, what would you say about >>It? I'd say it's reminiscent of, of early year, uh, early stage conferences I've seen with other technologies. There is a lot of startup activity. Here's a lot of money in the market, despite the sell off in the stock market lately. Uh, a lot of anticipation that there are, there could be big exits. There could be big things ahead for these companies. You don't see that when you go to the big established conferences, uh, you see just, uh, anticipation here that I don't think you see, uh, you you'll see maybe in a couple years, so it's fun to be here right now. I'm sure it'll be a very different experience in two or three years. >>So welcome to our guest cube alum. Batam Tobar the founder and CEO of Upbound. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be on, on the show again. >>So Paul, tell us the we're in this phase of migrations and, and moving to cloud native stacks. Are we another replatforming generation? I mean, we've done, the enterprise has done this, you know, time and time again, whether it's from Java to.net or do net to Java or from bare metal to VMs, but are we in another age of replatforming? >>You know, it's interesting. Every company has now become a tech company and every tech company needs to build a very model, you know, modern digital platform for them to actually run their business. And if they don't do that, then they'll probably be out of business. And, um, it is interesting to think about how companies are platforming and replatforming. Like, you know, as you said, just a, a few years back, you know, we were on people using cloud Foundry or using Heroku, you hear Heroku a lot, or, you know, now it's cloud native and Kubernetes and, and it, it begs the question, you know, is this the end? That to your point, is this, you know, do we have a, you know, what, what makes us sure that this is the, you know, the last platform or the future proof platform that, that people are building, >>There's never a last platform, right? There's always something around the core. The question is, is Kubernetes Linux, or is it windows? >>That, that's a good question. Um, it's more like more like Linux. I think, um, you know, the, you know, you've heard this before, but people talk about Kubernetes as a platform off platforms. Um, you can use it to build other platforms and if you know what you're doing, you can probably put, assemble a set of pieces around it and arrive at something that looks and can work for your business, but it requires a ton of talent. It requires a lot of people that actually can act, you know, know how to put this stick together to, to work for your business. It is, there's not a lot of guidance. I, we were, I think we were chatting earlier about the CSCF landscape and, and, um, how there are all these different projects and companies around it, but, but they don't come together in meaningful ways that you have, they act the enterprise itself has to figure out how to bring them together. Right. And that's the combination of what they do there organically or not is their platform. Right. And that changes. It can change over time. >>Do you think they really do. They really want to put these things together? I mean, there's, that's not what enterprise is like to do. They want to find someone who's gonna come in and, uh, turnkey do it all for them. >>Yeah. And, and if there was, this is the, this is the things like EV every week now you hear about another platform that says, this is the new Heroku. This is the new cloud Foundry, this replaces every, you know, some vendor has, and you can see them all around here. You know, companies that are basically selling platform solutions, um, that do put 'em together. And the problem with it is that you typically outgrow these, like you are, um, it might solve 80% of the use cases you care about, but the other 20% are not represented. And so you end up outgrowing the platform itself, right? And the, the choice has been mostly around, you know, do you buy something off the shelf that solves 80% of your use cases, or do you build something on your own? And then you have to spend all your resources actually going through and building all of it. And that's been the dilemma, you know, people who talk about this as a platform dilemma, but it's been, it's been the way for a long time. Like you, every, we go through this cycle every few years and, you know, people end up essentially oscillating between buying something off the, you know, that's off the shelf or building it, building it themselves. >>So what's the payoff. If I'm a CIO and I'm looking at the landscape, I don't need to understand, you know, I don't know to know what a pod is to know that looking at 200 plus projects in co and at, in cloud native, uh, foundation and the bevy of, of co-located projects and, and conferences before they, even the start of this, what's the payoff >>Increasing the pace of innovation. I mean, that literally is when we talk to customers, they all say roughly the same thing. They want something that works for their business. They want something that helps them take their, you know, line of business applications to production in a much quicker way, lets them innovate, lets them create higher engineers that can, don't have to understand everything about every system, but can actually specialize and focus on the, the parts that they sh they care about. Um, but it's all in the context of, you know, people want to be able to innovate at a very high pace, otherwise they get disrupted. >>So I was at the, you know, my favorite part of, of Coon in general is the hallway track and talking to people on the ground, doing cool things. I was talking to a engineer who was able to take their Java, stack their, their, uh, net stack and start to create APIs between and break 'em into microservices. Now teams are working across from one another realizing that, that, that promise of innovation, but that was the end point. They they're there. Yeah. As companies are thinking about replatforming where like, where do we start? I mean, looking at the, the CNCF, the, the map and it's 200 plus projects, where do I start? >>Do you typically today start with Kubernetes and, and um, a lot of companies have now deployed Kubernetes to production as a container orchestrator, whether they're going through a vendor or not, but now you are seeing all the things around it, whether it's C I C D or GI ops that they're looking at, you know, or the starting to build consoles around, you know, their, their platforms or looking at managing more than just containers. And that's a theme that, you know, we're seeing a lot now, people want, people want to actually bring this modern stack to manage, not just container workloads, but start looking at databases and cloud workloads and everything else that they're doing around it. Honestly, everybody's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to arrive at a single point of control, a single, you know, a platform that can do it all that they can centralize policy centralized controls to compliance governance, cost controls, and then expose a self-service experience to developers. Like they're all trying to build what we probably call an internal cloud platform. They don't know, they talk about it in different ways, but almost everyone is trying to build some internal platform that sits on top of, on premises. And on top of cloud, depending on their scenarios, >>You make an interesting point, which is that everyone here is to some extent trying to do the same thing. And there's fine points of granularity between now they're approaching it as you walk around this floor. Do you understand what all of these companies are doing? >>I'm not sure I understand all of them, but I, I do. I do recognize a lot of them. Yes. >>And in terms of your approach, you, you use the term control plane, uh, what is distinctive about your approach? >>Very good question. So, you know, we, we end up out take a, um, we we're trying to solve, uh, this problem as well. We're trying to help people build their own platforms. Um, but let me, let me, you know, there's a lot to it. So let me actually step back and talk about the architecture of this. But if you were to look at any cloud platform, let's take the largest one. AWS, if you peek behind the scenes at AWS, you know, um, it's basically a set of independent services, EC two S3 databases, et cetera, um, that are, you know, essentially working on different parts of, you know, like offer completely different pricing, different services, et cetera. They come together because they all integrate into a control plan. >>It's the thing that serves an API. It's the thing that gives it all a common field. It's where you do access control. It's where you do, um, billing, metering, cost control policy, et cetera. Right? And so our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and replatforming, why shouldn't they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs? And so we started this project almost four years ago, now three and a half years, um, called cross plain, which is a, essentially an open source control plane that can become the integration point for all services. And essentially gives you a universal control plane for cloud. >>So you mentioned the idea of the orchestrating or managing stuff other than containers, as I think about companies that built amazing platforms, enterprise companies, building amazing applications on AWS 10 years ago, and they're adopting the AWS control plane. And now I'm looking at Kubernetes is Kubernetes the way to multi-cloud to be able to control those discrete applic, uh, services in a AWS or Google cloud Azure or Oracle cloud is cetera. >>We kind of have the tease it, the parts. So there are really two parts to Kubernetes and everybody thinks of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform. Right? And, um, you know, there is a sense that people say, if I was to run Kubernetes on everywhere and can build everything on top of containers, that I get some kind of portability across clouds, right. That I can put things in containers. And then they magically run, you know, in different environments. Um, in reality, what we've seen is not everything fits in containers. It's not gonna be the world is not gonna look like containers on the bottom. Everything else is on top. Instead, what we're gonna see is essentially a set of services that people are using across the different vendors. So if you look at like, you could be at AWS shop primarily, but I bet you're using confluent or elastic or data breaks or snowflake or Mongo or other services. >>I bet you're using things that are on premises, right? And so when you look at that and you say to build my platform as an enterprise, I have to consume services from multiple vendors. Even it's just one major cloud vendor, but I'm consuming services from others. How do I bring them together in meaningful ways so that I can, you know, build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume. And self-service on. That's not a, that's not just containers. What's interesting though, is if you look at Kubernetes and, you know, look inside it, Kubernetes built a control plane. That's actually quite useful and applicable outside of container scenarios. So this whole notion of CRDs and controllers, if you've heard that term, um, the ability, you know, like there are two parts to Kubernetes, there is the control plane, and then there's the container container, uh, workloads and the control plane is generic. >>It could be used literally across, you know, you can use it to manage things that are completely outside of container workloads. And that's what we did with cross plain. We took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to digital ocean, to all these different environments. So you can bring the way of managing, you know, the style of managing that Kubernetes invented to more than just containers. You can now manage cloud services, using the same approach that you are now using with Kubernetes and using the entire ecosystem of tooling around it. >>Enterprise have been under pressure replatform for a long time. It was first go to Unix then to Linux and virtualize then to move to the cloud. Now, Kubernetes, do you think that this is the stack that enterprises can finally commit to? >>I think if you take the orientation of your deploying a control plane within your enterprise, that is extensible, that enables you to actually connect it to all the things that are under your domain, um, that that actually can be a Futureproof way of doing a platform. And, you know, if you look at the largest cloud platforms, AWS has been around for at least 15 years now, uh, and they really haven't changed the architecture of AWS significantly. It's still a control plane, a set of control planes that are managing services. >>It's a legacy >>They've added a lot of services. They've have a ton of diversity. They've added so many different things, but the architecture is still a hub and spoke that they've built, right? And if the enterprise can take the same orientation, put a control plane, let it manage all the things that are, you know, about today, arrive at a single point of control, have a single point where you can enforce policy compliance, cost controls, et cetera, mm-hmm <affirmative>, and then expose a self-service experience to your developers that actually can become future proof. >>So we've heard this promise before the cloud of clouds, basically. Yes, the, the, to be able to manage everything, what we find is the devils in the details. The being able to say, you know, a load balancer issuing a, a command to, to deploy a load balancer in AWS is different than it is in Azure, which is different than it is in GCP. How do, how do enterprises know that we can talk to a single control plane to do that? I mean, that just seems extremely difficult to manage. Oh >>Yeah. That, um, the approach is not, you're not trying to create a lowest common denominator between clouds. That's a really, really hard problem. And in fact, you get relegated to just using this, you know, really shallow features of each, if you're, if you're gonna do that, like your, your example of load balancers, load balances look completely different between between cloud vendors. Um, the approach that we kind of advocate for is that you shouldn't think of them as you shouldn't try to unify them in a way that makes them, you know, there's a, uh, there's a global abstraction that says, oh, there's a load balancer. And it somehow magically works across the different cloud vendors. I think that's a really, really hard thing to say, to do as you point out. However, if you bring them all under a same control plane, As different as they are, you're able to now apply policies. You're able to set cost controls. You're able to expose a self-service experience on top of them, even, even if they are very different. And that's, that's something that I think is, you know, been hard to do in the past. >>So BAAM, we'll love to dig deeper into this in future segments. And I'm gonna take a look at the, the, the product and project <laugh> and see where you folks land in this conversation from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith towns. And along with Paul Gillon, and you're watching the leader in high tech.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22 brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. Paul, we're gonna talk to some amazing people this week. Coon, what the energy here, what, what, what would you say about >>It? I'd say it's reminiscent of, of early year, early stage conferences I've seen with other technologies. There is a lot of startup activity. Here's a lot of money in the market, despite the selloff in the stock market lately, a lot of anticipation that there are, there could be big exits. There could be big things ahead for these companies. You don't see that when you go to the big established conferences, you see just anticipation here that I don't think you see you you'll see maybe in a couple of years. So it's fun to be here right now. I'm sure it'll be a very different experience in two or three years. >>So welcome to our guest Q alum. BAAM Tobar the founder and CEO of Upbound. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be on, on the show again. >>So Paul, tell us the we're in this phase of migrations and, and moving to cloud native stacks. Are we another re-platforming generation? I mean, we've done, the enterprise has done this, you know, time and time again, and whether it's from Java to.net or net to Java or from bare metal to VMs, but are we in another age of replatforming? >>You know, it's interesting. Every company has now become a tech company and every tech company needs to build a very model, you know, modern digital platform for them to actually run their business. And if they don't do that, then they'll probably be out of business. And it is interesting to think about how companies are platforming and replatforming. Like, you know, as you said, just a, a few years back, you know, we were on people using cloud Foundry or using Heroku, you hear Heroku a lot, or, you know, now it's cloud native and Kubernetes and, and it, it begs the question, you know, is this the end that the tr point is this, you know, do we have a, you know, what, what makes us sure that this is the, you know, the last platform or the future proof platform that, that people are building, >>There's never a last platform, right? There's always something around the core. The question is, is Kubernetes Linux, or is it windows? >>That, that's a good question. It's more like more like Linux. I think, you know, the, you know, you've heard this before, but people talk about Kubernetes as a platform off platforms, you can use it to build other platforms. And if you know what you're doing, you can probably put, assemble a set of pieces around it and arrive at something that looks and can work for your business. But it requires a ton of talent. It requires a lot of people that actually can act, you know, know how to put the stick together to, to work for your business. It is, there's not a lot of guidance. I, we were, I think we were chatting earlier about the CSCF landscape and, and how there all these different projects and companies around it. But, but they don't come together in meaningful ways that you have, they act the enterprise itself has to figure out how to bring them together. Right. And that's the combination of what they do there organically or not is their platform. Right. And that changes. It can change over time. >>Do you think they really do. They really want to put these things together? I mean, there's, that's not what enterprise is like to do. They want to find someone who's gonna come in and turnkey do it all for >>Them. Yeah. And, and if there were, this is the, this is the things like EV every week now you hear about another platform that says, this is the new Heroku. This is the new cloud Foundry. This replaces every, you know, some vendor has, and you can see them all around here. You know, companies that are basically selling platform solutions that do put 'em together. And the problem with it is that you typically outgrow these, like you are, it might solve 80% of the use cases you care about, but the other 20% are not represented. And so you end up outgrowing the platform itself, right? And the, the choice has been mostly around, you know, do you buy something off the shelf that solves 80% of your use cases? Or do you build something on your own? And then you have to spend all your resources actually going through and building all of it. And that's been the dilemma, you know, people who talk about this as a platform dilemma, but it's been, it's been the way for a long time. Like you, every, we go through this cycle every few years and, you know, people end up essentially oscillating between buying something off the, you know, that's off the shelf or building it, building it themselves. >>So what's the payoff. If I'm a CIO and I'm looking at the landscape, I don't need to understand, you know, I don't know what a pod is to know that looking at 200 plus projects in co and at, in cloud native foundation and the bevy of, of co-located projects and, and conferences before the, even the start of this, what's the payoff >>Increasing the pace of innovation. I mean, that literally is when we talk to customers, they all say roughly the same thing. They want something that works for their business. They want something that helps them take their, you know, line of business applications to production in a much quicker way, lets them innovate, lets them create higher engineers that can, don't have to understand everything about every system, but can actually specialize and focus on the, the parts that they sh they care about. But it's all in the context of, you know, people want to be able to innovate at a very high pace. Otherwise they get disrupted. >>So I was at the, you know, my favorite part of coan in general is the hallway track and talking to people on the ground, doing cool things. I was talking to a engineer who was able to take their Java, stack their, their.net stack and start to create APIs between and break 'em into microservices. Now teams are working across from one another realizing that, that, that promise of innovation, but that was the end point. They they're there. Yeah. As companies are thinking about replatforming where like, where do we start? I mean, I'm looking at the, the C CNCF, the, the map and it's 200 plus projects. Where, where do I start? >>You typically today start with Kubernetes. And, and a lot of companies have now deployed Kubernetes to production as a container orchestrator, whether they're going through a vendor or not. But now you're seeing all the things around it, whether it's C I C D or GI ops that they're looking at, you know, or they're starting to build consoles around, you know, their, their platforms or looking at managing more than just containers. And that's a theme that, you know, we're seeing a lot now, people want, people want to actually bring this modern stack to manage, not just container workloads, but start looking at databases and cloud workloads and everything else that they're doing around it. Honestly, everybody's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to arrive at a single point of control, a single, you know, a platform that can do it all that they can centralize policies, centralized controls to compliance governance, cost controls, and then expose a self-service experience to the developers. Like they're all trying to build what we probably call an internal cloud platform. They don't know, they talk about it in different ways, but almost everyone is trying to build some internal platform that sits on top of, on premises. And on top of cloud, depending on their scenarios, >>You make an interesting point, which is that everyone here is to some extent trying to do the same thing. And there's fine points of granularity between now they're approaching it as you walk around this floor. Do you understand what all of these companies are doing? >>I'm not sure I understand all of them, but I, I do. I do recognize a lot of them. Yes. >>And in terms of your approach, you, you use the term control plane. What is distinctive about your approach? >>Very good question. So, you know, we, we end, Upbound take a, we we're trying to solve this problem as well. We're trying to help people build their own platforms, but let me, let me, you know, there's a lot to it. So let me actually step back and, and talk about the architecture of this. But if you were to look at any cloud platform, let's take the largest one. AWS, if you peek behind the scenes at AWS, you know, it's basically a set of independent services, EC two S three databases, et cetera, that are, you know, essentially working on different parts of, you know, like offer completely different pricing, different services, et cetera. They come together because they all integrate into a control plan. >>It's the thing that serves an API. It's the thing that gives it all a common feel. It's where you do access control. It's where you do billing metering, cost control policy, et cetera. Right? And so our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and replatforming, why shouldn't they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs? And so we started this project almost four years ago, now three and a half years called cross plain, which is a, essentially an open source control plane that can become the integration point for all services. And essentially gives you a universal control plane for cloud. >>So you mentioned the idea of if orchestrating or managing stuff other than containers, as I think about companies that built amazing platforms, enterprise companies, building amazing applications on AWS 10 years ago, and they're adopting the AWS control plane. And now I'm looking at Kubernetes is Kubernetes the way to multi-cloud to be able to control those discrete services in a AWS or Google cloud Azure or Oracle cloud, is that true? >>We kind have the tease it, the parts. So there are really two parts to Kubernetes and everybody thinks of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform. Right? And you know, there is a sense that people say, if I was to run Kubernetes on everywhere and can build everything on top of containers, that I get some kind of portability across clouds, right. That I can put things in containers. And then they magically run, you know, in different environments. In reality, what we've seen is not everything fits in containers. It's not gonna be the world is not gonna look like containers on the bottom. Everything else is on top. Instead, what we're gonna see is essentially a set of services that people are using across the different vendors. So if you look at like, you could be at AWS shop primarily, but I bet you're using confluent or elastic or data breaks or snowflake or Mongo or other services. >>I bet you're using things that are on premises, right? And so when you look at that and you say to build my platform as an enterprise, I have to consume services from multiple vendors. Even if it's just one major cloud vendor, but I'm consuming services from others. How do I bring them together in meaningful ways so that I can, you know, build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume. And self-service on. That's not a, that's not just containers. What's interesting though, is if you look at Kubernetes and, you know, look inside it, Kubernetes built a control plane. That's actually quite useful and applicable outside of container scenarios. So this whole notion of CRDs and controllers, if you've heard that term, the ability, you know, like there are two parts to Kubernetes, there is a control plane, and then there's the container container workloads. >>And the control plane is generic. It could be used literally across, you know, you can use it to manage things that are completely outside of container workloads. And that's what we did with cross mind. We took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to digital ocean, to all these different environments. So you can bring the way of managing, you know, the style of managing that Kubernetes invented to more than just containers. You can now manage cloud services, using the same approach that you are now using with Kubernetes and using the entire ecosystem of tooling around it. >>Enterprise has been under pressure to replatform for a long time. It was first go to Unix then to Linux and virtualize then to move to the cloud. Now, Kubernetes, do you think that this is the stack that enterprises can finally commit to? >>I think if you take the orientation of your deploying a control plane within your enterprise, that is extensible, that enables you to actually connect it to all the things that are under your domain, that that actually can be a Futureproof way of doing a platform. And, you know, if you look at the largest cloud platforms, AWS has been around for at least 15 years now, and they really haven't changed the architecture of AWS significantly. It's still a control plane, a set of control planes that are managing services. >>It's a legacy >>They've added a lot of services. They've have a ton of diversity. They've added so many different things, but the architecture is still a hub and spoke that they've built, right? And if the enterprise can take the same orientation, put a control plane, let it manage all the things that are, you know, about today, arrive at a single point of control, have a single point where you can enforce policy compliance, cost controls, et cetera, and then expose a self-service experience to your developers that actually can become future proof. >>So we've heard this promise before the cloud of clouds, basically, yes, the, the, to be able to manage everything, what we find is the devils in the details. The being able to say, you know, a load balancer issuing a, a command to, to deploy a load balancer in AWS is different than it is in Azure, which is different than it is in GCP. How do, how do enterprises know that we can talk to a single control plane to do that? I mean, that just seems extremely difficult to manage. >>Oh yeah. That the approach is not, you're not trying to create a lowest common denominator between clouds. That's a really, really hard problem. And in fact, you get relegated to just using this, you know, really shallow features of each, if you're, if you're gonna do that, like your, your example of load balancers, load balances look completely different between between cloud vendors, the approach that we kind of advocate for is that you shouldn't think of them as you shouldn't try to unify them in a way that makes them, you know, there's a, there's a global abstraction that says, oh, there's a load balancer. And it somehow magically works across the different cloud vendors. I think that's a really, really hard thing to say, to do as you pointed out. However, if you bring them all under a same control plane, as different as they are, you're able to now apply policies. You're able to set cost controls. You're able to expose a self-service experience on top of them, even, even if they are very different. And that's, that's something that I think is, you know, been hard to do in the past. >>So BAAM, we'll love to dig deeper into this in future segments. And I'm gonna take a look at the, the, the product and project and see where you folks land in this conversation from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the leader in high tech coverage.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain and con cloud native con 20 Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson alongside a new host en Rico senior reti, senior editor. I'm sorry, senior it analyst at giong Enrique. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. And thank you for having me. It's exciting. >>So thoughts, high level thoughts of CU con first time in person again in couple years? >>Well, this is amazing for several reasons. And one of the reasons is that yeah, I had the chance to meet, uh, with, uh, you know, people like you again. I mean, we, we met several times over the internet, over zoom codes. I, I started to eat these zoom codes. <laugh> because they're very impersonal in the end. And like last night we, we are together group of friends, industry folks. It's just amazing. And a part of that, I mean, the event is, uh, is a really cool, it's really cool. There are a lot from people interviews and, you know, real people doing real stuff, not just, uh, you know, again, in personal calls, you don't even know if they're telling the truth, but when you can, you know, look in their eyes, what they're doing, I, I think that's makes a difference. >>So speaking about real people, meeting people for the first time, new jobs, new roles, Greg Moscarella enterprise container management in general manager at SUSE, welcome to the show, welcome back clue belong. >>Thank you very much. It's awesome to be here. It's awesome to be back in person. And I completely agree with you. Like there's a certain fidelity to the conversation and a certain, uh, ability to get to know people a lot more. So it's absolutely fantastic to be here. >>So Greg, tell us about your new role and what SUSE has gone on at KU con. >>Sure. So I joined SA about three months ago to lead the rancher business unit, right? So our container management pieces and, you know, it's a, it's a fantastic time. Cause if you look at the transition from virtual machines to containers and to moving to micro services, right alongside that transition from on-prem to cloud, like this is a very exciting time to be in this industry and rancher's been setting the stage. And again, I'm go back to being here. Rancher's all about the community, right? So this is a very open, independent, uh, community driven product and project. And so this, this is kinda like being back to our people, right. And being able to reconnect here. And so, you know, doing it, digital is great, but, but being here is changes the game for us. So we, we feed off that community. We feed off the energy. So, uh, and again, going back to the space and what's happening in it, great time to be in this space. And you guys have seen the transitions you've seen, I mean, we've seen just massive adoption, uh, of containers and Kubernetes overall, and rancher has been been right there with some amazing companies doing really interesting things that I'd never thought of before. Uh, so I'm, I'm still learning on this, but, um, but it's been great so far. >>Yeah. And you know, when we talk about strategy about Kubernetes today, we are talking about very broad strategies. I mean, not just the data center or the cloud with, you know, maybe smaller organization adopting Kubernetes in the cloud, but actually large organization thinking guide and more and more the edge. So what's your opinion on this, you know, expansion of Kubernetes towards the edge. >>So I think you're, I think you're exactly right. And that's actually a lot of meetings I've been having here right now is these are some of these interesting use cases. So people who, uh, whether it be, you know, ones that are easy to understand in the telco space, right? Especially the adoption of 5g and you have all these base stations, new towers, and they have not only the core radio functions or network functions that they're trying to do there, but they have other applications that wanna run on that same environment, uh, spoke recently with some of our, our good friends at a major automotive manufacturer, doing things in their factories, right. That can't take the latency of being somewhere else. Right? So they have robots on the factory floor, the latency that they would experience if they tried to run things in the cloud meant that robot would've moved 10 centimeters. >>By the time, you know, the signal got back, it may not seem like a lot to you, but if, if, if you're an employee, you know, there, you know, uh, a big 2000 pound robot being 10 centimeters closer to you may not be what you, you really want. Um, there's, there's just a tremendous amount of activity happening out there on the retail side as well. So it's, it's amazing how people are deploying containers in retail outlets. You know, whether it be fast food and predicting, what, what, how many French fries you need to have going at this time of day with this sort of weather. Right. So you can make sure those queues are actually moving through. It's, it's, it's really exciting and interesting to look at all the different applications that are happening. So yes, on the edge for sure, in the public cloud, for sure. In the data center and we're finding is people want to common platform across those as well. Right? So for the management piece too, but also for security and for policies around these things. So, uh, it really is going everywhere. >>So talk to me, how do, how are we managing that as we think about pushing stuff out of the data center, out of the cloud cloud, closer to the edge security and life cycle management becomes like top of mind thought as, as challenges, how is rancher and sushi addressing >>That? Yeah. So I, I think you're, again, spot on. So it's, it starts off with the think of it as simple, but it's, it's not simple. It's the provisioning piece. How do we just get it installed and running right then to what you just asked the management piece of it, everything from your firmware to your operating system, to the, the cluster, uh, the Kubernetes cluster, that's running on that. And then the workloads on top of that. So with rancher, uh, and with the rest of SUSE, we're actually tacking all those parts of the problems from bare metal on up. Uh, and so we have lots of ways for deploying that operating system. We have operating systems that are, uh, optimized for the edge, very secure and ephemeral container images that you can build on top of. And then we have rancher itself, which is not only managing your Kubernetes cluster, but can actually start to manage the operating system components, uh, as well as the workload components. >>So all from your single interface, um, we mentioned policy and security. So we, yeah, we'll probably talk about it more, um, uh, in a little bit, but, but new vector, right? So we acquired a company called new vector, just open sourced, uh, that here in January, that ability to run that level of, of security software everywhere again, is really important. Right? So again, whether I'm running it on, whatever my favorite public cloud providers, uh, managed Kubernetes is, or out at the edge, you still have to have security, you know, in there. And, and you want some consistency across that. If you have to have a different platform for each of your environments, that's just upping the complexity and the opportunity for error. So we really like to eliminate that and simplify our operators and developers lives as much as possible. >>Yeah. From this point of view, are you implying that even you, you are matching, you know, self, uh, let's say managed clusters at the, at the very edge now with, with, you know, added security, because these are the two big problems lately, you know, so having something that is autonomous somehow easier to manage, especially if you are deploying hundreds of these that's micro clusters. And on the other hand, you need to know a policy based security that is strong enough to be sure again, if you have these huge robots moving too close to you, because somebody act the class that is managing them, that could be a huge problem. So are you, you know, approaching this kind of problems? I mean, is it, uh, the technology that you are acquired, you know, ready to, to do this? >>Yeah. I, I mean, it, it really is. I mean, there's still a lot of innovation happening. Don't, don't get me wrong. We're gonna see a lot of, a lot more, not just from, from SA and rancher, but from the community, right. There's a lot happening there, but we've come a long way and we've solved a lot of problems. Uh, if I think about, you know, how do you have this distributed environment? Uh, well, some of it comes down to not just, you know, all the different environments, but it's also the applications, you know, with microservices, you have very dynamic environment now just with your application space as well. So when we think about security, we really have to evolve from a fairly static policy where like, you might even be able to set an IP address in a port and some configuration on that. It's like, well, your workload's now dynamically moving. >>So not only do you have to have that security capability, like the ability to like, look at a process or look at a network connection and stop it, you have to have that, uh, manageability, right? You can't expect an operator or someone to like go in and manually configure a YAML file, right? Because things are changing too fast. It needs to be that combination of convenient, easy to manage with full function and ability to protect your, your, uh, your resources. And I think that's really one of the key things that new vector really brings is because we have so much intelligence about what's going on there. Like the configuration is pretty high level, and then it just runs, right? So it's used to this dynamic environment. It can actually protect your workloads wherever it's going from pod to pod. Uh, and it's that, that combination, again, that manageability with that high functionality, um, that, that is what's making it so popular. And what brings that security to those edge locations or cloud locations or your data center >>Mm-hmm <affirmative> so one of the challenges you're kind of, uh, touching on is this abstraction on upon abstraction. When I, I ran my data center, I could put, uh, say this IP address, can't talk to this IP address on this port. Then I got next generation firewalls where I could actually do, uh, some analysis. Where are you seeing the ball moving to when it comes to customers, thinking about all these layers of abstraction I IP address doesn't mean anything anymore in cloud native it's yes, I need one, but I'm not, I'm not protecting based on IP address. How are customers approaching security from the name space perspective? >>Well, so it's, you're absolutely right. In fact, even when you go to I P six, like, I don't even recognize IP addresses anymore. <laugh> >>Yeah. Doesn't mean anything like, oh, just a bunch of, yes, those are numbers, ER, >>And colons. Right. You know, it's like, I don't even know anymore. Right. So, um, yeah, so it's, it comes back to that, moving from a static, you know, it's the pets versus cattle thing. Right? So this static thing that I can sort of know and, and love and touch and kind of protect to this almost living, breathing thing, which is moving all around, it's a swarm of, you know, pods moving all over the place. And so, uh, it, it is, I mean, that's what Kubernetes has done for the workload side of it is like, how do you get away from, from that, that pet to a declarative approach to, you know, identifying your workload and the components of that workload and what it should be doing. And so if we go on the security side some more like, yeah, it's actually not even namespace namespace. >>Isn't good enough. We wanna get, if we wanna get to zero trust, it's like, just cuz you're running in my namespace doesn't mean I trust you. Right. So, and that's one of the really cool things about new vectors because of the, you know, we're looking at protocol level stuff within the network. So it's pod to pod, every single connection we can look at and it's at the protocol layer. So if you say you're on my database and I have a mye request going into it, I can confirm that that's actually a mye protocol being spoken and it's well formed. Right. And I know that this endpoint, you know, which is a, uh, container image or a pod name or some, or a label, even if it's in the same name, space is allowed to talk to and use this protocol to this other pod that's running in my same name space. >>Right. So I can either allow or deny. And if I can, I can look into the content that request and make sure it's well formed. So I'll give you an example is, um, do you guys remember the log four J challenges from not too long ago, right. Was, was a huge deal. So if I'm doing something that's IP and port based and name space based, so what are my protections? What are my options for something that's got log four J embedded in like I either run the risk of it running or I shut it down. Those are my options. Like those neither one of those are very good. So we can do, because again, we're at the protocol layers like, ah, I can identify any log for J protocol. I can look at whether it's well formed, you know, or if it's malicious, if it's malicious, I can block it. If it's well formed, I can let it go through. So I can actually look at those, those, um, those vulnerabilities. I don't have to take my service down. I can run and still be protected. And so that, that extra level, that ability to kind of peek into things and also go pod to pod, you know, not just name space level is one of the key differences. So I talk about the evolution or how we're evolving with, um, with the security. Like we've grown a lot, we've got a lot more coming. >>So let's talk about that a lot more coming what's in the pipeline for SUSE. >>Well, how, before I get to that, we just announced new vector five. So maybe I can catch us up on what was released last week. Uh, and then we can talk a little bit about going, going forward. So new vector five, introduce something called um, well, several things, but one of the things I can talk in more detail about is something called zero drift. So I've been talking about the network security, but we also have run time security, right? So any, any container that's running within your environment has processes that are running that container. What we can do is actually comes back to that manageability and configuration. We can look at the root level of trust of any process that's running. And as long as it has an inheritance, we can let that process run without any extra configuration. If it doesn't have a root level of trust, like it didn't spawn from whatever the, a knit, um, function was and that container we're not gonna let it run. Uh, so the, the configuration that you have to put in there is, is a lot simpler. Um, so that's something that's in, in new vector five, um, the web application firewall. So this layer seven security inspection has gotten a lot more granular now. So it's that pod Topo security, um, both for ingress egress and internal on the cluster. Right. >>So before we get to what's in the pipeline, one question around new vector, how is that consumed and deployed? >>How is new vector consumed, >>Deployed? And yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. So, uh, again with new vector five and, and also rancher 2 65, which just were released, there's actually some nice integration between them. So if I'm a rancher customer and I'm using 2 65, I can actually just deploy that new vector with a couple clicks of the button in our, uh, in our marketplace. And we're actually tied into our role-based access control. So an administrator who has that has the rights can just click they're now in a new vector interface and they can start setting those policies and deploying those things out very easily. Of course, if you aren't using, uh, rancher, you're using some other, uh, container management platform, new vector still works. Awesome. You can deploy it there still in a few clicks. Um, you're just gonna get into, you have to log into your new vector, uh, interface and, and use it from there. >>So that's how it's deployed. It's, it's very, it's very simple to use. Um, I think what's actually really exciting about that too, is we've opensourced it? Um, so it's available for anyone to go download and try, and I would encourage people to give it a go. Uh, and I think there's some compelling reasons to do that now. Right? So we have pause security policies, you know, depreciated and going away, um, pretty soon in, in Kubernetes. And so there's a few things you might look at to make sure you're still able to run a secure environment within Kubernetes. So I think it's a great time to look at what's coming next, uh, for your security within your Kubernetes. >>So, Paul, we appreciate you stopping by from ity of Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with en Rico Sinte. Thank you. And you're watching the, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> The ascendancy of cloud and SAS has shown new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once sought after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays, and maximizing server utilization has been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros, developers with expertise in microservices, container, application development, and like. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. Begs the question, is hardware going the way of Coball? Well, not likely. Software has to run on something, but the labor needed to deploy, and troubleshoot, and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting. At the same time, we've seen the value flow also shifting in hardware. Once a world dominated by X86 processors value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and arm based designs. Moreover, other componentry like NICs, accelerators, and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated, and increasingly important. The question is, does it matter? And if so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs, and the broader society? Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we've organized a special power panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question, does hardware still matter? Allow me to introduce the panel. Bob O'Donnell is president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. David Nicholson is a CTO and tech expert. Keith Townson is CEO and founder of CTO Advisor. And Marc Staimer is the chief dragon slayer at Dragon Slayer Consulting and oftentimes a Wikibon contributor. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending some time here. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay before we get into it, I just want to bring up some data from ETR. This is a survey that ETR does every quarter. It's a survey of about 1200 to 1500 CIOs and IT buyers and I'm showing a subset of the taxonomy here. This XY axis and the vertical axis is something called net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. It's essentially the percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular area than those spending less. You subtract the lesses from the mores and you get a net score. Anything the horizontal axis is pervasion in the data set. Sometimes they call it market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just the percentage of activity in the data set as a percentage of the total. That red 40% line, anything over that is considered highly elevated. And for the past, I don't know, eight to 12 quarters, the big four have been AI and machine learning, containers, RPA and cloud and cloud of course is very impressive because not only is it elevated in the vertical access, but you know it's very highly pervasive on the horizontal. So what I've done is highlighted in red that historical hardware sector. The server, the storage, the networking, and even PCs despite the work from home are depressed in relative terms. And of course, data center collocation services. Okay so you're seeing obviously hardware is not... People don't have the spending momentum today that they used to. They've got other priorities, et cetera, but I want to start and go kind of around the horn with each of you, what is the number one trend that each of you sees in hardware and why does it matter? Bob O'Donnell, can you please start us off? >> Sure Dave, so look, I mean, hardware is incredibly important and one comment first I'll make on that slide is let's not forget that hardware, even though it may not be growing, the amount of money spent on hardware continues to be very, very high. It's just a little bit more stable. It's not as subject to big jumps as we see certainly in other software areas. But look, the important thing that's happening in hardware is the diversification of the types of chip architectures we're seeing and how and where they're being deployed, right? You refer to this in your opening. We've moved from a world of x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD to things like obviously GPUs, DPUs. We've got VPU for, you know, computer vision processing. We've got AI-dedicated accelerators, we've got all kinds of other network acceleration tools and AI-powered tools. There's an incredible diversification of these chip architectures and that's been happening for a while but now we're seeing them more widely deployed and it's being done that way because workloads are evolving. The kinds of workloads that we're seeing in some of these software areas require different types of compute engines than traditionally we've had. The other thing is (coughs), excuse me, the power requirements based on where geographically that compute happens is also evolving. This whole notion of the edge, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more detail later is driven by the fact that where the compute actually sits closer to in theory the edge and where edge devices are, depending on your definition, changes the power requirements. It changes the kind of connectivity that connects the applications to those edge devices and those applications. So all of those things are being impacted by this growing diversity in chip architectures. And that's a very long-term trend that I think we're going to continue to see play out through this decade and well into the 2030s as well. >> Excellent, great, great points. Thank you, Bob. Zeus up next, please. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing when you look at this chart to remember too is, you know, through the pandemic and the work from home period a lot of companies did put their office modernization projects on hold and you heard that echoed, you know, from really all the network manufacturers anyways. They always had projects underway to upgrade networks. They put 'em on hold. Now that people are starting to come back to the office, they're looking at that now. So we might see some change there, but Bob's right. The size of those market are quite a bit different. I think the other big trend here is the hardware companies, at least in the areas that I look at networking are understanding now that it's a combination of hardware and software and silicon that works together that creates that optimum type of performance and experience, right? So some things are best done in silicon. Some like data forwarding and things like that. Historically when you look at the way network devices were built, you did everything in hardware. You configured in hardware, they did all the data for you, and did all the management. And that's been decoupled now. So more and more of the control element has been placed in software. A lot of the high-performance things, encryption, and as I mentioned, data forwarding, packet analysis, stuff like that is still done in hardware, but not everything is done in hardware. And so it's a combination of the two. I think, for the people that work with the equipment as well, there's been more shift to understanding how to work with software. And this is a mistake I think the industry made for a while is we had everybody convinced they had to become a programmer. It's really more a software power user. Can you pull things out of software? Can you through API calls and things like that. But I think the big frame here is, David, it's a combination of hardware, software working together that really make a difference. And you know how much you invest in hardware versus software kind of depends on the performance requirements you have. And I'll talk about that later but that's really the big shift that's happened here. It's the vendors that figured out how to optimize performance by leveraging the best of all of those. >> Excellent. You guys both brought up some really good themes that we can tap into Dave Nicholson, please. >> Yeah, so just kind of picking up where Bob started off. Not only are we seeing the rise of a variety of CPU designs, but I think increasingly the connectivity that's involved from a hardware perspective, from a kind of a server or service design perspective has become increasingly important. I think we'll get a chance to look at this in more depth a little bit later but when you look at what happens on the motherboard, you know we're not in so much a CPU-centric world anymore. Various application environments have various demands and you can meet them by using a variety of components. And it's extremely significant when you start looking down at the component level. It's really important that you optimize around those components. So I guess my summary would be, I think we are moving out of the CPU-centric hardware model into more of a connectivity-centric model. We can talk more about that later. >> Yeah, great. And thank you, David, and Keith Townsend I really interested in your perspectives on this. I mean, for years you worked in a data center surrounded by hardware. Now that we have the software defined data center, please chime in here. >> Well, you know, I'm going to dig deeper into that software-defined data center nature of what's happening with hardware. Hardware is meeting software infrastructure as code is a thing. What does that code look like? We're still trying to figure out but servicing up these capabilities that the previous analysts have brought up, how do I ensure that I can get the level of services needed for the applications that I need? Whether they're legacy, traditional data center, workloads, AI ML, workloads, workloads at the edge. How do I codify that and consume that as a service? And hardware vendors are figuring this out. HPE, the big push into GreenLake as a service. Dale now with Apex taking what we need, these bare bone components, moving it forward with DDR five, six CXL, et cetera, and surfacing that as cold or as services. This is a very tough problem. As we transition from consuming a hardware-based configuration to this infrastructure as cold paradigm shift. >> Yeah, programmable infrastructure, really attacking that sort of labor discussion that we were having earlier, okay. Last but not least Marc Staimer, please. >> Thanks, Dave. My peers raised really good points. I agree with most of them, but I'm going to disagree with the title of this session, which is, does hardware matter? It absolutely matters. You can't run software on the air. You can't run it in an ephemeral cloud, although there's the technical cloud and that's a different issue. The cloud is kind of changed everything. And from a market perspective in the 40 plus years I've been in this business, I've seen this perception that hardware has to go down in price every year. And part of that was driven by Moore's law. And we're coming to, let's say a lag or an end, depending on who you talk to Moore's law. So we're not doubling our transistors every 18 to 24 months in a chip and as a result of that, there's been a higher emphasis on software. From a market perception, there's no penalty. They don't put the same pressure on software from the market to reduce the cost every year that they do on hardware, which kind of bass ackwards when you think about it. Hardware costs are fixed. Software costs tend to be very low. It's kind of a weird thing that we do in the market. And what's changing is we're now starting to treat hardware like software from an OPEX versus CapEx perspective. So yes, hardware matters. And we'll talk about that more in length. >> You know, I want to follow up on that. And I wonder if you guys have a thought on this, Bob O'Donnell, you and I have talked about this a little bit. Marc, you just pointed out that Moore's laws could have waning. Pat Gelsinger recently at their investor meeting said that he promised that Moore's law is alive and well. And the point I made in breaking analysis was okay, great. You know, Pat said, doubling transistors every 18 to 24 months, let's say that Intel can do that. Even though we know it's waning somewhat. Look at the M1 Ultra from Apple (chuckles). In about 15 months increased transistor density on their package by 6X. So to your earlier point, Bob, we have this sort of these alternative processors that are really changing things. And to Dave Nicholson's point, there's a whole lot of supporting components as well. Do you have a comment on that, Bob? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Dave. And one thing to bear in mind as well, not only are we seeing a diversity of these different chip architectures and different types of components as a number of us have raised the other big point and I think it was Keith that mentioned it. CXL and interconnect on the chip itself is dramatically changing it. And a lot of the more interesting advances that are going to continue to drive Moore's law forward in terms of the way we think about performance, if perhaps not number of transistors per se, is the interconnects that become available. You're seeing the development of chiplets or tiles, people use different names, but the idea is you can have different components being put together eventually in sort of a Lego block style. And what that's also going to allow, not only is that going to give interesting performance possibilities 'cause of the faster interconnect. So you can share, have shared memory between things which for big workloads like AI, huge data sets can make a huge difference in terms of how you talk to memory over a network connection, for example, but not only that you're going to see more diversity in the types of solutions that can be built. So we're going to see even more choices in hardware from a silicon perspective because you'll be able to piece together different elements. And oh, by the way, the other benefit of that is we've reached a point in chip architectures where not everything benefits from being smaller. We've been so focused and so obsessed when it comes to Moore's law, to the size of each individual transistor and yes, for certain architecture types, CPUs and GPUs in particular, that's absolutely true, but we've already hit the point where things like RF for 5g and wifi and other wireless technologies and a whole bunch of other things actually don't get any better with a smaller transistor size. They actually get worse. So the beauty of these chiplet architectures is you could actually combine different chip manufacturing sizes. You know you hear about four nanometer and five nanometer along with 14 nanometer on a single chip, each one optimized for its specific application yet together, they can give you the best of all worlds. And so we're just at the very beginning of that era, which I think is going to drive a ton of innovation. Again, gets back to my comment about different types of devices located geographically different places at the edge, in the data center, you know, in a private cloud versus a public cloud. All of those things are going to be impacted and there'll be a lot more options because of this silicon diversity and this interconnect diversity that we're just starting to see. >> Yeah, David. David Nicholson's got a graphic on that. They're going to show later. Before we do that, I want to introduce some data. I actually want to ask Keith to comment on this before we, you know, go on. This next slide is some data from ETR that shows the percent of customers that cited difficulty procuring hardware. And you can see the red is they had significant issues and it's most pronounced in laptops and networking hardware on the far right-hand side, but virtually all categories, firewalls, peripheral servers, storage are having moderately difficult procurement issues. That's the sort of pinkish or significant challenges. So Keith, I mean, what are you seeing with your customers in the hardware supply chains and bottlenecks? And you know we're seeing it with automobiles and appliances but so it goes beyond IT. The semiconductor, you know, challenges. What's been the impact on the buyer community and society and do you have any sense as to when it will subside? >> You know, I was just asked this question yesterday and I'm feeling the pain. People question, kind of a side project within the CTO advisor, we built a hybrid infrastructure, traditional IT data center that we're walking with the traditional customer and modernizing that data center. So it was, you know, kind of a snapshot of time in 2016, 2017, 10 gigabit, ARISTA switches, some older Dell's 730 XD switches, you know, speeds and feeds. And we said we would modern that with the latest Intel stack and connected to the public cloud and then the pandemic hit and we are experiencing a lot of the same challenges. I thought we'd easily migrate from 10 gig networking to 25 gig networking path that customers are going on. The 10 gig network switches that I bought used are now double the price because you can't get legacy 10 gig network switches because all of the manufacturers are focusing on the more profitable 25 gig for capacity, even the 25 gig switches. And we're focused on networking right now. It's hard to procure. We're talking about nine to 12 months or more lead time. So we're seeing customers adjust by adopting cloud. But if you remember early on in the pandemic, Microsoft Azure kind of gated customers that didn't have a capacity agreement. So customers are keeping an eye on that. There's a desire to abstract away from the underlying vendor to be able to control or provision your IT services in a way that we do with VMware VP or some other virtualization technology where it doesn't matter who can get me the hardware, they can just get me the hardware because it's critically impacting projects and timelines. >> So that's a great setup Zeus for you with Keith mentioned the earlier the software-defined data center with software-defined networking and cloud. Do you see a day where networking hardware is monetized and it's all about the software, or are we there already? >> No, we're not there already. And I don't see that really happening any time in the near future. I do think it's changed though. And just to be clear, I mean, when you look at that data, this is saying customers have had problems procuring the equipment, right? And there's not a network vendor out there. I've talked to Norman Rice at Extreme, and I've talked to the folks at Cisco and ARISTA about this. They all said they could have had blowout quarters had they had the inventory to ship. So it's not like customers aren't buying this anymore. Right? I do think though, when it comes to networking network has certainly changed some because there's a lot more controls as I mentioned before that you can do in software. And I think the customers need to start thinking about the types of hardware they buy and you know, where they're going to use it and, you know, what its purpose is. Because I've talked to customers that have tried to run software and commodity hardware and where the performance requirements are very high and it's bogged down, right? It just doesn't have the horsepower to run it. And, you know, even when you do that, you have to start thinking of the components you use. The NICs you buy. And I've talked to customers that have simply just gone through the process replacing a NIC card and a commodity box and had some performance problems and, you know, things like that. So if agility is more important than performance, then by all means try running software on commodity hardware. I think that works in some cases. If performance though is more important, that's when you need that kind of turnkey hardware system. And I've actually seen more and more customers reverting back to that model. In fact, when you talk to even some startups I think today about when they come to market, they're delivering things more on appliances because that's what customers want. And so there's this kind of app pivot this pendulum of agility and performance. And if performance absolutely matters, that's when you do need to buy these kind of turnkey, prebuilt hardware systems. If agility matters more, that's when you can go more to software, but the underlying hardware still does matter. So I think, you know, will we ever have a day where you can just run it on whatever hardware? Maybe but I'll long be retired by that point. So I don't care. >> Well, you bring up a good point Zeus. And I remember the early days of cloud, the narrative was, oh, the cloud vendors. They don't use EMC storage, they just run on commodity storage. And then of course, low and behold, you know, they've trot out James Hamilton to talk about all the custom hardware that they were building. And you saw Google and Microsoft follow suit. >> Well, (indistinct) been falling for this forever. Right? And I mean, all the way back to the turn of the century, we were calling for the commodity of hardware. And it's never really happened because you can still drive. As long as you can drive innovation into it, customers will always lean towards the innovation cycles 'cause they get more features faster and things. And so the vendors have done a good job of keeping that cycle up but it'll be a long time before. >> Yeah, and that's why you see companies like Pure Storage. A storage company has 69% gross margins. All right. I want to go jump ahead. We're going to bring up the slide four. I want to go back to something that Bob O'Donnell was talking about, the sort of supporting act. The diversity of silicon and we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades. You know, we asked, you know, is Moore's law dead? We say it's moderating. Dave Nicholson. You want to talk about those supporting components. And you shared with us a slide that shift. You call it a shift from a processor-centric world to a connect-centric world. What do you mean by that? And let's bring up slide four and you can talk to that. >> Yeah, yeah. So first, I want to echo this sentiment that the question does hardware matter is sort of the answer is of course it matters. Maybe the real question should be, should you care about it? And the answer to that is it depends who you are. If you're an end user using an application on your mobile device, maybe you don't care how the architecture is put together. You just care that the service is delivered but as you back away from that and you get closer and closer to the source, someone needs to care about the hardware and it should matter. Why? Because essentially what hardware is doing is it's consuming electricity and dollars and the more efficiently you can configure hardware, the more bang you're going to get for your buck. So it's not only a quantitative question in terms of how much can you deliver? But it also ends up being a qualitative change as capabilities allow for things we couldn't do before, because we just didn't have the aggregate horsepower to do it. So this chart actually comes out of some performance tests that were done. So it happens to be Dell servers with Broadcom components. And the point here was to peel back, you know, peel off the top of the server and look at what's in that server, starting with, you know, the PCI interconnect. So PCIE gen three, gen four, moving forward. What are the effects on from an interconnect versus on performance application performance, translating into new orders per minute, processed per dollar, et cetera, et cetera? If you look at the advances in CPU architecture mapped against the advances in interconnect and storage subsystem performance, you can see that CPU architecture is sort of lagging behind in a way. And Bob mentioned this idea of tiling and all of the different ways to get around that. When we do performance testing, we can actually peg CPUs, just running the performance tests without any actual database environments working. So right now we're at this sort of imbalance point where you have to make sure you design things properly to get the most bang per kilowatt hour of power per dollar input. So the key thing here what this is highlighting is just as a very specific example, you take a card that's designed as a gen three PCIE device, and you plug it into a gen four slot. Now the card is the bottleneck. You plug a gen four card into a gen four slot. Now the gen four slot is the bottleneck. So we're constantly chasing these bottlenecks. Someone has to be focused on that from an architectural perspective, it's critically important. So there's no question that it matters. But of course, various people in this food chain won't care where it comes from. I guess a good analogy might be, where does our food come from? If I get a steak, it's a pink thing wrapped in plastic, right? Well, there are a lot of inputs that a lot of people have to care about to get that to me. Do I care about all of those things? No. Are they important? They're critically important. >> So, okay. So all I want to get to the, okay. So what does this all mean to customers? And so what I'm hearing from you is to balance a system it's becoming, you know, more complicated. And I kind of been waiting for this day for a long time, because as we all know the bottleneck was always the spinning disc, the last mechanical. So people who wrote software knew that when they were doing it right, the disc had to go and do stuff. And so they were doing other things in the software. And now with all these new interconnects and flash and things like you could do atomic rights. And so that opens up new software possibilities and combine that with alternative processes. But what's the so what on this to the customer and the application impact? Can anybody address that? >> Yeah, let me address that for a moment. I want to leverage some of the things that Bob said, Keith said, Zeus said, and David said, yeah. So I'm a bit of a contrarian in some of this. For example, on the chip side. As the chips get smaller, 14 nanometer, 10 nanometer, five nanometer, soon three nanometer, we talk about more cores, but the biggest problem on the chip is the interconnect from the chip 'cause the wires get smaller. People don't realize in 2004 the latency on those wires in the chips was 80 picoseconds. Today it's 1300 picoseconds. That's on the chip. This is why they're not getting faster. So we maybe getting a little bit slowing down in Moore's law. But even as we kind of conquer that you still have the interconnect problem and the interconnect problem goes beyond the chip. It goes within the system, composable architectures. It goes to the point where Keith made, ultimately you need a hybrid because what we're seeing, what I'm seeing and I'm talking to customers, the biggest issue they have is moving data. Whether it be in a chip, in a system, in a data center, between data centers, moving data is now the biggest gating item in performance. So if you want to move it from, let's say your transactional database to your machine learning, it's the bottleneck, it's moving the data. And so when you look at it from a distributed environment, now you've got to move the compute to the data. The only way to get around these bottlenecks today is to spend less time in trying to move the data and more time in taking the compute, the software, running on hardware closer to the data. Go ahead. >> So is this what you mean when Nicholson was talking about a shift from a processor centric world to a connectivity centric world? You're talking about moving the bits across all the different components, not having the processor you're saying is essentially becoming the bottleneck or the memory, I guess. >> Well, that's one of them and there's a lot of different bottlenecks, but it's the data movement itself. It's moving away from, wait, why do we need to move the data? Can we move the compute, the processing closer to the data? Because if we keep them separate and this has been a trend now where people are moving processing away from it. It's like the edge. I think it was Zeus or David. You were talking about the edge earlier. As you look at the edge, who defines the edge, right? Is the edge a closet or is it a sensor? If it's a sensor, how do you do AI at the edge? When you don't have enough power, you don't have enough computable. People were inventing chips to do that. To do all that at the edge, to do AI within the sensor, instead of moving the data to a data center or a cloud to do the processing. Because the lag in latency is always limited by speed of light. How fast can you move the electrons? And all this interconnecting, all the processing, and all the improvement we're seeing in the PCIE bus from three, to four, to five, to CXL, to a higher bandwidth on the network. And that's all great but none of that deals with the speed of light latency. And that's an-- Go ahead. >> You know Marc, no, I just want to just because what you're referring to could be looked at at a macro level, which I think is what you're describing. You can also look at it at a more micro level from a systems design perspective, right? I'm going to be the resident knuckle dragging hardware guy on the panel today. But it's exactly right. You moving compute closer to data includes concepts like peripheral cards that have built in intelligence, right? So again, in some of this testing that I'm referring to, we saw dramatic improvements when you basically took the horsepower instead of using the CPU horsepower for the like IO. Now you have essentially offload engines in the form of storage controllers, rate controllers, of course, for ethernet NICs, smart NICs. And so when you can have these sort of offload engines and we've gone through these waves over time. People think, well, wait a minute, raid controller and NVMe? You know, flash storage devices. Does that make sense? It turns out it does. Why? Because you're actually at a micro level doing exactly what you're referring to. You're bringing compute closer to the data. Now, closer to the data meaning closer to the data storage subsystem. It doesn't solve the macro issue that you're referring to but it is important. Again, going back to this idea of system design optimization, always chasing the bottleneck, plugging the holes. Someone needs to do that in this value chain in order to get the best value for every kilowatt hour of power and every dollar. >> Yeah. >> Well this whole drive performance has created some really interesting architectural designs, right? Like Nickelson, the rise of the DPU right? Brings more processing power into systems that already had a lot of processing power. There's also been some really interesting, you know, kind of innovation in the area of systems architecture too. If you look at the way Nvidia goes to market, their drive kit is a prebuilt piece of hardware, you know, optimized for self-driving cars, right? They partnered with Pure Storage and ARISTA to build that AI-ready infrastructure. I remember when I talked to Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure about when the three companies rolled that out. He said, "Look, if you're going to do AI, "you need good store. "You need fast storage, fast processor and fast network." And so for customers to be able to put that together themselves was very, very difficult. There's a lot of software that needs tuning as well. So the three companies partner together to create a fully integrated turnkey hardware system with a bunch of optimized software that runs on it. And so in that case, in some ways the hardware was leading the software innovation. And so, the variety of different architectures we have today around hardware has really exploded. And I think it, part of the what Bob brought up at the beginning about the different chip design. >> Yeah, Bob talked about that earlier. Bob, I mean, most AI today is modeling, you know, and a lot of that's done in the cloud and it looks from my standpoint anyway that the future is going to be a lot of AI inferencing at the edge. And that's a radically different architecture, Bob, isn't it? >> It is, it's a completely different architecture. And just to follow up on a couple points, excellent conversation guys. Dave talked about system architecture and really this that's what this boils down to, right? But it's looking at architecture at every level. I was talking about the individual different components the new interconnect methods. There's this new thing called UCIE universal connection. I forget what it stands answer for, but it's a mechanism for doing chiplet architectures, but then again, you have to take it up to the system level, 'cause it's all fine and good. If you have this SOC that's tuned and optimized, but it has to talk to the rest of the system. And that's where you see other issues. And you've seen things like CXL and other interconnect standards, you know, and nobody likes to talk about interconnect 'cause it's really wonky and really technical and not that sexy, but at the end of the day it's incredibly important exactly. To the other points that were being raised like mark raised, for example, about getting that compute closer to where the data is and that's where again, a diversity of chip architectures help and exactly to your last comment there Dave, putting that ability in an edge device is really at the cutting edge of what we're seeing on a semiconductor design and the ability to, for example, maybe it's an FPGA, maybe it's a dedicated AI chip. It's another kind of chip architecture that's being created to do that inferencing on the edge. Because again, it's that the cost and the challenges of moving lots of data, whether it be from say a smartphone to a cloud-based application or whether it be from a private network to a cloud or any other kinds of permutations we can think of really matters. And the other thing is we're tackling bigger problems. So architecturally, not even just architecturally within a system, but when we think about DPUs and the sort of the east west data center movement conversation that we hear Nvidia and others talk about, it's about combining multiple sets of these systems to function together more efficiently again with even bigger sets of data. So really is about tackling where the processing is needed, having the interconnect and the ability to get where the data you need to the right place at the right time. And because those needs are diversifying, we're just going to continue to see an explosion of different choices and options, which is going to make hardware even more essential I would argue than it is today. And so I think what we're going to see not only does hardware matter, it's going to matter even more in the future than it does now. >> Great, yeah. Great discussion, guys. I want to bring Keith back into the conversation here. Keith, if your main expertise in tech is provisioning LUNs, you probably you want to look for another job. So maybe clearly hardware matters, but with software defined everything, do people with hardware expertise matter outside of for instance, component manufacturers or cloud companies? I mean, VMware certainly changed the dynamic in servers. Dell just spun off its most profitable asset and VMware. So it obviously thinks hardware can stand alone. How does an enterprise architect view the shift to software defined hyperscale cloud and how do you see the shifting demand for skills in enterprise IT? >> So I love the question and I'll take a different view of it. If you're a data analyst and your primary value add is that you do ETL transformation, talk to a CDO, a chief data officer over midsize bank a little bit ago. He said 80% of his data scientists' time is done on ETL. Super not value ad. He wants his data scientists to do data science work. Chances are if your only value is that you do LUN provisioning, then you probably don't have a job now. The technologies have gotten much more intelligent. As infrastructure pros, we want to give infrastructure pros the opportunities to shine and I think the software defined nature and the automation that we're seeing vendors undertake, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo take your pick that Pure Storage, NetApp that are doing the automation and the ML needed so that these practitioners don't spend 80% of their time doing LUN provisioning and focusing on their true expertise, which is ensuring that data is stored. Data is retrievable, data's protected, et cetera. I think the shift is to focus on that part of the job that you're ensuring no matter where the data's at, because as my data is spread across the enterprise hybrid different types, you know, Dave, you talk about the super cloud a lot. If my data is in the super cloud, protecting that data and securing that data becomes much more complicated when than when it was me just procuring or provisioning LUNs. So when you say, where should the shift be, or look be, you know, focusing on the real value, which is making sure that customers can access data, can recover data, can get data at performance levels that they need within the price point. They need to get at those datasets and where they need it. We talked a lot about where they need out. One last point about this interconnecting. I have this vision and I think we all do of composable infrastructure. This idea that scaled out does not solve every problem. The cloud can give me infinite scale out. Sometimes I just need a single OS with 64 terabytes of RAM and 204 GPUs or GPU instances that single OS does not exist today. And the opportunity is to create composable infrastructure so that we solve a lot of these problems that just simply don't scale out. >> You know, wow. So many interesting points there. I had just interviewed Zhamak Dehghani, who's the founder of Data Mesh last week. And she made a really interesting point. She said, "Think about, we have separate stacks. "We have an application stack and we have "a data pipeline stack and the transaction systems, "the transaction database, we extract data from that," to your point, "We ETL it in, you know, it takes forever. "And then we have this separate sort of data stack." If we're going to inject more intelligence and data and AI into applications, those two stacks, her contention is they have to come together. And when you think about, you know, super cloud bringing compute to data, that was what Haduck was supposed to be. It ended up all sort of going into a central location, but it's almost a rhetorical question. I mean, it seems that that necessitates new thinking around hardware architectures as it kind of everything's the edge. And the other point is to your point, Keith, it's really hard to secure that. So when you can think about offloads, right, you've heard the stats, you know, Nvidia talks about it. Broadcom talks about it that, you know, that 30%, 25 to 30% of the CPU cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offloads, or networking or security. It seems like maybe Zeus you have a comment on this. It seems like new architectures need to come other to support, you know, all of that stuff that Keith and I just dispute. >> Yeah, and by the way, I do want to Keith, the question you just asked. Keith, it's the point I made at the beginning too about engineers do need to be more software-centric, right? They do need to have better software skills. In fact, I remember talking to Cisco about this last year when they surveyed their engineer base, only about a third of 'em had ever made an API call, which you know that that kind of shows this big skillset change, you know, that has to come. But on the point of architectures, I think the big change here is edge because it brings in distributed compute models. Historically, when you think about compute, even with multi-cloud, we never really had multi-cloud. We'd use multiple centralized clouds, but compute was always centralized, right? It was in a branch office, in a data center, in a cloud. With edge what we creates is the rise of distributed computing where we'll have an application that actually accesses different resources and at different edge locations. And I think Marc, you were talking about this, like the edge could be in your IoT device. It could be your campus edge. It could be cellular edge, it could be your car, right? And so we need to start thinkin' about how our applications interact with all those different parts of that edge ecosystem, you know, to create a single experience. The consumer apps, a lot of consumer apps largely works that way. If you think of like app like Uber, right? It pulls in information from all kinds of different edge application, edge services. And, you know, it creates pretty cool experience. We're just starting to get to that point in the business world now. There's a lot of security implications and things like that, but I do think it drives more architectural decisions to be made about how I deploy what data where and where I do my processing, where I do my AI and things like that. It actually makes the world more complicated. In some ways we can do so much more with it, but I think it does drive us more towards turnkey systems, at least initially in order to, you know, ensure performance and security. >> Right. Marc, I wanted to go to you. You had indicated to me that you wanted to chat about this a little bit. You've written quite a bit about the integration of hardware and software. You know, we've watched Oracle's move from, you know, buying Sun and then basically using that in a highly differentiated approach. Engineered systems. What's your take on all that? I know you also have some thoughts on the shift from CapEx to OPEX chime in on that. >> Sure. When you look at it, there are advantages to having one vendor who has the software and hardware. They can synergistically make them work together that you can't do in a commodity basis. If you own the software and somebody else has the hardware, I'll give you an example would be Oracle. As you talked about with their exit data platform, they literally are leveraging microcode in the Intel chips. And now in AMD chips and all the way down to Optane, they make basically AMD database servers work with Optane memory PMM in their storage systems, not MVME, SSD PMM. I'm talking about the cards itself. So there are advantages you can take advantage of if you own the stack, as you were putting out earlier, Dave, of both the software and the hardware. Okay, that's great. But on the other side of that, that tends to give you better performance, but it tends to cost a little more. On the commodity side it costs less but you get less performance. What Zeus had said earlier, it depends where you're running your application. How much performance do you need? What kind of performance do you need? One of the things about moving to the edge and I'll get to the OPEX CapEx in a second. One of the issues about moving to the edge is what kind of processing do you need? If you're running in a CCTV camera on top of a traffic light, how much power do you have? How much cooling do you have that you can run this? And more importantly, do you have to take the data you're getting and move it somewhere else and get processed and the information is sent back? I mean, there are companies out there like Brain Chip that have developed AI chips that can run on the sensor without a CPU. Without any additional memory. So, I mean, there's innovation going on to deal with this question of data movement. There's companies out there like Tachyon that are combining GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs in a single chip. Think of it as super composable architecture. They're looking at being able to do more in less. On the OPEX and CapEx issue. >> Hold that thought, hold that thought on the OPEX CapEx, 'cause we're running out of time and maybe you can wrap on that. I just wanted to pick up on something you said about the integrated hardware software. I mean, other than the fact that, you know, Michael Dell unlocked whatever $40 billion for himself and Silverlake, I was always a fan of a spin in with VMware basically become the Oracle of hardware. Now I know it would've been a nightmare for the ecosystem and culturally, they probably would've had a VMware brain drain, but what does anybody have any thoughts on that as a sort of a thought exercise? I was always a fan of that on paper. >> I got to eat a little crow. I did not like the Dale VMware acquisition for the industry in general. And I think it hurt the industry in general, HPE, Cisco walked away a little bit from that VMware relationship. But when I talked to customers, they loved it. You know, I got to be honest. They absolutely loved the integration. The VxRail, VxRack solution exploded. Nutanix became kind of a afterthought when it came to competing. So that spin in, when we talk about the ability to innovate and the ability to create solutions that you just simply can't create because you don't have the full stack. Dell was well positioned to do that with a potential span in of VMware. >> Yeah, we're going to be-- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, in fact, I think you're right, Keith, it was terrible for the industry. Great for Dell. And I remember talking to Chad Sakac when he was running, you know, VCE, which became Rack and Rail, their ability to stay in lockstep with what VMware was doing. What was the number one workload running on hyperconverged forever? It was VMware. So their ability to remain in lockstep with VMware gave them a huge competitive advantage. And Dell came out of nowhere in, you know, the hyper-converged market and just started taking share because of that relationship. So, you know, this sort I guess it's, you know, from a Dell perspective I thought it gave them a pretty big advantage that they didn't really exploit across their other properties, right? Networking and service and things like they could have given the dominance that VMware had. From an industry perspective though, I do think it's better to have them be coupled. So. >> I agree. I mean, they could. I think they could have dominated in super cloud and maybe they would become the next Oracle where everybody hates 'em, but they kick ass. But guys. We got to wrap up here. And so what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to go and reverse the order this time, you know, big takeaways from this conversation today, which guys by the way, I can't thank you enough phenomenal insights, but big takeaways, any final thoughts, any research that you're working on that you want highlight or you know, what you look for in the future? Try to keep it brief. We'll go in reverse order. Maybe Marc, you could start us off please. >> Sure, on the research front, I'm working on a total cost of ownership of an integrated database analytics machine learning versus separate services. On the other aspect that I would wanted to chat about real quickly, OPEX versus CapEx, the cloud changed the market perception of hardware in the sense that you can use hardware or buy hardware like you do software. As you use it, pay for what you use in arrears. The good thing about that is you're only paying for what you use, period. You're not for what you don't use. I mean, it's compute time, everything else. The bad side about that is you have no predictability in your bill. It's elastic, but every user I've talked to says every month it's different. And from a budgeting perspective, it's very hard to set up your budget year to year and it's causing a lot of nightmares. So it's just something to be aware of. From a CapEx perspective, you have no more CapEx if you're using that kind of base system but you lose a certain amount of control as well. So ultimately that's some of the issues. But my biggest point, my biggest takeaway from this is the biggest issue right now that everybody I talk to in some shape or form it comes down to data movement whether it be ETLs that you talked about Keith or other aspects moving it between hybrid locations, moving it within a system, moving it within a chip. All those are key issues. >> Great, thank you. Okay, CTO advisor, give us your final thoughts. >> All right. Really, really great commentary. Again, I'm going to point back to us taking the walk that our customers are taking, which is trying to do this conversion of all primary data center to a hybrid of which I have this hard earned philosophy that enterprise IT is additive. When we add a service, we rarely subtract a service. So the landscape and service area what we support has to grow. So our research focuses on taking that walk. We are taking a monolithic application, decomposing that to containers, and putting that in a public cloud, and connecting that back private data center and telling that story and walking that walk with our customers. This has been a super enlightening panel. >> Yeah, thank you. Real, real different world coming. David Nicholson, please. >> You know, it really hearkens back to the beginning of the conversation. You talked about momentum in the direction of cloud. I'm sort of spending my time under the hood, getting grease under my fingernails, focusing on where still the lions share of spend will be in coming years, which is OnPrem. And then of course, obviously data center infrastructure for cloud but really diving under the covers and helping folks understand the ramifications of movement between generations of CPU architecture. I know we all know Sapphire Rapids pushed into the future. When's the next Intel release coming? Who knows? We think, you know, in 2023. There have been a lot of people standing by from a practitioner's standpoint asking, well, what do I do between now and then? Does it make sense to upgrade bits and pieces of hardware or go from a last generation to a current generation when we know the next generation is coming? And so I've been very, very focused on looking at how these connectivity components like rate controllers and NICs. I know it's not as sexy as talking about cloud but just how these opponents completely change the game and actually can justify movement from say a 14th-generation architecture to a 15th-generation architecture today, even though gen 16 is coming, let's say 12 months from now. So that's where I am. Keep my phone number in the Rolodex. I literally reference Rolodex intentionally because like I said, I'm in there under the hood and it's not as sexy. But yeah, so that's what I'm focused on Dave. >> Well, you know, to paraphrase it, maybe derivative paraphrase of, you know, Larry Ellison's rant on what is cloud? It's operating systems and databases, et cetera. Rate controllers and NICs live inside of clouds. All right. You know, one of the reasons I love working with you guys is 'cause have such a wide observation space and Zeus Kerravala you, of all people, you know you have your fingers in a lot of pies. So give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm not a propeller heady as my chip counterparts here. (all laugh) So, you know, I look at the world a little differently and a lot of my research I'm doing now is the impact that distributed computing has on customer employee experiences, right? You talk to every business and how the experiences they deliver to their customers is really differentiating how they go to market. And so they're looking at these different ways of feeding up data and analytics and things like that in different places. And I think this is going to have a really profound impact on enterprise IT architecture. We're putting more data, more compute in more places all the way down to like little micro edges and retailers and things like that. And so we need the variety. Historically, if you think back to when I was in IT you know, pre-Y2K, we didn't have a lot of choice in things, right? We had a server that was rack mount or standup, right? And there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, differences in choice. But today we can deploy, you know, these really high-performance compute systems on little blades inside servers or inside, you know, autonomous vehicles and things. I think the world from here gets... You know, just the choice of what we have and the way hardware and software works together is really going to, I think, change the world the way we do things. We're already seeing that, like I said, in the consumer world, right? There's so many things you can do from, you know, smart home perspective, you know, natural language processing, stuff like that. And it's starting to hit businesses now. So just wait and watch the next five years. >> Yeah, totally. The computing power at the edge is just going to be mind blowing. >> It's unbelievable what you can do at the edge. >> Yeah, yeah. Hey Z, I just want to say that we know you're not a propeller head and I for one would like to thank you for having your master's thesis hanging on the wall behind you 'cause we know that you studied basket weaving. >> I was actually a physics math major, so. >> Good man. Another math major. All right, Bob O'Donnell, you're going to bring us home. I mean, we've seen the importance of semiconductors and silicon in our everyday lives, but your last thoughts please. >> Sure and just to clarify, by the way I was a great books major and this was actually for my final paper. And so I was like philosophy and all that kind of stuff and literature but I still somehow got into tech. Look, it's been a great conversation and I want to pick up a little bit on a comment Zeus made, which is this it's the combination of the hardware and the software and coming together and the manner with which that needs to happen, I think is critically important. And the other thing is because of the diversity of the chip architectures and all those different pieces and elements, it's going to be how software tools evolve to adapt to that new world. So I look at things like what Intel's trying to do with oneAPI. You know, what Nvidia has done with CUDA. What other platform companies are trying to create tools that allow them to leverage the hardware, but also embrace the variety of hardware that is there. And so as those software development environments and software development tools evolve to take advantage of these new capabilities, that's going to open up a lot of interesting opportunities that can leverage all these new chip architectures. That can leverage all these new interconnects. That can leverage all these new system architectures and figure out ways to make that all happen, I think is going to be critically important. And then finally, I'll mention the research I'm actually currently working on is on private 5g and how companies are thinking about deploying private 5g and the potential for edge applications for that. So I'm doing a survey of several hundred us companies as we speak and really looking forward to getting that done in the next couple of weeks. >> Yeah, look forward to that. Guys, again, thank you so much. Outstanding conversation. Anybody going to be at Dell tech world in a couple of weeks? Bob's going to be there. Dave Nicholson. Well drinks on me and guys I really can't thank you enough for the insights and your participation today. Really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching this special power panel episode of theCube Insights powered by ETR. Remember we publish each week on Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com. All these episodes they're available as podcasts. DM me or any of these guys. I'm at DVellante. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai for all the data. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube with coverage of Kubecon and cloud nativecon North America, 2020 virtual brought to you by Red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, >> Coverage of Kubecon cloud nativecon 2020. It's virtual this year, though, theCUBE is virtual. This is theCUBE virtual I'm John Furrier your host. This is the segment where we kind of pre tease out the show for this year. We do a CUBE review and analyze and talk about some of the things we're expecting trends in the marketplace. And I'm pleased to announce a new CUBE co-host with me, Ali Amagasu, who's been part of theCUBE community since 2013, going back to the OpenStack days, which is now different name, but it's private clouds making a come back. But she's part of the cloud community, the cloud Harati, as we say, Ali, welcome to being a CUBE host. >> Thank you so much, John. It's a pleasure, it's been a while since we've hung out, but I do remember pestering you back in those days, and I've certainly stayed with theCUBE ever since then. I mean, you guys are an institution to put it. >> It's been so much fun, I have to say I had less gray hair. I didn't have glasses, I wear contacts. Now I have progressive vision, so I can't wear the contacts. They're hard for me, but it's been such a great evolution. And one of the things that's been really important to our mission has been to be kind of like an upstream project to be kind of open and be part of the community to be on the ground floor. We can't be there this year 'cause of the pandemic, but it's been great and about a few years ago, Stu Miniman and I were seeing that we had a great community of people who wanted a co-host, and we got a great community host model. And thanks for coming on and being part of this mission, it's been important to our mission. We've got Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight, John Troyer, Keith Townson, Justin Warren, Corey Quinn, to name a few. So welcome to the crew, thanks for coming on. >> Sure I'm happy to step in. >> So I want to go back in time. I mean, when we first met in 2013, you were a part of Metacloud, which got acquired by Cisco at that time, OpenStack was hot, OpenStack was at the cloud. And if you think about where Amazon was at that point and time, it was really the beginning of that sea change of rapid cloud scale, public cloud, specifically OpenStack kind of settled in, and that's kind of making a nice foundation for private cloud right now. It's still out there, telco clouds. You're seeing that trend, but this is the sixth Kubecon we've been there at all of them. We were there at the founding president creation. What an interesting turn of events. The world is kind of spun in the direction of all the conversations we were having back in 2013, 14, 15, 16. Now fast forward Kubernetes is the hottest thing on the planet and cloud native is the construct for all these modern apps, so what's your take on it. What's your view on this? 'Cause you've been riding this wave. >> Well, I think it's interesting. You brought up OpenStack because I remember in those days, OpenStack was smoking hot. And I remember talking to some of the organizers from the foundation, what they said was we want OpenStack to be boring. We want it to be part of the background. We will know we've made it when it's boring. And we could argue that they're there now, right? They aren't what we're talking about as much, but they're still there, they're still doing their thing. They're still growing as far as I know. So that's happened and now Kubernetes is the incredible hotness and it's just exploded. And so it turned from, you know, just a few projects, to now, if you look at the list of projects that are in incubation list of projects that have graduated, it's pretty long, and it's an impressive set of capabilities, when you look. >> It's been really interesting, you know, Dan Collin who's, the Ben was the director of the CNCF. I remember talking to him early on. And when he came, when he joined, he was, he hustled hard. He was smart. And he had a vision to balance the growing ecosystem cause he's done successful startups. So he kind of kind of knows the rocket ship labor, but he basically brought that entrepreneurial startup mentality. And I saw him in China when I was there with Intel with Alibaba conference in the lobby of the hotel, I'm like, dad, what are you doing here? So the CNC, I was already thinking global. They build out the most impressive landscape of vendors to participate in cloud nativecon and Kubecon At the same time, they maintain that end user focused. If you look at Envoy, right, it came from Lyft. So you have this really nice balance. And you know, it was always people chirping and complaining about this, that, and the other thing on the vendor's side. But the end user focus has been such a strong hand for Kubecon and the CNCF. It's just been really impressive and they maintain that. And this is the key. >> And I think what's impressive is that they've evolved. They've continued, they haven't sat there and said, "We've got a couple of fantastic projects," right? They're bringing in new ones all the time. They're staying at the cutting edge. They're looking at serverless and making sure there's projects that are taking care of that. And so I think that's, what's keeping it relevant, is the fact that they're relentlessly evolving. >> Yeah, and we comment, I think two years ago, Stu and I were pontificating about, can they maintain it? And one of the things that we were predicting, I want to get your reaction to this is that as Kubernetes becomes more standard and you're starting to see the tipping point now where it's beyond just testing and deploying in some clusters, you're starting to see Kubernetes native and in part of everything, in part of the future as service meshes and wrap around it and other things, the commercialization, the success of the vendor side is starting to be there. You starting to see real viable companies be started. So do they become end-users or so? So the question was, can it maintain its open source vibe while you have all this commercialization going on? Because that's always the challenge in open source. How do you balance it? What's your reaction to that threat or maybe an opportunity? >> I don't think it's a threat. I think there will always be folks who want to do it themselves. They want to use the vanilla upstream, Kubernetes. They want to build it. They don't want any vendor interference. There's also a very other solid other camp that says, "No, no, we don't want to deal with the updates ourselves. We don't want to deal with the integration with networking and security and all those things." And the vendor takes care of that. So I really think it's just serving two different audiences that as far as I can tell are changing, they're not, I don't see one side growing and one side shrinking. I really see it staying same, pretty stable. And so it's serving both teams. >> Yeah, I totally agree. And this is what's great about evolution. And when you talk about the community gets about the people involved. And I was riffing with someone the other day and were like, "Hey, you know what makes CNCF different?" And we were saying that everyone kind of knows each other. So as you have, you know, the most popular thing at Kubecon is the hallway tracks, right? So hallway tracks are always popular. And just being in the hallways, we call it lobby con and the CUBES on the floor there. So there's a lot of hallway conversations as hallway tracks, there's lightening talks, there's always something exciting, but even though people might move around from company to company for project to project, everyone kind of knows each other. So I think that kind of gives this kind of self governance piece, some legs. >> It does, and you're bringing up something that's really relevant right now 'cause it's virtual this year, right? So we don't get to have those hallway conversations. We don't get to have those, you know, accidental, you know, connections that means so much. I think they did an amazing job, amazing with the European version of Kubecon and you know, they're doing the best they can, I think the attend, I heard the attendance was great. The sessions were incredible from an efficiency standpoint. If you're an attendee, you could hit so many more sessions from home. There was so much to learn, the content was fabulous. The one thing that's missing, and I don't know how they replicate it is that ability to connect with your colleagues in the hallway, the folks you haven't seen'cause they, they moved on, they went to a different company. Maybe they'd been to two or three companies since you saw them last and the one place, you know, you're going to see them is at Kubecon or some of the other conferences you attend. >> Yeah and talking to Priyanka. And some of the co-chairs one of the things that was interesting out of that last conference was you had the virtual theater, but the Slack channel was very engaging. So you had people leaning in on the dialogue and it's interesting. And this is where I want to ask you your thoughts on the top conversations as we prepare. And we start doing the remote interviews, with the leaders of the CNCF, as well as the top end users, as well as vendors and companies, people want to know what's the top conversation that's happening and what are we looking for? So I want to ask you, what are you looking for, Ali? What are the things that you're trying to squint through? What smoke signals you're looking for? What's the trends that you're trying to tease out a coupon this year? >> I'm going to be really interested. You know, I already mentioned it once, but I'm going to be interested to hear how the new serverless projects are going. I know there are a couple in incubation that sounds really interesting. Priyanka brought them up when I've spoken with her. And so I'd love to see if those are getting so traction. What does the momentum around those look like? Is there as much excitement service meshes there was last year. I know there was a lot of discussion about what was happening with search. Most people were really excited. So I want to know what's happening with that. I want to know how new users to the community are dealing with the proliferation of projects. You know, how are they finding out ways to get involved? How are we nurturing new members to the CNCF community and making sure that they aren't overwhelmed, that they find their niche and they're able to contribute to become users, to do whatever their role is meant to be. I think those are the interesting things to me. How about you? >> That's a good question. I mean, I've, there's so many things. I mean, I look at the first of all, the open source projects are phenomenal. And again, talking about the people, I love to see the things that are maturing and getting promoted and what's kind of in sandbox, but I look at the, some of the ecosystem landscape maps with the vendors. And if you look at Amazon, Cisco and the HPE, IBM cloud, red hat, VMware to name a few, and you've got some other companies like Convolt for instance, which is pivoting to a cloud service, Microsoft Palo Alto networks for security Rancho was acquired., you know, a lot of companies are, I think at capital one out there, always in great end. You always great stuff. You got interesting and in Docker, for example, cup Docker containers, we did Docker con this year and I was blown away by the demand, the interest and just the openness of DAPA as they re-pivoted back to their roots. But I'm interested to see how the big cloud vendors are going to play because Google has always been an impressive and dominant partner in KubeCon, Amazon then joined, Azure is in there as well. So you've got those three, the big three in there. So the question is, okay, as this ecosystem is growing, I'm trying to tease out what is this, everything as a service, because one of the things that's coming out on the customer side, if you work backwards from the customer, they're getting kind of the missions from the CEOs and the CIO or CSO saying, "Take everything as a service," which is kind of like, I call it the ivory tower kind of marching orders. And then it gets handed down to the cloud architects and the developers and they go, "What's that? How's that, how does it's kind of hard?" It's not easy, right? So the modern apps is one and then this, everything as a service business model is going to be based upon cloud native. So I think the cloud native, this is the year that cloud native is going to start showing some signs and some visibility into what the metrics are going to be for success around the key projects. And then who can deliver at scale, do everything is a service. So, you know, understanding what that means, what does Kubernetes enable? What are some of the new things? So to me, I'm trying to tease that out because I think that's the next big wave. Everything is a service. And then what that means technically, how do you achieve it? Because when you start rolling out, it's like, okay, what's next? >> Yeah, I wonder who are going to be the new super users that emerged from this, you know, who are going to be the companies that maybe didn't adopt early, they're getting in now and they start running with it and they do incredible new things with it. And the truth is going to your earlier point about whether or not commercializing that, you know, should it be an upstream thing where you're using it vanilla using, you know, pure Kubernetes or using a vendor version? The truth is when you start getting vendors involved and getting super users involved, and these big companies, they can throw 10, 20 people at projects as contributors. You know, I tend to think of open source as being a bunch of small companies, but the truth is it's a lot harder for a small company to dedicate multiple head count to full-time contributions, right? Well big company, you could throw a couple dozen at them and not even blink. And so that's, it's critical to the survival truthfully of the community that we have, these big companies get in there and run with it. >> You know, I was talking to Constance and Steven Augustus, they're both co-chairs of the event and Steven brought up something. That's interesting because it's the theme that's kind of talked about, but no one likes to talk about it because it's kind of important and ugly at the same time. It's security and I think one of the things that I'm looking for this year, Ali is, you know, there's a buzz word out there has been kind of overused, but it's still kind of relevant and it's called shift left. So shift left means how do you build security into the CICB pipeline? So developers don't have to come back and do stuff, right? So it's like baking security in. This is going to be kind of a nuance point because of course everyone wants security, but that's not what application developers think about every day, right? It's like, they're not like security people, right? So, but they got to have security. So I think whoever can crack the code on making security brain dead easy will be great. And how that works together with across multiple vendors. So to me, that's something that I want to understand more. I don't yet have a formed opinion on it, but certainly we're hearing "Shift left" a lot. >> Yes I agree 100% at first we had developers and operators. Then we had devOps. Now I hear sec devOps all the time. You know, that I started hearing that last year and now these poor developers, you know, suddenly they are, whether they want to be, or not, to some degree, they are responsible for their company security, because if they aren't integrating best practices into their code, then they are introducing vulnerabilities. And so it it's just fallen upon them, whether they signed up for it or not, it's fallen upon them. And it'll be real interesting to see how that plays out. >> Well, one of the things I'd love to do is get me, you John, Troy, Keith Townsend, Justin Warren, and certainly Corey Quinn on a podcast or CUBE interview because man, we would have some war stories and have some real good stories to tell the evolution of what's real. And what's not real. Certainly Cory queen allows to talk about kind of like squinting through the hype and calling out kind of what's real, but this is kind of really kind of what's going on with coop comes a lot of exciting things. So I have to ask you over the years within CNCF and cloud nativecon and Kubecon, what are some of your favorite memories or moments that you can share could be personal, could be professional, could be code, could be accompany. What's some of the things that you can share about some, some happy moments for Kubecon >> Sure, sure, I'd say for me, some of the best moments have been the recent pivot toward trying to take care of the attendees. You know, I don't remember if it was San Diego. I think it was San Diego where they brought in all the puppies or mental wellness. And there was a meditation room. I don't know if you went in there, but it was quiet. And there was just some very soft lighting and some quiet music. And I didn't know how much traction that was going to get amongst attendees, that room was packed every time I went in there, dead quiet people relaxing, the puppies were bananas. People were just hoarding around the puppies and wanting to pet them. And I just really liked the way that they had really thought of a bunch of different angles to try to make sure that people who have left their families, they've come to a different place. They're, they're, they're under stress. 'Cause they're probably traveling with their boss and a bunch of their colleagues and they're stressed. And so to make sure that they had a break, I thought that was really somewhere where KubeCon was ahead of a lot of the other conferences I see. And it wasn't a single approach. It wasn't, we're going to throw a bunch of dogs in the hallway. It was, we're going to do that. We're going to have a therapist do a session. We're going to have puzzles in a quiet area at the hallway. It really went all in. And so for me, that was one of my favorite things from recent years. I thought that was fantastic. How about you? >> It's been fun. I mean, it's just so many moments. I mean, I love the European show. We did one year when I first, first time they had rolled out in Europe and I thought that was just so small and intimate. Of course the big mega shows have been great with activity. I think, but one of my favorite moments was I was wandering in the lobby. This was in Europe. It was, and it was a huge EU event, I think 2018 might've been, and I'm kind of buzzing around the lobby and I had nothing to do that night. And it was like five to 11 different parties to go to. People have, you know, dinners. And I ran into one of the CNCF co-hosts and also she's a Google engineer and I'm like, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" I'm like, she's like, "Oh, we're going to the women's happy hour." And I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." I'm like, "It sounds good." And she invited me and I went with her and I was the only guy there, okay. >> Oh lucky you. >> And I looked around and it was packed. And I said to myself, this is freaking amazing. And it was great women, great leaders, smart, super awesome. And they were all welcomed me. I wasn't like being stared at either, by the way. So I'm like, okay, there was no line for the men's room either by the way, just to, you know, and I was like, good tweet there. But I felt really welcomed. And I thought that was very cool. It was packed. And I went back until it's too much. Do you can't believe it was just really awesome. I was in this awesome happy hour. And I remember saying to myself, "This community is inclusive, they're awesome. And it was just one of just a great moment. >> It's great you've got to be the other side of that, right? Because as a woman, I am always on the standard side of it, which has guys everywhere, there's very few women, but here's the thing I have never felt intimidated or uncomfortable in any way at a Kubecon I've always felt welcomed, I've had fabulous interactions. I've met people from around the world. And I try to explain to my kids actually, when we talk and they they'll say something sometime not xenophobic, maybe that's an overstatement, but they're little kids. They don't have a great understanding of the world. And I'll say, "Wait till you grow up and you go to one of these conferences, you'll realize that people from countries that even fear that some of them there's some of the kindest, nicest, most polite people I have ever met. And you walk away really feeling like you want to just throw your arms around everyone, that's been my experience anyway. S0 maybe I've been lucky, but I haven't had that intimidation factor at all. >> You got it, you've got a great mindset and your kids are lucky. And I feel like for me, the moment was the community is very open and inclusive. And I think theCUBE when we interview people, we want people who are smart, you know, and we interview a lot of great women and at KubeCon, it's been fantastic, so that's the highlight. And of course the grueling hours, and then, you know, people like to drink beer in this community. And I like beer, although I'd been trimming down a little bit because, you know, IPA's have been kind of getting heavy on me, but good beer drinkers. They like to have fun and they also work hard and it's a great community, so. >> And now you have to bring your own beer. Now that it's virtual, you have to keep your own IPA. >> Well, the joke was virtual is that we can have a better lunch at home. 'Cause that's always kind of like the event thing. But I think virtuals, I miss the face to face, but we get to talk to more people with remote and they get more traffic on the site, but hopefully when it comes back, it'll be hybrid and we'll still be kind of doing more remote, but more face-to-face. >> So well, and it's more affordable. I did not look at what the pricing is this time, but I know for the European version, the pricing was very fair, certainly more affordable than going in real life. And, you know, for some folks who really can't swing that travel costs and the registration fee, it's a great opportunity to get in on the cheap and suck up a lot of knowledge really quickly. >> Well, Ali, thank you for riffing on Kubecon preview. Thank you very much. And looking forward to hosting with you and thanks for co-hosting on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, John. I enjoyed it. >> Thank you, okay you're watching theCUBE virtual. This is a Kubecon preview. I'm here with Ali. I'm a goo who's our new CUBE host helping out on the Kubecon looking forward to more interviews, this is the CUBE I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)