>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon LIVE 2020, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon LIVE 2020. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Deepak Singh. He's the vice president of compute services at Amazon Web Services. Deepak, great to see you. >> Likewise, hi, Stu. Nice to meet you again. >> All right, so for our audience that hasn't been in your previous times on theCUBE, give us a little bit about, you know, your role and your organization inside AWS? >> Yeah, so I'm, I've been part of the AWS compute services world from, for the last 12 years in various capacities. Today, I run a number of teams, all our container services, our Linux teams, I also happen to run a high performance computing organization, so it's a nice mix of all the computing that our customers do, especially some of the more new and large scale compute types that our customers are doing. >> All right, so Deepak, obviously, you know, the digital events, we understand what's happening with the global pandemic. DockerCon was actually always planned to be an online event but I want to understand, you know, your teams, how things are affecting, we know distributed is something that Amazon's done, but you have to cut up those two pizza and send them out to the additional groups or, you know, what advice are you giving the developers out there? >> Yeah, in many ways, obviously, how we operate has changed. We are at home, maybe I think with our families. DockerCon was always going to be virtual, but many other events like AWS Summits are now virtual so, you know, in some ways, the teams, the people that get most impacted are not necessarily the developers in our team but people who interact a lot with customers, who go to conferences and speak and they are finding new ways of being effective and being successful and they've been very creative at it. Our customers are getting very good at working with us virtually because we can always go to their site, they can always come to Seattle, or run of other sites for meeting. So we've all become very good at, and disciplined at how do you conduct really nice virtual meetings. But from a customer commitment side, from how we are operating, the things that we're doing, not that much has changed. We still run our projects the same way, the teams work together. My team tends to do a lot of happy things like Friday happy hours, they happen to be all virtual. I think last time we played, what word, bingo? I forget exactly what game we played. I know I got some point somewhere. But we do our best to maintain sort of our team chemistry or camaraderie but the mission doesn't change which is our customers expect us to keep operating their services, make sure that they're highly available, keep delivering new capabilities and I think in this environment, in some ways that's even more important than ever, as customer, as the consumer moves online and so much business is being done virtually so it keeps us on our toes but it's been an adjustment but I think we are all, not just us, I think the whole world is doing the best that they can under the circumstances. >> Yeah, absolutely, it definitely has humanized things quite a bit. From a technology standpoint, Deepak, you know, distributed systems has really been the challenge of you know, quite a long journey that people have been going on. Docker has played, you know, a really important role in a lot of these cloud native technologies. It's been just amazing to watch, you know, one of the things I point to in my career is, you know, watching from those very, very early days of Docker to the Cambrian explosion of what we've seen container based services, you know, you've been part of it for quite a number of years and AWS had many services out there. For people that are getting started, you know, what guidance do you give them? What do they understand about, you know, containerization in 2020? >> Yeah, containerization in 2020 is quite a bit different from when Docker started in 2013. I remember speaking at DockerCon, I forget, that's 2014, 2015, and it was a very different world. People are just trying to figure out what containers are that they could package code in deeper. Today, containers are mainstream, it is more customers or at least many customers and they are starting to build new applications, probably starting them either with containers or with some form of server technology. At least that's the default starting point but increasingly, we also seen customers with existing applications starting to think about how do they adapt? And containers are a means to an end. The end is how can we move faster? How can we deliver more quickly? How can our teams be more productive? And how can you do it more, less expensively, at lower cost? And containers are a big part, important and critical piece of that puzzle, both from how customers are operating their infrastructure, that there's a whole ecosystem of schedulers and orchestration and security tools and all the things that an enterprise need to deliver applications using containers that they have built up. Over the last few years, you know, we have multiple container services that meet those needs. And I think that's been the biggest change is that there's so much more. Which also means that when you're getting started, you're faced with many more options. When Docker started, it was this cute whale, Docker run, Docker build Docker push, it was pretty simple, you could get going really quickly. And today you have 500 different options. My guidance to customers really is, boils down to what are you trying to achieve? If you're an organization that's trying to corral infrastructure and trying to use an existing VM more effectively, for example, you probably do want to invest in becoming experts at schedulers and understanding orchestration technologies like ECS and EKS work but if you just want to run applications, you probably want to look at something like Fargate or more. I mean, you could go towards Lambda and just run code. But I think it all boils down to where you're starting your journey. And by the way, understanding Docker run, Docker build and Docker push is still a great idea. It helps you understand how things work. >> All right, so Deepak, you've already brought up a couple of AWS services of, you know, talk about the options out there, that you can either run on top of AWS, you have a lot of native services, you know, ECS, EKS, you mentioned, Fargate there, and very broad ecosystem in space. Could you just, you know, obviously, there are entire breakout sessions to talk about , the various AWS services, but you know, give us that one on one level as to what to understand for container service by AWS. >> Yeah, and these services evolved organically and we launched the Amazon Elastic Container Service or ECS in preview in November or whenever re:Invent was that year in 2014, which seems ages ago in the world of containers but in the end, our goal is to give our customers the most choice, so that they can solve problems the way they want to solve them. So Amazon ECS is our native container orchestration service, it's designed to work with and the rest of the AWS ecosystem. So it uses VPC for networking, it uses IAM identity, it uses ALB for load balancing, other than just good examples, some examples of how it works. But it became pretty clear over time that there was a lot of customers who were investing in communities, very often starting in their own data centers. And as they migrated onto the cloud, they wanted to continue using the same tool plane but they also wanted to not have to manage the complexity of communities control planes, upgrades. And they also wanted some of the same integrations that they were getting with ECS and so that's where the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or EKS comes in, which is, okay, we will manage a control plane for you. We will manage upgrades and patches for you. You focus on building your applications in Kubernetes way, so it embraces Kubernetes. It has, invokes with all the Kubernetes tooling and gives you a Kubernetes native experience, but then also ties into the broad AWS ecosystem and allows us to take care of some of the muck that many customers quite frankly don't and shouldn't have to worry about. But then we took it one step further and actually launched the same time as EKS and that's, AWS Fargate, and Fargate was, came from the recognition that we had, actually, a long time ago, which is, one of the beauties of EC2 was that customers never had, had to stop, didn't have to worry about racking and stacking and where a server was running anymore. And the idea was, how can we apply that to the world of containers. And we also learned a little bit from what we had done with Lambda. And we took that and took the server layer and took it out of the way. Then from a customer standpoint, all you're launching is a pod or a task or a service and you're not worrying about which machines I need to get, what types of machines I need to get. And the operational simplicity that comes with it is quite remarkable and quite finding not that, surprisingly, our customers want us to keep pushing the boundary of the kind operational simplicity we can give them but Fargate serves a critical building block and part of that, and we're super excited because, you know, today by far when a new customer, when a customer comes and runs a container on AWS the first time they pick Fargate, we're usually using ECS because EKS and Fargate is much newer, but that is a default starting point for any new container customer on AWS which is great. >> All right, well, you know, Docker, the company really helped a lot with that democratization, container technologies, you know, all those services that you talked about from AWS. I'm curious now, the partnership with Docker here, you know, how do some of the AWS services, you know, fit in with Docker? I'm thinking Docker Desktop probably someplace that they're, you know, or some connection? >> Yeah, I think one of the things that Docker has always been really good at as a company, as a project, is understanding the developer and the fact that they start off on a laptop. That's where the original Docker experience that go well, and Docker Desktop since then and we see a ton of Docker Desktop customers have used AWS. We also learned very early on, because originally ECS CLI supported Docker Compose. That ecosystem is also very rich and people like building Docker files and post files and just being able to launch them. So we continue to learn from what Docker is doing with Docker Desktop. We continue working with them on making sure that customizing the Docker Compose and Docker Desktop can run all their services and application on AWS. And we'll continue working with Docker, the company, on how we make that a lot easier for our customers, they are our mutual customers, and how we can learn from their simplicity that Docker, the simplicity that Docker brings and the sort of ease of use the Docker bring for the developer and the developer experience. We learn from that for our own services and we love working with them to make sure that the customer that's starting with Docker Desktop or the Docker CLI has a great experience as they move towards a fully orchestrated experience in the cloud, for example. There's a couple of other areas where Docker has turned out to have had foresight and driven some of our thinking. So a few years ago, Docker released this thing called containerd, where they took out their container runtime from inside the bigger Docker engine. And containerd has become a very important project for us as well as, it's the underpinning of Fargate now and we see a lot of interest from customers that want to keep building on containerd as well. And it's going to be very interesting to see how we work with Docker going forward and how we can continue to give our customers a lot of value, starting from the laptop and then ending up with large scale services in the cloud. >> Very interesting stuff, you know, interesting. Anytime we have a conversation about Docker, there's Docker the technology and Docker the company and that leads us down the discussion of open-source technologies . You were just talking about, you know, containerd believe that connects us to Firecracker. What you and your team are involved in, what's your viewpoint is the, you know, what you're seeing from open-source, how does Amazon think of that? And what else can you share with the audience on this topic? >> Yeah, as you've probably seen over the last few years, both from our work in Kubernetes, with things like Firecracker and more recently Bottlerocket. AWS gets deeply involved with open-source in a number of ways. We are involved heavily with a number of CNCF projects, whether it be containerd, whether it be things like Kubernetes itself, projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, the service mesh world with Envoy and with the containerd project. So where containerd fits in really well with AWS is in a project that we call firecracker-containerd. They're effectively for Fargate, firecracker-containerd as we move Fargate towards Firecracker becomes out of the container in which you run containerd. It's effectively the equivalent of runC in a traditional Docker engine world. And, you know, one of the first things we did when Firecracker got rolled out was open-source the firecracker-containerd project. It's a go project and the idea was it's a great way for people to build VM like isolation and then build sort of these serverless container architectures like we want to do with Fargate. And, you know, I think Firecracker itself has been a great success. You see customer, you know, companies like Libvirt integrating with Firecracker. I've seen a few other examples of, sometimes unbeknownst to us, of people picking a Firecracker and using it for very, very interesting use cases and not just on AWS in other places as well. And we learnt a lot from that that's kind of why Bottlerocket is, was released the way it was. It is both a product and a project. Bottlerocket, the operating system is an open-source project. It's on GitHub, it has all the building tooling, you can take it and do whatever you want with it. And then on the AWS side, we will build and publish Bottlerocket armies, Amazon machine images, we will support them on AWS and there it's a product. But then Bottlerocket the project is something that anybody in the world who wants to run a minimal operating system can choose to pick up. And I think we've learnt a lot from these experiences, how we deal with the community, how we work with other people who are interested in contributing. And you know, Docker is one of the, the Docker open-source pieces and Docker the company are both part of the growing open-source ecosystem that's coming from AWS, especially on the container world. So it's going to be very interesting. And I'll end with, containerization has started impacting other parts of AWS, as well as our other services are being built, very often through ECS and EKS, but they're also influencing how we think about what capabilities we need to build into the broader container ecosystem. >> Yeah, Deepak, you know, you mentioned that some of the learnings from Lambda has impacted the services you're doing on the containerization side. You know, we've been watching some of the blurring of the lines between another container world and the containerization world. You know, there's some open-source projects out there, the CNCS working on things, you know, what's the latest, as you see kind of containerization and serverless and you know, where do you see them going forward? >> This is that I say that crystal balls are not my strong suite. But we hear customers, customers often want the best of both world. What we see very often is that customers don't actually choose just Fargate or just Lambda, they'll choose both. Where for different pieces of their architecture, they may pick a different solution. And sometimes that's driven by what they know, sometimes driven by what fits into their need. Some of the lines blur but they're still quite different. Lambda, for example, as a very event driven architecture, it is one process at a time. It has all these event hooks into the rest of AWS that are hard to replicate. And if that's the world you want to live in or benefit from, you're going to use lambda. If you're running long running services or you want a particular size that you don't get in Lambda or you want to take a more traditional application and convert it into a more modern application, chances are you're starting on Fargate but it fits in really well you have an existing operational model that fits into it. So we see applications evolving very interestingly. It's one reason why when we build a service mesh, we thought forward instead. It is almost impossible that we will have a world that's 100% containers, 100% Lambda or 100% EC2. It's going to be some mix of all of these. We have to think about it that way. And it's something that we constantly think about is how can we do things in a way that companies aren't forced to pick one way to it and "Oh, I'm going to build on Fargate" and then months later, they're like, "Yeah, we should have probably done Lambda." And I think that is something we think a lot about, whether it's from a developer's experience side or if it's from service meshes, which allow you to move back and forth or make the mesh. And I think that is the area where you'll see us do a lot more going forward. >> Excellent, so last last question for you Deepak is just give us a little bit as to what, you know, industry watchers will be looking at the container services going forward, next kind of 12, 18 months? >> Yeah, so I think one of the great things of the last 18 months has been that type of application that we see customers running, I don't think there's any bound to it. We see everything from people running microservices, or whatever you want to call decoupled services these days, but are services in the end, people are running, most are doing a lot of batch processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence that work with containers. But I think where the biggest dangers are going to come is as companies mature, as companies make containers, not just things that they build greenfield applications but also start thinking about migrating legacy applications in much more volume. A few things are going to happen. I think we'll be, containers come with a lot of complexity right now. I think you've, if you've seen my last two talks at re:Invent along with David Richardson from the Lambda team. You'll hear that we talk a lot about the fact that we see, we've made customers think about more things than they used to in the pre container world. I think you'll see now that the early adopter techie part has done, cloud has adopted containers and the next wave of mainstream users is coming in, you'll see more attractions come on as well, you'll see more governance, I think service meshes have a huge role to play here. How identity works or this fits into things like control tower and more sort of enterprise focused tooling around how you put guardrails around your containerized applications. You'll see it two or three different directions, I think you'll see a lot more on the serverless side, just the fact that so many customers start with Fargate, they're going to make us do more. You'll see a lot more on the ease of use developer experience of production side because you started off with the folks who like to tinker and now you're getting more and more customers that just want to run. And then you'll see, and that's actually a place where Docker, the company and the project have a lot to offer, because that's always been different. And then on the other side, you have the governance guardrails, and how is going to be in a compliant environment, how am I going to migrate all these applications over so that work will keep going on and you'll more and more of that. So those are the three buckets I'll use, the world can surprise us and you might end up with something completely radically different but that seems like what we're hearing from our customers right now. >> Excellent, well, Deepak, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us again on theCUBE. >> No, always a pleasure Stu and hopefully, we get to do this again someday in person. >> Absolutely, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching theCUBE. >> Deepak: Yep, thank you. (gentle music)