>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape/19. (techno music) >> Yeah, welcome back to theCube's coverage here in New York City for the first ever inaugural multicloud conference called Escape 2019, escape, we're in New York, we're not escaping from New York, we're escaping from the cloud. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs, the custodian/founders of Cockroach Database. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Congratulations on your new role, new gig. Been there for a while? >> Yeah it's been a while since I've seen you, John, I've jumped out of the data space and into Kubernetes, and so, yeah, I landed at Cockroach Labs about a year ago. And having fun. >> It's interesting, the game is still the same, data is still the same as a value proposition, but software. >> Yeah. >> Data is now code, data is looking, interacting with software, data control planes, data layers, data lakes. All this is an evolution of stuff we were talking about back in the open source days at Hortonworks. The data is in motion, data in flight, data at rest, data is continuing to be critical in automation, security, every single app. >> Yeah, it's at the center of the big battle right now, right, there's this like... I just sense there's a larger battle going on for the platform right now, and the platform is being battled out by these large public cloud providers, and it's who can get compute, who can get actually, you know, people, residents in their cloud. Data has always been the centerpiece of that. Data is gravity, if it was on, before it was on-premise, so the battle was in-house at all these people and now it's like how do we get this stuff to move over. >> Yeah, we were talking before you came on camera, it helps we talk online a lot, and have a lot of connected friends in the cloud native space, but now that Cloud 2.0 has arrived, where it's enterprise hybrid, people are starting to get excited about that, you're seeing the re-platformization or refactoring or whatever word you want to use, a modern enterprise architecture, that has the best of cloud native, has the best of what the enterprise used to do with comput-- like mini-computers, whatnot, now packaged up an operating model. This modernization trend is hitting everything, note, developers, security, this is kind of where you're playing right now. Look what Google's done with Spanner database and where that's all come from in these kinds of large-scale data problems. Modernization's here, what's your take on this? >> Yeah, I know this is modernization, but it's stuff we've been doing for a long time. It's like, you know, I was talking to Steve Mulaney earlier, Steve's brilliant, right, and Steve's talking about 1992 we saw this transition to kind of client server. I've never seen anything like this trans... This transition and this modernization is much bigger than any of the other trends that we've been through. Back when we were talking before it was the Hadoop game, and we were talking modern data architecture, how do we actually transform the way we thought about data from these kind of single stovepipes of data into larger data lakes and this sort of thing. That was the beginning. What we're seeing this time though is a massive transformation up and down the stack of which data is one huge, massive piece of that. And as we know, man, data has gravity and it's at the center of this battle again. >> What's your definition of multicloud? We're at the first ever multicloud conference, what is multicloud? >> You know I get asked this a fair amount, so as I was looking for speakers it was like, "Well, what do you mean, a multicloud conference, what does that even mean?" There's a lot of people, multicloud unbelievers. I think we already live in a multicloud world. I think hybrid cloud is just multicloud. I talked to a lot of people through the CFP process for the conference. I had guys who were running edge computing platforms saying, "Talk to me about this", I'm like, "Well, if you look at it, it's just servers, they're just servers that are everywhere" and actually, how do we actually start to attach all this stuff. It's all multicloud, you know what is the cloud but a bunch of different servers that somebody else owns? You may own them, you may not. The challenge is going to be how do we tie all that together? >> Computer history has proven, if anything, heterogeneous environments, multi-vendor. You can go back and talk about, the comment about the client server, I mean, that was a real threat to the mainframe. Internetworking completely changed the game. At that time PCs were exploding in growth, and multi-vendor was a big buzzword. And that was the reality, you had to compete and service multiple vendors in an environment. >> Yeah, and-- >> Multiple cloud is just multiple vendors. >> John, it's called the multicloud conference, and you know my friend Joseph Jacks, I mean Joseph and I have a lot of conversations about things, you know, and he's brilliant in terms of how he thinks about commercial open source and how these things are, and you know I really played around with changing the name of this to the open and independent cloud conference, because that's really what this is about, it's about how do we have a conversation, in the open, about how we open up the cloud? I just thought, I was a little frustrated with some of the conferences I went to because, I think people are talking about this, but it's not lip service, it's just difficult to talk about it in a broader sense. >> Well, I'm really glad you did this because I've been calling multicloud bullshit on theCube for over a year, Stu and I have debates about this, and you know, putting-- >> I watched. >> Okay, of course, but people who know what I mean know that I believe that multicloud reality of "I have Amazon, I got Azure, I mean, hell, if you upgrade Office 365, you have Azure, so that's another cloud. So yes, people have multiple clouds in their environment, but the foundational work is being done now, you guys are doing it, and that's what I was getting at. There's no multiclouding going on, meaning sense of the seamless workload, what HashiCorp is doing, so this is the foundational, what you guys are getting at, in my mind, at least from my perspective, is a foundational conversation around what is the foundation of multicloud look like. >> And John, there is a technical equation here. I think a lot of people will argue the technical merits of what is multicloud, is it even possible to combine networking and security and all, those are really difficult problems to solve. At Cockroach Labs, to solve the database problem, to solve the data problem, to actually have, you know I could spin up a node at Cockroach on this laptop that's sitting next to you and have that participate in a database that spans multiple clouds, that's awesome. But there's a whole other side of this conversation, John, around what does it mean for my skills in my organization, what does it mean for the financial side of things, the legal, and so I think we're all dealing with a lot of these multicloud concepts, we're just not addressing them yet, and so, it's complex. >> Well, first of all, it's fun too, I mean it's complex, but innovation is complex. But here's the thing, Dave and I were joking around Cloud 2.0 and we picked that term, talking about Cloud 2.0, mainly because I remember during Web 2.0, it was just, everyone was just, "What is Web"..., and to create such a debate, so to goof on Web 2.0 we said Cloud 2.0, but what we mean is that it's changing, right? I'll give you an example, I mean to me Cloud 2.0 or multicloud is having a fully horizontal scalable infrastructure, that on-demand, elastic resource with domain specialty application development that takes advantage of data and machine learning for domain-specific context. And then having an addressable data layer on top of that. That to me is multicloud. >> And being able to service your customers no matter where they are. And unfortunately the public copywriters don't have full coverage across the whole planet so we inherently live in this multicloud world. If you wanted to pull an application today, I'm sorry but the world is your audience, there's no segmenting your app to just New York, right? And so how you actually service customers when they're coming at you from all over the planet. It's another challenge that we have. Fortunately I want to add to your Cloud Two conversation, I'm sorry the Cloud 2.0 conversation, that it is a world of hybrid and multi and multi region and single region and it's the evolution between these different kind of flavors of this situation, I feel is the emerging trend that's happening and we're-- >> Well categories are changing, network management becomes observability, configuration management becomes automation, the old database becomes a different kind of database for you, data protection is cyber protection. There's redefining moments here where white spaces are becoming larger categories. I mean, look at observability, probably going public, getting bought. >> John, look at what Google did over the past, like, 10, 12 years and look at the startups that are now out there that are kind of doing this really innovative stuff. We have LightStep here, you know Cockroach is another great example, what the Upbound team is doing, so people have been through this. From a data point of view we couldn't agree more. I can spin up an instance of RDS, Postgres and it's going to be a single instance, it's going to live in one region and that's going to service one bit of a cloud in one corner of the world. The cloud, and this massive distribution of stuff, it changed, you have to inherently start over when you're building these technologies, and that's why the CNCF has come about, right, is there's a fundamentally different approach-- >> CNCF, I love those guys and we're going to go to do CubeCon, but one of the things that I was talking with hashCode co-founder earlier today, he was talking about workflows. I was talking about workloads, and so I think the conversation is still technical and geeky but if you just abstract out all of the nerd talk and geek talk and say, "What's the workflow and what's the workload?", you go, okay, no other buzzwords should be talked. You've got to go onstage, so you've got to go. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing, Cockroach Labs, good friend of theCube, and our producer of this show, Mike Harold and the team, Escape/19, first inaugural multicloud conference. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape/19. (techno music) >> Yeah, welcome back to theCube's coverage here in New York City for the first ever inaugural multicloud conference called Escape 2019, escape, we're in New York, we're not escaping from New York, we're escaping from the cloud. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs, the custodian/founders of Cockroach Database. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Congratulations on your new role, new gig. Been there for a while? >> Yeah it's been a while since I've seen you, John, I've jumped out of the data space and into Kubernetes, and so, yeah, I landed at Cockroach Labs about a year ago. And having fun. >> It's interesting, the game is still the same, data is still the same as a value proposition, but software. >> Yeah. >> Data is now code, data is looking, interacting with software, data control planes, data layers, data lakes. All this is an evolution of stuff we were talking about back in the open source days at Hortonworks. The data is in motion, data in flight, data at rest, data is continuing to be critical in automation, security, every single app. >> Yeah, it's at the center of the big battle right now, right, there's this like... I just sense there's a larger battle going on for the platform right now, and the platform is being battled out by these large public cloud providers, and it's who can get compute, who can get actually, you know, people, residents in their cloud. Data has always been the centerpiece of that. Data is gravity, if it was on, before it was on-premise, so the battle was in-house at all these people and now it's like how do we get this stuff to move over. >> Yeah, we were talking before you came on camera, it helps we talk online a lot, and have a lot of connected friends in the cloud native space, but now that Cloud 2.0 has arrived, where it's enterprise hybrid, people are starting to get excited about that, you're seeing the re-platformization or refactoring or whatever word you want to use, a modern enterprise architecture, that has the best of cloud native, has the best of what the enterprise used to do with comput-- like mini-computers, whatnot, now packaged up an operating model. This modernization trend is hitting everything, note, developers, security, this is kind of where you're playing right now. Look what Google's done with Spanner database and where that's all come from in these kinds of large-scale data problems. Modernization's here, what's your take on this? >> Yeah, I know this is modernization, but it's stuff we've been doing for a long time. It's like, you know, I was talking to Steve Mulaney earlier, Steve's brilliant, right, and Steve's talking about 1992 we saw this transition to kind of client server. I've never seen anything like this trans... This transition and this modernization is much bigger than any of the other trends that we've been through. Back when we were talking before it was the Hadoop game, and we were talking modern data architecture, how do we actually transform the way we thought about data from these kind of single stovepipes of data into larger data lakes and this sort of thing. That was the beginning. What we're seeing this time though is a massive transformation up and down the stack of which data is one huge, massive piece of that. And as we know, man, data has gravity and it's at the center of this battle again. >> What's your definition of multicloud? We're at the first ever multicloud conference, what is multicloud? >> You know I get asked this a fair amount, so as I was looking for speakers it was like, "Well, what do you mean, a multicloud conference, what does that even mean?" There's a lot of people, multicloud unbelievers. I think we already live in a multicloud world. I think hybrid cloud is just multicloud. I talked to a lot of people through the CFP process for the conference. I had guys who were running edge computing platforms saying, "Talk to me about this", I'm like, "Well, if you look at it, it's just servers, they're just servers that are everywhere" and actually, how do we actually start to attach all this stuff. It's all multicloud, you know what is the cloud but a bunch of different servers that somebody else owns? You may own them, you may not. The challenge is going to be how do we tie all that together? >> Computer history has proven, if anything, heterogeneous environments, multi-vendor. You can go back and talk about, the comment about the client server, I mean, that was a real threat to the mainframe. Internetworking completely changed the game. At that time PCs were exploding in growth, and multi-vendor was a big buzzword. And that was the reality, you had to compete and service multiple vendors in an environment. >> Yeah, and-- >> Multiple cloud is just multiple vendors. >> John, it's called the multicloud conference, and you know my friend Joseph Jacks, I mean Joseph and I have a lot of conversations about things, you know, and he's brilliant in terms of how he thinks about commercial open source and how these things are, and you know I really played around with changing the name of this to the open and independent cloud conference, because that's really what this is about, it's about how do we have a conversation, in the open, about how we open up the cloud? I just thought, I was a little frustrated with some of the conferences I went to because, I think people are talking about this, but it's not lip service, it's just difficult to talk about it in a broader sense. >> Well, I'm really glad you did this because I've been calling multicloud bullshit on theCube for over a year, Stu and I have debates about this, and you know, putting-- >> I watched. >> Okay, of course, but people who know what I mean know that I believe that multicloud reality of "I have Amazon, I got Azure, I mean, hell, if you upgrade Office 365, you have Azure, so that's another cloud. So yes, people have multiple clouds in their environment, but the foundational work is being done now, you guys are doing it, and that's what I was getting at. There's no multiclouding going on, meaning sense of the seamless workload, what HashiCorp is doing, so this is the foundational, what you guys are getting at, in my mind, at least from my perspective, is a foundational conversation around what is the foundation of multicloud look like. >> And John, there is a technical equation here. I think a lot of people will argue the technical merits of what is multicloud, is it even possible to combine networking and security and all, those are really difficult problems to solve. At Cockroach Labs, to solve the database problem, to solve the data problem, to actually have, you know I could spin up a node at Cockroach on this laptop that's sitting next to you and have that participate in a database that spans multiple clouds, that's awesome. But there's a whole other side of this conversation, John, around what does it mean for my skills in my organization, what does it mean for the financial side of things, the legal, and so I think we're all dealing with a lot of these multicloud concepts, we're just not addressing them yet, and so, it's complex. >> Well, first of all, it's fun too, I mean it's complex, but innovation is complex. But here's the thing, Dave and I were joking around Cloud 2.0 and we picked that term, talking about Cloud 2.0, mainly because I remember during Web 2.0, it was just, everyone was just, "What is Web"..., and to create such a debate, so to goof on Web 2.0 we said Cloud 2.0, but what we mean is that it's changing, right? I'll give you an example, I mean to me Cloud 2.0 or multicloud is having a fully horizontal scalable infrastructure, that on-demand, elastic resource with domain specialty application development that takes advantage of data and machine learning for domain-specific context. And then having an addressable data layer on top of that. That to me is multicloud. >> And being able to service your customers no matter where they are. And unfortunately the public copywriters don't have full coverage across the whole planet so we inherently live in this multicloud world. If you wanted to pull an application today, I'm sorry but the world is your audience, there's no segmenting your app to just New York, right? And so how you actually service customers when they're coming at you from all over the planet. It's another challenge that we have. Fortunately I want to add to your Cloud Two conversation, I'm sorry the Cloud 2.0 conversation, that it is a world of hybrid and multi and multi region and single region and it's the evolution between these different kind of flavors of this situation, I feel is the emerging trend that's happening and we're-- >> Well categories are changing, network management becomes observability, configuration management becomes automation, the old database becomes a different kind of database for you, data protection is cyber protection. There's redefining moments here where white spaces are becoming larger categories. I mean, look at observability, probably going public, getting bought. >> John, look at what Google did over the past, like, 10, 12 years and look at the startups that are now out there that are kind of doing this really innovative stuff. We have LightStep here, you know Cockroach is another great example, what the Upbound team is doing, so people have been through this. From a data point of view we couldn't agree more. I can spin up an instance of RDS, Postgres and it's going to be a single instance, it's going to live in one region and that's going to service one bit of a cloud in one corner of the world. The cloud, and this massive distribution of stuff, it changed, you have to inherently start over when you're building these technologies, and that's why the CNCF has come about, right, is there's a fundamentally different approach-- >> CNCF, I love those guys and we're going to go to do CubeCon, but one of the things that I was talking with hashCode co-founder earlier today, he was talking about workflows. I was talking about workloads, and so I think the conversation is still technical and geeky but if you just abstract out all of the nerd talk and geek talk and say, "What's the workflow and what's the workload?", you go, okay, no other buzzwords should be talked. You've got to go onstage, so you've got to go. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing, Cockroach Labs, good friend of theCube, and our producer of this show, Mike Harold and the team, Escape/19, first inaugural multicloud conference. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)