>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at Nutanix NEXT 2018, happy to welcome to the program Brian Stevens, who's the CTO of Google Cloud, had on the program many times. Brian, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> Stu: And have a first time guest, Ricardo Jenez, who's the SVP of Development at Nutanix. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you for being, thanks for being here. >> Alright, so Ricardo you've only been with Nutanix for three months. I believe this is probably your first .NEXT? >> Ricardo: Yes, it is. >> So give us a little bit about your role and what brings you to us today. >> So I'm responsible for some of the core data path and per some products. So, you know, a lot of it has to do with how do we end up delivering value to our customers and actually end up having predictable, scalable HCI solutions. So, that's really what I'm focused on and focusing on sort of improving our ability to deliver products more quickly. >> So Brian, last year Diane Greene was up on stage talking about the partnership and what was happening here, see Google at the show, obviously a tighter partnership for Nutanix, but give us the update on-- >> We're downgrading. >> Yeah? >> Slumming it. >> Not at all. Not at all. I wish we had enough time to get into the weeds on some of the stuff you're working on, but tell us what brings you here and what kind of stuff you're poking at these days. >> Geez, I think I met Sunil Potti a couple years ago, just at the very beginning of trying to find sort of the intersection between Google Cloud and Nutanix. I mean, Nutanix is largely redefining what IT looks like on premise. We believe we're doing that in cloud, and you really just want to eliminate the impedance between on-premise and public cloud, and so the work with Nutanix is all like what can we do to actually make it more seamless for users that want to use core cloud technology. >> Yeah Brian, you're one of those people that we would say have enterprise DNA in what they've done in their background. People on the outside will always say, Well you know, it's Google, it's Google-y. It's too smart for us. >> Brian: Enterprise DNA is still sexy. >> Yeah, I mean look, there's a lot of enterprises out there, and while yes, the other startups. Maybe we talk a little bit about what that means inside Google. >> Oh my gosh, yeah it was quite a pivot for Google, you know. It was amazing technology, but the customer that you were serving with Google Cloud was already inside of Google. You were serving Surge and YouTube and ads. So you end being up, a really technically, but close relationship. And so what enterprise is, a couple things, it's been a cultural transformation inside of Google, it's been obviously working with enterprise customers globally and building that go to market model and motion that you can sell, but we want a really technical engineered partnership with our customers. So it's not a vendor relationship. So building all that out, we thing we're unique with that. And then the other part I think you were alluding to early before we went on mic, was just around enterprise has a increased set of requirements on what we deliver them from a capabilities perspective, from a security aspect, from a telemetry aspect. And then it's all like how do we actually slipstream into their process, rather than just redefine everything. So to us, that's a big part of what our enterprise pivot's been, for the last three, four years. >> So Ricardo, you have some background at Google. What brought you to Nutanix? What appealed to you? >> Well you know, more than anything else, I think Nutanix has set themselves up, to basically take that experience it has in enterprise, and translate that into the cloud. So when I was at Google, I actually worked on the Google search appliance, which was Google's first-- >> I remember that. >> You remember that. >> I had that one. >> Little yellow boxes, sometimes blue boxes, and that was a great experience. So I'm really happy to hear that Brain talk about the transformation that has happened within Google. But you know, being at Nutanix, the ability to take that experience very close with the work loads that customers are running, and then being able to work with a partner like Google and actually be able to have hybrid clouds where internal private cloud plus having public cloud providers, that really ends up changing the game for a lot of enterprises. >> Yep. Brain, One of the things we've been struggling with as an industry is, you know, it's application mobility. Data, where it goes. Nutanix has been talking about really hybrid cloud from their standpoint. We've talked with you before about where Kubernetes fits into this. Application portability, you just made an acquisition, today was announced, Velostrata. Give us your state on where those things added, it's a big gnarly topic. >> It was just more friction, like public cloud offers great capability that's going to be used not necessarily completely instead of, but in companion to, you know, application services. But there was still that friction around in the early incarnation, it was like it's VMware in this environment or KVM in this environment, and it's a whole nother AMI kind of model here. So the ability to use it, there was a tax. And then there also wasn't that portability and that lightweight aspect that you'd want from an application containerization. I mean, you want what you have on your phone. You want that ability to install apps anywhere. And cloud and IT infrastructure should be exactly the same way. So that's a big part of our investment in containerization. You know Google, back when I was at Red Hat, was investing in cgroups back when there was a kernel, way back then to kind of build that first incarnation of containers in Linux. Along comes Docker to standardize that. I mean, it's an amazing gift to the world. And then Kubernetes is, we're just moving up the stack, on how do you orchestrate it. So sure, companies like Velostrata are really interesting because you have, you know, beyond having Kubernetes platform everywhere, yeah we'll say it's the de facto, but that doesn't mean everybody's running it. And so you're still running on existing systems, you know, largely kind of virtualized. And Velostrata is a technology leader in being virtualization of this type to Google Cloud or other clouds. And then even more so, the technology they have to bring that to containers. So they help you do that migration, transformation process. And I think that's really important for IT organizations. >> Ricardo, you want to comment on some of the hybrid cloud migration stuff? >> So we have our com product, which allows us to actually end up taking workload and moving it to, for instance, Google Cloud or eventually sciCloud and then moving that workload back. So having that sort of Nutanix inside and outside gives it maximum flexibility, and that's a lot of power for IT to have, right? Deciding where it's best to actually run their workloads and be as efficient as possible. >> So as we look at the com, we look at Google Cloud, just the overall pictures, if you're enterprise, you're looking at Google and you're saying man, Google runs at two different speeds. One is 12 factor, micro services, Kubernetes, functions. And then the other side is that, some people just want a VM. They just want a cloud instance and how to make that simple. So let's talk about this relationship. How does Nutanix come together with Google who runs at two different speeds, to make Google Cloud more consumable to the average enterprise? >> Well we're going to talk a little bit more about it later, but the fact that basically we're going to be able to deploy Xi within Google Cloud with nested AHV, and then allow our customers, that'll basically be doing standard workloads to migrate their jobs over to a Google Cloud offering. And as Brian will point out, that basically creates opportunities for them to be able to avail themselves of other capabilities that Google has. So it's not altogether an instant moving path to rewrite, reorient all your apps. It's an ability to kind of do that school migration, if you want to. But you have that capability of being able to go back and forth, in terms of what your workloads are. >> Yeah. >> Brian, want to get your viewpoint on just some of the changing roles that are happening in our industry. We were talking that some of the interviews we've been doing today, it's people talking about infrastructure and code. There was a big hackathon at this event for the first time in, they sold out with over 14 groups, and everything like that. This is a show that started out with people talking about storage, and now we're talking about individual data centers and clouds and all of those things. What are you seeing out in the marketplace? What are some of the challenges and opportunities you're hearing from customers these days? >> I mean it depends on which customers, right? Which region of the world and what their business looks like and I think we all know the holy grail. Infrastructure, as code, is an implementation, but I think what we know that what you really desire is the ability for reproduce ability. The ability to sort of not have state in the IT process. You want to be able to recreate things anywhere. Recreate a whole application, blueprint internally, on public cloud. Tear it down, recreate it. There's no other way to do that without code. So what sort of comes from that SRE model that Google invented, is that what it you didn't have an IT department? And what if you had software engineers that were responsible for IT function? What would that look like? And that's where all of the sudden you realize, everything's APIs and code. So I think that's interesting, and that's sort of where you want to get to, but it's then like, how do you bridge that because a lot of people aren't software developers in IT departments. >> So here's my follow up, 'cause when I go to the Kubernetes show and I talk to users there, 95% of them-- >> They're way over there. >> Had built their own stack, and why do they do that? Because they were ahead of all the platforms. And then I come to the Nutanix show and they're like oh, tensorflow and functions and all that stuff. We're going to put an easy button, and make it easy. I need to take all of these tools and open source and put it together, versus the platform and the easy button. Is this just the early adopters and the majority? >> I think that's okay. That's the open source world, right? I mean think about what's great about open source, is not just creating sort of a venue for collaboration and developers, it's creating access for end users. And so some of the best companies in the world have been built on a DIY model of people just taking open source and integrating it and making the recipe that they want. And so I think you get that whole sort of spectrum and you aren't forced down this model of, here's a COTS product, oh and it happens to be based on open source, but you always have to use technology this way. Open source gives them the freedom to do it as they want. We just need to make sure that we bridge it, so that there's not anybody left behind. That everybody should be able to use the power of Kubernetes, and that means making things super easy to use, and the integration with Nutanix we think is a huge part of making you use that technology stack in a way that's seamlessly operated for an audience like this. >> So a lot of the debate and questions around Kubernetes is how far should it go? Should it go as far as being an opinionated pass? Should it just be a container platform? Where does it start and end? >> Brian: You want my opinion? >> Yeah, opinion that would be awesome. >> Yeah, that was it. Well I think the way the industry started was obviously, there were no PASes, and then we built OpenShift to Red Hat and Google app engine in Roku. And what happened is, those are interesting, but you're right, they are overly opinionated. So you were left either picking a PAS, and you got to change everything to do it this way, and it's great because it delivers value of managed service, but not everything fit in that model. Or you got next to nothing. >> Keith: Right. >> You got a straight IS platform, and then you got to do all the rest. So what we've been doing at Google is tearing that apart and building that architecture from the ground up where you opt into the level that you want. If you want to be able to use IS and the features of IS you use that. If you want to step up and just use containers and IS, you can use containers and IS. If you want to step up and use Kubernetes orchestration, you can do that. If you want to step up and run managing everything in services, than that stacks on top of Kubernetes with STO. If you want to be full on and put in a developer workflow that always has you do deploys this way, then that stacks on top. So I think you're going to get away from this false dichotomy of a choice over here or here, and you're going to all of a sudden get this architectural layering cake that lets you opt into what you want and have IT consistency all the way through it. >> I mean, I used to have a startup that was focused on Hatuputu service, and you know one of the things was basically you didn't have this layering, right? It was, you take the whole stack or you take nothing. And I think the strategy that Google has employed with Kubernetes is just brilliant, to kind of work you way up and basically get people at different levels to be involved. You know, there is a do-it-yourself folks, and they should be allowed to and empowered to do the things that they want to do. And then there are other people who want to have more composed environment. And so we can actually bring that to them as well. And I think that's brilliant. Basically very early on, while Google used a lot of open source internally, it wasn't a strong sort of part of the open source environment. And so I've just enjoyed watching the evolution of Google, sort of leading the open source movement. So, it's been fantastic. I'm right there with you, you know, give them at every level. >> Ricardo, one of the questions coming into this week, people want to know the update of what's happening with Xi. Can you speak about where we are with that and the relationship with Google? What should we be looking for for the rest of this year? >> Well I can't really talk about that, but you know, we are working very closely with Google. And we'll talk a little bit about that at our talk later today. But I won't comment on anything to do with Xi. >> So that gives me the opportunity to ask another controversial question about Kubernetes and getting both of your opinions on it. There's religions and open sourced as religions, enterprise IT, one of which is DevOps. And you look at what companies like Netflix have done with containerizing Java applications and running those legacy Java applications in their container platform. Enterprises are looking at that stuff and thinking, you know what, can I containerize my monolithic application, put it on top of Kubernetes, and drive more efficiency out of my operations from portability to being able to stack up applications in public cloud, general things. Monolithic applications, is that a good thing, bad thing, indifferent? Wrong plate, wrong tool, wrong-- >> No, I think it's just that there's no like one size even for what a monolithic app looks like. Like we don't really have a really proper definition of what it is, but I think people do feel that all of a sudden Kubernetes needs a rewrite and containers needs a rewrite, and actually it doesn't. Because apps are usually sort of separated from the OS already. And so what they're doing is marrying the libraries of the OS, and containers allows them to do that, but just get a higher degree of portability and then with Kubernetes orchestration. So it really depends more around what's the machine resources that that monolithic app needs and are those machine resources still available in a containerized environment. In most cases, the answer is yes. Now the most interesting thing is, what's the escape hatch? Because you can't have a monolithic app that your company, say it's on Mainframe, say it's in the case of something that will not containerize and shouldn't because it's working as designed and there's no use touching it. But that should still participate in the application architecture of the future. And that's why SEO and services are so important. So even if you can't change your runtime stack, you still need to be able to put a services layer in an API in front of that monolithic service, and you'll have a visibility of a service mesh inside of that environment. So now IT sees it just looks like a black box IT service. It doesn't really matter to them that it's not running on the next generation stack because they can still depend on its' services. >> Yeah, I mean I would agree. I look at what Kubernetes offers and containers as sort of an on ramp to creating services, the on ramp to actually taking that monolithic application, assuming that they're resources, and take a step up in terms of the architectures that you can build around it and then be able to break apart that monolithic application. It doesn't have to happen all at once. It's sort of the stepping stones that you can take. So it's a very powerful model for enablement for people who have stuff that they haven't been able to make the most value out of because maybe the application's been around for a while. Now they can actually end up putting it in an environment where they can actually make the most of it and then work on how they're going to end up slowly pulling it apart and making it more service oriented. >> Alright, Ricardo and Brian, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the update and look forward to seeing more throughout the show and further in the year. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net where you'll not only find all of this information, but theCUBE is really excited to say that we will be at the Google Cloud show in July. So for Keith Townsend, and I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of day one of two days of live coverage. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)