>>10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called Infinidat. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai, who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability, and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now, as Infinidat evolved, landed on a fourth vector, that has been a key differentiator and its value proposition, and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Qube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two longtime friends of theCube. Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of Infinidat and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of Marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents, welcome. >>Great to be here. Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary mark. Congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >>You know I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and, and enjoying many of the opportunities, you know, through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the Infinidat opportunity and it immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happened to be customers of Infinidat, , they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from, from the sidelines, I've always had a lot of respect for the Infinidat platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along, it really captured my interest in of course behind a great product is almost always a great team. >>And as I got to know the company and the board, and, you know, some of the leaders, and learned about the momentum and the business, it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just, you know, 60 days into the job. Everything I hoped for is here, not only a warm welcome to the company, but an exciting opportunity with respect to where Infinidat is at today with the growth of the business. The company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020, cashflow positive, EBITDA positive. And now it's a matter of scaling, scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with several times in my career and really, really enjoying the opportunity here at Infinidat to do that. >>That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course, Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem, but the data center's evolving the cloud is evolving, and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >>No, I think Satya recently said, right, that, that we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right. You know, we believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and you know, the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in, in the real thinking about it, because we're going to have distributed environments and, you know, one of the things that we're doing with Infinidat here today, right, is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that, uh, an interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element, but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale, you know, because storage is going to exist... We have very powerful storage value propositions, and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing Infinidat lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and vVols actually as a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >>These trends, I mean, building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work, especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, you know, that's a, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >>Yeah. You know, we're, we're in the middle of this every day as, as you know, Dave, uh, and certainly Lee, uh, data center architectures ebb and flow from centralized to decentralized, but clearly data locality, I think, is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers, but core is still very significant for, for most enterprise. Uh, and it's, it's, it has, it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud. You know, when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud, they don't want to talk about, you know, the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud. And almost always, these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. >>Uh, the reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal, uh, among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control of the security, the, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These, these are the things that are just fundamentally important, uh, to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic. It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of, of CIO's  you know, even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with, with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is, is over. Um, they want to seamlessly add capacity. They want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar. >>Now it has to be a consolidation. Massive consolidation is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. You know, the, the very characteristics that you talked about upfront, Dave, that make Infinidat unique, I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. Uh, I, I think our architecture also really does provide a, a set it and forget it, uh, kind of experience. Um, when we install a new Infinidat frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're, we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back, uh, to, to help fiddle with the bits or, uh, you know, tweak the configuration as applications and, and multitenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted, but you really, really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the CapEx rail and the OpEx rail and every, uh, every step in between. And importantly, when a customer, when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity, they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right. They're already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >>Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer, that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. Right. Let's talk about the VMware and Infinidat relationship. I mean, every, every year at VMworld, up until last year, thank you COVID, Infinidat would host this awesome dinner. You'd have the top customers there. Very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I, of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years, Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, but, you know, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to Infinidat? And I guess the question there is, is, is petabyte scale that really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >>It's a, it's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing Alliance partner of Infinidat. It goes back to really, almost the foundation of the company, certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of Infinidat VMware and a very tight integration with the VMware was a core part of that. Uh, we, we have a capability. We call the Host PowerTools, which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our, our VMware, uh, integration and, and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration. And, um, our customers typically are, are at scale petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up, um, and over 90% of our customers use VMware. So you would say, I, I think I can safely say we're we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints, uh, in the market. >>I know it's like children, you got, you love all your partners, but is there anything about Infinidat that, that stands out to you a particular area where, where they shine that from your perspective? >>Yeah, I think so. You know, the, the best partnerships, one are ones that are customer driven. It turns out right. And the idea that we have joint customers at large scale and listen storage is a tough business to get, right, right. It takes time to go and mature to harden a code base. Right. And particularly when you're talking about petabyte scale, right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements, makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right. It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications, this is one of the things we're seeing, right. Is new applications, which could be container-based Kubernetes orchestrated our Tanzu portfolio helps with that. >>Right. If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example, we announced some AI work, right. Uh, this week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers save us. And I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing. And particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven't seen before, uh, and Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new, a new record for that. >>Yeah. Let me, let me comment on that a little bit, Dave, we've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very, very exciting engaging, investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry, but in the, in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, we recently demonstrated on a single Infinidat frame over 200,000 vVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar, I think it completely redefines what, what scale means when you're talking about a vVols implementation. >>So not to geek out here, but vVols, they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins, having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers. An array, that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware, or actually vStorage API for, for storage awareness, VASA, anyway, with vVols, you can dynamically provision storage that matches the way I say it as a match as device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil,  it seems like so much in VMware land hearkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way. Right. And vVols is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of storage. So, so how do you guys see it? I, I presume you're, you're sort of vVols certified based on what you just said in the lab. >>Yeah. We recently announced our vVols release and we're not the first to market with the vVols, but from, from the start of the engineering project, we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do, and our customers were very prescriptive about the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in vVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. Uh, as I said, we, we redefined the bar for vVols scalability. We support on a single array now, um, a thousand storage containers. Uh, and I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So, uh, our customers are, again at scale, they said, if you're going to do vVols, we want it... We want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your, of your platform. We really liked vVols because it, it helps, it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the VI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put a majority of your most critical bits on Infinidat in your data center, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, but yet the vVols mplementation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration, give the VI, the VI administrator, all of the flexibility they need to manage applications. And vVols of course gives the VI administrator the native use of our snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure, but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's, it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >>Yeah. Storage has come a long way. Hasn't it, Lee? I'm wondering if you could add some color here, it seems in talking to ... Uh, so that's interesting. You've had, you had a hand in the growth of vSAN and it was very successful product, but he chose Infinidat for that higher end application. It seems like vVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the vVols uptake going from your perspective. >>Yeah, I think we you know, we're in the second phase of vVols adoption, right? First phase was, Hey, technically interesting, intriguing. Um, but adoption was relatively low, I think because, you know, up until five years ago, um, applications, weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business, when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now, it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors? Right? Can you go and get your labs? Right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years, and then the past 40 years of computing combined. >>And so when you think about that, what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure today. That's the application. So what vVols has helped you do is it allows the vSphere administrator, who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace, and be able to basically select storage attributes, including QoS, capacity, IOPS, and do that from the vCenter console, and then be able to rectify things and manage them right from the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction, like what we're talking about today, or, you know, integration, um, that the Infinidat has provided now, you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And, you know, consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs yes. VMs across HCI. Sure. Plus now, plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers. It's that consolidated management, which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >>Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago, you launched this, this via the VMware. I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. What, explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go into more detail about what your participation is, but Lee, why don't you explain it? >>Yeah. You know, we don't take just any products that, because listen, there's a mixing. What we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with Infinidat was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many, many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right. To go and bring in, not just vVols support, of course, all the things we do for just a normal interaction with vSphere. But, uh, bringing vVols in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly, as we expanded the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, to include storagee systems for a customer, for example, right, who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important. Now, as we expand a multicloud experience, that's different from the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect or from some right around the ongoing, underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI, and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >>Yeah. To Lee's point of, it's not like there's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like, you know, 10 or 12 from what I saw and Infinidat is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's I, we liked the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything eye candy it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore, you know, some of the most contemporary, workloads in that environment, as well as solutions to what I considered some of the most contemporary industry problems. We're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the Cloud Solutions Lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform.  That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on at Infinidat. And we're also a core part of, of what VMware is driving from a data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in, in the cloud solutions lab with, the VMware cloud foundation layers, as well as, their Tanzu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >>Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the other day I was on the VMware analyst meeting virtually of course in Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were giving the update. And, and just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here, this expansion of on-prem the cloud experience, the data from, especially from our survey data, we have a partner UTR that did great surveys on a regular quarterly basis, the VMware cloud on AWS, doing great for sure, but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together >>Well on the VMware Cloud Foundation right now with, uh, you know, over a thousand customers, but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, it's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and Infinidat right, you know, this large scale, actually the, you know, interesting crossover, right. And, you know, listen for customers to go and take on a new store system. We always know that it's a high bar, right. So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help? Right. And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together. Right. And how vVols fits into that, you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's the hype that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing right. And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >>Right. Well, let's close with a, kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you see as the future of the data center specifically, and also your, your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >>I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, you know, if you've looked at the, you know, what's happening in the cloud, not everything is migrating in the cloud, but the public cloud, for example, and I'm talking about public cloud there. The public cloud offers some really interesting, unique value and VMware is doing really interesting things about like DR as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time. Right. We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations. Right. And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so, you know, partnering with  leaders on, in storage, right, is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more right with Infinidat, as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications, including container based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right. As the pace of application change, you know, doesn't slow down. >>So what do you see for the next 10 years for Infinidat? >>Yeah, well, um, we, I appreciated your introduction because of this speak to sort of the core characteristics of Infinidat. And I think a company like us and at our, at our juncture of evolution, it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. And, uh, the partnership with VMware, uh, we talked about the Venn diagram. I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential Alliance partner for our business going forward. Um, I'm excited about, about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth in distributed architectures. We'll see growth at the edge in the core data center. >>I think the, the old, the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, um, those days are over, it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that, you have to be really good at, uh, at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our, our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves, but never stray far from what has made Infinidat unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing and in Kubernetes >>Is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about, um, uh, you know, not only staying relevant, but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, you know, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal, but predominantly as I said, 90% or above is VMware infrastructure. Uh, but we also see, uh, Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. Uh, so that, that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as, as the application environment evolves. Great, thank you. You know, many years ago when I attended my first, uh, VMworld, the practitioners that were there, you talked to them, half the conversations, they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And, you know, VMware really has done a great job, publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in how vVols and Infinidat and VMware were kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale, there's some good blogs out there. Check out the Virtual Blocks blog for more information, guys. Thanks so much great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching this Cube conversation, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are Cloud Native Insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. We talk about cloud native, we're talking about how customers can take advantage of the innovation and agility that's out there in the clouds, one of the undercurrents, not so hidden if you've been watching the program so far. We've talked a bit about serverless, say something that's helping remove the friction, allowed developers to take advantage of technology and definitely move really fast. So I'm really happy to welcome to the program, for coming from Fauna. First of all, I have the CTO and Co-founder, who's Evan Weaver. And also joining him is the new CEO Eric Berg. They said, both from Fauna, talking serverless, talking data as an API and talking the modern database. So first of all, thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Hi, good to be here. >> All right, so Evan, we're going to start with you. I love talking to founders always. If you could take us back a little bit, Fauna as a project first before it was a company, you of course were an early employee at Twitter. So if you could just bring us back a little bit, what created the Fauna project and bring us through a brief history if you would. >> So I was employee 15 and Twitter, I joined in 2008. And I had a database background, I was sort of a performance analyst and worked on Ruby on Rails sites at CNET networks with the team that went on to found GitHub actually. Now I went to Twitter 'cause I wanted Twitter the product to stay alive. And for no greater ambition than that. And I ended up running the back end engineering team there and building out all the distributed storage for the core business objects, tweets, timelines, the social graph, image storage, the cache, that kind of thing. And this was early in the cloud era. API's were new and weird. You couldn't get Amazon EC2 off the shelf easily. We were racking hardware and code ancient center. And there were no databases or platforms for data of any kind. They really let us the Twitter engineering team focus on building the product. And we did a lot of open source work there. Some of which has influenced Fauna, originally, Twitter's open source was hosted on the Fauna GitHub account, which predated Twitter like you mentioned. And I was there for four years build out the team, basically scaled the site, especially scaled the Twitter.com API. And we just never found a platform which was suitable for what we were trying to accomplish. Like a lot of what Twitter did was itself a platform. We had developers all over the world using the Twitter API to interact with tweets. And we're frustrated that we basically had to become specialists in data systems because there wasn't a data API, we can just build the product on. And ultimately, then data API that we wished we had, is now Fauna. >> Well, it's a story we've loved hearing. And it's fascinating one, is that the marketplace wasn't doing what we needed. Often open source is a piece of that, how do we scale that out? How do we build that? Realized that the problem that you have is what others have. And hey, maybe there's a company. So could you give us that transition, Fauna as a product, as a company, where was it understood that, hey, there's a lot of other people that can take advantage from some of the same tools that you needed before. >> I mean, we saw it in the developers working with the Twitter platform. We weren't like, your traditional database experiences, either manage cloud or on-prem, you have to administrate the machine, and you're responsible for its security and its availability and its location and backups and all that kind of thing. People building against Twitter's API weren't doing that. They're just using the web interface that we provided to them. It was our responsibility as a platform provider. We saw lots of successful companies being built on the API, but obviously, it was limited specifically to interacting with tweets. And we also saw peers from Twitter who went on to found companies, other people we knew in the startup scene, struggling to just get something out the door, because they had to do all this undifferentiated heavy lifting, which didn't contribute to their product at all, if they did succeed and they struggled with scalability problems and security problems and that kind of thing. And I think it's been a drag on the market overall, we're essentially, in cloud services. We're more or less built for the enterprise for mature and mid market and enterprise companies that already had resources to put behind these things, then wasn't sort of the cloud equivalent of the web, where individuals, people with fewer resources, people starting new projects, people doing more speculative work, which is what we originally and Jack was doing at Twitter, it just get going and build dynamic web applications. So I think the move to cloud kind of left this gap, which ultimately was starting to be filled with serverless, in particular, that we sort of backtracked from the productivity of the '90s with the lamp era, you can do everything on a single machine, nobody bothered you, you didn't have to pay anyone, just RPM install and you're good to go. To this Kubernetes, containers, cloud, multi site, multi region world where it's just too hard to get a basic product out the door and now serverless is sort of brought that around full circle, we see people building those products again, because the tools have probably matured. >> Well, Evan, I really appreciate you helping set the table. I think you've clearly articulated some of the big challenges we're seeing in the industry right now. Eric, I want to bring you into the conversation. So you relatively recently brought in as CEO, came from Okta a company that is also doing quite well. So give us if you could really the business opportunity here, serverless is not exactly the most mature market, there's a lot of interest excitement, we've been tracking it for years and see some good growth. But what brought you in and what do you see is that big opportunity. >> Yeah, absolutely, so the first thing I'll comment on is what, when I was looking for my next opportunity, what was really important is to, I think you can build some of the most interesting businesses and companies when there are significant technological shifts happening. Okta, which you mentioned, took advantage of the fact of SaaS application, really being adopted by enterprise, which back in 2009, wasn't an exactly a known thing. And similarly, when I look at Fauna, the move that Evan talked about, which is really the maturation of serverless. And therefore, that as an underpinning for a new type of applications is really just starting to take hold. And so then there creates opportunities that for a variety of different people in that stack that to build interesting businesses and obviously, the databases is an incredibly important part of that. And the other thing I've mentioned is that, a lot of people don't know this but there's a very good chunk of Okta's business, which is what they call their customer identity business, which is basically, servicing of identity is a set of API's that people can integrate into their applications. And you see a lot of enterprises using this as a part of their digital transformation effort. And so I was very familiar with that model and how prevalent, how much investment, how much aid was out there for customers, as every company becoming a software company and needing to rethink their business and build applications. And so you put those two trends together and you just see that serverless is going to be able to meet the needs of a lot of those companies. And as Evan mentioned, databases in general and traditionally have come with a lot of complexity from an operational perspective. And so when you look at the technology and some of the problems that Fauna has solved, in terms of really removing all of that operational burden when it comes to starting with and scaling a database, not only locally but globally. It's sort of a new, no brainer, everybody would love to have a database that scales, that is reliable and secure that they don't have to manage. >> Yeah, Eric, one follow up question for you. I think back a few years ago, you talked to companies and it's like, okay, database is the center of my business. It's a big expense. I have a team that works on it. There have been dealt so much change in the database market than most customers I talked to, is I have lots of solutions out there. I'm using Mongo, I've got Snowflake, Amazon has flavors of things I'm looking at. Snowflake just filed for their IPO, so we see the growth in the space. So maybe if you could just obviously serverless is a differentiation. There's a couple of solutions out there, like from Amazon or whether Aurora serverless solution but how does Fauna look to differentiate. Could you give us a little bit of kind of compared to the market out there? >> Sure, yeah, so at the high level, just to clarify, at the super high level for databases, there tends to be two types operational databases and then data warehouse which Snowflake is an example of a data warehouse. And as you probably already know, the former CEO of Snowflake is actually a chairman of Fauna. So Bob Muglia. So we have a lot of good insight into that business. But Fauna is very much on the operational database side. So the other half of that market, if you will, so really focused on being the core operational store for your application. And I think Evan mentioned it a little bit, there's been a lot of the transformation that's happened if we rewind all the way back to the early '90s, when it was Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server were kind of the big players there. And then as those architectures basically hit limits, when it came to applications moving to the web, you had this whole rise in a lot of different no SQL solutions, but those solutions sort of gave up on some of the promises of a relational database in order to achieve some of the ability to scale in the performance required at the web. But we required then a little bit more sophistication, intelligence, in order to be able to basically create logic in your application that could make up for the fact that those databases didn't actually deliver on the promises of traditional relational databases. And so, enter Fauna and it's really sort of a combination of those two things, which is providing the trust, the security and reliability of a traditional relational database, but offering it as serverless, as we talked about, at the scale that you need it for a web application. And so it's a very interesting combination of those capabilities that we think, as Evan was talking about, allows people who don't have large DevOps teams or very sophisticated developers who can code around some of the limitations of these other databases, to really be able to use a database for what they're looking for. What I write to it is what I'm going to read from it and that we maintain that commitment and make that super easy. >> Yeah, it's important to know that the part of the reason that operational database, the database for mission critical business data has remained a cost center is because the conventional wisdom was that something like Fauna was impossible to build. People said, you literally cannot in information science create a global API for data which is transactional and consistent and suitable for relying on, for mission critical, user login, banking payments, user generated content, social graphs, internal IT data, anything that's irreplaceable. People said, there can be no general service that can do this ubiquitously a global internet scale, you have to do it specifically. So it's sort of like, we had no power company. Instead, you could call up Amazon, they drive a truck with a generator to your house and hook you up. And you're like, right on, I didn't have to like, install the generator myself. But like, it's not a good experience. It's still a pain in the neck, it's still specific to the location you're at. It's not getting utility computing from the cloud the way, it's been a dream for many decades that we get all our services through brokers and API's and the web and it's finally real with serverless. I want to emphasize that the Fauna it technology is new and novel. And based on and inspired by our experience at Twitter and also academic research with some of our advisors like Dr. Daniel Abadi. It's one of the things that attracted us, Snowflake chairman to our company that we'd solve groundbreaking problems in information science in the cloud, just the way Snowflakes had. >> Yeah, well and Evan, yeah please go on Eric. >> Yeah, I'm just going to have one thing to that, which is, in addition, I think when you think about Fauna and you mentioned MongoDB, I think they're one of a great examples of database companies over the last decade, who's been able to build a standalone business. And if you look at it from a business model perspective, the thing that was really successful for them is they didn't go into try to necessarily like, rip and replace in big database migrations, they started evolving with a new class of developers and new applications that were being developed and then rode that obviously into sort of a land and expand model into enterprises over time. And so when you think about Fauna from your business value proposition is harnessing the technological innovation that Evan talked about. And then combining this with a product that bottoms up developer first business motion that kind of rides this technological shift into you creating a presence in the database market over time. >> Well, Evan, I just want to go back to that, it's impossible comment that you made, a lot of people they learn about a technology and they feel that that's the way the technology works. Serverless is obviously often misunderstood from the name itself, too. We had a conversation with Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS a couple years ago, and he said, "If I could rebuild AWS from the ground up today, "it would be using all serverless," that doesn't mean only lambda, but they're rebuilding a lot of their pieces underneath it. So I've looked at the container world and we're only starting the last year or so, talking about people using databases with Kubernetes and containers, so what is it that allows you to be able to have as you said, there's the consistency. So we're talking about acid there, not worry about things like cold starts, which are thing lots of people are concerned about when it comes to serverless and help us understand a little bit that what you do and the underlying technologies that you leverage. >> Yeah, databases are always the last to evolve because they're the riskiest to change and the hardest to build. And basically, through the cloud era, we've done this lift and shift of existing on premises solutions, especially with databases into cloud machines, but it's still the metaphor of the physical computer, which is the overriding unit of granularity mental concept, everything like you mentioned, containers, like we had machines then we had Vms, now we have containers, it's still a computer. And the database goes in that one computer, in one spot and it sits there and you got to talk to it. Wherever that is in the world, no matter how far away it is from you. And people said, well, the relational database is great. You can use locks within a single machine to make sure that you're not conflicting your data when you update it, you going to have transactionality, you can have serialize ability. What do you do, if you want to make that experience highly available at global scale? We went through a series of evolutions as an industry. From initially that the on-prem RDBMS to things like Google's percolator scheme, which essentially scales that up to data center scale and puts different parts of the traditional database on different physical machines on low latency links, but otherwise doesn't change the consistency properties, then to things like Google Spanner, which rely on synchronized atomic clocks to guarantee consistency. Well, not everyone has synchronized atomic clocks just lying around. And they're also, their issues with noisy neighbors and tenancy and things because you have to make sure that you can always read the clock in a consistent amount of time, not just have the time accurate in the first place. And Fauna is based on and inspired and evolved from an algorithm called Calvin, which came out of a buddy's lab at Yale. And what Calvin does is invert the traditional database relationship and say, instead of doing a bunch of work on the disk and then figuring out which transactions won by seeing what time it is, we will create a global pre determined order of transactions which is arbitrary by journaling them and replicating them. And then we will use that to essentially derive the time from the transactions which have already been committed to disk. And then once we know the order, we can say which one's won and didn't win and which happened before, happen after and present the appearance of consistency to all possible observers. And when this paper came out, it came out about a decade ago now I think, it was very opaque. There's a lot of kind of hand waving exercises left to the reader. Some scary statements about how wasn't suitable for things that in particular SQL requires. We met, my co-founder and I met as Fauna chief architect, he worked on my team at Twitter, at one of the database groups. We were building Fauna we were doing our market discovery or prototyping and we knew we needed to be a global API. We knew we needed low latency, high performance at global scale. We looked at Spanner and Spanner couldn't do it. But we found that this paper proposed a way that could and we can see based on our experience at Twitter that you could overcome all these obstacles which had made the paper overall being neglected by industry and it took us quite a while to implement it at industrial quality and scale, to qualify it with analysts and others, prove to the world that it was real. And Eric mentioned Mongo, we did a lot of work with Cassandra as well at Twitter, we're early in the Cassandra community. Like I wrote, the first tutorial for Cassandra where data stacks was founded. These vendors were telling people that you could not have transactionality and scale at the same time, and it was literally impossible. Then we had this incrementalism like things with Spanner. And it wasn't till Fauna that anyone had proved to the world that that just wasn't true. There was more marketing around their failure to solve the information science problem, than something fundamental. >> Eric, I'm wondering if you're able to share just order of magnitude, how many customers you have out there from a partnership standpoint, we'd like to understand a little bit how you work or fit into the public cloud ecosystems out there. I noticed that Alphabets General Venture Fund was one of the contributors to the last raise. And obviously, there's some underlying Google technology there. So if you could just customers and ecosystem. >> Yeah, so as I mentioned, we've had a very aggressive product lead developer go to market. And so we have 10s of thousands of people now on the service, using Fauna at different levels. And now we're focused on, how do we continue to build that momentum, again, going back to the model of focus on a developer lead model, really what we're focused on there is taking everything that Evan just talked about, which is real and very differentiated in terms of the real core tech in the back end and then combining that with a developer experience that makes it extremely easy to use and really, we think that's the magic in terms of what Fauna is bringing, so we got 10s of thousands of users and we got more signing up every day, coming to the service, we have an aggressive free plan there and then they can migrate up to higher paying plans as they consume over time. And the ecosystem, we're aggressively playing in the broader serverless ecosystem. So what we're looking at is as Evan mentioned, sometimes the databases is the last thing to change, it's also not necessarily the first thing that a developer starts from when they think about building their application or their website. And so we're plugging into the larger serverless ecosystem where people are making their choices about potentially their compute platform or maybe a development platform like I know you've talked to the folks over at JAMstack, sorry at Netlify and Purcell, who are big in the JAMstack community and providing really great workflows for new web and application developers on these platforms. And then at the compute layer, obviously, our Amazon, Google, Microsoft all have a serverless compute solution. CloudFlare is doing some really interesting things out at the edge. And so there's a variety of people up and down that stack, if you will, when people are thinking about this new generation of applications that we're plugging into to make sure that the Fauna is that the default database of choice. >> Wonderful, last question, Evan if I could, I love what I got somebody with your background. Talk about just so many different technologies maturing, give us a little bit as to some of the challenges you see serverless ecosystem, what's being attacked, what do we still need to work on? >> I mean, serverless is in the same place that Lamp was in the in the early '90s. We have the old conservatives ecosystem with the JAMstack players that Eric mentioned. We have closed proprietary ecosystems like the AWS stack or the Google Firebase stack. As to your point, Google has also invested in us so they're placing their bets widely. But it's seeing the same kind of criticism. That Lamp, the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, it's not mature, it's a toy, no one will ever use this for real business. We can't switch from like DV2 or mumps to MySQL, like no one is doing that. The movement and the momentum in serverless is real. And the challenge now is for all the vendors in collaboration with the community of developers to mature the tools as those the products and applications being built on the new more productive stack also mature, so we have to keep ahead of our audience and make sure we start delivering and this is partly why Eric is here. Those those mid market and ultimately enterprise requirements so that business is built on top of Fauna today, can grow like Twitter did from small to giant. >> Yeah, I'd add on to that, this is reminiscent for me, back in 2009 at Okta, we were one of the early ISVs that built on in relied 100% on AWS. At that time there was still, it was very commonplace for people racking and stacking their own boxes and using Colo and we used to have conversations about I wonder how long it's going to be before we exceed the cost of this AWS thing and we go and run our own data centers. And that would be laughable to even consider today, right, no one would ever even think about that. And I think serverless is in a similar situation where the consumption model is very attractive to get started, some people sitting there, is it going to be too expensive as I scale. And as Evan mentioned, when we think about if you fast forward to kind of what the innovation that we can anticipate both technologically and economically it's just going to be the default model that people are going to wonder why they used to spend all these time managing these machines, if they don't have to. >> Evan and Eric, thank you so much, is great to hear the progress that you've made and big supporters, the serverless ecosystem, so excited to watch the progress there. Thanks so much. >> Thanks Stu. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> All right and I'm Stu Miniman. Stay tuned. Every week we are putting out the Cloud Native Insights. Appreciate. Thank you for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Presenter: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are cloud native insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. When we launched this program, we talked about, how do we take advantage of the innovation and agility that's in the cloud? And of course, one of the big components that we've talked about for many years on theCUBE is, how do we empower developers? and developers are helping change things, and I'm really happy to welcome to the program first time guests that helped build many of the tools that developers are very well familiar. So Tom Preston Werner, he is the co-founder of Chatterbug, he is the creator of redwoodjs, we had an early episode, the JAMstack Netlify team, he's also on the board for that, and we'll talk about those pieces. People might know him, if you check him out on Wikipedia, you know, GitHub, he was one of the co-founders as well as held both CTO and CEO roles there. I could go on but Tom, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so let's start there, Tom, you know, when I live in the enterprise space, how do you take advantage of new things? One of the biggest challenges out there is, let's go to something new, but let's do it the old way. And we know that that really doesn't take advantage of it you know, I think back to the oldest, some of the older technologies, it's like, well, you know, if I talk to people that are riding horses, what do they want? You know, well, I want faster horses, not the, you know, let's completely change things. I was hearing a stat that, you know, back in the early days of cars, we had like, 30% of them were electric cars, and now it's one. So what's old is new again, but I digress. One, as I mentioned, you know, GitHub, of course, is, you know, such a fundamental piece when we look at in the technology space over the last decade, you know, get in general, GitHub, specifically, of course, has created so much value engaged, you know, just millions and millions of developers and transform businesses. Take us back a little bit and you know, like to get your philosophy on, you know, building tools, how do you do it? How do you think about it? And what's inspired you? >> Yeah, I think it goes a long way back to just wanting to build things for the community. One of the first big projects I worked on was called Gravatar, and I remember laying in bed staring at the ceiling, just trying to think up some idea that that would contribute to what we then called The Blogosphere, and I came up with an idea for avatars that would follow you around and I coded it up and I got it out to a few bloggers and they started using it, and it caught on and it was really, it really introduced me to this idea that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, you know, I grew up in Iowa, things are very different there. And with with the Internet, and the ability to code, you can impact the world in really significant ways. And so it follows on from there, and I think GitHub is an extension of that desire to really put things into the world that will be useful for people, and knowing that, if you have the ability to code and especially with the advent of web applications as a common tool, there's such power in that you have global reach, you just need a computer and the ability to code and you can create these things, and GitHub kind of became that. It was just, it started out really as a side project, and I hoped that someday it would be able to support me to work on it full time. But I, we started building it just because we wanted it to exist. And that's most of what I work on is, is just ideas that I want to exist in the world. >> Yeah, it's been one of those great trends to watch at, you know, there were certain technologies that used to have to be a nation state, or, you know, one of the one of the global 50 companies to take advantage of it. Now, tools like GitHub, making it so that, you know, the smallest company or even the individuals can participate in communities, can create and build you know, the building is such an important theme. So Maybe, let's fast forward a little bit if we would, I mentioned Netlify and JAMstack, you talked about the blogosphere, that team is helping to really reinvent how we think about the web, you know, it's real time, It's high performance, and you know, we need to be able to get that to where everybody is. So, you know, back in the early days, web pages, you know, relatively static and, you know, had certain criteria, and now, of course, you know, edge devices and the global population change things. So, you know, you, you've been engaged in a, you know, huge supporter of that project, and that'll lead us towards the redwoods discussion, but maybe bring us as to how you got involved there, and what got you excited? >> Well, like you said, Everything old is new again and I think that's true in fashion. It's also true in technology, in a lot of ways, and the JAMstack really is taking these old ideas where the web started, taking files and just serving them as static files and it's super fast, and it's extremely secure. This is how the internet started, and now we've sort of come full circle. But we've added a lot of really nice things and workflows on top of that. And so my journey into the JAMstack, I suppose, started more than a decade ago, when I started working on a project called Jekyll, that's a, I called it at the time, A Blog Aware Static Site Generator. So you would write your blog articles, and you would run it through Jekyll, and that would take your markdown, you'd write your articles in markdown, and it would combine them with a, some kind of a theme that you would have, and that would output static pages that represented your blog, and then you could serve those from any kind of static blog serving system. GitHub had has one built in called GitHub Pages, and so we ended up adopting Jekyll for GitHub Pages. So everything that you put up on GitHub Pages. would be run through Jekyll, and so it was a really natural place to put your blog. And so I had a blog post, one of my blog posts using Jekyll was called Blogging Like A Hacker. And it was this idea that you don't need WordPress, you don't need to have a database somewhere that's, that's hackable, that's going to cause you security problems, all the WordPress admin stuff that constantly is being attacked. You don't need all that, like you can just write articles in flat files, and then turn them into a blog statically and then put those up to serve them somewhere, right? And so when I say it like that, it sounds a little bit like the JAMstack, right? That's not how we thought about it at the time, because it was really hard to do dynamic things. So if you wanted to have comments on your blog for instance, then you needed to have some third party service that you would embed a component onto your blog, so you could receive comments. And so you had to start gluing things together, but even then, again, that sounds a little bit like the JAMstack. So it's all of these ideas that have been, evolving over the last decade to 15 years, that now we finally have an entire tool chain and adding Git on top of that and Git based workflows, and being able to push to GitHub and someone like Netlify can pick those up and publish them, and you have all these third party services that you can glue together without having to build them yourself. All of the billing things, like there's just the ecosystem is so much more advanced now, so many more bits are available for you to piece together that in a very short amount of time, you can have an extremely performant site capable of taking payments, and doing all of the dynamic things that we want to do. Well, many, I should say many of the dynamic things that we want to do, and it's fast and secure. So it's like the web used to be when the web started, but, now you can do all the modern things that you want to do. >> You're giving me flashbacks remembering how I glued discus into my Tumblr instance when that was rolling out. (laughing) >> That's what I was referring to, discuss. >> Yeah, so absolutely, you talk about there's just such a robust ecosystem out there, and one of the real challenges we have out there is, people will come in and they say, "Oh my gosh, where do I start?" And it's like, well, where do you want to go? There's the Paradox of Choice, and that I believe is one of the things that led you to create Redwoods. So help explain to our audience you know, you created this project Redwood, it related to JAMstack, but, but I'll let you explain you know, what it is in life needed? >> Yeah, Redwood is a response to a couple of things. One of those things, is the JavaScript world has, as everything has evolved in tremendous way, in all kinds of ways and almost entirely positive I think. The language itself has been improved so much from when I was a teenager using view source and copy pasting stuff into you know, some random X Files fan site. To now it's a first class language I can compete with with everything, from a ergonomics perspective. I really enjoy programming in it and I come from a Ruby, Ruby on Rails background and now I'm very happy in JavaScript that was not true even five, seven years ago, right? So JavaScript itself has changed a lot. Along with that comes NPM in the whole packaging universe, of availability of modules, right? So most of the things that you want to do, you can go and you can search and find code that's going to do those things for you, and so being able to, to just pull those into your projects so easily. That is amazing, right? The power that that gives you is tremendous. The problem comes in when, like you said, you have the Paradox of Choice. Now you have, not just one way to do something, but you have 100 ways to do something, right? And now as a as a developer, and especially as a new developer, someone who's just learning how to build web applications, you come into this and you say, all you see is the complexity, just overwhelming complexity, and every language goes through this. They go through a phase of sort of this Cambrian explosion of possibilities as people get excited, and you see that the web is embracing these technologies, and you see what's possible. Everyone gets excited and involved and starts creating solution after solution after solution, often times to the same problems. And that's a good thing, right, like exploring the territory is a good and necessary part of the evolution of programming languages and programming ecosystems. But there's comes a time where that becomes overwhelming and starts to trend towards being a negative. And so at Chatterbug, which is a foreign language learning service, if you want to learn how to speak French or Spanish or German, we'll help you do that, as part of that work, we started using react on the front end, because I really love what react brings you from a JavaScript and interactivity perspective. But along with react, you have to make about 50 other choices of technologies to use to actually create a fully capable website, something for state management, you got to choose a way to do JavaScript or sorry, CSS. There's 100 things that you have to choose, and it's, it seems very arbitrary and you go through a lot of churn, you choose one, and then the next day an article comes out and then people raving about another one, and then you choose, you're like, Oh, that one looks really nice. You know, grass is always greener, and so Redwood is a bit of a, an answer to that, or a response to that, which is to say, we've learned a lot of things now about what works in building with react, especially on the front end. And what I really want to do is have a tool that's more like Ruby on Rails, where I come from, having done years and years of Ruby on Rails, what GitHub was built with. And Ruby on Rails presents to you a fully capable web application framework that has made all the choices or most of the choices, many of the important choices. And the same is kind of missing in the JavaScript TypeScript world and so, when I saw Netlify come out with their feature where you could commit the code for a lambda function to your repository, and if you push that up to GitHub, Netlify will grab it, and they will orchestrate deploying that code to an AWS lambda so that you can run business logic in a lambda but without having to touch AWS, because touching AWS is another gigantic piece of complexity, and their user interfaces are sometimes challenging, I'll say. That, that then made me think that, here finally is the ability to combine everything that's awesome about the JAMstack and static files, and security, and this workflow, with the ability to do business logic, and that sounded to me like the makings of a full stack web application framework, and I kept waiting for someone to come out and be like, hey, tada, like we glued this all together, and here's your thing, that's rails, but for the JAMstack, JavaScript, TypeScript world and nobody was doing it. And so I started working on it myself, and that has become Redwoodjs. >> It's one of the things that excited me the early days when I looked into Serverless was that, that low bar to entry, you know, I didn't have to have, you know, a CS degree or five years of understanding a certain code base to be able to take advantage of it. Feels like you're hoping to extend that, it believe it's one of your passions, you know, helping with with Chatterbug and like, you know, helping people with that learning. What do you feel is the state out there? What's your thoughts about kind of the future of jobs, when it when it comes to this space? >> I think the future of jobs in technology and especially software development is, I mean, there is no, there is no better outlook for any profession than that. I mean, this is the, this is where the world is going, more and more of what we want to accomplish, we do in software and it happens across every industry. I mean, just look at Tesla's for instance, right? You think about automobiles and the car that you owned, you know, 10 years ago, and you're like, I don't know, I know there's a computer in here somewhere, but like, I don't really, you know, either the software for it is terrible, and you're like, who, when was the last time you actually use the navigation system in your car, right? You just like get like just turn that off because it's, it's so horrible. And then Tesla comes along and says, hey, what if we actually made all this stuff useful, and had a thoughtful interface and essentially built a car that where everything was controlled with software, and so now cars are are basically software wrapped in hardware, and the experience is amazing. And the same is true of everything, look at your, look at how many things that your phone has replaced that used to be physical devices. Look at manufacturing processes, look at any any element of bureaucracy, all of this stuff is mediated by computers, and oftentimes it's done badly. But this just shows how much opportunity there is speaking of like governmental websites, right, you go to the DMV, and you try to schedule an appointment, and you just have no confidence that that's going to work out because the interfaces feel like they were written 15 years ago, and sometimes I think they were, written that long ago. But there's so much, there's still so much improvement to be had and all of that is going to take developers to do it. Unless, you know, we figure out how to get AI to do it for us, and there's been some very interesting things lately around that angle, but to me, it's, humans will always be involved. And so, at some level, humans are telling machines what to do, whether you're doing it more or less directly, and having the ability to tell machines what to do gives you tremendous leverage. >> Yeah, we're big fans, if you know Erik Bryjolfsson and Andy McAfee from MIT, they've, you know, are very adamant that it's the combination of people plus machines that always will win against either people alone or machines alone. Tom, what, you know, right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic, there're financially, there's a lot of bad news around the globe right now. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that said, well, a downturn market is actually a great time to start something new. You're an investor, you've helped build lots of things. We talked a lot about lowering the bar for people to create and build new things. What do you see are some of the opportunities out there, if you know, you had to recommend for the entrepreneurs out there? Where should they be looking? >> I'd say look at all of the things in your life that have become challenging, because where there's challenge, where there's pain, there's opportunity for solutions. And especially when there's a big environmental change, which we see right now, with COVID-19, obviously has changed a lot of our behaviors and made some of the things that used to be easy. It's made those a lot harder, and so you see, certain segments of the economy are doing extremely well, namely technology and things that allow us to do interviews like this instead of in person, and so those industries are doing extremely well. So you look at the you look at the stock market in the United States, and it's it's very interesting, because while much of the country is suffering, the people that are already wealthy are doing very well, and technology companies are doing very well. And so the question for me is, what are the opportunities that we have, leveraging technology in the internet, to where we can create more opportunities for more people, to get people back to work, right? I think there's so much opportunity there. Just look at education, like the entire concept of educating kids right now and I have three. So we feel this very much, it has been turned on its head. And so we so you see many people looking for solutions in that space, and that's, I think that's as it should be. When things get, when things get challenged when our, our normal daily experience is so radically changed, there's opportunity there, because people are willing to change more quickly in a crisis, right? Because you need, you need something like any solution. And so some choice is going to be made, and where that's happening, then you can find early adopters more easily, than you can under other circumstances, and so in economic downturns, you often see that kind of behavior where these are crisis moments for people, you have an opportunity to come in and if you have something that could solve a problem for them, then you can get a user where that may have not been a problem for a person before. So where there is, where there is a crisis, there is always opportunity to help people solve their problems in different and better ways to address that crisis. So again, it goes back to pain, you know, and it doesn't have to be the pain from a crisis. It could be a pain from from anything. Just like with GitHub, it was, it was hard to share code as developers like it was, there was too much pain, and this was, we started it in 2008, right after the housing crisis. It was unrelated to that, but it turns out that when you start a company, when the economy is depressed in a certain way, then at least you can look forward to the economy getting better as you are building your company. >> Oh, Tom, Preston Werner, thank you so much for joining pleasure talking with you. I appreciate all of your input. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for joining this Episode of cloud native insights. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. (light music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students leaky bomb John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere seven I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of Product Management guys thanks for coming in and talking about the big news thank you for having us you guys announced some interesting things back in march around containers kubernetes and the vSphere there's just about the hard news what's being announced today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7 John it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years we previewed it this project Pacific a few months ago with this release we are putting kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform what that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on kubernetes and containers as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform and it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release this is a key part of our tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available you know really vSphere 7 yes ok that so let's on the trend line here the relevance is what what's the big trend line that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz Pat Keller says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on Prem and public cloud together so they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack but modernize their infrastructure stack which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications kubernetes or container based applications and VMs what's excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at VMworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business I mean this is really the move to the cloud if you look at the successful enterprises even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies the on premise isn't effective so it's not so much on premises going away we know it's not but it's turning into cloud native this is the move to the cloud generally this is a big wave yeah absolutely I mean if Jon if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share by far the leader in the market and so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using but bring their application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a stack for the traditional applications you have operators and administrators who are specialized in kubernetes on one side and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side with this move what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had and at the same time offer the developers what they like which is kubernetes dial-tone that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications yep all Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but a buddy mince is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know we've heard over the years skill gap skill gap not a lot of skills out there but when you look at the reality of skills gap it's really about skills gaps and shortages not enough people most CIOs and chief and major security are so that we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi-cloud this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model they like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way and we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem to Google cloud to Amazon Cloud to Microsoft cloud to any of our VC peepee partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by a kubernetes based dial-tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me when he says dial tone of the internet kubernetes does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically just that it's always available what's what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase the the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware cloud foundation and be able to work with a set of api's that are kubernetes api s-- so developers understand that they're looking for that they understand that dial tone right and you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy their application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does VMware vSphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or are you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey just Bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody's actually tried deploying kubernetes first it's it's highly complicated um so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out ninety percent of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 as well we're bringing in a couple things that are very important you also have to be able to manage at scale just like you would in the cloud you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self-managed and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself and so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments both on-premise and public cloud environments and scale and then associated with that as well is you must make it secure so there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security which is how can we actually build in truly a trusted platform for your developers and IIT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the the way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with kubernetes the same way administered the older laces so they don't have to learn anything new they're just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as it was before more capable dealer and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's infrastructure as code means as app developers on the other side taking advantage of it what's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7 so I think it's it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps as a real trend inside an IT organizations they need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker they need to be able to respond to the business and to do that what they are doing is is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what what we're really doing in the core kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on-demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need but it's it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and m/l applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA were FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications so you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your kubernetes and container based applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle improvement I get the application acceleration innovation but the intrinsic security is interesting could you take a minute explain what that is yeah so there's there's a few different aspects one is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment and that means that you need to have a way that the the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your Intel or internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment in independent we've got these fair trust Authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know continuous runtime now not only that we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot conversations the carbon black in the security piece Chris obviously have vsphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is got the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your Google IBM cloud Oracle cloud so all the major clouds there is a vSphere stack running so it allows customers if you think about it right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it once it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all for a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take Derek take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere we are bringing to every one of those be sphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators they can now manage kubernetes environments you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment that's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage so so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP partners you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits that's got efficiency benefits that's got agility benefits yeah I just add to that and say that look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way and I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people process and technology and there's more to come that we're laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud and so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome vSphere core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna be important five years from now because of what I just said it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go to Amazon native and then you have orc Lord and as your you're going to have different tools different processes different people trained to work with those clouds but when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation you have one operating model across all these environments and that's going to be game-changing great stuff great stuff thanks for unpacking that for us graduates on the insulin Thank You Vera bees fear 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Farrar your thanks for watch [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special Q conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7 dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin had a whole lot to do with this build so Jared first off congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's kubernetes right into the virtualization platform and so this means that as a developer I can now use kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment and it means as an IT admin I'm actually able to deliver kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run so I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments regardless of whether that's on Prem public cloud this public cloud that public cloud so this really is the the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now how do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio and you know as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises at the edge with service providers there's a secondary question how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern work clothes as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so why don't ya well into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right so the developer uses this kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole kubernetes cluster and the whole developer experience now is driven by kubernetes they can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of kubernetes api is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know that's not just provisioning workloads though this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed so go look at hey what's the IP address that got allocated to that or what's the CPU load on this you know workload I just deployed on top of kubernetes we've integrated a container registry into vSphere so here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images and you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint now the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control I can check in not just my code but also the description of the kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app so now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side we see V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department says hey I got a problem with my database we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about they got the same name they say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of e spear I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure so I can use the same you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers can use storage policy based management to provide storage for kubernetes and it's hooked in with things like DRS right so I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's going to be enforced by Drs inside the cluster and again as an as an admin I'm just using vSphere but to the developer they're getting a whole kubernetes experience out of this platform now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the kubernetes environment so besides you know seeing the VMS and and things that developers have deployed I can see all of the desired state specifications all the different kubernetes objects that the developers have created the compute network and storage objects they're all integrated right inside the the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center experience isn't transformed a lot we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say where's the kubernetes and they're surprised that like they've been managing kubernetes all this time it just looks it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got but all those kubernetes objects the pods and containers kubernetes clusters load balancer stores they're all represented right there natively in the V Center UI and so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kid teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's and really bringing those together in a unified environment so that depending on what your job is and what you're working on that's what you're gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as the traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic memes and then kind of the modern you know county cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle if you will and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go their future state architecture and that involves embracing cloud it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are kind of the old current world and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there and they believe it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you and that's obviously very expensive very time-consuming and very error-prone as well there's a lot of things that can go wrong there and so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it the the messy middle I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources how come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about about one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a reach sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can't do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense you said not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna have this firewall rule and what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management so you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like I kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these have turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload a modern were close not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-prem some in the cloud and so how do you start managing that more holistically and this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right and why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time that's it's a nice big word but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications and more importantly how do you continue to evolve them and change them you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way but now instead what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are gonna inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications and they could before because we automate so much of that operation and it's not just the scale part which is obviously really important but it's also the rate of change and this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done done ie building applications well at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns these sorts of elements and so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better they're not stepping over each other but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance is ready fourth so there's a lot more to this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER context or many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides right look at what's there so outside of kubernetes there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on the first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle so let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics so we have this new technology vSphere lifecycle management VL cm and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts how do we make them more declarative with a single image you can now specify for an entire cluster we find that a lot of our vSphere admins especially at larger scales have a really tough time doing this there's a lot of in and out today it's somewhat tricky to do and so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well so if you're doing kubernetes on kubernetes I suppose you're gonna have automation on automation right because they're upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequent inconsequential tasks mm-hm and yeah and going forward and allowing you know as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes in the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplifications there across the board one I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust Authority and so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base when we talk to customers what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones right how do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted and obviously if you're hiring someone you somewhat trust them but you know what what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust right yeah topic exactly so the idea with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown only a few people have access to it and then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know what things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work here as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mentioned all sort of accelerators coming out we all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases not to mention 3d rendering but you know FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there and so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we find very low utilization rates inability to automate that inability to manage that well putting security and compliance and so forth and so this is really the reality that we see at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry shouldn't we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network but now we really needed to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see in the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use we can you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use they don't even need to think about it in fact integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows so it's pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the opportunities flash they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know a couple other things just I don't have a slide on it but just things we're doing to our base capabilities things around DRS and vmotion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P Hana or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that the emotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff not just kind of brand new cool new accelerator stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right all right so do I give you the last word you've been working on this for a while there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys what do you what do you tell them what should they be excited about what are you excited for them in this new release I think what I'm excited about is how you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team make you more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for forgetting to release out I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the weeds so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right ease Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven announcement we've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people but we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it so really happy to have joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is in infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us nice - all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group it's called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a B to be part of BT you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I'm in particular my group is for we do infrastructure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work BC or seven sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about twelve thirteen years something like that and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our operations design development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products and so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know in particular with serving us and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while we currently use extensively we use vSphere NSX t.v raps log insight network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications and our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize they know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to still with Yemen where environments and Along Came containers and like I say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container that's really the holy grail right so we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on premises cloud or off premises and be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you walked through here you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna create and destroy things all the time so you know bring us inside that organizational piece you know how much will there need to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes making absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that were talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we we probably oughta certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly but I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff it you know does require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the heartbeat that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment allows troubleshoot and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how the behave in terms of their networking to be able to essentially put our deployments on Rails by using in particular tag based policies means that we can take the onus of security we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about a lot of time and they can just get on with their job which is to develop new functionality and help our customers so that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new visa so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just to add slightly different completely unit which is really what we're talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and as your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take oh yeah still I really like how you described it really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your theme is going to need to understand so maybe if you could dig in a little bit some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio what is the business asking of your organization that that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwind pushing you towards you know kubernetes and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down with the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services so we have to address that really from a development perspective it's our developers that have the responsibility to design them to deploy those so we have to in infrastructure we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that that allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted as performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously is a big aspect to it so really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted great Phil you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as you know your your your your VMware farm one of make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things number one is when it comes to your team especially your infrastructure team how much are they involved with setting up some of the the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud and secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us climate allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud but very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have well it makes sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever then we can do that as well but where we say for instance we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey for to allow them to view that and to gain access to that well why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity so we do absolutely have hybrid applications not sorry hybrid blocks we have blocks of suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platform as I mentioned that some of the smoothers application blocks I have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to you know have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well and that way we best serve our customers we you know we get to get our customers yeah what they need all right great Phil final question I have for you you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMS containers public cloud what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago well I'll be honest I was a little bit surprised by vSphere so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we MS I mean they're called VMware after all we knew that they were looking it's no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole tansy stuff from the Mission Control stuff I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from an application perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the very between version six and seven I've been following these since version three at least and it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture the aims to - what they want to achieve with the application and you know luckily the nice thing is is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that but my word there's no awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should really just take it as an opportunity to really revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and useless you've seen the products just how revolutionary the the version 7 is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and know a lot of my peers other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I'm really excited about the whole ball base well Phil thank you so much absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around helped move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students of the cube um John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7 I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of Product Management guys thanks for coming in and talking about the big news thank you for having us you guys announced some interesting things back in march around containers kubernetes and vSphere Chris just about the hard news what's being announced today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7 John it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years we previewed it this project Pacific a few months ago with this release we are putting kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform what that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on kubernetes and containers as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform and it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release this is a key part of our tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is star gated fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available generally vSphere 7 yes ok that so let's on the trend line here the relevance is what what's the big trend line that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz pascal Cerner says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on Prem and public cloud together so they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack but modernize their infrastructure stack which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications kubernetes or container based applications and VMs was excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at vmworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business I mean this is really the move to the cloud if you look at the successful enterprises and even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies the on premise isn't effective so it's not so much on premises going away we know it's not but it's turning into cloud native this is the move to the cloud generally this is a big wave yeah absolutely I mean if John if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share by far the leader in the market and so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using but bring their application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a stack for the traditional applications you have operators and administrators who are specialized in kubernetes on one side and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side with this move what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had and at the same time offer the developers what they like which is kubernetes dial tone that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications yeah Paul Paul Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but what he meant is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know we've heard over the years skill gap skill gap not a lot of skills out there but when you look at the reality of skills gap it's really about skills gaps and shortages not enough people most CIOs and chief and major securitizers as we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi clout this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model they like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way and we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem to Google cloud to Amazon Cloud to Microsoft cloud to any of our VC PP partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by kubernetes based dial tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me when he says dial tone of the Internet kubernetes does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically just that it's always available what's what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase no I the the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware cloud foundation and be able to work with a set of api's that are kubernetes api s-- so developers understand that they are looking for that they understand that dial tone right and you come to our VMware cloud foundation that one across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy that application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does vmware vsphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or user you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey use bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody has actually tried deploying kubernetes first its highly complicated and so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt-on but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple and you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out 90% of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 as well we're bringing in a couple things that are very important you also have to be able to manage at scale just like you would in the cloud you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself and so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large-scale environments both on-premise and public cloud environments and scale and then associated with that as well is you must make it secure so there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security which is how can we actually build in truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the the way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with kubernetes the same way they administered the older releases so they don't have to learn anything new they are just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as Italy before more capable they are and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's infrastructure as code means as app developers on the other side taking advantage of it what's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7 so I think it's it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations they need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker they need to be able to respond to the business and to do that what they are doing is is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what what we're really doing in the core kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on-demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need but it's it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA our FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications so you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your kubernetes and container based applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then in the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle improvement I get the application acceleration innovation but the intrinsic security is interesting could you take a minute explain what that is yeah so there's there's a few different aspects one is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment and that means that you need to have a way that the the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your in choler internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment and independent we've got these fair trust authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know continuous runtime now not only that we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot in conversations the carbon black on the security piece chrishelle see these fear everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is that the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your Google IBM cloud Oracle cloud so all the major clouds there is a vSphere stack running so it allows customers if you think about it right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it wants it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all fun a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take dare take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere we are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators they can now manage kubernetes environments you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment that's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage so so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP partners you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits that's got efficiency benefits that's got agility benefits yeah I just add to that and say that look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way and I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people process and technology and there's more to come that we're laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud and so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome we spear core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna be important five years from now because of what I just said it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go the Amazon native and then yeah warlord and agile you're going to have different tools different processes different people trained to work with those clouds but when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation you have one operating model across all these environments and that's going to be game-changing great stuff great stuff thanks for unpacking that for us graduates on the announcement thank you at vSphere 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Fergus thanks for watching [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new a VMware vSphere seven dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin had a whole lot to do with this build so Jared first off congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's kubernetes right into the virtualization platform and so this means that as a developer I can now use kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment and it means as an IT admin I'm actually able to deliver kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run so I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments regardless of whether that's on Prem public cloud this public cloud that public cloud so this really is the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific all right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now how do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio and you know as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises at the edge with service providers there's a secondary question how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern workflows as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so I don't know yeah why was dive into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right so the developer uses this kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole kubernetes cluster and the whole developer experience now is driven by kubernetes they can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of kubernetes api is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know that's not just provisioning workloads though this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed so go look at hey what's the IP address that got allocated to that or what's the CPU load on this you know workload I just deployed on top of kubernetes we've integrated a container registry into vSphere so here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images and you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint now the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control I can check in not just my code but also the description of the kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app so now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side we see V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department says hey I got a problem with my database we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about they got the same name they say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of East fear I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure so I can use the same you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for kubernetes and it's hooked in with things like DRS right so I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster and again as an as an admin I'm just using vSphere but to the developer they're getting a whole kubernetes experience out of this platform now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the kubernetes environment so besides you know seeing the VMS and and things that developers have deployed i can see all of the desired state specifications all the different kubernetes objects that the developers have created the compute network and storage objects they're all integrated right inside the the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center experience isn't transformed a lot we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say where's the kubernetes and they're surprised that like they've been managing kubernetes all this time it just looks it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got but all those kubernetes objects the pods and containers kubernetes clusters load balancer stores they're all represented right there natively in the V Center UI and so we're able to take all that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kit teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's and really bringing those together in a unified environment so that depending on what your job is and what you're working on that's what you're gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as a traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classic old-school apps that are that are running in their classic themes and then kind of the modern you know counting cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle if you will and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go their future state architecture and that involves embracing cloud it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are kind of the old current world and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there and they believe it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you and that's obviously very expensive very time-consuming and very error-prone as well there's a lot of things that can go wrong there and so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it the messy middle I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources how come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense you said not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey did you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talked about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna have this firewall rule and what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management so you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these hammer turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload amount and we're closed not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-premise I'm in the cloud and so how do you start managing that more holistically and this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside a vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right and why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time that's it's a nice big word but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications and more importantly how do you continue to evolve them and change them you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way but now instead what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation and it's not just the scale part which is obviously really important but it's also the rate of change and this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done done ie building applications well at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns these sorts of elements and so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer they'll to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better they're not stepping over each other but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance is a fourth so there's a lot more just this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER contexture of many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know VCR 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides I'm ready look at what's there so outside of kubernetes there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on that first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle so let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics so we have this new technology vSphere lifecycle management VL cm and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts how do we make them more declarative with a single image you can now specify for an entire cluster we find that a lot of our vSphere admins especially at larger scales have a really tough time doing this there's a lot of in and out today it's somewhat tricky to do and so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well so if you're doing kubernetes on kubernetes I suppose you're gonna have automation on automation right because upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequence in consequential tasks mm-hmm and yeah and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness yeah we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes and the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplification is there across the board a one I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust Authority and so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base when we talk to customers what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones right how do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted and obviously if you're hiring someone you somewhat trust them but you know what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust me yeah topic exactly so they deal with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown only a few people have access to it and then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work there as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mention all sort of accelerators coming out we all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases not to mention 3d rendering but you know FPGA is and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there and so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we find very low utilization rates inability to automate that inability to manage that well putting security and compliance and so forth and so this is really the reality that we see at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry should we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see and the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use we can you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use they don't even need to think about it in fact integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows so it's pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the the the opportunities flash challenge they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know a couple other things just I don't have a slide on it but just things we're doing to our base capabilities things around DRS and V motion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P HANA or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that V motion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff is not just kind of brand-new cool new accelerated stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right alright so Joe I give you the last word you've been working on this for a while there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys what do you what do you tell them what should they be excited about what are you excited for them in this new release I think what I'm excited about is how you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team making more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for for getting a release out I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the wheat so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right he's Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven announcement we've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people but we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it so really happy to have joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us hi Stu all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group is called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi-millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a beat to be part of beating you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I mean in particular my group is four we were um structure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past the boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams on but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know you what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work be cr7 sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 1213 years some weather and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our of our operations design development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products and so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know in particular with the server less bandwidth containers and a whole bunch of other things like that we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while we currently use extensively we use vSphere NSX T V ROPS login site network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications and our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize they know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to till we p.m. where environments and Along Came containers and like say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container that's really the Holy Grail right so we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on premises cloud or off premises I'm be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you walk through here you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna create and destroy things all the time so you know bring us inside that organizational piece you know how much will there need to be interaction and more in a rack or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes make absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we probably all certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time and there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff you know just require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I mean they just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the Harpeth that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment allows Troubleshooters and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking to be able to essentially put our deployments on Rails by using in particular tag based policies means that we can take the onus of security we can take the onus of performance management capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about a lot of time and they can just get on with their job which is to develop new functionality and help our customers so that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new vSphere so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just towards slightly different completely unit which is really all are talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and those your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take home yeah bill I really like how you described it really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your team is going to need to understand so maybe if you could dig in a little bit some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio what is the business asking of your organization that that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know urban Eddie's and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down to the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services so we have to address that really from a development perspective it's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those so we have to in infrastructure we have to act as a a firm foundation really underneath all of that that them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in the in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously is a big aspect to it and so really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted great Phil you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as you know your your your your VMware farm what a minute make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things number one is when it comes to your team especially your infrastructure team how much are they involved with setting up some of the the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud and secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us cloud allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud but very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time and I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that will it make sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever then we can do that as well but where we say for instance we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into an order journey for to allow them to view that and to gain access to that well why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity so we do absolutely have hybrid applications not sorry hybrid blocks we have blocks of suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms I mentioned that some of the smothers application blocks I have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to you know have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well and that way we best serve our customers we you know we get to get our customers yeah what they need all right great Phil final question I have for you you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers public cloud what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago well I'll be honest I was a little bit surprised by base rate so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we Eames I mean they're called VMware after all right we knew that they were looking at at that no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole town zoo stuff in the Mission Control stuff and I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from Asian perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the vote between version six and seven I've been following these since version three at least and it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture the aims to - what they would want to achieve with the application and you know luckily the nice thing is is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that but my word there's an awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think all the people in my position should really just take it as opportunity to greevey will revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and he's lost you've seen the products just have a revolutionary the the version seven is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I I'm really excited about the whole whole base well Phil thank you so much absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon brought to you by Redhat, a CloudNative computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are here in San Diego where we are keeping CloudNative classy. I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost is John Troyer, and we are happy to welcome back to the program, our host, Dan Kohn, who is the executive director of the CloudNative computing foundation, or the CNCF. Dan, thank you so much for having us. >> Thrilled to be back again. >> All right, and, yeah, so our fourth year doing this show, the big shows-- >> Dan: Nothing's really changed. You just tear right along the same level. One year to the next, you can just confuse them pretty easily.. >> So, you know, Dan, we actually did a prediction show yesterday, and I said, maybe it's my math background, but I look back two years ago, it was four thousand, then eight thousand, now twelve thousand, so I predict Boston must be sixteen thousand because I was used to those standardized tests, but with the growth, you never know, and it is very difficult, you know, we talk about planning, we've talked, this facility was booked before-- >> Dan: Two years ago. >> --the curve really started taking off. So, help us set the stage a little bit, we're getting towards the end of the event, but you know, tons of day zero things, so many sessions, so many people, there were pre-show events I heard that started like the end of last week, so, it's a small city in this community in so many pieces, and the CNCF helps enable all of it. >> It does, and what's fun for us is just that, the community is out there adopting these technologies and contributing to it and growing, and being able to come together, this is always our biggest event in North America but also in Europe and China. It's just a really nice snapshot of the point of time, in saying, okay, where are things, how many companies are interested in having sponsor booths, how many developers are there, how many track, but, I think maybe my favorite anecdote from Kubecon CloudNativeCon San Diego is that there was a, so we offer, a CFP track, a call for proposals that's extremely competitive, only 12% of the talks get accepted. And then we have a maintainer track, where the different providers can have either an intro, a deep-dive, or both. So the deep dive for the project Helm, which is not even a graduated project yet, I mean, it's very widely used, package manager for Kubernetes, but the deep dive for Helm had more than 1600 people inside their session, which is more than we had at all of attending Kubecon 2015 and 2016 combined. >> So, Dan, one of the words that gets mentioned a lot in this space, and it has lots of different meanings, is "scale". You know, we talk about Kubernetes built for big scale, we're talking about Edge computing which goes to small scale. This event, you look at the ecosystem. There's a thirty foot banner with all of the logos there, you look at the landscape-- >> Dan: They're not that big, either. >> --there are so many logos on there. Actually, I really thought you had an enjoyable yet useful analogy in your opening keynote. You talk about Minecraft. I've got a boy, he plays Xbox, I've seen Minecraft, so when he pulls up the little chart and there's like, you know, all of these little things on the side, my son can tell you how they're used and what you can build with them, I would be completely daunted looking at that, much like many of the people coming to this show, and they look around and they're like, I don't even know where to start. >> And that was fun keynote for me to put together, because I did need to make sure, both on the Minecraft part, that all the formulas were correct, I didn't want anyone... But then I drew the analogy to Kubernetes and how it is based on a set of building blocks, hundreds of them, that have evolved over time, and for that, I actually did some software archeology of reaching out to the people who created the original IPFW, Linux firewall 20 years ago based on PSD and then the evolution since then, made sure that they were comfortable with my description of it. But now, bringing it out to Kubecon, CNCF, we have a lot of projects now, so we're up to 43. When we met in Seattle four years ago, it was 2. And so it's definitely incumbent on CNCF to do a good job, and we can probably do an even better one on trying to draw this trail map, this recommended path through understanding the technologies, deciding on which ones people might want to adopt. >> Yeah, I think that would be really interesting. In fact, the words trail map kind of came up on Twitter, today, I saw. And one of the things that struck me was how the first rule of Kubecon is, well, Kubernetes is not maybe in the center of everything, it's underneath everything, but, like you said, 42 projects in the CNCF, many more projects, open-source projects, of course, from different vendors, from different coalitions, that you can see here on the show floor as well, if not in a session, so, without giving a maybe a CNCF 101, what does the path forward look like in terms of that, the growth of projects within the CNCF umbrella, the prominence of Kubecon, are we headed towards CloudNativeCon? >> Well, we've always been calling it Kubecon CloudNativeCon, and we could reverse the names, but I don't see any particular drive to do that. But I would really emphasize, and give credit to Craig McLuckie and some of the other people who originally set up CNCF, where Google had this technology, if they'd come to the Linux Foundation and said, we want to call it the Kubernetes Foundation, we probably would've said yes to that. But the impact, then, would be that all of these other technologies and approaches would have come in and said, we need to become part of the Kubernetes project, and instead, there was a vision of an ecosystem, and the reality is that Kubernetes is still by far the largest project. I mean, if you look at the total number of contributors, I believe it's approximately the same between Kubernetes and our other 42 projects combined. So, and of course, there's overlap. But in that sense, in some ways, Kubernetes sort of represents the sun, and the other projects are orbiting around it, but from the beginning, the whole idea was to say that we wanted to allow a diversity of different approaches, and CNCF has had this very clear philosophy that we're not king makers, that if you look at our landscape document, where we look at different functions like key management or container run times or databases or others, there can be multiple CNCF hosted projects in each box. And so far at least, that approach seems to be working quite well. >> Yeah, Dan, having been to a number of these, the maturity and progress is obvious. Something we've said is Kubernetes is really table sticks at this point, no matter where I go, there is going to be Kubernetes, and therefore, I've seen it some over the last year or so, but very prominent on this show, we're talking about work loads, we're talking about applications, you know, it's defining and explaining that CloudNative piece of it, and the tough thing is, you know, modern applications and building applications and that AppDev community. So, you know, speak a little bit-- You've got a very diverse audience here, talk about the personas you have to communicate with, and who you're attracting to this. I know they put out lots of metrics as to the surveys and who's coming and who's participating. >> Well, we do, and we'll be publishing those, and I love the fact. I think some people misunderstand in the thinking that Kubecon CloudNativeCon is all infrastructure engineers, and something like a third or more of the attendees are application developers, and so I do think there's this natural move, particularly towards AppDev. The difference is that on the infrastructure side, there's just a really strong consensus about Kubernetes, as you're saying, where on the application development side, it's still very early days. And I mean, if anything, I think really the only area that there is consensus on is that the abstractions that Kubernetes provides are not the ones that we want to have regular application developers at most enterprises working with, that they shouldn't actually need to build their own container and then write the YAML in order to configure it. Brian Liles hit that point nicely with his keynote today around Rails. But so we can agree that what we have isn't the right outcome, we can agree that whatever are the winning solutions are very likely underneath going to be building those containers and writing the YAML. But there are so many different approaches right now, at a high layer on what that right interface is. >> Yeah, I mean, just, one example I have, I had the opportunity to interview Bloomberg for the second time. And a year ago, we had talked very much about the infrastructure, and this year we talked about really, they've built internally that PaaS layer, so that their AppDevs, they might know that there's Kubernetes, but they don't have to interface with that at all. I've had a number of the CNCF end user members participate, maybe, speak to that, the community of end users participating, and end user usage overall. >> Yeah, so when we first met in Seattle four years ago, we had three members of our end user community. We appreciated them joining early, but that was a tough call. But to be up to 124 now, representing almost every industry, all around the world, just a huge number of brand names, has been fantastic. What is interesting is, if you go talk to them, almost all of them are using Kubernetes as the underlying layer for their own internal PaaS, and so the regular developers in their organizations can often just want to type get push, and then have the continuous integration run and the things built and then deployed out and everything. But it's somewhat surprising there hasn't yet been a level of consensus on what that sort of common PaaS, the common set of abstractions on top should be. There's a ton of our members and developers and others are all working to sort of build that winning solution, but I don't have a prediction for you yet. >> And of course, skill interoperability and skill transferability is going to be key in growing this ecosystem, but I thought the stats on you know, the searches you can do on the number of job openings for Kubernetes is incredible. >> Yeah, so on the interoperability, we were very pleased to announce Tuesday that we've now passed 100 certified vendors, and of all the things that CNCF does, probably even including Kubecon, I might say that that certified Kubernetes program is the one that's had the biggest impact. To have implementations from over 100 different organizations that you can take the same workloads and move them across and have the confidence, those APIs will be supported, it's just a huge accomplishment, and in some ways, up there with WiFi or Bluetooth or some of the best interoperability standards. And then you mentioned the job support, which is another-- >> Yeah, I want to transfer engineers too, as well as workloads. >> --area that we're thrilled, and we just launched that, but we now have a couple hundred jobs listed on it and a bunch of people applying, and it's just a perfect example of the kind of ecosystem development that we're thrilled to do, and in particular the fact that we're not charging either the employers or the applicants, so it's jobs.CNCF.io to get access to that. >> Great. Dan, you also mentioned in your keynote, Kubernetes has crossed the chasm. That changes the challenges that you have when you start talking about you know, the early or mid majority environment, so I know you've been flying around the globe, there's not only the three big events, but many small events, talk about how CNCF6 mission helps you know, educate and push, I guess not push, but educate and further innovation. >> Yeah, and just enable. So, one of the other programs we have is the Kubernetes Certified service provider, these are organizations, essentially consulting firms, that have a deep expertise that have had at least three of their engineers pass our certified Kubernetes administrator exam, and it is amazing now that we've passed 100 of those, but they're in over 30 different countries. So we're just thrilled to see businesses all around the world be able to take advantage of that. And I do get to go to a lot of events around the world; we're actually, CNCF is hosting our first ever events in Seoul and in Sydney in two weeks, that I'm quite excited for, and then in February, we're going to be back in India, and we're going to be in Bengaluru, where we had a very successful event in March. We'll be there in February 2020 and then our first one in New Delhi, those are both in the third week of February. And I think it does just speak to the number of people who are really eager for these to soak this up, but one of the cool things about it is we're combining both local experts, half of our speakers are local, half are international, and then we do a beginner track and an advanced track. >> Yeah, Dan, you know, I'd just love a little bit of insight from you as to, there's a little bit of uncontrolled chaos when you talk about open source. Many of the things that we're talking about this year, a year ago, we would've been, oh my gosh, I would've never thought of that. So give us what it's like to be kind of at the eye of the hurricane, if you would. >> A lot of criticism, to be honest. An amazing number of people like to point out the things that we're not quite doing correctly. But you know, the huge challenge for an organization like CNCF, where, we're a non-profit, these events are actually spinning off money that we're then able to reinvest directly into the projects, so doing things like a quarter million dollars for a security audit for Kubernetes that we were able to publish. Or a Jepson testing for NCD, or improving documentation and such. So a big part of it is trying to create those positive feedback loops, and have that, and then another huge part is just, given all the different competing interests and the fact that we literally have every big technology company in the world on our board and then all of the, I mean, hundreds of start ups that tend to be very competitive, it's just really important that we treat organizations similarly. So that all of our platinum members are treated the same, all our gold, all our silver, and then within the projects, that all the graduated projects are treated similarly, incubating, sandbox, and people really notice. I have kids, and it's a little bit there, where they're sort of always believing that the other kid is getting extra attention. >> Yeah, right, you can't be the king maker, if it will, you're letting it out. Look out a little bit, Dan, and you know, we still have more growth to go in the community, obviously the event has room for growth. What do you see looking forward to 2020 and beyond? >> Yeah, I would love to predict some sort of amazing discontinuity where everyone adopts these technologies and then CNCF is not necessary anymore, something like that. But the reality is, I mean, I love that crossing the chasm metaphor, and I do think it's very powerful, and we really do say 2018 was the year that Kubernetes crossed the chasm from the early adopters to the early majority, but I would emphasize the fact that it's only the early majority. We haven't reached in to the entire second half of the curve, the late majority and the laggards. And so there are a ton of organizations here at the event who are just getting up to speed on this and realizing, oh, we really need to invest and start understanding it. And so, I mean, I don't, we also talk about there will be some point of peak Kubecon, just like peak Loyal, and I don't yet see any signs of it being 2019 or 2020, but it's something that we're very cognizant of and working hard to try and ensure that the event remains useful for people and that they're seeing value from it. I mean, there was a real question when we went from one thousand Seattle four years ago to four thousand in Austin three years ago, oh, is this event even still useful, can developers still interact, do you still have conversations, is the hallway track still valuable? And thankfully, I'm able to chat with a lot of the core developers, where this is their fifth North American Kubecon and they're saying, no, I'm still getting value out of it. Now, what we tend to hear from them is, "but I didn't get to go to any sessions," or "I have so many hallway tracks and private meetings and interactions and such," but the great thing there is that we actually get all of these sessions up on YouTube within 48 or 72 hours, and so, people ask me, "oh, there's 18 different tracks, how do I decide which one to go to?" And I always say, "go to the one where you want to interact with the speaker afterwards, or ask a question," because the other ones, you can watch later. But there isn't really a substitute for being here on the ground. >> Well, there's so much content there, Dan, I think if they start watching now, by the time you get to Amsterdam, they'll have dented a little bit. >> I'll give a quick pitch for my favorite Chrome extension, it's called Video Speed Player. And you can speed people up to 120, 125%, get a little bit of that time back. >> Yeah, absolutely, we have at the backend of ours, there is YouTube, so you can adjust the speed and it does help most of the time, and you can back up a few seconds if needed. Dan, look, congratulations, we know you have a tough role, you and the CNCF, we really appreciate the partnership. We love our community, it has had a phenomenal time this week at the show, and look forward to 2020 and beyond. >> I do as well, I really want to thank you for being with us through this whole way, and I think it is just an important part of the ecosystem. >> And I know John Furrier also says thank you and looks forward to seeing you next year. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Dan, thank you so much. John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of our three days, wall-to-wall coverage here in sunny San Diego, California, thanks for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth into the topics that are most important to the technology industry with the thought leaders who are actually getting the work done. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got a great conversation today, and it all starts with the idea of how do you get smart people outside of your organization, in-service organizations to help you achieve your outcomes? It's a challenge because as we become more dependent upon services, we discover that service companies are often trying to sell us bills of goods or visions that aren't solving our exact problem. There's a new breed of service company that's really fascinated by your problem, and wants to sell it. Starts with engineering, starts with value add, and then leads to other types of potential relationships and activities. So what do those service companies look like? Well, to have that conversation, we've got Greg Tinker, who is the CTO and founder of Serene IT. Greg, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter, glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Serene IT. >> So Serene IT is a, well we call it a next generation bar. So what do I mean by that? We mean that we are an engineering-first firm, so our staff is big, we're across the U.S., we have multiple branches and we just went international into Canada, with Serene IT Canada. We have other international branches that we coming online next year. So with that being said though, the key to our growth, the key to our success is the fact that we're an engineering firm first. We have very few sales staff. Our sales staff are more of an account management style, more of a nurturer or a farmer, we would call it, versus a hunter that means someone going out, because the customers are coming to us with their problems because they need a smart engineering bench to help them. They're not looking for somebody else's to bring them askew, or resell them a product. That can be easily done by some of the large conglomerates that are already out there, not to mention, spend 30 seconds on Google, you can pretty much buy anything you want. >> Yeah, and you know Fred Brookes said a million years ago, when I was, even before I got into computer science, wrote "The Mythical Man Month", and made the observation that the solution to a hard problem typically, is not more people, >> Right. >> It's working smarter, and working more with the right people. So tell a little about how you're able to find the right people from the industry, and bring them together to turn them into the right team. >> It's a great question, Peter, so I've been very fortunate. I loved my career at Hewlett Packard. I left on good terms because I saw a problem in the industry that I wanted to go and tackle head-on. It's easy for people to sit back and talk about it, it's more difficult to actually go and try to solve the problem, and I'm trying to solve the problem. The problem is, there's a lot of orders out there that bring very low value today, they bring a lot of resale. And that's great for those clients that just know what they want. The vast majority of customers don't know what they want today because the technologies are so advanced, they need help to get from where they were, a legacy model, to a more modern software-defined ecosystem. >> And the business problems are so complex. >> Yes. >> It's that combination of complex business problems, 'cause your competitions and your customers are pushing you, and now advanced technologies that have to be marshaled to solve those problems. >> That's exactly right, so with that being said, I set out build an engineering firm and resale would be something later, but we sell through the engineering consulting firms to solve those business problems for our clients. And so our engineering bench is comprised of engineers from Cisco, from Dell, from HPE, from a lot of big conglomerates that everybody all knows. But when you work in this industry, in the labs of these big conglomerates, me coming from HPE, when you do that, you get a lot of friends across the pillars. >> Sure. >> You build networks. >> You build networks. And quite frankly, it's the Marvel lab guys that own today Q-Logic. We all know each other, and with that being said, some of these guys want to go out and try to solve these big problems with companies like myself, and so with that being said, that's how we're building Serene IT, is engineering-first, and we have a very large technical bench today. Just think about it, the company came online in 2017 with just two, so today, we are significantly bigger than that. We're approaching a 50-plus headcount, and we continue to expand with multiple branches, and our growth rate is almost double every six months. And it's something I'm having a great deal of fun doing. The key thing here though is solving business problems and helping customers. >> Well let's talk about that, because every IT organization faces the challenge that they've been so focused on the hardware assets for so long, or the application assets. Now they're trying to focus on the data assets, but they find themselves often in conflict with the business They're not doing a particularly good job of translating a business opportunity into a technology solution still. >> True. >> You've got these great engineers. How are you getting them to also speak business, so that you facilitate that domain expertise about the business so it can be turned into a technology-reliable solution? >> Like any good engineering firm, you have to have levels right? So we have a knock all the way to level four, and our level four engineers are our master technologists that are usually patent published or some varied nature thereof, with usually a multitude of master ASC certification structures to be able to state the fact that they are level four. We also have some college kids that are coming up that are wanting to learn with us, which is good. But I want to tell you on that same point though, is we only allow those elite, the level three, the level four guys, to be in front of our clients, because they've been in this industry a long time. Like myself, we can understand the business problems, as well as the technology problems, and help a client go from zero to hero. That's what we do well. >> So you're bringing in people who have been business people, but have strong engineering backgrounds >> Correct. >> In product domains, in service domains, in the industry, and you're bringing them together and saying, let's go back to being engineers, that can still talk business. >> That's exactly it, that's the key differentiator with us, is the fact that we're not talking just essays, a lot of ours, in our mindsets have essays they call engineers. We don't hire anyone that can't put fingers on a keyboard. If they can't make magic happen on a keyboard, they're of no value to us, they're of no value to our clients, which is what they need help with. So if we're not able to sit down and have a conversation and pull out a laptop and make some some magic happen with, name it, Ansible, Puppet, Shell, Saltstack, that's just in automation CodeLogics, C-code we've got all the cool stuff in that space. But if we can't sit down and write Python, Ruby on Rails and whatnot, and make something tangible to a client in very short order, we didn't do our job. >> So a lot of companies that I've experienced, a lot of customers I've talked to, have what I would call the "goldilocks" problem with their service providers. By that I mean, some of their service providers don't have the technical chops to just throw numbers at it, so they're too cold. Some of their service providers are too smart, or pushing too hard and they get suspicious of them. How do you be that just right, stay focused on the problem bringing the other team, the engineers or the IT folks that you're working with along with you, so you get that natural technology transfer so the business gets the capability that it can run and you can go do something else? >> So that's a good point, Peter. I mean, we're still working out some of those details, I'll tell you, to be honest with you on that stuff. >> Everybody is. >> Yeah. We're getting better at it, you know customers. If we get to aggressive, and tell the customers this is what's wrong with your problem, this is where you need to go, we call their baby ugly, it puts a lot of contention right on the onset, so it causes problems. So we have to be very cognitive of what they have, and where they want to go, and show them where we're going and why we're doing it, and not just focus on "You did it the wrong way". We don't want to focus on that. That's already done, that ship's already sailed, why bash it? I tell my engineers don't talk negative, there's no good going to come of it. Focus on what you have, and where you need to go with it, and how we're going to get there. Keep it a positive message, and you'll find it'd be more receptive, and it's working for our team. >> Well I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard about Serene IT is that you guys especially developed competencies in technologies that have worked in the past. >> You can say that. >> It seems as though one of the things you're able to do is you're able not to make something so new and so distinct that the client can't see how they can possibly operate it without you. You're taking a lot of open-source, a lot of established tried-and-true technologies and using your smarts to put them together in new and interesting ways so the customer says, "Oh that was smart, that was smart. "I can do that, oh yes, now I get it". Is that, am I mis-characterizing your guys? >> No, you're not, you're actually spot-on. We actually have one of the largest ZFS file systems on the planet right now with 142 million users hitting it and-- >> ZFS? >> Yeah, it's old school. >> With 142 million, okay. >> Yeah, it's old-school But if what's old is new again, we're just putting a new wrapper around it. It worked great in its day, but you put that old technology, the file system itself that's been around for a long time, one of the biggest file systems at 128 bit. You take that file system and you put that on today's Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE, name your favorite. You put that on a big machine, a Linux machine today, a large scale like an HPDL380 with NVME drives with a back-end data store, like a 3PAR or Primäre, or name whatever you want on the back end with a big fiber channel, you'd be surprised what we can do with that thing. So we're able to keep customers' costs down by showing them we can take a old-school technology and make it far bigger than you ever imagined, and give you more horsepower and at less cost, and customers are really receptive to that. Now is that perfect for every footprint? No, that was a unique situation. Not everybody's got 142 million users.(chuckles) >> Well, that's true. And so let me build on that, because the other thing that the CIOs I talk to and senior IT people and also business people, increasingly, is they want to make sure that the solution works now, but that it's not going to end-of-life options for them. >> Yeah. >> How do you do this using tried-and-true technologies combined into new and interesting ways, in a way that still nonetheless gives customers future growth options or future application options? >> I'm not a fan of vendor-locking, I'm not a fan of Franken-monsters. Our team of engineers, we have a mandate that they do not build anything like that, I won't approve it. Because I don't want to have a customer locked in to Serene IT. That was never the intent. We want them to choose us, we want them to come to our team and get our value, so we can show them how to grow their business, and do it in a nice, sustainable way, so we can show their staff how to support it. That takes us into our managed services component. Most of the big things we design and do, we're what we call an adaptive managed services, an AMS model. What do I mean by that statement? We're not a WITO. What's a WITO, you ask? It's a "Walk In, Take Over". That's the big boys, that's the DXEs of the world, that's the Assentras, that's what they do. And they do that well. We're not here to compete with that. But what we're here to do is say, to a company or business, whoever they might be, you probably don't need us to take over everything in your IT shop, and really, we're not going to be the best at that, nor are they in some cases, the other vendors. I'll tell you, you know your business the best. We know infrastructure the best, and we can show you where you can build your skillsets up and get better at it. We can automate a lot of it and show you how to manage the automation, and there'll be certain key points that maybe you guys don't want to own for various reasons, and we will manage just that key component, and we do that today with a lot of our big clients. >> Greg Tinker, CTO and founder of Serene IT, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, I want to thank you for participating in this CUBEConversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, live coverage here in theCUBE, in Europe, at Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon Europe 2018. This is theCUBE. We have the CNCF, at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with Lauren Cooney, the founder of SparkLabs, new venture around open source and innovation. Our analysts here, today with theCUBE, and our two guests are Michael Hausenblas, who's the direct developer advocate at Red Hat. Diane Meuller's the director of community development at Red Hat, talking about OpenShift, Red Hat, and just the rise and success of OpenShift. It's been really well-documented here on theCUBE, but certainly, in the industry, everyone's taking notice. Great to see you again, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> And wonderful to be here again. >> So, first of all, a lot of big news going on. CoreOS is now part of Red Hat, so that's exciting. I haven't had a chance to talk to you guys about that yet here on theCUBE, but great, great puzzle piece from the industry there for you guys, congratulations. >> Yeah, it's been a wonderful collaboration, having the CoreOS team as part of the Red Hat, and the OpenShift team, it's just a perfect fit. And the team from CoreOS, they've always been my favorite people. Alright, and Brandon Philips and the team over there are just awesome. And to have the expertise from Tectonics, the operator framework, which you'll hear more about here at KubeCon EU this week, to have Quay under the wings of Red Hat now, and Quay is a registry with OpenShift or with any other Kubernetes, you know, the stuff that they brought to the table, and the expertise, as well as the wonderful culture that they had, it was such a perfect fit with OpenShift. >> And you know, you guys bring a lot to the table, too. And I was, I mean, I've been kind of critical of CoreOS in the past, in a good way, 'cause I love those guys. I had good chats with them over the years, but they were so pure open-source guys, like Red Hat. >> Diane: Well, there's nothing wrong with being pure open-source. (laughing) >> No, no, I'm cool with that, but you guys have perfected the business more, you have great customers. So one of the things that they were always strong at was the open-source piece but when you start to monetize, and you start to get into the commercialization, it's hard for a start-up to be both, pure open-source and to monetize. You guys now have it together, >> Yeah. >> Great fit. >> So, it's a wonderful thing. We, on the OpenShift side, we have the OpenShift Commons, which is our open-source community, and we've sort of flipped the model of community development and that's at Red Hat. And one of the things is, they've been really strong, CoreOS, with their open-source projects, whether etcd, or you know, a whole myriad of other things. >> Well, let's double down on that. I want to get your thoughts. What is this OpenShift Commons? Take a minute to talk about what you guys had. You had an event Monday. It was the word on the streets, here in the hallways, is very positive. Take a minute to explain what happened, what's going on with that program? >> So OpenShift Commons is the open-source community around OpenShift Origin, but it also includes all the upstream projects that we collaborate with, with everybody from the Kubernetes world, from the Promytheus, all the CNCF project leads, all kinds of people from the upstream projects that are part of the OpenShift Ecosystem, as well as all the service providers and partners, who are doing wonderful things, and all the hosts, like Google, and you know, Microsoft Azure folks are in there. But, we've kind of flipped the model of community development on its head. In the past, if you were a community manager, which is what I started out as, you were trying to get people to contribute to your own code base. And here, because there's so much cross-community collaboration going on, we've got people working on Kubernetes. We got Kubernetes people making commits to Origin. We work on the OCI Foundation, trying to get the container stuff all figured out. >> So when you say you flipped the model, you mean there's now multiple-project contributions going on, or? >> Yeah, we've got our fingers in lots of pies now, and we have to, the collaboration has to be open, and there has to be a lot of communication. So the OpenShift Commons is really about creating those peer-to-peer networks. We do a lot of stuff virtual. I host my own OpenShift Commons briefings twice a week, and I could probably go to three or four days a week, and do it, because there's so much information. There's a fire hose of new stuff, new features, new releases, and stuff. Michael just did one on FAS. You did one before for the machine-learning Saigon OpenShift on Callum. >> Hold on, I want to just get your thoughts, Michael, on this, because what came up yesterday on theCUBE, was integration glue layers are really important. So I can see the connection here. Having this Commons model allows people to kind of cross-pollenate, one. Two, talk about integration, because we've got Promytheus, I might use KubeFlow. So there's new things happening. What does this mean for the integration piece? Good for it, or accelerating it? What's your thoughts? >> Right, right, right. So, I mainly work upstream which means when it is KubeFlow and other projects. And for me, these kind of areas where you can bring together both, the developers, and the end users, which is super important for us to get the feedback to see where we really are struggling. We hear a lot from those people that meet there, what their pinpoints are. And that is the best way to essentially shape the agenda, to say, well, maybe let's prioritize this over this other feature. And as you mention, integration being one big part, and Functions and Service being, could be considered as the visual basics of applications for Cloud Native Computing. It can act as this kind of glue between different things there. And I'm super excited about Commons. That's for me a great place to actually meet these people, and talk with them. >> So the Commons is almost a cross-pollination of folks that are actually using the code, building the code, and they see other projects that makes sense to contribute to, and so it's an alignment where you allow for that cross-pollination. >> It's a huge series of conversations, and one of the things that is really important to all of the projects is, as Michael said, is getting that feedback from production deployments. People who are working on stuff. So we have, I think we're at around 375 organizational members, so there's... >> John: What percentage of end-user organizations, do you think? >> It's probably about 50/50. You know, you can go to Commons.OpenShift.org, and look up the participants list. I'm behind a little bit in getting everybody in there, but-- >> John: So it's a good healthy dose of end-users? >> It's a good healthy dose of end-users. There's some special interest groups. Our special interest groups are more around used cases. So, we just hosted a machine-learning reception two nights ago, and we had about 200 people in the room. I'd say 50% of them were from the KubeFlow community, and the other 50% were users, or people who are building frameworks for our people to run on OpenShift. And so our goal, as always, is to make OpenShift the optimal, the best place to run your, in this case, machine-learning workloads, or-- >> And I think that's super critical, because one of the things that I've been following a little bit, and you know, I have your blog entry in front of me, is the operator framework, and really what you're trying to do with that framework, and how it's progressing, and where it's going, and really, if you can talk a little bit about what you're doing there, I think that would be great for our viewers. >> So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure you get Brandon Philips here, on your KubeFlow, sometime this week, 'cause I don't want to steal the thunder from his keynote tomorrow morning-- >> Lauren: Well, drop a couple hints. (laughs) >> John: Share a little bit, come on. >> So the operator stuff that CoreOS, and they brought it to the table, so it's really their baby. They had done a lot of work to make sure that they had first-class access to be able to inject things into Kubernetes itself, and make it run. And they're going to do a better technical talk on it than I am, and make things run. And so that what they've done is they've opened up and created an STK for operators, so other people can build more. And we think, this is a tipping point for Kubernetes, and I really don't want to steal any thunder here, or get in over my head, is the other part of it, too. >> I think Brandon is the right person to talk about that. >> Brandon, we'll drag Brandon over here. >> I'm super excited about it, but let's-- >> Yeah, let's talk about why you're super excited about it. Is there anything you can kind of tell us in terms of what? >> Enables people to run any kind of workload in communities, in a reliable automated fashion. So you bring the experience that human operators have into software. So you automate that application, which makes it even more suitable to run your enterprise application that so far might have not been the best place to run. >> Lauren: That's great, yeah. >> And yeah, I'm also looking forward to Brandon explaining the details there. >> So I think it's great hearing about that, and we talk a lot about how it's great for users. It's great, you know, operators, developers, how they're building things out, and things along those lines. But one of the things that we are not hearing a ton about here, and we want to hear more about, is security. Security is increasingly important. You know, we're hearing bits and pieces but nothing's really kind of coming together here and what're your thoughts on that? >> Security, I was recently, when I blogged about it, and people on Twitter said, well, is that really true that, you know, couldn't this secure body fall? It's like, well, all the pieces are there. You need to be aware of it. You need to know what you're doing. But it is there, right? All the defaults might not be as you would expect it, but you can enable it. And I think we did a lot of innovations there, as well. With our back, and security context, and so on. And, actually, Liz Rice and myself are working on putting the security cookbook, and for a variety that will come out later this year. We're trying to document the best practice, because it is early days, and it's quite a range of things. From building container images in a secure way, to excess control, and so on, so there's a lot of stuff (mumbles). >> What're some of the end-user feedback sessions, or feedback data that you're getting from these sessions? What is some of the things you guys are hearing? What's the patterns? What's the things that are boiling up to the top? >> Well, there's so many. I mean, this conference is one of those ones where it's a cornucopia of talks, and trying to, I just wrote a little blog post called, The Hitchhiker's Guide to KubeCon. It's on blog.openshift.com. And because, you could spend all of your time here in a different track, and never leave it, like Security 1, or in Operations 1, or-- >> John: There's a lot of great content. >> I think the Istio stuff is probably the hottest thing I'm hearing people going to. There was a great deep-dive training session, hands-on on Monday, here, that got incredible feedback. IBM and Google did that one. We had a lot of customer talks and hands-on training sessions on Monday. Here, there are pretty much, there's a great talk coming up this afternoon, on Kube Controllers that Magic... I think that's at 11:45-ish. There are a lot of the stuff around Service Fish, and service brokers, is really kind of the hot thing that people are looking for to get implemented. And we've got a lot of people from Red Hat working on that. There's, oh man, there's etcd updtes, there's a bazillion things going-- >> John: It's exploding big time here. >> Yeah. >> No doubt about it. >> The number one thing that I'm seeing last couple of months, being onsite with customers, and also here, is that given that Kubernetes is now the defective standard of container authorization, people are much more willing to go all-in, you know? >> Yeah. >> A lot of folks were on the fence, for a couple of years, going like, which one's going to make it? Now, it's kind of like, this is a given. You couldn't, you know, just as Linux is everywhere on the servers, that's the same with Kubernetes, and people are now happy to really invest, to like, okay, let's do it now, let's go all in. >> Yeah, and, what we're hearing, too, just stepping back and looking at the big picture is we see the trend, kind of hearing and connecting the dots, as the number of nodes is going to expand significantly. I mean, Sterring was on stage yesterday, and we heard their, and still small, not a lot of huge, not a lot on a large scale. So, we think that the scale question is coming quickly. >> Well, I think it already came, alright? In the machine-learning reception that we had at night, one of the gentleman, Willem Bookwalter, from Microsoft, and Diane Feddema, from Red Hat, and a whole lot of people are talking about how do we get, because machine-learning workloads, have such huge work, you know, GPU, and Google has their TPU requirements to get to scale, to run these things, that people are already pushing the envelope on Kubernetes. Jeremy Eater from Red Hat has done some incredible performance management work. And on the CNCF blog, they've posted all of that. To get the optimal performance, and to get the scale, is now, I think, one of the next big things, and there's a lot of talks that are on that. >> Yeah, and that's Istio's kind of big service mesh opportunity there, is to bring that to the next level. >> To the next level, you know, there's going to be a lot of things that people are going to experience trying to get the most out of their clusters, but also, I think we're still at the edge of that. I mean, someone said something about getting to 2,500 nodes. And I'm like, thinking, that's just the beginning, baby. >> Yeah, it's going to be more, add a couple zeroes. I got to ask you guys, I got to put you both on the spot here, because it's what we do on theCUBE. You guys are great supporters of theCUBE. We appreciate that, but we've had many conversations over the years with OpenShift, going back to OpenStacks, I don't know what year it was, maybe 2012, or I don't know. I forget what year it was. Now, the success of OpenShift was really interesting. You guys took this to a whole 'nother level. What's the reaction? Are you, as you look back now on where you were with OpenShift and where you are today, do you pinch yourself and say, damn? Or what's your view? >> Red Hat made a big bet on Kubernetes three years ago, three and a half years ago, when people thought we were crazy. You know, they hadn't seen it. They didn't understand what Google was trying to open-source, and some of the engineers inside of Red Hat, Clayton Coleman, Matt Hicks, a lot of great people, saw what was coming, reached out, worked with Google. And the rest of us were like, well, what about Ruby and Rails, and Mongo DB, and you know, doing all this stuff? And like, we invested so much in gears and cartridges. And then, once they explained it, and once Google really open-sourced the whole thing, making that bet as a company, and pivoting on that dime, and making version 3.0 of OpenShift and OpenShift Origin, as a Kubernetes-based platform, as a service, and then, switching over to being a container platform, that was a huge thing. And if you had talked to me back then, three years ago, it was kind of like, is this the right way to go? But, then, you know, okay. >> Well, it's important to history to document that point, because I remember we talked about it. And one of the things, you guys made a good bet, and people were scratching their head, at that time. >> Oh yeah. >> Big time. But also, you've got to give credit to the community, because the leaders in the community recognized the importance of Kubernetes early on. We've been in those conversations, and said, hey, you know, we can't screw this up, because it was an opportunity. People saw the vision, and saw it as a great opportunity. >> I think, as much as I like the technical bits, as an engineer, the API being written and go, and so on, I really think the community, that is what really makes the difference. >> Yeah, absolutely does. >> If you compare it with others, they're also successful. But here with CNCF, all the projects, all the people coming together, and I love the community, I really-- >> It's a case study of how to execute, in my opinion. You guys did a great job in your role, and the people didn't get in the way and try to mess it up. Great smart people understood it, shepherded it through, let it grow. >> And it really is kudos to the Kubernetes community, and the CNCF, for incubating all of this wonderful cross-community collaboration. They do a great job with their ambassadors program. The Kubernetes community does amazing stuff around their SIGs, and making sure that projects get correctly incubated. You know, they're not afraid to rejig the processes. They've just done a wonderful thing, changing the way that new projects come into the Kubernetes, and I think that willingness to learn, learn from mistakes, to evolve, is something that's really kind of unique to the whole new way of thinking about open-source now, and that's the change that we've seen. >> And open-source, open movements, always have a defining moment. You know, the OSI model, remember? That stack never got fully standardized but it stopped at a really important point. PCPIP, IP became really important. The crazy improbability world, CISCO, as we know, and others. This is that kind of moment where there's going to be a massive wealth creation, value creation opportunity because you have people getting behind something, as a de facto standard. And then, there's a lot of edge work around it that can be innovated on. I think, to me, this is going to be one of those moments we look back on. >> Yeah, and I think it's that willingness to adjust the processes, to work with the community, and you know, that Kubernetes, the ethos that's around this project, we've learned from a lot of other foundations' mistakes. You know, not that they're better or worse, but we've learned that you could see the way we're bringing in new projects, and adding them on. We took a step back as a community, and said okay, this is, we're getting too many, too soon, too fast. And maybe, this is not quite the right way to go. And rather than doing the big tent umbrella approach, we've actually starting doing some really re-thinking of our processes, and the governing board and the TOC of the CNCF, have done an awesome job getting that done. >> When you got lightning in a bottle, you stop and you package it up, and you run with it, so congratulations. Red Hat Summit next week, we'll be there, theCUBE. >> Oh yeah. >> Looking forward to going deep on this. >> Well, the OpenShift Commons Gathering is the day before Red Hat Summit. We've completely sold out, so sorry, there's a waitlist. We've gone from being, our first one, I think we had 150 people come. There's over 700 people now coming to the Gathering one, and 25 customers with production deployments speaking. This is the day before Red Hat Summit. And I lost count of how many OpenShift stories are being told at Red Hat Summit. It's going to be a crazy, jetlag-y week, next week, so-- >> Congratulations, you guys got a spring in your step, well done. OpenShift going to the next level, certainly the industry and Kubernetes, a service mesh as Istio. Lot of great coverage here in theCUBE, here in Europe for KubeCon 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm John Furrier, and Lauren Cooney, the founder of SparkLabs. I'm with theCUBE, we'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us! Day Two, here at KubeCon, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Dell Technologies World. It's the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watchin' The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante, and I'm really excited to have Sanjay Poonen on, COO of VMWare, long-time Cube alum. Great to see you, my friend. >> Always great, Dave. >> Thanks again so much for makin' time. I know you're in and out, but things are good. We had Pat on, on Monday. You guys made the call early on. You said to the industry, you know, I think the industry handed us and maybe the forecasts are a little bit conservative. We're seeing great demand. We love our business right now, and it's comin' true. Data centers booming, VMWare's kickin' butt. It's goin' great. >> You know it's been obviously a very good couple of years, since the Dell EMC merger. It's really helped us, and you know, when we think about our partnerships, we put this in a very special place. In the last two years, partnerships like Dell and AWS have been very instrumental, built on top of the partnerships we've had for many years. And our core principles at VMWare have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the planet more green. We think we've got a long way to go in just building that private cloud, making the data center feel like a cloud. That's priority number one. Priority number two, extending tno the hybrid cloud. Last time we talked was at AWS Reinvent. That's very important. We're doing a bit of work there at AWS and many other clouds. And user computing, making sure that every one of these type of devices are secure and managed, whether it's Apple devices, Google, or Microsoft. Those three priorities have still stayed the same, and now Dell's comin' to give us a lot more of that sort of draft, to help us do that inside the Dell EMC customer base, too. >> Yeah, I mean you guys are doin' it again, the whole, NSX obviously is booming. >> Sanjay: Big launch this week. >> You know, it's funny, the whole software-defined networking thing. Everybody flocked to it. VCs flocked to it. You guys changed the game with that Nycera acquisition. I mean, could you imagine, I guess you did imagine what it was going to become, I mean it's really taken off in a big way. >> Bold move. I got to give credit to the, I mean I wasn't at the company at the time, but I got to tell you, when I saw that I was stunned. Paying 1.2 billion for a company that didn't have much revenue. But here we are. We talked about it in our earnings call being a 1.4 billion one rate business. 4,500 hundred customers. We were zero customers five years ago when we did the acquisition, and what we really defined is that the future of networking is going to be software-defined, clearly, and it's much the same way a Tesla is transforming the automotive industry, right? What's the value of a Tesla? It's not just the hardware, but the software that's changing the way in which you drive, park, all of the mapping, all of that stuff. We believe the same way the networking industry's going to go through mighty revolution. We think the data center gets more efficeint and driven through software. The path into the into the public cloud, and the path to the branch, and that's what we as we launched our virtual cloud networking. It's extremely differentiated in the industry. We're the only ones really pioneering that, and we think it's extremely visionary. And we're excited to take our customers on this journey. It was a big launch for us this week, and we think NSX is just getting started. 4500 customers is about 1% of our roughly 500,000 customers Every single one of them should be looking at NSX. Big opportunity ahead of us. >> Huge. And the cloud play, we talked about this at VM World last summer. The clarity now that your customers have. They can now make bets for a couple of cycles anyway, really having confidence in your cloud strategy. You've seen that, I'm sure, in your customer base. >> We have, and you know, it started off by telling the world that the 4,000 service providers that have built their stack on VMWare, VMWare Cloud Providers, VCPP, are all going to be very special to us as they build out their clouds, often in many specialized country that have country-specific cloud requirements. But the we're going to take the public clouds and systematically start working them. IBM cloud was the first, When they acquired software we had a strong relationship with them, announced two or three years ago. And then I think the world was shocked. It was almost, as I've described on the media, a Berlin Wall moment, when AWS and VMWare came together because it sort of felt like the United States and Soviet German in 1987, okay? And you know, here we have these two companies, really workin'. That's worked out very well for us, and then we've done systematic other things with Azure, Google, and so on and so forth, and we'll see how the public cloud plays out, but we think that that hybrid cloud bridge. We're going to be probably the only company who can really play a very pivotal role in the world moving from private cloud to public cloud and there's going to be balance on both sides of that divide. >> So you really essentially are trying to become the infrastructure for the digital world now, aren't you? Talk about that a little bit. You're seeing new workloads, obviously AI's all the buzz. You guys are doing some work in blockchains. It's going to take a while for all that to pick up, but really it's the ability and containers is the other thing. Everybody thought, oh containers, that's the end of VMs, and Pat at the time said, no no no, you guys don't understand. Let me explain it. He sort of laid it out. You seem to be embracing that, again embracing change. >> I got to tell you, that one for me because I'll tell you when I first joined the company four and a half years ago, I was at SAP. I asked Pat two questions. I said the public cloud's going to, I mean, probably take out VMWare, aren't you concerned with Amazon. Here we are taking that headwind and making a tailwind. The second was like, everyone's talking about Docker. Aren't containers going to just destroy VMs? And that one wasn't as clear to us at the time, but we were patient. And what happened we started to notice in the last few years. We began to notice on GitHub tremendous amount of activity around Kubernetes, and here comes Google almost taking the top off of a lot of you know parts of Docker Two, Docker Swarm, Enterprise, Docker still remains a very good container format, but the orchestration layers become a Google-based project called Kubernetes. And I think our waiting allowed us and pivotal to embrace Google in the partnership that we announced last year. And we plan to become the de facto enterprise container platform. If VMs became the VM in VMWare and we have 500,000 customers, tens of millions of VMs, you'd think we could multiply those VMs by some number to get number of containers. VMWare has its rightful place, a birthright, to become the de facto enterprise container platform. We're just getting started, both between us and Pivotal, the Kubernetes investment, Big deal. And we're going to do it in partnership with companies like Google. >> I want to ask you about Pivotal. When Joe Tucci was the swansong in the MC world, he came out with an analyst meeting and we asked them, if you had a mulligan, you know, what would you do over again. He said, you know, we're going to answer it this way. He said, I wished I had done more to bring together the family, you know, the federation. We laid that vision out, and I probably, he said, personally I probably could've done more. I feel like Michael has taken this on. I almost feel like Joe, when he laughs at Michael. My one piece of advice is do a better job than I did with that integration. And it seems like Michael's takin' that on as an outsider. What can you tell us about the relationship between all the companies, particularly Pivotal. >> Yeah, you know Joe's a very special man, as our chairman, and Joe and Pat are the reasons I joined VMWare, and so I have tremendous respect for them. And he stayed on as an advisor to Mike O'Dell. And I think Mike O'Dell just took a lot of those things and improved on it. I wouldn't say that anything was dramatically bad, but you know he tightened up much of the places where we could work together. One material change was having the Dell EMC reps carry quota, for example VMWare. They're incetivized. That has been a huge difference to allow us to have our sales forces completely align together. Big big huge difference. I mean, sales people care about our product when they're compensated, carry quota on it, and drive it. The second aspect was in many of these places where Dell and VMWare or VMWare and Pivotal were needed to just take obstacles out of the way, and I don't think Pivotal would've been really successful if it had stayed in VMWare four or five years ago. So Paul Mertz leaving, the genius of that whole move, which Joe orchesthrated, and allowing them to flourish. Okay, here they have four or five years, they've gone public. They have a tremendous amount of traction. Then last year, we began to see that Kubernetes Coming back allowed us to get closer to them, okay? We didn't need to do that necessarily by saying that Pivotal needs to be part of VMWare. We just needed to build a joint engineering effort around Kubernetes And make that enormously successful. So you get the best of both worlds. We're an investor, obviously, in Pivotal. We're proud of their success in the public markets. We benefit some from that sort of idea process, but at the same time we want to make sure this Kubernetes Effort and the broader app platform, our cloud foundry, is enormously successful, and every one of our customers who have VMs starts looking containers. >> Well, I always said Pivotal was formed with a bunch of misfit toys that just didn't seem to fit into VMWare. >> Sanjay: It's come a long way. >> And you took that, but it was smart because you took it and said, here it is. Let's start figuring that out. Who better to do that than Paul? And it's really come together and obviously a very successful. >> Yeah, Rob, Scott, Bill, Yara, many of that team there. They're passionate about developers, okay? We understand the infratstructure role very well, but when you can get dev and ops together, in a way they collaborate, so we're excited about it. And we have a key part for us, we have a very simple mission: to make the container platform just very secure. What's the differenetiation between us and other companies trying to build container platforms? NSX? So our contribution into that is to take Kubernetes Watch for some of the management capabilities, and then add NSX to it, highly differentiate it. And now all of a sudden customers say, this is the reason why I mean, 'cause every container brings a place where the port could be insecure. NSX makes that secture, and we think that that's another key part to what's made NSX the launch this week extremely sepcial is that its story relates to cloud and containers. Those two Cs, I would say, cloud and containers. We've taken what were headwinds to us, VMWare over the last four or five years, and made them tailwinds. And for us that's been a tremendous learnnig lesson, not just I would say in our own technology road map, but in leadership and management. That's important for us as business leaders, too. >> Dave: And I got to give some love to my friends in the Vsin world, Yen Bing and those guys. Obviously Vsin doin' very well. Give us the update there. I mean, you're doin', he's doin' exactly what you said: we're going to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. >> I mean, again you know, when we start things off. If you'll remember, three or four years ago, we were confusing EMC and VMWare, Evo, Rails, some of those things. We just had to clean that up. And as Dell EMC came together and VMWare, we said, listen. We're going to do software-defined storage really well because it has a very close synergy point to the Kubernetes I mean, we know a lot about storage because it's very closely connected to Compute. And if we could do that better than anybody else, and in the meantime all these startups were doing reasonably well, Simplicity, Nutanics, Pivotry, so on and so forth. I mean there's no reason if we don't have our act together we could build the best software-defined storage and then engineer a system together with Dell that has the software, and that's what VX rails has become. So a few false stubs of the toe when we started off, you know three or four years ago, but we've come a long way. Pat talked about over 10,000 customers at the revenue run rate that we announced last year, and a 600 million run rate at the end of Q4. We believe we are, for just the software piece, we are the de facto leader, and we have to continue to make customers happy and to drive, you know, this as the future of hyper converge infrastructure because converged had its place. And now the coming together of Compute Storage, over time networking with a layer of management, that's the future of the data center. >> Yeah, I was watching. THere's some good, interesting maneuvering goin' on in the marketplace. A lot of fun for a company like ours to watch. I want to talk about leadership. There's a great, you got to go to Sanjay's LinkedIn profile. There's an awesome video on there. It's like a mini TED talk that some of your folks mashed up and put out there. It's only about eight minutes. But I want to touch on some of the things that I learned from that video. Your background, I mean I knew you came from India. You came over at 18 years old, right? >> Sanjay: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a poor home in India, and I came here only because I got a scholarship to go to Dartmouth College. And I think I might have been one of the few brown-skinned guys in Hanover, New Hampshire. I mean, you've been there, you know there's not much Indian goin' on here. (laughter) But I'm very forutnate. And this country is a very special country to immigrants, if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself. I'm a product of that hard work. And now as an Indian American living in California. So I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me become who I am. >> So you were on a scholarship to Dartmouth. >> Yes, that's right. >> As a student in India. So obviously an accomplished student in India, and you said, you know, I got bullied a little bit. I had the glasses, right? Somebody once told me, Dave, don't peak in high school. It's good advice, right? So it was funny to hear you tell that story because I see you as such a charismatic, dynamic leader. I can't picture you as, you know, a little kid getting bullied. >> We were always geeks at one point in time, but one of the things my mother and dad always taught me, especially my mom, who had a tremendous influence on my life and is my hero, is, listen, don't worry what people say about you, okay? Your home is always going to feel a safety and a fortress to us, and I appreciate the fact that irrespective of what happened on the playground, if I was bullied, at home I knew it was secure. And I seek to have that same attitude twoards my children and everybody I consider my extended family, people at work, and so on and so forth. But once you've done that, you don't build your identity just to what people say about you. You're going to build your identity over what's done over a long period of time, okay? With, of course, if everybody in the world hates you, that's a tough place. That's happened to a few people in the world. I wasn't in that state at all. And as I came to this country, just got tougher because I was a minority in a place. But many of those lessons I learned as a young boy helped me as an 18 year old, as I came here, and I'm very thankful for that. >> And you came here with no money, alright? >> A scholarship. >> Right. >> Maybe 50 bucks in the pocket. >> You had 50 bucks and an opportunity, and made the most of it. And then obviously you did very well at Dartmouth. You graduated from Harvard, right? >> I did my MBA at Harvard. >> MBA at Harvard, probably met some interesting people there. >> Andy Jackson being one of them. >> I know he's a friend of yours. >> Sam Berg, who's the head of the client business, was also a classmate of mine at HBS. The '97 class of HBS had some accomplished people: Chris Kapensky is running McDonald's. She's President of US. So I'm very fortunate to have some good classmates there. >> So what did you do? Did you go right to Harvard from? >> No, I spent four years working at Apple. And then went back to do my business school. >> And then what'd you do after that? >> I came back to Silicon Valley at a startup. I was one of the founding product managers at AlphaBlocks. Then went to Informatica. And bulk of my time was at SAP, and most of my life was in the analytics, big data business. What we called big data at the time. >> And that's when we first met it. >> Analytics at BI, and then when Joe and Pat called me for this, the end-user computing role at VMWare four and a half years ago. That's when I came to VMWare. >> And that was a huge coup for VMWare. We knew you from SAP, and that business was struggling. You always give credit to your team, of course. Awesome. Which is what a good leader does. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we break is, you talked about leadership and how importatn it is to embrace cahnge. You said you have three choices when change hits you. What are those three choices? >> You either embrace it, okay? You either stand on the sidelines or you leave. And that's typically what happens in any kind of change, whether it's change in work, change in fafmilies, change in other kinds of religious settings, I mean it's a time-old prinicple. And you want to let the people who are not on board with it leave if they want to leave. The people who are staying in the middle and not yet convinced, you'll hope they'll do. But they cannot yet throw the grenades, 'cause then they're just going to be. And you want to take that nucleus of people who are with you in the change to help you get the people who sit on the sidelines in. And to me when I joined VMWare, the end-user computing team had the highest attrition, okay, and the lowest satisfaction. And I found the same thing. There were popel who were leaving in droves. Some people sittin' on the sidelines, but a core group of people I loved that were willing to really work with me, 'cause I didn't really know a lot about it. The smarter people were in the team and some people that we hired in. We had to take that group and become the chagne agents, and when that happens it's a beautiful thing because from within starts to form this thing that's the phoenix rising out of the ashes. And the company, and then these people who are sidelineers start to get involved. New people want to join. Now everybody wants to be part of the end-user computing team at VMWare because we're a winner, but it wasn't that way four and a half years ago. Same thing in cloud. How are we going to transform this cloud business to be one where, VCloudAir. We're being made fun of, like how are you ever going to compete with Amazon. We had to go through our own catharsis. We divested that business, but out of that pain point came a fundamental change. Some people left. Some people stayed, but I'm just grateful through all of this that we learned a tremendous amount. I think change is the most definitive thing that happens to every company, and you have to embrace it. If you embrace chance, it's going to make you a much stronger leader. I'll tell you, the Mandarin word, okay, for crisis is two symbols: one that shows disaster and one that shows opportunity. I choose the opportunity side. >> Dave: You choose? Right? Yeah! >> And eveyrone makes that choice, right? And if you make the right path, it could be a beautiful learning experience. >> Sanjay, words to live by. Definitely check out that video on Sanjay's profile. >> It's on LinkedIn. >> Really fabulous always to sit down and talk to you. >> Always a pleasure, Dave. Congratulations to all your success. >> Dave: Thank you! I really appreaciate your support. >> Thank you. >> Alright, everybody that's it from Dell Technologies World 2018. You can hear the music behind us. Next week, big week. We've got Red Hat Summit. I'll be at Service Now Knowledge. We got a couple of other shows and tons of shows coming up. I don't know, you were at Vmon last year. I don't know if you're going to be there this year, maybe maybe not, we'll see. >> Well we got a big one coming up at VM World. We'll see you there. >> We got big one coming up, VM World, at the end of August through early September, which is back at Mosconi this year? >> It's back at Las Vegas still. One more thing and then it's going back to Mosconi after the construction's over. >> So go to theCUBE.net, check out all the shows. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>> Announcer: From Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to the live CUBE coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark, for KubeCon 2018, Kubernetes European conference. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, my co-host Lauren Cooney here with Adrian Cockcroft who is the Vice President of Cloud Architecture and Strategy for Amazon Web Services, AWS. CUBE alumni, great to see you, a legend in the industry, great to have you on board today. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks very much. >> Quick update, Amazon, we were at AWS Summit recently, I was at re:Invent last year, it gets bigger and bigger just continue to grow. Congratulations on successful great earnings. You guys posted last week, just continuing to show the scale and leverage that the cloud has. So, again, nothing really new here, cloud is winning and the model of choice. So you guys are doing a great job, so congratulations. Open source, you're handling a lot of that now. This community here, is all about driving cloud standards. >> Adrian: Yeah. >> Your guys position on that is? Standards are great, you do what customers want, as Andy Jassy always says, what's the update? I mean, what's new since Austin last year? >> Yeah, well, it's been great to be back on had a great video of us talking at Austin, it's been very helpful to get the message out of what we're doing in containers and what the open source team that I lead has been up to. It's been very nice. Since then we've done quite a lot. We were talking about doing things then, which we've now actually done and delivered on. We're getting closer to getting our Kubernetes service out, EKS. We hired Bob Wise, he started with us in January, he's the general manager of EKS. Some of you may know Bob has been working with Kubernetes since the early days. He was on the CNCF board before he joined us. He's working very hard, they have a team cranking away on all the things we need to do to get the EKS service out. So that's been major focus, just get it out. We have a lot of people signed up for the preview. Huge interest, we're onboarding a lot of people every week, and we're getting good feedback from people. We have demos of it in the booth here this week. >> So you guys are very customer-centric, following you guys closely as you know. What's the feedback that you're hearing and what are you guys ingesting from an intelligence standpoint from the field. Obviously, a new constituent, not new, but a major constituent is open source communities, as well as paying enterprise customers? What's the feedback? What are you hearing? I would say beyond tire kicking, there's general interest in what Kubernetes has enabled. What's Amazon's view of that? >> Yeah, well, open source in general is always getting a larger slice of what people want to do. Generally, people are trying to get off of their enterprise solutions and evolving into an open source space and then you kind of evolve from that into buying it as a service. So that's kind of the evolution from one trend, custom or enterprise software, to open source to as a service. And we're standing up all of these tools as a service to make them easier to consume for people. Just, everybody's happy to do that. What I'm hearing from customers is that that's what they're looking for. They want it to be easy to use, they want it to scale, they want it to be reliable and work, and that's what we're good at doing. And then they want to track the latest moves in the industry and run with the latest technologies and that's what Kubernetes and the CNCF is doing, gathering together a lot of technologies. Building the community around it, just able to move faster than we'd move on our own. We're leveraging all of those things into what we're doing. >> And the status of EKS right now is in preview? And the estimated timetable for GA? >> In the next few months. >> Next few months. >> You know, get it out then right now it's running in Oregon, in our Oregon data center, so the previews are all happening there. That gets us our initial thing and then everyone go okay, we want to in our other regions, so we have to do that. So another service we have is Fargate, which is basically say just here's a container, I want to run it, you don't have to declare a node or an instance to run it first. We launched that at re:Invent, that's already in production obviously, we just rolled that out to four regions. That's in Virginia, Oregon, Dublin and Ohio right now. A huge interest in Fargate, it lets you simplify your deployments a little bit. We just posted a new blog post that we have an open source blog, you can find if you want to keep up with what's going on with the open source team at AWS. Just another post this morning and it's a first pass at getting Fargate to work with Kubernetes using Virtual Kubelet which is a project that was kicked off by, it's an experimental project, not part of the core Kubernetes system. But it's running on the side. It's something that Microsoft came up with a little while ago. So we now have, we're working with them. We did a pull request, they accepted it, so that team and AWS and a few other customers and other people in the community, working together to provide you a way to start up Fargate as the underlying layer for provisioning containers underneath Kubernetes as the API for doing you know the management of that. >> So who do you work with mostly when you're working in open source? Who do you partner with? What communities are you engaging with in particular? >> It's all over. >> All over? >> Wherever the communities are we're engaging with them. >> Lauren: Okay, any particular ones that stand out? >> Other than CNCF, we have a lot of engagement with Apache Hadoop ecosystem. A lot of work in data science, there's many, many projects in that space. In AI and machine learning, we've sponsored, we've spend a lot of time working with Apache MXNet, we were also working off with TensorFlow by Torch and Caffe and there's a lot, those are all open source frameworks so there's lots of contributions there. In the serverless arena, we have our own SAM service application model. We've been open sourcing more of that recently ourselves and we're working with various other people. Across these different groups there's different conferences you go to, there's different things we do. We just sponsored Rails Conference. My team sponsors and manages most of the open source conference events we go to now. We just did RAILCON, we're doing a Rust conference, soon I think, there's Python conferences. I forget when all these are. There's a massive calendar of conferences that we're supporting. >> Make sure you email us that that list, we're interested actually in looking at what the news and action is. >> So the language ones, AltCon's our flagship one, we'll be top-level sponsor there. When we get to the U.S., CubeCon in Seattle, it's right there, it's two weeks after re:Invent. It's going to be much easier to manage. When we go to re:Invent it's like everyone just wants to take that week off, right. We got a week for everyone to recover and then it's in the hometown. >> You still have that look in your eyes when we interviewed you in Austin you came down, we both were pretty exhausted after re:Invent. >> Yeah, so we announced a bunch of things on Wednesday and Thursday and I had to turn it into a keynote by Tuesday and get everyone to agree. That's what was going on, that was very compressed. We have more time and all of the engineering teams that really want to be at an event like this, were right in the hometown for a lot. >> What's it like workin' at Amazon, I got to ask you it since you brought it up. I mean and you guys run hard at Amazon, you're releasing stuff with a pace that's unbelievable. I mean, I get blown away every year. Almost seems like, inhuman that that you guys can run at that pace. And earnings, obviously, the business results speak for themselves, what's it like there? I mean, you put your running shoes on, you run a marathon every day. >> It's lots of small teams working relatively independently and that scales and that's something other engineering organizations have trouble with. They build hierarchies that slow down. We have a really good engineering culture where every time you start a new team, it runs at its own speed. We've shown that as we add more and more resources, more teams, they are just executing. In fact, their accelerated, they're building on top of other things. We get to build higher and higher level abstractions to layer into. Just getting easier and easier to build things. We're accelerating our pace of innovation there's no slowing down. >> I was telling Jassy they're going to write a Harvard Business School case study on a lot of the management practices, but certainly the impact on the business side with the model that you guys do. But I got to ask you, on the momentum side, super impressed with SageMaker. I predicted on theCUBE at AWS Summit that that will be the fastest growing service. It will overtake Aurora, I think that is currently on stage, presented as the fastest growing service. SageMaker is really popular. Updates there, its role in the community. Obviously, Kubernete's a good fit for orchestrating things. We heard about CubeFlow, is an interesting model. What's going on with SageMaker how is it interplaying with Kubernetes? >> People that want to run, if you're running on-premise, cluster of GPU enabled machines then CubeFlow is a great way of doing that. You're on TensorFlow, that manages your cluster, you run CubeFlow on top. SageMaker is running at very low scale and like a lot of things we do at AWS, what you need to run an individual cluster for any one customer is different from running a multi-tenant service. SageMaker sits on top of ECS and it's now one of the largest generators of traffic to ECS which is Amazon's horizontally scaled, multi-tenant, cluster management system, which is now doing hundreds of millions of container launches a week. That is continuing to grow. We see Kubernetes as it's a more portable abstraction. It has some more, different layers of API's and a big community around it. But for the heavy lifting of running tens of thousands of containers in for a single application, we're still at the level where ECS does that every day and Kubernetes that's kind of the extreme case, where a few people are pushing it. It'll gradually grow scale. >> It's evolution. >> There's an evolution here. But the interesting things are, we're starting to get some convergence on some of the interfaces. Like the interfacing at CNA, CNA is the way you do networking on containers and there is one way of doing that, that is shared by everybody through CNA. EKS uses it, BCS uses it and Kubernetes uses it. >> And the impact of customers is what for that? What's the impact? >> It means the networking structures you want to set up will be the same. And the capabilities and the interfaces. But what happens on AWS is because it has a direct plug-in, you can hook it up to our accelerated networking infrastructure. So, AWS's instances right now, we've offloaded most of the network traffic processing. You're running 25 gigabits of traffic, that's quite a lot of work even for a big CPU, but it's handled by the the Nitro plug-in architecture we have, this in our latest instance type. So if you talked a bit about that at re:Invent but what you're getting is enormous, complete hypervisor offload at the core machine level. You get to use that accelerated networking. You're plugging into that interface. But that, if you want to have a huge number of containers on a machine and you're not really trying to drive very high throughput, then you can use Calico and we support that as well. So, multiple different ways but all through the same thing, the same plug-ins on both. >> System portability. You mentioned some stats, what's the numbers you mentioned? How many containers you're launching a week, hundreds of thousands? On ECS, our container platform that's been out for a few years, so hundreds of millions a week. It's really growing very fast. The containers are taking off everywhere. >> Microservices growth is, again that's the architecture. As architecture is a big part of the conversation what's your dialogue with customers? Because the modern software architecture in cloud, looks a lot different than what it was in the three layered approach that used to be the web stack. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, you know we were just talking to folks about how in large enterprise organizations, you're still finding groups that do waterfall development. How are you working to kind of bring these customers and these developers into the future, per se? >> Yeah, that's actually, I spend about half my time managing the open source team and recruiting. The other half is talking to customers about this topic. I spend my time traveling around the world, talking at summits and events like this and meeting with customers. There's lots of different problems slowing people down. I think you see three phases of adoption of cloud, in general. One is just speed. I want to get something done quickly, I have a business need, I want to do it. I want machines in minutes instead of months, right, and that speeds everything up so you get something done quickly. The second phase is where you're starting to do stuff at scale and that's where you need cloud native. You really need to have elastic services, you can scale down as well as up, otherwise, you just end up with a lot of idle machines that cost you too much and it's not giving you the flexibility. The third phase we're getting into is complete data center shutdown. If you look at investing in a new data center or data center refresh or just opening an AWS account, it really doesn't make sense nowadays. We're seeing lots of large enterprises either considering it or well into it. Some are a long way into this. When you shut down the data center all of the backend core infrastructure starts coming out. So we're starting to see sort of mainframe replacement and the really critical business systems being replaced. Those are the interesting conversations, that's one of the areas that I'm particularly interested in right now and it's leading into this other buzzword, if you like, called chaos engineering. Which is sort of the, think of it as the availability model for cloud native and microservices. We're just starting a working group at CNCF around chaos engineering, is being started this week. So you can get a bit involved in how we can build some standards. >> That's going to be at Stanford? >> It's here, I mean it's a working group. >> Okay, online. >> The CNCF working group, they are wherever the people are, right. >> So, what is that conversation when you talk about that mainframe kind of conversation or shut down data centers to the cloud. What is the key thing that you promote, up front, that needs to get done by the by the customer? I mean, obviously you have the pillars, the key pillars, but you think about microservices it's a global platform, it's not a lift and shift situation, kind of is, it shut down, but I mean not at that scale. But, security, identity, authentication, there's no perimeter so you know microservices, potentially going to scale. What are the things that you promote upfront, that they have to do up front. What are the up front, table stake decisions? >> For management level, the real problem is people problems. And it's a technology problem somewhere down in the weeds. Really, if you don't get the people structures right then you'll spend forever going through these migrations. So if you sort of bite the bullet and do the reorganization that's needed first and get the right people in the right place, then you move much faster through it. I say a lot of the time, we're way upstream of picking a technology, it's much more about understanding the sort of DevOps, Agile and the organizational structures for these more cellular based organizations, you know, AWS is a great example of that. Netflix are another good example of that. Capital One is becoming a good example of that too. In banking, they're going much faster because they've already gone through that. >> So they're taking the Amazon model, small teams. Is that your general recommendation? What's your general recommendation? >> Well, this is the whole point of microservices, is that they're built by these small teams. It's called Conway's law, which says that the code will end up looking like the team, the org structure that built it. So, if you set up a lots of small teams, you will end up with microservices. That's just the way it works, right. If you try to take your existing siloed architecture with your long waterfall things, it's very hard not to build a monolith. Getting the org structure done first is right. Then we get into kind of the landing zone thing. You could spend years just debating what your architecture should be and some people have and then every year they come back, and it's changing faster than they can decide what to do. That's another kind of like analysis paralysis mode you see some larger enterprises in. I always think just do it. What's the standard best practice, layout my accounts like this, my networks like this, my structures we call it landing zone. We get somebody up to speed incredibly quickly and it's the beaten path. We're starting to build automation around these on boarding things, we're just getting stuff going. >> That's great. >> Yeah, and then going back to the sort of chaos engineering kind of idea, one of the first things I should think you should put into this infrastructure is the disaster recovery automation. Because if that gets there before the apps do, then the apps learn to live with the chaos monkeys and things like that. Really, one of the first apps we installed at Netflix was Chaos Monkey. It wasn't added later, it was there when you arrived. Your app had to survive the chaos that was in the system. So, think of that as, it used to be disaster recovery was incredibly expensive, hard to build, custom and very difficult to test. People very rarely run through their disaster recovery testing data center fail over, but if you build it in on day one, you can build it automated. I think Kubernetes is particularly interesting because the API's to do that automation are there. So we're looking at automating injecting failure at the Kubernetes level and also injecting into the underlying machines that are running Good Maze, like attacking the control plane to make sure that the control plane recovery works. I think there's a lot we can do there to automate it and make it into a low-cost, productized, safe, reliable thing, that you do a lot. Rather than being something that everyone's scared of doing that. >> Or they bolted on after they make decisions and the retrofit, pre-existing conditions into a disaster recovery. Which is chaotic in and of itself. >> So, get the org chart right and then actually get the disaster recovery patterns. If you need something highly available, do that first, before the apps turn up. >> Adrian, thanks for coming on, chaos engineering, congratulations and again, we know you know a little about Netflix, you know that environment, and been big Amazon customer. Congratulations on your success, looking forward to keeping in touch. Thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Lauren Cooney live in Denmark for KubeCon 2018 part of the CNC at the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. We'll back with more live coverage, stay with us. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. It's the Cube! Covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage here in Mountain View, California, heart of Silicon Valley, at the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their developer eco-system for cloud natives, an extension to their popular and successful DevNet developer programs. A special event, really getting down and dirty on Kubernetes cloud native, and how to create real-time applications on the cloud. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Raj Krishna, who's the VP of Product Management with Cisco Meraki, doing some great things here, made a big announcement on stage. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So, before we jump into the speeds and feeds of some of the real impactful things that you've been doing, with this cool area in cloud, you just had some news on stage, you announced it. You guys are giving away a lot of Benjamins in product. Share the news. Yeah, we're going to be giving away 1.4 million dollars worth of our products, our cloud managed switches. And the reason why we're doing that is because we want to see the ecosystem, we want people to have access to our technology, because they're going to build all kinds of cool and interesting applications that we may not have thought of. So, by giving this gear away, we want to help evangelize, and help promote the ecosystem. >> You guys are creating a nice culture here, I got to say. I give you guys props, the second event you guys have done with DevNet create, where you're really looking at, and aligning with the cloud native developers. You've got things, you've got some hackathons, you've got some team-oriented camps here, but really it's about giving them the enablement, and the tooling to do things. You're not telling people "you need to develop this." You're not jamming stuff down their throat. Talk about the role of that, and what you guys are doing with your product, and how does that fit in? Because IoT comes right to mind for me. You know, new sensors, new things are happening, talk about specifically the things that you guys are offering from a tech standpoint, tools that you offer, and some of the things you expect that might happen. >> Most definitely. So, throughout the years as we've kind of built out a very large-scale cloud management platform, we've realized that the need for external orchestration tools, external monitoring tools, data aggregation tools, is paramount because people want to build not just interesting and cool applications, but they want to build security applications. They want to build data logging applications, analytics applications where they can take data from the infrastructure and then take data from their CRM, their customer resource management systems, and mix and match that data to be able to understand "hey, is there a pattern here, in terms of network traffic and foot traffic in my stores." So, as we've come to terms with this trend, we've been building out a very rich set of API's, that can help you aggregate data, that can help you visualize data, and we realized that that's not enough. So, that's why we've been investing heavily in the ecosystem play. That's why we've actually set up dedicated teams at Meraki. We have a brand new solutions architecture team that is hyperfocused and their sole mission in life is to enable developers. It's to go out and evangelize the technology, but then also have whiteboarding conversations with those developers, give them sample code, show them other sample applications. They've also stood up a brand new application app store where third party developers can have their apps featured, and they can have their apps purchased on their store. >> Take a minute to explain Meraki's role in this ecosystem, because it's a product, it's a switch, but it's not just hardware. Can you just take a minute just to lay it out, what is it, what does it do, and what does it enable? >> Yeah, so the reason why Meraki was so successful and acquired by Cisco was the cloud management aspect of it. The ability to roll out and provision and monitor, manage and scale a network, whether it's wireless, whether it's routing, whether it's switching, whether it's security, and to do that at a gargantuan scale where you have 10,000 sites or 20,000 sites, that was Meraki's bread and butter, but almost by accident what we realized was that would give you a large scale programmable platform, so we built these API's on top, and what we've learned through the years is that this is a massively programmable orchestration layer, right? For being able to program things, being able to extract data at scale-- >> Like what, like program what? >> So, let me give you an example. We have a service provider that we work with in Europe that services a million end customers. And what they do, is they're offering their services, their broadband connectivity services, their VoIP services, and they're also offering Meraki hardware in their web stores. I can go to their web store, and I can click "I want to buy a three year broadband contract, and I want to buy these widgets that come with it, one of those widgets is a Meraki widget." When they click Buy, it makes a series of API calls to the Meraki backend and everything gets provisioned automatically. Not just the Meraki services, but also the service providers own portfolio services, so it's enabled a seamless ordering experience where someone take Meraki, just as one part of the solution, and wrap a bunch of other services around it, and enable provisioning of that, at scale. >> Versus the alternative is ship a box, unpack it, connect to it-- >> Ship a box to a warehouse, unpack it, plug it in-- >> Login command line interface I mean, it's a nightmare, compared to what is is automated. >> Right >> Turnkey. >> Right, exactly. And the way that we really see ourselves fostering this ecosystem and our role in the ecosystem is we're just the platform, we are enabling the platform we want to make the platform easy to use, we want there to be rich documentation, we want there to be a set of API's, we want there to be scripts that we can make available, but really the creativity is going to come from those developers who come on board and solve unique customer problems that we may not have even thought of, so it's about working with those people, and making sure that they have the tools, the knowledge, the expertise and just enabling them. >> So, what would a traditional, kind of, Meraki developer look like? What kind of skills do they need? Do they have to have experience in networking, or app development, or what are you really looking at? >> Yeah, we're getting experience with an entire range of different types of application engineers, you know. People who are more mobile app centric, so we've seen mobile apps that are crafted, that integrate with Meraki beacons to trigger some kind of an action when I walk into a store, so very mobile app centric developers. We've seen a lot of interesting web-centric applications, you know, developers who are proficient in Java script, things like Ruby on Rails, building very rich, front-end visualizations of Meraki data, and then we've seen some even more hardcore networking engineers who really understand bits and bytes and the flows of data coming out of the network to, for example, take a NetFlow feed from our security appliance, and say "hey, this is a threat and I want to create, using this API call that tells me this is a threat, I want to have a tie-in with something like a lightbulb so that lightbulb goes off any time I see a network threat in my environment." So, what's kind of cool and interesting here is I have a range of different types of developers with different types of skillsets, and they're able to enable use cases and applications based off of their area of domain expertise. >> All right, I got to ask the hard question. This is the tough one. Increased surface area increases more potential security threats, malware, I mean there's lightbulbs out that that have, you know, connect to your WiFi, I mean they're basically a PC, you've got a processor in there, so great for malware, to attach to, sit there dormant, get inside the network, this is a huge concern. How do you guys look at the security paradigm for this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's why building a large scale network means having security first and foremost in your mind. So, we actually have a very rich set of security products that can help you secure your endpoints, and help you secure your network. So, just giving you an example here: We have a security appliance that actually integrates with Cisco's Talos threat engine. Cisco Talos is a team of hundreds of security researchers, and they're constantly staying up to date with the latest security vulnerabilities, security patches, trojans, malware, etc, etc. If you're running a Meraki security appliance, you have visibility into these real-time threats, and also you can extract that data and visualize it in a third party portal, or you can save it for logging. So, making sure that people are aware of the security threats, making rich tools available to our developer ecosystem that can help protect them against these threats, and then also having a privacy by design mindset when we're building and constructing API's. Let me give you an example. The upcoming laws in Europe, the GDPR laws, going into effect May 25th, we're actually building API's that will help you abide to these laws by letting you delete personally identifying information for a specific client. So, we want to help our customers and our developers be compliant with GDPR for their end users, so if their end users come to them and say "hey, I was connected to this network, but I want to be forgotten now, I want you to delete all my data," they can do that programmatically using an API. So, it's the kind of entire spectrum, right? It's building the awareness, building the product suite, as well as building the tools to help developers build privacy applications as well. >> That's definitely enabling the developer ecosystem, like we were talking about before. Now, what do you think is, when you talk about the industries that you're in, you know, I can see enterprises, retail, and manufacturing, and lots of different areas there, and there's probably service providers examples where they can make a lot of money, working with you guys and adding services to what they deliver to their customers. Where do you see kind of the most growth coming from, or the most interest? >> Yeah, we see the most growth coming from, kind of, a range of customers across the board, to be honest with you. Some of our traditional sweet spot verticals, that we were very strong in were distributed enterprise, retail and education because in these kinds of environments, you often have lean IT teams that want to do a lot more with a lot less. But what we've found is, our historic sweet spot was that kind of mid-market customer, you know, between 100 and 1000 employees, but over time we've been moving more and more up market, because we've been adding enterprise features, we've been really hardening and stabilizing the platform, so that can deliver enterprise networking at scale, and what we're finding now is increasingly more and more interest from that very high end premium segment of customer, you know, the Fortune 1000 companies who are saying "this is interesting for all my branch sites," or "hey, this is interesting for all my distribution centers or all my warehouses," so we're seeing growth across the board, which is why it's such an exciting time to be at Meraki. >> Raj, good luck with everything. Thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. What's next for you guys as this things evolves? More programmability, more automation? >> More of everything. We're going to be launching more products, we're going to be crafting more API's, we very recently released a new series of HD video surveillance cameras, and we're seeing a ton of very interesting IoT type of applications where those are being used in manufacturing or farming, we're getting interesting API requests for that. So, we're going to be continuing to invest heavily in our portfolio, build out more hybrid products, more software features, as well as more API calls. >> You guys are targeting the developers at the edge, on the cutting edge, pun intended-- [Raj] We hope so. >> Great stuff. IoT certainly a great opportunity for developers, you know, stuff that you couldn't do years ago are possible, certainly with the cloud and IoT, and Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier. More live coverage here in Mountain View after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Manhattan, it's theCube, covering AWS Summit, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to the Big Apple as we continue our coverage here on theCube of AWS Summit 2017. We're at the Javits Center. We're in midtown. A lot of hustle and bustle outsie and inside there, good buzz on the show floor with about 5,000 strong attending and some 20,000 registrants also for today's show. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and glad to have you here on theCube. And Dustin Kirkland now joins us. He's at Ubuntu, the product and strategy side of things at Canonical, and Dustin, good to see you back on theCube. >> Thank you very much. >> You just threw a big number out at us when we were talking off camera. I'll let you take it from there, but it shows you about the presence, you might say, of Ubuntu and AWS, what that nexus is right now. >> Ubuntu easily leads as the operating system in Amazon. About 70%, seven zero, 70% of all instances running in Amazon right now are running Ubuntu. And that's actually, despite the fact that Amazon have their own Amazon Linux and there are other, Windows, Rails, SUSE, Debian, Fedora, other alternatives. Ubuntu still represents seven out of 10 workloads in Amazon running right now. >> John: Huge number. >> So, Dustin, maybe give us a little insight as to what kind of workloads you're seeing. How much of this was people that, Ubuntu has a great footprint everywhere and therefore it kind of moved there. And how much of it is new and interesting things, IOT and machine learning and everything like that, where you also have support. >> When you're talking about that many instances, that's quite a bit of boat, right? So if you look at just EC2 and the two types of workloads, there are the long-running workloads. The workloads that are up for many months, years in some cases. I met a number of customers here this week that are running older versions of Ubuntu like 12.04 which are actually end of life, but as a customer of Canonical we continue providing security updates. So we have a product called Extended Security Maintenance. There's over a million instances of Ubuntu 12.04 which are already end of life but Canonical can continue providing security updates, critical security updates. That's great for the long-running workloads. The other thing that we do for long-running workloads are kernel live patches. So we're able to actually fix vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel without rebooting, using entirely upstream and open source technology to do that. So for those workloads that stay up for months or years, the combination of Extended Security Maintenance, covering it for a very long time, and the kernel live patch, ensuring that you're able to patch those vulnerabilities without rebooting those systems, it's great for hosting providers and some enterprise workloads. Now on the flip side, you also see a lot of workloads that are spikey, right. Workloads that come and go in bursts. Maybe they run at night or in the morning or just whenever an event happens. We see a lot of Ubuntu running there. It's really, a lot of that is focused on data and machine learning, artificial intelligence workloads, that run in that sort of bursty manner. >> Okay, so it was interesting, when I hear you talk about some things that have been running for a bunch of years, and on the other side of the spectrum is serverless and the new machine learning stuff where it tends to be there, what's Canonical doing there? What kind of exciting, any of the news, Macey, Glue, some of these other ones that came out, how much do those fit into the conversations you're having? >> Sure, they all really fit. When we talk about what we're doing to tune Ubuntu for those machine learning workloads, it really starts with the kernel. So we actually have an AWS-optimized Linux kernel. So we've taken the Ubuntu Linux kernel and we've tuned it, working with the Amazon kernel engineers, to ensure that we've carved out everything in that kernel that's not relevant inside of an Amazon data center and taken it out. And in doing so, we've actually made the kernel 15% smaller, which actually reduces the security footprint and the storage footprint of that kernel. And that means smaller downloads, smaller updates, and we've made it boot 30% faster. We've done that by adding support, turning on, configuring on some parameters that enable virtualization or divert IO drivers or specifically the Amazon drivers to work really well. We've also removed things like floppy disk drives and Bluetooth drivers, which you'll never find in a virtual machine in Amazon. And when you take all of those things in aggregate and you remove them from the kernel, you end up with a much smaller, better, more efficient package. So that's a great starting point. The other piece is we've ensured that the latest and greatest graphics adapters, the GPUs, GPGPUs from Invidia, that the experienced on Ubuntu out of the box just works. It works really well, and well at scale. You'll find almost all machine learning workloads are drastically improved inside of GPGPU instances. And for the dollar, you're able to compute sometimes hundreds or thousands of times more efficiently than a fewer CPU type workload. >> You're talking about machine learning, but on the artificial intelligence side of life, a lot of conversation about that at the keynotes this morning. A lot of good services, whatever, again, your activity in that and where that's going, do you think, over the next 12, 16 months? >> Yes, so artificial intelligence is a really nice place where we see a lot of Ubuntu, mainly because the nature of how AI is infiltrating our lives. It has these two sides. One side is at the edge, and those are really fundamentally connected devices. And for every one of those billions of devices out there, there are necessarily connections to an instance in the cloud somewhere. So if we take just one example, right, an autonomous vehicle. That vehicle is connected to the internet. Sometimes well, when you're at home, parked in the garage or parked at Whole Foods, right? But sometimes it's not. You're in the middle of the desert out in West Texas. That autonomous vehicle needs to have a lot of intelligence local to that vehicle. It gets downloaded opportunistically. And what gets downloaded are the results of that machine learning, the results of that artificial intelligence process. So we heard in the keynotes quite a bit about data modeling, right? Data modeling means putting a whole bunch of data into Amazon, which Amazon has made it really easy to do with things like Snowball and so forth. Once the data is there, then the big GPGPU instances crunch that data and the result is actually a very tight, tightly compressed bit of insight that then gets fed to devices. So an autonomous vehicle that every single night gets a little bit better by tweaking its algorithms, when to brake, when to change lanes, when to make a left turn safely or a right turn safely, those are constantly being updated by all the data that we're feeding that. Now why I said that's important from an Ubuntu perspective is that we find Ubuntu in both of those locations. So we open this by saying that Ubuntu is the leading operating system inside of Amazon, representing 70% of those instances. Ubuntu is, across the board, right now in 100% of the autonomous vehicles that are running today. So Uber's autonomous vehicle, the Tesla vehicles, the Google vehicles, a number of others from other manufacturers are all running Ubuntu on the CPU. There's usually three CPUs in a smart car. The CPU that's running the autonomous driving engine is, across the board, running Ubuntu today. The fact that it's the same OS makes it, makes life quite nice for the developers. The developers who are writing that software that's crunching the numbers in the cloud and making the critical real-time decisions in the vehicle. >> You talk about autonomous vehicles, I mean, it's about a car in general, thousands of data points coming in, in continual real time. >> Dustin: Right. >> So it's just not autonomous -- >> Dustin: Right. >> operations, right? So are you working in that way, diagnostics, navigation, all those areas? >> Yes, so we catch as headlines are a lot of the hobbyist projects, the fun stuff coming out of universities or startup space. Drones and robots and vacuum cleaners, right? And there's a lot of Ubuntu running there, anything from Raspberry Pis to smart appliances at home. But it's actually, I think, really where those artificially intelligent systems are going to change our lives, is in the industrial space. It's not the drone that some kids are flying around in the park, it's the drone that's surveying crops, that's coming to understand what areas of a field need more fertilizer or less water, right. And that's happening in an artificially intelligent way as smarter and smarter algorithms make its way onto those drones. It's less about the running Pandora and Spotify having to choose the right music for you when you're sitting in your car, and a lot more about every taxicab in the city taking data and analytics and understanding what's going on around them. It's a great way to detect traffic patterns, potentially threats of danger or something like that. That's far more industrial and less intresting than the fun stuff, you know, the fireworks that are shot off by a drone. >> Not nearly as sexy, right? It's not as much fun. >> But that's where the business is, you know. >> That's right. >> One of the things people have been looking at is how Amazon's really maturing their discussion of hyrid cloud. Now, you said that data centers, public cloud, edge devices, lots of mobile, we talked about IOT and everything, what do you see from customers, what do you think we're going to see from Amazon going forward to build these hybrid architectures and how does that fit in to autonomous vehicles and the like? >> So in the keynote we saw a couple of organizations who were spotlighted as all-in on Amazon, and that's great. And actually almost all of those logos that are all-in on Amazon are all-in on Amazon on Ubuntu and that's great. That's a very small number of logos compared to the number of organizations out there that are actually hybrid. Hybrid is certainly a ramp to being all-in but for quite a bit of the industry, that's the journey and the destination, too, in fact. That there's always going to be some amount compute that happens local and some amount of compute that happens in the cloud. Ubuntu helps provide an important portability layer. Knowing something runs well on Ubuntu locally, it's going to run well on Ubuntu in Amazon, or vise versa. The fact that it runs well in Amazon, it will also run well on Ubuntu locally. Now we have a support -- >> Yeah, I was just curious, you talked about some of the optimization you made for AWS. >> Dustin: Right. >> Is that now finding its way into other environments or do we have a little bit of a fork? >> We do, it does find it's way back into other environments so, you know, the Amazon hypervisors are usually Xen-based, although there are some interesting other things coming from Amazon there. Typically what we find on-prem is usually more KVM or Vmware based. Now, most of what goes into that virtual kernel that we build for Amazon actually applies to the virtual kernel that we built for Ubuntu that runs in Xen and Vmware and KVM. There's some subtle differences. Some, a few things that we've done very specifically for Amazon, but for the most part it's perfectly compatible all the way back to the virtual machines that you would run on-prem. >> Well, Dustin, always a pleasure, >> Yeah. >> to have you hear on theCube. >> Thanks, John. >> You're welcome back any time. >> All right. >> We appreciate the time and wish you the best of luck here the rest of the day, too. >> Great. >> Good deal. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be with us. Dustin Kirkland from Canonical joining us here on theCube. Back with more from AWS Summit 2017 here in New York City right after this.

>> Narrator: Live, from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Hi this is Stu Miniman, joined with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Chip Childers, who's the CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Chip, fresh off the keynote stage, >> Yep. >> how's everything going? >> It's going great. We're really happy with the turnout of the conference. We are really happy with the number of large enterprises that are here to share their story. The really active vendor ecosystem around the project. It's great. It's a wonderful event so far. >> Yeah, I was looking back, I think the last time I came to the Cloud Foundry Show, it was before the Foundation existed, We were in the Hilton in San Francisco, it was obviously a way smaller group. Tell us kind of the goals of the Foundation, doing the event, bringing the community in. >> Yeah, you can think about our goals as being of course, we're the stewards of the intellectual property, the actual software that the vendors distribute. We see our role in the ecosystem as being really two key things. One: we're focused on supporting the users, the customers, and the direct uses of the Open Source software. That's first and foremost. Second though, we want to make sure there is a really robust market ecosystem that is wrapped around this project, right. Both in terms of the distribution, the regional providers that offer Cloud Foundry based services, but also large system integrators that are helping those customers go through digital transformation. Re-platform applications, you know really figure out their way through this process. So, it's all about supporting the users and then supporting the market around it. >> Yeah, as we go to a lot of these events, you know, there are certain themes that emerge. There were two big ones that both of them showed up in what you did in the Keynote. Number one is Multicloud, number two is you got all of these various open sourced pieces, >> Chip: Yep. you know, what fits together, what interlocks together, you know which ones sit side by side. Why don't we start with kind of the open source piece first? Because you're heavily involved in a lot of those. Cloud Foundry, you know, what are the new pieces that are bolting on, or sitting on top, or digging into it, and what's going on there? >> You know, I think first I want to start with a basic philosophy of our upstream community. There are billions of dollars that rely on this platform today. And that continues to grow. Right, because we're showing up in Fortune 500, Global 2000, as well as lots of small start-ups, that are using Cloud Foundry to get code shipped faster. So our community that builds the UpStream software, spends a lot of time being very thoughtful about their technical decisions. So what we release and that what gets productized by the down streams is a complete system. From operating system all the way up to including the various programming languages and frameworks and everything in between. And because we release a complete platform, at a really high velocity, so many people rely on it's quality, we're very thoughtful about when is the right time to build our own, when should we adopt and embrace and continue to support another OpenSource project, so we spend a lot of time really thinking about that. And the areas today that I highlight around specific collaborations include the Open Service Broker API which we actually spun out of being just a Club Foundry implementation. And we embrace other communities, and found a way to share the governance of that. So we move forward as a big industry together. >> Stu: Yeah and speaking on that a little bit more. Very interesting to see. I saw Red Hat for instance speaking with Open Shift, Kubernetes is there. So, how should customers think about this? Are the path wars over? Now you can choose all the pieces that you want? Or, it's probably oversimplifying it. >> I think it's over simplifying it, it depends. You can go try to build your own platform if you want, through a number of serious components, or you can just use something like Cloud Foundry, that has solve for that. But the important thing is that we have specifically designed Cloud Foundry to allow for the backing services to come from anywhere. And so, it's both a differentiator for the various distributions of Cloud Foundry, but also an opportunity for Cloud providers, and even more importantly, it's an opportunity for the enterprise users that live in complex worlds, right? They're going to have multiple platforms, they're going be multiple levels of abstraction from Bms to containers, you know, to the path abstraction even event driven frameworks. We want that all to work really well together. Regardless of the choices you make, because that's what's most valuable to the customers. >> Okay, the other piece, networking you talked about. Why don't you share. >> Yeah, yeah so, besides the Service Broker API, we've added support for what's called Container to Container Networking. I don't necessarily need to dig into the details there, but let's just say that when you're building microservices that the application that the user is experiencing is actually a combination of a lot of different applications. That all talk to each other and rely on each other. So we want to make sure there's a policy-based framework for describing how the webs here is going to talk to the authentication service or is going to talk to the booking service, or the inventory service. They all need to have rules about how they communicate with each other. And we want to do that in the most efficient way possible. So we've adopted the Containing Networking interface as the standard plugin that is now at CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We think it's the right abstraction, we think it's great. It gives us access to all the fascinating work that is going on around software networking, overlay networking, industry standard API plugin to our policy-driven framework. >> Along the same theme, Kubo, a big new news project also kind of integration of some Cloud Foundry concepts with a broader ecosystem, in this case another CNCF project, Kubernetes. Could you speak a little bit to that? >> The Kubernetes community is doing a great job creating great container driven experience. You know that abstraction is all about the container. It's not about, you know, the code. So it's different than Cloud Foundry. There are workloads that make sense to run in one or the other. And we want to make sure that they run really well. Right, so the problem that we're solving with the Kuber project is what deploys Kubernetes? What supports Kubernetes if there is an infrastructure adage and a node goes offline? Right, because it does a great job of restarting containers, but if you have ten nodes in a cluster, and then now you're down to nine, that's a problem. So what Bosh does, is it takes care of solving the node outage level problem. You can also do rolling upgrades that are seamless, no downtime for the Kubernetes cluster. It brings a level of operational maturity to the Kubernetes users that they may not have had otherwise. >> Chip, can you bring us inside a little bit the creation of Kubo, is that something that the market and customers drove towards you? I talked to a couple other Cloud Foundry ecosystem members that were doing some other ways of integrating in Kubernetes. So what lead to this way of deploying it with Bosh? >> Yeah, absolutely so, it came out of a direct collaboration between Pivotal and Google. And it was driven based on Pivotal customer demand. It also, if you speak with people from Google that are involved in the project, they also see it as a need, for the Kubernetes ecosystem. So it's driven based on real-world large financial services companies that wanted to have the multiple abstractions available, they wanted to do it with a common operational platform that is proven mature that they've already adopted. And then as that collaboration board, the fruit of the project, and it was announced by Pivotal and Google several months back, they realized that they needed to move it to the vendor neutral locations so that we can continue to expand the community that can work on it, that can build up the story. >> The other topic I raised at the beginning of the interview, was the Multicloud. So in a panel, Microsoft, Google, MTC for Amazon was there. All of the Cloud guys are going to tell you we have the best platform and can do the best things for you. >> Of course they do. >> How do you balance the "We want to live in a multicultural Cloud world" and be able to go there versus "Oh I'm going to take standard plus and get in a little bit deeper to make sure that we're stickier with the customers there." What role does Cloud Foundry play? What have you seen in the marketplace for that? >> Well the public lab providers are, if you look at the services that they offer, you can roughly categorize them with two things. One, are the infrastructure building blocks. Two, are the higher level services, like their database capabilities, their analytics capabilities, log aggregation, you know, and they all have a portfolio that varies, some have specific things that are very similar. So when we talk about MultiCloud we talk about Cloud Foundry as a way to make use of those common capabilities, now they're going to differentiate based on speeds and feeds, availability, whatever they choose to, but you can then as a user have choice. And then secondarily, that Open Service Broker initiative is what's really about saying "great, there's also all these really valuable additional capabilities, that, as a user, I may choose to integrate with a Google machine learning-service, or I may choose to integrate with a wonderful Microsoft capability, or an Amazon capability." And we just want to make that easy for a developer to make that choice. >> Chip, Cloud Founder was very early in terms of a concept of a platform of services, let's not call it platform as a service right now. But you know, this platform that going to make developers lives easier, multi-target, MultiCloud we call it now, on from your laptop to anywhere. And it's been a really interesting discussion over the last couple years as this parallel container thread can come up with Kubernetes and Mesosphere and all the orchestration tools, and the focus has been on orchestration tools. And I've always thought Cloud Foundry was kind of way ahead of the game in saying "wait a minute, there's a set of services that you're going to have for full life-cycles, day two operation, at scale that you all are going to have to pull together from components." As we're doing this interview here, and this year at Cloud Foundry Summit are there anything that you think people don't kind of realize that over and over again people who are using Cloud Foundry go, "Wow I'm really glad "I had logging or identity management," or what are some of the frameworks that people sometimes don't realize is in there that actually is a huge time-savor. >> Yeah, there are a lot of operational capabilities in the Cloud Foundry platform. When you include both our Bosh layer, as well as the elastic runtime which is in the developer centers experience-- >> John: Anything that people don't often realize is in there? >> Well, I think that the right way to think of it is, it's all the things you need in one application, right? So we've been doing this for years as developers. In the applications operators team, we've been doing it. We've just been doing it via bunch of tickets, we've been doing it via bunch of scripts. What Cloud Foundry does is it takes all of those capabilities you need to really trust a platform to operate something on your behalf, and give you the right view into it, right? The appropriate telemetry, log aggregation, and know that there's going to be help monitoring there. It makes it really easy. Right, so we were talking earlier about the haiku, that Onsi Fakhouri from Pivotal had authored, it's appropriate. It's a promise that a platform makes. And platforms designed to let a user trust that the declarative nature of asking a platform to do X, Y, or Z, will be delivered. >> Chip, we've been hearing Pivotal talks a lot about Spring, when Cloud Foundry's involved. Is it so much so that the Foundation needs to be behind that, or support that? How does that interact and work? >> Well, we're super supportive of all the languages in the framework communities that are out there. You know, even if you pick a particular vendor, Pivotal in this case has a very strong investment in the Spring, Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, they're doing really amazing things. But that's also, it's our software, you know, they steward that community, so all the other vendors actually get the advantage of that. Let's take Dot Net and Microsoft. Microsoft open sourced Dot Net. So now you can run Dot Net applications on Linux. They're embrace of the container details and the APIs and their operating system is making it so that now it can also run on Windows. So the whole Microsoft technology stack, languages and frameworks, they matter quite a bit to the enterprise as well. So we see ourselves as supportive of all of these communities, right? Even ones like the Ruby community. When there's an enterprise developer that chooses to use something like Ruby, with the Ruby on Rails framework, if they use Cloud Foundry, they're getting the latest and greatest version of that language, framework, they know that it's secure, they know that it's going to be patched for them. So it's actually a great experience for that developer, that's working with the language. So, we like to support all of them, we're big fans of any that work really well with the platform and maybe integrate deeper. But it's a polyglot platform. >> We want to give you the final word. People take away from Cloud Foundry Summit 2017, what would you want them to take away? >> Yeah the simple takeaway that I can give you is that this is an absolutely enterprise grade open source ecosystem. And you don't hear that often, right? Because normally we talk about products, being enterprise great. >> Did somebody say in the keynote enterprise great mean that there's a huge salesforce that's going to try sell you stuff? (Chip laughs) Well that's coming from the buying side of the market for years. And you know, it was a bit of a joke. What is "enterprise great?" Well, it means that there's a piece of paper that says, this product will cost x dollars and the salesperson is offering it to you. So of course it's going to be enterprise great. But really, we see it as four key things, right? It's about security, it's about being well-integrated, it's about being able to scale to the needs of even the largest enterprises, and it's also about that great developer experience. So, Cloud Foundry is an ecosystem and all of our downstream distributions get the advantage of this really robust and mature technical community that is producing this software. >> Chip, really appreciate you sharing all the updates with us, and appreciate the foundation's support to bring theCUBE here. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from The Cloud Foundry Summit 2017, you're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Austen, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker, in support from its ecosystem partners. >> And we're back. Hi I'm Stu Miniman joined by Jim Kobielus and this is theCUBE, worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Happy to have on the program, Scott McCarty, who is technical product marketing for containers with Red Hat, thanks so much for joining us! >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright so, obviously this is the big container show, You know, Red Hat, I saw when you talk about the number of contributors, you're one of the top contributors there, but first tell us a little bit about your role at Red Hat, how long you've been there, some of your passions, what do you work on? >> Yeah for sure. So I've been at Red Hat six years and I started actually as a solutions architect, six-ish years ago, came from a startup before that, and so been in the operations space for a long time, did a lot of programming, background in anthropology computer science. Yeah. >> You're dating yourself, you call it programming >> I know, I know! >> Because it's coding now! >> I know, I know! (laughs) >> I'm like, yeah, I used to program but, uh, what's this, this coding stuff. >> I am dating myself! >> Did you say anthropology? >> I did. >> Well we've got to connect it with Red Hat at some point in our interview now. >> It matters in the culture of things. >> James: Okay, yeah. >> You know, culture is important. (laughing) So did you know, a very wide swath of our portfolio I understand from being a solutions architect and then about two years ago moved into, well when Docker first started off, you know, got into containers and got pretty heavy and that, and was excited about it, and then moved into just doing strictly technical product marketing for only containers. You know, for focusing on containers. >> Okay, so talk to us about how containers fits into the Red Hat portfolio. >> So containers is really something that touches every part of our portfolio, because whether at the lower levels of like the Linux layers you know that's the actual nuts and bolts of, you know, what builds the containers and what the containers really are. But then at the other end of the stack, if you look at our storage and our middleware, containerizing those applications and then figuring out how to package them in a cloud-native way and making them work in a cloud-native way, so that they can operate inside of something like OpenShift, there's a lot of work to be done there. So there's a wide swath of tech across our entire portfolio of work around containers going on. >> Yeah, in the keynote this morning I like there's the maturation of the use cases because it sounds a lot like, you know, remember of the early days of Linux, or the early days of virtualization, once again they've put together a load of use cases and are like, "Oh, we're running applications," >> Scott: Yes. >> In a wide variety of applications in containers, so what are your customers seeing, you know, any kind of cool use cases or things that people are doing and anything new that they're doing that they couldn't do before? >> Well, so, I'll give you a little take on that, so even for the last two years that I've been going out all over the world to talk to customers, I've noticed that there's a little bit of a disconnect between the industry and kind of only focusing on the app dev side of things. I think today, kind of hearing Soloman talk about some of the more traditional use cases, traditional or non-cloud native or, we don't like to say the word legacy but people say it. >> Stu: Kind of wrapping-- >> I would argue those have been a huge portion of what people are experimenting with and playing with, but we don't talk about them. Also I think there's a little bit of a notion of this mode one, mode two kind of mentality, but that limits the way we think about it into only production workloads. So I have some really funny use cases. So I'll give you some examples, network scanning. So, like, there are some vendors that provide network scanning software and I was a couple of months back up in Canada talking to ATTO Co., and they mentioned they they were actually putting a commercial network scanning package in containers because when you think about, you see a production oracle database and, you know, you talk to the oracle DBA, and you say, "Hey I'm going to install "this giant network scanning package on your server." And they're like, "No. You're not doing that." (laughing) So a container makes it very easy to just bring that application down, do this network scanning, troubleshoot something and then delete it, it's gone. That's just a tools use case, right? But it's something that people have been doing for a long time but nobody is really talking about it. Another one is even affecting business more transformationally. So if you think about the way startups hire people, this happened to a friend of mine that's a CTO at a startup. They're interviewing a developer, it's very common to send them home with a homework program, you know? And so they send them home with the Ruby on Rails program, and he comes back with a GitHub Repo that has like a database schema file for Postgres and a working Ruby on Rails application. And there are two hiring managers. The one hiring manager says, "Okay I'm going to," And I'm sorry, also he says, "By the way, I have a Docker Repo, "you can go out and pull it down if you want, "just run my program and see if it works." The one hiring manager decides to try to rebuild it from scratch, takes about two hours messing around trying to get the database schema to work because he used the newer version of Postgres than she had on her laptop, you can imagine the dependency, you know, chaos that is. The other hiring manager literally just said, "Okay, just Docker run this thing." And then, kind of ran the container and looked at the code. The one spent two hours, you know, getting it up on her own, the other one spent five minutes. And so now if I can give you back the most valuable people in your organization, these very, very technical architects that are doing hiring decisions and trying to evaluate really critical core developers for your startup, if I can give you back two hours, and if you have to interview 10 of those, that's 20 hours of your time, that's transformational, that's really digital transformation, essentially, but for a startup, you know. Like, we don't want to have to spend all this analog time doing that. In addition to the traditional applications like databases and even, you know, typical web servers, all of those things, but not just mode two or cloud native, but also just traditional workloads. And we've been seeing that for a long time, I mean, this is similar to the virtualization journey, it's like you said, everyone said it was impossible and even two years ago was saying, "Wait a minute, just wait for this, it'll happen," and we're seeing it happen. >> Yeah. Anything particular? You know, we've made a lot of progress, but we're still working on storage, networking seems to be a little bit more mature than storage you know, what are you guys helping to work on at Red Hat and what do you want to see going forward that we come here a year from now we're going to say, "Oh, cool, we knocked down this barrier, or we're doing something even better." >> So one of the things I'm excited about is kind of if you look at the integration points between cloud infrastructure software like OpenStack and even the cloud providers, and then something like our OpenShift solution or Kubernetes, if you look at the storage and the network interactions, today the networking is pretty mature but the interaction is pretty static, so if you provision OpenStack, you know, say you have an OpenStack environment, you want to run OpenShift on top of it, you would go pre-provision kind of a VLAN, you know a subnet for it, and then you would- we rebuild, actually, key templates to deploy OpenShift inside of it, within that subnet. In the future we're investing in Courier and you know, a year from now I'd like to see some really dynamic interactions happening between OpenShift and OpenStack. I'd like to see an administer say, "Oh, I need to provision a new project "and that project needs its own network isolation." When that happens, OpenShift goes and talks to OpenStack, provisions a subnet that's encrypted with OVS, and actually it already is kind of set up, comes back, says, "Okay cool," and then can provision a project inside that. On the storage side we've actually already got that going, So we have what's called dynamic provisioning, so if you need storage inside of OpenShift and you have a persistent volume claim that needs access to storage, we actually have something called a dynamic provisionary that will actually go create that person's environment and go to talk the the storage and carve off a LUN of exactly the size you want or a NFS share of the exact size that you want. So, so, I'd like to see more and more of that dynamic provisioning happening between the infrastructure in a container environment. >> Is that as capable, uh, should we build into Kubernetes or totally independent of that? You know what I mean-- >> So the current project is kind of neutral but it would be, kind of, think of it as almost like an interface that Kubernetes will be able to use as an interface to all the networking providers. >> James: Right. >> So it's kind of a neutral, third-party thing. Really it could be used by other things other than Kubernetes. >> I want to get your take on project Moby, that was a real interesting announcement today, to what extent, would Red Hat consider possibly using that as a tool to build custom container applications for your own product family? >> Probably the most interesting thing I found about the announcement was kind of a validation of, uh, you know already a kind of strategy that we had around Project Atomic. And if you look at Origin and Project Atomic and Fedora, you know, they mention Fedora, that model. >> James: Yeah, absolutely. >> I think it's a good model, and you'll appreciate that we appreciate it. I think that, you know, there's some validation also around the idea of an immutable host, and having control over the host and honestly I think it kind of validates that the Linux itself is not a commodity, there is something actually very technical there and you do need to actually build a dry features in that kernel to actually support the containers, because I think they made the kernel hot again, you know, in a lot of ways. So I think it's validation of that and I think that's exciting. >> At the beginning we talked about culture a little bit, you know, we've interview Jim Whitehurst, so you know, I've read his book, >> Scott: Yeah. >> You know, the open organization, >> James: The anthropology. (laughs) >> You know, when you come to a show like this where, I mean, today we talked about the developer, we talked lots about open-source and, right, you know there's Linux Kit, there's the Moby Project, you know, all these different things out in open-source, what's your take on this ecosystem and what's going on in the industry? >> I think ecosystems are harder to build than what people first think. I don't think you can just, so if you look at certain, you know if I were to analyze the way open source works, you know there sot of open-core models which are like, "Let's give enough away to get free marketing." Then there's kind of open-source models where we give away all the code but we don't really have a community, we don't really take patches, we just put it out there, use it however you want, that's fine. And then I think there's truly community-driven open-source which is what Red Hat really tries to focus on. So if you're able to get Fedora, it's truly a community. I think building those and maintaining those takes a lot of nurturing and a lot of care and a lot of love and feeding. And I also think it takes a lot of discipline around allowing these best-of-breed ideas to kind of happen the way they're going to happen and then also fail if they don't work. And so that can be tough, you know. If you look at the model of a lot of startups, it's more kind of like unilaterally make decisions and then kind of release it and then if it sticks, and it's fail-fast. The community-driven model is a lot harder to handle because consensus is harder to build and so you've seen Jim talk about this, I mean one of the dangers in an open organization of our size is consensus, finding consensus and not going towards a completely consensus-driven decision model. But that's hard because you have to satisfy everybody in the community and make sure everybody's getting something out and everybody's putting something in. And so it's tough. >> It's funny, I remember in OpenStack for a couple of years, it's like, "Do we need, you know, the fanatical dictator "of this ecosystem?" Red Hat, obviously is not, you know, a fanatical dictator of its community. >> You can't win. Do you think Docker has a fanatical dictator of their community? (laughter) >> I, I, I'm sure the-- >> Or is the person a visionary, I mean, you know they'll put the positive euphemism on it. >> Yeah, yeah. Or the joking word in the community is the benevolent dictator. >> Yeah. >> The benevolent dictator for life, I think some of the communities work that way. >> Yeah. >> I think if you look at Python, you look at Linux, you know, it works that way. But if you've all got bigger projects, and I don't want to date myself, but you think about KDE and Gnome, and some of those, there's no benevolent dictator, they're so big and so wide-reaching again. Such, you know, wide-use case differences between what people do with them, but I think it's hard to have that. There are visionaries, you know, within the group. And even that's true in the kernel, I mean if you look at what's happened, you know, Linus has other generals essentially that kind of, I mean it's become a very big community, a very boisterous community. I think that that takes again, though, a lot of discipline and maintenance to make that happen and keep that alive. >> Alright, Scott, to take us on home, why don't you give us a little view as to what Red Hat has going on this week, of course you guys have your big show Red Hat Summit coming up in a couple of weeks, we'll have theCUBE there, I'm excited to be there, also, but you know, talk a little bit about this week and what you guys are doing. >> So this week, you know, we're excited because we have kind of a bunch of three-five You know, I don't know if you guys, have you guys heard about Atomic Image? We released Atomic Image? >> So it was not discussed in Brian's interview this morning, so. >> Okay! >> We would love to hear a little bit about it. >> So Atomic Image, we've kind of looked at some of the use cases around how people are consuming containers and I've blogged on about this and talked and honestly it's pretty deep technically when you kind of get into it. It's about having, you know, Soloman talked about it today, you know, image size matters, and there is definitely a hunger for smaller images, you don't want to have stuff that you don't want. But that is also a very fine-line balance. So the challenge being that the typical way that enterprises operate is that they have a core build where they will add all the pieces that core build that they think should be everywhere, right? Because you don't, like, say you need a fundamental core library like glibc, you wouldn't add that to all of the different applications, you would add it once and then inherit it in all the, so it's kind of the dry model, do not repeat yourself, right? So when you get into this dry model you got to balance the size of that base image versus, you know and it's flexibility versus conciseness, and you know, how concise it is. Atomic Image, though, is meant for, we essentially released a very minimal image that matters for those very concise applications, so if you look at like a C binary that's very small, maybe all it needs is DNS resolutions, some other services from the OS from the userspace, it doesn't need much, but it's a real small binary, it wants a really small image to live on. So we released something called Atomic Image really targeting those use cases-- >> I don't know if I remember if Atomic is launched, so it sounds a lot like what Docker announced with the Linux Kit today, too. >> So, it's, flip-side of it-- >> Maybe you could compare contrast a little bit. >> Yeah so, so I would compare Linux Kit to Atomic Coast, which we've had for a long time. >> Stu: Okay. >> Which is the Kernel and systemd and kind of what runs the containers, right? But now we've released a different userspace setup that's smaller-- >> Stu: Oh I got that, okay. >> For, to run on top of, you know. >> So like an agile minimum viable product, this is a minimum viable container >> Yes. >> For a particular function. >> Yeah exactly, like BusyBox or some of the smaller images that you want to play with. >> And Scott, do you guys have their website or some documentation that you recommend people starting with on your sites? Yeah absolutely, I swear, I think Project Atomic's a great place to start. >> Stu: And that's in the blogs, I'm assuming, right? >> It is, if you blog for Atomic Image, too, you'll find a REL Blog entry, so REL Blog's a good place to kind of find some of that stuff, so relblog.redhat.com And then also if, if you look on just redhat.com. And also out container catalog is a good place to actually go get started with that. So if you go to access.redhat.com/containers. >> James: We'll get to that. >> Scott McCardy, it's great catching up with you. Next time we have you on we got to get the story behind "fatherlinux" as your-- >> Yes! (laughs) >> Alright, but we'll be back with more coverage here from DockerCon 2017, thank you for watching theCUBE.