>>Hey guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with the cube at Coan Cloud Native Con North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. Yeah, it's maturing. >>Yeah. We got three days of wall to wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We about security, large scale, cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's gonna be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next NextGen Cloud first, transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic of what we call super cloud-like, like interview. It's gonna be great. I'm looking forward >>To this anytime we can talk about Super Cloud. All right, please welcome back. One of our alumni, Bani is here, the CEO of Rafe. Great to see you Santos. Ula also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Ge. Great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Thank you for having me. >>So Steve, you've been on the queue many times. You were on just recently with the momentum that that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on, on day one of the show? >>Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I, I, I live in this industry and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. I mean, it means that the, the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other coupons. Like when we hung out at, you know, in Valencia for example, or even, you know, other places. It hasn't been this many people, which means, and this is, this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component, right. For their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >>Definitely becoming foundational. >>Yep. Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at the Cube and you got a practitioner here with you. You guys are both pioneering kind of what I call the next gen cloud. First you gotta get through gen one, which you guys done at Mass Mutual, extremely well, take us through the story of your transformation. Cause you're on the, at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here. You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual. >>So I was actually talking about this topic few, few minutes back, right? And, and the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or, or our insurance sector. It takes generations of leadership to get, to get to that perfection level. And, and ideally the, the, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then, and then how do you, how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? You know, that that's, that's the second gen altogether. And then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if, you know, if you're talking about Kubernetes, you know, in the traditional world, you know, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And then containerization is a topic that come, that came in. And docker is, is you know, basically the runtime containerization. So that came in first and from Docker, you know, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually when, when, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And, and Hasi was pointing out, you know, like you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing and how important it is for your cloud strategy. So, >>And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now as you look forward? What's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >>So we are, we are past the stage of, you know, proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, you know, the real game now. So in the past I used the quote, you know, like, hello world to real world. So we are actually playing in the real world, not, not in the hello world anymore. Now, now this is where the real time challenges will, will pop up, right? So if you're talking about standardizing it and then optimizing the cloud and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? You know, the, the, the demands that come out of regulations are met and, and how, how are you going to scale it and, and, and while scaling, however you wanna to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it. So we are in that stage today. >>Has Steve talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual has talked a little bit about who, you mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this Coan and Detroit is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here who, who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations, Who are the deci decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >>Hmm. Well this guy, >>It's usually, you know, one of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So consistently what I'm seeing is, you know, somebody, a cto, CIO level, you know, individual is making a determin decision. I have multiple internal buss who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps. And this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization and they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and, and, and sort of, you know, consume it. So what that means to us is our customer is a platform organization and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer who's a developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not gonna be >>Successful. You're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure. >>Yes sir. It has to be both. Exactly. Right. Right. So, so that look, honestly, that it, it, you know, it takes iterations to figure these things out, right? But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy. Cuz if you don't have a platform strategy, you're gonna have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things and some will be successful and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >>Yeah. And, and stage, I wanna get to you, you mentioned that your transformation was what you look forward and your title, global head of cloud sre. Okay, so sre, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google, Google's a unique thing. It's only one Google. But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept is, is, is can be portable, but, but the situation isn't. So board became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening. Is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering. >>So I I totally agree. Google introduce, sorry, Ty engineering. And, and if you take, you know, the traditional transformation of the roles, right? In the past it was called operations and then DevOps ops came in and then SRE is is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like product engineering, right? And, and, and in this journey, you know, here is what I tell, you know, folks on my side like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company, might not work for an insurance company. So, so, so it's, it's okay to use the word sre, but but the end of the day that SRE has to be tailored down to, to your requirements and and, and the customers that you serve and the technology that you serve. Yep. >>And this is, this is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're gonna have a platform engineering team cuz you gotta enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper guardrails policy. So this, it's kind of becoming the, you serve the business, which is now the developers it used to serve the business Yep. Back in the old days. Hey, the, it serves the business. Yep. Which is a terminal, >>Which is actually true >>Now it the new, it serves the developers, which is the business. Which is the business. Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. Yep. >>And the, you know, the, the hard line between development and operations, right? So, so that's thining down over the time, you know, like that that line might disappear. And, and, and that's where asari is fitting in. >>Yeah. And they're building platforms to scale the enablement up that what is, so what is the key challenges you guys are, are both building out together this new transformational direction? What's new and what's the same, The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >>So the new thing if, if I may go fast these, so the faster market to, you know, value, right? That we are bringing to the table. That's, that's very important. You know, business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and, and take it into real time. So that journey we have cut down, right? Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes, it makes, you know, an IT person's life so easy that, that they can, they can speed up the process in, in, in a traditional way. What used to take like an year or six months can be done in a month today or or less than that, right? So, so there's definitely the losses, speed, velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters, you know, these, these are today like, you know, it is possible to, to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past it used to take like, you know, probably, you know, a hundred, a hundred percent team and operational team to do it. And a lot of time. But, but, but that automation is happening. You know, and we can get into the technology as much as possible. But, but, you know, blueprinting and all that stuff made >>It possible. Well say that for another interview, we'll do it take time. >>But the, the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had. Right? Right. It's, I want this in my lab now. Now, how does the culture of Mass Mutual, how is it evolv to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >>So if once in a while, you know, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their, from their, from their perspective, business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product and, and, and how, how, how easy it is to reach out to the customers and how well we are serving the customers, right? So whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Dr. Swam or es you know, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about it is if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And, and, and if you, if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, so at that point, the business will step in. So our job is to make sure, you know, from an, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it and how efficiently you can implement it. And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance. >>So I was gonna ask you if you have VMware in your environment, cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I I can say that you're the v center of Kubernetes. I mean, as a, as an as an metaphor, a place to manage it all is all 1, 1 1 paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >>So virtualization has gone a long way, you know where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now we are virtualizing applications and, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes basically got. >>So you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Uber, >>Definitely a need in the market in the way you need to think is like, you know, let's say there is, there is an insurance company who actually mented it and, and they gain the market advantage. Right? Now the, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, so, so there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that, that, that's very critical and it's, it's a critical component of cloud strategy as >>A whole. See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say you like the V center of Kubernetes, Explain what that means and your turn. If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would say bs or would you say on point, >>Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? Right? It's, it's so in my opinion, by the way, well vCenter in my opinion is one of the best platforms ever built. Like ha it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. It's, VMware did an amazing job because they took an IT engineer and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VMs, multitenancy, access management audit, everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from a single, essentially single >>Platform, from a utility standpoint home >>Run. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it is because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So the, the premise man Rafa was, well, oh, bless, I should have IT engineers, same engineers now they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that mass major are able to do now, right? So to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management, you need ac, you know, all of these things that have happened before chargebacks, they used to have it in, in V center. Now they need to happen in other platforms. But for es so should do we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >>Kind >>Of. Yeah. Are we a vCenter for es? Yeah, that is a John Forer question. >>All right, well, I, I'll, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the, the complexity and not make it more steps or change a tool chain or do something, then the devs move faster and the service layer that serves the business, the new organization has to enable speed. So this, this is becoming a, a real discussion point in the industry is that, oh yeah, we've got new tool, look at the shiny new toy. But if it doesn't move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot, what's your reaction? >>Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just, you know, hit my mind is think about, you know, the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb, right? Or, or, or the taxi industry, you know, before Uber and after Uber, right? So if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is like, you know, build their application and deployed and running, right? They, they, they don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers and then building the middleware on top of it and then, you know, do a bunch of testing to make sure, you know, they, they, they iron out all the, all the compatible issues and whatnot. Yeah. Now, now, today, all I, all I say is like, hey, you have, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application and then deploy it in a development environment. That's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together, make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that, that you do is like, you know, you know, build >>Production, chip, build production, go and chip release it. Yeah, that's the nirvana. But then we're there. I mean, we're there now we're there. So we see the future. Because if you, if that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where this I call the architectural list environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >>Yeah. And, and on top of it, you know, if, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick, right? So how do you do it? Right? And, and, and you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and testers in real time, right? So, so from an innovation perspective, you know, agility plays a key role. And, and that, that's where the Kubernetes platforms or platforms like Kubernetes >>Plays. You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Chasy, when he was the CEO of aws, either one on one or on the cube, he always said, and this is kind of happening, companies are gonna be builders where it's not just utility. You need that table stakes to enable that new business idea. And so he, this last keynote, he did this big thing like, you know, think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators. And I think that, I think starting to see that, what do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that in, in sight or is that still ways away? >>I, I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level now. Now the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality, right? Yeah. I mean, you can, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then, and then prove it out. Like, Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great. Yeah. And, and it's to the business advantage, right? But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually >>Using it and the board meetings, Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from? Agile developer. Again, this is real. Yeah, >>Yeah. >>Absolutely agree. Yeah. I think, think both of you gentlemen said a word in, in your, as you were talking, you used the word guardrails, right? I think, you know, we're talking about rigidity, but you know, the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So it's automation with the guardrails. Yeah. Guardrails are like children, you know, you know, shouldn't be hurt. You know, they're seen but not hurt. Developers don't care about guard rails. They just wanna go fast. They also bounce >>Around a little bit. Yeah. Off the guardrails. >>One thing we know that's not gonna slow down is, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Ds the business, the, the business top line, and of course the customers. So the ability to, to really, as your website says, let's see, make life easy for platform teams is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here is you're, you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. Yep. So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the, the evolution of Kubernetes, why, and really what the focus should be on those platform games. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us. Thanks >>For our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live, Cobe Con, Cloud Native con from Detroit. We've out with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with "theCUBE" at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. It's maturing. >> Yeah, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We heard about Security, Large scale, Cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's going to be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next-gen cloud. First transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic, what we call Super Cloud-Like interview. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to this. >> Anytime we can talk about Super Cloud, right? Please welcome back, one of our alumni, Haseeb Budhani is here, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Santhosh Pasula, also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Haseeb, you've been on "theCUBE" many times. You were on just recently, with the momentum that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on day one of the show? >> Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I live in this industry, and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. It means that the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is, I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other KubeCons. Like when we hung out at in Valencia, for example, or even other places, it hasn't been this many people. Which means, and this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component for their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >> Definitely, becoming foundational. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at "theCUBE," and you got a practitioner here with you guys, are both pioneering, kind of what I call the next-gen cloud. First you got to get through Gen-One, which you guys done at Mass Mutual extremely well. Take us through the story of your transformation? 'Cause you're on at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here? You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual? >> So, I was actually talking about this topic few minutes back. And the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or insurance sector, it takes generations of leadership to get to that perfection level. And ideally, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? That's the second-gen altogether, and then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if you're talking about Kubernetes, in the traditional world, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And their containerization is a topic that came in. And Docker is basically the runtime containerization. So, that came in first, and from Docker, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And as Haseeb was pointing out, you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So, that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing, and how important it is for your cloud strategy. >> And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now? As you look forward, what's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >> So we are past the stage of proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, the real game now. In the past, I used the quote, like "Hello world to real world." So, we are actually playing in the real world, not in the hello world anymore. Now, this is where the real time challenges will pop up. So, if you're talking about standardizing it, and then optimizing the cloud, and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? The demands that come out of regulations are met? And how are you going to scale it? And while scaling, how are you going to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it? So we are in that stage today. >> Haseeb talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual. Haseeb talk a little bit about who? You mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this KubeCon in Detroit, is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here? Who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations? Who are the decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >> Hmm. Well, this guy. (Lisa laughing) One of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So, consistently what I'm seeing, is somebody, a CTO, CIO level, an individual is making a decision. I have multiple internal Bus who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps, and this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization. And they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and sort of consume it. So, what that means to us, is our customer is a platform organization, and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer, who's your developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not going to be successful. >> So, you're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure? >> Yes, sir. It has to be both. >> On the other side? >> Exactly, right. So that look, honestly, it takes iteration to figure these things out. But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now, is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy? Because if you don't have a platform strategy, you're going to have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things, and some will be successful, and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >> Yeah, and Santhosh, I want to get to you. You mentioned your transformations, what you look forward, and your title, Global Head of Cloud, SRE. Okay, so SRE, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google. Google's a unique thing. >> Haseeb: Only one Google. >> But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept can be portable, but the situation isn't. So, Borg became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So, you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale, you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening, is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering? >> So, I totally agree. Google introduce SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. And if you take the traditional transformation of the roles, in the past, it was called operations, and then DevOps ops came in, and then SRE is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like Product Engineering. And in this journey, here is what I tell folks on my side, like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company. It might not work for an insurance company. It's okay to use the word, SRE, but end of the day, that SRE has to be tailored down to your requirements. And the customers that you serve, and the technology that you serve. >> This is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're going to have a platform engineering team? 'Cause you got to enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper, guardrails, policies. It's kind of becoming the, these serve the business, which is now the developers. IT used to serve the business back in the old days, "Hey, the IT serves the business." >> Yup. >> Which is a term now. >> Which is actually true now. >> The new IT serves the developers, which is the business. >> Which is the business. >> Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. >> The hard line between development and operations, so that's thinning down. Over the time, that line might disappear. And that's where SRE is fitting in. >> Yeah, and then building platform to scale the enablement up. So, what is the key challenges? You guys are both building out together this new transformational direction. What's new and what's the same? The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >> So, the new thing, if I may go first. The faster market to value that we are bringing to the table, that's very important. Business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and take it into real time? So, that journey we have cut down. Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes an IT person's life so easy that they can speed up the process. In a traditional way, what used to take like an year, or six months, can be done in a month today, or less than that. So, there's definitely speed velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters. These are today, it is possible to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past, it used to take, probably, 100-person team, and operational team to do it, and a lot of time. But that automation is happening. And we can get into the technology as much as possible, but blueprinting and all that stuff made it possible. >> We'll save that for another interview. We'll do it deep time. (panel laughing) >> But the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had, right? It's, "I want this in my lab now." How does the culture of Mass Mutual? How is it evolve to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >> Once in a while, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their perspective. Business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product, and how easy it is to reach out to the customers. And how well we are serving the customers, right? So, whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Docker Swam or Kubernetes, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about, it is, if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, at that point, the business will step in. So, our job is to make sure, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it? And how efficiently you can implement it? And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance? >> So, I was going to ask you, if you have VMware in your environment? 'Cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I can say that, you're the vCenter of Kubernetes. I mean, as as metaphor, a place to manage it all, is all one paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >> So, virtualization has gone a long way. Where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now, we are virtualizing applications, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes plays a role. >> So, you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Kubernetes? >> There's definitely a need in the market. The way you need to think is like, let's say there is an insurance company who actually implement it today, and they gain the market advantage. Now, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that's very critical, and it's a critical component of cloud strategy as a whole. >> See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say, you're like the vCenter of Kubernetes. Explain what that means in your term? If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would you say, BS, or would you say on point? >> Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? So, in my opinion, by the way, vCenter in my opinion, is one of the best platforms ever built. Like it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. VMware did an amazing job, because they took an IT engineer, and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VM's multitenancy, access management, audit. Everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from essentially single platform. >> John: From a utility standpoint, home-run? >> It's amazing. >> Yeah. >> Because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well, why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So, the premise man Rafay was, well, I should have IT engineers, same engineers. Now, they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that Mass Mutual are able to do now. So, to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management. All of these things that have happened before, chargebacks, they used to have it in vCenter, now they need to happen in other platforms but for Kubernetes. So, should we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >> John: Kind of, yeah. >> Are we a vCenter for Kubernetes? >> No. >> That is a John Furrier question. >> All right, well, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the complexity and not make it more steps, or change a tool chain, or do something, then the Devs move faster. And the service layer that serves the business, the new organization, has to enable speed. This is becoming a real discussion point in the industry, is that, "Yeah, we got new tool. Look at the shiny new toy." But if it move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So, I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just hit my mind, is think about the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb. Or the taxi industry before Uber and after Uber. So, if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks, or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is build their application and deploy it, and run it. They don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers, and then building the Middleware on top of it, and then, do a bunch of testing to make sure they iron out all the compatible issues and whatnot. Now, today, all I say is like, "Hey, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application, and then deploy it in a development environment, that's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together. Make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that you do is like, do the correction. >> John: Shipping. >> Shipping. You build the production. >> John: Press. Go. Release it. (laughs) That when you move on, but they were there. I mean, we're there now. We're there. So, we need to see the future, because that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where there's, I call the Architectural List Environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >> Yeah, and on top of it, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick. So, how do you do it? And you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and test it in real time. So, from an innovation perspective, agility plays a key role. And that's where the Kubernetes platforms, or platforms like Kubernetes plays. >> You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Jassy, when he was the CEO of AWS, either one-on-one or on "theCUBE," he always said, and this is kind of happening, "Companies are going to be builders, where it's not just utility, you need that table stakes to enable that new business idea." And so, in this last keynote, he did this big thing like, "Think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators." I think I'm starting to see that. What do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that an insight, or is that still ways away? >> I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level. Now ,the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality. I mean, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then prove it out like, "Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great." And it's to the business advantage. But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually using it. >> In the board meetings, "Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from?" Agile Developer. Again, this is real. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Absolutely agree. Yeah, I think both of you gentlemen said a word as you were talking, you used the word, Guardrails. We're talking about agility, but the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So, it's automation with the guardrails. Guardrails are like children, you know, shouldn't be heard. They're seen but not heard. Developers don't care about guardrails, they just want to go fast. >> They also bounce around a little bit, (laughs) off the guardrails. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> One thing we know that's not going to slow down, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Devs, the business, the business top line, and, of course, the customers. So, the ability to really, as your website says, let's say, "Make Life Easy for Platform Teams" is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here, is you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. >> Yup. >> So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the evolution of Kubernetes, why? And really, what the focus should be on those platform teams. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" Live, KubeCon CloudNativeCon from Detroit. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay welcome back, we're live here in New York City. It's theCUBE's presentation of Big Data NYC, our fifth year doing this event in conjunction with Strata Data, formerly Strata Hadoop, formerly Strata Conference, formerly Hadoop World, we've been there from the beginning. Eight years covering Hadoop's ecosystem now Big Data. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Our next guest is Santhosh Mahendiran, who is the global head of technology analytics at Standard Chartered Bank. A practitioner in the field, here getting the data, checking out the scene, giving a presentation on your journey with Data at a bank, which is big financial obviously an adopter. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> So we always want to know what the practitioners are doing because at the end of the day there's a lot of vendors selling stuff here, so you got, everyone's got their story. End of the day you got to implement. >> That's right. >> And one of the themes is the data democratization which sounds warm and fuzzy, collaborating with data, this is all good stuff and you feel good and you move into the future, but at the end of the day it's got to have business value. >> That's right. >> And as you look at that, how do you look at the business value? Cause you want to be in the bleeding edge, you want to provide value and get that edge operationally. >> That's right. >> Where's the value in data democratization? How did you guys roll this out? Share your story. >> Okay, so let me start with the journey first before I come to the value part of it, right? So, data democratization is an outcome, but the journey has been something we started three years back. So what did we do, right? So we had some guiding principles to start our journey. The first was to say that we believed in the three S's, which is speed, scale, and it should be really, really flexible and super fast. So one of the challenges that we had was our historical data warehouses was entirely becoming redundant. And why was it? Because it was RDBMS centric, and it was extremely disparate. So we weren't able to scale up to meet the demands of managing huge chunks of data. So, the first step that we did was to re-pivot it to say that okay, let's embrace Hadoop. And what you mean by embracing is just not putting in the data lake, but we said that all our data will land into the data lake. And this journey started in 2015, so we have close to 80% of the Bank's data in the lake and it is end of day data right now and this data flows in on daily basis, and we have consumers who feed off that data. Now coming to your question about-- >> So the data lake's working? >> The data lake is working, up and running. >> People like it, you just got a good spot, batch 'em all you throw everything in the lake. >> So it is not real time, it is end of day. There is some data that is real-time, but the data lake is not entirely real-time, that I have to tell you. But one part is that the data lake is working. Second part to your question is how do I actually monetize it? Are you getting some value out of it? But I think that's where tools like Paxata has actually enabled us to accelerate this journey. So we call it data democratization. So the best part it's not about having the data. We want the business users to actually use the data. Typically, data has always been either delayed or denied in most of the cases to end-users and we have end-users waiting for the data but they don't get access to the data. It was done because primarily the size of the data was too huge and it wasn't flexible enough to be shared with. So how did tools like Paxata and the data lake help us? So what we did with data democratization is basically to say that "hey we'll get end-users to access the data first in a fast manner, in a self-service manner, and something that gives operational assurance to the data, so you don't hold the data and then say that you're going to get a subset of data to play with. We'll give you the entire set of data and we'll give you the right tools which you can play with. Most importantly, from an IT perspective, we'll be able to govern it. So that's the key about democratization. It's not about just giving them a tool, giving them all data and then say "go figure it out." It's about ensuring that "okay, you've got the tools, you've got the data, but we'll also govern it," so that you obviously have control over what they're doing. >> So now you govern it, they don't have to get involved in the governance, they just have access? >> No they don't need to. Yeah, they have access. So governance works both ways. We establish the boundaries. Look at it as a referee, and then say that "okay, there are guidelines that you don't," and within the datasets that key people have access to, you can further set rules. Now, coming back to specific use cases, I can talk about two specific cases which actually helped us to move the needle. The first is on stress testing, so being a financial institution, we typically have to report various numbers to our regulators, etc. The turnaround time was extremely huge. These kind of stress testing typically involve taking huge amount-- >> What were some of the turnaround times? >> Normally it was two to three weeks, some cases a month-- >> Wow. >> So we were able to narrow it down to days, but what we essentially did was as with any stress testing or reporting, it involved taking huge amounts of data, crunching them and then running some models and then showing the output, basically a number of transformations involved. Earlier, you first couldn't access the entire dataset, so that we solved-- >> So check, that was a good step one-- >> That was step one. >> But was there automation involved in that, the Paxata piece? >> Yeah, I wouldn't say it was fully automated end-to-end, but there was definitely automation given the fact that now you got Paxata to work off the data rather than someone extracting the data and then going off and figuring what needs to be done. The ability to work off the entire dataset was a big plus. So stress testing, bringing down the cycle time. The second one use case I can talk about is again anti-money laundering, and in our financial crime compliance space. We had processes that took time to report, given the clunkiness in the various handoffs that we needed to do. But again, empowering the users, giving the tool to them and then saying "hey, this"-- >> How about know your user, because we have to anti-money launder, you need to have to know your user base, that's all set their too? >> Yeah. So the good part is know the user, know your customer, KYCs all that part is set, but the key part is making sure the end-users are able to access the data much more earlier in the life cycle and are able to play with it. In the case of anti-money laundering, again first question of three weeks to four weeks was shortened down to question of days by giving tools like Paxata again in a structured manner and with which we're able to govern. >> You control this, so you knew what you were doing, but you let their tools do the job? >> Correct, so look at it this way. Typically, the data journey has always been IT-led. It has never been business-led. If you look at the generations of what happens is, you source the data which is IT-led, then you model the data which is IT-led, then you prepare then massage the data which is again IT-led and then you have tools on top of it which is again IT-led so the end-users get it only after the fourth stage. Now look at the generations within. All these life cycles apart from the fact that you source the data which is typically an IT issue, the rest need to be done by the actual business users and that's what we did. That's the progression of the generations in which we now we're in the third generation as I call it where our role is just to source the data and then say, "yeah we'll govern it in the matter and then preparation-- >> It's really an operating system and we were talking with Aaron with Elation's co-founder, we used the analogy of a car, how this show was like a car show engine show, what's in the engine and the technology and then it evolved every year, now it's like we're talking about the cars, now we're talking about driver experience-- >> That's right. >> At the end of the day, you just want to drive. You don't really care what's under the hood, you do but you don't, but there's those people who do care what's under the hood, so you can have best of both worlds. You've got the engines, you set up the infrastructure, but ultimately, you in the business side, you just want to drive, that's what's you're getting at? >> That's right. The time-to-market and speed to empower the users to play around with the data rather than IT trying to churn the data and confine access to data, that's a thing of the past. So we want more users to have faster access to data but at the same time govern it in a seamless manner. The word governance is still important because it's not about just give the data. >> And seamless is key. >> Seamless is key. >> Cause if you have democratization of data, you're implying that it is community-oriented, means that it's available, with access privileges all transparently or abstracted away from the users. >> Absolutely. >> So here's the question I want to ask you. There's been talk, I've been saying it for years going back to 2012 that an abstraction layer, a data layer will evolve and that'll be the real key. And then here in this show, I heard things like intelligent information fabric that is business, consumer-friendly. Okay, it's a mouthful, but intelligent information fabric in essence talks about an abstraction layer-- >> That's right. >> That doesn't really compromise anything but gives some enablement, creates some enabling value-- >> That's right. >> For software, how do you see that? >> As the word suggests, the earlier model was trying to build something for the end-users, but not which was end-user friendly, meaning to say, let me just give you a simple example. You had a data model that existed. Historically the way that we have approached using data is to say "hey, I've got a model and then let's fit that data into this model," without actually saying that "does this model actually serve the purpose?" You abstracted the model to a higher level. The whole point about intelligent data is about saying that, I'll give you a very simple analogy. Take zip code. Zipcode in US is very different from zipcode in India, it's very different from zipcode in Singapore. So if I had the ability for my data to come in, to say that "I know it's a zipcode, but this zipcode belongs to US, this zipcode belongs to Singapore, and this zipcode belongs to India," and more importantly, if I can further rev it up a notch, if I say that "this belongs to India, and this zipcode is valid." Look at where I'm going with intelligent sense. So that's what's up. If you look at the earlier model, you have to say that "yeah, this is a placeholder for zipcode." Now that makes sense, but what are you doing with it? >> Being a relational database model, it's just a field in a schema, you're taking it and abstracting it and creating value out of it. >> Precisely. So what I'm actually doing is accelerating the adoption, I'm making it more simpler for users to understand what the data is. So I don't need to as a user figure out "I got a zipcode, now is it a Singapore, India or what zipcode." >> So all this automation, Paxata's got a good system, we'll come back to the Paxata question in a second, I do want to drill down on that. But the big thing that I've been seeing at the show, and again Dave Alonte, my partner, co-CEO of Silicon Angle, we always talk about this all the time. He's more less bullish on Hadoop than I am. Although I love Hadoop, I think it's great but it's not the end-all, be-all. It's a great use case. We were critical early on and the thing we were critical on it was it was too much time being spent on the engine and how things are built, not on the business value. So there's like a lull period in the business where it was just too costly-- >> That's right. >> Total cost of ownership was a huge, huge problem. >> That's right. >> So now today, how did you deal with that and are you measuring the TCO or total cost of ownership cause at the end of the day, time to value, which is can you be up and running in 90 days with value and can you continue to do that, and then what's the overall cost to get there. Thoughts? >> So look I think TCO always underpins any technology investment. If someone said I'm doing a technology investment without thinking about TCO, I don't think he's a good technology leader, so TCO is obviously a driving factor. But TCO has multiple components. One is the TCO of the solution. The other aspect is TCO of what my value I'm going to get out of this system. So talking from an implementation perspective, what I look at as TCO is my whole ecosystem which is my hardware, software, so you spoke about Hadoop, you spoke about RDBMS, is Hadoop cheaper, etc? I don't want to get into that debate of cheaper or not but what I know is the ecosystem is becoming much, much more cheaper than before. And when I talk about ecosystem, I'm talking about RDBMS tools, I'm talking about Hadoop, I'm talking about BI tools, I'm talking about governance, I'm talking about this whole framework becoming cheaper. And it is also underpinned by the fact that hardware is also becoming cheaper. So the reality is all components in the whole ecosystem are becoming cheaper and given the fact that software is also becoming more open-sourced and people are open to using open-source software, I think the whole question of TCO becomes a much more pertinent question. Now coming to your point, do you measure it regularly? I think the honest answer is I don't think we are doing a good job of measuring it that well, but we do have that as one of the criteria for us to actually measure the success of our project. The way that we do is our implementation cost, at the time of writing out our PETs, we call it PETs, which is the Project Execution Document, we talk about cost. We say that "what's the implementation cost?" What are the business cases that are going to be an outcome of this? I'll give you an example of our anti-money laundering. I told you we reduced our cycle time from few weeks to a few days, and that in turn means the number of people involved in this whole process, you're reducing the overheads and the operational folks involved in it. That itself tells you how much we're able to save. So definitely, TCO is there and to say that-- >> And you are mindful of, it's what you look at, it's key. TCO is on your radar 100% you evaluate that into your deals? >> Yes, we do. >> So Paxata, what's so great about Paxata? Obviously you've had success with them. You're a customer, what's the deal. Was it the tech, was it the automation, the team? What was the key thing that got you engaged with them or specifically why Paxata? >> Look, I think the key to partnership there cannot be one ingredient that makes a partnership successful, I think there are multiple ingredients that make a partnership successful. We were one of the earliest adopters of Paxata. Given that we're a bank and we have multiple different systems and we have lot of manual processing involved, we saw Paxata as a good fit to govern these processes and ensure at the same time, users don't lose their experience. The good thing about Paxata that we like was obviously the simplicity and the look and feel of the tool. That's number one. Simplicity was a big point. The second one is about scale. The scale, the fact that it can take in millions of roles, it's not about just working off a sample of data. It can work on the entire dataset. That's very key for us. The third is to leverage our ecosystem, so it's not about saying "okay you give me this data, let me go figure out what to do and then," so Paxata works off the data lake. The fact that it can leverage the lake that we built, the fact that it's a simple and self-preparation tool which doesn't require a lot of time to bootstrap, so end-use people like you-- >> So it makes it usable. >> It's extremely user-friendly and usable in a very short period of time. >> And that helped with the journey? >> That really helped with the journey. >> Santosh, thanks so much for sharing. Santosh Mahendiran, who is the Global Tech Lead at the Analytics of the Bank at Standard Chartered Bank. Again, financial services, always a great early adopter, and you get success under your belt, congratulations. Data democratization is huge and again, it's an ecosystem, you got all that anti-money laundering to figure out, you got to get those reports out, lot of heavylifting? >> That's right, >> So thanks so much for sharing your story. >> Thank you very much. >> We'll give you more coverage after this short break, I'm John Furrier, stay tuned. More live coverage in New York City, its theCube.