(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Detroit guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We've been on the floor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America for about two days now. We've been breaking news, we would have a great conversations, John. We love talking with CUBE alumni whose companies are just taking off. And we get to do that next again. >> Well, this next segment's awesome. We have former CUBE host, Brian Gracely, here who's an executive in this company. And then the entrepreneur who we're going to talk with. She was on theCUBE when it just started now they're extremely successful. It's going to be a great conversation. >> It is, Idit Levine is here, the founder and CEO of solo.io. And as John mentioned, Brian Gracely. You know Brian. He's the VP of Product Marketing and Product Strategy now at solo.io. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, great to have you here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Idit: Thank so much for having us. >> Talk about what's going on. This is a rocket ship that you're riding. I was looking at your webpage, you have some amazing customers. T-Mobile, BMW, Amex, for a marketing guy it must be like, this is just- >> Brian: Yeah, you can't beat it. >> Kid in a candy store. >> Brian: Can't beat it. >> You can't beat it. >> For giant companies like that, giant brands, global, to trust a company of our size it's trust, it's great engineering, it's trust, it's fantastic. >> Idit, talk about the fast trajectory of this company and how you've been able to garner trust with such mass organizations in such a short time period. >> Yes, I think that mainly is just being the best. Honestly, that's the best approach I can say. The team that we build, honestly, and this is a great example of one of them, right? And we're basically getting the best people in the industry. So that's helpful a lot. We are very, very active on the open source community. So basically it building it, anyway, and by doing this they see us everywhere. They see our success. You're starting with a few customers, they're extremely successful and then you're just creating this amazing partnership with them. So we have a very, very unique way we're working with them. >> So hard work, good code. >> Yes. >> Smart people, experience. >> That's all you need. >> It's simple, why doesn't everyone do it? >> It's really easy. (all laughing) >> All good, congratulations. It's been fun to watch you guys grow. Brian, great to see you kicking butt in this great company. I got to ask about the landscape because I love the ServiceMeshCon you guys had on a co-located event on day zero here as part of that program, pretty packed house. >> Brian: Yep. >> A lot of great feedback. This whole ServiceMesh and where it fits in. You got Kubernetes. What's the update? Because everything's kind of coming together- >> Brian: Right. >> It's like jello in the refrigerator it kind of comes together at the same time. Where are we? >> I think the easiest way to think about it is, and it kind of mirrors this event perfectly. So the last four or five years, all about Kubernetes, built Kubernetes. So every one of our customers are the ones who have said, look, for the last two or three years, we've been building Kubernetes, we've had a certain amount of success with it, they're building applications faster, they're deploying and then that success leads to new challenges, right? So we sort of call that first Kubernetes part sort of CloudNative 1.0, this and this show is really CloudNative 2.0. What happens after Kubernetes service mesh? Is that what happens after Kubernetes? And for us, Istio now being part of the CNCF, huge, standardized, people are excited about it. And then we think we are the best at doing Istio from a service mesh perspective. So it's kind of perfect, perfect equation. >> Well, I'll turn it on, listen to your great Cloud cast podcast, plug there for you. You always say what is it and what isn't it? >> Brian: Yeah. >> What is your product and what isn't it? >> Yeah, so our product is, from a purely product perspective it's service mesh and API gateway. We integrate them in a way that nobody else does. So we make it easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to secure. I mean, those two things ultimately are, if it's an internal API or it's an external API, we secure it, we route it, we can observe it. So if anybody's, you're building modern applications, you need this stuff in order to be able to go to market, deploy at scale all those sort of things. >> Idit, talk about some of your customer conversations. What are the big barriers that they've had, or the challenges, that solo.io comes in and just wipes off the table? >> Yeah, so I think that a lot of them, as Brian described it, very, rarely they had a success with Kubernetes, maybe a few clusters, but then they basically started to on-ramp more application on those clusters. They need more cluster maybe they want multi-class, multi-cloud. And they mainly wanted to enable the team, right? This is why we all here, right? What we wanted to eventually is to take a piece of the infrastructure and delegate it to our customers which is basically the application team. So I think that that's where they started to see the problem because it's one thing to take some open source project and deploy it very little bit but the scale, it's all about the scale. How do you enable all those millions of developers basically working on your platform? How do you scale multi-cloud? What's going on if one of them is down, how do you fill over? So that's exactly the problem that they have >> Lisa: Which is critical for- >> As bad as COVID was as a global thing, it was an amazing enabler for us because so many companies had to say... If you're a retail company, your front door was closed, but you still wanted to do business. So you had to figure out, how do I do mobile? How do I be agile? If you were a company that was dealing with like used cars your number of hits were through the roof because regular cars weren't available. So we have all these examples of companies who literally overnight, COVID was their digital transformation enabler. >> Lisa: Yes. Yes. >> And the scale that they had to deal with, the agility they had to deal with, and we sort of fit perfectly in that. They re-looked at what's our infrastructure look like? What's our security look like? We just happened to be right place in the right time. >> And they had skillset issues- >> Skillsets. >> Yeah. >> And the remote work- >> Right, right. >> Combined with- >> Exactly. >> Modern upgrade gun-to-the-head, almost, kind of mentality. >> And we're really an interesting company. Most of the interactions we do with customers is through Slack, obviously it was remote. We would probably be a great Slack case study in terms of how to do business because our customers engage with us, with engineers all over the world, they look like one team. But we can get them up and running in a POC, in a demo, get them through their things really, really fast. It's almost like going to the public cloud, but at whatever complexity they want. >> John: Nice workflow. >> So a lot of momentum for you guys silver linings during COVID, which is awesome we do hear a lot of those stories of positive things, the acceleration of digital transformation, and how much, as consumers, we've all benefited from that. Do you have one example, Brian, as the VP of product marketing, of a customer that you really think in the last two years just is solo.io's value proposition on a platter? >> I'll give you one that I think everybody can understand. So most people, at least in the United States, you've heard of Chick-fil-A, retail, everybody likes the chicken. 2,600 stores in the US, they all shut down and their business model, it's good food but great personal customer experience. That customer experience went away literally overnight. So they went from barely anybody using the mobile application, and hence APIs in the backend, half their business now goes through that to the point where, A, they shifted their business, they shifted their customer experience, and they physically rebuilt 2,600 stores. They have two drive-throughs now that instead of one, because now they have an entire one dedicated to that mobile experience. So something like that happening overnight, you could never do the ROI for it, but it's changed who they are. >> Lisa: Absolutely transformative. >> So, things like that, that's an example I think everybody can kind of relate to. Stuff like that happened. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's also what's special is, honestly, you're probably using a product every day. You just don't know that, right? When you're swiping your credit card or when you are ordering food, or when you using your phone, honestly the amount of customer they were having, the space, it's like so, every industry- >> John: How many customers do you have? >> I think close to 200 right now. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> How many employees, can you gimme some stats? Funding, employees? What's the latest statistics? >> We recently found a year ago $135 million for a billion dollar valuation. >> Nice. >> So we are a unicorn. I think when you took it we were around like 50 ish people. Right now we probably around 180, and we are growing, we probably be 200 really, really quick. And I think that what's really, really special as I said the interaction that we're doing with our customers, we're basically extending their team. So for each customer is basically a Slack channel. And then there is a lot of people, we are totally global. So we have people in APAC, in Australia, New Zealand, in Singapore we have in AMEA, in UK and in Spain and Paris, and other places, and of course all over US. >> So your use case on how to run a startup, scale up, during the pandemic, complete clean sheet of paper. >> Idit: We had to. >> And what happens, you got Slack channels as your customer service collaboration slash productivity. What else did you guys do differently that you could point to that's, I would call, a modern technique for an entrepreneurial scale? >> So I think that there's a few things that we are doing different. So first of all, in Solo, honestly, there is a few things that differentiated from, in my opinion, most of the companies here. Number one is look, you see this, this is a lot, a lot of new technology and one of the things that the customer is nervous the most is choosing the wrong one because we saw what happened, right? I don't know the orchestration world, right? >> John: So choosing and also integrating multiple things at the same time. >> Idit: Exactly. >> It's hard. >> And this is, I think, where Solo is expeditious coming to place. So I mean we have one team that is dedicated like open source contribution and working with all the open source community and I think we're really good at picking the right product and basically we're usually right, which is great. So if you're looking at Kubernetes, we went there for the beginning. If you're looking at something like service mesh Istio, we were all envoy proxy and out of process. So I think that by choosing these things, and now Cilium is something that we're also focusing on. I think that by using the right technology, first of all you know that it's very expensive to migrate from one to the other if you get it wrong. So I think that's one thing that is always really good at. But then once we actually getting those portal we basically very good at going and leading those community. So we are basically bringing the customers to the community itself. So we are leading this by being in the TOC members, right? The Technical Oversight Committee. And we are leading by actually contributing a lot. So if the customer needs something immediately, we will patch it for him and walk upstream. So that's kind of like the second thing. And the third one is innovation. And that's really important to us. So we pushing the boundaries. Ambient, that we announced a month ago with Google- >> And STO, the book that's out. >> Yes, the Ambient, it's basically a modern STO which is the future of SDL. We worked on it with Google and their NDA and we were listed last month. This is exactly an example of us basically saying we can do it better. We learn from our customers, which is huge. And now we know that we can do better. So this is the third thing, and the last one is the partnership. I mean honestly we are the extension team of the customer. We are there on Slack if they need something. Honestly, there is a reason why our renewal rate is 98.9 and our net extension is 135%. I mean customers are very, very happy. >> You deploy it, you make it right. >> Idit: Exactly, exactly. >> The other thing we did, and again this was during COVID, we didn't want to be a shell-for company. We didn't want to drop stuff off and you didn't know what to do with it. We trained nearly 10,000 people. We have something called Solo Academy, which is free, online workshops, they run all the time, people can come and get hands on training. So we're building an army of people that are those specialists that have that skill set. So we don't have to walk into shops and go like, well okay, I hope six months from now you guys can figure this stuff out. They're like, they've been doing that. >> And if their friends sees their friend, sees their friend. >> The other thing, and I got to figure out as a marketing person how to do this, we have more than a few handfuls of people that they've got promoted, they got promoted, they got promoted. We keep seeing people who deploy our technologies, who, because of this stuff they're doing- >> John: That's a good sign. They're doing it at at scale, >> John: That promoter score. >> They keep getting promoted. >> Yeah, that's amazing. >> That's a powerful sort of side benefit. >> Absolutely, that's a great thing to have for marketing. Last question before we ran out of time. You and I, Idit, were talking before we went live, your sessions here are overflowing. What's your overall sentiment of KubeCon 2022 and what feedback have you gotten from all the customers bursting at the seam to come talk to you guys? >> I think first of all, there was the pre-event which we had and it was a lot of fun. We talked to a lot of customer, most of them is 500, global successful company. So I think that people definitely... I will say that much. We definitely have the market feed, people interested in this. Brian described very well what we see here which is people try to figure out the CloudNative 2.0. So that's number one. The second thing is that there is a consolidation, which I like, I mean STO becoming right now a CNCF project I think it's a huge, huge thing for all the community. I mean, we're talking about all the big tweak cloud, we partner with them. I mean I think this is a big sign of we agree which I think is extremely important in this community. >> Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you so much. >> And where can customers go to get their hands on this, solo.io? >> Solo.io? Yeah, absolutely. >> Awesome guys, this has been great. Congratulations on the momentum. >> Thank you. >> The rocket ship that you're riding. We know you got to get to the airport we're going to let you go. But we appreciate your insights and your time so much, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> A pleasure. >> Thanks. >> For our guests and John Furrier, This is Lisa Martin live in Detroit, had to think about that for a second, at KubeCon 2022 CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back with our final guests of the day and then the show wraps, so stick around. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of CloudNativeCon and Kubecon for Kubernetes conference. This is the second year, it's really getting large, community's awesome. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm here with Stu Miniman, Wikibon analyst with SiliconANGLE. Our next guest is Chen Goldberg, engineering director at Google; on stage today, Keynote. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you very much for inviting me. >> We'd love to have Google on... Google is the guard in cloud, you guys are doing a lot of amazing technology, it's fun to watch. It's also fun to watch how Google's handled the Kubernetes evolution. I know it was a hard decision internally from the conversation we had with Craig, back in the day, and Brendan. But really, what a good decision that was, to bring it out into the open, CNCF gets ahold of it, really created a community here, so congratulations. >> Thank you. I think there is more to that than just bringing it to the open and creating a community, it's also about the culture and values. I've started in my Keynote talking about empowerment. But this is really one of the core values of the engineering culture in Google. That anyone can come up with a great idea. So having that thought into the design of Kubernetes with modularity and extensibility is really key. >> And you guys are no stranger to large-scale technology. We've been talking on theCUBE here and certainly for the past year about the democratization with containers and microservices. Really showing a clear path to value, you start to have this accelerated goodness happening in developer community. You've got software engineering happening at levels of the stack, and then you've got really focused application development happening, infrastructurous code. Kind of for the first time, we're starting to see some real cohesiveness there, on both sides. >> We are getting there. I will not say we are there already, but definitely, that's the goal. >> What are you most excited about with Kubernetes here at the show, what are some of the things that you see that's standing out for you in Kubernetes? >> I would say two things. The first one is, if you have noticed, in all the Keynotes, there was a very consistent message coming from all the speakers, regardless of what company they're on. So in my mind, it just shows that the leadership of the Kubernetes community is aligned. We have the same vision in mind. We all know it's just the beginning. We all know that there's more work to do. We all talk about the core: extensibility, and I'm happy to see that. And we all talk about the same values, by the way. Which is also very important. Because I've been an engineering major for many years, and in my mind, the key of building a strong team is with the alignment of the leadership. Once you have that, you can do whatever you want. >> Google has a long history of just building amazing technology. One of the knocks is sometimes the industry is like "Well Google builds really amazing stuff "that only Google people can understand how to use." We've talked to the founder of Kubernetes, and they said "Well, we wanted to help bring some "of that operating model to the world." It sure feels like, at this show, it feels a little bit more Google-y. If I can use the term. What have you been seeing out there? What do you hear when you talk with the community, with customers? >> I think that one thing that helped my team work well with Kubernetes' community is being Google-y, and being humble, and listening, and being pragmatic. You know, there was asked today, at Zig Architecture, a team said that he had to defend of why we are only supporting 100 nodes in the first release of Kubernetes. And they explained that they know how to build for scale, they know how to do it, but realistically, most of users don't need large clusters. So why create this complexity, for example. >> Scale is one of those things that we all bat around as to what scale really means. There's only a handful of customers that have Google type of scale, so what does it mean when you're building these type of technologies? What does scale mean to the community and the customers? Scale. >> From the perspective of the community, what it means? >> Like when Kubernetes, all these projects, you said limit to 100 nodes, I've heard there were some people that... >> So now it's 5000 nodes. >> Okay, 5000. But there have been some alternatives to Kubernetes that said Kubernetes didn't scale big enough, and I've yet to find customers that say that. >> I think, again going to be pragmatic, is what do you do first, and how do you show value when building a product? So when we started, the 100 nodes was sufficient. Today, we support 5000 nodes. Do you want to grow than that, think there are better ways to scale than just improve with nodes? For example, we are supporting, again, part of the vision of Kubernetes is the multi-workloads. Can you take the same cluster and run different type of workloads and then utilize the resources in a more efficient way? Because there's also, of course, the toll of managing different nodes. Scale is on many aspects, you usually think about how you scale your team. This will mean, again, that I think Google is bringing a lot to the community. We have, for example, our SRE team did a talk here in Kubecon on how we are managing our clusters. And how we bring our own experience, and much of the automation of a Kubernetes cluster is built on top of our experience. Saying that, this is also where we differentiate. Our goal is to bring everything we know from Google into the Kubernetes community. The tooling, developer experience, this is what we bring as add on to the Kubernetes. Operational excellence, we do that for you. >> You've done that. You've had great container mindset from day one. Not so much VMs either so you had that microservices vision. When you guys look at building the cloud for customers, we are seeing that customers aren't yet there yet, some are, they seek, they want microservices, but they're still in their old VM worlds of dealing with virtual machines and some bare metal. How is Kubernetes an opportunity for customers? Because they're looking at this announcement, saying "I like Cloud-Native, I like Kubernetes. "This is good for me. "I got to get more developers, I have to port my applications." They're going to need some cloud to go with that. Your thoughts. >> I have many thoughts on that. Definitely we cannot cover that in the time we have. I do believe in containerization and Kubernetes. I do expect that the majority of the workloads, at least in clouds, will be containerized. Saying that, I'm confident that not all of them will be containerized. Which is important to acknowledge. Definitely in building such a platform. I think the first value that Kubernetes brings to those customers is that they can have it on-prem. And it's easy to manage, and with the new set of technologies, like Estio, for example, and our effort to, and a service vocal to be across broader than just Kubernetes, we are allowing them to have a hybrid setting, even within their own prem. So I can manage with Kubernetes, but also have some other workloads. And you can see that much of the obstruction that we are trying to build in the co-ed community. We are trying to make sure that they will be relevant outside of the Kubernetes scope, because we acknowledge that. >> Could you expand on, you were talking about Kubernetes can be both on-premises and the public cloud, obviously Google Cloud has to be a major focus for what you're doing. How do you look at that experience between the data center and the public cloud? I know it's a pretty broad question, but. >> So some things are similar. For example, from tuning perspective and experience, I think that we can, we, and also customers on-prem can achieve a consistent experience whatever they run. Like for example, we have some little customers that are running Kubernetes on the warehouse and in the data centers, and they are happy with that. You can probably not get to zero to one, and you can not just start a new node, so your auto-scaling is different from management prospective. Upgrade, of course other aspects, but the way we are working with some obstructions, we are allowing the vendors in particular to make sure that there is a good foundation to run Kubernetes on-prem. >> And I want to get your thoughts on the questions. So pretend that I bring you into a talk, and in the audience is all these IT, architects, and CIOs, and CDOs, and CSOs, and I raise my hand, I say "And why should I go, I like the vision, "but what does it mean to me? "I have all this stuff." >> Consistency. >> What talk do you give to those folks and saying "Here's what Kubernetes is, here's what "the impact is for you, and here's some of the outcomes you might see if you go down that path." >> I talk about consistency and freedom of choice. I've been working for a long time with IT teams, and also including myself building software. And where we spend most of our money and time... It's not about even building more hollow, it's about educating teams and mobility of engineers. And then there is a new technology or something that takes all of effort to bake into whatever we already have existing, and I think that's the promise for enterprises. Imagine that everything run on Kubernetes. And it's the same Kubernetes everywhere. So how upgrade or application running on Kubernetes will look like. I know how hard it is to do upgrades today. I was in IT department, leading IT department, and that's all that we did. Our annual planning was how we upgrade the middleware and the infrastructure. Q1 we are doing that, Q2, we are doing that. And why? Because it's all very different. And we are trying to get to a place where it's not. I know it's a vision, I know it's a dream. >> ServiceMesh points to this. This is what ServiceMesh can bring. This notion of having this architecture where you can have multiple codebases. >> But it's relying on Kubernetes. It has to have that consistent infrastructure. So that would be one, it would be the consistency between environments. And really the freedom of choice I think is very important, from what I hear from customers. They want to move to cloud in their own pace. They want to move to maybe more than one cloud. So that gives them that ability without being locked-in. >> So we get one piece of the stack that's consistent with Kubernetes, but one of the things we've heard is some people say "It's too complicated", but that's also the opportunity, because every customer can kind of build what they need, you know, build Kubernetes the hard way, and have the adjustments so it's not one solution, a simple kind of homogenous stack, there's a lot of layers there. >> So before you asked me what are the two things that I was most happy seeing here at the con. So the first one was the alignment of the leadership. The other one was the amount of innovation. Like if you look around us, the amount of companies that innovate on top of Kubernetes, I'm super happy about it, like that's a dream come true. >> Two years only, three years maybe. The gestation period's very short. >> Yes. So first of all, Kubernetes is not hard today. Splitting off a cluster is not hard. We did it, we already help fixing that. But there are still harder problems. Talking about developer experience, signing into other environments. We have more things to solve, but it's not just on us. We are building this ecosystem around us that can help you do that. >> One of the things I'm most impressed with this event is, first of all, it's super exciting, great community of smart people really contributing. We had Lifton earlier, I mean just amazing end user, building out scale, donating it, participating. Kind of a new generation of open source is coming. Real, hardcore practitioners who had to build some hard stuff at scale. And you guys, obviously Google's been doing it for many, many years. But now, contributing these gifts. The gifts of open source are, it's amazing. How does someone make, so that means that it's a dream for developers. How do developers make sense of it? If you were a young developer again, just getting into the business, what would you do? How would you attack this? How would you get creative? What would you sink your teeth into? >> So I think two things. So first of all, I think it will change a bit, the industry and the way we innovate. Because I am a believer that the open source pace is faster. That's one thing that we already see, that we have to keep up with everything that is going up in the community. Another thing that I think sometimes we as infrastructure engineers, we forget, this would be boring. There are bigger problems to solve. There are other ways to make the world better. And I would love, as a software engineer, to try and solve those problems. How can we make other processes to have more machine learning? You see my eyes, you see how excited, there's so many more interesting things to solve than this. >> And that's what you guys are enabling. With Kubernetes, that creates an abstraction layer. So I guess the theme going forward is more abstractions and more primitives. Declarative primitives, right? >> Yes. >> We're getting excited here on theCUBE. Chen, you are an inspiration, thanks for coming on theCUBE, I really appreciate it. Keynote was fantastic. >> Thank you very much. >> You had a great shirt on with all the names of all the pioneers and women intact. Certainly awesome to see the great engineering work you guys are doing, congratulations. And of course, we're doing our part, just trying to share that data here, open sourcing the content here on theCUBE at Kubecon and CloudNativeCon. This is theCUBE, I'm John and with Stu. We'll be right back with more live coverage. From Austin, Texas, after this short break. >> Woman: Awesome. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's the Cube, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the Cube's Ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage live in Austin, Texas here for the three day CloudNative and now two days of KubeCon, Kubernetes conference. We had the second annual conference celebrating the evolution and growth of Kubernetes. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Stu Miniman and next guest Steve Watt, Chief Architect of Emerging Technologies at Red Hat, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me, always a pleasure. >> So Red Hat making some good bets, some Kubernetes, not a bad call. >> No, Kubernetes has done wonders for our openship business, absolutely. (laughter) >> So how is this all playing out? We were just talking before we came on camera here about the just the pace of change. You been at Red Hat five years. We interviewed you when you were at HB during the big day to days, boy the world has certainly grown and changed. What has changed in your mind the most the people need to understand? >> I think Kubernetes has been a single biggest driving force to shift all enterprising architecture from scale up to scale out and I think that has just created a whole number of ripple effects across how applications are designed within the enterprise. >> I think that's the big one. >> Yeah. >> So Steve, that whole shift from scale up to scale out has affected lots of parts of the stack, but storage is something you've been working on, something we've been keeping a close eye on and was one of the top items we wanted to kind of dig into this week. Maybe, bring us inside a little bit, what's happening, what's Red Hat's role? >> Sure. >> Help explain. >> Absolutely, one of my favorite topics. It's kind of counterintuitive. I work in a CT office, I run the emerging technologies team, which is sort of the team that does the experiments that help shape and inform our long term strategy. And so you might think, well storage is kind of old news, how does that fit into this CloudNative world? Why does Red Hat care about it so much for their platform? And I think if you look at the CloudNative stack today, you have GKE, the new Amazon Kubernetes service, Azure, et cetera, these are all places where you can run your Kubernetes app, but just in that one place. Red Hat's platform perspective's a little different. We want you to be able to run your platform in an open hybrid cloud, whether that's in Google, in Azure or on premise, on OpenStack or on Bare Metal So you want to be able to run everywhere, but what's the biggest problem to achieving that application portability? It's data locking, so storage becomes cool again. (laughter) We got to solve this problem. >> Because you got to store the data somewhere. >> Steve: Right. >> And that's in the storage devices. >> Right, exactly. >> In the new way, the architecture. >> The new architecture, right? So the problem is, you've got to be very careful that if you want to move, ever you should think upfront about your persistence platform, so that it gives you the freedom to be able to move around. So Red Hat is investing heavily in trying to solve this problem. We've got a few exploratory prototypes that we're actually showing at this conference. And we work in both Kubernetes, building out the storage sub-system there, but also sort of in our products for like container native storage. >> Steve walk us through a little bit because we've been talking about this in the Docker Ecosystem for a bunch of years, where are we, what's being worked on? What still needs to be kind of sorted out? >> So, yeah that's interesting, I think we're finally over the hump where everybody's asking, Who's solving the persistence problem for containers? It used to drive me crazy, that went on for about three years. I think people finally realize, there are solutions. Kubernetes has always had them actually. And so, we've got past sort of the day one, like being able to, dynamically provision. Kind of like you'd see with Cinder in OpenStack. We've got a great storage. we've got a vibrant huge storage ecosystem and at our Kubernetes face to face meetings we have 50 people, they're like a mini conference. So we've got broad engagement from the entire storage ecosystem and that's doing everything that you need sort of on the file level, but there is recent (mumbles) work that we've done in Kubernetes for Service Broker is now the pattern to sort of provision object storage if you need it and most importantly, we've just enabled lock storage in Kubernetes in the 1.9 release that ships this week. And that is really interesting because it opens up the potential to run virtualization with loads on Kubernetes. >> Where's the action for the projects with storage? I heard some hallway rumbles just when I was, the Rook project. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Is that something, what projects, if I'm interested in storage, where do I dive in? Where's the most action for moving the needle for tuning the innovation around storage. >> I think it's if you're a storage vendor it's different if you're a storage consumer so Rook is a project that's focused on providing a sort of an abstraction for software defined storage platforms to run inside Kubernetes. Cluster doesn't take that approach, we've used sort of more of the pure Kubernetes approach. Sort of get to the same place. But Rook is definitely an interesting project in that, it's sort of an inception level project phase. Then for people that are wanting to consume storage, I think Kubernetes is the king of the pack. I obviously have a strong opinion on it, amongst the other container orchestrators, but the amount of investment in allowing people to do more continually more sophisticated features, you know snapshot's in, you know cloning, things like that. And obviously, I'm sure you've heard a little bit about container storage interface. >> Yes. >> CSI, and that makes it a lot easier for storage vendors to build one adapter that works across, Decos, Cloud foundry, Kubernetes, et cetera. >> What's the biggest surprise here for you, because we've been looking trying to read the tea leaves. Obviously Kubernetes, clear the runway, good standardization seeing some commoditization, great adoption, although people can tailor it. A lot of different versions, still early. >> Steve: Yeah. >> We're only two years old conference. >> I know. >> Three years it's been around. What's surprising you right now? What's jumping out at you? >> I think Amazon's announcement yesterday was very interesting. I think the fact that it's heartening to see that there's pure Kubernetes as a service being offered in Azure, Google and Amazon. And I think that quite interesting for affordability standpoint, right. And so I think to me that was a big surprise. Amazon doesn't usually go the pure vanilla open source approach and also the statements they're going to contribute back to Kubernetes, I think is quite interesting as well. So to me that's the one thing that stood out. >> What's going on for the future too? You mentioned you've got to set the roadmap. You guys have an agenda there obviously of installed base. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Now you've got OpenShift doing really well. What are you guys looking at? What's on your radar, how do you see this thing unfolding? What's in your mind? >> Yeah, I think there's a couple of really interesting things. Container orchestration is a legitimate disruption to virtualization. And that it solves the same problem opportunity space but in a fundamentally different manner that reshapes the market. I think the Kubert project is something that we're working on at Red Hat. It's another one of our sort of emerging technology focus areas. And when we enable block storage and it enables virtualization, what it gives us the opportunity to do in Kubernetes is have a single deployed platform that can serve both later adopters and early adopters. So the early adopters with pure container orchestration, but if you're wanting to have the same platform and do virtualization too on it, you can have sort of one investment, one shared experience to be able to do all of those. I think that's pretty cool. (laughter) >> Steve, talk about the customers that are watching or will be hearing over the next few months and a year around how to architectually package this and think about it in their mind. Whether it's a mental model or specifics. 'Cause there's always going to be that time tested trade off between performance, security and so you have, obviously people have VM's, not going away, but containerization where Google say, hey, we don't really care about VM's, we're a container company. There's always still going to be trade offs. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Speed, security. >> Steve: Security. >> So security factors in there. How should a practitioner think about getting their arms around this? >> I think this is the tact that OpenShift takes which is that Kubernetes is a decent project. Despite the huge amount of interest and contributions that we have and its maturity curve as far as, there are different things at attention, like enterprise use cases, versus public cloud use cases. And so we're very focused on our enterprise use cases and sort of enabling that inside OpenShift and bringing OpenShift up as a platform back to sort of enterprise level that our customers would expect. Virtualization platforms are much further down the maturity curve, and so I think that's sort of our approach is that, where that tries to meet our customers where they are. Some organizations have teams that are more advanced. Some that are less advanced. And so we try to offer, you know if you want to go virtualization we've got OpenStack, we've got Rev. If you want you could use this new school Kubernetes based container orchestration and you got teams understand it. (laughter) And you corrupt microservices then we've got a solution for that. >> Well you know that whole theme here is infrastructures is boring storage. It used to be called snorage back in the day. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It's pretty boring but relevant. Most people look at like Lambda from Amazon and some other serverless trends and certainly see them here with ServiceMesh and what not, the abstraction way of infrastructure, it's almost eliminating storage in the mind of the developer, yet it's changing, how are you guys specifically riding that wave? Because one, it's good for developers. >> Steve: Right. >> The velocity of developers increases, but the role of storage is changing. You mention block, people are like, oh block-- >> Yeah. >> It's dead. I mean storage has been dead for like 20 years now? >> Steve: Yeah. >> It keeps growing and growing, but now the role changes to the developer, abstracted away and also more important for automation and some of the dev ops things. What specifically are you guys doing? >> So, I think you said the word role. That's really important right? Like to an application developer what you said is absolutely true, they want to use persistence platforms for storing their data in a cloud native way, okay. However, the maturity code is also important. Not every application developer team is fully microservice based and understands all these architectural patterns. It's a journey, right? So we want to basically give them multiple options along their journey. So that's the one around the application persistence. So if they used to like file storage or object storage, et cetera, like we have our container native storage platform provides that for them from the application persistence level, but from an OpenShift standpoint, an OpenShift is our new platform. It's based on real but it's our new platform, our new service area to build applications and most notably, infrastructure services on. So just like with (mumbles) where we have, we created the opportunity to have a fertile ecosystem around it, we're doing the same with OpenShift, which means that we've got to enable the companies that are providing those persistence platforms. Those message cues, those NoSQL databases, to run on OpenShift. You want to run Cassandra on OpenShift on premise? What do you need underneath the Cassandra? Block storage, direct attached block storage, which we're building in Kubernetes 1.10. >> Steve, any patterns you're seeing between the customers that are being able to embrace really the kind of this new cloud data world versus those that are having challenges? Any advice you can give based on customer interactions and what you're seeing. >> That's a good question. I think, I just have to fall back on the fact that culture is a hard thing to change. It takes a long time. Institutions are persistent and so I think that for what we sort of say to our customers, our guidance on these topics is that, what we try and give you is choice. Depending on where you are on the journey, slowly move our customers through that journey and try to give them a variety of different choices on that. I think personally like with any new disruption, it usually has like 10 x value. Like the one benefit of containers over to machines is you don't have to bring the operating system along every time you create a new container, right? You can much more densely pack a server with containers with virtual machines. Get more resource utilization, but it takes a long time for an application development team to like fully get there. And so, that's the thing I think, is you just got to be judicious about like the right tool at the right time. >> Yeah, the other thing related to that is the pace of change. >> Steve: Yeah. >> I've talked to some of the people that created Kubernetes, the people who are running all this and they're like, I can't keep up with all these projects. What are you finding internally in Red Hat, as well as from your customers? >> Yeah, I think that it's absolutely true. I was just remarking on that a minute ago it's, you know I'm walking around. I hear this great quote, like why do you come to conferences? Do you come to conferences to learn or do you come to conferences to learn about what you need to learn? (laughter) >> Yeah. >> And it's the latter for me, right. And the ecosystem, the CloudNative ecosystem is exploding. And so I think what we try to do at Red Hat is, especially our team. Our goal in Emerging Technologies is to look 18 months down the road and pick the winners. Like community vitality standpoint, but also like the right technology. And there's this plethora of choices that we need to wave through and what we tend to do is distill that down into our platform that's something our customers can rely on. And that's reliable and we've picked the right project, but it's a big challenge. Like there's so much happening and even in storage it's becoming challenging. >> Steve Watt the Chief Architect of Emerging Engineering at Red Hat thanks for coming on the Cube, appreciate your perspective. It's an architectural game right now. A lot of people putting these new architectures together. It's cultural change. Congratulations on your success with OpenShift and everything else. >> Steve: Yeah, thank you very much. >> Alright, and more coverage here on the Cube after this short break. >> Steve: Thanks. (upbeat music)