(gentle upbeat music) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music) >> We're back in Barcelona at the Fira. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. We're live at MWC23, day four of the coverage. The show is still rocking. You walk the floor, it's jamming. People are lined up to get in the copter, in the right. It's amazing. Planes, trains, automobiles, digitization of analog businesses. We're going to talk private wireless here with Dell. Sarvesh Sharma, the Global Director for Edge and Private Mobility Solutions practice at Dell. And John McCready is a Senior Director for 5G Solutions and product management at Dell Technologies. Guys, good to see you. >> Likewise, likewise. >> Good to see you too. >> Private wireless. It's the buzz of the show. Everybody's talking about it. What's Dell's point of view on that? >> So Dell is, obviously, interested entering the private wireless game, as it's a good part of the overall enterprise IT space. As you move more and more into the different things. What we announced here, is sort of our initial partnerships with some key players like Airspan and expedo and AlphaNet. Players that are important in the space. Dell's going to provide an overall system integration solution wrap along with our Edge BU as well. And we think that we can bring really good solutions to our enterprise customers. >> Okay, I got to ask you about AlphaNet. So HPE pulled a little judo move they waited till you announced your partnership and then they bought the company. What, you know, what's your opinion on that? You going to, you going to dump AlphaNet, you're going to keep 'em? >> No. >> We're open Ecosystem. >> Yeah, it's an open ecosystem. We announce these are our initial partners, you know we're going to announce additional partners that was always the case. You know, there's a lot of good players in this space that bring different pros and cons. We got to be able to match the solution requirements of all our customers. And so we'll continue to partner with them and with others. >> Good, good answer, I like that. So some of these solutions are sort of out of the box, others require more integration. Can you talk about your, the spectrum of your portfolio? >> So I'm glad you brought up the integration part, right? I mean, if you look at private wireless, private mobility it is not a sell by itself. At the end of the day what the enterprise wants is not just private mobility. They're looking for an outcome. Which means from an integration perspective, you need somebody who can integrate the infrastructure stack. But that's not enough. You need somebody who can bring in the application stack to play and integrate that application stack with the enterprises IT OT. And that's not enough. You need somebody to put those together. And Dell is ideally suited to do all of this, right? We have strong partners that can bring the infrastructure stack to play. We have a proven track record of managing the IT and the enterprise stack. So we are very excited to say, "Hey, this is the sweet spot for us. And if there was a right to win the edge, we have it." >> Can you explain, I mean, people might be saying, well, why do I even need private wireless? I got Wi-Fi. I know it's kind of a dumb question for people who are in the business, but explain to folks in the audience who may not understand the intersection of the two. >> So, yeah, so I think, you know, wireless is a great techno- pardon me, Wi-Fi is a great technology for taking your laptop to the conference room. You know, it's effectively wireless LAN Where private 5G and before that private LTE had come into play is where there's a number of attributes of your application, what you're using it for, for which Wi-Fi is not as well suited. And so, you know, that plays out in different verticals in different ways. Either maybe you need a much higher capacity than Wi-Fi, better security than Wi-Fi, wider coverage like outdoor, and in many cases a more predictable reliability. So cellular is just a different way of handling the wireless interface that provides those attributes. So, you know, I think at the beginning, the first several years, you know Wi-Fi and 5G are going to live side by side in the enterprise for their different roles. How that plays out in the long term? We'll see how they each evolve. >> But I think anybody can relate to that. I mean, Wi-Fi's fine, you know, we have our issues with Wi-Fi. I'm having a lot of issues with Wi-Fi this week, but generally speaking, it works just fine. It's ubiquitous, it's cheap, okay. But I would not want to run my factory on it and rely on it for my robots that are shipping products, right? So that really is kind of the difference. It's really an industry 4.0 type. >> Yeah, exactly. So I mean, manufacturing's an important vertical, but things of energy and mining and things like that they're all outdoor, right? So you actually need the scale that comes, with a higher power technology, and even, you know just basic things like running cameras in a retail store and using AI to watch for certain things. You get a much better latency performance on private 5G and therefore are able to run more sophisticated applications. >> So I could be doing realtime inference. I can imagine Dave, I got an arm processor I'm doing some realtime inference AI at the Edge. You know, you need something like 5G to be able to do that, you can't be doing that over Wi-Fi. >> Yeah >> You nailed it. I mean that's exactly the difference, right? I mean if you look at Wi-Fi, it grow out from a IT enabled mode, right? You got to replace an ethernet. It was an IT extension. A LAN extension. Cellular came up from the mode of, "Hey, when I have that call, I need for it to be consistent and I need for it to be always available," right? So it's a different way of looking at it. Not to say one is better, the other is not better. It's just a different philosophy behind the technologies and they're going to coexist because they meet diverse needs. >> Now you have operators who embrace the idea of 5G obviously, and even private 5G. But the sort of next hurdle to overcome for some, is the idea of open standards. What does the landscape look like right now in terms of those conversations? Are you still having to push people over that hump, to get them beyond the legacy of proprietary closed stacks? >> Yeah, so I think I look, there are still people who are advocating that. And I think in the carrier's core networks it's going to take a little longer their main, you know macro networks that they serve the general public. In the private network though, the opportunity to use open standard and open technology is really strong because that's how you bring the innovation. And that's what we need in order to be able to solve all these different business problems. You know, the problems in retail, and healthcare and energy, they're different. And so you need to be able to use this open stack and be able to bring different elements of technology and blend it together in order to serve it. Otherwise we won't serve it. We'll all fail. So that's why I think it's going to have a quicker path in private. >> And the only thing to add to that is if you look at private 5G and the deployment of private LTE or private 5G, right? There is no real technology debt that you carry. So it's easy for us to say, "Hey, the operators are not listening, they're not going open." But hey, they have a technical debt, they have 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, systems, right? >> Interviewer: Sure. >> But the reason we are so excited about private 5G and private 4G, is right off the bat when we go into an enterprise space, we can go open. >> So what exactly is Dell's role here? How do you see, obviously you make hardware and you have solutions, but you got to open ecosystems. You got, you know, you got labs, what do you see your role in the ecosystem? Kind of a disruptor here in this, when I walk around this show. >> Well a disruptor, also a solution provider, and system integrator. You know, Sarvesh and I are part of the telecom practice. We have a big Edge practice in Dell as well. And so for this space around private 5G, we're really teamed up with our cohort in the Edge business unit. And think about this as, it's not just private 5G. It's what are you doing with it? That requires storage, it requires compute, it requires other applications. So Dell brings that entire package. There definitely are players who are just focused on the connectivity, but our view is, that's not enough. To ask the enterprise to integrate that all themself. I don't think that's going to work. You need to bring the connectivity and the application to storage compute the whole solution. >> Explain Telecom and and Edge. They're different but they're like cousins in the Dell organization. Where do you guys divide the two? >> You're saying within Dell? >> Yeah, within Dell. >> Yeah, so if you look at Dell, right? Telecom is one of our most newest business units. And the way it has formed is like we talk Edge all the time, right? It's not new. Edge has always been around. So our enterprise Edge has always been around. What has changed with 5G is now you can seamlessly move between the enterprise Edge and the telecom Edge. And for that happen you had to bring in a telecom systems business unit that can facilitate that evolution. The next evolution of seamless Edge that goes across from enterprise all the way into the telco and other places where Edge needs to be. >> Same question for the market, because I remember at Dell Tech World last year, I interviewed Lowe's and the discussion was about the Edge. >> John: Yep. >> What they're doing in their Edge locations. So that's Edge. That's cool. But then I had, I had another discussion with an agriculture firm. They had like the massive greenhouses and they were growing these awesome tomatoes. Well that was Edge too. It was actually further Edge. So I guess those are both Edge, right? >> Sarvesh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Spectrum there, right? And then the telecom business, now you're saying is more closely aligned with that? >> Right. >> Depending on what you're trying to do. The appropriate place for the Edge is different. You, you nailed it exactly, right. So if you need wide area, low latency, the Edge being in the telecom network actually makes a lot of sense 'cause they can serve wide area low latency. If you're just doing your manufacturing plant or your logistics facility or your agricultural growing site, that's the Edge. So that's exactly right. And the tech, the reason why they're close cousins between telecom and that is, you're going to need some kind of connectivity, some kind of connectivity from that Edge, in order to execute whatever it's you're trying to do with your business. >> Nature's Fresh was the company. I couldn't think of Nature's Fresh. They're great. Keith awesome Cube guest. >> You mentioned this mix of Wi-Fi and 5G. I know it's impossible to predict with dates certain, you know, when this, how's this is going to develop. But can you imagine a scenario where at some point in time we don't think in terms of Wi-Fi because everything is essentially enabled by a SIM or am I missing a critical piece there, in terms of management of spectrum and the complicated governmental? >> Yeah, there is- >> Situation, am I missing something? It seems like a logical progression to me, but what am I missing? >> Well, there is something to be said about spectrum, right? If you look at Wi-Fi, as I said, the driver behind the technology is different. However, I fully agree with you that at some point in time, whether it's Wi-Fi behind, whether it's private 5G behind becomes a moot point. It's simply a matter of, where is my data being generated? What is the best technology for me to use to ingest that data so I can derive value out of that data. If it means Wi-Fi, so be it. If it means cellular, so be it. And if you look at cellular right? The biggest thing people talk about SIMs. Now if you look at 5G standard. In 5G standard, you have EAPTLS, which means there is a possibility that SIMs in the future go away for IoT devices. I'm not saying they need to go away for consumer devices, they probably need to be there. But who's to say going ahead for IoT devices, they all become SIM free. So at that point, whether you Wi-Fi or 5G doesn't matter. >> Yeah, by the way, on the spectrum side people are starting to think about the concept. You might have heard this NRU, new radio unlicensed. So it's running the Wi-Fi standard, but in the unlicensed bands like Wi-Fi. So, and then the last piece is of course you know, the cost, the reality it stays 5G still new technology, the endpoints, you know, what would go in your laptop or a sensor et cetera. Today that's more expensive than Wi-Fi. So we need to get the volume curve down a little bit for that to really hit every application. I would guess your vision is correct. >> David: Yep >> But who can predict? >> Yeah, so explain more about what the unlicensed piece means for organizations. What does that for everybody? >> That's more of a future thing. So you know, just- >> No, right, but let's put on our telescope. >> Okay, so it's true today that Wi-Fi traditionally runs in the bands that have been licensed by the government and it's a country by country thing, right? >> Dave: Right. >> What we did in the United States was CBRS, is different than what they've done in Germany where they took part of the Zurich C-band and gave it to the enterprises. The telco's not involved. And now that's been copied in Japan and Korea. So it's one of the complications unfortunately in the market. Is that you have this different approach by regulators in different countries. Wi-Fi, the unlicensed band is a nice global standard. So if you could run NR just as 5G, right? It's another name for 5G, run that in the unlicensed bands, then you solve the spectrum problem that Dave was asking about. >> Which means that the market really opens up and now. >> It would be a real enabler >> Innovation. >> Exactly. >> And the only thing I would add to that is, right, there are some enterprises who have the size and scale to kind of say, "Hey, I'm going the unlicensed route. I can do things on my own." There are some enterprises that still are going to rely on the telcos, right? So I don't want to make a demon out of the telcos that you own the spectrum, no. >> David: Sure. >> They will be offering a very valuable service to a massive number of small, medium enterprises and enterprises that span regional boundaries to say, hey we can bring that consistent experience to you. >> But the primary value proposition has been connectivity, right? >> Yes. >> I mean, we can all agree on that. And you hear different monetization models, we can't allow the OTT vendors to do it again. You know, we want to tax Netflix. Okay, we've been talking about that all week. But there may be better models. >> Sarvesh: Yes. >> Right, and so where does private network fit into the monetization models? Let's follow the money here. >> Actually you've brought up an extremely important point, right? Because if you look at why haven't 5G networks taken off, one of the biggest things people keep contrasting is what is the cost of a Wi-Fi versus the cost of deploying a 5G, right? And a portion of the cost of deploying a 5G is how do you commercialize that spectrum? What is going to be the cost of that spectrum, right? So the CSPs will have to eventually figure out a proper commercialization model to say, hey listen, I can't just take what I've been doing till date and say this is how I make. Because if you look at 5G, the return of investment is incremental. Any use case you take, unless, let's take smart manufacturing, unless the factory decides I'm going to rip and replace everything by a 5G, they're going to introduce a small use case. You look at the investment for that use case, you'll say Hmm, I'm not making money. But guess what? Once you've deployed it and you bring use case number two, three, four, five, now it starts to really add value. So how can a CSP acknowledge that and create commercial models to enable that is going to be key. Like one of the things that Dell does in terms of as a service solution that we offer. I think that is a crucial way of really kick starting 5G adoption. >> It's Metcalfe's Law in this world, right? The first telephone, not a lot of value, second, I can call one person, but you know if I can call a zillion now it's valuable. >> John: Now you got data. >> Yeah, right, you used a phrase, rip and replace. What percentage of the market that you are focusing on is the let's go in and replace something, versus the let's help you digitally transform your business. And this is a networking technology that we can use to help you digitally transform? The example that you guys have with the small breweries, a perfect example. >> Sarvesh: Yeah. >> You help digitize, you know, digitally transform their business. You weren't going in and saying, I see that you have these things connected via Wi-Fi, let's rip those out and put SIMs in. >> No. >> Nope, so you know- >> That's exactly right. It's enabling new things that either couldn't be achieved before or weren't. So from a private 5G perspective, it's not going to be rip and replaced. As I said, I think we'll coexist with Wi-Fi, it's still got a great role. It's enabling those, solving those business problems that either hadn't been solved before or could not be solved with other technology. >> How are you guys using AI? Everybody's talking about ChatGPT. I love ChatGPT, we use it all the time. Love it, hate it, you know, whatever. It's a fun topic. But AI generally is here in a way that it wasn't when the enterprise disaggregated. >> John: Right. >> So there's AI, there's automation, there's opportunities there. How do they fit into private 5G? >> So if you look at it, right, AI, AI/ML is actually crucial to value extraction from that data, because all private 5G is doing is giving you access to that precious data. But that data by itself means nothing, right? You get access to the data, extracting value out of the data that bring in business value is all going to be AI/ML. Whether it's computer vision, whether it's data analytics on the fly so that you can, you know do your closed loop controls or what have you. All of these are going to be AI/ML models. >> Dave: Does it play into automation as well? >> Absolutely, 'cause they drive the automation, right? You learn your AI models, drive their automation. Control, closed loop control systems are a perfect example of their automation. >> Explain that further. Like give us an example. >> So for example, let's say we're talking about a smart manufacturing, right? So you have widgets coming down the pipe, right? You have your computer vision, you have your AI/ML model that says, "Hey, I'm starting to detect a consistent error in the product being manufactured. I'm going to close loop that automation and either tweak the settings of the machine, shut down the machine, open a workflow, escalate it for human intervention." All that automation is facilitated by the AI/ML models >> And that, and by the way, there's real money in that, right? If you're making your power and you're making it wrong, you don't detect it for hours, there's real money in fixing that >> Right. >> So I've got a, I've got an example albeit a slight, not even slightly, but a tragic one. Let's say you have a train that's rolling down the tracks at every several miles or so, temperature readings are taken from bearings in the train. >> Sarvesh: Yes, yes. >> Wouldn't it be nice to have that be happening in real time? >> Sarvesh: Yes. >> So it doesn't reach that critical point >> Yes. >> Where then you have a derailment. >> Yes. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I mean, those are, it's doesn't sound sexy in terms of "Hey, what a great business use case that we can monetize." >> John: Yeah. >> But I'll bet you in hindsight that operator would've loved to have that capability. >> John: Yeah. >> Sarvesh: Right. >> To be able to shut the train down and not run. >> That's a great example where the carrier is actually, probably in a good position, right? Cause you got wide area, you want low latency. So the traditional carriers would be able in great position to provide that exact service. Telemetry is another great example. We've been talking about other kinds of automation, but just picking up measurements and so on. The other example of that is in oil and gas, right? As you've got pipelines running around you're measuring pressure, temperature, you detect a leak, >> David: Right. >> in minutes, not weeks. >> David: Right. >> So there's a lot of good examples of things like that >> To pick up in a point, Dave. You know, it's like you look at these big huge super tankers, right? They have big private networks on that super tanker to monitor everything. If on this train we had, you know, we hear about so many Edges, let's call one more the rolling Edge. >> Yeah. >> Right, that, that Edge is right on that locomotive tracking everything with AI/ML models, detecting things, warning people ahead of time shutting it down as needed. And that connectivity doesn't have to be wired. It can be a rolling wireless. It potentially could be a spectrum that's you know, open spectrum in the future. Or as you said, an operator could facilitate that. So many options, right? >> Yeah, got to double down on this. Look, I know 'cause I've been involved in some of these projects. Amusement park operators are doing this for rides. >> John: Yes. >> Sarvesh: Yep. >> So that they can optimize the amount of time the ride is up, so they can shorten lines >> Yes. >> So that they can get people into shops to buy food and souvenirs. >> John: Yes. >> Certainly we should be able to do it to protect infrastructure. >> Sarvesh: Absolutely. >> Right, so- >> But I think the ultimate point you're making is, it's actually quite finally segmented. There's so many different applications. And so that's why again, we come back to what we started with is at Dell, we're bringing the solution from Edge, compute, application, connectivity, and be able to bring that across all these different verticals and these different solutions. The other amusement park example, by the way, is as the rides start to invest in virtual reality, so you're moving, but you're seeing something, you need some technology like 5G to have low latency and keep that in sync and have a good experience on the ride. >> To 5G and beyond, gents. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> All right, thank you Dave. >> It was great to have you. >> Thank, thank you guys. >> Great to meet you guys. Thank you very much. >> Great, all right. Keep it right there. For David Nicholson and Dave Vellante, This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC23. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. theCUBE.net is where all these videos live. John Furrier is in our Palo Alto office, banging out that news. Keep it right there. Be right back after this short break. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant cloud community, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> I'm doing well, thanks, yeah. >> Yeah, I feel like... >> I'm hanging in there. >> you've got a lot of pep in your step today for the fourth day. >> I think my voice is coming back, actually. >> (laughs) Look at you, resilient. >> I was almost lost yesterday, yeah. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So, I actually, at a Hitachi event one time almost completely lost my voice. The production guys pulled me off. They said, "You're done." (Savannah laughing) They gave me the hook. >> You got booted? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, you actually (laughs) got the hook, wow. >> So, I have good memories of Hitachi. >> I was going to say (Dave laughing) interesting that you mentioned Hitachi. Our two guests this morning are from Hitachi. Sid and KP, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: How you guys doing? Looking great for day four. >> Great. Thank you. >> Great. >> Hanging in there. >> Thank you, Dave and Savannah. (Savannah laughing) >> Dave: Yeah, cool. >> Savannah: Yeah. (laughs) >> Yeah, it was actually a Pentaho thing, right? >> Oh, Pentaho? Yeah. >> Which kind of you guys into that software edge. It was right when you announced the name change to Hitachi Vantara, which is very cool. I had Brian Householder on. You remember Brian? >> Yeah, I know. >> He was explaining the vision, and yeah (indistinct). >> Yeah. Well, look at you a little Hitachi (indistinct). >> Yeah, I've been around a long time, yeah. >> Yeah, all right. (Dave laughing) >> Just a casual flex to start us off there, Dave. I love it. I love it. Sid, we've talked a lot on the show about delivering outcomes. It's a hot theme. Everyone wants to actually have tangible business outcomes from all of this. How are customers realizing value from the cloud? What does that mean? >> See, still 2007, 2008, it was either/or kind of architecture. Either I'm going to execute my use cases on cloud or I'm going to keep my use cases and outcomes through edge. But in the last four or five years and specifically we are in re:Invent, I would talk about AWS. Lot of the power of hyperscalers has been brought to edge. If you talk about the snowball family of AWS, if you talk about monitor on edge devices, if you talk about the entire server list being brought into Lambda coupled inside snowball, now the architecture premise, if I talk about logical shift is end. Now the customers are talking about executing the use cases between edge and cloud. So, there is a continuum rather than a binary bullion decision. So, if you are talking about optimizing a factory, earlier I'll do the analytics at cloud, and I'll do machine on edge. Now it is optimization of a factory outcome at scale across my entire manufacturing where edge, private cloud, AWS, hyperscalers, everything is a continuum. And the customer is not worried about where, which part of my data ops, network ops, server ops storage ops is being executed. >> Savannah: It's like (indistinct). >> The customer is enjoying the use cases. And the orchestration is abstracted through an industrial player like Hitachi working very collaboratively with AWS. So, that is how we are working on industrial use cases right now. >> You brought up manufacturing. I don't think there's been a hotter conversation around supply chain and manufacturing than there has been the last few years. I can imagine taking that guessing game out for customers is a huge deal for you guys. >> Big because if you look at the world today, right from a safety pin, to a cell phone jacket, to a cell phone, the entire supply chain is throttled. The supply chain is throttled because there are various choke points. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And each choke points is surrounded by different kind of supply and geopolitical issues. >> Savannah: 100%. >> Now, if we talk about the wheat crisis happening because of the Ukraine-Russia war, but the wheat crisis actually creates a multiple string of impacts which impact everything. Silicon, now we talk about silicon, but we then forget about nickel. Nickel is also controlled in one part of that geopolitical conflict. So, everything is getting conflagrated into a very big supply issue. So, if your factories are not performing beyond optimum, if they are not performing at real, I'm, we are talking about factory, hyperscale of the factory. The factory needs to perform at hyperscale to provide what the world needs today. So, we are in a very different kind of a scenario. Some of the economists call it earlier the recession was because of a demand constraint. The demand used to go down. Today's recession is because the supply is going down. The demand is there, but the supply is going down. And there is a different kind of recession in the world. The supply is what is getting throttled. >> And the demand is somewhat unpredictable too. People, you know, retailers, they've... >> Especially right now. >> kind of messed up their inventory. And so, the data is still siloed. And that's where, you know, you get to, okay, can I have the same experience across clouds, on-prem, out to the edge? Kind of bust those silos. >> Yep. >> You know, I dunno if it's, it's certainly not entirely a data problem. There's (laughs), like you say, geopolitical and social issues. >> Savannah: There's so much complexity. >> But there's a data problem too. >> Yes. >> Big. >> So, I wonder if you could talk about your sort of view of, point of view on that cross-cloud, hybrid, out to the edge, what I call super cloud? >> Absolutely. So, today, if you look at how enterprises are adopting cloud or how they're leveraging cloud, it's not just a hosting platform, right? It is the platform from where they can draw business capabilities. You heard in the re:Invent that Amazon is coming up with a supply chain service out of the box in the cloud. That's the kind of capabilities that business wants to draw from cloud today. So, the kind of multicloud or like hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, those are the things which are kind of going to be behind the scenes. At the end of the day, the cloud needs to be able to support businesses by providing their services closer to their consumers. So, the challenges are going to be there in terms of like reliability, resilience, cost, security. Those are the ones that, you know, many of the enterprises are grappling with in terms of the challenges. And the way to solve that, the way how we approach our customers and work with them is to be able to bring resilience into the cloud, into the services which are running in cloud, and by driving automation, making autonomous in everything that you do, how you are monitoring your services, how we are making it available, how we are securing it, how we are making it very cost-effective as well. It cannot be manually executed; it has to be automated. So, automation is the key in terms of making the services leveraged from all of this cloud. >> That's your value add. >> Absolutely. >> And how do I consume that value add? Is it sort of embedded into infrastructure? Is it a service layer on top? >> Yeah, so everything that we do today in terms of like how these services have to be provided, how the services have to be consumed, there has to be a modern operating model, right? I think this is where Hitachi has come up with what we are calling as Hitachi Application Reliability Center and Services. That is focusing on modern operating, modern ways of like, you know, how you support these cloud workloads and driving this automation. So, whether we provide a hyper-converged infrastructure that is going to be at the edge location, or we are going to be able to take a customer through the journey of modernization or migrating onto cloud, the operating model that is going to be able to establish the foundation on cloud and then to be able to operate with the right levels of reliability, security, cost is the key. And that's the value added service that we provide. And then the way we do that is essentially by looking at three principles: one, to look at the service in totality. Gone are the days you look at infrastructure separately, applications separately, data and security separately, right? >> Savannah: No more silos. >> No more silos. You look at it as a workload, and you look at it as a service. And number two is to make sure that the DevOps that you bring and what you do at the table is totally integrated and it's end to end. It's not a product team developing a feature and then ops team trying to keep the lights on. It has to be a common backlog with the error budget that looks at you know, product releases, product functionalities, and even what ops needs to do to evolve the product as well. And then the third is to make sure that reliability and resiliency is inbuilt. Cloud offers native durability, native availability. But if your service doesn't take advantage of that, it's kind of going to still be not available. So, how do you kind of ingrain and embed all of these things as a value add that we provide? >> There's a lot of noise. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We've got a lot going on. It adds to the complexity. How do you help customers solve that complexity as they begin their transformation journey? I mean, I'm sure you're working with the biggest companies, making really massive change. How do you guide them through that process? >> So, it is to look at the outcome working backwards, like what AWS does, right? Like, you know, how do you look at the business outcome? What is the value that you're looking to drive? Again, it's not to be pinned through one particular cloud. I know there is lot of technology choices that you can make and lot of deployment models that you can choose from. But at the end of the day, having a common operating model which is kind of like modern, agile, and it is kind of like keeping the outcomes in the mind, that is what we do with our customers to be able to create that operating model, which completes the transformation, by the way. And cloud is just one part of the LEGO blocks which provides that overall scheme and then the view for driving that overall transformation. >> So, let's paint a picture. Let's say you've got this resilient foundation; you've kind of helped the customers build that out. How do they turn that into value for their customers? Do you have any examples that you can share? That'd be great. >> Yeah, I can start with what we're doing for one of the, you know, world's largest facility, infrastructure, power, cooling, security, monitoring company that has their products deployed in 2,000 locations across the globe. For them, and always on business means you are monitoring the temperature. You are monitoring the safety of people who are within the facility, right? A temperature shift of one to two degree can affect even the sustainability goals of NARC, our customer, but also their end consumers. So, how do you monitor these kind of like critical parameters? How do you have a platform? >> Savannah: Great example, yeah. >> How you have cloud resources that are going to be always on, that are going to be reliable, that are going to be cost-effective as well is what we are doing for one of our customers. Sid can talk about another example as well. >> Great. >> Yeah, go for it, Sid. >> So, there are examples: rail. We are working with a group in England; it's called West Coast Partnership. And they had a edge device which was increasing in size. Now, this edge device was becoming big because the parameters which go into the edge device were increasing because of regulation and because the rail is part of national security infrastructure. We have worked with West Coast Partnership and Hitachi Rail, which is a group company, to create a miniaturization of this edge device, because if the size of the edge device is increasing on the train, then the weight of the train increases, and the speed profile, velocity profile, everything goes down. So, we have miniaturized the edge device. Secondly, all the data profiles, signal control, traction control, traction motors, direction control, timetable compliance, everything has been kept uniform. And we have done analytics on cloud. So, what is the behavior of the driver? What is a big breaking parameter of the driver? If the timetable has being missed, is there an erratic behavior being demonstrated by the driver to just meet the timetable? And the timetable is a pretty important criteria in rail because if you miss one, then... So, what we have done is we have created an edge-to-cloud environment where the entire rail analytics is happening. Similarly, in another group company, Hitachi Energy, they had a problem that arguably one of the largest transformer manufacturer in the world. The transformer is a pretty common name now because you're seeing what is happening in Ukraine. Russia went after the transformers and substations before the start of the winter so that their district heating can be meddled with. Now, the transformer, it had a lead time of 17 weeks before COVID. So, if you put me an order of a three-phase transformer, I can deliver it to you in 17 weeks. After and during COVID, the entire lead time increased to 57 to 58 weeks. In cases of a complex transformer, it even went up to something like two years. >> Savannah: Ooh! >> Now, they wanted to increase the productivity of their existing plant because there is only that much sheet metal, that much copper for solenoid, that much microprocessor and silicon. So, they wanted to increase the output of their factory from 95 to 105, 10 more transformers every day, which is 500 and, which is 3,650 every- >> Savannah: Year. >> Year. Now, to do that, we went to a very complex machine; it's called a guard machine. And we increased the productivity of the guard machine by just analyzing all the throttles and all the wastages which are happening there. There are multiple case studies because, see, Hitachi is an industrial giant with 105 years of body of work. KP and I just represent the tip of the digital tip of the arrow. But what we are trying to do through HARC, through industry cloud, through partnership with AWS is basically containerizing and miniaturizing our entire body of work into a democratized environment, an industrial app store, if I may say, where people can come and take their industrial outcomes at ease without worrying about their computational and network orchestration between edge and cloud. That's what we are trying to do. >> I love that analogy of an industrial app cloud. Makes it feel easier in decreasing the complexity of all the different things that everyone's factoring into making their products, whatever they're making. So, we have a new challenge here on theCUBE at AWS re:Invent, where we are looking for your 30-second hot take, your Instagram reel, sound bite. What's the most important story or theme either for you as a team or coming out of the show? You can ponder it for a second. >> It might be different. See, for me, it is industrial security. Industrial OT security should be the theme of the Western world. Western world is on the crosshairs of multiple bad actors. And the industrial security is in the chemical plants, is in the industrial plants, is in the power grids, is in our postal networks and our rail networks. They need to be secured; otherwise, we are geopolitically very weak. Gone are the days when anyone is going to pick up a battle with America or Western world on a field. The battle is going to be pretty clandestine on an cyber world. And that is why industrial security is very important. >> Critical infrastructure and protecting it. >> Absolutely. >> Well said, Sid. KP, what's your hot take? >> My take is going to be a modern operating model, which is going to complete the transformation and to be able to tap into business services from cloud. So, a modern operating model through HARC, that is going to be my take. >> Fantastic. Well, can't wait to see what comes out of Hitachi next. Sid, KP... >> KP: Thank you. >> thank you so much for being here. >> Sid: Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Thanks, guys. >> Savannah: This is I could talk to you all about supply chain all day long. And thank all of you for tuning in to our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in fantastic Sin City. I'm Savannah. Oh, excuse me. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (digital xylophone music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, we are in the meat of the conference. >> It's really in crunch time, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage and this next guest is running the show at CNCF, the OG and been in the community doing a great job. I'm looking forward to this segment. >> Me too. I'm even wearing... You may notice, I am in my CNCF tee, and I actually brought my tee from last year for those of you. And the reason I brought it, actually, I want to use this to help introduce our next guest is the theme last year was resistance realized, and I think that KubeCon this year is an illustration of that resistance realized. Please welcome Priyanka Sharma to the show. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> This is your show. How are you feeling right now? What does it feel like to be here? >> It's all of our show. I am just another participant, but I am so happy to be here. I think this is our third hybrid in person back event. And the whole ecosystem, we seem to have gotten into the groove now. You know, the first one we did, was in LA >> Savannah: Yes. >> Where you have that shirt from. Then we went to Valencia, and now here in Detroit I could sense the ease in the attendees. I can sense that it just feels great for everyone to be here. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you guys, who were face to face in LA, but this is really kind of back face to face, somewhat normalized, right? >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> And so that's a lot of feedback there. What's your reaction? Because the community's changed so much in three years, >> Savannah: Yes. >> Even two years, even last year. Where do you see it now? Because there's so much more work to do, but it feels like it's just getting started, but also at the same time it feels like people are celebrating at the same time. >> Yeah. >> Kubernetes is mainstream, CloudNative at scale. >> Savannah: That feels like a celebration. >> People are talking about developer... more developers coming on board, more traction, more scale, more interoperability, just a lot of action. What's your thoughts? >> I think you're absolutely right that we are just getting started. I've been part of many open source movements and communities. This is... I think this is something special where we have our flagship project considered mainstream, but yet so much to be done right over there. I mean, you've seen announcements around more and more vendors coming to support the project in, you know, the boring but essential ways that happened I think this week, just today, I think. And so Kubernetes continues to garner support and energy, which is unique in the ecosystem, right? Because once something becomes mainstream, normally, it's like, "Okay, boring." (John laughs) But that's happening. And I think the reason for that is CloudNative. It's built upon Kubernetes and so much more than Kubernetes. >> We have 140 plus projects >> Absolutely. >> and folks have a choice to contribute to something totally cutting edge or something that's, you know, used by everyone. So, the diversity of options and room for innovation at the same time means this is just the beginning. >> And also projects are coming together too. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see formation, you're starting to see some defacto alignment. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see the- >> Priyanka: Clustering. >> Some visibility into how the big moves are being playing out, almost the harvesting of that hard work. >> Priyanka: Yes, I do think there is consolidation, but I would definitely say that there's consolidation and innovation. >> John: Yeah. >> And that is something... I genuinely have not seen this before. I think there are definitely areas we're all really focusing on. I talked a lot about security in my keynote because it continues to gain importance in CloudNative, whether that is through projects or through practices. The same, I did not mention this in my keynote, but around like, you know, continuous delivery generally the software delivery cycle, there's a lot coming together happening there. And, you know, >> John: Yeah. >> many other spaces. So, absolutely right. >> Let's dig in a little bit actually, because I'm curious. You get to see these 140 plus projects. >> Yes. >> What are some of the other trends that you're seeing, especially now, as we're feeling this momentum around Kubernetes? The excitement is back in the ecosystem. >> Yes. So, so much happening. But I would definitely say that like the underlying basis of all these projects, right? I brought that up in my keynote, is the maintainers. And I think the maintainer group, is the talent keeps thriving and growing, the load on them is very heavy though. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And I do think there's a lot more we all company, the companies around us need to do to support these people, because the innovation they're bringing is unprecedented. Besides Kubernetes, which has its own cool stuff all the time. I think I'm particularly excited about the Argo projects. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So, they're the quadruplets as I like to call them. Right? Because there's four of them within the Argo banner. I had Yuan from Argo on my keynote actually. >> Savannah: Oh, nice. >> Alongside Hiba from Kubernetes. And we talked about their maintainer journey. And it's interesting. Totally different projects. Same asks, you know, which is more support and time from employers, more ways to build up contributors and ultimately they love the CNCF marketing supports. >> That Argo project's really in a great umbrella. There are a lot of action going on. Arlon, I saw that. Got some traction. A lot of great stuff. The question I want to ask you, and I want to get your reaction to this, you know, we always go to a lot of events with theCUBE and you can always tell the vibrant of the ecosystem when you see developers doing stuff, projects going on. But when you start seeing the commercialization >> Priyanka: Yes. >> The news briefings coming out of this show feels a lot like reinvent, like it's like a tsunami. I've never seen this much news. Everyone's got a story, they got announcing products. >> Savannah: That was a lot of news. That's a great point, John. >> There was a lot of flow even from the CNCF. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? I mean like to me it's a tell sign of activity, certainly, >> Right. >> And engagement. >> Right. >> But there's real proof coming out, real visibility into the value propositions, >> Priyanka: Yes. >> rendering itself with real products. What's your reaction to the news flow? >> Absolutely. I think it's market proof, like you said, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> That we have awesome technologies that are useful to lots of people around the world. And I think that, I hope this continues to increase. And with the bite basket of project portfolios that's what I hope to see. CNCF itself will continue supporting the maintainers with things like conformance programs which are really essential when you are... when you have people building products on top of your projects and other initiatives so that the technological integrity remains solid while innovation keeps happening. >> I know from a little birdie, Brendan, good friend of mine that you had a board meeting today. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I am curious because I hope I'm not going out about an assumption I imagine that room is full of passionate people. >> Priyanka: Absolutely. >> CNCF board would be a wild one. (Priyanka laughs) What are the priorities for the board between now and KubeCon next year? >> Sure. So the CNCF governing board is an over... It's like an oversight body. And their focus is on working with us on the executive team to make sure that we have the right game plan for the foundation. They tend to focus on the business decisions, things such as how do we manage our budget, how do we deploy it, and what are the initiatives? And that's always their priority. But because this is CloudNative and we are all technologists who love our projects, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> we also engage closely with the technical oversight committee who was in the said meeting that we just talked about. And so lots of discussions are around project health, sustainability. How do we keep moving? Because as you said, Kubernetes is going mainstream but it's still cool. There are all these other cool things. It's a lot going on, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. You got a lot of balls in the air. It's complex decision making and balancing of priorities. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> John: And demands, stakeholders. You have how many stakeholders? Every project, every person, every company. >> Everyone's a stakeholder. You're a stakeholder, too. >> And a hundred... I mean, I love how community focused you are. Obviously we're here to talk about the community. You have contributors from 187 different countries. >> Priyanka: It's one of the things I'm the most proud of. >> Savannah: It's... Yeah. It gives me all the feels as a community builder as well. >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> What an accomplishment and supporting community members in those different environments must be so dynamic for you and the team. >> Absolutely, and it behooves us to think globally in how we solve problems. Even when we introduce programs. My first question is, are we by accident being, let's say, default U.S. or are we being default Europe, whatever it may be because we really got to think about the whole world. >> John: It's global culture, it's a global village. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I think global now more than ever is so important. And, the Ukraine >> Priyanka: Yes. >> discussion on the main stage was awesome. I love how you guys did that because this is impacting the technology. We need the diverse input. Now I made a comment yesterday that it's going to make... it might slow things down. I meant as is more diversity, there's more conversations. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> But once people get aligned and committed, that's where the magic happens. Share your thoughts on the global diversity, why it's important, how things are made, how decisions are made. What's the philosophy? Because there's more to get your arms around. >> Yes, absolutely. It may seem harder or slower or whatever but once it gets done, aligned and committed, the product's better, everything's better. >> Priyanka: Yes, absolutely. I think the more people involved, the better it is for sure. Especially from a robustness resilience perspective. Because you know, as they say, sunlight makes bugs shallow. That's because the more eyes on something the faster people will solve problems, fix bugs and make, you know, look for security, vulnerability, solve all that. So especially in those areas, I think, where you want to be more resilient, the more the people, the better it is. A hundred percent. And then when it comes to direct technical direction and choosing a path, I think that's where, you know it's the role of the maintainers. And as I was saying there's only a thousand audit maintainers for 140 plus projects, right? So they are catering- >> Wow, they have a lot of responsibility. >> Right. >> Serious amount of responsibility. >> It's crazy. I know. And we have to do everything we can for those people because they are the ones who set the vision, set the direction, and then 176,000 plus contributors follow their lead. So we have... I think, the bright mechanisms of contribution and collaboration in a global way are in place. And we keep chugging along and doing better and better each year. >> What's next for you guys? You got the EU of show coming out, >> Priyanka: Correct, Amsterdam. the economy looking, I don't see your recession for technology, but that's me. I'm Polish on tech. Yeah, there's some layoffs going on, some cleaning up, overinflated expectations on valuations of startups, but I don't see this stopping or slowing down. But what's your take? >> Priyanka: Yeah, I mean, as I said in my keynote, right? Open source usage soars in times of turmoil and financial turmoil is one example of that. So we are expecting growth and heavy growth this year, next year and onwards. And in fact, going back to the whole maintainer journey, now is a time there's even more pressure on them and companies as they manage their, you know, workforces and prioritization, they really need to remember they're building products off of open source. They are... This is open sources on which what their business realize, whether they're a vendor or end user and give maintainers a space time to work on what they need to work on. >> Yeah. They need a little work-life balance. I mean the self-care there, I can't even imagine the complexity of the decision matrix in their mind. Speaking of that, and obviously you... Culture must be a huge part of how you lead these teams. How do you approach that as leader? >> I think the number one... So the foundation is a very small set of staff, just so you know. >> Savannah: I was actually... Let's tell the audience, how many people are on the team? >> Priyanka: You know, it's actually a difficult question because we have folks who like spin up and down and we have matrix support from the Linux Foundation, but about 30 people in total are dedicated to CNCF at any given time. >> Savannah: Wow. >> But compared... >> Savannah: You all do hard work. >> Yes. >> Savannah: You're doing great. I am impressed. >> It's a flat organization. >> It's pretty flat. >> Seriously, it's beautiful. >> It's actually in some ways very similar to the projects and there the, you know, contribution communities there where it's like everyone kind of like steps up and does what needs to be done, which is wonderful and beautiful, but with the responsibility on our shoulders, it's definitely a balancing act. So first off, it is, I ask everyone to have some grace for the staff. They are in a startup land with no IPO on the other side of the rainbow. They're doing it because they love love, love this community and technology so much. >> John: Yeah. Yeah, and then also they're acknowledging that nobody in open source wants to see a bureaucracy. >> Priyanka: Right. >> I mean, everyone see lean, efficient. >> Savannah: Yeah, absolutely John. It's great. It's a great point. And and I think that it's just... It's amazing what passionate people can do if given the opportunity. Let's talk a little bit about the literal event that we're at right now. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> Theme today, building for the road ahead. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> What was the inspiration for that? >> Detroit. (group laughs) We're in Detroit, people drive here. >> Savannah: In case you didn't know, cars have been made in this city. >> Motor city. >> It's everywhere being here in this city, which is awesome. >> But you know, it did... There was of course a geographical element but it also aligns with where we're at, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're building for the road ahead, which frankly given the changes going on in the world is a bumpy road. So it's important to talk about it. And that's what the theme was. >> And how many folks have shown up... This is a totally different energy from Los Angeles last year. I'm sure we can both agree. Everyone was excited last year, but this is an order of magnitude. >> Yes. >> How many folks do you think are milling around? >> Yeah, it's much more than double of Los Angeles. We are close to 8,000. >> Savannah: That's amazing. And it's so... You're absolutely right. The energy is just... >> Savannah: Way up. >> It's so good. People are enjoying themselves. It's been lovely. >> That's great. So you're feeling good? You're riding the high? >> Congratulations. >> Awesome. >> Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm a little bit of a zombie right now. (group laughs) >> You don't look it, we wouldn't know. Nobody knows. They don't know. >> If you want to take a break, We got 12 interviews tomorrow. (Savannah and Priyanka laughing) You can co-host with us. We'd love to have you. >> Exactly. You're welcome anytime. Welcome anytime, Priyanka. >> Well thank you. But no, it's been such a wonderful show and you folks are part of the reason you say everybody here is contributing to the awesomeness. >> John: Yep. >> You're part of it. Look at your smiley faces. >> John: And Lisa Marty is over there. Lisa's over there. >> Yes! >> Say hi to Lisa and team. >> Yes, the team is awesome. >> Guys, thank you for your support for theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We enjoy it a lot. And we love the community. Thank you. >> Yes. Thank you for your support for CloudNative. >> Thank you. >> One last thing I just want to point out, because it's not always it happens in this industry. The women outnumber the men on this stage right now. >> John: Proud of that? >> And I know the diversity and inclusion is a priority for CNCF. >> Priyanka: Top priority. >> Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> Yes. It is something at the forefront of my mind, no matter what we do. And it's because I have such great role models. You know, when I was just a participant in the ecosystem, Dan Conn was leading the foundation and he took it so seriously to always try to uplift people from a diverse backgrounds and bring those faces into CloudNative. >> Savannah: Yes. >> And he made a serious lasting impact. >> John: Yes. >> And I am not going to let that go to waste. It's not going to be me who drops the ball. (group laughs) >> We're behind you all the way. >> Right? >> We see improvement over here. >> We got your back. >> I mean, even from an attendance perspective on stage I feel like you've done just an outstanding job with the curation and representation. I don't say that lightly. It really matters to me. But even in the audience looking around, it's so refreshing. Even it sounds silly. The shirts are more fitted. >> It's not silly. >> There's different types of shirts, and I mean, you know how it is. We've been in this industry long enough. >> It's a shirt you want to wear. >> Savannah: Exactly. And that's the whole point. I absolutely love it. Have we announced a location for KubeCon North America 2023, yet? >> It's Chicago. >> Savannah: Exciting! >> Yes. >> Savannah: All right. So we'll be seeing you >> Midwest. >> not that far away. >> This is the first time I've said this publicly, I just realized, It's Chicago, people. >> The scoop, yay! >> Oh, I feel so lucky we got to break the scoop. I was learning from John's lead there and I'm very excited. Amsterdam, Chicago. It's going to be absolutely >> I'll get my hotel now. >> Fantastic. >> Yes. >> Smart move. Everybody listen to him. >> Yeah, right? Especially after Detroit. It's actually not a... It's not a bad move. Priyanka, is there anything else you'd like to say to folks? Maybe they're thinking about coming or contributing to the ecosystem? >> Priyanka: Yes. Anyone and everyone can and should contribute and join us. The maintainers are holding us all up. Let's rally to support them. We have more and more programs to do that. As you know, we did ContribFest here this week which was the first time. So we will help you get involved so you're not on your own. So that's my number one message, which is anyone and everyone, you're welcome here. We'll make sure you have a good time. So just come. >> Okay. Please do it. >> I can tell you that Priyanka is not blowing smoke. I feel very welcome here. This community has welcomed me as a non-technical, so I think you're absolutely preaching the truth. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us today on the show, for helping herd the cats and wrangle the brilliant minds that make CNCF possible. And honestly for just bringing your energy and joy to the entire experience. John, thank you for hanging out with me. >> I'm glad I can contribute in a small way. >> I was going to say... I was going to say thank you for founding theCUBE so that we could be here in this little marriage and collaboration can be possible. And thank all of you for tuning in to theCUBE here, live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. I am thrilled to be sharing this content with you today and I hope to see you for the rest of our interviews this afternoon. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

(upbeat music) >> Man: We're good. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS Summit NYC. We're in New York City, been here all day. Lisa Martin, John Furrier, talking with AWS partners ecosystem folks, customers, AWS folks, you name it. Next up, one of our alumni, rejoins us. Please welcome Anshu Sharma the co-founder and CEO of Skyflow. Anshu great to have you back on theCube. >> Likewise, I'm excited to be back. >> So I love how you guys founded this company. Your inspiration was the zero trust data privacy vault pioneered by two of our favorites, Apple and Netflix. You started with a simple question. What if privacy had an API? So you built a data privacy vault delivered as an API. Talk to us, and it's only in the last three and a half years. Talk to us about a data privacy vault and what's so unique about it. >> Sure. I think if you think about all the key challenges we are seeing in our personal lives when we are dealing with technology companies a lot of anxiety is around what happens to my data, right? If you want to go to a pharmacy they want to know not just your health ID number but they want to know your social security number your credit card number, your phone number and all of that information is actually useful because they need to be able to engage with you. And it's true for hospitals, health systems. It's true for your bank. It's true for pretty much anybody you do business with even an event like this. But then question that keeps coming up is where does this data go? And how is it protected? And the state of the art here has always been to keep kind of, keep it protected when it's in storage but almost all the breaches, all the hacks happen not because you've steal somebody's disc, but because someone enters through an API or a portal. So the question we asked was we've been building different shapes of containers for different types of data. You don't store your logs in a data warehouse. You don't store your analytical data in a regular RDBMS. Similarly, you don't store your passwords and usernames you store them in identity systems. So if PI is so special why isn't it a container that's used for storing PII? So that's how the idea of Pii.World came up. >> So you guys just got a recent funding, a series B financing which means for the folks out there that don't know the inside baseball, must people do, means you're doing well. It's hard to get that round of funding means you're up and growing to the right. What's the differentiator? Why are you guys so successful? Why the investment growth, what's the momentum driver? >> So I think in some ways we took one of the most complex problems, data privacy, like half the people can't even describe like, does data privacy mean like I have to be GDPR compliant or does it actually mean I'm protecting the data? So you have multiple stakeholders in any company. If you're a pharma company, you may have a chief privacy officer, a data officer, this officer, that officer, and all of these people were talking and the answer was buy more tools. So if you look around behind our back, there's probably dozens of companies out there. One protecting data in an API call another protecting data in a database, another one data warehouse. But as a CEO, CTO, I want to know what happens to my social security number from a customer end to end. So we said, if you can radically simplify the whole thing and the key insight was you can simplify it by actually isolating and protecting this data. And this architecture evolved on its own at companies like Apple and other places, but it takes dozens of engineers for those companies to build it out. So we like, well, the pattern will makes sense. It logically kind is just common sense. So instead of selling dozens of tools, we can just give you a very simple product, which is like one API call, you know, protect this data... >> So like Stripe is for a plugin for a financial transaction you plug it into the app, similar dynamic here, right? >> Exactly. So it's Stripe for payments, Twilio for Telephony. We have API for everything, but if you have social security numbers or pan numbers you still are like relying on DIY. So I think what differentiated us and attracted the investors was, if this works, >> It's huge. every company needs it. >> Well, that's the integration has become the key thing. I got to ask you because you mentioned GDPR and all the complexities around the laws and the different regulations. That could be a real blocker in a wet blanket for innovation. >> Anshu: Yes. >> And with the market we're seeing here at, at your Summit New York, small event. 10,000 people, more people here than were at Snowflake Summit as an example. And they're the hottest company in data. So this small little New York event is proven that that world is growing. So why should this wet blanket, these rules slow it down? How do you balance it? 'Cause that's a concern. If you checking all the boxes you're never actually building anything. >> So, you know, we just ran into a couple of customers who still are struggling with moving from the data center to AWS Cloud. Now the fact that here means they want to but something is holding them back. I also met the AI team of Amazon. They're doing some amazing work and they're like, the biggest hindrance for them is making customers feel safe when they do the machine learning. Because now you're opening up the data sets to more people. And in all of those cases your innovation basically stops because CSO is like, look you can't put PII in the cloud unprotected. And with the vault architecture we call it privacy by architecture. So there's a term called privacy by design. I'm like what the, is privacy by design, right? >> John: It's an architecture. (John laughing) >> But if you are an architecture and a developer like me I was like, I know what architecture is. I don't know what privacy by design is. >> So you guys are basically have that architecture by design which means foundational based services. So you're providing that as a service. So other people don't have to build the complex. >> Anshu: Exactly. >> You know that you will be Apple's backend team to build that privacy with you you get all that benefit. >> Exactly. And traditionally, people have had to make compromises. If you encrypt the data and secure it, then you can't use it. Using a proprietary polymorphic encryption technology you can actually have your cake and eat it to. So what that means for customers is, if you want to protect data in Snowflake or REDshare, use Skyflow with it. We have integrations to databases, to data lakes, all the common workflow tools. >> Can you give us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Skyflow is delivering? >> Well, I'll give you two examples. One in the FinTech space, one in the health space. So in the FinTech space this is a company called Nomi Health. They're a large payments processor for the health insurance market. And funnily enough, their CTO actually came from Goldman Sachs. He actually built apple card. (John laughing) Right? That if we all have in our phones. And he saw our product and he's like, for my new company, I'm going to just use you guys because I don't want to go hire 20 engineers. So for them, we had a HIPAA compliant environment a PCI compliant environment, SOC 2 compliant environment. And he can sleep better at night because he doesn't have to worry what is my engineer in Poland or Ukraine doing right now? I have a vault. I have rules set up. I can audit it. Everything is logged. Similarly for Science 37, they run clinical trials globally. They wanted to solve data residency. So for them the problem was, how do I run one common global instance? When the rules say you have to break everything up and that's very expensive. >> And so I love this. I'm a customer. For them a customer. I love it. You had me at hello, API integration. I love it. How much does it cost? What's it going to cost me? How do I need to think about my operationalizing? 'Cause I know with an API, I can do that. Am I paying by the usage, by the drink? How do I figure out? >> So we have programs for startups where it's really really inexpensive. We get them credits. And then for enterprises, we basically have a platform fee. And then based on the amount of data PII, we charge them. We don't nickel and dime the customers. We don't like the usage based model because, you don't know how many times you're going to hit an API. So we usually just based on the number of customer records that you have and you can hit them as many time as you want. There's no API limits. >> So unlimited record based. >> Exactly. that's your variable. >> Exactly. We think about you buying odd zero, for example, for authentication you pay them by the number of active users you have. So something similar. >> So you run on AWS, but you just announced a couple of new GTM partners, MuleSoft and plan. Can you talk to us about, start with MuleSoft? What are you doing and why? And the same with VLA? >> Sure. I mean, MuleSoft was very interesting customers who were adopting our products at, you know, we are buying this product for our new applications but what about our legacy code? We can't go in there and add APIs there. So the simplest way to do integration in the legacy world is to use an integration broker. So that's where MuleSoft integration came out and we announced that. It's a logical place for you to swap out real social security numbers with, you know, fake ones. And then we also announced a partnership with SnowFlake, same thing. I think every workload as it's moving to the cloud needs some kind of data protection with it. So I think going forward we are going to be announcing even more partnerships. So you can imagine all the places you're storing PII today whether it's in a call center solution or analytics solution, there's a PII story there. >> Talk about the integration aspect because I love the momentum. I get everything makes secure the customers all these environments, integrations are super important to plug into. And then how do I essentially operate you on my side? Do I import the records? How do you connect to my environment in my databases? >> So it's really, really easy when you encrypt the data and use Skyflow wall, we create what is called a format preserving token, which is essentially replacing a social security number with something that looks like an SSN but it's not. So that there's no schema changes involved. You just have to do that one time swap over and then in terms of integrations, most of these integrations are prebuilt. So Snowflake integration is prebuilt. MuleSoft integration is prebuilt. We're going to announce some new ones. So the goal is for off the table in platforms like Snowflake and MuleSoft, we prebuilt all the integrations. You can build your own. It takes about like a day. And then in terms of data import basically it's the same standard process that you would use with any other data store. >> Got to ask you about data breaches. Obviously the numbers in 2021 were huge. We're seeing so much change in the cyber security landscape ransomware becoming a household word, a matter of when but not if... How does Skyflow help organizations protect themselves or reduce the number of breaches so that they are not the next headline? >> You know, the funny thing about breaches is again and again, we see people doing the same mistakes, right? So Equifax had a breach four years ago where a customer portal, you know, no customer support rep should have access to a 100 million people's data. Like is that customer agent really accessing 100 million? But because we've been using legacy security tools they either give you access or don't give you access. And that's not how it's going to work. Because if I'm going to engage with the pharmacy and airline they need to be able to use my data in multiple different places. So you need to have fine grain controls around it. So I think the reason we keep getting breaches is cybersecurity industry is selling, 10s of billions of dollars worth of tools in the name of security but they cannot be applied at a fine grain level enough. I can't say things like for my call center agent that's living in Phoenix, Arizona they can only verify last four digits, but the same call center worker in Philippines can't even see that. So how do you get all that granular control in place? Is really why we keep seeing data breaches. So the Equifax breach, the Shopify breach the Twitter breaches, they're all the same. Like again and again, it's either an inside person or an external person who's gotten in. And once you're in and this is the whole idea of zero trust as you know. Once you're in, you can access all the data. Zero trust means that you don't assume that you actually isolate PII separately. >> A lot of the cybersecurity issues as you were talking about, are people based. Somebody clicking on something or gaining access. And I always talk to security experts about how do you control for the people aspect besides training, awareness, education. Is Skyflow a facilitator of that in a way that we haven't seen before? >> Yeah. So I think what ends up happening is, people even after they have breaches, they will lock down the system that had the breach, but then they have the same data sitting in a partner database, maybe a customer database maybe a billing system. So by centralizing and isolating PII in one system you can then post roles based access control rules. You can put limitations around it. But if you try to do that across hundreds of DS bases, you're just not going to be able to do it because it's basically just literally impossible, so... >> My final question for you is on, for me is you're here at AWS Summits, 10,000 people like I said. More people here than some big events and we're just in New York city. Okay. You actually work with AWS. What's next for you guys as you got the fresh funding, you guys looking for more talent, what's your next mountain you're going to climb? Tell us what's next for the company. Share your vision, put a plug in for the company. >> Well, it's actually very simple. Today we actually announced that we have a new chief revenue officer who's joining us. Tammy, she's joined us from LaunchDarkly which is it grew from like, you know, single digits to like over nine digits in revenue. And the reason she's joining Skyflow is because she sees the same inflection point hitting us. And for us that means more marketing, more sales, more growth in more geographies and more partnerships. And we think there's never been a better time to solve privacy. Literally everything that we deal with even things like rove evade issues eventually ties back into a issue around privacy. >> Lisa: Yes. >> AWS gets the model API, you know, come on, right? That's their model. >> Exactly. So I think if you look at the largest best companies that have been built in the last 20 years they took something that should have been simple but was not. There used to be Avayas of the world, selling Telephony intel, Twilio came and said, look an API. And we are trying to do the same to the entire security compliance and privacy industry is to narrow the problem down and solve it once. >> (indistinct) have it. We're going to get theCube API. (Lisa laughing) That's what we're going to do. All right. >> Thank you so much. >> Awesome. Anshu, thank you for joining us, talking to us about what's new at Skyflow. It sounds like you got that big funding investment. Probably lots of strategic innovation about to happen. So you'll have to come back in a few months and maybe at next reinvent in six months and tell us what's new, what's going on. >> Last theCube interview was very well received. People really like the kind of questions you guys asked. So I love this show and I think... >> It's great when you're a star like you, you got good market, great team, smart. I mean, look at this. I mean, what slow down are we talking about here? >> Yeah. I don't see... >> There is no slow down on the enterprise. >> Privacy's hot and it's incredibly important and we're only going to be seeing more and more of it. >> You can talk to any CIO, CSO, CTO or the board and they will tell you there is no limit to the budget they have for solving the core privacy issues. We love that. >> John: So you want to move on to building? >> Lisa: Obviously that must make you smile. >> John: You solved a big problem. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. Anshu, thank you again. Congrats on the momentum and we'll see you next time and hear more on the evolution of Skyflow. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live from New York City at AWS Summit NYC 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So stick around. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my cohot Paul Gillon, who's been putting in some pretty good work talking to incredible people. And we have, I don't wanna call, heard the face of CNCF, but you kind of introduced me to, you don't know this, but you know, charmer executive director of CNCF. You introduced me to Kuan at Cuan San Diego's my one of my first CU coupons. And I was trying to get my bearings about me and you're on stage and I'm like, okay. Uh, she looks like a reasonable person. This might be a reasonable place to learn about cloud native. Welcome to the show. >>Thank you so much for having me. And that's so nice to hear >><laugh> it is an amazing show, roughly 7,500 people. >>Yes, that's right. Sold out >>Sold. That's a big show. And with that comes, you know, uh, so someone told me, uh, CNCF is an outstanding organization, which it, which it is you're the executive director. And I told them, you know what, that's like being the president of the United States without having air force one. <laugh> like you get home. I dunno >>About that. You >>Get, no, you get all of the, I mean, 7,500 people from across, literally across the world. That's true at Europe. We're in Europe, we're in, we're coming out of times that have been, you know, it can't be overstated. It, this, this is unlike any other times. >>Yes, absolutely >>Difficult decisions. There was a whole co uh, uh, I don't know the term, uh, uh, cuffa uh, or blow up about mask versus no mask. How do you manage just, just the diversity of the community. >>That is such a great question, because I, as I mentioned in my keynote a little bit, right? At this point, we're a community of what, 7.1 million developers. That's a really big group. And so when we think about how should we manage the diversity, the way I see it, it's essential to treat each other with kindness, professionalism, and respect. Now that's easy to say, right. Because it sounds great. Right. Old paper is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Great >>Concept. 0.1 million people later. >><laugh> exactly. And so, uh, this is why like, uh, I phoned a friend on stage and, um, van Jones came and spoke with us. Who's the renowned CNN contributor, uh, commentator, sorry. And his advice was very much that in such a diverse community, there's always gonna be lots of perspectives, lots opinions. And we need to a always bring the version of ourselves, which we think will empower this ecosystem, BEC what are, what we are doing. If everybody did that, is that gonna be a good thing or a bad thing? And the other is we need to give each other space and grace, um, space to do what we need to do. Grace. If there are mistakes, if there are challenges. And so those are, those are some good principles for us to live by. And I think that in terms of how CNCF tries to enable the diversity, it's by really trying to hear from everybody possible, the vocal loud voices, as well as the folks who you need to reach out a little bit, pull in a little bit. So it's an ongoing, it's an ongoing challenge that we do our best with. >>How do you balance? And I've been to a lot of trade shows and conferences over the years, their trade organizers are very coin operated. You know, they're there, they're there for the money. Yeah. <laugh> and you have traditional trade shows and you have a situation here where an open source community that is motivated by very different, um, principles, but you need to make money. You need the show to be profitable. Uh, you need to sell some sponsorships, but you also need to keep it available and open to the people who, who don't have the big budgets. How are you balancing that? >>So I would actually like to, uh, share something that may not be obvious, which is that we don't actually do the shows to make money. We, um, as you said, like, uh, a lot of trade shows are coin up and the goal there is like, um, well actually they're different kinds of, I think if it's an independent event organization, it can be like, Hey, let's make as much revenue as possible. If it's part of a large, um, large company, like, like cloud provider, et cetera, the events tend to be lost leaders because they're like lead gen, I think, >>But they're, they're lost leaders, but they're profit makers ultimately >>Long term. Yeah. Yeah. It's like top of the funnel. I, I guess for us, we are only doing the events to enable the community and bring people from different companies together. So our goal is to try and break even <laugh> >>Well, that's, that's laudable. Um, the, how big does it get though? I mean, you're at the point with 7,500 attendees here where you're on the cusp of being a really big event, uh, would you limit it size eventually? Or are you just gonna let this thing run? Its course. >>So our inherent belief is that we want to be accessible and open to more and more and more people because the mission is to make cloud native ubiquitous. Right. Uh, and so that means we are excited about growth. We are excited about opening the doors for as everyone, but I think actually the one, one good thing that came out of this pandemic is that we've become a lot more comfortable with hybrid. So we have a virtual component and an in-person component. So combining that, I think makes it well, it's very challenging cause like running to events, but it's also like, it can scale a little bit better. And then if the numbers increase from like, if they double, for example, we're still, I think we're still not in the realm of south by Southwest, which, which feels like, oh, that's the step function difference. So linear increases in number of attendees, I think is a good thing. If, and when we get to the point where it's, um, you know, exponential growth at that point, we have to think about, um, a completely different event really. Right, >>Right. So 7 billion people in the world approaching 8 billion, 7.1 members in the community. Technology is obviously an enabler where I it's enabled me to, to be here and Licia Spain experiencing this beautiful city. There's so much work to be done. What mm-hmm <affirmative> what is the role of CNCF in providing access to education and technology for the rest of the world? >>Absolutely. So, you know, one of the key, uh, areas we focus on is learning and development in supporting the ecosystem in learners beginners to start their cloud native journey or expand their cloud native journey with training certifications, and actually shared this in the keynote every year. Uh, the increase in number of people taking certifications grows by 216% year over year growth. It's a lot, right? And every week about a thousand people are taking a certification exam. So, and we set that up primarily to bring people in and that's one of our more successful initiatives, but we do so many, we do mentorship programs, internship programs. We, uh, a lot of diversity scholarships, these events, it all kind of comes together to support the ecosystem, to grow >>The turning away from the events, uh, toward just toward the CNCF Brit large, you have a growing number of projects. The, the number of projects within CNCF is becoming kind of overwhelming. Is there an upper threshold at which you would, do you tighten the, the limits on, on what projects you will incubate or how big does that tent become? >>Right. I think, you know, when we had 50 projects, we were feeling overwhelmed then too, but we seem to have cop just fine. And there's a reason for that. The reason is that cloud native has been growing so fast with the world. It's a representative of what's going on in our world over the course of the pandemic. As you know, every company became a technology company. People had to like double their engineering staffs over without anybody ever having met in person mm-hmm <affirmative> right. And when that kind of change is going around the world cloud needing be being the scaffolding of how people build and deploy modern software just grew really with it. And the use cases we needed to support grew. That's why the types of projects and kinds of projects is growing. So there's a method. There's a reason to the madness I should say. And I think, um, as the world and, uh, the landscape of technology evolves cloud native will, will evolve and keep developing in either into new projects or consolidation of projects and everything is on the table. >>So I think one of these perceptions Riley Arone is that CNCF is kind of where the big people go to play. If you're a small project and you're looking at CNCF, you're thinking one day I'll get big enough. Like how should small project leaders or leaders of small projects, how should they engage CNCF? >>Totally. And, you know, I want to really change this narrative because, um, in CNCF we have three tiers of projects. There's the graduated ones, which are at the top. These are the most mature ones we really believe and put our sand behind them. They, uh, then there's the incubating projects, which are pretty solid technologies with good usage that are getting there. And then there's the sandbox, which is literally a sandbox and op open ground for innovation. And the bar to entry is low in that it's, uh, easy to apply. There's a mass boat to get you in. And once you're in, you have a neutral IP zone created by being a CNCF project that you can attract more maintainers, more companies can start collaborating. So we, we become an enabler for the small projects, so everybody should know that >>FYI. Yeah. So I won't be interested to know how that, so I have an idea. So let's say I don't have an idea, but let's say that idea have, >>I'm sure you have an idea. <laugh>, I'm >>Sure I have idea. And, and I just don't have the infrastructure to run a project. I need help, but I think it it's going to solve a pro problem. Yeah. What's that application process like, >>So, okay. So you apply after you already have let's a GitHub repo. Okay. Yeah. >>So you, I have a GI help repo. >>Yeah. As in like your pro you've started the project, you started the coding, you've like, put it out there on GitHub, you have something going. And so it's not at just ideal level. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's at like early stage of execution level. Um, and so, and then your question was, how do you apply? >>Yeah. So how do I, so I have, let's say that, uh, let, let's talk about something I'm thinking about doing, and I actually do, is that we're thinking about doing a open store, a cloud native framework for people migrating to the public cloud, to, or to cloud native. There's just not enough public information about that. And I'm like, you know what? I wanna contribute what I know to it. So that's a project in itself, not necessarily a software project, but a IP project, or let's say I have a tool to do that migration. And I put that up on my GitHub report. I want people to iterate on that tool. >>Right. So it would be a simple process of literally there is when you go to, um, our, uh, online, uh, materials, there's a simple process for sandbox where you fill a Google form, where you put in your URL, explain what you're doing, or some basic information hit submit. And we batch process these, um, about every once a month, I think. And, uh, the TC looks at the, what you've filled in, takes a group vote and goes from there. >>When about your operating model, I mean, do, do you, you mentioned you don't look to make a profit in this show. Do you look, and I wanna be sure CNCF is a non-profit, is that correct? Correct. Do you look, what models do you look at in determining your own governance? Do you look at a commercial business? Do you look at a nonprofit? Um, like of ourselves? Yeah. What's your model for how you run CNCF. >>Oh, okay. So it's a nonprofit, as I said, and our model is very simple. We want to raise the funds that we are able to raise in order to then invest them into community initiatives that play the supporter enabler role to all these projects we just talked about. We're not, we are never the project. We are the top cheerleader of the project. Think of us like that. And in terms of, um, but interestingly, unlike, I, I mean, I don't know much about other found, uh, nonprofit session compare, but interestingly, the donating companies are relevant, not just because of their cash that they have put in, but because those companies are part of this ecosystem and they need to, um, them being in this ecosystem, they help create content around cloud native. They, they do more than give us money. And that's why we really like our members, uh, they'll provide contributing engineers to projects. They will help us with marketing with case studies and interviews and all of that. And so it, it becomes this like healthy cycle of it starts with someone donating to become a member, but they end up doing so many different things. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and ultimately the goal is make cloud native ubiquitous and all this goes towards >>That. So talk to me about conflict resolution, because there's some really big projects in CNC, but only some stuff that is changed, literally changing the world, but there's competing interest between some of the projects. I mean, you, you, there there's, if you look at service mesh, there's a lot of service mesh solutions Uhhuh. Yes. And there's just different visions. Where's the CNCF and, and kind of just making sure the community aspect is thought across all of the different or considered across all the different projects as they have the let's say inevitably bump heads. >>Yeah. So by design CNCF was never meant to be a king maker where you picked one project. Right. And I think that's been working out really well because, um, one is when you accept a project, you're not a hundred percent sure that specific one is gonna take over that technology space. Right. So we're leaving it open to see who works it out. The second is that as every company is becoming a technology company, use cases are different. So a service mesh service mesh a might work really well for my company, but it really may not be a fit for your code base. And so the diversity of options is actually a really good thing. >>So talk to me about, uh, saw an interesting note coming out of the keynote yesterday, 65% of the participants here at CU con are new to Kuan. I'm like, oh, I'm a, I'm a vet. You are, I went to two or three before this. So O GE yeah, OG actually, that's what I tweeted OG of Kuan, but, uh, who, who are they like, what's making up? Are they developers? Are they traditional enterprises? Are they contributing companies? Who's the 65%, >>Um, who's the 65%, >>Right? The new, new, >>Well, it's all kinds of C companies sending their developers, right? It's sometimes there's a lot of them are end users. I think at least half or a third, at least of attendees are end user companies. And, uh, then there is also like the new startups around town. And then there is like the, every big company or small has been hiring developers as fast as possible. And even if they've always been a player in cloud native, they need to send all these people to this ecosystem to start building the relationships start like learning the technology. So it's all kinds of folks are collecting to that here. >>As I, as I think about people starting to learn the technologies, learn the communities, the one thing the market change for this coupon for me over others is the number of customers, sharing stories, end user organizations. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm, <affirmative> much of the cuon that I've been through many of the open source conferences. It's always been like vendors pushing their message, et cetera. What talk, tell me about that. C change. >>One thing that's like just immediate, um, and the case right now is that all the co-chairs for the event who are in charge of designing the agenda are end users. So we have Emily Fox from apple. We have Jasmine James from Twitter, and we have Ricardo Roka from se. So they're all end users. So naturally they're like, you know, picking talks that they're like, well, this is very relevant. Imma go for that and I'm here for it. Right? So that's one thing that's just happening. The other though is a greater trend, which is, as I was saying in the pandemic, so many companies has to get going and quickly that they have built expertise and users are no longer the passive recipients of information. They're equal contributors. They know what they need, what they want, they have experiences to share. And you're seeing that reflected in the conference. >>One thing I've seen at other conferences in the past that started out really for practitioners, uh, is that invariably, they want to go upscale and they wanna draw the CIOs and the, oh yeah. The, uh, you know, the executive, the top executives. Is that an objective, uh, for you or, or do you really want to keep this kind of a, a t-shirt crowd for the long term? >>Hey, everyone's welcome. That's really important, you know? Right. And, um, so we, and that's why we are trying to expand. It's like, you know, middle out as they had in the Silicon valley show the idea being, sorry, I just meant this a little. Okay. So the idea being that we've had the core developer crews, developer, DevOps, SRE crowd, right op over the course of the last virtual events, we actually expanded in the other direction. We put in a business value track, which was more for like people in the business, but not in as a developer or DevOps engineer. We also had a student thing where it's like, you're trying to get all the university crowd people, and it's been working phenomen phenomenally. And then actually this, this event, we went, uh, in the other direction as well. We hosted our inaugural CTO summit, which is for senior leadership and end user companies. And the idea is they're discussing topics of technology that are business relevant. So our topic this time was resiliency in multi-cloud and we're producing a research paper about it. That's gonna come out in some weeks. So BA so with, for us, it's about getting everybody under this tent. Right. And, but it will never mean that we deprioritize what we started with, which is the engineering crowd. It's just an expansion >>Stay true to your roots. >>Yes. Well, Prianca, we're going to talk to a lot of those startup communities tomorrow. Ah, tomorrow's coverage. It's all about startups. Why should CTOs, uh, new startups talk to these upstarts of as opposed to some of the bigger players here on the show floor, over 170 sponsoring companies, the show floor has been vibrant engaging. Yes. And we're going to get into that community tomorrow's coverage on the cube from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the cube, the leader and high tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. And we're back at AWS Re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE and we're here, day two. Actually we started Monday night and we got wall-to-wall coverage. We going all the way through Thursday, myself. I'm Dave Volante with the co-host, David Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also here. Of course, John Furrier. Partners, technologists, customers, the whole ecosystem. It's good to be back in the live event. Of course we have hybrid event as well a lot of people watching online. Anshu Sharma is here. He is the co-founder and CEO of Skyflow, new type of privacy company, really interested in this topic. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thanks for bringing me here. >> It's timely, you know. Privacy, security, they're kind of two sides of the same coin. >> Yes. >> Why did you found Skyflow? >> Well, the idea for Skyflow really comes from my background in some ways. I spent my first nine years at Oracle, six years at Salesforce. And whether we were building databases or CRM products, customers would come to us and say, "Hey, you know, I have this very different type of data. It's things like social security numbers, frequent flyer card numbers, card numbers. You know, can you secure it better? Can you help me manage things like GDPR?" And to be honest, there was never a clear answer. There's a lot of technology solutions out there that do one thing at a time, you can walk around the booths here, there's like a hundred companies. And if you use all those hundred things correctly, maybe you could go tell your board that maybe a social security number is not going to be lost anymore. And I was like, "You know, we've simplified everything else. Why is it so hard to protect my social security number? It should be easy. It should be as easy as using Stripe or Twilio." And this idea just never went away and kept coming back till a few years ago, we learned about the Facebook privacy challenges, the Equifax challenges. And I was like, boy, it's the time. It's time to go do it now. >> You started the company in 2019. Right? >> Yes. >> I mean, your timing was pretty good, right? So what are the big sort of Uber trends that you're seeing? Obviously GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act. I heard this morning. Did you hear this? That like, if you post a picture on social media now without somebody's permission, you're now violating their privacy. It's like, you can see the smiles on Anshu's face. >> Its like every week, we're like every week, there's a new story that could be like, well, Skyflow. The new story is the question, the answer is Skyflow. But honestly I think what's happened is, the issue is put very simple. You know all we're trying to do is protect people's social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers, things we hold dear. At the same time, it's complex. Like what does it mean to protect your social security number let's say? Does that mean I don't get to use it for filing your taxes? Well, I need your credit card number to process a payment. And we were like, this is just too complicated. Why, how do companies like Apple do it? How do companies like Netflix manage not have as many breaches as my hotel that barely has any data. And the answer is those companies actually have evolved to a completely different architecture, the zero trust data architecture. And that was our inspiration for starting this company. >> Yeah. I mean. How many times have you been asked to give your social security number? And you're like, why? why do you want it? What are you going to do with it? How do you protect it? And they go, "I don't know." >> You know, what's even, my favorite is like, you give your social security number to say TurboTax, how many days of the year do they need to use it? One. How many days of the year do they have it? And the thing is, it's a liability for those CTOs too. >> Yeah right. >> The CTO of Walgreens, the CTO of Intuit. They don't really want that social security number just so they can process your card once a year, or your social security number once a year. It's almost like we're forcing them to hold onto data. And then they have to bear the burden of having these stories. Like, you know, everybody wants to prevent a New York Times story that says, what Robin Hood had a breach, Twitter had a breach. >> So walk us through how Skyflow would address something like that. So take the, you know, take the make a generic version of TurboTax, social security members. There they are right now, they're sitting in a database somewhere. Hopefully there's some security wrapped around it in some way or another. What would you advise a customer like that to do? And what are you actually doing for them? >> So, look, it's very simple. You are not going to put your username passwords in a generic database. You're going to use something like OD Zero or Octa to do it. We're living in a world where we have polyglot data stores. Like there's a key value store. There's a time series database. There is a search database like Elastic. There's a log database like Splunk. But PII data, Somehow we think just fine. If it's in a hundred places and our answer is that we should do the same thing that companies like Apple, Netflix, Google, everybody, does. They take this data. They completely isolate it from the databases. And it gets stored in a custom data store in our case, that would be Skyflow. And essentially we'd give you encrypted tokens back and you can use these encrypted tokens that look like fake social security number. It's called a Format Preserving Encryption. So if you think about all the breakthroughs we've had in homomorphic encryption, on secure elements, like the way your phone works, the credit card number is stored in a secure element. So it's the same idea. There's a secure part of your data stack, which is Skyflow. That basically keeps the data always protected. And because we can compute and search on encrypted data, this is important, everybody can encrypt data at rest. Skyflow is the first company that's come out and said, "Look, you can keep your phone number and social security number, encrypted while I can run an aggregation query." So I can tell you what's the balance of your customer's account balance. And i can run that query without decrypting, a single row of data. The only other company I know that can do that internally is a certain Cupertino based company. >> So think about it. Anybody can walk something up to a certain degree, but allowing frictionless access at the same time. >> While it's encrypted. So how do you make that? Are you, is a strategy to make that a horizontal service? That I can put into my data protection service or my E-commerce service or whatever. >> It's a cloud-based service that runs on AWS and other clouds. We basically given instance just like, you'll get an instance of a post-grad store or you get an API handled to OD Zero. You basically instantiate Skyflow of what gets created. It can be in your AWS environment, dedicated VPC. So it's private to you and then you have a handle and then basically you just start using it. >> So how, how do you, what's the secret sauce? How do you do that? >> The secret source. Well, now that we filed the patents on it, I can reveal the secret sauce. So the holy grail of encryption right now, if you go talk to people at a leading company, is there's something called Fully Homomorphic Encryption. That's fundamentally the foundation on which things like Bitcoin are built actually. But the hard part about Fully Homomorphic Encryption is it works. You can actually do mathematical computations on it without decrypting the data, but it's about a million times slower. >> Yes slower, right. >> So nobody uses it. My insight was that we don't need to do multiplications and additions on phone numbers. You never take my phone number and divide by your social security number. (Dave laughing) These numbers are not numbers, they are data structures. So our insight was if you treat them as specialized data structures, we're all talking about basically about 80 different types of data across the globe. Every human being has an ID, date of birth, height, color of eyes. There's not that many fields. What we can do then is create specialized encryption schemes for each data type. We call this polymorphic data encryption. Poly means multiple. As a result of that, we can actually store the data encrypted and build indexes on it. Since we can index interpret data, it's kind of like, imagine you can run real-time queries on data that's encrypted. Every other data store, When you encrypt the data, it becomes invisible to database. And that's why we had to build this as a full stacked service. Just like the Snowflake guys had to start with the foundation of storage, rethink indexing, and build Snowflake. We did the same thing, except we built it for encrypted indexes Whereas they built it for encrypted, for regular data stores. >> So thinking, if you think about today's tech stack, it's evolving, right? The data protection and security are coming together. Where does this fit? Is it sort of now becoming a fundamental part of the-- >> We think every leading company, whether you're building a new brokerage application or you are the largest bank in the world, and we're talking to some of them right now. They're all going to have an internal service called a PII wall. This wall just like Apple and Google have their own internal walls. You're going to have a wall service in your service oriented architecture, essentially. And it's going to basically be the API. Every other application and database in your company is not going to store my social security number. The SSNs don't belong in 600 databases at a leading bank. They don't belong inside your customer support system. Think about what happened with Robinhood two weeks ago, right? Someone tricked one call center guy into giving the keys up, which is fine happens. But why did the call center guy have access to like a million email addresses? He's never used going to use that. So we think if you isolate the PII, every leading company is going to end up with a PII Wall, as part of their core architecture. Just like today, we have an Alt API, you have a Search API, you have a Logging API, you're going to have a PII API. And that's going to be part of your modern data stack. >> So okay. So this is definitely not a bolt on, right? It's going to be a fundamental company, just like security is, just like backup is. It's now, you got to have it. It's-- >> Yes. I mean, if you think about it, it just logically makes sense. Like you should be isolating this data. You don't keep your money and gold around at home. You put it either in a locker or a bank. I think the same applies for PII. We just haven't done it because companies would pay off a fine for $10,000 or a million dollars. And. >> Yeah. So you've recently raised $45 million to expand your efforts. Obviously that means that people are looking at this and saying there's opportunity, right? What does that look like when you think of growth, where during your go to market strategy at first you're convincing people that it's a good idea to do it. Do you think or hope for, hope one day that there's an inflection point where it's not that people are thinking, you know, let's do this because it's a good idea, but people are like, I have to do this because if I don't, it's irresponsible and I'm going to be penalized for not having it. It becomes something that isn't really a choice. It's something where you just do it. >> So, you know, when we were starting the company, we didn't even have a word to explain what we were trying to do. We would say things like what if there was a cloud service for XYZ. And, but over the last one year, I don't want to take credit for creating this market, but this market has been created in the last year and a half. And you know, we get tons of people, including some of the largest institutions emailing us, saying, "I'm looking to build a PII wall, API service inside my company. Can you tell me why your product meets that need?" And I thought that would take us three to five years to get there. And, you know, we've ended up creating a category, basically just like other companies have. And I think, you know, you don't get, I believe in market permission. You don't get to create a category. The market gives somebody the permission to create a category. Saying, "Look, this makes sense. Something like this should emerge." And if you're there at the right time, like you said. >> Yep. >> You get to take the opportunity. >> So where are you at as a company say for some, some capital is great. When do you scale? >> We're scaling now? So we just doubled our headcount in the last nine to 10 months. We're now 75 people. We think we'll be about 150 to 200 people in the next year. We are hiring across all regions. We just hired a head of Asia pack from segment.com. We just hired our first, you know, lead on international expansion. And in the US, we have an office in Palo Alto. We have an office in Bangalore. We just announced a data residency solution for Europe, data residency solution for India and emerging markets. Because data residency is another one of those things that's just emerging right now. And irrespective of whether you believe in security and privacy. Data residency is one of those things that you are mandated to implement. >> And where are you hiring? Is it combination to go to market? Tell me about your go to market. >> The go to market. We are direct sales organization, but we work with partners. So we haven't announced some of these partnerships, but you're working with some of the companies here who either are large database companies, large security companies. We think there is a win-win relationship between us and some of the partner. >> You're a partner model, partner channel model. >> So, direct sales but partner assisted. >> Yeah. Right. All right. We got to go. Hey, awesome story. Congratulations. Best of luck. >> Very interesting. >> Love to have you back and track the progress. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Okay. Thank you for watching theCUBE, the leader in and high-tech coverage. We're at Re-Invent 2021. Be right back (upbeat music)

hey welcome back to los angeles thecube is live here at kubecon cloud native con 2021 we're so excited to be here in person lisa martin with dave nicholson and we are here with priyanka sharma the executive director of cnc at prayanka welcome to the program thank you so much for having me first of all congratulations on doing an event in person in such a safe clean way i was really impressed when i walked in this morning was asked for my vaccination record my temperature was scanned you're proving you can do these events safely this isn't rocket science so agreed and i'm so glad you appreciate all the measures we've put in place because this is how we can do it in-person interaction is essential for us as human beings for us as professionals and so we owe it to each other to just do the right thing you know have a vaccine requirement wear your masks have these what i call the traffic light uh system where if you have a green a green band it means people can come a little closer it's okay red means please at least six feet of distance and these things go a long way in making an event successful in times like this they do i love that when i saw that mine keeps falling off i'm cold so it keeps falling i'm green just so you know i know you're green what about you i'm green here you can can i have yours that's my favorite and you know you fell off again you had um the three folks that came up who were uh like uh co-chairs co-chairs yeah yeah and uh and they did almost a little almost a little skit yes that on the surface people could say well that's ridiculous and it's like no it's not it's giving everybody the guidelines so that everyone can be comfortable because when i see your green wristband i understand that you are comfortable because i don't want to accidentally reach out to give you a fist bump when you might be particularly of course yeah yeah so no visual cues make it easy yes yeah yeah very very easy very comfortable talk about the energy at the event this is the second full day tina was standing room only yesterday give us an overview of the energy and some of the things that are happening since you can't replicate those hallway networking conversations on video conference i know exactly what you mean man it is so lovely to be in person to meet people and you know for those who are comfortable there's like the fist bumps and the hugs and the big smiles and that energy i haven't seen it in almost two years um and even you know just standing on stage as i was telling you folks uh off camera i've been in this role for over a year and a close to a year and a half i've done three cube cons already but this was my first in person and being on that stage experiencing the energy of the people in that room like when i asked everyone during my keynote i was like are you all proud to be team cloud native and i got a resounding yes back from the audience that's what i'm talking about yeah you know it was amazing what's some of the news that's breaking lots of stuff going on obviously some first one in person in almost two years but talk to me about some of the the news that's breaking here at the event yes so so much new stuff to share um from our side on cncf our journey has been very much about being celebrating our culture and welcoming more and more people into it so that we can have more folks in team cloud native to take various jobs to find fulfillment and all those great things right and all of our announcements are around that theme of people finding a place here people paying it forward in this community and building the culture the first one i would like to share is the announcement of the kubernetes and cloud native associate certification so this is an exam that is going to go live end of the year so people sign up apparently the beta signups went away like this after i announced it so it was really cool wow popular by demanding yeah very very popular and it's it's an exam for folks who are brand new to cloud native and it the studying for it you'll go through you know the fun fundamentals of kubernetes what is the cncf landscape what are the key projects and ultimately you will actually deploy an application using coop cuddle commands and it's such a great primer so so how brand new can someone be when you when you say brand new are you talking about someone who already has a phd in computer science but hasn't done anything in the kubernetes space tell me how brand new can you be uh-huh that's a very good question and it is literally you can come with zero knowledge you would of course have to study for the exam and like go through that journey but the idea is that it is the gateway and so it is possible you're a phd in computer science but you've studied some esoteric part of computer science that's very unconnected to what we do sure go ahead and take it but maybe most likely you would like the more advanced certifications better but if you're let's say a marketer looking to break into the cloud native industry this is the move take this exam and suddenly all these employers you speak their language they'll be impressed that you took it and it's it's an opportunity to advance your career the oh community is huge i was looking at the website the other day 138 000 contributors yes from more than 177 countries 186 is the latest number 186 awesome 289 plus million lines of code written this community is really so productive and so prolific and it's great that you're offering more folks that don't have the background like you were saying to be able to get in and get started absolutely it's our whole thing of bring in more people because as you all probably know there's so much demand for cloud native skill sets across job functions so that's why we're here to help with yeah i you know i i want to double click on this as we say because you hear the word inclusive associated with this whole community so much um you're talking about something that is a certification yeah a marketer okay fine but we're really talking about anyone who has the drive to potentially completely transform their lives yes and in this age where things can be done remotely you don't necessarily have to live in silicon valley or cambridge massachusetts to do this or in one of the other global centers of technology anywhere yeah so that's the that's the kind of energy that's part of this that isn't a part of any large industry focused conference because you really are making opportunities for people of all backgrounds to change their lives so i don't know i don't am i extending a a virtual thank you from all of those people whose lives have been changed and will be changed in the future maybe i am but so but talk about inclusiveness in in you know from from other perspectives yes i think that you know talent drive skills none of these are exclusive to a certain zip code you know people everywhere have great qualities and deserve chances and why shouldn't they be part of a community that as you said is especially inclusive feels especially nice to be a part of and that's what i exhorted the community to do in my keynote yesterday which is that our ranks will grow and we should go out of our way to make sure our ranks grow and we do that by shining a light on our culture telling people to join in lending a hand and you know letting people's personalities shine even when they'll be different from who we are whether in terms of job function or skill set whatever and i think that's the top level um paradigm that we want to have right where we are always welcoming people when we think of inclusiveness it is you know there is certifications like kcna did do a great job there are also efforts that we must always be doing so something that we work on constantly consistently is contributor strategy where we're working on creating ladders and pathways for folks to become open source contributors it is known now that open source contributions lead to job advancement in your career right and so the whole goal is bring people in not just to hang out not just to talk but to actually grow and actually kubecon cloudnativecon is a great example of another little thing we do which is uh we uh award uh underrepresented minorities and people who are who need need-based funds scholarships to attend nice yeah and it's changed one thousand 1518 lives already and we actually uh in uh in this event have announced that we are renaming the scholarship to the dan khan scholarship fund um i i do you folks know dan yes did yeah so dan he breathed life into team cloud native right he built this organization to have the impact that it does today and all the while he was relentlessly focused on diversity equity inclusion so it was it was just like the idea came from within the team and the minute someone said it it just struck a chord with all of us yeah we're like we're doing this no question and it was one of the fastest decisions we've ever made i saw uh some results of a dei micro survey on the website where 75 percent of respondents say this community is becoming more inclusive there's obviously work to go but as a female in technology you feel that you see that as well yes i think i'm very proud of that survey that we did by the way because it's our way we're going to keep doing it it's our way to keep a pulse on the ecosystem because you can keep doing initiatives right but if people are not feeling great then who cares and so um but yes i think dei is a journey if there is no destination right always we have to be thinking harder trying harder to you know i think for example something cncf's done a great job is identifying particularly gender diverse folks who are in the community and maybe could deserve a role of high responsibility so i'm really proud that our technical oversight committee which is our really the top technical people in the ecosystem who desi decide project stuff they are led by a woman there's many women on that and it's they're all very exemplary awesome technologists and so i think um the diversity survey gives us like a hint into like the things people do like and i mean the fact remains we need to do more to source more people to come into the ecosystem we need to always be changing and evolving with the needs of the community right as i mentioned the community is 138 000 strong 6.8 million plus contributions so far you can imagine by opening that dei door just the thought diversity that comes in alone and the number of projects that will come from folks that just come in with a different mindset oh 100 we are already seeing that um we started off as folks who had you know lots of projects from the great big tech companies people who had web scale problems as i call it and that was great but in recent years the end users who are initially just consuming this technology and that too slowly are now hook line and sinker in and we have like argo cd came from intuit which is an end user uh backstage came from spotify which is an end user so this trend is growing and the diversity as you said is continuing yeah i i'm particularly interested in the dynamic where you have people who have their day job if you will where their employer is absolutely 100 encouraging them to participate in the community to develop things that will not only help the employer and that mission but also building uh solutions for everyone and providing enrichment for the for the person and and i i'm i'm going to make a little bit of a prediction i want to get your thoughts on this i think that um one of the silver linings of what we've been through in the pandemic having a lot of people at home having that relationship with your primary employer be just a little bit different and just a little bit more removed i think everyone is realizing that you know what um we all need a passion play to be a part of in addition to whatever we're doing to put bread on the table in the immediate future and so i i think that i want to hear your thoughts there's going to be an explosion in contributions from people and hopefully a lot more openness on the part of employers to let people dedicate their time to this do you do you see that do you think that yes i think i think you're really on to something here um something i mentioned in my keynote right was this conversation i've had with so many that we in this community our identity is cloud native first so we're folks who are in team cloud native before we are working at insert company name you know um google at t spotify whatever it's not a dig on the company it's actually a celebration of those companies because they are liking the developments that happen in open source they are appreciating the value these people are creating and they're employing them so absolutely there is this ongoing trend of folks seeing great value in folks who understand this cloud native projects in particular and of course right because we have been such a great place for industry collaboration lots of vendors have great products make lots of money on these projects and that's as it should be and so the value of the people contributing to these projects is very high and it will only continue to grow i imagine so so here we are in los angeles at kubecon cloud native con 21 what's what's next well uh the good news is this was the first of many to come hybrid events in person plus virtual and the next one is happening in end of may in valencia for europe 22. valencia spain and i have heard beautiful weather very nice people amazing food so just for that that alone is worth registration yes i know right it's going to be amazing i'm so excited and i hope i will see you folks there sign me up i've never been to spain i'm there me too let's do it excited let's do it for our spanish-speaking uh viewers i will say claroque he you can't you do you can do it all you can speak spanish on the queue we can have something honestly i'm impressed i'm impressed i can't i can't do that any and you donated your green card so thank you so much so nice congratulations on the event thank you uh for growing the community for and growing the diversity of it and for the the projects that are going on now and we're sure many more to come we look forward to seeing you in valencia in may thank you so much see you in valencia all right we'll see you there for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin we are live in los angeles the cube is covering kubecon and cloudnativecon at 21. stick around we'll be back after a short break with our next guest

>>Well, welcome to the special cube conversation. I'm Jennifer with the cube, your host, we're here with Jeremy and Iisha Sharma director of product management for trim. We're going to talk about data, data lakes, the future of data, and how it works with cloud and in the new applications. Iisha thanks for joining me. >>Thank you for having me, John, >>You guys are a cutting-edge startup. You've got a lot of good action going on. You're kind of on the new, the new guard as Andy Jassy at AWS always talks about this. The old guard incumbents you guys are on the, on the new breed, you guys are doing the new stuff around data lakes and also making data accessible for customers. Uh, what, what is that all about? Take us through what is Dremio. >>So Dremio is the data Lake service that essentially allows you to very simply run SQL queries on directly on your data Lake storage, without having to make any of those copies that everybody's going on about all the time. So you're really able to get that fast time to value without having to have this long process of let's put in a request to my data team, let's make all of those copies and then finally get this very reduced scope of, of your data and still have to go back to your data team every time you need it, you need a change to that. So dreamy is bringing you that fast time to value with that. No copy data strategy, and really providing you the flexibility to keep your data in your data Lake storage, as the single source of truth. >>You know, the past 10 years, we've watched with cube coverage since we've been doing this program and in the community following from the early days of Hadoop to now, we've seen the trials and tribulations of ETL data warehousing. We've seen the starts and stops, and we've seen that the most successful formula has been store everything. Um, and then, you know, then the ease of use became a challenge. I don't want to have to hire really high powered engineers to manage certain kinds of clusters. I just got cloud now comes into the mix. I got on-premise storage, but the notion of a data Lake became hugely popular because it became a phrase meant store everything, and it meant different things to different peoples. And since then, teams of people have been hired to be the data teams. So it's kind of new. So I got to ask you, what is the challenge of these data teams? What do they look like? What's the psychology going on with some of the people on these teams? What problems are they solving what's going on? Because you know, they becoming data full >>To take >>Us through what's going on with data teams, >>To your point, the volumes, the variety of data, Eastern growing exponentially every day, there's really no end to it, right? And companies are looking to get their hands on as much data as they possibly can. So that means data teams in a position to how do I provide access to as many users as easily as possible that self service experience or data, um, and data democratization as much of a great concept as it is in theory, it comes with its own challenges in terms of all of those copies that ended up being created to provide the quote unquote self service experience. And then with all of these copies comes the cost to store all of them. And you've just added a tremendous amount of complexity and delayed your time to value significantly. >>You mentioned self-service is one of those things that seems like a moving train. Everyone I talked to is like, Oh, self-service is the Holy grail we've got to get to self-service almost. And then you get to some self serves, then you gotta, you gotta re rethink it cause more stuff's changing. So I have to ask in that capacity, you've got data architects and you've got analysts, the customer of the data. How's the, what's the relationship between those two is who gives and who gets, who drives it, who leans in to the analyst, feed the requirements into the architect, set up the boundaries. How is that relationship? Can you take us through how you guys view the relationship between the data analyst and architect? I mean data architect and the data analysts. >>Sure. So you have the data architect, the data team that's actually responsible for providing data access at the end of the day, right? They're the people that have the data democratization requirement on them. And so they've created these copies, tremendous amount of copies. A lot of the times the data Lake storage is, is that source of truth. But, um, you're copying your data into a data warehouse. And then what they end up doing is your, your end user, your analyst, they want, they all want different types of data. They want different views of this data. So there's a tremendous amount of personalized copies that the architects end up creating. And then on top of it, there's performance. We need to get everything back in a timely manner. Otherwise what's the point, right? Real time analytics. So there's all these performance related copies, whether that be additive tables or, you know, VI extract cues, all of that fun stuff. >>And so the architect is the one that's responsible for creating all of those. That's what they have to do to provide access to the analyst. And then, like I'm saying, when we need an update to that data set, when I discover that I have a new data set, that I need to join with an existing one, I have the analyst go to the data architect and say, Hey, by the way, I need this new data set. Can you make this usable for me? Or can you provide me access? And so then we did protect has to process that request now. And so again, coming back to all these copies that have been created, um, the data architect goes through a tremendous amount of work and almost, um, has, has to do this over and over again to actually make the data available to the analyst. But it's a cycle that goes on between the two. >>Yeah. It's interesting dynamic. It's a power dynamic, but also trying to get to the innovation. I've got to ask you, some people are saying that data copies are the major obstacle for democratization. How do you respond to that? What's your view? >>They absolutely are. Data copies are the complete opposite of data democratization. There's no aspect of self-service there, which is exactly what you're looking to do with data democratization. Um, because of those copies, how do you manage those? How do you govern those? How, uh, like I was saying, when somebody needs a new data set or an update to one, they have to go back to that data team. And there goes that self-service actually Dana coffees create a bottleneck because it all comes back to that data team that has to continue to get through those requests that are coming in from their analysts. So, uh, data copies and data democratization is completely automated. >>You know, I remember talking to David latte in a cube event two years ago, he said infrastructure as code was the big DevOps movement. And we felt that data ops would be something similar where data as code, where you didn't have to think about it. So you're kind of getting to this idea of, you know, copies are bad because it doesn't, it holds back that self-service this modern error is looking for more of programmability with data. Kind of what you're teasing out here is that's the modern architecture. Is that how you see it? How do, how do you see, uh, a, uh, a modern data architecture? >>Yeah, so the modern data or the data architecture has evolved significantly in the last several years, right? We started with traditional data warehouses and the traditional data Lake with Duke where the storage and compute were totally tightly coupled. And then we moved on to cloud data warehouses, where there was a separation of compute and storage, and that provided a little more flexibility there. But then with the modern data architecture now with cloud data lakes, you have this aspect of separating, not only storage and compute, but also compute data. So that creates a separate tier for data altogether. What does that look like? So you have your data and your feeling storage as three ATLs, whatever it may be. And on top of that. So of course it's an open format, right? And so on top of that, thanks to technology. It's like Apache iceberg and Delta Lake. There's this ability to give your files, your data, a table structure. And so that starts to bring the capabilities that a data warehouse was providing the data. Thanks to these. You have the ability to do transactions, record level mutations, burgeoning things that were missing completely from a data Lake architecture before. And so, um, introducing that, that data to your, having that separation of compute and data really, really accelerate the ability to get that time to value because you're keeping your data in the data Lake storage at the end of the day. >>And it's interesting, you see all the hot companies tend to be, have that kind of mindset and architecture, and it's creating new opportunities as a ton of white space. So I have to kind of ask you guys, how does Dremio fit into this because you guys are playing in this kind of the new wave here with data it's growing extremely, it's moving fast. You got, again, edge is developing more. Data's coming in at the edge. You've got hybrid testing multi-cloud environments on the horizon. I mean this ultimate multicloud, but I mean, data in real time across multiple clouds is the next kind of area people are focused on. What does, what's the role of GMU and all this to take, take us through that. >>Yeah. So Dremio provides, again, like I said, this data Lake service, and we're all referring to just storage or Hadoop. When we say data Lake, we're talking about an entire solution. Um, so you keep your data, you keep your data in your data, Lake orange. And then on top of that, with the integrations that Dremio has with Apache iceberg and Delta, like we do provide that data here that I was talking about. And so you've given your data, this table structure, and now you can operate on it like you would in a data warehouse. So there's really no need to move your data from a data Lake data warehouse, again, keeping that data Lake as that source of truth. And then on top of that, um, when we talk about copies, personalized copies, performance related copies, you, you really, like I was saying, you've created so much complexity with Jeremy of you don't do that when it comes to personalized copies, we've got the semantic layer and that's a very key aspect of Dremio where you can provide as many views of, of data that you want without having to make any copies. So it really accelerates that, that data democratization story, and then when it, >>So it's the no cop, my strategy trim, you guys are on it, but you're about no copy keeps semantic layer, have that be horizontal across whatever environment and just applications have, can applications tap into this, or how do you guys integrate into apps if I'm an app developer, for instance, how does that work? >>Of course. So that's, that's one of the most important use cases in the sense that when there's an application or even when it's a, you know, a BI client or some other tool that's tapping into the data in S3 or ATLs, a lot of people see performance degradation. Typically with the Dremio, that's not the case we've got, Aeroflight integrated into Tremino, it's a key component as well. And that puts so much, uh, it, so put so much ease in terms of running dashboards off of that, running your analytics apps off of that, because that replay can deliver 20 times the performance that PIO DBC could. So coming back to the no data strategy or note copy data strategy, there's no those local copies anymore that you needed to make. >>So one of the things I got to ask you is, cause this comes up all the time. So she had less pass re-invent. I notice again, Amazon was, I was banging on this hard Azure as well on their side too. Their whole thing is we want to take the AI environment and make it so that people can normal people can use it and deploy machine learning. The same thing kind of comes down into this layer where you're talking about is this democratization is a huge trend because you don't have to be super peaked, you know, math, PhD, data scientist, or ETL, or data Wrangler. You just want to actually code the data or play party with the data in any way you want to do with it. So, so the question I have is is that that's certainly a great trend and no one debates that, but the reality is people are storing data, like almost hoarding it, just throw it in a data Lake and we'll deal with them later. How does you guys solve that problem? Because once that starts happening, do you have to hire someone super smart to dig that out or rearchitected or because that seems to be kind of the pattern, right? You know, throw everything into data Lake, uh, and we'll deal with it later >>Called the data swamp. And it's like, no one knows what's going on. >>Of course though, you don't actually want to throw everything into a data Lake. There still needs to be a certain amount of structure that all of this lands in. You want it to live in one place, but have still a little bit of structure so that, um, Dremio and other are, are much more enabled to query that with fantastic performance. So there's, there's still some amount of structure that needs to happen at a data Lake level, but from, uh, that semantic layer that we have with during the, you you're, you're creating structure for your end user, >>How would you advise, how would you advise someone who wants to hedge their future and not take on too much technical debt, but says, Hey, you know, I do have the store. Is there a best practice on kind of some guard rails around getting going, how do you, how do you advise your customers who want to get it going? >>So how we advise our customers is again, plugin put your, put your data in that data Lake. A lot of them already have three TLS in place. And getting started with Bermeo is really easy. I would say I did it for the first time and it took a matter of minutes if not less. And so what you're doing with Dremio is connecting data directly to that data source and then creating a semantic layer on top. So you bring together a bunch of data. That's sitting in your data Lake, you know, if that sales data and Sophia, and we give you a really streamlined way to say together, the, you know, last, however, we go back in time, create a view on top of all of that. If you have that structured in folders as great, we will provide you a way to create one view on top of all of that, as opposed to having a view for every day or whatnot. And so again, that semantic layer really comes in handy when you're trying to, as the architect provide access to this data Lake. And then as the user who just, just interacts with the data as, as the views are provided to them, there's really, uh, there's a whole lot of transparency there, and it's really easy to get up and running with drumming. >>I'm looking forward to it. I got to finally ask the question is how do I get started? How do people engage with you guys? Is it, is it a freemium? Is it a cloud service? What's the requirements? What are some of the ways that people can engage and work with you guys? >>Yeah, so we get started, uh, on our website at dot com. And speaking of self-service, we've got a virtual lab at dremio.com/labs that you can get started with that gives you a product tour and even gives you a getting started, walk through the tissue through your first query so that you can see how well it works. And in addition to that, we've got a free trial of Dremio available on AWS marketplace. >>Awesome. Net marketplace is a good place to download stuff. So can I ask you a personal question, Isha? Um, you're the director of product management. You get to see inside the kitchen where everyone's making the, making the product. You also got the customer relationships out there looking at product market fit, as it evolves, customer's requirements evolve. What's some of the cool things that you've seen in this space. That's just interesting to you that either you kind of expected or maybe some surprises, what's the coolest thing you've seen come out of this new data environment we're living in. >>I think just the ability to the way things have evolved, right? It used to be data Lake or data warehouse, and you pick one, you probably have both, but you're not like reaching either to their highest potential. Now you've got, this is coming together of both of them. I think it's been fantastic to see how you've got technology is like a iceberg and Delta Lake and bringing those two things together. And you know, you're in your data Lake and it's great in terms of cost and storage and all of that. But now you're able to have so much flexibility in terms of some of those data warehouse capabilities. And on top of that with technologies like Dremio, and just in general, this open format concept, you're, you're never locked in with a particular vendor with a particular format. You're not locking yourself out of a technology that you don't even know exists yet. And thinking in the past, you were always going to end up there. You always ended up putting your data in something where it was going to be difficult to change it, to get it out. But now you have so much flexibility with the open architecture that's coming. What's the DNA like of the >>Culture at Treme. And obviously you've got a cutting edge. We're in a big, hot wave data. You're enabling a lot of value. Uh, what's the, what's it like there at Jemena? What do you guys strive for? What's the purpose? What's the, what's the DNA of the culture. >>There's a lot of excitement in terms of getting customers to this flexibility, to get them out of things they're locked into really in providing them with accessibility to their data, right? This data access data democratization concept to make that actually happen so that, you know, time to value is a key thing. You want to derive insights out of your, out of your data. And everybody, I drove you in super excited and charging towards that, >>Unlocking that value. That's awesome. Aisha, thank you for coming on the cube conversation. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. He's just Sharma director of product management. Dremio here inside the cube. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of Kubecon and CloudNativeCon, North America, 2020, virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, virtual coverage of Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2020. We're not in person this year, normally we're there in person. We have to do remote because of the pandemic, but hey, it opens up more conversations. And this is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. And you'll see a lot of interviews. We've got some great guests, Talking to the leaders, the developers, the end users, as well as the vendors with the CNCF, we got two great guests, Priyanka Sharma, the General Manager of the CNCF, great to see you and Stephen Augustus OSS Engineer at VMware. He's also the KubeCon co-chair back on the cube. Thanks for coming on folks. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. So, thanks for coming on, actually, remote and virtual. We're doing a lot of interviews, we're getting some perspectives, people are chatting in Slack. It's still got the hallway vibe feel, a lot of talks, a lot of action, keynotes happening, but I think the big story for me, and I would like to talk about, I want to get your perspective is this new working group that's out there. So I know there's some news around it. Could you take a minute to explain kind of what this is all about? >> Sure. I'll give a little bit of context for those who may have missed my keynote which... very bad. (Priyanka laughs) As I announced, I'm so proud to be working with the likes of Stephen Augustus here, and a bunch of other folks from different companies, different open source projects, et cetera, to bring inclusive naming to code. I think it's been a forever issue. Quite frankly. We've had many problematic terms in software out there. The most obvious one being master-slave. That really shouldn't be there. That have no place in an inclusive world, inclusive software, inclusive community with the help of amazing people like Stephen, folks from IBM, Red Hat, and many, many others. We came together because while there's a lot of positive enthusiasm and excitement for people to make the changes that are necessary to make the community welcome for all, there's a lot of different work streams happening. And we really wanted to make sure there is a centralized place for guidelines and discussion for everybody in a very non...pan-organizational kind of way. And so that's the working group that John is talking about. With that said, Stephen, I think you can do the best justice to speak to the overall initiative. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's to Priyanka's point, there are lots of people who are interested in this work and again, lots of work where this is already happening, which is very exciting to say, but as any good engineer, I think that's it's important to not duplicate your work. It's important to recognize the efforts that are happening elsewhere and work towards bringing people together. So part of this is providing, being able to provide a forum for discussion for a variety of companies, for a variety of associations that... and foundations that are involved in inclusive naming efforts. And then to also provide a framework for walking people through how we evaluate language and how we make these kinds of changes. As an example, for Kubernetes, we started off the Kubernetes working group naming and the hope for the working group naming was that it was going to evolve into hopefully an effort like this, where we could bring a lot of people on and not just talk about Kubernetes. So since we formed that back in, I want to say, June-ish, we've done some work on about of providing a language evaluation framework, providing templates for recommendations, providing a workflow for moving from just a suggestion into kind of actuating those ideas right and removing that language where it gets tricky and code is thinking about, thinking about, say a Kubernetes API. And in fact that we have API deprecation policies. And that's something that we have to if offensive language is in one of our APIs, we have to work through our deprecation policy to get that done. So lots of moving parts, I'm very excited about the overall effort. >> Yeah, I mean, your mind can explode if you just think about all the complications involved, but I think this is super important. I think the world has voted on this, I think it's pretty obvious and Priyanka, you hit some of the key top-line points, inclusive software. This is kind of the high order bit, but when you get down to it, it's hard as hell to do, because if you want to get ne new namings and/or changing namings accepted by the community and code owners, you're dealing with two things, a polarizing environment around the world today, and two, the hassles involved, which includes duplicate efforts. So you've got kind of a juggling act going on between two forces. So it's a hard problem. So how are you tackling this? Because it's certainly the right thing to do. There's no debate there. How do you make it happen? How do you go in without kind of blowing things up, if you will? And do it in a way that's elegant and clean and accept it. 'Cause that's the... end of the day, it's acceptance and putting it code owners. >> Absolutely. I think so, as you said, we live in a polarizing environment right now. Most of us here though know that this is the right thing to do. Team CloudNative is for everyone. And that is the biggest takeaway I hope people get from our work in this initiative. Open source belongs to everybody and it was built for the problems of today. That's why I've been working on this. Now, when it goes into actual execution, as you said, there are many moving parts, Stephen and the Kubernetes working group, is our shining example and a really good blueprint for many folks to utilize. In addition to that, we have to bring in diverse organizations. It's not just open source projects. It's not just companies. It's also standards organizations. It's also folks who think about language in books, who have literally done PhDs in this subject. And then there are folks who are really struggling through making the changes today and tomorrow and giving them hope and excitement. So that at the end of this journey, not only do you know you've done the right thing, but you'd be recognized for it. And more people will be encouraged by your own experience. So we and the LF have been thinking at it from a holistic perspective, let's bring in the standards bodies, let's bring in the vendors, let's bring in the open source projects, give them guidelines and blueprints that we are lucky that our projects are able to generate, combine it with learnings from other people, because many people are doing great work so that there is one cohesive place where people can go and learn from each other. Eventually, what we hope to do is also have like a recognition program so that it's like, hey, this open source project did this. They are now certified X or there's like an awards program. They're still figuring that piece out, but more to come on that space. That's my part. But Stephen can tell you about all the heavy lifting that they've been doing. >> Before we get to Steve, I just want to say congratulations to you. That's great leadership. And I think you're taking a pragmatic approach and you putting the stake in the ground. And that's the number one thing, and I want to take my hat off to you guys and Priyanka, thank you for that leadership. All right, Stephen, let's talk about how this gets done because you guys open sources is what it's all about is about the people, it's about building on the successes of others, standing on the shoulders of others, you guys are used to sitting in rooms now virtually and squabbling over things like, code reviews and you got governing bodies. This is not a new thing in collaboration. So this is also a collaboration test. What are you seeing as the playbook to get this going? Can you share your insights into what the Kubernetes group's doing and how you see this. What are the few first few steps you see happening? So people can either understand it, understand the context and get involved? >> So I think it comes down to a lot of it is scope, right? So as a new contributor, as a current contributor, maybe you are one of those language experts, that is interested in getting involved as a co-chair myself for SIG Release. A lot of the things that we do, we have to consider scope. If we make this change, how is it affecting an end user? And maybe you work in contributor experience. Maybe you work in release, maybe you work in architecture. But you may not have the entire scope that you need to make a change. So I think that first it's amazing to see all of the thought that has gone through making certain changes, like discussing master and slave, discussing how we name control plane members, doing the... having the discussion around a whitelist and blacklist. What's hard about it is, is when people start making those changes. We've already seen several instances of an invigorated contributor, and maybe the new contributor coming in and starting to kind of like search and replace words. And it... I wish it was that simple, it's a discussion that has to be heard, you need buy-in from the code owners, if it's an API that you're touching, it's a conversation that you need to have with the SIG Architecture, as well as say SIG Docs. If it's something that's happening in Release, then it's a easier 'cause you can come and talk to me, but, overall I think it's getting people to the point where they can clearly understand how a change affects the community. So we kind of in this language evaluation framework, we have this idea of like first, second and third order concerns. And as you go through those concerns, there are like diminishing impacts of potential harm that a piece of language might be causing to people. So first order concerns are the ones that we want to eliminate immediately. And the ones that we commonly hear this discussion framed around. So master-slave and whitelist, blacklist. So those are ones that we know that are kind of like on the track to be removed. The next portion of that it's kind of like understanding what it means to provide a recommendation and who actually approves the recommendation. Because this group is, we have several language aficionados in this group, but we are by now means experts. And we also want to make sure that we do not make decisions entirely for the community. So, discussing that workflow from a turning a recommendation into actuating a solution for that is something that we would also do with the steering committee. So Kubernetes kind of like top governing body. Making sure that the decision is made from the top level and kind of filtered out to all of the places where people may own code or documentation around it is I think is really the biggest thing. And having a framework to make it easy to make, do those evaluations, is what we've been craving and now have. >> Well, congratulations. That's awesome. I think it's always... it's easier said than done. I mean, it's a system when you have systems and code, it's like, there's always consequences in systems architecture, you know that you do in large scales OSS. You guys know what that means. And I think the low hanging fruit, obviously master, slave, blacklist, whitelist, that's just got to get done. I mean, to me, if that just doesn't get done, that's just like a stake in the ground that must happen. But I think this idea of it takes a village, kind of is a play here. People just buy into it. That so it's a little bit of a PR thing going on too, for get buy-in, this is again a classic, getting people on board, Priyanka, isn't it? It's the obvious and then there's like, okay, let's just do this. And then what's the framework? What's the process? What's the scope? >> Yeah, absolutely agree. And many people are midway through the journey. That's one of the big challenges. Some people are on different phases of the journey, and that was one of the big reasons we started this working group, because we want to be able to provide a place of conversation for people at different stages. So we get align now rather than a year later, where everybody has their own terms as replacements and nothing works. And maybe the downstream projects that are affected, like who knows, right? It can go pretty bad. And it's very complex and it's large-scale opensource or coasters, anywhere, large software. And so because team CloudNative belongs to everyone because open source belongs to everyone. We got up, get people on the same page. For those who are eager to learn more, as I said in my keynote, please do join the two sessions that we have planned. One is going to happen, which is about inclusive naming in general, it's an hour and a half session happening on Thursday. I'm pretty sure. And there we will talk about all the various artists who are involved. Everybody will have a seat at the table and we'll have documentation and a presentation to share on how we recommend the all move, move together as an ecosystem, and then second is a presentation by Celeste in the Kubernetes working group about how Kubernetes specifically has done naming. And I feel like Stephen, you and your peers have done such amazing work that many can benefit from it. >> Well, I think engineers, you got two things going to work in for you, which is one, it's a mission. And that's... There's certainly societal benefits for this code, code is for the people. Love that, that's always been the marching orders, but also engineers are efficient. If you have duplicate efforts. I mean, it's like you think about people just doing it on their own, why not do it now, do it together, more efficient, fixing bugs over stuff, you could have solved now. I mean, this is a huge issue. So totally believe it. I know we got to go, but I want to get the news and Priyanka, you guys had some new stuff coming out from the CNCF, new things, survey, certifications, all kinds of new reports. Give us the quick highlights on the news. >> Yes, absolutely. So much news. So many talking points. Well, and that's a good thing, why? Because the CloudNative Ecosystem is thriving. There is so many people doing so much awesome stuff that I have a lot to share with you. And what does that tell us about our spirit? It tells you about the spirit of resilience. You heard about that briefly in the conversation we just had with Stephen about our working group to align various parties and initiatives together, to bring inclusive naming to code. It's about resilience because we did not get demoralized. We did not say, "oh, it's a pandemic. I can't meet anyone. So this isn't happening." No, we kept going. And that is happening in inclusive naming that is happening in the CloudNative series we're doing, that's happening in the new members that are joining, as you may have seen Volcano Engine just joined as platinum member and that's super exciting. They come from China. They're part of the larger organization that builds Tik Tok, which is pretty cool as a frequent bruiser I can say that, in addition, on a more serious note, security is really key and as I was talking to someone just minutes ago, security is not something that's a fad. Security is something that as we keep innovating, as cloud native keeps being the ground zero, for all future innovation, it keeps evolving. The problems keep getting more complex and we have to keep solving them. So in that spirit, we in CNCF see it as our job, our duty, to enable the ecosystem to be better conversant in the security needs of our code. So to that end, we are launching the CKS program, which is a certification for our Kubernetes security specialist. And it's been in the works for awhile as many of you may know, and today we are able to accept registrations. So that's a really exciting piece of news, I recommend you go ahead and do that as part of the KubeCon registration folks have a discount to get started, and I think they should do it now because as I said, the security problems keep getting worse, keep getting more complicated. And this is a great baseline for folks to start when they are thinking about this. it's also a great boon for any company out there, whether they're end users, vendors, it's all sometimes a blurry line between the two, which is all healthy. Everybody needs developers who are security conversant I would say, and this certification help you helps you achieve that. So send all of your people to go take it. So that's sort of the announcements. Then other things I would like to share are as you go, sorry, were you saying something? >> No. Go ahead. >> No, as you know, we talked about the whole thing of team CloudNative is for everyone. Open source is for everyone And I'm really proud that CNCF has offered over 1000 diversity scholarships since 2016 to traditionally under-representing our marginalized groups. And I think that is so nice, and, but just the very, very beginning. As we grow into 2021, you will see more and more of these initiatives. Every member I talked to was so excited that we put our money where our mouth is, and we support people with scholarships, mentorships, and this is only going to grow. And it just so like at almost 17%, the CNCF mentors in our program are women. So for folks who are looking for that inspiration, for folks who want to see someone who looks like them in these places, they have more diverse people to look up to. And so overall, I think our DEI focus is something I'm very proud of and something you may hear about in other news items. And then finally, I would like to say is that CloudNative continues to grow. The cloud native wave is strong. The 2.0 for team CloudNative is going very well. For the CloudNative annual survey, 2020, we found an astonishing number of places where CloudNative technologies are in production. You heard some stories that I told in my keynote of people using multiple CNCF projects together. And these are amazing and users who have this running in production. So our ecosystem has matured. And today I can tell you that Kubernetes is used in production, by at about 83% of the places out there. And this is up by 5% from 78% last year. And just so much strength in this ecosystem. I mean, now at 92% of people are using containers. So at this point we are ubiquitous. And as you've heard from us in various times, our 70 plus project portfolio shows that we are the ground zero of innovation in cloud native. So if you asked me to summarize the news, it's number one, team CloudNative and open source is for everyone. Number two, we take pride in our diversity and over 1000 scholarships have been given out since 2016 to recipients from underrepresented groups. Number three, this is the home base for innovation with 83% of folks using Kubernetes in production and 70 plus projects that deliver a wide variety of support to enterprises as they modernize their software and utilize containers. >> Awesome. That was a great summary. First of all, you're a great host. You should be hosting theCUBE with us. Great keynote, love the virtual events that you guys have been doing, love the innovation. I think I would just say just from my perspective and being from there from the beginning is it's always been inclusive and the experience of the events and the community have been top-notch. People squabble, people talk, people have conversations, but at the end of the day, it is a great community and it's fun, memorable, and people are accepting, it's a great job. Stephen, good job as co-chair this year. Well done. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Take it easy. >> Okay, this is theCUBE virtual, we wish we were there in person, but we're not, we're remote. This is the virtual Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020, the Europe virtual edition. Happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Priyanka Sharma. She's the general manager of the CNCF. Priyanka, thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you. And we all get to be together even while we're apart. >> That's absolutely right. Thank you so much for having me Stu and great energy in the interwebs today with my keynote and everybody engaging and attending KubeCon. So, very happy to be here. >> All right, so I want to dig into your keynote a little bit. I had a bunch of key themes, a lot of pieces, and of course, community at the heart of it. When I spoke with you when you first took the job, of course, you've got strong background, you know this community really well. We've loved covering it for the last five years, but you talked about the foundation of doers and how that's powering the end user driven open tour. So talk to us a little bit about that, how is this community different from everything else. You know, open source always is community, but this feels a little bit special. >> Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, it is special. Yes, so when you think about the Cloud Native Ecosystem, right? There's so many people who've come together to create this amazing field that we all get to create. The awesome technology that people use to be part of this whole technology creation and deployment process. Those people are the end users first and foremost, they utilize the technology every day. And as time has grown, as time has gone by, they have played a bigger and bigger role. Over time they've become very sophisticated, they're contributing their own projects such as you know, I mean, you all know Envoy and a Jaeger came from Lyft and Uber respectively, but there's many more like Spotify and Wayfair, the furniture company. They have all submitted projects for the sandbox. So there was a lot of momentum, but not only are they creating their own technologies very needed and donating them. They're becoming the guider. They're becoming the guidance for the project that exists. They're giving feedback, they're sharing requirements. It's a very collaborative process and that's what is end-user-driven open source. Now this end user-driven-open source cannot happen by one contributor alone by one maintainer or alone by one company. No, it takes a lot of people. I mean, CNCF, as you know, has invested in its global community since day one. That's why we have the KubeCon EU, we have China events, we have North America. And just the other day I was speaking on a virtual Brazil event. There's just the geographic diversity is amazing. And by being able to reach out to a very large ecosystem and by especially having a formal role for end users, by having an end user member program with their own special interest groups and working groups, we've created a safe space where there is a neutral IP zone, open governance, and also a clear directive and shared partnership with the end users. So that ends up being a large group of people who are all doers, everybody's collaboration matters, and together they create end user-driven-open source. >> Well, Priyanka, I'm not sure that that most people understand really the full charter of what the CNCF does. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, obviously there's all the projects involved. You just brought up some of the end users and how you get engaged. There's also help along career development, when you talk to the individual developers and participants. So help us understand beyond the big events that we gather people at any given time with the smaller events, just, you know, what the CNCF its charter as these days. >> Absolutely, so as some of you know, the CNCF stands for Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And our objective is to host and proliferate technologies that support development, infrastructure development that is cloud native. Now what does cloud native mean, cloud native is when you develop, when you utilize cloud computing, which is the big clouds you must have heard of such as, Alibaba cloud, AWS, Google cloud platform, Azure, IBM, all these hyperscalers. They provide these offerings by which you don't need to have your own server farm, and you can buy compute from them and run your applications on that. When you do that, the way you develop software changes, it should change in order to maximize the value you get. So you started developing with micro services, containerization happens once that happens you need to orchestrate the containers, which is where Kubernetes our founding project comes in. And then you go from there because you have different complexities and observability, you have different complexities and storage and all the cloud native tech comes together to support you in that journey. So from a technology perspective that's what we do. As we have been so fortunate to develop this large ecosystem that so many people joining in of all kinds, we believe it is part of our responsibility to support this community in skill development and always like knowledge sharing. So knowledge sharing community empowers education. And that's how we talked about the events, right? Like KubeCon et cetera. But also these days, we are focusing a lot on our programs with the certifications we offer such as a CKA, which stands for a Certified Kubernetes Admin and CKAD, which stands for Certified Kubernetes Application Developer. To date, 15,000 plus people have taken these certifications successfully. So we have more and more people joining in these ranks. And we are here to support people as they build their careers, as they get more knowledgeable on cloud native, from in formal ways, such as training edX and in informal ways, such as KubeCon and the Meetups and the Webinars, you name it, and we're here for you. >> Well, you used a word that I want to touch on, responsibility, obviously in 2020, there's a lot going on Priyanka. So first of all, you talk about the global pandemic. Some of my favorite interviews I've done for this shows and others talking about how open source and communities are contributing to it. One of the interviews I have coming up for the KubeCon show is out of the Pronto area with how's my flattening, which uses data and visualization, really phenomenal to see how, you know, Kubernetes and collaboration allowed people to rally fast and share data and get information from the right people. The other piece is social justice. You announced a new working group for racial terminology, talk about, how's the CNCF dealing with, all the changes and all the things that are happening in 2020. And how are you helping the community get engaged and participate? >> Absolutely. 2020s is a very unique year. It's had very unique challenges. We've all been through it out together as a global community. So in that way, it has brought us all together, but the fissures and cracks that maybe were overlooked before have gotten deeper this year. And we are committed to bringing the open source cloud native way to help support this full global push to overcome 2020 as a year. (laughs) So part of that as you said, we have a working group to eradicate racially charged tech, sorry, I am really not speaking well to that. So part of our initiatives is a working group to eradicate racially charged terminology from code we're working on it, not just on the CNCF level, but on the entire Linux foundation level, by bringing together various folks, such as companies projects, regardless of where they stand, they don't need to be an LF project or a CNCF project, but we're sharing best practices on What should be the terminology we agree upon? What is the change management look like? And soon we want to really encourage the people who are making these positive steps with and enablement and incentive programs, such as prizes, et cetera. So I'm very committed to this. I think anyone and everyone has a home in open source. This cannot be, you know, the take ground of one type of person or one type of community. And we're going to do our very best to welcome each and every one. This world of technology has been built by the blood, sweat, and tears off many people, and we honor them all. And we also open our arms to more and more of you, no matter how few of people from your ecosystem or community you see in open source, join in, we welcome you.. we are here for you and this working group and this initiative hopes to voice exactly just that. >> Well, yeah, the KubeCons absolutely. I can speak from the event I've gone to, you know, strong diversity. We've really appreciated being able to hear those voices. When you talk about the collaboration, the community activity, we'd love when we can help support those from our team's standpoint, when we can, we want to be able to help those nonprofits, help those communities get their messages and do their call to actions. All right, Priyanka so much to cover. This week when I look at all the breakouts, when I look at the interviews and the technologies, there's a lot of emerging themes also in edge computing has been something we've been talking about for the last year or two, of course, IOT, DevSecOps, what are some of the hot technologies that you're seeing and making sure that the show covers. >> Well, you send them all. (laughs) No, but these are the key themes. Yes, absolutely. As you know, devices are proliferating across the globe. So many people have cell phones, with the coming of 5G things will be even more rocket ship. And these folks need to go cloud native to support development as this change happens, and Kubernetes and CNCF is here to support. We have projects such as KubeEdge. We have k3s from Rancher and the sandbox, all these are meant for edge deployment. So there's that focus that we have. There's always going to be DevSecOps. The minute there is this complexity, the minute there's this growth, new security vulnerabilities, pop up, new interfaces become exposed. And so we have to be on a constant watch. So DevSecOps is a theme that we are going to see a lot of innovation and development in. For anyone who may not be familiar with DevSecOps, DevSecOps does for security, what DevOps did for operations, which is shifted left into the application developers workflow, so that things have got faster so that there is a better collaboration between security teams and application development team. So these are absolutely trans, I think a trend we briefly touched upon is, end-user-driven open source. I think the voice of end users is going to grow bigger and more louder and just that much more critical. The ship has left the dock. And now it's just going to gain steam and gain steam. I think we're going to see more technology contributions from them. We're going to see much more utilization of cloud native from them. And we also will get lots of feedback and advice from them. And there'll be interwoven into the fabric of cloud native in a way like never before. >> Yeah, Priyanka, you've known this community, but now you're very steeped into it. You had to work with a lot of people. I'm curious, does anything, especially from those end users, you know, a big focus of what you've been talking about. Absolutely, it's so important that they not just use the technology, but are participate in it. It's been one of those big waves we've been watching in the open source community for a number of years. So any insight you can give us as to why it is so important to those end users, what is encouraging them, not just to, use these projects, but, you know, assigned people and sponsor events and have much deeper integration with this community. >> They don't integrate with this community. They are part of this community. That's one key thing to remember. I would say, when we all, like, I mean, CNCF is relatively young, it started end of 2015. I started working on a project in it in 2016. And back then we were talking about things like, what are microservices? How to do a lift and shift to the cloud, or what are containers, things like that, right? And there was maybe a bit of a gap in the knowledge that people had to acquire to get good at deploying containers, that's using microservices, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the last four years, huge leaps have been made by an users just because they were in the trenches, they were doing the work, right? So now their knowledge level has gone really up. And they've also started like knowing where the gaps are, what they need, because they're doing the building, they're the doers here. And so in that environment, it is a natural thing that they will have the best sense of where things should go next. They will have the best sense of what their own requirements are. And so it's an evolution of the end user community. It's an evolution of the doers. And I think that's why this trend is going to continue. And I would like to take like, not a credit, but I would say a tiny shoutout to the CNCF ecosystem program, which is run by Cheryl on my team. She's done a phenomenal job having been a developer herself to bring people and create safe spaces where the enhancers or the vendors are not like necessarily breathing down their neck and they can discuss amongst each other, the topics that matter. And I think that's gone a really long way. >> Yeah. There's, Cheryl's been doing some great work. I know I'm having a conversation with Liz Rice to talk about some of the new pooling, helping customers understand. It's such a broad ecosystem out there that, you know, we didn't even touch on. We're going to talk in many of the other interviews I have Priyanka. There's so many projects, new ways for sandbox and incubation and everything like that. It is definitely a challenge for everybody to look at this space. Want to give you the final word though. What do you want people to have as their takeaway from the event this time? >> Absolutely. Hi everybody. I am so happy. You all took the time and engaged with the community you joined in and attended KubeCon EU virtual, stay with us, partnering with us, come to our events, give us feedback, share ideas. We're all a foundation of doers. We're all team cloud native, and we're in this together. We will go through 2020, we'll come out strong. And this is just the beginning. >> Well, Priyanka, thank you so much. We love the partnership with the CNCF and definitely happy to be able to participate in the event again this year. >> Absolutely. Thank you so much Stu. >> All right, and stay tuned. Lots of coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 Europe the virtual edition. I'm Stu Minimam. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for many years, but a first time on the program. Priyanka Sharma, thank you so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, and Priyanka, let's not bury the lead or anything. The reason we're talking to you is the news. You've got a new job, but in an area that you know really well. So we've known you through the cloud native communities for a number of years. We see you at the shows. We see you online. So happy to share with our community you are now the general manager of the CNCF, so congratulations so much on the job. >> Thank you so much. I am so honored to have this opportunity, and I can't wait to work even more closely with the cloud native community than I have already. I mean, as you said, I've been involved for a long time. I actually just saw on my LinkedIn today that 2016 was when my conversation within the CNCF started. I was then working on the OpenTracing Project, which was the third project to join the foundation, and CNCF had started in 2015, so it was all very new. We were in conversations, and it was just such an exciting time, and that just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then with GitLab I served, I actually still serve, until the 31st, on the board. And now this, so I'm very, very excited. >> Yeah, well right. So you're a board member of the CNCF, but Priyanka, if you go back even further, we look at how did CNCF start. It was all around Kubernetes. Where did Kubernetes come from? It came from Google, and when I dug back far enough into your CV I found Google on there, too. So maybe just give us a little bit of your career arc, and what you're involved with for people that don't know you from all these communities and events. >> Sure, absolutely. So my career started at Google in Mountain View, and I was on the business side of things. I worked with AdSense products, and around that same time I had a bit of the entrepreneurial bite, so the bug bit me, and I first joined a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy later on, and then I went off on my own. That was a very interesting time for me, because that was when I truly learned about the power of opensource. One of the products that me and my co-founder were building was an opensource time tracker, and I just saw the momentum on these communities, and that's when the dev tools love started. And then I got involved with Heavybit Industries, which is an accelerator for dev tools. There I met so many companies that were either in the cloud space, or just general other kinds of dev tools, advised a few, ended up joining LightStep, where the founders, them and a few community members were the creators of the OpenTracing standard. Got heavily, heavily involved in that project, jumped into cloud native with that, was a project contributor, organizer, educator, documentarian, all kinds of things, right, for two-plus years, and then GitLab with the board membership, and that's how I saw, actually, the governance side. Until then it had all been the community, the education, that aspect, and then I understood how Chris and Dan had built this amazing foundation that's done so much from the governance perspective. So it's been a long journey and it all feels that it's been coming towards in this awesome new direction. >> Well, yeah. Congratulations to you, and right, CNCF, in their press release I see Dan talked about you've been a speaker, you've been a governing board member, you participate in this, and you're going to help with that next phase, and you teased out a little bit, there's a lot of constituencies in the CNCF. There's a large user participation. We always love talking at KubeCon about the people not only just using the technology, but contributing back, the role of opensource, the large vendor ecosystem, a lot there. So give us your thought as to kind of where the CNCF is today, and where it needs to continue and go in the future. >> Absolutely. So in my opinion the CNCF is a breakout organization. I mean, we're approaching 600 members, of which 142 are end users. So with that number the CNCF is actually the largest, has the largest end user community of all opensource foundations. So tremendous progress has been made, especially from those days back in 2016 when we were the third project being considered. So leaps and bounds, so impressive. And I think... If you think about what's the end user storyline right now, so the CNCF did a survey last year, and so 84% of the people surveyed were using containers in production, and 78% were using Kubernetes in production. Amazing numbers, especially since both are up by about 15, 20% year over year. So this move towards devops, towards cloud native, towards Kubernetes is happening and happening really strong. The project has truly established itself. Kubernetes has won, in my opinion, and that's really good. I think now when it comes to the second wave, it is my perspective that the end user communities and the... Just the momentum that we have right now, we need to build and grow it. We need deeper developer engagement, because if you think about it, there's not just one graduated project in CNCF. There are 10. So Kubernetes being one of them, but there's Prometheus, there's Envoy, Jaeger, et cetera, et cetera. So we have amazing technologies that are all gaining adoption. Being graduated means that they have fast security audits, they have diverse contributors, they have safe, good governance, so as an end user you can feel very secure adopting them, and so we have so much to do to expand on the knowledge of those projects. We have so much to make software just better every day, so that's my one vector in my opinion. The second vector, I would say it has been more opportunistic. As you know, we are all living in a very unprecedented time with a global pandemic. Many of us are sheltering in place. Many are... Generally, life is changed. You are in media. You know this much better than me, I'm sure, that the number of, the amount of digital consumption has just skyrocketed. People are reading that many more articles. I'm watching that many more memes and jokes online, right? And what that means is that more and more companies are reaching that crazy web scale that started this whole cloud native and devops space in the first time, first place with Google and Netflix being D-to-C companies just building out what eventually became cloud native, SRE, that kind of stuff. So in general, online consumption's higher, so more and more companies need to be cloud native to support that kind of traffic. Secondly, even for folks that are not creating content, just a lot of the workflows have to move online. More people will do online banking. More people will do ecommerce. It's just the shift is happening, and for that we, as the foundation, need to be ready to support the end users with education, enablement, certifications, training programs, just to get them across that chasm into a new, even more online-focused reality. >> Yeah, and I say, Priyanka, that tees up one of the ways that most people are familiar with the CNCF is through the event. So KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, really the signature event. Tremendous growth over the last few years. You actually had involvement in a virtual event, the Cloud Native Summit recently. For KubeCon-- >> Yes. >> The European show is announced virtual. We know that there's still some uncertainty when it comes to the North America show. Supposed to be in my backyard here in Boston, so we'd love for it to happen. If it happens-- >> Of course. >> If not, we'll be there virtually or not. Give us a little bit your experience with the Cloud Native Summit, and what's your thinking today? We understand, as you said, a lot of uncertainty as to what goes on. Absolutely, even when physical events come back in the future, we expect this hybrid model to be with us for a long time. >> I definitely hear that. Completely agree that everything is uncertain and things have changed very rapidly for our world, particularly when it comes to events. We're lucky at the CNCF to be working with the LF Events team, which is just best in class, and we are working very hard every day, them, doing a lot of the lion's share of the work of building the best experience we can for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon EU, which, as you said, went virtual. I'm really looking forward to it because what I learned from the Cloud Native Summit Online, which was the event you mentioned that I had hosted in April, is that people are hungry to just engage, to see each other, to communicate however they can in this current time. Today I don't think the technology's at a point where physical events can be overshadowed by virtual, so there's still something very special about seeing someone face-to-face, having a coffee, and having that banter, conversations. But at the same time there are some benefits to online. So as an example, with the Cloud Native Summit, really, it was just me and a few community folks who were sad we didn't get to go to Amsterdam, so we're like, "Let's just get together in a group, "have some fun, talk to some maintainers," that kind of thing. I expected a few hundred, max. Thousands of people showed up, and that was just mind blowing because I was like, "Wait, what?" (chuckling) But it was so awesome because not only were there a lot of people, there were people from just about every part of the globe. So normally you have US, Europe, that kind of focus, and there's the Asia-PAC events that cater to that, but here in that one event where, by the way, we were talking to each other in realtime, there were folks from Asia-PAC, there were folks from Americas, EU, also the African continent, so geo meant nothing anymore. And that was very awesome. People from these different parts of the world were talking, engaging, learning, all at the same time, and I think with over 20,000 people expected at KubeCon EU, with it being virtual, we'll see something similar, and I think that's a big opportunity for us going forward. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. There are some new opportunities, some new challenges. I think back to way back in January I got to attend the GitLab event, and you look at GitLab, a fully remote company, but talking about the benefits of still getting together and doing things online. You think of the developer communities, they're used to working remote and working across different timezones, but there is that need to be able to get together and collaborate, and so we've got some opportunities, we've got some challenges when remote, so I guess, yeah, Priyanka. Give me the final word, things you want to look forward to, things we should be expecting from you and the CNCF team going forward. I guess I'll mention for our audience, I guess, Dan Kohn staying part of Linux Foundation, doing some healthcare things, will still stay a little involved, and Chris Aniszczyk, who's the CTO, still the CTO. I just saw him. Did a great panel for DockerCon with Kelsey Hightower, Michelle Noorali, and Sean Connelly, and all people we know that-- >> Right. >> Often are speaking at KubeCon, too. So many of the faces staying the same. I'm not expecting a big change, but what should we expect going forward? >> That's absolutely correct, Stu. No big changes. My first big priority as I join is, I mean, as you know, coming with the community background, with all this work that we've put into education and learning from each other, my number one goal is going to be to listen and learn in a very diverse set of personas that are part of this whole community. I mean, there's the board, there is the technical oversight committee, there is the project maintainers, there's the contributors, there are the end users, potential developers who could be contributors. There's just so many different types of people all united in our interest and desire to learn more about cloud native. So my number one priority is going to listen and learn, and as I get more and more up to speed I'm very lucky that Chris Aniszczyk, who has built this with Dan, is staying on and is going to be advising me, guiding me, and working with me. Dan as well is actually going to be around to help advise me and also work on some key initiatives, in addition to his big, new thing with public health and the Linux Foundation. You never expect anything average with Dan, so it's going to be amazing. He's done so much for this foundation and brought it to this point, which in my mind, I mean, it's stupendous the amount of work that's happened. It's so cool. So I'm really looking forward to building on this amazing foundation created by Dan and Chris under Jim. I think that what they have done by not only providing a neutral IP zone where people can contribute and use projects safely, they've also created an ecosystem where there is events, there is educational activity, projects can get documentation support, VR support. It's a very holistic view, and that's something, in my opinion, new, at least in the way it's done. So I just want to build upon that, and I think the end user communities will keep growing, will keep educating, will keep working together, and this is a team effort that we are all in together. >> Well, Priyanka, congratulations again. We know your community background and strong community at the CNCF. Looking forward to seeing that both in the virtual events in the near term and back when we have physical events again in the future, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right. Be sure to check out thecube.net. You'll see all the previous events we've done with the CNCF, as well as, as mentioned, we will be helping keep cloud native connected at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, the virtual event in August, as well as the North American event later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (smooth music)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube Covering CloudNow 7th Annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >> Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at Facebook Headquarters. We are here for the 7th Annual CloudNow Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Welcoming to the Cube for the first time, one of tonight's winners, we have Charu Sharma, the Founder and CEO of Nextplay.ai. Charu, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thanks Lisa, I'm really excited to be talking to you. >> And congratulations on your award. Your pedigree, when I looked you up on LinkedIn, I thought wow, where do I even start, the things you've accomplished in such a short time period are pretty impressive. I want to share a few with our guests. You've built, in college, in your spare time, two award-winning start-up companies out of your dorm room before you got napped up by LinkedIn to grow their talent solutions revenue. You've won awards by Grace Hopper. We mention tonight you're here with CloudNow, one of the top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation. Tell us about, I'd love to get your story of what inspired you to go off and found Nextplay.ai, the inspiration, also the chutzpah to say, "You know what I want to do this, "and I need to go get funding" which is really challenging for women in technical roles to do. Tell us about that. >> Yeah, so tonight I'll be giving a talk next to Sheryl Sandberg and that's nothing short of a miracle for me because I grew up in a family in India where women were not allowed to work, and so growing up it was important for me to have access to economic opportunities and that's how I came to the US for a scholarship, and I'm here today because a lot of mentors serendipitously came in my life and opened doors for me. So, to pay it forward, when I worked at LinkedIn before, I built a mentoring program for women at LinkedIn specifically cuz I think in the workplace especially women, minorities, and introverts suffer in finding a sponsor in helping open doors for you and mentors at your company can specially help you navigate the political landscape and help you grow your career at the company which helps the companies with retention as well. Exactly two years ago I started Nextplay.ai to be able to do this at scale, so today we work with companies from Coca Cola to Lyft to Splunk, and we not only connect their employees internally for mentorship, we also have robust analytics to show the ROI on retention. >> I was looking at some of your stats, I was telling you before we went live, I geek out on stats, that really show that your technology can make significant business impact for, you mention Coca Cola, Lyft, Splunk, etcetera but you obviously saw a gap a few years ago when you got into tech yourself saying not only do we know the numbers and the stats of women in technical roles as being quite low, but one of the things that you saw is one of the things we need to do to help increase those numbers is start internally and mentoring these women. To your point, of not just helping them establish confidence to stay but navigate that political landscape. I think that's a really unique opportunity, when you pitched this idea to these Cs, what was their response? >> Yeah, so mentorship is not an established product category, and on top of that, I inserted gender, race, accent, age, etcetera, and so frankly I got mixed opinions, but I chose to focus on the people who saw the big vision and who cared about the story and the impact something like this could have, so LinkedIn's executives, 500 Start-ups, TechCrunch's former CEO, who's a woman, they're some of the earliest investors who put their bets on us. Today we have shown success stories at every scale, so after six months of working with us employees are 25% more likely to recommend working at their company which actually when you do the math, it's huge. It saves millions of dollars for companies. There was a woman at a company who became the first woman at her company to get promoted while away on mat leave, that's huge. >> Wow, that is huge. >> A new product manager was able to, because of us, connect with somebody who they otherwise wouldn't know, and they were able to help identify a multi-million dollar market opportunity for the company, so there are definitely these case studies which is now creating a movement and now we have over 300 companies who want to work with us. They're on a waiting list. >> A waiting list? >> Mmhhm So we're definitely creating this momentum. >> And we talk about groundswell and momentum, especially at an event like tonight where there's over 300 attendees, 1o winners, one of them being yourself, and there was no advertising to buy tickets because the groundswell is growing so much. The trajectory that Nextplay.ai is on, in two years is pretty steep, you got some exciting things coming up in March, tell us about that. >> Yes, thank you, so when ai play and we sell to enterprise companies to do their mentoring and sponsorship programs internally for talent retention, that said, we started the company to help level the playing field so now that we're relatively stable and are a strong robust team with decent traction, this March we want to give a give back, so we're launching a social impact campaign where around the world we're going to help 100,000 women get mentored. So, if you want to host events at your company, if you want to get involved as a mentor or a mentee, please e-mail me at charu@nextplay.ai. >> And people can also go to the website to find out more information about that? >> Not about that campaign specifically yet, but they'll find my contact information, so it's nextplay.ai. >> And even at your Twitter handle which is probably in the lower third here. >> Yes >> Excellent, so congratulations on the award. The amount of work that you have done in such a short period of time is incredible. I can see it in your attitude and your smile and your energy, congratulations on getting to present to Sheryl Sandberg tonight and for seeing this opportunity in the market to help with that retention from within. What a great opportunity and thanks again. >> Thank you Lisa. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I am Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook headquarters, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California, it's The Cube, covering Big Data Silicon Valley 20-17. (rhythmic music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live in Silicon Valley for Big Data SV, Big Data Silicon Valley in conjunction with Strata + Hadoob. This is the week where it all happens in Silicon Valley around the emergence of the Big Data as it goes to the next level. The Cube is actually on the ground covering it like a blanket. I'm John Furrier. My cohost, George Gilbert with Boogie Bond. And our next guest, we have two executives from Zeloni, Ben Sharma, who's the founder and CEO, and Tony Fischer, SVP and strategy. Guys, welcome back to The Cube. Good to see you. >> Thank you for having us back. >> You guys are great guests. You're in New York for Big Data NYC, and a lot is going on, certainly, here, and it's just getting kicked off with Strata-Hadoob, they got the sessions today, but you guys have already got some news out there. Give us the update. What's the big discussion at the show? >> So yeah, 20-16 was a great year for us. A lot of growth. We tripled our customer base, and a lot of interest in data lake, as customers are going from say Pilot and POCs into production implementation so far though. And in conjunction with that, this week we launched what we call a solution named Data Lake in a Box, appropriately, right? So what that means is we're bringing the full stack together to customers, so that we can get a data lake up and running in eight weeks time frame, with enterprise create data ingestion from their source systems hydrated into the data lake and ready for analytics. >> So is it a pretty big box, and is it waterproof? (all laughing) I mean, this is the big discussion now, pun intended. But the data lake is evolving, so I wanted to get your take on it. This is kind of been a theme that's been leading up and now front and center here on The Cube. Already the data lake has changed, also we've heard, I think Dave Alante in New York said data swamp. But using the data is critical on a data lake. So as it goes to more mature model of leveraging the data, what are the key trends right now? What are you guys seeing? Because this is a hot topic that everyone is talking about. >> Well, that's a good distinction that we like to make, is the difference between a data swamp and a data lake. >> And a data lake is much more governed. It has the rigor, it has the automation, it has a lot of the concepts that people are used to from traditional architectures, only we apply them in the scale-out architecture. So we put together a maturity model that really maps out a customer's journey throughout the big data and the data lake experience. And each phase of this, we can see what the customer's doing, what their trends are and where they want to go, and we can advise to them the right way to move forward. And so a lot of the customers we see are kind of in kind of what we call the ignore stage. I'd say most of the people we talk to are just ignoring. They don't have things active, but they're doing a lot of research. They're trying to figure out what's next. And we want to move them from there. The next stage up is called store. And store is basically just the sandbox environment. "I'm going to stick stuff in there." "I'm going to hope something comes out of it." No collaboration. But then, moving forward, there's the managed phase, the automated phase, and the optimized phase. And our goal is to move them up into those phases as quickly as possible. And data lake in a box is an effort to do that, to leapfrog them into a managed data lake environment. >> So that's kind of where the swamp analogy comes in, because the data lake, the swamp is kind of dirty, where you can almost think, "Okay, the first step is store it." And then they get busy or they try to figure out how to operationalize it, and then it's kind of like, "Uh ..." So your point, they're trying to get to that. So you guys get 'em to that set up, and then move them quickly to value? Is that kind of the approach? >> Yeah. So, time to value is critical, right? So how do you reduce the time to insight from the time the data is produced by the date producer, till the time you can make the data available to the data consumer for analytics and downstream use cases. So that's kind of our core focus in bringing these solutions to the market. >> Dave often and I were talking, and George always talk about the value of data at the right time at the right place, is the critical lynch-pin for the value, whether it's an app-driven, or whatever. So the data lake, you never know what data in the data lake will need to be pulled out and put into either real time or an app. So you have to assume at any given moment there's going to be data value. >> Sure >> So that, conceptually, people can get that. But how do you make that happen? Because that's a really hard problem. How do you guys tackle that when a customer says, "Hey, I want to do the data lake. "I've got to have the coverage. "I got to know who's accessing stuff. "But at the end of the day, "I got to move the data to where it's valuable." >> Sure. So the approach we have taken is with an integrated platform with a common metadata layer. Metadata is the key. So, using this common metadata layer, being able to do managed ingestion from various different sources, being able to do data validation and data quality, being able to manage the life cycle of the data, being able to generate these insights about the data itself, so that you can use that effectively for data science or for downstream applications and use cases is critical based on our experience of taking these applications from, say, a POC pilot phase into a production phase. >> And what's the next step, once you guys get to that point with the metadata? Because, like, I get that, it's like everyone's got the metadata focus. Now, I'm the data engineer, the data NG or the geek, the supergeek and then you've got the data science, then the analysts, then there will probably be a new category, a bot or something AI will do something. But you can have a spectrum of applications on the data side. How do they get access to the metadata? Is it through the machine learning? Do you guys have anything unique there that makes that seamless or is that the end goal? >> Sure, do you want to take that? >> Yes sure, it's a multi-pronged answer, but I'll start and you can jump in. One of the things we provide as part of our overall platform is a product called Micah. And Micah is really the kind of on-ramp to the data. And all those people that you just named, we love them all, but their access to the data is through a self-service data preparation product, and key to that is the metadata repository. So, all the metadata is out there; we call it a catalog at that point, and so they can go in, look at the catalog, get a sense for the data, get an understanding for the form and function of the data, see who uses it, see where it's used, and determine if that's the data that they want, and if it is, they have the ability to refine it further, or they can put it in a shopping cart if they have access to it, they can get it immediately, they can refine it, if they don't have access to it, there's an automatic request that they can get access to it. And so it's a onramp concept, of having a card catalog of all the information that's out there, how it's being used, how it's been refined, to allow the end user to make sure that they've got the right data, they can be positioned for their ultimate application. >> And just to add to what Tony said, because we are using this common metadata layer, and capturing metadata every instance, if you will, we are serving it up to the data consumers, using a rich catalog, so that a lot of our enterprise customers are now starting to create what they consider a data marketplace or a data portal within their organization, so that they're able to catalog not just the data that's in the data lake, but also data that's in other data stores. And provide one single unified view of these data sets, so that your data scientists can come in and see is this a data set that I can use for my model building? What are the different attributes of this data set? What is the quality of the data? How fresh is the data? And those kind of traits, so that they are effective in their analytical journey. >> I think that's the key thing that's interesting to me, is that you're seeing the big data explosions over the past ten years, eight years, we've been covering The Cube since the dupe world started. But now, it's the data set world, so it's a big data set in this market. The data sets are the key because that's what data scientists want to wrangle around with, and sling data sets with whatever tooling they want to use. Is that kind of the same trend that you guys see? >> That's correct. And also what we're seeing in the marketplace, is that customers are moving from a single architecture to a distributed architecture, where they may have a hybrid environment with some things being instantiated in the Cloud, some things being on PRIM. So how do you not provide a unified interface across these multiple environments, and in a governed way, so that the right people have access to the right data, and it's not the data swamp. >> Okay, so lets go back to the maturity model because I like that framework. So now you've just complicated the heck out of it. Cause now you've got Cloud, and then on PRIM, and then now, how do you put that prism of maturity model, on now hybrid, so how does that cross-connect there? And a second follow-up to that is, where are the customers on this progress bar? I'm sure they're different by customer but, so, maturity model to the hybrid, and then trends in the customer base that you're seeing? >> Alright, I'll take the second one, and then you can take the first one, okay? So, the vast majority of the people that we work with, and the people, the prospects customers, analysts we've talked to, other industry dignitaries, they put the vast majority of the customers in the ignore stage. Really just doing their research. So a good 50% plus of most organizations are still in that stage. And then, the data swamp environment, that I'm using it to store stuff, hopefully I'll get something good out of it. That's another 25% of the population. And so, most of the customers are there, and we're trying to move them kind of rapidly up and into a managed and automated data lake environment. The other trend along these lines that we're seeing, that's pretty interesting, is the emergence of IT in the big data world. It used to be a business user's world, and business users built these sandboxes, and business users did what they wanted to. But now, we see organizations that are really starting to bring IT into the fold, because they need the governance, they need the automation, they need the type of rigor that they're used to, in other data environments, and has been lacking in the big data environment. >> And you've got the IOT code cracking the code on the IOT side which has created another dimension of complexity. On the numbers of the 50% that ignore, is that profile more for Fortune 1000? >> It's larger companies, it's Fortune, and Global 2000. >> Got it, okay, and the terms of the hybrid maturity model, how's that, and add a third dimension, IOT, we've got a multi-dimensional chess game going here. >> I think they way we think about it is, that they're different patterns of data sets coming in. So they could be batched, they could be files, or database extracts, or they could be streams, right? So as long as you think about a converged architecture that can handle these different patterns, then you can map different use cases whether they are IOT and streaming use cases versus what we are seeing is that a lot of companies are trying to replace their operational analytics platforms with a data lake environment, and they're building their operational analytics on top of the data lake, correct? So you need to think more from an abstraction layer, how do you abstract it out? Because one of the challenges that we see customers facing, is that they don't want to get sticky with one Cloud service provider because they may have multiple Cloud service providers, >> John: It's a multi-Cloud world right now. >> So how do you leverage that, where you have one Cloud service provider in one geo, another Cloud service provider in another geo, and still being able to have an abstraction layer on top of it, so that you're building applications? >> So do you guys provide that data layer across that abstraction? >> That is correct, yes, so we leverage the ecosystem, but what we do is add the data management and data governance layer, we provide that abstraction, so that you can be on PREM, you can be in Cloud service provider one, or Cloud service provider two. You still have the same controls, and same governance functions as you build your data lake environment. >> And this is consistent with some of the Cube interviews we had all day today, and other Cube interviews, where when you had the Cloud, you're renting basically, but you own your data. You get to have a nice ... And that metadata seems to be the key, that's the key, right? For everything. >> That's right. And now what we're seeing is that a lot of our Enterprise customers are looking at bringing in some of the public cloud infrastructure into their on-PRAM environment as they are going to be available in appliances and things like that, right? So how do you then make sure that whatever you're doing in a non-enterprise cloud environment you are also able to extend it to the enterprise-- >> And the consequences to the enterprise is that the enterprise multiple jobs, if they don't have a consistent data layer ... >> Sure, yeah. >> It's just more redundancy. >> Exactly. >> Not redundancy, duplication actually. >> Yeah, duplication and difficulty of rationalizing it together. >> So let me drill down into a little more detail on the transition between these sort of maturity phases? And then the movement into production apps. I'm curious to know, we've heard Tableau, XL, Power BI, Click I guess, being-- sort of adapting to being front ends to big data. But they don't, for their experience to work they can't really handle big data sets. So you need the MPP sequel database on the data lake. And I guess the question there is is there value to be gotten or measurable value to be gotten just from turning the data lake into you know, interactive BI kind of platform? And sort of as the first step along that maturity model. >> One of the patterns we were seeing is that serving LIR is becoming more and more mature in the data lake, so that earlier it used to be mainly batch type of workloads. Now, with MPP engines running on the data lake itself, you are able to connect your existing BI applications, whether it's Tableau, Click, Power BI, and others, to these engines so that you are able to get low-latency query response times and are able to slice-and-dice your data sets in the data lake itself. >> But you're essentially still, you have to sample the data. You can't handle the full data set unless you're working with something like Zoom Data. >> Yeah, so there are physical limitations obviously. And then there are also this next generation of BI tools which work in a converged manner in the data lake itself. So there's like Zoom Data, Arcadia, and others that are able to kind of run inside the data lake itself instead of you having to have an external environment like the other BI tools, so we see that as a pattern. But if you already are an enterprise, you have on board a BI platform, how do you leverage that with the data lake as part of the next-generation architecture is a key trend that we are seeing. >> So that your metadata helps make that from swamp to curated data lake. >> That's right, and not only that what we have done, as Tony was mentioning, in our Micah product we have a self-service catalog and then we provide a shopping cart experience where you can actually source data sets into the shopping cart, and we let them provision a sandbox. And when they provision the sandbox, they can actually launch Tableau or whatever the BI tool of choice is on that sandbox, so that they can actually-- and that sandbox could exist in the data lake or it could exist on a relational data store or an MPP data store that's outside of the data lake. That's part of your modern data architecture. >> But further to your point, if people have to throw out all of their decision support applications and their BI applications in order to change their data infrastructure, they're not going to do it. >> Understood. >> So you have to make that environment work and that's what Ben's referring to with a lot of the new accelerator tools and things that will sit on top of the data lake. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate it. I'll give you guys the final word in the segment ... What do you expect this week? I mean, obviously, we've been seeing the consolidation. You're starting to see the swim lanes of with Spark and Open Source and you see the cloud and IOT colliding, there's a huge intersection with deep learning, AI is certainly hyped up now beyond all recognition but it's essentially deep learning. Neural networks meets machine learning. That's been around before, but now freely available with Cloud and Compute. And so kind of a interesting dynamic that's rockin' the big data world. Your thoughts on what we're going to see this week and how that relates to the industry? >> I'll take a stab at it and you may feel free to jump in. I think what we'll see is that lot of customers that have been playing with big data for a couple of years are now getting to a point where what worked for one or two use cases now needs to be scaled out and provided at an enterprise scale. So they're looking at a managed and a governance layer to put on top of the platform. So they can enable machine learning and AI and all those use cases, because business is asking for them. Right? Business is asking for how they can bring intenser flow and run on the data lake itself, right? So we see those kind of requirements coming up more and more frequently. >> Awesome. Tony? >> What he said. >> And enterprise readiness certainly has to be table-- there's a lot of table stakes in the enterprise. It's not like, easy to get into, you can see Google kind of just putting their toe in the water with the Google cloud, tenser flow, great highlight they got spanner, so all these other things like latency rearing their heads again. So these are all kind of table stakes. >> Yeah, and the other thing, moving forward with respect to machine learning and some of the advanced algorithms, what we're doing now and some of the research we're doing is actually using machine learning to manage the data lake, which is a new concept, so when we get to the optimized phase of our maturity model, a lot of that has to do with self-correcting and self-automating. >> I need some machine learning and some AI, so does George and we need machine learning to watch the machine learn, and then algorithmists for algorithms. It's a crazy world, exciting time for us. >> Are we going to have a bot next time when we come here? (all laughing) >> We're going to chat off of messenger, we just came from south by southwest. Guys, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great insight and congratulations on the continued momentum. This is The Cube breakin' it down with experts, CEOs, entrepreneurs, all here inside The Cube. Big Data Sv, I'm John for George Gilbert. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks! (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon North America 2023. Obviously, CUBE's coverage with our CUBE Center Report. We're not there on the ground, but we have folks and our CUBE Alumni there. We have entrepreneurs there. Of course, we want to be there in person, but we're remote. We've got Ben Hirschberg, CTO and Co-Founder of Armo, a cloud native security startup, well positioned in this industry. He's there in Seattle. Ben, thank you for coming on and sharing what's going on with theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, John. >> So we had written on you guys up on SiliconANGLE. Congratulations on your momentum and traction. But let's first get into what's going on there on the ground? What are some of the key trends? What's the most important story being told there? What is the vibe? What's the most important story right now? >> So I think, I would like to start here with the I think the most important thing was that I think the event is very successful. Usually, the Cloud Native Security Day usually was part of KubeCon in the previous years and now it became its own conference of its own and really kudos to all the organizers who brought this up in, actually in a short time. And it wasn't really clear how many people will turn up, but at the end, we see a really nice turn up and really great talks and keynotes around here. I think that one of the biggest trends, which haven't started like in this conference, but already we're talking for a while is supply chain. Supply chain is security. I think it's, right now, the biggest trend in the talks, in the keynotes. And I think that we start to see companies, big companies, who are adopting themselves into this direction. There is a clear industry need. There is a clear problem and I think that the cloud native security teams are coming up with tooling around it. I think for right now we see more tools than adoption, but the adoption is always following the tooling. And I think it already proves itself. So we have just a very interesting talk this morning about the OpenSSL vulnerability, which was I think around Halloween, which came out and everyone thought that it's going to be a critical issue for the whole cloud native and internet infrastructure and at the end it turned out to be a lesser problem, but the reason why I think it was understood that to be a lesser problem real soon was that because people started to use (indistinct) store software composition information in the environment so security teams could look into, look up in their systems okay, what, where they're using OpenSSL, which version they are using. It became really soon real clear that this version is not adopted by a wide array of software out there so the tech surface is relatively small and I think it already proved itself that the direction if everyone is talking about. >> Yeah, we agree, we're very bullish on this move from the Cloud Native Foundation CNCF that do the security conference. Amazon Web Services has re:Invent. That's their big show, but they also have re:Inforce, the security show, so clearly they work together. I like the decoupling, very cohesive. But you guys have Kubescape of Kubernetes security. Talk about the conversations that are there and that you're hearing around why there's different event what's different around KubeCon and CloudNativeCon than this Cloud Native SecurityCon. It's not called KubeSucSecCon, it's called Cloud Native SecurityCon. What's the difference? Are people confused? Is it clear? What's the difference between the two shows? What are you hearing? >> So I think that, you know, there is a good question. Okay, where is Cloud Native Computing Foundation came from? Obviously everyone knows that it was somewhat coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes. It was a clear understanding in the industry that there are different efforts where the industry needs to come together without looking be very vendor-specific and try to sort out a lot of issues in order to enable adoption and bring great value and I think that the main difference here between KubeCon and the Cloud Native Security Conference is really the focus, and not just on Kubernetes, but the whole ecosystem behind that. The way we are delivering software, the way we are monitoring software, and all where Kubernetes is only just, you know, maybe the biggest clog in the system, but, you know, just one of the others and it gives great overview of what you have in the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think it's a good call. I would add that what I'm hearing too is that security is so critical to the business model of every company. It's so mainstream. The hackers have a great business model. They make money, their costs are lower than the revenue. So the business of hacking in breaches, ransomware all over the place is so successful that they're playing offense, everyone's playing defense, so it's about time we can get focus to really be faster and more nimble and agile on solving some of these security challenges in open source. So I think that to me is a great focus and so I give total props to the CNC. I call it the event operating system. You got the security group over here decoupled from the main kernel, but they work together. Good call and so this brings back up to some of the things that are going on so I have to ask you, as your startup as a CTO, you guys have the Kubescape platform, how do you guys fit into the landscape and what's different from your tools for Kubernetes environments versus what's out there? >> So I think that our journey is really interesting in the solution space because I think that our mode really tries to understand where security can meet the actual adoption because as you just said, somehow we have to sort out together how security is going to be automated and integrated in its best way. So Kubescape project started as a Kubernetes security posture tool. Just, you know, when people are really early in their adoption of Kubernetes systems, they want to understand whether the installation is is secure, whether the basic configurations are look okay, and giving them instant feedback on that, both in live systems and in the CICD, this is where Kubescape came from. We started as an open source project because we are big believers of open source, of the power of open source security, and I can, you know I think maybe this is my first interview when I can say that Kubescape was accepted to be a CNCF Sandbox project so Armo was actually donating the project to the CNCF, I think, which is a huge milestone and a great way to further the adoption of Kubernetes security and from now on we want to see where the users in Armo and Kubescape project want to see where the users are going, their Kubernetes security journey and help them to automatize, help them to to implement security more fast in the way the developers are using it working. >> Okay, if you don't mind, I want to just get clarification. What's the difference between the Armo platform and Kubescape because you have Kubescape Sandbox project and Armo platform. Could you talk about the differences and interaction? >> Sure, Kubescape is an open source project and Armo platform is actually a managed platform which runs Kubescape in the cloud for you because Kubescape is part, it has several parts. One part is, which is running inside the Kubernetes cluster in the CICD processes of the user, and there is another part which we call the backend where the results are stored and can be analyzed further. So Armo platform gives you managed way to run the backend, but I can tell you that backend is also, will be available within a month or two also for everyone to install on their premises as well, because again, we are an open source company and we are, we want to enable users, so the difference is that Armo platform is a managed platform behind Kubescape. >> How does Kubescape differ from closed proprietary sourced solutions? >> So I can tell you that there are closed proprietary solutions which are very good security solutions, but I think that the main difference, if I had to pick beyond the very specific technicalities is the worldview. The way we see that our user is not the CISO. Our user is not necessarily the security team. From our perspective, the user is the DevOps and the developers who are working on the Kubernetes cluster day to day and we want to enable them to improve their security. So actually our approach is more developer-friendly, if I would need to define it very shortly. >> What does this risk calculation score you guys have in Kubscape? That's come up and we cover that in our story. Can you explain to the folks how that fits in? Is it Kubescape is the platform and what's the benefit, what's the purpose? >> So the risk calculation is actually a score we are giving to clusters in order for the users to understand where they are standing in the general population, how they are faring against a perfect hardened cluster. It is based on the number of different tests we are making. And I don't want to go into, you know, the very specifics of the mathematical functions, but in general it takes into account how many functions are failing, security tests are failing inside your cluster. How many nodes you are having, how many workloads are having, and creating this number which enables you to understand where you are standing in the global, in the world. >> What's the customer value that you guys pitching? What's the pitch for the Armo platform? When you go and talk to a customer, are they like, "We need you." Do they come to you? Is it word of mouth? You guys have a strategy? What's the pitch? What's so appealing to the customers? Why are they enthusiastic about you guys? >> So John, I can tell you, maybe it's not so easy to to say the words, but I nearly 20 years in the industry and though I've been always around cyber and the defense industry and I can tell you that I never had this journey where before where I could say that the the customers are coming to us and not we are pitching to customers. Simply because people want to, this is very easy tool, very very easy to use, very understandable and it very helps the engineers to improve security posture. And they're coming to us and they're saying, "Well, awesome, okay, how we can like use it. Do you have a graphical interface?" And we are pointing them to the Armor platform and they are falling in love and coming to us even more and we can tell you that we have a big number of active users behind the platform itself. >> You know, one of the things that comes up every time at KubeCon and Cloud NativeCon when we're there, and we'll be in Amsterdam, so folks watching, you know, we'll see onsite, developer productivity is like the number one thing everyone talks about and security is so important. It's become by default a blocker or anchor or a drag on productivity. This is big, the things that you're mentioning, easy to use, engineering supporting it, developer adoption, you know we've always said on theCUBE, developers will be the de facto standards bodies by their choices 'cause developers make all the decisions. So if I can go faster and I can have security kind of programmed in, I'm not shifting left, it's just I'm just having security kind of in there. That's the dream state. Is that what you guys are trying to do here? Because that's the nirvana, everyone wants to do that. >> Yeah, I think your definition is like perfect because really we had like this, for a very long time we had this world where we decoupled security teams from developers and even for sometimes from engineering at all and I think for multiple reasons, we are more seeing a big convergence. Security teams are becoming part of the engineering and the engineering becoming part of the security and as you're saying, okay, the day-to-day world of developers are becoming very tangled up in the good way with security, so the think about it that today, one of my developers at Armo is creating a pull request. He's already, code is already scanned by security scanners for to test for different security problems. It's already, you know, before he already gets feedback on his first time where he's sharing his code and if there is an issue, he already can solve it and this is just solving issues much faster, much cheaper, and also you asked me about, you know, the wipe in the conference and we know no one can deny the current economic wipe we have and this also relates to security teams and security teams has to be much more efficient. And one of the things that everyone is talking, okay, we need more automation, we need more, better tooling and I think we are really fitting into this. >> Yeah, and I talked to venture capitalists yesterday and today, an angel investor. Best time for startup is right now and again, open source is driving a lot of value. Ben, it's been great to have you on and sharing with us what's going on on the ground there as well as talking about some of the traction you have. Just final question, how old's the company? How much funding do you have? Where you guys located? Put a plug in for the company. You guys looking to hire? Tell us about the company. Were you guys located? How much capital do you have? >> So, okay, the company's here for three years. We've passed a round last March with Tiger and Hyperwise capitals. We are located, most of the company's located today in Israel in Tel Aviv, but we have like great team also in Ukraine and also great guys are in Europe and right now also Craig Box joined us as an open source VP and he's like right now located in New Zealand, so we are a really global team, which I think it's really helps us to strengthen ourselves. >> Yeah, and I think this is the entrepreneurial equation for the future. It's really great to see that global. We heard that in Priyanka Sharma's keynote. It's a global culture, global community. >> Right. >> And so really, really props you guys. Congratulations on Armo and thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing insights and expertise and also what's happening on the ground. Appreciate it, Ben, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, cheers. Okay, this is CUB coverage here of the Cloud Native SecurityCon in North America 2023. I'm John Furrier for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're back with more of wrap up of the event after this short break. (gentle upbeat music)