(bright upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California Studio and remoting is a great guest CUBE alumni, co-founder, technical co-founder and she's also the VP of Product at Platform9 Systems. It's a company pioneering Kubernetes infrastructure, been doing it for a long, long time. Madhura Maskasky, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. Always exciting. >> So I always... I love interviewing you for many reasons. One, you're super smart, but also you're a co-founder, a technical co-founder, so entrepreneur, VP of product. It's hard to do startups. (John laughs) Okay, so everyone who started a company knows how hard it is. It really is and the rewarding too when you're successful. So I want to get your thoughts on what's it like being an entrepreneur, women in tech, some things you've done along the way. Let's get started. How did you get into your career in tech and what made you want to start a company? >> Yeah, so , you know, I got into tech long, long before I decided to start a company. And back when I got in tech it was very clear to me as a direction for my career that I'm never going to start a business. I was very explicit about that because my father was an entrepreneur and I'd seen how rough the journey can be. And then my brother was also and is an entrepreneur. And I think with both of them I'd seen the ups and downs and I had decided to myself and shared with my family that I really want a very well-structured sort of job at a large company type of path for my career. I think the tech path, tech was interesting to me, not because I was interested in programming, et cetera at that time, to be honest. When I picked computer science as a major for myself, it was because most of what you would consider, I guess most of the cool students were picking that as a major, let's just say that. And it sounded very interesting and cool. A lot of people were doing it and that was sort of the top, top choice for people and I decided to follow along. But I did discover after I picked computer science as my major, I remember when I started learning C++ the first time when I got exposure to it, it was just like a light bulb clicking in my head. I just absolutely loved the language, the lower level nature, the power of it, and what you can do with it, the algorithms. So I think it ended up being a really good fit for me. >> Yeah, so it clicked for you. You tried it, it was all the cool kids were doing it. I mean, I can relate, I did the same thing. Next big thing is computer science, you got to be in there, got to be smart. And then you get hooked on it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What was the next level? Did you find any blockers in your way? Obviously male dominated, it must have been a lot of... How many females were in your class? What was the ratio at that time? >> Yeah, so the ratio was was pretty, pretty, I would say bleak when it comes to women to men. I think computer science at that time was still probably better compared to some of the other majors like mechanical engineering where I remember I had one friend, she was the single girl in an entire class of about at least 120, 130 students or so. So ratio was better for us. I think there were maybe 20, 25 girls in our class. It was a large class and maybe the number of men were maybe three X or four X number of women. So relatively better. Yeah. >> How about the job when you got into the structured big company? How did that go? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that was a pretty smooth path I would say after, you know, you graduated from undergrad to grad school and then when I got into Oracle first and VMware, I think both companies had the ratios were still, you know, pretty off. And I think they still are to a very large extent in this industry, but I think this industry in my experience does a fantastic job of, you know, bringing everybody and kind of embracing them and treating them at the same level. That was definitely my experience. And so that makes it very easy for self-confidence, for setting up a path for yourself to thrive. So that was it. >> Okay, so you got an undergraduate degree, okay, in computer science and a master's from Stanford in databases and distributed systems. >> That's right. >> So two degrees. Was that part of your pathway or you just decided, "I want to go right into school?" Did it go right after each other? How did that work out? >> Yeah, so when I went into school, undergrad there was no special major and I didn't quite know if I liked a particular subject or set of subjects or not. Even through grad school, first year it wasn't clear to me, but I think in second year I did start realizing that in general I was a fan of backend systems. I was never a front-end person. The backend distributed systems really were of interest to me because there's a lot of complex problems to solve, and especially databases and large scale distributed systems design in the context of database systems, you know, really started becoming a topic of interest for me. And I think luckily enough at Stanford there were just fantastic professors like Mendel Rosenblum who offered operating system class there, then started VMware and later on I was able to join the company and I took his class while at school and it was one of the most fantastic classes I've ever taken. So they really had and probably I think still do a fantastic curriculum when it comes to distributor systems. And I think that probably helped stoke that interest. >> How do you talk to the younger girls out there in elementary school and through? What's the advice as they start to get into computer science, which is changing and still evolving? There's backend, there's front-end, there's AI, there's data science, there's no code, low code, there's cloud. What's your advice when they say what's the playbook? >> Yeah, so I think two things I always say, and I share this with anybody who's looking to get into computer science or engineering for that matter, right? I think one is that it's, you know, it's important to not worry about what that end specialization's going to be, whether it's AI or databases or backend or front-end. It does naturally evolve and you lend yourself to a path where you will understand, you know, which systems, which aspect you like better. But it's very critical to start with getting the fundamentals well, right? Meaning all of the key coursework around algorithm, systems design, architecture, networking, operating system. I think it is just so crucial to understand those well, even though at times you make question is this ever going to be relevant and useful to me later on in my career? It really does end up helping in ways beyond, you know, you can describe. It makes you a much better engineer. So I think that is the most important aspect of, you know, I would think any engineering stream, but definitely true for computer science. Because there's also been a trend more recently, I think, which I'm not a big fan of, of sort of limited scoped learning, which is you decide early on that you're going to be, let's say a front-end engineer, which is fine, you know. Understanding that is great, but if you... I don't think is ideal to let that limit the scope of your learning when you are an undergrad phrase or grad school. Because later on it comes back to sort of bite you in terms of you not being able to completely understand how the systems work. >> It's a systems kind of thinking. You got to have that mindset of, especially now with cloud, you got distributed systems paradigm going to the edge. You got 5G, Mobile World Congress recently happened, you got now all kinds of IOT devices out there, IP of devices at the edge. Distributed computing is only getting more distributed. >> That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. But the other thing is also happens... That happens in computer science is that the abstraction layers keep raising things up and up and up. Where even if you're operating at a language like Java, which you know, during some of my times of programming there was a period when it was popular, it already abstracts you so far away from the underlying system. So it can become very easier if you're doing, you know, Java script or UI programming that you really have no understanding of what's happening behind the scenes. And I think that can be pretty difficult. >> Yeah. It's easy to lean in and rely too heavily on the abstractions. I want to get your thoughts on blockers. In your career, have you had situations where it's like, "Oh, you're a woman, okay seat at the table, sit on the side." Or maybe people misunderstood your role. How did you deal with that? Did you have any of that? >> Yeah. So, you know, I think... So there's something really kind of personal to me, which I like to share a few times, which I think I believe in pretty strongly. And which is for me, sort of my personal growth began at a very early phase because my dad and he passed away in 2012, but throughout the time when I was growing up, I was his special little girl. And every little thing that I did could be a simple test. You know, not very meaningful but the genuine pride and pleasure that he felt out of me getting great scores in those tests sort of et cetera, and that I could see that in him, and then I wanted to please him. And through him, I think I build that confidence in myself that I am good at things and I can do good. And I think that just set the building blocks for me for the rest of my life, right? So, I believe very strongly that, you know, yes, there are occasions of unfair treatment and et cetera, but for the most part, it comes from within. And if you are able to be a confident person who is kind of leveled and understands and believes in your capabilities, then for the most part, the right things happen around you. So, I believe very strongly in that kind of grounding and in finding a source to get that for yourself. And I think that many women suffer from the biggest challenge, which is not having enough self-confidence. And I've even, you know, with everything that I said, I've myself felt that, experienced that a few times. And then there's a methodical way to get around it. There's processes to, you know, explain to yourself that that's actually not true. That's a fake feeling. So, you know, I think that is the most important aspect for women. >> I love that. Get the confidence. Find the source for the confidence. We've also been hearing about curiosity and building, you mentioned engineering earlier, love that term. Engineering something, like building something. Curiosity, engineering, confidence. This brings me to my next question for you. What do you think the key skills and qualities are needed to succeed in a technical role? And how do you develop to maintain those skills over time? >> Yeah, so I think that it is so critical that you love that technology that you are part of. It is just so important. I mean, I remember as an example, at one point with one of my buddies before we started Platform9, one of my buddies, he's also a fantastic computer scientists from VMware and he loves video games. And so he said, "Hey, why don't we try to, you know, hack up a video game and see if we can take it somewhere?" And so, it sounded cool to me. And then so we started doing things, but you know, something I realized very quickly is that I as a person, I absolutely hate video games. I've never liked them. I don't think that's ever going to change. And so I was miserable. You know, I was trying to understand what's going on, how to build these systems, but I was not enjoying it. So, I'm glad that I decided to not pursue that. So it is just so important that you enjoy whatever aspect of technology that you decide to associate yourself with. I think that takes away 80, 90% of the work. And then I think it's important to inculcate a level of discipline that you are not going to get sort of... You're not going to get jaded or, you know, continue with happy path when doing the same things over and over again, but you're not necessarily challenging yourself, or pushing yourself, or putting yourself in uncomfortable situation. I think a combination of those typically I think works pretty well in any technical career. >> That's a great advice there. I think trying things when you're younger, or even just for play to understand whether you abandon that path is just as important as finding a good path because at least you know that skews the value in favor of the choices. Kind of like math probability. So, great call out there. So I have to ask you the next question, which is, how do you keep up to date given all the changes? You're in the middle of a world where you've seen personal change in the past 10 years from OpenStack to now. Remember those days when I first interviewed you at OpenStack, I think it was 2012 or something like that. Maybe 10 years ago. So much changed. How do you keep up with technologies in your field and resources that you rely on for personal development? >> Yeah, so I think when it comes to, you know, the field and what we are doing for example, I think one of the most important aspect and you know I am product manager and this is something I insist that all the other product managers in our team also do, is that you have to spend 50% of your time talking to prospects, customers, leads, and through those conversations they do a huge favor to you in that they make you aware of the other things that they're keeping an eye on as long as you're doing the right job of asking the right questions and not just, you know, listening in. So I think that to me ends up being one of the biggest sources where you get tidbits of information, new things, et cetera, and then you pursue. To me, that has worked to be a very effective source. And then the second is, you know, reading and keeping up with all of the publications. You guys, you know, create a lot of great material, you interview a lot of people, making sure you are watching those for us you know, and see there's a ton of activities, new projects keeps coming along every few months. So keeping up with that, listening to podcasts around those topics, all of that helps. But I think the first one I think goes in a big way in terms of being aware of what matters to your customers. >> Awesome. Let me ask you a question. What's the most rewarding aspect of your job right now? >> So, I think there are many. So I think I love... I've come to realize that I love, you know, the high that you get out of being an entrepreneur independent of, you know, there's... In terms of success and failure, there's always ups and downs as an entrepreneur, right? But there is this... There's something really alluring about being able to, you know, define, you know, path of your products and in a way that can potentially impact, you know, a number of companies that'll consume your products, employees that work with you. So that is, I think to me, always been the most satisfying path, is what kept me going. I think that is probably first and foremost. And then the projects. You know, there's always new exciting things that we are working on. Even just today, there are certain projects we are working on that I'm super excited about. So I think it's those two things. >> So now we didn't get into how you started. You said you didn't want to do a startup and you got the big company. Your dad, your brother were entrepreneurs. How did you get into it? >> Yeah, so, you know, it was kind of surprising to me as well, but I think I reached a point of VMware after spending about eight years or so where I definitely packed hold and I could have pushed myself by switching to a completely different company or a different organization within VMware. And I was trying all of those paths, interviewed at different companies, et cetera, but nothing felt different enough. And then I think I was very, very fortunate in that my co-founders, Sirish Raghuram, Roopak Parikh, you know, Bich, you've met them, they were kind of all at the same journey in their careers independently at the same time. And so we would all eat lunch together at VMware 'cause we were on the same team and then we just started brainstorming on different ideas during lunchtime. And that's kind of how... And we did that almost for a year. So by the time that the year long period went by, at the end it felt like the most logical, natural next step to leave our job and to, you know, to start off something together. But I think I wouldn't have done that had it not been for my co-founders. >> So you had comfort with the team as you knew each other at VMware, but you were kind of a little early, (laughing) you had a vision. It's kind of playing out now. How do you feel right now as the wave is hitting? Distributed computing, microservices, Kubernetes, I mean, stuff you guys did and were doing. I mean, it didn't play out exactly, but directionally you were right on the line there. How do you feel? >> Yeah. You know, I think that's kind of the challenge and the fun part with the startup journey, right? Which is you can never predict how things are going to go. When we kicked off we thought that OpenStack is going to really take over infrastructure management space and things kind of went differently, but things are going that way now with Kubernetes and distributed infrastructure. And so I think it's been interesting and in every path that you take that does end up not being successful teaches you so much more, right? So I think it's been a very interesting journey. >> Yeah, and I think the cloud, certainly AWS hit that growth right at 2013 through '17, kind of sucked all the oxygen out. But now as it reverts back to this abstraction layer essentially makes things look like private clouds, but they're just essentially DevOps. It's cloud operations, kind of the same thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then with the edge things are becoming way more distributed where having a single large cloud provider is becoming even less relevant in that space and having kind of the central SaaS based management model, which is what we pioneered, like you said, we were ahead of the game at that time, is becoming sort of the most obvious choice now. >> Now you look back at your role at Stanford, distributed systems, again, they have world class program there, neural networks, you name it. It's really, really awesome. As well as Cal Berkeley, there was in debates with each other, who's better? But that's a separate interview. Now you got the edge, what are some of the distributed computing challenges right now with now the distributed edge coming online, industrial 5G, data? What do you see as some of the key areas to solve from a problem statement standpoint with edge and as cloud goes on-premises to essentially data center at the edge, apps coming over the top AI enabled. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, so I think... And there's different flavors of edge and the one that we focus on is, you know, what we call thick edge, which is you have this problem of managing thousands of as we call it micro data centers, rather than managing maybe few tens or hundreds of large data centers where the problem just completely shifts on its head, right? And I think it is still an unsolved problem today where whether you are a retailer or a telecommunications vendor, et cetera, managing your footprints of tens of thousands of stores as a retailer is solved in a very archaic way today because the tool set, the traditional management tooling that's designed to manage, let's say your data centers is not quite, you know, it gets retrofitted to manage these environments and it's kind of (indistinct), you know, round hole kind of situation. So I think the top most challenges are being able to manage this large footprint of micro data centers in the most effective way, right? Where you have latency solved, you have the issue of a small footprint of resources at thousands of locations, and how do you fit in your containerized or virtualized or other workloads in the most effective way? To have that solved, you know, you need to have the security aspects around these environments. So there's a number of challenges that kind of go hand-in-hand, like what is the most effective storage which, you know, can still be deployed in that compact environment? And then cost becomes a related point. >> Costs are huge 'cause if you move data, you're going to have cost. If you move compute, it's not as much. If you have an operating system concept, is the data and state or stateless? These are huge problems. This is an operating system, don't you think? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a distributed operating system where it's multiple layers, you know, of ways of solving that problem just in the context of data like you said having an intermediate caching layer so that you know, you still do just in time processing at those edge locations and then send some data back and that's where you can incorporate some AI or other technologies, et cetera. So, you know, just data itself is a multi-layer problem there. >> Well, it's great to have you on this program. Advice final question for you, for the folks watching technical degrees, most people are finding out in elementary school, in middle school, a lot more robotics programs, a lot more tech exposure, you know, not just in Silicon Valley, but all around, you're starting to see that. What's your advice for young girls and people who are getting either coming into the workforce re-skilled as they get enter, it's easy to enter now as they stay in and how do they stay in? What's your advice? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think it's the same goal. I have two little daughters and it's the same principle I try to follow with them, which is I want to give them as much exposure as possible without me having any predefined ideas about what you know, they should pursue. But it's I think that exposure that you need to find for yourself one way or the other, because you really never know. Like, you know, my husband landed into computer science through a very, very meandering path, and then he discovered later in his career that it's the absolute calling for him. It's something he's very good at, right? But so... You know, it's... You know, the reason why he thinks he didn't pick that path early is because he didn't quite have that exposure. So it's that exposure to various things, even things you think that you may not be interested in is the most important aspect. And then things just naturally lend themselves. >> Find your calling, superpower, strengths. Know what you don't want to do. (John chuckles) >> Yeah, exactly. >> Great advice. Thank you so much for coming on and contributing to our program for International Women's Day. Great to see you in this context. We'll see you on theCUBE. We'll talk more about Platform9 when we go KubeCon or some other time. But thank you for sharing your personal perspective and experiences for our audience. Thank you. >> Fantastic. Thanks for having me, John. Always great. >> This is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day, I'm John Furrier. We're talking to the leaders in the industry, from developers to the boardroom and everything in between and getting the stories out there making an impact. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat melody) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, here at theCUBE in Palo Alto, California, for our live stage performance all day for Supercloud2. Unpacking this next generation movement in cloud computing. Dave, Supercloud1 was in August. We had great response and acceleration of that momentum. We had some haters too. We had some folks out there throwing shade on this. But at the same time, a lot of leaders came out of the woodwork, a lot of practitioners. And this Supercloud2 event I think will expose and illustrate some of the examples of what's happening in the industry and more importantly, kind of where it's going. >> Well it's great to be back in our studios in Palo Alto, John. Seems like just yesterday was August 9th, where the community was really refining the definition of Super Cloud. We were identifying the essential characteristics, with some of the leading technologists in Silicon Valley. We were digging into the deployment models. Whereas this Supercloud, Supercloud2 is really taking a practitioner view. We're going to hear from Walmart today. They've built a Supercloud. They called it the Walmart Cloud native platform. We're going to hear from other data practitioners, like Saks. We're going to hear from Western Union. They've got 200 locations around the world, how they're dealing with data sovereignty. And of course we've got some local technologists and practitioners coming in, analysts, consultants, theCUBE community. I'm really excited to be here. >> And we've got some great keynotes from executives at VMware. We're going to expose some of the things that they're working on around cross cloud services, which leads into multicloud. I think the practitioner angle highlights my favorite part of this program, 'cause you're starting to see the builders, a term coined by Andy Jassy, early days of AWS. That builder movement has been continuing to go. And you're seeing the enterprise, global enterprises adopt this builder mentality with Cloud Native. This is going to power the next generation global economy. And I think the role of the cloud computing vendors like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba are going to be the source engine of innovation. And what gets built on top of and with the clouds will be a big significant market value for all businesses and their business models. So I think the market wants the supercloud, the business models are pointing to Supercloud. The technology needs supercloud. And society, from an economic standpoint and from a use case standpoint, needs supercloud. You're seeing it today. Everyone's talking about chat GPT. This is an example of what will come out of this next generation and it's just getting started. So to me, you're either on the supercloud side of the camp or you're on the old school, hugging onto the old school mentality of wait a minute, that's cloud computing. So I think if you're not on the super cloud wave, you're going to be driftwood. And that's a term coined by Pat Gelsinger. And this is really the reality. Are you on the super cloud side? Or are you on the old huggin' the old model? And that's going to be a determinant. And you're going to see who's going to be the players on that, Dave. This is going to be a real big year. >> Everybody's heard the phrase follow the money. Well, my philosophy is follow the data. And that's a big part of what Supercloud2 is, because the data is where the money is across the clouds. And people want more simplicity, or greater simplicity across the clouds. So it's really, there's two forces here. You've got the ecosystem that's saying, hey the hyperscalers, they've done a great job but there's problems that they're not solving. So we're going to lean in and solve those problems. At the same time, you have the practitioners saying we have multicloud, we have to deal with this, help us. It's got to be simpler. Because we want to share data across clouds. We want to build data products, we want to monetize and drive revenue and cut costs. >> This is the key thing. The builder movement is hitting a wall, and that wall will be broken down because the business models of the companies themselves are demanding that the value from the data with security has to be embedded. So I think you're going to see a big year this next year or so where the builders will accelerate through this next generation, supercloud wave, will be a builder's wave for business. And I think that's going to be the nuance here. And all the people that are on the side of Supercloud are all pro-business, pro-technology. The ones that aren't are like, wait a minute I used to do things differently. They're stuck. And so I think this is going to be a question of are we stuck? Are builders accelerating? Will the business models develop around it? That's digital transformation. At the end of the day, the market's speaking, Dave. The market wants more. Chat GPT, you're seeing AI starting to flourish, powered by data. It's unstoppable, supercloud's unstoppable. >> One of our headliners today is Zhamak Dehghani, the creator of Data Mesh. We've got some news around her. She's going to be live in studio. Super excited about that. Kit Colbert in Supercloud, the first Supercloud in last August, laid out an initial architecture for Supercloud. He's going to advance that today, tell us what's changed, and really dig into and really talk about the meat on the bone, if you will. And we've got some other technologists that are coming in saying, Hey, is it a platform? Is it an architecture? What's the right model here? So we're going to debate that a little bit today. >> And before we close, I'll just say look at the guests, look at the talk tracks. You're seeing a diversity of startups doing cloud networking, you're seeing big practitioners building their own thing, being builders for business value and business model advantages. And you got companies like VMware, who have been on the wave of virtualization. So the, everyone who's involved in super cloud, they're seeing it, they're on the front lines. They're seeing the trend. They are riding that wave. And they have, they're bringing data to the table. So to me, you look at who's involved and you judge it that way. To me, that's the way I look at this. And because we're making it open, Supercloud is going to continue to be debated. But more importantly, the results are going to come in. The market supports it, the business needs it, tech's there, and will it happen? So I think the builders movement, Dave, is going to be big to watch. And then ultimately how that business transformation kicks in, and I think those are the two variables that I would watch on Supercloud. >> Our mission has always been around free content, giving back to the community. So I really want to thank our sponsors today. We've had a great partnership with VMware, who's not only contributed some financial support, but also great content. Alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo, all phenomenal, allowing us to achieve our mission of serving our audiences and really trying to give more than we take from. >> Free content, that's our mission. Dave, great to kick it off. Kickin' off Supercloud2 all day, we've got some great programs here. We've got VMware coming up next. We have Victoria Viering, who's been on before. He's got a great vision for cross cloud service. We're getting also a keynote with Kit Colbert, who's going to lay out the fragmentation and the benefits that that solves, from solvent fragmentation and silos, breaking down the silos and bringing multicloud future to the table via Super Cloud. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. (bright upbeat music) (music fades)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California. We're gonna be talking about super computing an event coming up in Dallas this November. I'm joined by the infamous John Furrier. John, thank you for joining me today. >>Great to see you. You look great. >>Thank you. You know, I don't know if anyone's checked out the conference colors for for supercomputing, but I happen to match the accent pink and you are rocking their blue. I got the so on >>There it is. >>We don't always tie our fashion to the tech ladies and gentlemen, but we're, we're a new crew here at, at the Cube and I think it should be a thing that we, that we do moving forward. So John, you are a veteran and I'm a newbie to Supercomputing. It'll be my first time in Dallas. What can I expect? >>Basically it's a hardware nerd fest, basically of the top >>Minds. So it's like ces, >>It's like CES for like, like hardware. It's like really the coolest show if you're into like high performance computing, I mean game changing kind of, you know, physics, laws of physics and hardware. This is the show. I mean this is like the confluence of it's, it's really old. It started when I graduated college, 1988. And back then it was servers, you know, super computing was a concept. It was usually a box and it was hardware, big machine. And it would crank out calculations, simulations and, and you know, you were limited to the processor and all the, the systems components, just the architecture system software, I mean it was technical, it was, it was, it was hardware, it was fun. Very cool back then. But you know, servers got bigger and you got grid computing, you got clusters and then it be really became high performance computing concept. But that's now multiple disciplines, hence it's been around for a while. It's evergreen in the sense it's always changing, attracting talent, students, mentors, scholarships. It's kind of big funding and big companies are behind it. Wl, look, Packard Enterprise, Dell computing startups and hardware matters more than ever. You look at the cloud, what Amazon and, and the cloud hyper skills, they're building the fastest chips down at the root level hardware's back. And I think this show's gonna show a lot of that. >>There isn't the cloud without hardware to support it. So I think it's important that we're all headed here. You, you touched on the evolution there from super computing in the beginning and complex calculations and processing to what we're now calling high performance computing. Can you go a little bit deeper? What is, what does that mean, What does that cover? >>Well, I mean high high performance computing and now is a range of different things. So the super computing needs to be like a thing now. You got clusters and grids that's distributed, you got a backbone, it's well architected and there's a lot involved. This network and security, there's system software. So now it's multiple disciplines in high performance computing and you can do a lot more. And now with cloud computing you can do simulations, say drug research or drug testing. You have, you can do all kinds of cal genome sequencing. I mean the, the, the ability to actually use compute right now is so awesome. The field's got, you know, is rebooting itself in real time, you know, pun intended. So it's like really, it's really good thing. More compute makes things go faster, especially with more data. So high encapsulates all the, the engineering behind it. A lot of robotics coming in the future. All this is gonna be about the edge. You're seeing a lot more hardware making noise around things that are new use cases. You know, your Apple watch that's, you know, very high functionality to a cell tower. Cars again, high performance computing hits all these new use cases. >>It yeah, it absolutely does. I mean high performance computing touches pretty much every aspect of our lives in some capacity at this point and including how we drive our cars to, to get to the studio here in Palo Alto. Do you think that we're entering an era when all of this is about to scale exponentially versus some of the linear growth that we've seen in the space due to the frustration of some of us in the hardware world the last five to 10 years? >>Well, it's a good question. I think everyone has, has seen Moore's law, right? They've seen, you know, that's been, been well documented. I think the world's changing. You're starting to see the trend of more hardware that's specialized like DPU are now out there. You got GPUs, you're seeing the, you know, Bolton hardware, accelerators, you got chi layer software abstraction. So essentially it's, it's a software industry that's in impacted the hardware. So hardware really is software too and it's a lot more software in there. Again, system software's a lot different. So it's, I think it's, it's boomerang back up. I think there's an inflection point because if you look at cyber security and physical devices, they all kind of play in this world where they need compute at the edge. Edge is gonna be a big use case. You can see Dell Technologies there. I think they have a really big opportunity to sell more hardware. H WL Packard Enterprise, others, these are old school >>Box companies. >>So I think the distributed nature of cloud and hybrid and multi-cloud coming on earth and in space means a lot more high performance computing will be sold and and implemented. So that's my take on it. I just think I'm very bullish on this space. >>Ah, yes. And you know me, I get really personally excited about the edge. So I can't wait to see what's in store. Thinking about the variety of vendors and companies, I know we see some of the biggest players in the space. Who are you most excited to see in Dallas coming up in November? >>You know, HP enter, you look back on enterprise has always been informally, HP huge on hpc, Dell and hpe. This is their bread and butter. They've been making servers from many computers to Intel based servers now to arm-based servers and and building their own stuff. So you're gonna start to see a lot more of those players kind of transforming. We're seeing both Dell and HPE transforming and you're gonna see a lot of chip companies there. I'm sure you're gonna see a lot more younger talent, a lot, a lot of young talent are coming, like I said, robotics and the new physical world we're living in is software and IP connected. So it's not like the old school operational technology systems. You have, you know, IP enabled devices that opens up all kinds of new challenges around security vulnerabilities and also capabilities. So it's, I think it's gonna be a lot younger crowd I think than we usually see this year. And you seeing a lot of students, and again universities participating. >>Yeah, I noticed that they have a student competition that's a, a big part of the event. I'm curious when you say younger, are you expecting to see new startups and some interesting players in the space that maybe we haven't heard of before? >>I think we might see more use cases that are different. When I say younger, I don't mean so much on the Democratic but young, younger i new ideas, right? So I think you're gonna see a lot of smart people coming in that might not have the, you know, the, the lens from when it started in 1988 and remember 1988 to now so much has changed. In fact we just did AEG a segment on the cube called does hardware matter because for many, many years, over the past decades, like hardware doesn't matter, it's all about the cloud and we're not a box company. Boxes are coming back. So you know, that's gonna be music for for into the years of Dell Technologies HPE the world. But like hardware does matter and this, you're starting to see that here. So I think you'll see a lot a younger thinking, a little bit different thinking. You're gonna start to see more conf confluence of like machine learning. You're gonna see security and again, I mentioned space. These are areas where you're starting to see where hardware and high performance is gonna be part of all the new systems. And so it's just gonna be industrial to i o is gonna be a big part too. >>Yeah, absolutely. I, I was thinking about some of these use cases, I don't know if you heard about the new drones they're sending up into hurricanes, but it takes literally what a, what an edge use case, how durable it has to be and the rapid processing that has to happen as a result of the software. So many exciting things we could dive down the rabbit hole with. What can folks expect to see here on the cube during supercomputing? >>Well we're gonna talk to a lot of the leaders on the cube from this community, mostly from the practitioner's side, expert side. We're gonna have, we're gonna hear from Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packer Enterprise and a lot of other executives who are investing wanna find out what they're investing in, how it ties into the cloud. Cuz the cloud has become a great environment for multi-cloud with more grid-like capability and what's the future? Where's the hardware going, what's the evolution of the components? How is it being designed? And then how does it fit into the overall software open source market that's booming right now that cloud technology has been doing. So I wanna, we wanna try to connect the dots on the cube. >>Great. So we have a very easy task ahead of us. Hopefully everyone will enjoy the content and the guests that we leaving to, to our table here from from the show floor. When we think about, do you think there's gonna be any trends that we've seen in the past that might not be there? Has anything phased out of the super computing world? You're someone who's been around this game for a while? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I think the game is still the same but the players might shift a little bit. So for example, a lot more with the supply chain challenges you might see that impact. We're gonna watch that very closely to find out what components are gonna be in what. But I'm thinking more about system architecture because the use case is interesting. You know, I was talking to Dell folks about this, you know they have standard machines but then they have use cases for how do you put the equivalent of a data center next to say a mobile cell tower because now you have the capability for wireless and 5g. You gotta put the data center like CAPA speed functionality and capacity for compute at these edges in a smaller form factor. How do you do that? How do you handle all the IO and that's gonna be all these, all these things are nerd again nerdy conversations but they're gonna be very relevant. So I like the new use cases of power more compute in places that they've never been before. So I think that to me is where the exciting part is. Like okay, who's got the, who's really got the real deal going on here? That's something be the fun part. >>I think it allows for a new era in innovation and I don't say that lightly, but when we can put processing power literally anywhere, it certainly thrills the minds of hardware nerds. Like me, my I'm OG hardware, I know you are too, I won't reveal your roots, but I got my, my start in in hardware product design back in the day. So I can't wait >>To, well you then, you know, you know hardware, when you talk about processing power and memory, you can never have enough compute and memory. It's like, it's like the internet bandwidth. You can't never have enough bandwidth. Bandwidth, right? Network power, compute power, you know, bring it on, you know, >>Even battery life, simple things like that when it comes to hardware, especially when we're talking about being on the edge. It's just like our cell phones. Our cell phones are an edge device >>And we get, well when you combine cloud on premises hybrid and then multi-cloud and edge, you now have the ability to get compute at capabilities that were never fathom in the past. And most of the creativity is limited to the hardware capability and now that's gonna be unleashed. I think a lot of creativity. That's again back to the use cases and yes, again, you're gonna start to see more industrial stuff come out edge and I, I, I love the edge. I think this is a great use case for the edge. >>Me too. A absolutely so bold claim. I don't know if you're ready to, to draw a line in the sand. Are we on the precipice of a hardware renaissance? >>Definitely no doubt about it. When we, when we did the does hardware matter segment, it was really kind of to test, you know, everyone's talking about the cloud, but cloud also runs hardware. You look at what AWS is doing, for instance, all the innovation, it's at robotics, it's at that at the physical level, pro, pro, you know you got physics, I mean they're working on so low level engineering and the speed difference. I think from a workload standpoint, whoever can get the best out of the physics and the materials will have a winning formula. Cause you can have a lot more processing specialized processors. That's a new system architecture. And so to me the hype, definitely the HPC high press computing fits perfectly into that construct because now you got more power so that software can be more capable. And I think at the end of the day, nobody wants to write a app on our workload to run on on bad hardware, not have enough compute. >>Amen to that. On that note, John, how can people get in touch with you and us here on the show in anticipation of supercomputing? >>Of course hit the cube handle at the cube at Furrier, my last name F U R R I E R. And of course my dms are always open for scoops and story ideas. And go to silicon angle.com and the cube.net. >>Fantastic. John, I look forward to joining you in Dallas and thank you for being here with me today. And thank you all for joining us for this super computing preview. My name is Savannah Peterson and we're here on the cube live. Well not live prerecorded from Palo Alto. And look forward to seeing you for some high performance computing excitement soon.

>>Everyone, welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furry, your host of The Cube. We've got a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Mattor Makki, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloud native at scale. So enjoy the program, see you soon. Hello and welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube. Pleasure to have here me Makowski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. >>Thank you for having >>Me. So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is a, is an appropriate term for >>That. So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge Notes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, o ot, and it kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here, there's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenge. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and >>Regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that skill really needs some well thought out, well-structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer's site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on all of these various factors at their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success cloud native, you know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can configure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotpot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the, the two factors of scale is we talked about start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because yeah, you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say you radio sell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did it, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like ishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, Can you share what our lawn is, this new product, What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arwan is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what alarm lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in. What's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, >>What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right online. And if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each components, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the I pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency >>For those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. C C I CD pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, the developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of application that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both those >>Teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OP teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, Kubernetes really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, c communities clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so online addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>Ed, do I wanna get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model on from model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fi, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also opensource because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that, Well, but that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for helpers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating me metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo customer? >>Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native es, and then we have our C I CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS CD pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Spico would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on s Amazon and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us >>Stability. Yeah, I think people are scared, not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Lon uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is arlon also makes use of cluster api capi, which is a ES sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with algo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what Algo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform nine has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Alon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that sla. >>And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with, that are familiar with, with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD and they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our line before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and, you know, give you an inventory and that, >>So customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yeah. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. >>And you provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value >>Here. That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up >>Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables Super club, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And alon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And, you know, alarm flows >>In one. Okay, so now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. There's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for >>That. So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, there's designed to do, the question is, what did, does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo, and, and, and on all the other goodness to automate, What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be in indications of things are effed up a little bit. >>Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your, your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your, So those are, those are the >>Signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the IIA terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. The company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and see, and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yeah. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things with things. So just >>Taking care of, and the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CSO there at the beach. >>Yeah. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for having >>Me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here at Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine b. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or well later, earlier when opens Stack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now was realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructure's code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level. And then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure as configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah, yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. Not declaring, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code. It's code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space that, >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the by intu. They had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our inaugural event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so to deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just really wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD Stock is down arm has been on rise, we've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in, in this community of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Maria Teel at our super cloud event, She's a cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built AR lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads at the end of the day, and I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We've heard people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with AR loan you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call the profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, So >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, just deploy it. Now what there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructure as configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things are controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure as configuration is built kind of on, it's a super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year at CubeCon a lot of this, what does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot rogue, that CubeCon coming up and now this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? It's the big story this year. What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jockeying for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupon and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career VMware over decades with them within 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here a platform. I you's been around for a while at this game, man. We talked about OpenStack, that project we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a Cloud Aati team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Opens Stack was an example and then Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud need of its scale? >>The, the hyper squares? >>Yeah, yeah. A's Azure Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep well, >>They got great performance. I mean, from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, >>Right? Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyper skaters really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems, the platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware and he kinda over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, cloud native develop for developers. And John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud is around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and Edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark I put on on there. Panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's just thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm, right? >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what where we come into >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were kind of talking about the glory days in 2000, 2001 when the first ASPs application service providers came out. Kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like >>It wasn't, >>And web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>In fact, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflations sea year. It's interesting. This is the first downturn, the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. Nope. Cause pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some, you know, new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Alon and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, More dynamic, more unreal. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think Super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's, you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pan or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is as a pilot to get the conversations flowing with, with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third Cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. >>What's, >>What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have 1, 2, 3 container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And it, the beauty of it is yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool and >>Just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores about thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un on-prem as an air gap version. Can >>You give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right. >>So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact, the customer says like, like the Maytag service person, cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. What >>Benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we heard it all here, ops and security teams. Cause they're kind of part of one thing, but option security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right? >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So >>You working two sides to that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side. >>Okay. Another customer that I give an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on it's classic edge. It's classic edge, yeah. Right? They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a box, like a small little box, >>Right? And all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of >>Them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the locations. >>So you guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well. >>Tucan, of course Detroit's >>Coming so, so it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud, not you have to rewrite and redevelop your application in business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. >>And I'll give you an example, I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations >>Are >>For the customer. Customer, >>The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn. >>That's to wrap it up. I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now let's CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super Cloud. >>Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. CARSs being been in an asb, being in a real time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative. You know, that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce is interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the gain, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart that made you an e-commerce or e retailer or an e e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Nascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Fur with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Hello and welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having me. >>So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good, in a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of microsites, these microsites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So I, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors are their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is in when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and pos from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, what >>Would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Our line, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what arlon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for >>Those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. See c i CD pipe pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both >>Those teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer's. That's right. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined a declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fision, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also open source, because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that long. But that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo? I'm a >>Customer. Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on ecos Amazon, and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the >>Ability to, Yeah, I think people are scared. Not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, platform line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that >>Sla. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with that are familiar with, with Argo and then rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo adn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our land before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customers' hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and you know, give you an inventory. And that will, >>So if customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value here. >>That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And you know, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >>So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're designed to do, the question is, what did does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. Yeah. >>More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because they're the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just the success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructure as code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. And that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or applications specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think that the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We remember pointing for many years now that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself. You can, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And is my workloads running effectively? So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, >>Right? So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's kinda like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Armon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, so >>Essentially standard creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on, it's as super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring and saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Could be nice, it has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform. Now you guys have been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud ERO team at that time. We would to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys tr pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example when the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud native of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep, >>Well they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes, that's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the the new risk and arm ecosystems and the platforms. >>Yeah, not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer, it's, it's hardware and he got software and you got middleware and he kind over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back on the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark. I put on on that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm? Yeah, right. >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And and web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>I, in fact you, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. >>Nope. >>Cuz the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing Infras infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools, It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Ante and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, more dynamic, more real. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pain, a single platform for you to build your innovations on regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to, as a pilots, to get the conversations flowing with with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration and then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. What's the, what's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here, it is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool >>And just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores are thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un OnPrem as an air gap version. >>Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your >>Customer? Right. So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have, I dunno, hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms but they really needed to bring the agility and they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact the customer says like, like the Maytag service person cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. >>What benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right. >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on, It's a classic edge. It's classic edge. Yeah. Right. They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a net box box, like a small little >>Box and all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage >>Thousands of them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So >>You guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, so we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>And I'll give you an example. I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. To wrap it up, I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super >>Cloud. Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Mascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. Welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around the solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John fur, host of the cube here at our headquarters on the west coast in Palo Alto, California. Got a great news guest here. Matt McGill, Wayne managing director of Madrona venture group is here with me on the big news and drone raising their record 690 million fund and partnering with their innovative founders. Matt, thanks for coming on and, and talking about the news and congratulations on the dry powder. >>Well, Hey, thanks so much, John. Appreciate you having me on the show. >>Well, great news here. Oley validation. We're in a new market. Everyone's talking about the new normal, we're talking about a recession inflation, but yet we've been reporting that this is kind of the first generation that cloud hyperscale economic scale and technical benefits have kind of hit any kind of economic downturn. If you go back to to 2008, our last downturn, the cloud really hasn't hit that tipping point. Now the innovation, as we've been reporting with our startup showcases and looking at the results from the hyperscalers, this funding news is kind of validation that the tech society intersection is working. You guys just get to the news 430 million in the Madrona fund nine and 200. And I think 60 million acceleration fund three, which means you're gonna go stay with your roots with seed early stage and then have some rocket fuel for kind of the accelerated expansion growth side of it. Not like late stage growth, but like scaling growth. This is kind of the news. Is that right? >>That's right. You know, we, we've had a long time strategy over 25 years here in Seattle of being early, early stage. You know, it's like our friends at Amazon like to say is, well, we're there at day one and we wanna help build companies for the long run for over 25 years. We've been doing that in Seattle. And I think one of the things we've realized, I mean, this is, these funds are the largest funds ever raised by a Seattle based venture capital firm and that's notable in and of itself. But we think that's the reason is because Seattle has continued to innovate in areas like consumer internet software cloud, of course, where the cloud capital of the world and increasingly the applications of machine learning. And so with all that combination, we believe there's a ton more companies to be built here in the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle in particular. And then through our acceleration fund where we're investing in companies anywhere in the country, in fact, anywhere in the world, those are the kinds of companies that want to have the Seattle point of view. They don't understand how to work with Amazon and AWS. They don't understand how to work with Microsoft and we have some unique relationships in those places and we think we can help them succeed in doing that. >>You know, it's notable that you guys in particular have been very close with Jeff Bayo Andy Jesse, and the success of ABUS as well as Microsoft. So, you know, Seattle has become cloud city. Everyone kind of knows that from a cloud perspective, obviously Microsoft's roots have been there for a long, long time. You go back, I mean, August capital, early days, funding Microsoft. You remember those days not to date myself, but you know, Microsoft kind of went up there and kind of established it a Amazon there as well. Now you got Google here, you got Facebook in the valley. You guys are now also coming down. This funding comes on the heels of you appointing a new managing director here in Palo Alto. This is now the migration of Madrona coming into the valley. Is that right? Is that what we're seeing? >>Well, I think what we're trying to do is bring the things that we know uniquely from Seattle and the companies here down to Silicon valley. We've got a terrific partner in Karama Hend, Andrew he's somebody that we have worked together with over the years, co-investing in companies. So we knew him really well. It was a bit opportunistic for us, but what we're hearing over and over again is a lot of these companies based in the valley, based in other parts of the country, they don't know really how to best work with the Microsoft and Amazons are understand the services that they offer. And, you know, we have that capability. We have those relationships. We wanna bring that to bear and helping build great companies. >>What is your expectation on the Silicon valley presence here? You can kind of give a hint here kind of a gateway to Seattle, but you got a lot of developers here. We just reported this morning that MEA just open source pie, torch to the Linux foundation again, and Mary material kind of trend we are seeing open source now has become there's no debate anymore has become the software industry. There's no more issue around that. This is real. I >>Think that's right. I mean, you know, once, you know, Satya became CEO, Microsoft, and they started embracing open source, you know, that was gonna be the last big tech holdout. We think open source is very interesting in terms of what it can produce and create in terms of next generation, innovative innovation. It's great to see companies like Facebook like Uber and others that have had a long track record of open source capabilities. But what we're also seeing is you need to build businesses around that, that a lot of enterprises don't wanna buy just the open source and stitch it together themselves. They want somebody to do it with them. And whether that's the way that, you know, companies like MongoDB have built that out over time or that's, you know, or elastic or, you know, companies like opt ML and our portfolio, or even the big cloud, you know, hyperscalers, you know, they are increasingly embracing open source and building finished services, managed services on top of it. So that's a big wave that we've been investing in for a number of years now and are highly confident gonna >>Continue. You know, I've been a big fan of Pacific Northwest for a while. You know, love going up there and talking to the folks at Microsoft and Amazon and AWS, but there's been a big trend in venture capital where a lot of the, the later stage folks, including private equity have come in, you seen tiger global even tiger global alumni, that the Cubs they call them, you know, they're coming down and playing in the early state and the results haven't been that good. You guys have had a track record in your success. Again, a hundred percent of your institutional investors have honed up with you on this two fund strategy of close to 700 million. What's this formula says, why aren't they winning what's is it, they don't have the ecosystem? Is it they're spraying and praying without a lot of discipline? What's the dynamic between the folks like Madrona, the Neas of the world who kind of come in and Sequoia who kind of do it right, right. Come in. And they get it done in the right way. The early stage. I just say the private equity folks, >>You know, I think that early stage venture is a local business. It is a geographically proximate business when you're helping incredible founders, try to really dial in that early founder market fit. This is before you even get to product market fit. And, and so the, the team building that goes on the talking to potential customers, the ITER iterating on business strategy, this is a roll up your sleeves kind of thing. It's not a financial transaction. And so what you're trying to do is have a presence and an understanding, a prepared mind of one of the big themes and the kinds of founders that with, you know, our encouragement and our help can go build lasting companies. Now, when you get to a, a, a later stage, you know, you get to that growth stage. It is generally more of a financial, you know, kind of engineering sort of proposition. And there's some folks that are great at that. What we do is we support these companies all the way through. We reserve enough capital to be with them at the seed stage, the series B stage the, you know, the crossover round before you go public, all of those sorts of things. And we love partnering with some of these other people, but there's a lot of heavy lifting at the early, early stages of a business. And it's, it's not, I think a model that everybody's architected to do >>Well, you know, trust becomes a big factor in all this. You kind of, when you talk about like that, I hear you speaking. It makes me think of like trusted advisor meets money, not so much telling people what to do. You guys have had a good track record and, and being added value, not values from track. And sometimes that values from track is getting in the way of the entrepreneur by, you know, running the certain meetings, driving board meetings and driving the agenda that you see to see that trend where people try too hard and that a force function, the entrepreneur we're living in a world now where everyone's talking to each other, you got, you know, there's no more glass door it's everyone's on Twitter, right? So you can see some move, someone trying to control the supply chain of talent by term sheet, overvaluing them. >>You guys are, have a different strategy. You guys have a network I've noticed that Madrona has attracted them high end talent coming outta Microsoft outta AWS season, season, senior talent. I won't say, you know, senior citizens, but you know, people have done things scaled up businesses, as well as attract young talent. Can you share with our audience that dynamic of the, the seasoned veterans, the systems thinkers, the ones who have been there done that built software, built teams to the new young entrepreneurs coming in, what's the dynamic, like, how do you guys look at at those networks? How do you nurture them? Could you share your, your strategy on how you're gonna pull all this together, going forward? >>You know, we, we think a lot about building the innovation ecosystem, like a phrase around here that you hear a lot is the bigger pie theory. How do we build the bigger pie? If we're focusing on building the bigger pie, there'll be plenty of that pie for Madrona Madrona companies. And in that mindset says, okay, how are we gonna invest in the innovation ecosystem? And then actually to use a term, you know, one of our founders who unfortunately passed away this year, Tom Aber, he had just written a book called flywheel. And I think it embodies this mindset that we have of how do you create that flywheel within a community? And of course, interestingly enough, I think Tom both learned and contributed to that. He was on the board of Amazon for almost 20 years in helping build some of the flywheels at Amazon. >>So that's what we carry forward. And we know that there's a lot of value in experiential learning. And so we've been fortunate to have some folks, you know, that have worked at some of those, you know, kind iconic companies, join us and find that they really love this company building journey. We've also got some terrific younger folks that have, you know, some very fresh perspectives and a lot of, a lot of creativity. And they're bringing that together with our team overall. And you know, what we really are trying to do at the end of the day is find incredible founders who wanna build something lasting, insignificant, and provide our kind of our time, our best ideas, our, our perspective. And of course our capital to help them be >>Successful. I love the ecosystem play. I think that's a human capital game too. I like the way you guys are thinking about that. I do wanna get your reaction, cause I know you're close to Amazon and Microsoft, but mainly Jeff Bezos as well. You mentioned your, your partner who passed away was on the board. A lot of great props on and tributes online. I saw that, I know I didn't know him at all. So I really can't comment, but I did notice that Bezos and, and jazz in particular were complimentary. And recently I just saw Bezos comment on Twitter about the, you know, the Lord of the rings movie. They're putting out the series and he says, you gotta have a team. That's kinda like rebels. I'm paraphrasing, cuz these folks never done a movie like this before. So they're, they're getting good props and reviews in this new world order where entrepreneurs gotta do things different. >>What's the one thing that you think entrepreneurs need to do different to make this next startup journey different and successful because the world is different. There's not a lot of press to relate to Andy Jassey even on stage last week in, in, in LA was kind of, he's not really revealing. He's on his talking points, message, the press aren't out there and big numbers anymore. And you got a lot of different go-to market strategies, omnichannel, social different ways to communicate to customers. Yeah. So product market fit is becomes big. So how do you see this new flywheel emerging for those entrepreneurs have to go out there, roll up their sleeves and make it happen. And what kind of resources do you think they need to be successful? What are you guys advocating? >>Well, you know, what's really interesting about that question is I've heard Jeff say many times that when people ask him, what's gotta be different. He, he reminds them to think about what's not gonna change. And he usually starts to then talk about things like price, convenience, and selection. Customer's never gonna want a higher price, less convenience, smaller selection. And so when you build on some of those principles of, what's not gonna change, it's easier for you to understand what could be changing as it relates to the differences. One of the biggest differences, I don't think any of us have fully figured out yet is what does it mean to be productive in a hybrid work mode? We happen to believe that it's still gonna have a kernel of people that are geographically close, that are part of the founding and building in the early stages of a company. >>And, and it's an and equation that they're going to also have people that are distributed around the country, perhaps around the world that are some of the best talent that they attract to their team. The other thing that I think coming back to what remains the same is being hyper focused on a certain customer and a certain problem that you're passionate about solving. And that's really what we look for when we look for this founder market fit. And it can be a lot of different things from the next generation water bottle to a better way to handle deep learning models and get 'em deployed in the cloud. If you've got that passion and you've got some inkling of the skill of how to build a better solution, that's never gonna go away. That's gonna be enduring, but exactly how you do that as a team in a hybrid world, I think that's gonna be different. >>Yeah. One thing that's not changing is that your investor, makeup's not changing a hundred percent of your existing institutional investors have signed back on with you guys and your oversubscribed, lot of demand. What is your flywheel success formula? Why is Tron is so successful? Can you share some feedback from your investors? What are they saying? Why are they re-upping share some inside baseball or anecdotal praise? >>Well, I think it's very kind to you to frame it that way. I mean, you know, it does for investors come back to performance. You know, these are university endowments and foundations that have a responsibility to, to generate great returns. And we understand that and we're very aligned with that. I think to be specific in the last couple years, they appreciated that we were also not holding onto our, our stocks forever, that we actually made some thoughtful decisions to sell some shares of companies like Smartsheet and snowflake and accolade in others, and actually distribute capital back to them when things were looking really, really good. But I think the thing, other thing that's very important here is that we've created a flywheel with our core strategy being Seattle based and then going out from there to try to find the best founders, build great companies with them, roll up our sleeves in a productive way and help them for the long term, which now leads to multiple generations of people, you know, at those companies. And beyond that we wanna be, you know, partner with and back again. And so you create this flywheel by having success with people in doing it in a respectful. And as you said earlier, a trusted way, >>What's the message for the Silicon valley crowd, obviously bay area, Silicon valley, Palo Alto office, and the center of it. Obviously you got them hybrid workforce hybrid venture model developing what's the goals. What's the message for Silicon valley? >>Well, our message for folks in Silicon valley is the same. It's always been, we we're excited to partner with them largely up here again, cause this is still our home base, but there'll be a, you know, select number of opportunities where we'll get a chance to partner together down in Silicon valley. And we think we bring something different with that deep understanding of cloud computing, that deep understanding of applied machine learning. And of course, some of our unique relationships up here that can be additive to what the they've already done. And some of them are just great partners and have built, you know, help build some really incredible companies over >>The years. Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview, given them big news. I guess the question on everyone's mind, certainly the entrepreneur's mind is how do I get some of that cash you have and put it into work for my opportunity. One what's the investment thesis can take a minute to put the plug in for the firm. What are you looking to invest in? What's the thesis? What kind of entrepreneurs you're looking for? I know fund one is seed fund nine is seed to, to a and B and the second one is beyond B and beyond for growth. What's the pitch. What's the pitch. >>Yeah. Well you can, you can think of us as you know, any stage from pre-seed to series seed. You know, we'll make a new investment in companies in all of those stages. You know, I think that, you know, the, the core pitch, you know, to us is, you know, your passion for the, for the problem that you're trying to, trying to get solved. And we're of course, very excited about that. And you know, at, at, at the end of the day, you know, if you want somebody that has a distinct point of view on the market that is based up here and can roll up their sleeves and work alongside you. We're, we're, we're the ones that are more than happy to do that. Proven track record of doing that for 25 plus years. And there's so much innovation ahead. There's so many opportunities to disrupt to pioneer, and we're excited to be a part of working with great founders to do that. >>Well, great stuff. We'll see you ATS reinvent coming up shortly and your annual get together. You always have your crew down there and, and team engaging with some of the cloud players as well. And looking forward to seeing how the Palo Alto team expands out. And Matt, thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks very much, John. Appreciate you having me look forward to seeing you at reinvent. >>Okay. Matt, Matt here with Madrona venture group, he's the partner managing partner Madrona group raises 690 million to fund nine and, and, and again, and big funds for accelerated growth fund. Three lot of dry powder. Again, entrepreneurship in technology is scaling. It's not going down. It's continuing to accelerate into this next generation super cloud multi-cloud hybrid cloud world steady state. This is the cubes coverage. I'm John for Silicon angle and host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're here to talk about the state of MarTech and AI. We're here with the co-founder and head of AI for Blueshift, Manyam Mallela. Welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me, excited to chat with you. >> Blueshift is a company you've co-founded with a couple other co-founders and you guys have a stellar pedigree going in data AI back before it was fashionable, in the old days, Web 1.0, if you want to call it that. So, you know, we know what you guys have been doing in your careers. Now you got a company on the cutting edge, solving problems for customers as they transition from this new, new way of doing things where users have data and power and control, customers are trying to be more authentic, got walled gardens emerging everywhere but that we're supposed to be away from walled gardens. So there's a whole set of new patterns, new expectations and new behaviors. So all this is challenging, but yet it's an opportunity. So I want to get into it. What is your vision? And what's your view on the MarTech today and AI, and how do you guys fit into that, that story? >> Yeah. Great question, John. We are still in the very early innings of where every digital experience is informed, both creatively from the marketing side of our organization, as well as the AI doing the heavy lifting under the herd to be able to create those experience at scale. And I think today every digital customer and every user out there are leaving a trail of very rich, very frequent interaction data with their brands and organizations that they interact with. You know, if you look at each of us, many, many moments and hours of our digital lives are with these interactions that we do on screens and devices, and that leaves a rich trail of data. And brands that are winning, brands that we want to interact with more, have user privacy and user safety at the center of it. And then they build that authentic connection from there on. And, you know, just like when we log into our favorite streaming shows or streaming applications, we want to see things that are relevant to us. They, in some sense, knowing kind of intimately our preferences or changing taste. And how does a brand or organization react to that but still make room for that authentic connection? >> It's an awesome opportunity. And it's a lot of challenges, and it's just starting, I totally agree. Let me ask you a question, Manyam, if you don't mind. How did you guys come up with Blueshift? I know you guys have been in this game before it was fashionable, so to speak, but you know, solving Web 1.0, 2.0 problems. And then, you know, Walmart Labs, everyone knows the history of Walmart and how fast they were with inventory and how they used data. You have that kind of trajectory. When you saw this opportunity, was it like the team was saying, wow, look at this, it's right in our wheelhouse, or, how did you guys get here, and then how did it all come together? >> Yeah, thanks for offering me an opportunity to share our personal journey. You know, I think prior to starting Blueshift with my co-founders, who I worked with for almost the past 20 years of my life, we were at a company called Kosmix, which was a Silicon Valley, early AI pioneer. We were doing semantics search, and in 2011, Walmart started their Silicon Valley innovation hub, Walmart Labs, with the acquisition of Kosmix. And, you know, we went into Walmart Labs, and until then they were already an e-commerce leader. They had been practicing e-commerce for better part of 12 years prior to that, but they're certainly you know, behind, compared to their peers, right? And the peers to be named! (laughs) But, they saw this lack of what it is that they were doing so well in brick and mortar that they're not able to fully get there on the digital side. And, you know, this was almost a decade ago. And when they brought in our team with a lot of AI and data systems at scale, building things at the cutting edge, you know, we went into it a little bit naively, thinking, you know, hey, we are going to solve this problem for Walmart scale in three months. (laughs) But it took us three years to build those systems of engagement. Despite Walmart having an enormous amount of resources being the number one retailer in the world and the data and the resource at their disposal, we had to rethink a lot of assumptions and the trends that were converging were, you know, uses for interacting with them across multiple formats and channels. And both offline and online, the velocity and complexity of the data was increasing. All the marketing and merchandising teams said even a millisecond delay for me is unconscionable. And how do you get fresh data and activated at the moment of experience, without delay, this significant challenge at scale? And that's what we solve for our organizations. >> It really is the data problem. It's a scale problem. It's all that. And then having the software to have that AI predictive and, you know, it's omnichannel when you think about it, in that retail and that brick and mortar term used for physical space and digital converging. And we saw the pandemic pull forward this same dynamic where events and group behaviors and just interactions were all converging. So this line between physical and digital is now blurred, completely blended, the line between customer experience and marketing has been erased, and you guys are the center of this. What does it mean for the customer? Because the customers out there, your customers, or potential customers. They got problems to solved. They're going all digital cloud-native applications, the digital transformation. This is the new normal, and some are on it, are starting it, some are way behind. What are they- What's the situation with the customers? >> Yeah, that's certainly the maturity of, you know, the, each brand and organization along that, you know, both transformation and from transformation to actually thriving in that ecosystem. And how do we actually win, you know, share of mind and then share of, like, that market that they're looking to does take a while. And, and many are, you know, kind of midway through their journey. I think, there was, initially there is a lot of, you know, push towards let's collect all the data that we can but then, you know, how does the actually data becomes something useful that changes experience for Manyam versus John is really that critical moment. And that moment is when, you know, a lot of things come into place. And if I look at, like, the broader landscape, there are certainly lines of powers like Discovery, like Udacity and LendingTree, and Zumper car pods across all these industries. Who would've thought like, you know, all these industries who you would not think of actually as solving a digital engagement problem are now saying that's the key to our success and our growth. >> Yeah. It's absolutely the number one problem. This is the number one opportunity for all businesses, not just verticals here and there, all verticals. So walk me through your typical customer scenario. You know, what are the challenges that they face? You're in the middle of it, you're solving these problems, what are their challenges that they face and how do you guys solve them? >> Absolutely. So I'll talk through two examples, one from a finance industry, one from online learning, you know, o One of our great customers that we partner with is LendingTree. They offer tens of millions of customers' finance products that span from home loans, students loans, auto loans, credits, all of that. And, and let these people come into their website and collect information that is relevant to the loan that they're considering, but engage them in a way for the next period of time. So if you typically think about engagement, it's not just a one interaction, usually that follows a series of steps an organization has to take to be able to explain all their offerings in a way that is digestible and relevant and personalized to each of those millions of customers and actually have them through the funnel and measure it and report on it and make sure that that is the most relevant to them. So in a finance setting that is about consuming credit products, consuming loan products, consuming reporting products in an online context. I'll give you an example of one of our customers, Udacity. Imagine you are a marketing team of two people, and you are in challenged with, how do you engage 20 million students. You're not going to write 20 million communications that are different for each of those students, certainly. I think you need a system to say what did actually all these students come for? How do I learn what they want at this moment in time? What do they want next? If they actually finished something that they started two months ago, would they be eligible for the right course? Maybe today we are talking about self-driving cars. That's the course that I should bring in front of them. And that's only a small segment of the students but someone else maybe on the media and the production side. How do I personalize the experience so that every single step of the way for that student is, you know, created and delivered at scale? And that's kind of the problem that we solve for our brands, which is they have these millions of touchpoint that are, that they have, how do they bring all their data, very fresh and activated at the moment of action? >> So you guys are creating the 10x marketer. I mean, kind of- >> That's right. That's a very (indistinct)- >> 10X engineer, the famous, you're 10X engineer. >> Right. >> You guys are bringing a lot of heavy lifting to short staffs or folks that don't have a data science team or data engineering team. You're kind of bringing that 10x marketing capability. >> Absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. I call it the mission impossible, which is, you know, you're signing up for the mission impossible, for every marketing team, it's like, now they're like, they are the product managers they're the data scientists, they're the analysts. They are the creator, you know, author, all of that combined into a role. And now you're entrusted with this really massive challenge. And how do you actually get there? And it's that 10x marketer who are embracing these technologies to get there. >> Well, I'm looking forward to challenging though because I can imagine you get a lot of skeptics out there. I don't believe you. It sounds too good to be true. And I want to get to that in the next segment, but I want to ask you about the state of MarTech and AI specifically. MarTech traditionally has been on Web 2.0 standards, DNS, URLs. It's the naming system of the internet. It's the internet infrastructure. So- >> Right. what needs to change to make that scale higher? Does, is there any new abstraction or any kind of opportunities for doing things in just managing you know, tokens that need to be translated? It's hard to do cross to- I mean, there's a lot of problems with Web 2.0 legacy that kind of holds back the promise of high availability of data, privacy, AI, more machine learning, more exposure of data. Can you share your vision on this next layer? >> Absolutely. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of excitement about what Web3 would bring us there in the very early innings of that possibility. But the challenge of, you know, data that leads to authentic experience still remains the same whichever metaverse we might actually interact with a brand name, like, you know, even if I go to a Nike store in the Metaverse, I still need to understand what that customer really prefers and keep up with that customer as they change their preferences. And AI is the key to be able to help a marketer. I call it the, you know, our own group call it like IPA you know, which is ingest all possible data, even from Metaverse, you know, the protocols might change, the formats might change, but then you have to not only have a sense of what happened in the past. I think there are more than enough tools to know what happened. There are only emerging tools to tell you what might happen. How do I predict? So ingest, predict, and then next step is activate. Actually you had to do something with it. How do I activate it, that the experience for you, whether it's Web3 or Web2 changes, and that IPA is kind of our own brew of, you know, AI marketing that we are taking to market. >> And that's the enablement piece, so how does this relate to the customer's data? You guys are storing all the data? Are they coming in? Is there a huge data lake involved? Can I bring in third party data? Does it have to be all be first party? How is that platform-level enabling this new form of customer engagement? >> Absolutely. There's a lot of heavy lifting that the data systems that one has to you know, bring to bear upon the problem, data systems ranging from, you know, distributed search, distributed indexing, low latency systems, data lakes that are built for high velocity, AI machine learning, training model inference, that validation pipeline. And, you know, we certainly leverage a lot of of data lake systems out there, including many of the components that are, you know, provided by our preferred partner, AWS and open source tools. And these data systems are certainly very complex to manage. And for an organization that, with a, you know, 5 to 10 people team of marketers, they're usually short staffed on the, the amount of attention that they get from rest of the organization. And what we have made is that you can ingest a lot more raw data. We do the heavy lifting, but both data management, identity resolution, segmentation, audience building, predictions, recommendations, and then give you also the delivery piece, which is, can I actually send you something? Can I put something in front of the user and measure it and report on it and tell you that, this is the ROI? How do, if all this would be for nothing, if actually you go through all this and there's no real ROI. And we have kind of, you know, our own forester did a total economic impact study with us. And they have found, they have found 781% ROI for implementing Blueshift. And it's a tremendous amount of ROI you get once you are able to reorient your organizations towards that. >> You know, Manyam, one of the problems of being a visionary and a pioneer like you guys are, you're early a lot. And so you must be scratching your head going, oh, the hot buzzword these days is the semantic layer, in Khan, you see snowflake and a bunch of other people kind of pushing this semantic layer. It's basically a data plane essentially for data, right? >> Right. >> And you guys have done that. Been there, done that, but now that's in play, you guys have this. >> That's right. >> You've got all this semantic search built in into the system, all this in data ingestion, it's a full platform. And so I need to ask you how you see this vectoring into the future state of customer engagement. Where, where do you see this intersecting with the organizations you're trying to bring this to? Are they putting more investment in, are they pulling back? Are they, where are, where are they and where are you guys relative to this, this technology? And, and, and, and first of all let's get your reaction to this semantic layer first. >> Right, right. It's a fantastic, you know, as a technologist, I love, you know, kind of the ontology and semantic differences, you know, how, how, you know, data planes, data meshes, data fabrics are put together. And, you know, I saw this, you know, kind of a dichotomy between CIO org and CMO org, right? The CO says like, you know, I have the best data plane, the data mesh, the data fabric. And the CMO says like, but I'm actually trying to accomplish something for this campaign. And they're like, oh, that, does it actually connect the both of pieces? >> So I think, the- >> Yeah? >> The CMO org certainly will need purpose-built applications, on top of the data fabric, on top of the data lakes, on top of the data measures, to be able to help marketing teams both technical and semi-technical to be able to accomplish that. >> Yeah. And then, and the new personas they want turnkey, they want to have it self-service. Again, the 10x marketer is someone with a small staff that can do the staff of hundred people, right? >> That's absolutely- >> So that's where it's going. And this is, this i6s the new normal. >> So, we call them AI marketers. And I think it's a, it's like you're calling a 10x marketer. I think, you know, over time we didn't have, you know this word, business intelligence analyst, but then once the tool are there, then they become business intelligence analysts. I think likewise, once these tools are available then we'll have AI marketers out in the market. >> Well, Manyam, I'd love to do a full, like, one-hour podcast with you. You can go for a long time with these topics given what you guys are working on, how relevant it is, how cool it is right now, and with what you guys have as a team and solution. I really appreciate you coming on the CUBE to chat. For the last minute we have here, give a quick plug for the company, what you guys are up to, size, funding, revenues, what you're looking for. What should people pay attention to? Give the plug. >> Yeah. Yeah, we are a global team, spanning, you know, multiple time zones. You know, we have raised $65 million to date to build out our vision and, you know, over the last eight years of our funding, we have served hundreds of customers and continuing to, you know, take on more. I think, you know, our hope is that over time, the next 10,000 organizations see this as a very much an approachable, you know, problem to solve for themselves, which I think is where we are. AI marketing is real doable, proven ROI. Can we get the next 10,000 customers to embrace that? >> You know, as we always used to say in the kind of web business and search, it's the contextual and the behavioral, you got to bring 'em together here. You got all that technology for the, for the sites and applications for the behavior and converting that contextually into value. Really compelling solution. Thanks for sharing your insight. >> Yeah. Thank you John, really appreciate this. >> Okay, this is CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around. We have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, you know, falling from, from the non hyperscalers where they like the value propers, you know, technology. And I want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle on the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm <affirmative> would be looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data center? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it tributed computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's <inaudible> right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big end happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own dumps. They want, uh, uh, a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contains architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated world on website. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economics, multi vendor ecosystem, open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux. Uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, uh, you large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 25. >>You know, we've Al we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation, because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work and what starts with networking lay what they did kind of with the, in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are the concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of now is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of Dell in all this? You guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what do you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our vision has been primarily to bridge the cap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the stents and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable, open source NA, which is hardened supported and backed by industry leader and open networking that has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we CU the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, a predictable software and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can average, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetric capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called manage framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your environment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening from the non hyperscaler awards. And, uh, we've made significant in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of code what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to absorb this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual to MOS. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better of it with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell, how supply chain was really part of their advantage. Um, and this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but you look back back then it was a of systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around the system and with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here and comput as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and open source growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we Dell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customers. Now, it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about out, you know, protocol stacks, or, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's, it's with software, right? Sonic being open software. There's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. You know, we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their applications and get better at monitoring, get better at you managing that entire CIC CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructure today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the customers. >>It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, urine in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of it and the role of data, uh, and also application developers all in the partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of plays mm-hmm, <affirmative> in providing a best in class service because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, there's a ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered on protocol stack, right? So it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity, and based on these needs, we've built up, uh, portfolio with, with plethora of options, for, uh, you know, integrations into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, apps are Juniper. Um, Okta, there are crews that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the broader, the, the tier two cloud of this point is the large enterprises also want, you know, based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. We have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into open source marketing tools like Telegraph or far and Promeus, and then we continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on easy integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring the choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kabar, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change the, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on. Find final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start off a journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on a networking happening with Sonic so much. This, this technology has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop and microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature additions, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, brings Sonic to the wider market. So, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the so journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking networking's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here at Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around, we have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it, the better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. And, and it has >>Go ahead, continue. >>Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, of, you know, falling from, from the non-hyper killers where they like the value propers of technology and they want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle in the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm, <affirmative> what we looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data centers? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it distributing computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's ion, right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big 10 happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own terms. They want a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contain architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the, the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and, and, you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated to the world on the server side. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economic, multi vendor ecosystem open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux, uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, you know, large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 2025. >>You know, we've, we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work, Amazon what starts with networking lay, what they did kind of with in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of out is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of the Dell and all this, you guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what are you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our, our vision has been primarily to bridge the gap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the strengths and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable opensource NA, which is hard and supported and backed by industry leader in open networking. That has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we cus the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, predictable, soft, and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide at extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can leverage, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetry capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called management framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your employment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening the non hyperscale awards. And, uh, we made significant contributions in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of court, what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to, of this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual demos. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers, and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better with, with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell house supply chain was really part of their advantage. And this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but look back back then it was a systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around this system. And with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here in computing as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and openside growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we tell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customer is now it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about, you know, protocol stacks that, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's it's software, right? Sonic being open software, there's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. We know we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their app applications and get better at monitoring, get better at, you know, managing that entire C I CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructures today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the >>Customers. It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, you're in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of, and the role of data and also application developers all in play. The partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of ways in providing a best in class service, because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, the ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered around protocol Sachs. It it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity. And based on these needs, we built up portfolio with, with plethora of options for, uh, you know, into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, abstract, Juniper, um, Okta, and are crew that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the product, the, the tier two cloud at this point is the large enterprises also want based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. So we have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into opensource modeling tools like Telegraph or FA and pros. And then we are continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on these integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring that choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage the, the inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kalo, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change their, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start of our journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on and networking happening with Sonic. There's so much this, this has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop around microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature addition, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the com community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, bring Sonic to the wider market. So, uh, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the Sonic journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking, networking it's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>>mhm. What the special cube conversation here in Palo alto, I'm john Kerry host of the cube. We're here talking about kubernetes Cloud native and all things Cloud, cloud enterprise amir Sure VP of product and morgan Stanley is with me and we are great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you taking the time, >>appreciate it, john good to be here. You >>know, cloud Native obviously super hot right now as the edges around the corner, you're seeing people looking at five G looking at amazon's wavelength outposts you've got as you got a lot of cloud companies really pushing distributed computing and I think one of the things that people really are getting into is okay, how do I take the cloud and re factor my business and then that's one business side then, the technical side. Okay, How do I do it? Like it's not that easy. Right. So it sounds, it sounds really easy to just go to move to the cloud. This is something that's been a big problem. So I know you guys in the center of all this uh and you've got, you know, microservices, kubernetes at the core of this, take a minute to introduce the company, what you guys do then I want to get into some specific questions. >>Mhm, of course. Well, bob Sani is a startup? Silicon Valley startup and what we do is automate system configuration that's typically worked at an engineer does and take lengthy and if done incorrectly at least to a lot of errors and cost overruns and the user experience problems. We completely automate that using an Ai and ml back end so that the engineering can focus on writing code and not worry about having to tune the little pieces working together. >>You know, I love the, I was talking to a V. C on our last uh startup showcase, cloud startup showcase and uh really prominent VC and he was talking about down stack up stack benefits and he says if you're going to be a down stack um, provider, you got to solve a problem. It has to be a big problem that people don't want to deal with. So, and you start getting into some of the systems configuration when you have automation at the center of this as a table stakes item problems are cropping up as new use cases are emerging. Can you talk about some of the problems that you guys see that you solve for developers and companies, >>of course. So they're basically, they're, the problem expresses itself in a number of domains. The first one is that he who pays the bills is separate from he who consumes the resources. It's the engineers that consume the resources and the incentives are to deliver code rapidly and deliver code that works well, but they don't really care about paying the bills. And then the CFO office sees the bills and there's a disparity between the two. The reason that creates a problem, a business problem is that the developers uh, will over provision stuff, uh to make sure that everything works and uh, they don't want to get caught in the middle of the night. You know, the bill comes due at the end of the month or into the quarter and then the CFO has smoke coming out of his ears because there's been clawed overruns. Then the reaction happens to all right, let's cut costs. And then, you know, there's an edict that comes down that says everything, reduce everything by 30%. So people go across and give a haircut to everything. So what happens next to systems out of balance? There's allocation resource misallocation and uh, systems start uh, suffering. So the customers become unhappy. And ironically, if you're not provisioned correctly, Not ironically, but maybe understandably, customers start suffering and that leads to a revenue problem down the line if you have too many problems unhappy. So you have to be very careful about how you cut costs and how you apportion resources. So both the revenue side is happy and it costs are happy because it all comes down to product experience and what the customers consume. You >>know, that's something that everyone who's done. Cloud development knows, you know, whose fault is it? You know, it's this fall. But now you can actually see the services you leave a switch open or, you know, I'm oversimplifying it. But, you know, you experiment services, you can the bills can just have massive, you know, overruns and then, and then you got to call the cloud company and you gotta call the engineers and say why did you do this? You got to get a refund or or the bad one. Bad apple could ruin it for everyone as you, as you highlighted over the bigger companies. So I have to ask you mean everyone lives this. How do companies have cost overruns? Is their patterns that you see that you guys wrote software 4-1, automate the obvious ones. Is there is there are certain things that you know always happen. Are there areas that have some indications? So why do, first of all, why do companies have cloud cost overruns? >>That's a great question. And let's start with a bit of history where we came from a pre cloud world, you built your own data centers, which means that you have an upfront Capex cost and you spend the money and you were forced to live within the needs that your data center provided. You really couldn't spend anymore. That provided kind of a predictable expenditure bottle it came in big chunks. But you know what, your budget was going to be four years from now, three years from now. And you built for that with the cloud computing, Your consumption is now on on demand basis and it's api enabled. So the developer can just ask for more resources. So without any kind of tools that tell the developer here is x amount of CPU or X amount of memory that you need for this particular service, that for it to deliver the right uh, performance that for the customer. The developers incentivized to basically give it a lot more than the application needs. Why? Because the developer doesn't want to pick up service tickets. He's incentivizing delivering functionality quickly and moving on to next project, not in optimizing costs. So that creates kind of uh an agency problem that the guy that actually controls how research are consumed is not incentivized to control the consumption of these resources. And we see that across the board in every company, engineers, engineering organization is a separate organization than the financial organization. So the control place is different. The consumption place and it breaks down the patterns are over provisions. And what we want to do is give engineers the tools to consume precisely the right amount of resources for the service level objectives that they have, given that you want a transaction rate of X and the literacy rate of Why here's how you configure your cloud infrastructure. So the application delivers according to the sls with the least possible resources consumed. >>So on this tool you guys have in the software you guys have, how how do you guys go to mark with that, you target the business buyer or the developer themselves and and how do you handle the developers say, I don't want anyone looking over my shoulder. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna have a blank check to do whatever it takes, um how do you guys roll that out because actually the business benefits are significant controlling the budget, I get that. Um how do you guys rolling this out? How do people engage with you? What's your strategy? >>Right. Are there, is the application owner, is the guy that owns the PML for the application? It tends to be a VP level or a senior director person that owns a SAAS platform and he or she is responsible for delivering good products to the market and delivering good financial results to the CFO So in that person of everything is rolled up, but that person will always favor the revenue site, which means consume more resources than you need in order to maximize customer happiness, therefore faster growth and uh they do that while sacrificing the cost side. So by giving the product owner the optimization tools autonomous of optimization tools that Sandy has, we allow him or her to deliver the right experience to the customer, with the right sufficient resources and address both the performance and the cost side of equation simultaneously, >>awesome. Can you talk about the impact c I C D s having in the cloud native computing on the optimization cycle? Um Obviously, you know, shifting left for security, we hear a lot of that, you're hearing a lot of more microservices being spun up, spun down automatically. Uh I'll see kubernetes clusters are going mainstream, you start to see a lot more dynamic uh activity if you if you in these new workflows, what is the impact of these new CSC D cloud? Native computing on the optimization cycle? >>C i c D is there to enable a fast delivery of software features basically. Uh So, you know, we have a combination of get get ups where you can just pull down repositories, libraries, open source projects from left and right. And using glue code, developers can deliver functionality really quick. In fact, microservices are there in service of that capability, deliver functionality quickly by being able to build functional blocks and then through a piece you put everything together. So ci cd is just accelerates the software delivery code. Between the time the boss says, give me an application until the application team plus the devops team plus SRE team puts it out in production. Now we can do this really quickly. The problem is though, nobody optimizes in the process. So when we deliver 1.0 in six months or less, we've done zero in terms of optimization and at one point, oh, becomes a way that we go through QA in many cases, unfortunately. And it also becomes a way that we go through the optimization. The customer screams that you eyes Laghi, you know, the throughput is really slow and we tinker and tinker and tinker and by the time it typically goes through a 12 month cycle of maturation, we get that system stability in the right performance with a I and machine learning that a person has enabled. We can deliver that, we can shrink that time out considerably. In fact, uh you know what we're going to announce in q khan is something that be called Kite storm is the ability to uh install our product and kubernetes environment in roughly 20 minutes and within two days you get the results. So before you have this optimization cycle that was going on for a very long time now that it's frank down and because of Ci Cd, you know, you don't have the luxury of waiting and the system itself can become part of the way of contributing system. The system being the uh ai ml service, that the presiding deliveries can be uh part and parcel of the Ci cd pipeline, that optimizes the code and gives you the right configuration and you get to go. So >>you guys are really getting down and injecting in some uh instrumentation for metadata around key areas. That right. Is that kind of how it's working? Are you getting in there with codes going to watch? Um how was it working under the hood? Can you just give me a quick example of, you know, how this would play out and what people might expect, how it would handle, >>of course. So what the way we optimize application performance is we have to have a metric against which we measure performance. That metric is an S L O service level, objective and in a kubernetes environment, we typically tap into Prometheus, which is the metrics gathering place metrics database for kubernetes workloads and we really focus on red metrics, the rate of transactions, the error rate and the for delay or latency. So we focus on these three metrics and what we have to do is inject a small container, it's an open source container into the application work space that we call that a container. Servo. Servo interacts with Prometheus to get the metrics and then it talks to our back end to tell the M L engine what's happening and then L engine and does this analysis and comes back with a new configuration which then servo implements in a canary instance. So the Canary instances where we run our experiments and we compare it against the main line, Which the application is doing after roughly 20 generations or so. The Bellingen Learns what part of the problem space to focus on in order to optimize to deliver optimal results. And then it very quickly comes to the right set of solutions to try and it tries those inside uh inside the canary instance and when it finds the optimal solution, it gives the recommendation back to the application team or alternatively, when you have enough trust in the tiny you can ought to promote it into mainline that >>gets the learning in there is a great example of some cloud native action. I want to get into some examples with your customer, but before we get there, I want to ask you, since I have you here, if you don't mind, what is cloud native mean these days, because you know, cloud native become kind of much cloud computing, um which essentially go move to the cloud, but as people start developing in the cloud where there's real new benefits, people talk about the word cloud native, could you take a quick minute to define? What is cloud Native, Does that even mean? What does cloud native mean? >>I'll try to give you my understanding government, we could get into a bit of philosophy. Uh Yeah, that's good. But basically cloud Native means it's, your application is built for the cloud and it takes advantages of the inherent benefits that a cloud environment can give you, which means that you can grow and shrink resources on the fly, if you built your application correctly, that you can scale up and scale down, you're a number of instances very quickly and uh, everything has taken advantage of a P I S so initially that was kind of done inside of the environment. Uh AWS Ec two is a perfect example of that. Kubernetes shifted cloud native to container its workload because it allows for rapid, more, rapid deployment and even enables or it takes advantage of a more rapid development cycle as we look forward. Cloud Native is more likely to be a surplus environment where you write functions and the backend systems of the cloud service provider, just give you that capability and you don't have to worry about maintaining and managing a fleet of any sort, whether it's VMS or containers, that's where it's gonna go. Currently we are to contain our space >>so as you start getting into the service molly good land, which we've been playing with, loves that as you get into that, that's going to accelerate more data. So I gotta ask you as you get into more of this this month, I will say monitoring or observe ability, how we want to look at it. You gotta get at the data. This becomes a critical part of solving a lot of problems and also making sure the machine learning is learning the right thing. How do you view that you guys over there? Because I think everyone is like getting that cloud native and it's not hard sell to say that's all good, but we can go back, you know, the expression ships created ships and then you have shipwrecks, you know, there's always a double edged sword here. So what's the downside? If you don't get the data right? >>Uh well, so the for us, the problem is not too much data, it's lack of data. So if you don't get data right is you don't have enough data. And the places where optimization cannot be automated is where the transaction rates are slow, where you don't have enough fruit. But coming into the application and it really becomes difficult to optimize that application with any kind of speed. You have to be able to profile the application long enough to know what moves its needle and in order for you to hit the S. L. O. Targets. So it's not too much data, it's not enough data. That seems to be the problem. And there are a lot of applications that are expensive to run but have a low throughput. And I would uh in all cases actually in every customer environment that have been in, where that's been the case if the application is just over provision, if you have a low throughput environment and it's costing too much, don't use ml to solve it. That's a wrong application of the technology. Just take a sledgehammer and back your resources by 50%, see what happens. And if that thing breaks back it again, until you find the baggage point. >>Exactly for you over prison, you bang it back down again. It's like the old school now with the cloud. Take me through some examples when you guys had some success, obviously you guys are in the right area right now, you're seeing a lot of people looking at this area to do that in some cases like changing the whole data center and respect of their business. But as you get it with customers with the app side, what some successes can you share some of the use cases, what you guys are being successful, your customers can get some examples. >>Yeah. So well known financial software for midsize businesses that that does accounting. It's uh there are customer during a large fleet and this product has been around for a while. It's not a container ice product. This product runs on VMS. Angela is a large component of that. So the problem for this particular vendor has been that they run on heterogeneous fleet that the application has been a along around for a very long time. And as new instance types on AWS have come in, developers have used those. So the fleet itself is quite heterogeneous and depending on the time of the day and what kind of reports are being run by organisations, they, the mix of resources that the applications need are different. So uh when we started analyzing the stack, we started we started looking at three different tiers, we looked at the database level, we looked at the job of mid tier and we looked at the web front end. And uh one of the things that became counterproductive is that m L. Discovered that using for the mid tier using larger instances but fear of a lot for better performance and lower cost and uh typically your gut feel is to go with smaller instances and more of a larger fleet if you would. But in this case, what the ML produced was completely counter intuitive And the net result for the customer was 78% cost reduction while agency went down by 10%. So think about it that you're, the response time is less, uh 10% less but your costs are down almost 80% 78% in this case. And the other are the fact that happened in the job of mitt here is that we improve garbage collection significantly and because whenever garbage collection happens on a JV M it takes a pause and that from a customer perspective it reflects as downtime because the machines are not responding so by tuning garbage collection Andrzej VMS across this very large fleet we were able to recover over 5000 minutes and month across the entire fleet. So uh, these are some substantial savings and this is what the right application of machine learning on a large fleet can do for assess business. >>And so talk about this fleet dynamic, You mentioned several lists. How do you see the future evolving for you guys? Where are you skating to where the puck is? As the expression goes? Um obviously with server list is going to have essentially unlimited fleets potentially That's gonna put a lot of power in the hands of developers. Okay. And people building experiences, What's the next five years look like for you guys? >>So I'm looking at the product from a product perspective, the service market depends on the mercy of the cloud service provider and typically the algorithms that they use. Uh basically they keep very few instances warm for you until you're the rate of api calls goes up and they start they start uh start turning on VMS are containers for you and then the system becomes more responsive over time. One place that we can optimize the service environment is give predictability of what the cyclicality of load is. So we can pre provision those instances and warm up the engine before the loads come into the system always stays responsive. You may have noticed that some of your apps on your phone that when you start them up, they may have a start up like a minute or two. Especially if it's a it's a terror gap. What's happening in those cases that you're starting an api calls goes in containers being started up for you to start up that instance, not enough of our warm to give you that rapid response. And that can lead to customer churn. So by by analyzing what the load on the overall load of the system is and pre provision the system. We can prevent the downtime uh prevent the lag to start up black on the downside. Which when you know when the usage goes down, it doesn't make sense to keep that many instances up. So we can talk to the back in infrastructure and the commission of those VMS in order to make to prevent cost creeps basically. So that's one place that we're thinking about extending our technology. >>So it's like, it's like the classic example where people say, oh during black monday everyone searches to do e commerce. You guys are thinking about it on A level that's a user centric kind of use case where you look at the application and be smart about what the expectation is on any given situation and then flex the resources on that. Is that right? That by getting right? So if it's your example, the app is a good one. If I wanted to load fast, that's the expectation. It better load fast. >>Yes, that's exactly but more romantic. So I use valentine's day and flowers my example. But you know, it doesn't have to be annual cycles. It can be daily cycles or hourly cycles. And all those patterns are learning about by an Ml back in. >>Alright, so I gotta ask you love the, this, this this new concept because most people think auto scaling right? Because that's a server concept. Can auto scale or database. Okay. On a scale up, you're getting down to the point where, okay, we'll keep the engines warm, getting more detailed. How do you explain this versus a concept like auto scaling. Is it the same as a cousins? >>They're they're basically the way they're expressed, it's the same technology but their way there expressed is different. So uh in a cooper native environment, the H. B A is your auto scaler basically in response to the need, response more instances and you get more containers going on. What happens as services? Less environment is you're unaware of the underpinnings that do that scale up for you. But there is an auto Scaler in place that does that scale up for you. So the question becomes that we're in a stack from a customer's perspective, are you talking about if you imagine your instances we're dealing with the H. B. A. If you're managing at the functional level we have to have api calls on the service provider's infrastructure to pre warm up the engine before the load comes. >>I love I love this under the hood is kind of love new dynamics kind of the same wine, new bottle but still computer science, still coding, still cool and relevant to make these experiences great. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. I really appreciate it. Take a minute to put a plug in for the company. What are you guys doing in terms of status funding scale employees, what are you looking for? And if someone's watching this and there should be a customer of you guys, what what's, what's, what's going on in their world? What tells them that they need to be calling you? >>Yeah, so we're serious. Dave we've had the privilege of uh, our we've been privileged by having a very good success with large enterprises. Uh, if you go to our website, you'll see the logos of who we have, we will be at Q khan and there were going to be actively targeting the mid market or smaller kubernetes instances, as I mentioned, it's gonna take about 20 minutes to get started and we'll show the results in two hours. And our goal is for our customers to deliver the best user experience in terms of performance, reliability. Uh, so that they, they delight their customers in return and they do so without breaking the bank. So deliver excellent products, do it at the most efficient way possible, deliver a good financial results for your stakeholders. This is what we do. So we encourage anybody who is running a SAS company to come and take a look at us because we think we can help them and we can accelerate there. The growth at the lower cost >>and the last thing people need is have someone coming breathing down their necks saying, hey, we're getting overcharged. Why are you guys screwing up when they're not? They're trying to make a great experience. And I think this is kind of where people really want to do push the envelope and not have to go back and revisit the cost overruns, which if it's actually a good sign if you get some cost overruns here and there because you're experimenting. But again, you don't want to get out of control. >>You don't want to be a visual like the U. S. Debt. >>Exactly. I'm here. Thank you for coming on. Great. We'll see a coupe con. The key will be there in person is a hybrid event. So uh, coupon is gonna be awesome and thanks for coming on the key. Appreciate it. >>John is a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. >>Okay. I'm john fryer with acute here in Palo alto California remote interview with upsetting hot startup series. I'm sure they're gonna do well in the right spot in the market. Really well poisoned cloud Native. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier with The Cube, we're here in Palo Alto, California for a remote interview and session for The Cube presents AWS startup showcase, the next big thing in AI security in life sciences. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great segment on cloud. Next big thing in Cloud with Chaos Search, Thomas Hazel, Chief Technology and Science Officer of Chaos Search joined by Jeremy Foran, the head of data analytics, the bad boy of data analyst as they say, but BAI communications, Jeremy Thomas, great to have you on. >> Great to be here. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about applying large scale log analytics to building the future of the transit industry. Obviously Telco's a big part of that, smart cities, you name the use case self-driving trucks, cars, you name it, everything's now edge. That the edge is super valuable, it's a new kind of last mile if you will, it's moving fast, it's mobile. This is a huge deal. Let's get into it, Thomas. What's this big story around this, this session? >> Well, we provide unique ability to take all that edge data and drive it into a data lake offering that we provide data analytics, both in logs, BI and coming out with ML there this year into next. So our unique play is transforming customers' cloud outer storage into an analytical platform. And really, I think with BIA is a log analytics specifically where, you know there's a lot of data streams from all those devices going into a lake that we transform their lake into analytics for driving, I guess, operational analysis. >> You know, Jeremy, I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember when the edge was the remote switch or campus hub or something. And then even on the Telco side, there was no wifi back in 2000 and you know, someone was driving in a car and you got any signal, you're lucky. Now you got, you know, no perimeter you have unlimited connectivity everywhere. This has opened up more of an Omni channel data problem. How do you see that world? Because you still got more devices pushing out at this edge and it's getting super local, right? Even on the body, even on people in the car. So certainly a lot of change on the infrastructure side. What does that pose for data challenge? >> Yeah, I, I would say that, you know users always want more, more bandwidth, more performance and that requires us to create more systems that require more complexity to deliver that user experience that we're, we're very proud of. And with that complexity means, you know exponentially more data. And so one of the wifi networks we offer in the Toronto subway system, T-connect, you know we see a 100-200,000 unique users a day and you can imagine just the amount of infrastructure to support that so that everyone has a seamless experience and can get their news and emails and even stream media while they're waiting for the subway. >> So you guys provide state of the art infrastructure for cell, wifi, broadcast, radio, IP networks, basically I mean, I call it the smart city kind of go-to. But that's basically anything involving kind of that edge piece. This is a huge thing. So as smart cities are on the table, which and you seeing 5G being called more of an enterprise app where there's feeding large dense areas of people this is now a new modern version of what I would call the, the smart city blueprint. What's changed in your mind on this whole modernization of this smart city infrastructure concept? What's new? What's cutting edge? >> Yeah. I would say that, you know there was an explosion of data and a lot of our insights aren't coming from one system anymore. It's coming from collecting data from all of the different pieces, the different infrastructure whether that's your fiber infrastructure or your wireless infrastructure, and then to solve problems you need to correlate data across those systems. So we're seeing more and more technologies that allow you to do that correlation. And that's really where we're finding tons of value, right? >> Thomas, take us through what you guys do as a, as a, as a product, a value proposition, the secret sauce, and and why I'm here with Jeremy? Why is this conversation important for the folks watching? What's the connection between Chaos Search and BAI communication? >> Well, it's data, right? And lots of it. So our unique platform allows people like Jeremy to stream all this data, right? In you know, today's world terabytes go to petabytes really easily, billions go to trillion really easily, and so providing the analysis of that data for their operations is challenging particularly based on technology and architectures that have been around for a long time. So what we do here at Chaos Search is the ability for BIA to stream all these devices, all these services into one centralized data lake on their cloud outer storage, where we connect to that cloud outer storage and transform it into an analytical database to do, in this case log analytics and do it seamlessly, easily where a new workload a new stream just streams into that lake. And we, as a service take over, we discover we index it and publish well-known open API and visualization so that they can focus on their business, not all the operational data pipeline, database and data engineering type work that again, at these types of scales is is frankly a nightmare. >> You know, one of the things that we've always observed on The Cube when you see new things come out that are really cool groundbreaking products like you guys are doing it's always a challenge to manage the cost and complexity of bringing in the new. So Jeremy, take us through this tech stack here because you know, it's, sometimes it might be unwieldy just in from a tech stack perspective, nevermind the business logic or the business processes that got to be either unwound or changed. Can you take us through the IT stack that's critical to support your, your area? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with all the various different equipment you know, to provide our public wifi and and our desks, carrier agnostic, LT and 5G networks, you know, we need to be able to adhere to PCI compliance and ISO 27,000, so that, you know, requires us to keep a tremendous amount of our data. And the challenge we were facing is how do we do that cost effectively, and not have to make any sort of compromises on how we do that? A lot of times you'll find you don't know the value of your data today until tomorrow. An example would be COVID. You know, we, when we were storing data two years ago we weren't planning for a pandemic, but now that we were able to retain that data and look back we can see a tremendous amount of value with trying to forecast how our systems will recover when things get back to normal. And so when I met Thomas and we were sort of talking about how we were going to solve some of these data retention problems, he started explaining to me their compression in some of the performance metrics of their profession. And, you know, I said, oh, middle out compression. And it was a bit, it's been a bit of a running joke between me and him and I'm sure others, but it's incredibly impressive the amount of data we're able to store at the kind of cost, right? >> What, what problem does, did he solve for you? Because I mean, these guys, honestly, you know the startups have a lot and the Cloud's enabling more value now, we're seeing this, but when you look at this what was your, what was your core problem that you had? >> Yeah, so we, when you we want to be able to, I mean, primarily this is for our CIS log server. And CIS long servers today aren't what they were 10, 15 years ago where you just sort of had a machine and if something broke you went and looked, right? Now, they're very complex, that data is feeding to various systems and third-party software. So, you know, we're actively looking for changes in patterns and we have our, you know security teams auditing these from, for penetration testing and such. And then the getting that data to S3 so that we could have it in case, you know, for two, three years of storage. Well, the problem we were facing is all of that all of these different systems we needed to feed and retain data, we couldn't do that on site. We wanted to do use S3 but when we were doing some projections, it's like, we, we don't really have the budget for all of these places. Meeting Thomas and, and working with Chaos Search, you know, using their compression brought those costs down drastically. And then as we've been working with them the really exciting thing is they we're bringing more and more features to that surface or offering. So, you know, first it was just storing that data away. And now we're starting to build solutions off of that sitting in storage. So that's where it gets really exciting because you know, there, it's nothing to start getting anomaly detection off those logs, which, you know originally it was just, we need to store them in case somebody needs them two, three years from now. >> So Thomas Thomas, if I get this right then what I'm hearing is obviously I've put aside the complexity and the governing side the regulations for a minute just generally. Data retention as, as a key value proposition and having data available when you need it and then to do that and doing it in a very cost-effective simple way. It sounds like what you guys are offering. Is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, one key aspect of our solution is retention, right? Those are a lot of the challenges, but at the same time we provide real time notification like a classic log analytic type platform, alerting, monitoring. The key thing is to bringing both those worlds together and solving that problem. And so this, you know, middle in middle out, well, to be frank, we created a new technology called what we call Chaos Index that is a database index that is wonderfully small as as we're indicating, but also provides all the features that makes Cloud object storage, high performance. And so the idea is that use this lake offering to store all your data in a cost effective way but our service allows you to analyze it both in a long retention perspective as well as real-time perspective and bringing those two worlds together is so key because typically you have Silo Solutions and whether it's real-time at scale or retention scale the cost complexity and time to build out those solutions I know Jeremy knows also, well, a lot of folks come to us to solve those problems because you know when you're dealing with, you know terabytes and up, you know these things get complicated and to be frank, fall over quite often. >> Yeah. Let me, let me just ask you the question that's probably on everyone's mind who's watching and you guys probably have both heard this many times, because a lot of people just throw the data lake solution around like it's, you know why they whitewash their kind of old legacy solutions with data lake, store it on data lake. It's been called a data swamp. So people are fearful that, okay. I love this idea of a data lake, who doesn't like throwing data into a repository, having it available at will with notifications, all this secret magic beans that just magically create value. But I doubt that, I don't want to turn into a data swamp. So Thomas and Jeremy, talk about that, that concern. How do you mitigate that? How do you talk to that? Because if done properly, there's huge value in having a control plane or some sort of data system that is going to be tied in with signals and just storage retention. So I see the value. How do you manage the concern that people might say, Hey, I don't want to date a swamp? >> Yeah, I'll jump into that. So, you know, let's just be frank, Hadoop was a great tool for a very narrow scenario. I think that data swamp came out because people were using the tooling in an incorrect way. I've always had the belief that data lakes are the future. You just have the right to have the right service the right philosophy to leverage it. So what we do here at Chaos Search is we allow you to organize it, discover it, automatically index that data so that swamp doesn't get swampy. You know, when you stream data into your lake how do you organize it, such that it's has a nice stream? How do you transform that data into a value? So with our service we actually start where the storage begins, not a end point, not an archive. So we have tooling and services that keep your lake from being swampy to be, to be clear. And, but the key value is the benefits of the lake, the cost effectiveness, the reliability, security, the scale, those are all the benefits. The problem was that no one really made cloud offer storage a first-class citizen and we've done that. We've dressed the swamp nature but provided all the value of analysis. And that cost metrics, that scale. No one can touch cloud outer storage, it just, you can't. But what we've done is cracked the code of how you make it analytical. >> Jeremy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, on your side I mean, as a practitioner and customer of, of of these solutions, you know, the concern is am I missing anything? And I've been a big proponent of data retention for many, many years. You know, Dave Alondra in our Cube knows all know that I bang on the table all the time, store your data, be a data hoarder, because it's going to come back and be valuable. Costs are going down so I'm a big fan of data retention. But the fear might be on, what am I missing? Because machine learning starts to come in down the road you got AI, the more data you have that's accessible in real time, the more machine learning is effective. Do you, do you worry about missing anything or do you just store everything? >> We, we store everything. Sometimes it's, it's interesting where the value and insights come from your data. Something that see, might seem trivial today down the road offers tremendous, tremendous value. So one of the things we do is provide because we have wifi in the subway infrastructure, you know taking that wifi data, we can start to understand the flow of people in and out of the subway network. And we can take that and provide insights to the rail operators, which get them from A to B quicker. You know, when we built the wifi it wasn't with the intention of getting Torontonians across the city faster. But that was one of the values that we were able to get from the data in terms of, you know, Thomas's solution, I think one of the reasons we we engaged him in the first place is because I didn't believe his compression. It sounded a little too good to be true. And so when it was time to try them out, you know all we had to do was ship data to an S3 bucket. You know, there's tons of, of solutions to do that. And, and data shippers right out of the box. It took a few, you know, a few minutes and then to start exploring the data was in Cabana, which is or their dashboard, which is, you know, an interface that's easy to use. So we were, you know, within a two days getting the value out of that data that we were looking for which is, you know, phenomenal. We've been very happy. >> Thomas, sounds like you've got a great, great testimonial here and it's not like an easy problem that he's living in there. I mean, I think, you know, I was mentioning this earlier and we're going to get into it now. There's regulations and there's certain compliance issues. First of all, everyone has this now problem now, it's not just within that space. But just the technical complexities of packets moving around I got on my wifi and the stop here, I'm jumping over here, and there's a ton of data it's all over the place, it's totally unstructured. So it's a tough, tough test for you guys, Chaos Search. So yeah, it's almost like the Mount Everest of customer testimonials. You've got to, it's a big, it's a big use case here. How does this translate to other clients? And talk about this governance and security controls because I know this highly regulated and you got there's penalties involved on his side of the world and Telco, the providers that have these edge devices there's actually penalties and, and whatnot so, not just commercial, it's maybe a, you know risk management, but here there's actually penalties. >> Absolutely. So, you know centralizing your data has a real benefit of of not getting in trouble, right? So you have one place, you store one place that's a good thing, but what we've done and this was a key aspect to our offering is we as Chaos, Chaos Search folks, we don't own the customer's data. We don't own BIA's data. They own the data. They give us access rights, very standard way with Cloud App storage roll on policies from Amazon, read only access rights to their data. And so not owning a customer's data is a big selling point not only for them, but for us for compliance regulatory perspective. So, you know, unlike a lot of solutions where you move the data into them and now they are responsible, actually BIA owns everything. We, they provide access so that we could provide an analysis that they could turn off at any point in time. We're also SOC 2 type 1 and type 2 compliant you got to do it, you know, in this, this world, you know when we were young we ran at this because of all of these compliance scenarios that we will be in, but, you know, the long as short of it is, we're transient service. The storage, cloud storage is the source of truth where all data resides and, you know, think about it, it's architecturally smart, it's cost effective, it's secure, it's reliable, it's durable. But from a security perspective, having the customer own their own data is a big differentiation in the market, a big differentiation. >> Jeremy, talk about on your end the security controls surrounding the log management environments that span across countries with different regulations. Now you've got all kinds of policy dimensions and technical dimensions and topology dimensions. >> Yeah, absolutely. So how we approach it is we look at where we have offerings across the globe and we figure out what the sort of highest watermark level of adherence we need to hit. And then we standardize across that. And by shipping to S3, it allows us to enforce that governance really easily and right to Tom's point you know, we manage the data, which is very important to us and we don't have to be worried about a third party or if we want to change providers years down the road. Although I don't think anyone's coming out with 81% compression anytime soon (laughs). But yeah, so that's, for us, it's about meeting those high standards and having the technologies that enable us to do it. And Chaos Search is a very big part of that right now. >> All right let me ask you a question, for the folks watching that are like really interested in this topic, what would you say to them when evaluating Chaos Search obviously, your use case is complex, but so are others as enterprises start to have an edge, obviously the security posture shifts, everything shifts. There's no more perimeter and the data problem becomes acute to them. So the enterprises are going to start seeing what you've been living for in your world. What's your advice to people watching? >> My advice would be to give them a try. You know, it's it's has been really quite impressive. The customer service has been hands-on and we've been getting, you know, they've been under-promising and over-delivering, which when you have the kind of requirements to manage solutions in these very complex environment, cloud local, you know various data centers and such, you know that kind of customer service is very important, right? It enables us to continue to deliver those high quality solutions. >> So Thomas give us the, the overview of the secret sauce. You've got a great testimonial here. You got people watching, what's different now in the world that you're going after, what wave are you on? Talk to the people who are watching this and saying, okay why Chaos Search? Why are you relevant? Obviously there's some cool things you're doing. I love that. What's cool, and what's relevant and why what's in it for them if they work with you? >> Yeah. So you know, that that whole Silicon Valley reference actually got that from my patent attorney when we were talking. But yeah, no, we, we, you know, focus on if we can crack this code of making data, one a face small, store small, moves small, process small. But then make it multimodal access make it virtual transformation. If we could do that, and we could transform cloud outer storage into a high-performance medical database all these heavy, heavy problems, all that complexity that scaffolding that you build to do these type of scales would be solved. Now what we had to focus on and this has been my, I guess you say life passion is working on a new data representation. And that's our secret sauce that enables a new architecture a new service that where the customer folks on their tooling, their APIs, their visualizations that they know and love, what we focus is on taking that data lake, and again, to transform it into an analytical database, both for log analytics think of like elastic search replacement, as well as a BI replacement for your SQL warehousing database. And coming out later this year into 2022, ML support on one representation. You don't have the silo your information you don't have to re index your data, both. So elastic search CQL and actually ML TensorFlow actions on the exact same representation. So think about the data retention, doing some post analysis on all those logs of data, months, years, and then maybe set up some triggers if you see some anomaly that's happening within your service. So you think about it, the hunt with BI reporting, with predictive analysis on one platform. Again, it sounds a little unicorn, I agree with Jeremy, maybe it didn't sound true but it's been a life's work. So it didn't happen overnight. And you know, it's eight years, at least in the in the making, but I guess the life journey in the end. >> Well, you know, the timing is great. You know, all the database geeks out there who have been following the data industry know that, you know there's a good point for structured data but when you start getting into mechanisms and they become a bottleneck or a blocker to innovation, you know you starting to see this idea of a data lake being let the data kind of form, let it be. You know, I hate the word control plane but more of a, a connective tissue between systems is become an interesting thing. So now you can store everything so you know, no worries there, no blind spots and then let the magic of machine learning in the future, come around. So Jeremy, with that, I got to ask you since you're the bad boy of data analytics at BAI communications head of data analytics, what does that, what do you look for in the future as you start to set this up because I can almost imagine and connecting the dots here in the interview, you got the data lake you're storing everything, which is good. Now you have to create more insights and get ahead of the curve and provide some prescriptive and automated ways to do things better. What's your vision? >> First I would just like to say that, you know when astrophysicists talk about, you know, dark dark energy, dark matter, I'm convinced that's where Thomas is hiding the ones and zeros to get that compression, right? I don't don't know that to be fact but I know it to be true. And then in terms of machine learning and these sort of future technologies, which are becoming available you know, starting from scratch and trying to build out you know, models that have value, you know that takes a fair amount of work. And that landscape keeps changing, right? Being able to push our data into an S3 bucket and then you know, retain that data and then get anomaly detection on top of it. That's, I mean, that's something special and that unlocks a lot of ability for you know, our teams to very easily deliver anomaly detection, machine learning to our customers, without having to take on a lot of work to understand the latest and greatest in machine learning. So, I mean, it's really empowering to our team, right? And, and a tool that we're going to. >> Yeah, I love and I love the name, Chaos Search, Thomas. I got to say, you know it brings up the inside baseball around chaos monkey which everyone knows was a DevOps tool to create kind of day two simulate day two operations and disruptions in DevOps. But what you're really getting at is your whole new architecture that's beyond DevOps movement, it's like next gen architecture. Talk about that to the people watching who have a lot of legacy and want to transform over to a more enabling platform that's going to give them some headroom for their data. What, what do you say to them? How do they get started? What, how should they, how what's their mindset? What they, what are some first principles you can share? >> Well, you know, I always start with first principles but you know, I like to say we're the next next gen. The key thing with the Chaos Search offering is you can start today with B, without even Chaos Search. Stream your data to S3. We're going to make hip and cool data lakes again. And actually it's a, Google it now, data lakes are hip and cool. So start streaming now, start managing your data in a well-formed centralized viewpoint with security governance and cost effectiveness. Then call Chaos Search shop, and we'll make access to it easily, simply to ultimately solve your problems. The bug whether your security issue, the bug, whether it's more performance issues at scale, right? And so when workloads can be added instantaneously in your data lake it's, it's game changing it's mind changing. So from the DevOps folks where, you know, you're up all night trying to say, how am I going to scale from terabyte, you know one today to 50 terabytes, don't. Stream it to S3. We'll take over, we'll worry about that scale pain. You worry about your job of security, performance, operations, integrity. >> That really highlights the cloud scale the value proposition as, as apps start to be using data as an input, not just as a a part of a repo repo, so great stuff. Thomas, thanks for sharing your life's work and your technology magic. Jeremy, thanks for coming on and sharing your use cases with us and how you are making it all work. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. >> Okay. This is The Cubes, coverage and presenting AWS this time showcase the next big thing here with Chaos Search. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's coverage virtually of the AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit Online. Normally we're face to face in Bahrain or Asia Pacific, or even down in New Zealand and Australia, but we have to do it remotely. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE, we've got a great segment here with a great guest, Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion Health, talking about the Global Healthcare Industry with Cloud Technology because now more than ever, we all know what it looks like, before COVID and after COVID, has upending the health care business, we're seeing it play out in real time, a lot of great benefits to technology. Ian, thank you for coming remotely from New Zealand and we're here in Palo Alto, California, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> You're the Founder and CEO of Orion Health global, award-winning provider of health information technology, supports the delivery of optimized healthcare throughout New Zealand, but now more than ever around the world, congratulations. But now COVID has hit, what is the impact of COVID because this is changing healthcare for the better and speed agility, is the services up to snuff, is it up to par? What is the situation of the post-COVID or the current COVID and then what we'll post-COVID look like for healthcare, what's your opinion? >> So, sir, I've never seen such a dramatic change in such a short time, as has happened over the last nine to 10 months. And you know what we're seeing is before COVID, a lot of focus on automating hospitals, probably primary care, et cetera, now all the focus is on putting medical records together, digital front doors giving patients access to their medical records, and much of the same way you have access to your bank records, when you travel you go into well, we don't travel now actually, but when you go into the lounges, the airline apps are very, very user friendly and the healthcare sector has been a laggard on this area, that's all about to change. And patients will be wanting, they don't want to go when they're feeling ill, they don't want to go down to their local physician practice because, well, there are other sick people there, they want to get the right care, at the right time, and the right place. And usually when they're not feeling well, they want to go online, probably symptom checking, if they need to have a consult they would like to do it there and then and not two or three days later, and they'd like to it virtually, and you know, there are definitely some things that can be done remotely and that's what people want. >> One of the things that comes up in all my interviews around innovation and certainly around AWS and cloud is the speed of innovation, and we were talking before we came on camera about I'm in Palo Alto, California, you're in Auckland, New Zealand, I don't have to fly there, although it's been quarantined for 14 days in New Zealand and summer is coming. but we can get remote services, we're talking and sharing knowledge right now. And when you were also talking before we went on about how healthcare is taking a trajectory similar to the financial industry, you saw our ATM machines, what an innovation, self service, then you got apps and then, you know, the rest is history just connect the dots. The same kind of thing is happening in healthcare, can you share your vision of how you see this playing out, why is it so successful, what are some of the things that need to be worked on and how does cloud bring it all together? >> Just on the banking front, I haven't been to the bank for many years because I understood all online, I had to go to the bank the other day, it was a novel experience. But you know I have a lot of, when I discussed with our developers and they say, well what are the requirements, I said, well, hold on, you're a patient you know what you want, you want your medical record pulled together, right, you want everything there, you can have easy access to it, perhaps you might like the computer to make some suggestions to you, it may want to give you warnings and alerts. And you know what we're also getting is a lot more data, and historically a medical record will be your lab, your radiology, your pharmacy, few procedures, maybe, but what we're getting now is genomic data getting added to its social determinants, where do you live, where do you work, behavioral and lots of other things are getting entered onto the medical record and it is going to get big. Oh, actually I forgot device data as well, all sorts of data. Now, within that vast amount of data, there will be signals that can be picked up, not by humans, but by machine learning and we need to pick the right suggestions that I give them back to the patients themselves, or the circle of care, be it their doctors, physicians, or maybe their family. So the picture I'm trying to paint here is health is going to, historically it's been all seated around physicians and hospitals, and it's all about to change. And it's going to happen quickly, you know normally health is very slow, it's a leg out it takes forever and forever to change, what we're seeing right across the world, I'm talking from Europe, Middle East, Asia, the North America, right across the world, the big health systems looking to provide firm or far richer services to their populations. >> Big joke in Silicon Valley used to be about a decade ago when big data was hitting the scene, we have the smartest data engineers, working on how to make an ad, be placed next to for you and on a page, which in concept is actually technically a challenge, you know, getting the right contextual, relevant piece of information in front of you, I guess it's smart. But if you take that construct to say medicine, you have precision needs, you also have contextual needs so if I need to get a physician, why not do virtually? If that gives me faster care, I got knowledge based system behind it, but if I want precision, I then can come in and it's much efficient, much more efficient. Can you share how the data, 'cause machine learning is a big part of it and machine learning is a consumer of data too, not just users, you're consuming data, but the results are still the same, how are you seeing that translate into value? >> I think the first thing is that if you can treat patients earlier more accurately, you can ultimately keep them healthier and using less health resources. And, you know, you notice around the world, different health systems take a different approach. The most interesting approach we see is when a payer also happens to own the hospitals, their approach changes dramatically and they start pouring a lot of money into primary care so they have to have less hospital beds, but, with data information, you can be more precise in the way you treat the patient. So I've had my genome done, probably quite a few times actually, I just one of the care pair, the different providers so I have avian called CYP2C19, I'm pretty sure I've got it right, and that means I hyper metabolize suite on drugs, so you give them to me they won't work. And so there's information in our medical records, with machine-learning, if you can keep a Tesla on the road, we must be able to use the same, in fact we're, we have a very big machine learning project here on this company, and to not only get the information out of the medical records but save it back up, this is the hard part, save it back up to the providers, and to the patients in a meaningful useful way, an actionable way, not too much, not too little and that's usually the challenge, actually. >> You're a customer in your business, and you guys are in New Zealand, but it's global, you've a global footprint, how are you leveraging cloud technology to address your customers? >> It's usually useful because we end up with one target platform so when we come to deploy in any part of the world, it's the same platform. And you know from a security point of view, if we're trying to secure all these on-prem installations, it's very, very hard so we have a lot of security features that are provided for us, there are lots of infrastructure tooling, deployment and monitoring all the stuff is just inherent within the cloud and I guess what's most important we have a standard platform that we can target right across the world. >> And you're using Amazon Web Services, I mean, I'd imagine that as you go outside and look at the edge, as you have to have these secure edge points where you're serving clients, that's important, how're you securing that edge? >> Well, fortunately for us as Amazon is increasingly getting right across the world so there are still some regions which, this tool are working on, but over time, we would be expecting officially every country in the world to have all sorts of services available. >> You see the future of health care going from your standpoint, I mean, if you had to throw a projectile in the future to say, you know, five years from now, where are we on the progress and innovation wave, how do you see that Ian, playing out? >> So, certainly last 30 years, we've had various ways of innovation on healthcare, I think this pandemic is going to transform healthcare in such a major way in such a short time, and we'll see it totally transform within two to four years. And the transformation will be just like your bank, your airline, or lots of other buying stuff actually via Amazon actually, we'll see that sort of transformation of healthcare. We have talked a lot about healthcare, historically being patient centric, it is really not true, our healthcare today and most parts of the world has been geared around the various healthcare facilities, so this change we're going to see now, it'll be geared around the patients themselves, which is really intriguing but exciting. >> Position, I want to get my genome done, you've reminded me, I got to get that done. >> Finding that out, you know, you know--- >> I want to know, (laughs) I want to kind of know in advance, so I can either go down the planes, have a good time or low the loam games. >> I find out I had the positivity gene, you know, I kind of knew that and you know, I'm the fairly positive individual, so (laughs). >> Yeah, well, so as you I'm going to get my, I've to go through that process. But you know, again, fundamentally, you know that I agree this industry is going to be right for change, I remember the old debates on HIPAA and having silos, and so the data protection was a big part of that business and privacy as a huge, but one area, I'll get to that in a second, but the one area I want to touch on first is that really an important one, for everyone around the world is how does technology help people, everywhere get access to healthcare? How do you see that unless there's one approach that the government do it all, some people like that, some people don't, but generally speaking technology should help you, what's your view on how technology helps us, get accessible healthcare? >> What it means no matter where you live or what you do, most people have access to the internet either via our phone or a computer. And so what you want to be able to do, what we need to do, as a society, is give everybody access, just like they have access to their banking records, have a similar access to their medical records. And again, you know, the standard features, you know, symptom checking for patients who have chronic conditions, advice, help, medication charts are really important, the ability to go online and do internet consult or the conditions that don't require a physical examination, be able to message your circle of care, it's basically the automation of healthcare, which, you know, sadly has legged other industries. >> It is a critical point, you mentioned that early, I want to get back on the date and we'll get to privacy right after. You mentioned AI and machine learning, obviously it's a huge part of it, having data models that are intelligent, I know I've covered Amazon SageMaker and a bunch of other stuff they're working on, so they're getting smarter and they're doing it by industry, which I think is smart. But I want to ask you about data, I was just having a conversation this morning with a colleague, and we hear about AI and AI and machine learning, they're consumers too, (chuckles) so if machines are going to automate humans, which they are, the machines are consuming data so the machine learning is now a consumer, not just a technology. So when you're consuming data, you got to have a good approach. You guys are doing a lot with data, how should people think about machine learning and data, because if you believe that machine learning will assist humans, then machines are going to talk to other machines and consume data, and create insights, et cetera, and spoil another systematic effects. How should people think about data who are in healthcare, what's your insight there? >> Well, the tricky thing with machine learning and healthcare is not so much the algorithms, the algorithms are readily available on Amazon and elsewhere, and the big problem that we have found, and we've been working on this for some time and have a lot of people working on it, the big problem we have is first of all marshaling, getting all the data together, wrangling the data, so and then there's a fun part where run the algorithms and then the next big problem is getting the results back into the clinical workflow. So we spent all our time upstream and downstream and a bit in the middle, which is the fun bit, takes a very small amount of time. And so it's probably the hardest part is getting it back into the clinical workflow, that's the hardest part, really, it's really difficult. >> You know, I really appreciate what you do, I think this is going to be the beginning of a big wave of innovation, I was talking with Max Peterson about some areas where they saw, you know, thousands and thousands of people being cared, that they never would have been cared for virtually with the systems and then cloud. Again, just the beginning, and I think this is a reconfiguration of the healthcare value chain and--- >> Configuration, I mean, at pre-COVID we as a company spend so much time on planes, traveling all over the world, I've hardly traveled this year and zoom and all the other technologies, I've quite enjoyed it to be fair. So, and I think that there's a reconfiguration of how business is done, it's started to happen in healthcare and--- >> If tell my wife, I'm coming to New Zealand, I get quarantined for 14 days. >> That's right. >> Yeah, I'm stuck down under summertime. >> You get one of those hotels with the view of the Harbor, very nice. >> And final question and just close it out here in the segments, I think this is super important, you mentioned at the top, COVID has upended the healthcare industry, remote health is what people want, whether it's for, you know, not to being around other sick people, or for convenience, or for just access. This is a game changer, you got iWatches now, I was just watching Apple discuss some of the new technologies and processes that they have in these things for heartbeat, so, you know how this signals. This is absolutely going to be a game changer, software needs to be written, it has to be so far defined, cloud is going to be at the center of it. What's your final assessment, share your partying thoughts? >> We are definitely, in a major reconfiguration of healthcare that's going to happen very quickly, I would've thought that 24 months, maybe no more than 36 and what we're going to end up with is a health system, just like your bank and the big challenge for our sector is first of all, the large amounts of data, how do you store it, where do you store, and the cloud is ideal place to do it, then how do you make sense of it, you know, how do you give just the right advice to an elderly patient versus a millennial who is very technology aware? So these, there's lots of innovation and problems to be solved and lots of opportunities I believe for startups and new innovative companies, and so it's interesting times. >> I think time's short, you know, it's just so much to do, great recruitment opportunity in Orion Health. Thank you for spending time, Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion health, an award winning provider of health information global based out of New Zealand, thank you for taking the time to come on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We're not face to face, normally we'd be in person, but we're doing it remotely due to the pandemic, thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube. With digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. This is The Cube. Cube Virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with The Cube and Silicon Angle. Two great guests here. Two engineers and architects. Michael McCarthy who is a architect at Delivery Engineering, who's giving a talk with Gamesys and Jurgen Grech who's a technical architect for the platform engineering team at Gamesys. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on. >> Hello. >> Nice to see you. >> Coming in from London, coming in from Malta, you guys are doing a lot of engineering. You're a customer of Ansible, want to get into some of the cool things you're doing obviously Kubernetes automation, platform engineering, this is what everyone's working on right now that's going to be positioned for the future. Before we get started though, tell me a little bit about what Gamesys does and you guys' role. Michael, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so we're a gaming operator, we run multiple bingo-led and casino-led gaming websites, some of them are B2B, some are B2C. I think we've been doing it now for probably 14 or 15 years at least. I've been there for 12 and a half of those. So we essentially run gaming websites where people come and play their favorite games. >> And what's your role there? What do you do? >> So I'm in the operation side of things, I used to be a developer for 12 or so years. We make sure that everything's kind of up and running, we keep the systems running. My team in particular focuses on the speed of delivery for developers so we're constantly looking at, how long has it taken to get things in front of the customers, can we make it faster, can we make it easier, can we put cool stuff out there quicker? So it's a kind of platformy type role that I do, and I enjoy it a lot, so it's good. >> Jurgen you're platform engineering that sounds deep. >> Yes. >> Which is your role? (laughing) >> Well, I've been with Gamesys also for eight and a half years now. I hold the position of technical architect at the moment within this platform engineering group which is mostly tasked with all things ops related. I am responsible for designing, implementing and validating strategies for continuous deployment, whilst always ensuring high availability on both production and pre-production systems. I'm also responsible for the design and implementation of automated dynamic environment to support the needs of the development teams and also collaborating with other architects, especially those on the development floors in order to optimize the deployment and operational strategies for both existing and new types of services alike. >> Awesome, thanks for sharing that. Good, good context. Well, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when you talk about gaming it's uptime and a high availability is critical. You know, having people, being the login you got to have the right data strategies, it can't be down, right. (laughs) It's a critical app. People are not going to enjoy it if they're not at, so I can see how scale's huge. Can you guys talk about how Ansible fits in because automation's been the theme here, you guys have been having a journey with automation. What's been your automation solution with Ansible? >> I'll go Michael. >> Yeah sure. >> So, basically back in July 2014, we started to look at Ansible to replace those commonly used, day to day, best scripts, which our ops team use to execute and which could lead to some human error. That was our main original goal of using Ansible at the time. At the time was our infrastructure looked considerably different. Definitely much, much smaller than the current private cloud footprint. And as I said, as early adopters within the operations team it was imperative for us to automate as much as possible. Those repetitive tasks, which involved the execution of various scripts and were prone to human error. Since then however, aware Ansible usage, it worked quickly. Since 2014, we went through two major infrastructure overhauls and automation using Ansible was always at the heart of each of those overhauls. In fact, our latest private cloud which is based on OpenStack is completely built from the ground up using Ansible code. So this includes the provision and co-visual machines, our entire networking stacks, so switches, routers, firewall, the SDN which OpenStack is built up on, our internal DNS system. Basically all you need to have a fully functional private cloud. At Gamesys we also have some workloads running in two different public clouds. And even in this case, we are running against the build code to set up all the required infrastructure components. Again, since we were fairly new adopters at the time of this technology, without all of those Ansible code, using the original as the case, cover now this has worked considerably and with enhancements of litigated modules polished public cloud, we've made the code look much cleaner, readable and ad approved. >> You made some great progress. Michael, you want to weigh in on this? Any thoughts on? >> Yeah, I think it's kind of, I mean, adding to what Jurgen said I think it's kind of everywhere. So, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned high availability, you mentioned kind of uptime, you know, imagine the people that operate the infra, the people who get called out and they're working 24 seven, you know, a lot of the things that they would do, the kind of run books they would use to, you know, restart something they're Ansible as well. So it's the deployment scripts, it's the kind of scripts that keep things running, it's the stuff that spins up the environments as Jurgen said. I've noticed a lot on the development side where, you know, we look at continuous delivery, people are running their own build servers. A lot of the scripting that people do, which, you know you'd imagine, might be done with say Bash, I think I've seen a lot of Ansible being used there amongst developers, I guess. Yeah, it's got an easy learning curve. It's all of those modules. A lot of the scripting around CD I think is Ansible. It plays quite nicely, you know, URI module and file modules and yeah, I think it's kind of everywhere I think. It's quite pervasive. >> Once again I said, when to get something going. Good, it's awesome. >> Yeah. Automation get great success. So it's been a big theme of Ansible Fest 2020 automation collectors, et cetera. But the question I have for you guys as customers, is how large of an IT estate were you looking to automate and where was the most imperative places to automate first? >> The most imperative items we wanted to automate first as I said, were those operational day to day tasks handled by our network operations team. Our estate is massive. So we are running our infrastructure across five different data centers around the world, thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of network components. So we, we deal with customers all around the world. So our point of presence is spread out around the world as well. And you can't really handle such kind of size without some sort of automation. And Ansible fit the bill perfectly, in my opinion. >> And so your goal is to automate the entire landscape. Are you there now? Where are you on that progress? >> I would say we're at a very advanced stage in that process. Since 2014 we've made huge strides. All of our most recent private cloud setups as I said, have been built from the ground up using Ansible. And I would say a good 90% plus of our operational tasks are handled using some kind of Ansible playbook. >> Yeah, that makes total sense. Michael you brought up the, you start early in people's, it spreads. Those are my words, but you were saying that. What kind of systems do people tend to start with at Ansible? And what's, where's that first sticky moment where it lands and expands and which teams jump on it first? Is it the developers? Is it more the IT? Take us through some of the how this all gets started and how it spreads. >> I think in the, the first time I remember using it was probably I think 2014, 2015. And it was what Jurgen mentioned. I was on the Dev side and we wanted a way to have consistency in how we deployed. We wanted to be able to deploy the exact same way, you know into earlier environments, into Dev environments as we did in staging and production. And, you know, someone kind of found Ansible and then someone in operations kind of saw it and they were happy with it and they felt comfortable using the, kind of getting up to speed. And I think it was hard to know where it really started first, but you sort of looked around and every team, every team kind of had it. So, you know, who actually started I'm not sure, but it's all over the place. >> He did. (laughs) >> Yeah. I think, you know, where people start with it first it probably depends if you're on the ops or the dev side, I think on the dev side you know, we're encouraging people to own their own deployment playbooks you know, you're responsible for the deployment of your system to production. Obviously you've got the network operations the not group sort of doing it for you, but you know, your first exposure is probably going to be writing a playbook to deploy your app or maybe it's around some build tooling, spinning up your own build environment but that's something you'll be doing. I know with Ansible and it's especially around this point of stuff because everything's in git, there's that collaboration which I never saw, obviously I saw people chatting over kind of slack in teams but in terms of being able to sort of raise PR's having developers raise PR's, having operations comment on them the same the other way around, that's been a massive change which I think has come from using Ansible. >> The collaboration piece is huge. And I think it's one of those things early on out of all the Ansible friends that I know that use it and customers and in the company product was just good. It just word of mouth, spreads it around and be like, this is workable, saves a lot of time and it's a pain point remover. Also enables some things to happen with now automation, but now it's mature. Right? So Jurgen I got to ask you in the maturation of all this automation you're talking about scale, you mentioned it. OpenStack, you guys got the private clouds, people use it for public cloud, I now see Red Hat has a angle on that. But when you think about the current modern state of the art today, you can't go anywhere without talking about Kubernetes. >> Yup. >> Kubernetes has really emerged on the scene to manage these clusters but yet it's just getting started. You have a lot of experience with Ansible and Kubernetes. Can you share your journey with Kubernetes and Ansible, and what's your reaction to that? >> Yes, so back in June 2016 Gamesys was developing a new gaming platform which was stood on now Kubernetes. Kubernetes at the time was fairly new to many at an enterprise level with only a handful of production systems online. So we were tasked to assess how we're going to bring Kubernetes into production. So we first, we identified the requirements to set up a production grade cluster and given our experience with Ansible, we embarked on a journey to automate the installation process. Again using Ansible this would ensure that all the required installation and configuration parameters as Michael mentioned, we are committing it, the code is shared with all the respective development teams for ease of collaboration and feedback. And we decided to logically divide our code into two. And we said, we're going to have an installation code in order to provide Kubernetes as a service. So this basically installs Docker onto every worker node. It installs cube lit, all the master playing components of Kubernetes installs core DNS, the container storage interface, and they full blown and cluster monitoring stack. Then we also had our configuration code which basically sets up name spaces, it labels nodes for specific uses at certain security policies according to the cluster use case and creates all the required role based access configurations. This need to split the code in two came about really with the growing adoption of Kubernetes because at the inception stage we only had the one team which had a requirement to use Kubernetes. However, with various teams getting on board each required their own flavor with their particular unique configurations. This is of course well managed quite easily to reduce of different Ansible inventories. And it's all integrated now within Ansible Tower with different unique drop templates to install and configure the Kubernetes clusters. We started as I said with just one pre-production or staging cluster in 2010 16. Today we manage 42 different Kubernetes clusters including six which are in production. >> What problems >> So, as I mentioned earlier >> I got to ask you 'cause Kubernetes certainly when it came out, I mean, that was a big fan boy of that. I was promoting Kubernetes from the beginning. I saw it as a really great opportunity to bring things together with containers. It turns out that developers love it for that reason. What, so getting your hands on is great, but as you moved it in to practice, what problems did it solve for you? >> So using Ansible, definitely solve the problem of ensuring that all of our 42 clusters across all the different data centers are running the same configuration. So they're running the same version. They're running the same security policies. They're running the same name space, according to the type. Each team has a similar deployment token. And it's very, very convenient to roll out changes and upgrades especially when all of our code has been integrated with Ansible Tower through a simple user interface click. >> How's Ansible Tower working for you? Is that going well? Ansible Tower? >> Eh, I would say so, yes. Most of our code now is integrated with Ansible Tower. It's allowed us to also share some of the tasks with a wider group of people. Within Peg we are the guardians of the production environments really. However, we share the responsibility of staging environments with the respective development teams, who primarily those environments. So as such, through the use of Ansible Tower we've managed to also securely and consistently share the same way how they can install and upgrade these clusters themselves without our involvement. >> Thank you. Michael you're giving, oh sorry go ahead. Go ahead Jurgen. >> Sorry is no no. >> Michael, you're giving a presentation breakout session at Ansible Fest. Can you give us a sneak peek >> Yup. >> Of what you're going to talk about? >> Yeah sure. So we, I said we've been using Tower for a long time. We've been using it since 2015 I think. Think we've probably made some mistakes along the way, I guess, or we've learned a lot of stuff from how we started then to now. So what it does is it follows this sort of timeline of how we started, why there was this big move to making an effort to put all of our deployment playbooks in Ansible. Why you would go to Tower over and above Ansible itself. It talks about our early interactions with quite an old version of Tower and now version two, things that we struggled with, then we saw version three came out there was loads and loads of really good stuff in version three. And it's really about kind of how we've used the new features, how it's worked out for us. It's kind of about what Gamesys have done with Tower but I think it's probably applicable to everyone and anyone that uses Tower I think will, they'll probably come across the same things, how do I scale it for multiple teams? How do I give teams the ownership to kind of own their own playbooks? How do I automate Tower itself? It talks about that. Sort of check pointing every few years about where we'd got to and what was going well and what was going less well. So, and a bit of a look forward to, what's going to come next with Tower. So we're constantly keeping up to date and we've got kind of roadmap for where we want to go. >> What's interesting about you guys is you think about look at OpenStack and then how Cloud came on the scene and Private Cloud has emerged with hybrid and obviously public, you guys are right on the wave of all this large scale stuff and your gaming app really kind of highlights that. And you've been through the paces with Ansible. So I guess my question, and you've got a lot of scar tissue and you got success to show for it too, a lot of great stuff. What advice would you give people who are now getting on the new wave, the bigger wave that's coming which is more users, more scale, more features more automation, microservices are coming around the corner. As long as I get more scale. What advice would you give someone who's coming on board with Ansible for the first time? >> I think there was, you were talking before about Kubernetes and it was so where we were, I think we'd got into containers kind of relatively early. And we were deploying Docker and we had some pretty big, kind of scary playbooks and they managed low balances and deployed Docker containers. And it was always interesting thinking how is this all going to change when Kubernetes comes along? And I think that's been really smooth. I think there's a really nice Ansible module that's just called gates. And I think it's really simple actually, it simplified a lot of the playbooks. And I think that the technologies can coexist quite happily. I don't think you have to feel like Kubernetes is going to change all of the investment you've made into Ansible. Even if you go down the route of Kubernetes operators, you can write them in Ansible. So I still think it's a very relevant tool even with Kubernetes being so kind of prevalent. >> Jurgen what's your thoughts on folks getting in now, who want to jump in and take advantage of the automation, all the cool stuff with Ansible? What advice would you give them? >> Yes, I would definitely recommend to look at their infrastructure set ups as they would look at their code. So break it down into small manageable components, start small, build your roles, make sure to build your roles properly for each of that small component. And then definitely look at Ansible Tower as a way to visualize and control the execution of your code. Make sure you're running it with the proper security policies with the proper credentials and all, they're not, of course so break anything which is at the production level. >> Michael McCarthy, Jurgen Grech two great engineers at Gamesys. Congratulations on your success and love to unpack the infrastructure and the scale you have and certainly automation, great success path. And it's going to get easier. I mean, that's what everyone's saying, it's going to get easier. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, welcome >> Thank you, take care. Bye bye. >> I'm John Furrier with The Cube here in Palo Alto California. We're virtual, The Cube virtual for Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. Yeah, Lauren, Welcome to the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly and hosted with Silicon Angle acute here in Palo Alto, California for a virtual conference. Couldn't happen in person this year. I'm John for a year. Host the intersection of space and cybersecurity. I'll see critical topics, great conversations. We got a great guest here to talk about the addressing the cybersecurity workforce gap, and we have a great guest, a feature speaker. Stewart Knox, the undersecretary with California's Labor and Workforce Development Office. Stewart Thanks for joining us today. >>Thank you so much, John. Appreciate your time today and listening to a little bit of our quandaries with making sure that we have the security that's necessary for the state of California and making sure that we have the work force that is necessary for cybersecurity in space. >>Great, I'd love to get started. I got a couple questions for you, but first take a few minutes for an opening statement to set the stage. >>Sure, realizing that in California we lead the nation in much of cybersecurity based on Department of Defense contractors within the Santa California leading the nation with over $160 billion within the industry just here in California alone and having over 800,000 bus workers. Full time employment in the state of California is paramount for us to make sure that we face, um, defense manufacturers approximate 700,000 jobs that are necessary to be filled. There's over 37,000 vacancies that we know of in California, just alone in cybersecurity. And so we look forward to making sure that California Workforce Development Agency is leading the charge to make sure that we have equity in those jobs and that we are also leading in a way that brings good jobs to California and to the people of California, a good education system that is developed in a way that those skills are necessarily met for the for the employers here in California and the nation, >>One of the exciting things about California is obviously look at Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard in the garage, storied history space. It's been a space state. Many people recognize California. You mentioned defense contractors. It's well rooted with with history, um, just breakthroughs bases, technology companies in California. And now you've got technology. This is the cybersecurity angle. Um, take >>them into >>Gets more commentary to that because that's really notable. And as the workforce changes, these two worlds are coming together, and sometimes they're in the same place. Sometimes they're not. This is super exciting and a new dynamic that's driving opportunities. Could you share, um, some color commentary on that dynamic? >>Absolutely. And you're so correct. I think in California we lead the nation in the way that we developed programs that are companies lead in the nation in so many ways around, uh, cyberspace cybersecurity, Uh, in so many different areas for which in the Silicon Valley is just, uh, such a leader in those companies are good qualified companies to do so. Obviously, one of the places we play a role is to make sure that those companies have a skilled workforce. Andi, also that the security of those, uh, systems are in place for our defense contractors onda For the theater companies, those those outlying entities that are providing such key resource is to those companies are also leading on the cutting edge for the future. Also again realizing that we need to expand our training on skills to make sure that those California companies continue to lead is just, um, a great initiative. And I think through apprenticeship training programs on By looking at our community college systems, I think that we will continue to lead the nation as we move forward. >>You know, we've had many conversations here in this symposium, virtually certainly around. The everyday life of consumer is impacted by space. You know, we get our car service Uber lyft. We have maps. We have all this technology that was born out of defense contracts and r and D that really changed generations and create a lot of great societal value. Okay, now, with space kind of on the next generation is easier to get stuff into space. The security of the systems is now gonna be not only paramount for quality of life, but defending that and the skills are needed in cybersecurity to defend that. And the gap is there. What >>can we >>do to highlight the opportunities for career paths? It used to be the day when you get a mechanical engineering degree or aerospace and you graduated. You go get a job. Not anymore. There's a variety of of of paths career wise. What can we do to highlight this career path? >>Absolutely correct. And I think it starts, you know, k through 12 system on. I know a lot of the work that you know, with this bow and other entities we're doing currently, uh, this is where we need to bring our youth into an age where they're teaching us right as we become older on the uses of technology. But it's also teaching, um, where the levels of those education can take them k through 12. But it's also looking at how the community college system links to that, and then the university system links above and beyond. But it's also engage in our employers. You know, One of the key components, obviously, is the employers player role for which we can start to develop strategies that best meet their needs quickly. I think that's one of the comments we hear the most labor agency is how we don't provide a change as fast as we should, especially in technology. You know, we buy computers today, and they're outdated. Tomorrow it's the same with the technology that's in those computers is that those students are going to be the leaders within that to really develop how those structures are in place. S O. K. Through 12 is probably primary place to start, but also continuing. That passed the K 12 system and I bring up the employers and I bring them up in a way, because many times when we've had conversations with employers around what their skills needs were and how do we develop those better? One of the pieces that of that that I think is really should be recognized that many times they recognized that they wanted a four year degree, potentially or five year, six year degree. But then, when we really looked at the skill sets, someone coming out of the community college system could meet those skill sets. And I think we need to have those conversations to make sure not that they shouldn't be continue their education. They absolutely should. Uh, but how do we get those skill sets built into this into 12 plus the two year plus the four year person? >>You know, I love the democratization of these new skills because again. There's no pattern matching because they weren't around before, right? So you gotta look at the exposure to your point K through 12 exposure. But then there's an exploration piece of whether it's community, college or whatever progression. And sometimes it's nonlinear, right? I mean, people are learning different ways, combining the exposure and the exploration. That's a big topic. Can you share your view on this because this now opens up mawr doors for people choice. You got new avenues. You got online clock and get a cloud computing degree now from Amazon and walk in and help. I could be, you know, security clearance, possibly in in college. So you know you get exposure. Is there certain things you see? Is it early on middle school? And then I'll see the exploration Those air two important concepts. Can you unpack that a little bit exposure and exploration of skills? >>Absolutely. And I think this takes place, you know, not only in in the K 12 because somebody takes place in our community colleges and universities is that that connection with those employers is such a key component that if there's a way we could build in internships where experiences what we call on the job training programs apprenticeship training pre apprenticeship training programs into a design where those students at all levels are getting an exposure to the opportunities within the Space and Cybersecurity Avenue. I think that right there alone will start to solve a problem of having 37 plus 1000 openings at any one time in California. Also, I get that there's there's a burden on employers. Thio do that, and I think that's a piece that we have to acknowledge. And I think that's where education to play a larger role That's a place we had. Labor, Workforce, Development Agency, player role With our apprenticeship training programs are pre apprenticeship training programs. I could go on all day of all of our training programs that we have within the state of California. Many of the list of your partners on this endeavor are partners with Employment Training Panel, which I used to be the director of the Brown administration of um, That program alone does incumbent worker training on DSO. That also is an exposure place where ah worker, maybe, you know, you know, use the old adage of sweeping the floors one day and potentially, you know, running a large portion of the business, you know, within years. But it's that exposure that that employee gets through training programs on band. Acknowledging those skill sets and where their opportunities are, is what's valid and important. I think that's where our students we need to play a larger role in the K 12. That's a really thio Get that pushed out there. >>It's funny here in California you're the robotics clubs in high school or like a varsity sport. You're seeing kids exposed early on with programming. But you know, this whole topic of cybersecurity in space intersection around workforce and the gaps and skills is not just for the young. Certainly the young generations gotta be exposed to the what the careers could be and what the possible jobs and societal impact and contributions what they could be. But also it's people who are already out there. You know, you have retraining re Skilling is plays an important role. I know you guys do a lot of thinking on this is the under secretary. You have to look at this because you know you don't wanna have a label old and antiquated um systems. And then a lot of them are, and they're evolving and they're being modernized by digital transformation. So what does the role of retraining and skill development these programs play? Can you share what you guys are working on in your vision for that? >>Absolutely. That's a great question. And I think that is where we play a large role, obviously in California and with Kobe, 19 is we're faced with today that we've never seen before, at least in my 27 years of running program. Similar Thio, of course, in economic development, we're having such a large number of people displaced currently that it's unprecedented with unemployment rates to where we are. We're really looking at How do we take? And we're also going to see industries not return to the level for which they stood at one point in time. Uh, you know, entertainment industries, restaurants, all the alike, uh, really looking at how do we move people from those jobs that were middle skill jobs, topper skilled jobs? But the pay points maybe weren't great, potentially, and there's an opportunity for us to skill people into jobs that are there today. It may take training, obviously, but we have dollars to do that generally, especially within our K 12 and are que 14 systems and our universities. But we really wanna look at where those skill sets are are at currently. And we want to take people from that point in time where they said today, and try to give them that exposure to your point. Earlier question is, how do we get them exposed to a system for which there are job means that pay well with benefit packages with companies that care about their employees? Because that's what our goal is. >>You know. You know, I don't know if you have some visibility on this or ah opinion, but one observation that I've had and talking to whether it's a commercial or public sector is that with co vid uh, there have been a lot of awareness of the situation. We're adequately prepared. There's, um, readiness. But as everyone kind of deals with it, they're also starting to think about what to do. Post covert as we come out of it, Ah, growth strategy for a company or someone's career, um, people starting to have that on the top of their minds So I have to ask you, Is there anything that you see that they say? Okay, certain areas, maybe not doubling down on other areas. We're gonna double down on because we've seen some best practices on a trajectory of value for coming out of co vid with, you know, well, armed skills or certain things because you because that's what a lot of people are thinking right now. It's probably cyber is I mean, how many jobs are open? So you got well, that that's kind of maybe not something double down on here are areas we see that are working. Can you share your current visibility to that dynamic? >>Absolutely. Another great question. One of the key components that we look at Labor Workforce Development Agency. And so look at industries and growth modes and ones that are in decline boats. Now Kobe has changed that greatly. We were in a growth rate for last 78 years. We saw almost every industry might miss a few. You know that we're all in growth in one way or enough, obviously, that has changed. Our landscape is completely different than we saw 67 months ago. So today we're looking at cybersecurity, obviously with 30 plus 1000 jobs cos we're looking at Defense Department contractor is obviously with federal government contracts. We were looking at the supply chains within those we're looking at. Health care, which has always been one, obviously are large one of our large entities that has has grown over the years. But it's also changed with covered 19. We're looking at the way protective equipment is manufactured in the way that that will continue to grow over time. We're looking at the service industry. I mean, it will come back, but it won't come back the way we've seen it, probably in the past, but where the opportunities that we develop programs that we're making sure that the skill sets of those folks are transferrable to other industries with one of the issues that we face constant labor and were forced moment programs is understanding that over the period of time, especially in today's world again, with technology that people skill sets way, don't see is my Parents Day that you worked at a job for 45 years and you retired out of one job. Potentially, that is, that's been gone for 25 years, but now, at the pace for which we're seeing systems change. This is going to continue to amp up. I will stay youth of today. My 12 year old nephew is in the room next door to me on a classroom right now online. And so you know, there. It's a totally different atmosphere, and he's, you know, enjoying actually being in helping learning from on all online system. I would not have been able to learn that way, but I think we do see through the K Through 12 system where we're moving, um, people's interest will change, and I think that they will start to see things in a different way than we have in the past. They were forced systems. We are an old system been around since the thirties. Some even will say prior to the thirties came out of the Great Depression in some ways, and that system we have to change the way we develop our programs are should not be constant, and it should be an evolving system. >>It's interesting a lot of the conversation between the private and public partnerships and industry. You're seeing an agile mind set where it's a growth mindset. It's also reality based mindset and certainly space kind of forces. This conversation with cyber security of being faster, faster, more relevant, more modern. You mentioned some of those points, and with co vid impact the workforce development, it's certainly going to put a lot of pressure on faster learning. And then you mentioned online learning. This has become a big thing. It's not just putting education online per se. There's new touch points. You know you got APS, you got digital. This digital transformation is also accelerating. How do you guys view the workforce development? Because it's going to be open. It's gonna be evolving. There's new data coming in, and maybe kids don't want to stare at a video conference. Is there some game aspect to it? Is there how do you integrate thes new things that are coming really fast? And it's happening kind of in real time in front of our eyes. So I love to get your thoughts on how you guys see that, because it will certainly impact their ability to compete for jobs and or to itself learn. >>I think one of the key components of California's our innovation right and So I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in California is around that, um that said, that is the piece that I think the Silicon Valley and there's many areas in California that that have done the same, um, or trying to do the same, at least in their economy, is to build in innovation. And I think that's part of the K through 12 system with our with our our state universities and our UCS is to be able to bridge that. I think that you we see that within universities, um, that really instill an innovative approach to teaching but also instill innovation within their students. I'm not sure there yet with our fully with our K 12 system. And I think that's a place that either our community colleges could be a bridge, too, as well. Eso that's one component of workforce development I think that we look at as being a key. A key piece you brought up something that's really interesting to me is when you talk about agile on day, one of the things that even in state government on this, is gonna be shocking to you. But we have not been an agile system, Aziz. Well, I think one of the things that the Newsome administration Governor Newsom's administration has brought is. And when I talk about agile systems, I actually mean agile systems. We've gone from Kobol Systems, which are old and clunky, still operating. But at the same time, we're looking at upgrading all of our systems in a way that even our technology in the state of California should be matching the technology that our great state has within our our state. So, um, there in lies. It's also challenges of finding the qualified staff that we need in the state of California for all of our systems and servers and everything that we have. Um, currently. So you know, not only are we looking at external users, users of labor, workforce development, but we're looking at internal users that the way we redevelop our systems so that we are more agile in two different ways. >>You just got me. I triggered with COBOL. I programmed in the eighties with COBOL is only one credit lab in college. Never touched it again. Thank God. But this. But this >>is the >>benefit of cloud computing. I think this is at the heart, and this is the undertone of the conference and symposium is cloud computing. You can you can actually leverage existing resource is whether there legacy systems because they are running. They're doing a great job, and they do a certain work load extremely well. Doesn't make sense to replace what does a job, but you can integrate it in this. What cloud does this is Opening up? Can mawr more and more capabilities and workloads? This is kind of the space industry is pointing to when they say we need people that can code. And that could solve data problems. Not just a computer scientist, but a large range of people. Creative, um, data, science, everything. How does California's workforce solve the needs of America's space industry? This is because it's a space state. How do you see that? Let your workforce meeting those needs. >>Yeah, I think I think it's an investment. Obviously, it's an investment on our part. It's an investment with our college partners. It's an investment from our K 12 system to make sure that that we are allocating dollars in a way through meeting the demand of industry Onda, we do look at industry specific around there needs. Obviously, there's a large one. We wanna be very receptive and work with our employers and our employee groups to make sure that we need that demand. I think it's putting our money where our mouth is and and designing and working with employer groups to make sure that the training meets their needs. Um, it's also working with our employer groups to make sure that the employees are taken care of. That equity is built within the systems, Um, that we keep people employed in California on their able to afford a home, and they're able to afford a life here in California. But it's also again, and I brought up the innovation component. I think it's building an innovation within systems for which they are employers but are also our incoming employees are incumbent workers. And you brought this up earlier. People that already employed and people that are unemployed currently with the skill set that might match up, is how do we bridge those folks into employment that they maybe have not thought about. We have a whole career network of systems out throughout the city, California with the Americans job Centers of California on day will be working, and they already are working with a lot of dislocated workers on day. One of the key components of that is to really look at how do we, um, take what their current skills that might be and then expose them to a system for which we have 37 plus 1000 job openings to Andi? How do we actually get those books employed? It's paying for potentially through those that local Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, funding for Americans job centers, um, to pay for some on the job, training it Z to be able to pay for work experiences. It's to be able to pay for internships for students, um, to get that opportunity with our employers and also partner with our employers that they're paying obviously a percentage of that, too. >>You know, one of the things I've observed over my, um, career 54 times around the sun is you know, in the old days when I was in college in school, you had career people have longer jobs, as you mentioned. Not like that anymore. But also I knew someone I'm gonna be in line to get that job, maybe nepotism or things of that nature. Now the jobs have no historical thing or someone worked longer in a job and has more seniority. Ah, >>lot of these >>jobs. Stewart don't HAVA requirements like no one's done them before. So the ability for someone who, um, is jumping in either from any college, there's no riel. It's all level set. It's like complete upside down script here. It's not like, Oh, I went to school. Therefore I get the job you could be Anyone could walk into these careers because the jobs air so new. So it's not where you came from or what school you went to or your nationality or gender. The jobs have been democratized. They're not discriminating against people with skills. So this opens up mawr. How >>do you >>see that? Because this really is an opportunity for this next generation to be more diverse and to be mawr contributed because diversity brings expertise and different perspectives. Your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. And that was one of the things we welcome. Obviously we want to make sure that that everybody is treated equally and that the employers view everyone as employer employer of choice but an employee of choices. Well, we've also been looking at, as I mentioned before on the COVITZ situation, looking at ways that books that are maybe any stuck in jobs that are don't have a huge career pathway or they don't have a pathway out of poverty. I mean, we have a lot of working for people in the state of California, Um, that may now do to cope and lost their employment. Uh, this, you know, Let's let's turn back to the old, you know? Let's try, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. How do we take those folks and get them employed into jobs that do have a good career pathway? And it's not about just who you knew or who you might have an in with to get that job. It is based on skills, I think, though that said there we need to have a better way to actually match those jobs up with those employers. And I think those are the long, ongoing conversations with those employer groups to make sure that one that they see those skill sets is valid and important. Um, they're helping design this crew sets with us, eh? So that they do match up and that were quickly matching up those close skills. That so that we're not training people for yesterday skills. >>I think the employer angles super important, but also the educators as well. One of the things that was asked in another question by the gas they they said. She said The real question to ask is, how early do you start exposing the next generation? You mentioned K through 12. Do you have any data or insight into or intuition or best practice of where that insertion point is without exposure? Point is, is that middle school is a elementary, obviously high school. Once you're in high school, you got your training. Wheels are off, you're off to the races. But is there a best practice? What's your thoughts? Stewart On exposure level to these kinds of new cyber and technical careers? >>Sure, absolutely. I I would say kindergarten. We San Bernardino has a program that they've been running for a little bit of time, and they're exposing students K through 12 but really starting in kindergarten. One is the exposure Thio. What a job Looks like Andi actually have. I've gone down to that local area and I've had three opportunity to see you know, second graders in a health care facility, Basically that they have on campus, built in on dear going from one workstation as a second grader, Uh, looking at what those skills would be and what that job would entail from a nurse to a Dr Teoh physician's assistant in really looking at what that is. Um you know, obviously they're not getting the training that the doctor gets, but they are getting the exposure of what that would be. Andi, I think that is amazing. And I think it's the right place to start. Um, it was really interesting because I left. This was pre covet, but I jumped on the plane to come back up north. I was thinking to myself, How do we get this to all school district in California, where we see that opportunity, um, to expose jobs and skill sets to kids throughout the system and develop the skill set so that they do understand that they have an opportunity. >>We're here at Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. We have educators. We have, um, students. We have industry and employers and government together. What's your advice to them all watching and listening about the future of work. Let's work force. What can people do? What do you think you're enabling? What can maybe the private sector help with And what are you trying to do? Can you share your thoughts on that? Because we have a range from the dorm room to the boardroom here at this event. Love to get your thoughts on the workforce development view of this. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the mix. I mean, I think it's going to take industry to lead A in a lot of ways, in terms of understanding what their needs are and what their needs are today and what they will be tomorrow. I think it takes education, toe listen, and to understand and labor and workforce development also listen and understand what those needs will look like. And then how do we move systems? How do we move systems quickly? How do we move systems in a way that meets those needs? How do we, uh, put money into systems where the most need is, but also looking at trends? What is that trend going to look like in two years? What does that train gonna look like in five years. But that's again listening to those employers. Um, it's also the music community based organizations. I think, obviously some of our best students are also linked to CBS. And one way or another, it may be for services. It maybe for, uh, faith based. It may be anything, but I think we also need to bring in the CBS is Well, ah, lot of outreach goes through those systems in conjunction with, but I think that's the key component is to make sure that our employers are heard on. But they sit at the table like you said to the boardroom of understanding, and I think bringing students into that so that they get a true understanding of what that looks like a well, um, is a key piece of this. >>So one of the things I want to bring up with you is maybe a bit more about the research side of it. But, um, John Markoff, who was a former New York Times reporter with author of the book What the Dormouse, said It was a book about the counter culture of the sixties and the computer revolution, and really there was about how government defense spending drove the computer revolution that we now saw with Apple and PC, and then the rest is history in California has really participated. Stanford, uh, Berkeley and the University of California School system and all the education community colleges around it. That moment, the enablement. And now you're seeing space kind of bringing that that are a lot of research coming in and you eat a lot of billionaires putting money in. You got employers playing a role. You have this new focus space systems, cybersecurity, defending and making it open and and not congested and peaceful is going to enable quickly new inflection points for opportunities. E want to get your thoughts on that? Because California is participate in drove these revolutions that created massive value This next wave seems to be coming upon us. >>Yeah, absolutely. And again, Nazis covered again as too much of ah starting point to this. But I think that is also an opportunity to actually, because I think one of the things that we were seeing seven months ago was a skill shortage, and we still see the skills shortage, obviously. But I think a key piece to that is we saw people shortage. Not only was it skills shortage, but we didn't have enough people really to fill positions in addition to and I think that people also felt they were already paying the bills and they were making ends meet and they didn't have the opportunities. Thio get additional skills This again is where we're looking at. You know that our world has changed. It changed in the sixties based on what you're you're just expressing in terms of California leading the way. Let's like California lead the way again in developing a system from which labor, workforce development with our universities are, you know, are amazing universities and community college system and structure of how do we get students back into school? You know, a lot of graduates may already have a degree, but how do they now take a skill so that they already have and develop that further with the idea that they those jobs have changed? Whales have a lot of folks that don't have a degree, and that's okay. But how do we make that connection to a system that may have failed? Ah, lot of our people over the years, um, and our students who didn't make it through the school system. How do we develop in adult training school? How do we develop contract education through our community college system with our employer sets that we developed cohorts within those systems of of workers that have amazing talents and abilities to start to fill these needs? And I think that's the key components of hearing Agency, Labor, Workforce Development Agency. We work with our community. Colleges are UCS in our state universities t develop and figure that piece out, and I think it is our opportunity for the future. >>That's such a great point. I want to call that out This whole opportunity to retrain people that are out there because these air new jobs, I think that's a huge opportunity, and and I hope you keep building and investing in those programs. That's that's really worth calling out. Thank you for doing that. And, yeah, it's a great opportunity. Thes jobs they pay well to cyber security is a good job, and you don't really need to have that classical degree. You can learn pretty quickly if you're smart. So again, great call out there question for you on geography, Um, mentioned co vid we're talking about Covic. Virtualization were virtual with this conference. We couldn't be in person. People are learning virtually, but people are starting to relocate virtually. And so one observation that I have is the space state that California is there space clusters of areas where space people hang out or space spaces and whatnot. Then you got, like, the tech community cybersecurity market. You know, Silicon Valley is a talented in these hubs, and sometimes cyber is not always in the same hubs of space. Maybe Silicon Valley has some space here, Um, and some cyber. But that's not generally the case. This is an opportunity potentially to intersect. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is This is something that we're seeing where your space has historical, you know, geography ease. Now, with borderless communication, the work boat is not so much. You have to move the space area. You know what I'm saying? So okay. What's your thoughts on this? How do you guys look at this? Is on your radar On how you're viewing this this dynamic? >>It's absolute on our radar, Like you said, you know, here we are talking virtually on and, you know, 75% of all of our staff currently in some of our department that 80% of our staff are now virtual. Um you know, seven months ago, uh, we were not were government again being slow move, we quickly transitioned. Obviously, Thio being able to have a tele work capacity. We know employers move probably even quickly, more quickly than we did, but we see that as an opportunity for our rural areas. Are Central Valley are north state um, inland Empire that you're absolutely correct. I mean, if you didn't move to a city or to a location for which these jobs were really housed, um, you didn't have an opportunity like you do today. I think that's a piece that we really need to work with our education partners on of to be able to see how much this has changed. Labor agency absolutely recognizes this. We are investing funding in the Central Valley. We're investing funding in the North State and empire to really look a youth populations of how the new capacity that we have today is gonna be utilized for the future for employers. But we also have to engage our universities around. This is well, but mostly are employers. I know that they're already very well aware. I know that a lot of our large employers with, um, Silicon Valley have already done their doing almost 100% tele work policies. Um, but the affordability toe live in rural areas in California. Also, it enables us to have, ah, way thio make products more affordable is, well, potentially in the future. But we want to keep California businesses healthy and whole in California. Of course, on that's another way we can We can expand and keep California home to our 40 plus million people, >>most to a great, great work. And congratulations for doing such a great job. Keep it up. I gotta ask about the governor. I've been following his career since he's been office. A za political figure. Um, he's progressive. He's cutting edge. He likes toe rock the boat a little bit here and there, but he's also pragmatic. Um, you're starting to see government workers starting to get more of a tech vibe. Um um just curious from your perspective. How does the governor look at? I mean, the old, almost the old guard. But like you know, used to be. You become a lawyer, become a lawmaker Now a tech savvy lawmaker is a premium candidates, a premium person in government, you know, knowing what COBOL is. A start. I mean, these are the things. As we transform and evolve our society, we need thinkers who can figure out which side the streets, self driving cars go on. I mean, who does that? I mean, it's a whole another generation off thinking. How does the Governor how do you see this developing? Because this is the challenge for society. How does California lead? How do you guys talk about the leadership vision of Why California and how will you lead the future? >>Absolutely no governor that I'm aware of that I've been around for 26 27 years of workforce development has led with an innovation background, as this governor has a special around technology and the use of technology. Uh, you know, he's read a book about the use of technology when he was lieutenant governor, and I think it's really important for him that we, as his his staff are also on the leading edge of technology. I brought a badge. I'll systems. Earlier, when I was under the Brown administration, we had moved to where I was at a time employment training panel. We moved to an agile system and deported that one of the first within within the state to do that and coming off of an old legacy system that was an antique. Um, I will say it is challenging. It's challenging on a lot of levels. Mostly the skill sets that are folks have sometimes are not open to a new, agile system to an open source system is also an issue in government. But this governor, absolutely. I mean, he has established three Office of Digital Innovation, which is part of California and department technology, Um, in partnership with and that just shows how much he wants. Thio push our limits to make sure that we are meeting the needs of Californians. But it's also looking at, you know, Silicon Valley being at the heart of our state. How do we best utilize systems that already there? How do we better utilize the talent from those those folks is well, we don't always pay as well as they dio in the state. But we do have great benefit packages. Everybody does eso If anybody's looking for a job, we're always looking for technology. Folks is well on DSO I would say that this governor, absolute leads in terms of making sure that we will be on cutting edge of technology for the nation, >>you know, and, you know, talk about pay. I mean, I know it's expensive to live in some parts of California, but there's a huge young population that wants a mission driven job and serving, um, government for the governments. Awesome. Ah, final parting question for you, Stuart, is, as you look at, um, workforce. Ah, lot of people are passionate about this, and it's, you know, you you can't go anywhere without people saying, You know, we got to do education this way and that way there's an opinion everywhere you go. Cybersecurity is a little bit peaked and focused, but there are people who are paying attention to education. So I have to ask you, what creative ways can people get involved and contribute to workforce development? Whether it's stem underrepresented minorities, people are looking for new, innovative ways to contribute. What advice would you give these people who have the passion to contribute to the next cyber workforce. >>Yeah, I appreciate that question, because I think is one of the key components. But my secretary, Julie Sue, secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Agency, talks about often, and a couple of us always have these conversations around. One is getting people with that passion to work in government one or on. I brought it up community based organizations. I think I think so many times, um, that we didn't work with our CBS to the level of in government we should. This administration is very big on working with CBS and philanthropy groups to make sure that thing engagement those entities are at the highest level. So I would say, You know, students have opportunities. Thio also engage with local CBS and be that mission what their values really drives them towards Andi. That gives them a couple of things to do right. One is to look at what ways that we're helping society in one way or another through the organizations, but it also links them thio their own mission and how they could develop those skills around that. But I think the other piece to that is in a lot of these companies that you are working with and that we work with have their own foundations. So those foundations are amazing. We work with them now, especially in the new administration. More than we ever have, these foundations are really starting to help develop are strategies. My secretary works with a large number of foundations already. Andi, when we do is well in terms of strategy, really looking at, how do we develop young people's attitudes towards the future but also skills towards the future? >>Well, you got a pressure cooker of a job. I know how hard it is. I know you're working hard, appreciate you what you do and and we wish you the best of luck. Thank you for sharing this great insight on workforce development. And you guys working hard. Thank you for what you do. Appreciate it. >>Thank you so much. Thistle's >>three cube coverage and co production of the space and cybersecurity supposed in 2020 Cal Poly. I'm John for with silicon angle dot com and the Cube. Thanks for watching