>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think Virtual 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got three great guests here talking about IBM cloud satellite and AI operations, Lori G O G M of Global SisQo Alliance, Matthew, Engelstad, IBM partner. Lead client partner for Canada financial services and cooper on Kent Asami VP of personal insurance. That economical insurance folks. Thanks for coming on the cube. This great panel on cloud satellite and Ai Ops. Thanks for joining me. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you john. Good to see you. >>Well, first let's start with you. There's a general manager for the IBM Cisco Strategic Partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid. It's pretty much determined that's the standard and multi clouds right around the corner. The program ability of the infrastructure is critical and so obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that take us through the IBM Cisco strategic partnership. >>Mhm. Absolutely. So john as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25 year relationship between IBM and Cisco longstanding. Now if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company, but with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kendrell, our spin off of what we were previously calling Newco, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the red hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our satellite product which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So we're super excited about this >>real quick. Why have you brought up a couple key points? I just want to get too. I know we're gonna get to it later, but the operating model has shifted, you mentioned with the new co and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and mps are critical. This new cloud operating model is really a center of of that. That that equation, how does that relate into all that? >>So, the, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically and you take what Cisco is doing and you know, we've got a client here with us Today programme who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client, what are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place And then what are all those surrounding elements around software managing the apps and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco coupled together. Really bring value >>cooper. You got teed up beautifully there so I want to go to you then go to Matthew after but okay, tell us more about this IBM. Cisco dynamic. You guys are hot growth company um doing very well and continuing to grow and sure, post pandemic. It's looking good too. So take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco? >>Sure, sure john thank you. Um you know, to appreciate how we got here and why? We asked IBM and Cisco to help us. Let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet and M. V. P. Uh Sonnet is a fully automated director customer digital channel where customers can quote and buy home and all of his online without the need to engage anyone at economical. Then in 2018, we launched by another m. v. p. Wine is our simplified self serve and digitized broker channel where broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers again, without the need to engage anyone at economical. Both uh some wine have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences, given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And you know, we maintained platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro macro level. We we and and the way we did the enhancement where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered design results for our business. But as our excitement grew for our upcoming I. P. O. And our business started ramping up their growth plans. We needed to increase our focus on fine tuning key components which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our sonnet and wine platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level so that we can monitor the pulse of uh you know, every component of our users journey uh across both solid and wine. And we need to help with this. And this is where we engage idea Francisco to help us through this journey >>on that vision real quick. How does the A. I. Fit in more on the automation side or on the upside? I mean I can imagine what that growth in the I. P. O. You're thinking automation I'm assuming. Can you elaborate quickly? >>Absolutely. So I mean if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get like it's all digitized so we have a lot of data in there and this is where you know the ability to be able to actually mined that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting having predictability and all that. That's where the Ai Ops comes in but that's part of our journey through this. >>Yeah that's good. I mean the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the financial services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics uh with your clients and how are you responding? House IBM participating? >>Yeah, absolutely. And cooper and was touching on on this from economical perspective, they already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in vine with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year or so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that and then digital experience. So our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient. Right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco appdynamics around high hybrid, multi cloud and AI. >>So, if you don't mind if I don't mind following up on that app dynamics point, um can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that involved? >>Yeah, absolutely. So first off this was based again on our longstanding relationship with Cisco appdynamics that laura was speaking about and then unique to what cooper and and economical was seeking. Of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture. But leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that app dynamics brings to this scenario here is a market leading solution that does bring together those multiple datasets, but contextual ISeS them in a business context. So you can understand from a user perspective that end to end journey right from initiation in the application all the way through the technical infrastructure and it becomes very preventative uh in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >>So empty and this IBM services worked well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's >>absolutely. And that's the point is bringing to bear the best combination of, of solutions and services on behalf of our customers set. And this is where appdynamics and IBM uh, and our other partners work incredibly well together. >>We'll talk about the dynamics. Again, this is again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned, um what can other clients expect? I mean, this is gonna be the playbook. I mean you got the cloud satellite take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >>Yeah, absolutely. I'll start and maybe even laura can can add as as needed, but from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're gonna work with our partner ecosystem um in the hybrid, multi cloud world. So uh we've really evolved whether it's IBM cloud aws as some of our clients, including economical and others Microsoft, Azure, um google. Uh It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together and again, stitching together the data across those applications sets to drive value out of it. Uh This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM in our partner ecosystem and the evolution of IBM services as well. Awesome. >>Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco is trying to do, um they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring elements to the solution. When you look at networking we look at some of the security and then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for a client. >>I love the end to end story, actually hybrids, distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multi club, it's just subsystems and all gonna have to be operated together and the software all makes that happen. I could see tons of headroom opportunity there cooper and talk about what you guys are seeing as results now because this is where you start to see uh the conversation shift too. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really people want to see, can you share what you're seeing as a result? And where do you go from there? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um you know what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time, the team which really was composed of a cross functional and the highly collaborative group of people, uh they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line aside into what's going on for our business solution and you know, the implemented uh scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster, helping us reduce defect linkage through a quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where um implementations are driven by predetermined scope, we are changing the mindset specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together and our vision is to navigate yeah continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So you know to be able to have a robust self healing capability and this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability because now you can actually enable the self self healing capabilities and with afghan um is bringing in the uh uh dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Summit and Wine where it was a fully digitized end to end solution that provides services and value for excuse me for our customers. Right? So hopefully that changes the picture. >>That's awesome. Great insight, Laura Matthew Gordon? Thanks for coming on the cube in the last minute that we have, let's go down the line laura Matthew cooper on. We'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco relationship with the cloud satellite and a I guess what should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >>So as IBM invest more and more in these strategic cloud hybrid cloud solutions industry focused, it's really bringing an industry focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you heard from from Kobrin here, I mean we're bringing that value to our customers. >>All right Matthew, >>yeah, I just like to add and this is a great example here of being able to co innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, economical in this case to evolve these solutions And as cooper and had stated, uh, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come, >>come on, take us home. Final word. >>Thank you. What I would say is what we've learned from. This is really uh, standing this up more like a garage style kind of situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing RY very quickly. So that's the benefit. I've >>seen some great points. IBM and Cisco better together this ecosystem. The co creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks a lot john >>Okay. IBM think 2021. I'm John for with the Cube. Thank you for watching. >>Mm

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios with our ongoing coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020, the digital version. It would have been the North American version but obviously everything is digital. So we're excited, we've been coming back here for years and we've got a founder of CNCF and also a practitioner, really great opportunity to get some insight from someone who's out in the field and putting this stuff into work. So we're joined in this next segment by Ken Owens. He is the Vice President of Software Development Engineering for MasterCard, and he's a founding member of the CNCF, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Ken, great to see you. >> Yeah, great. Thank you for having me, I have, I've enjoyed theCUBE over the years and I'm glad to be a part of it again. >> Yeah, so we're, we're psyched to have you on, and I think it's the first time I've got to talk to you. I think you might've been on in LA a couple of years ago, or I was kind of drifting around that show. I don't think I was a it was on the set that day, but before we jump into kind of what's going on now, you were a founding member of CNCF. So let's take a step back and kind of share your perspective as to kind of where we are now from where this all began and kind of this whole movement around Cloud Native. Certainly it's a good place to be. >> Yeah, yeah definitely. It's been a great ride. In our industry, we go through these sort of timeframes every decade or so, where something big kind of comes along and you get involved in and you participate in it. And it gets to be a lot of fun and it either dies or it evolves into something else, right? And with CloudNativeCon Cloud Native itself, this concept of just how difficult it was to really move with the type of agility and the type of speed that developers in the enterprise really need to move at. It was just, it was hard to get there with just traditional infrastructure, traditional ways of doing configurations of doing management of infrastructure and it really needed something different and something to kind of help, it was called orchestration of course but at the time we didn't know it was called orchestration right. We knew we needed things like service mesh, but they weren't called service meshes then. There were more like control planes. And how do you, how do you custom create all of these different pieces? And the great thing about the CNCF is that we, when we started it, we had very simple foundational principles we wanted to follow right. One was, we wanted to have end users involved. A lot of foundations as become very vendor-driven and very vendor-centric. And you kind of lose your, your core base of the practitioners as you call us right? The guys who actually need to solve problems they're trying to make a living solving problems for the industry, not just for selling products, right? And so it was important that we get those end users involved and that, and that's probably the biggest changes. It's a great technology body. We had great technologists, great engineers and the foundation but we also have a huge over 150 end users that have engaged and been very involved and contributing to the end users things of the community, contributing to the foundation now. And it's been awesome to see that come to fruition over the last three years. >> Yeah, it certainly part of the magic of open source, that's been so, so transformative. And we've seen that obviously with servers and Linux and what what that did, but we've been talking a lot lately too about kind of the anniversary of the of the Agile Manifesto and kind of the Agile Movement and really changing the prioritization around change and really making change a first class citizen as opposed to kind of a nightmare I don't want to deal with and really building systems and ways of doing things that adopt that. I want to just to pull up the Cloud Native definition 'cause I think it's interesting. We talk about Cloud Native a lot and you guys actually wrote some words down and I think it's worth reading them that Cloud Native Technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in dynamic environments. Dynamic environments is such a key piece to this puzzle because it used to be, this is your infrastructure person, you've got to build something that fits into this. Now with an app-centric world has completely flipped over and the application developer doesn't have to worry about the environment anymore, right? It's spin it up and make it available to me when I need it. A really different way of thinking about things than kind of this static world. >> Definitely and then that was the big missing piece for all those years was how do you get to this dynamic environment, right, that embraces change and embraces risk to some extent. Not risk like you heard in the past with risk avoidance is so important to have, right. It's really more, how do you embrace risk and fail earlier in the process, learn earlier in the process so that when you get to production you're not failing, you're not having to worry about failure because you cut as much as you could in the earlier phases of your development life cycle. And that's been set, like you said that dynamic piece has just been such the difference. I think in why it's been taken off. >> Yeah. >> And industry this last five years now that we've been around. >> Yeah, for sure. So then the next one well, I'm just going to go through them 'cause there's three main tenants of this thing. These techniques and techniques enabled loosely coupled systems that allow engineers to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimum toil. I mean, those are, those are really hard challenges in a classic waterfall way with PRDs and MRDs and everything locked down in a big, giant Gantt chart that fills half of the half the office to actually be able to have loosely coupled systems. Again a really interesting concept versus hardwired, connected systems. Now you're talking about APIs and systems all connecting. Really different way to think about development and how do you build applications. >> Yeah and the interesting thing there is the very first definition we came up with five plus years ago was containers, containerized workloads, right? And being technologist, everyone focused on those words containers and containerized and then everything had to be a container, right? And to your point, that isn't what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to create services that are just big enough to support whatever is needed for that service to support and be able to scale those up and down independently of other dependent systems that may have different requirements associated with what they have to do, right. And it was more about that keeping those highly efficient type of patterns in mind of spinning up and spinning down things that don't have impact or cause impact to other larger components around them was really the key not containers or containerized. >> Right. >> Obviously that's one of the patterns you could follow to create those types of services and those patterns, but there is nothing that guarantees it has to be a container that can do that. Lots of BMS today and lots of Bare Metal Servers can have a similar function. They're just not going to be as dynamic as you may want them to be in other environments. >> Right and then the third tenant, three of three is fostering sustainable ecosystem of open source vendor neutral projects, democratizing state-of-the-art patterns to make these innovations accessible for everyone. So just the whole idea of democratization of technology, democratization of data, democratization of tools, to do something with the data to find the insight democratization of the authority to execute on those decisions once you get going on that, I mean the open source and kind of this democratization to enable a broad distribution of power to more than just mahogany row, huge fundamental shift in the way people think about things. And really even still today, as everyone's trying to move their organizations to be more data-centric in the way they operate, it is really all about the democratization and getting that information and the tools and the ability to do something with it to as broad a group of people as you can. And that's even before we talk about open source development and the power of again, as you said, bringing in this really active community who want to contribute. It's a really interesting way that open source works. It's such a fun thing to watch, and I'm not a developer from the outside, but to see people get excited about helping other people. I think that's probably the secret to the whole thing that really taps into. >> Yeah, it is. And open source, there were discussions about open source for 20 plus years trying to get more into open source contributing to open source in an enterprise mindset, right? And it could never really take off 'cause it's not really the foundation or the platforms or the capabilities needed to do that. And now to your point, open source was really the underlying engine that is making all of this possible. Without open source and some of those early days of trying to get more open source and understanding of open source in the enterprise, I think we'd still be trying to get adoption but open source had just gotten to that point where everyone wanted to do more with open source. The CNCF comes along and said, here's the set of democratized, we're not going to have kingmakers in this organization. We're going to have a lot of open solutions, a lot of good options for companies to look at, and we're not going to lock you in to anything. 'Cause that's another piece of that open source model, right. Open source still can lock you in, right. But if you have open choices within open source, there's less, lock-in potential and locking isn't really a horrible thing. It's just one of those tenants you don't want to be tied too tightly to any one solution or one hope, open source even program because that could 'cause issues of that minimal toil we talked about, right. If you have a lot of dependencies and a lot of, I always joked about OpenStack but if I have to email two guys, if I find an issue in OpenStack about security that's not really a great security model that I can tell my customers I have your security covered, right? So, you want to get away from emails and having to ask for help, if you see a big security issue you want to just address it right then and fix it fast. >> Right, right. So much to unpack there. And for those that don't follow you, you've done a ton of presentations. You've got a ton of great content out of the internet with deep technical dives, into some of this stuff and the operational challenges in your philosophies but good keeping it kind of high level here. 'Cause one of the themes that comes up over and over in some of the other stuff I saw from you is really about asking the right questions. And we hear this time and time again, that the way to get the right answer first you got to frame the question right. And you talk quite extensively about asking the why and asking the how. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit as to why those two questions are so important and how do you ask them in a way that doesn't piss everybody off or scare them away when you're at a big company like MasterCard that has a lot of personal information, you're in the finance industry, you got ton of regulation but still you're asking how and you're asking why. >> Yeah, definitely. And those, those are two questions that I keep coming back to in the industry because they are, they're not asked enough in my opinion. I think they, for the reasons you brought up those there's too much pushback or there's, you don't want to be viewed as someone who's being difficult, right? And there maybe other reasons why you don't want to ask that but I like to ask the why first because it, you kind of have to understand what's the problem you're trying to solve. And it kind of goes back to my engineering background, I think right. I love to solve problems and one of my early days and you might have heard this on one of my, my interviews, right. But in my early days, I was trying to fix a problem that I was on an advanced engineering team. And I was tier four support in a large Telco. And for months we had this issue with one of our large oil based companies and no one could solve it. And I was on call the night that they called in. And I asked the guy a simple question, tell me which lights you see on this DHUC issue? Which is a piece of equipment that sits between a ATM network and a regular Sonnet network. So we're watching, I'm asking them as kind of find out where in this path, there's a problem. And the guy tells me where there's no lights on. And I'm like well, plug in the power and let me know when it boots up and then let's try another test. And that was the problem. So my, the cleaning crew would come through and unplugged it. And so I learned early on in my crew that if you don't ask those simple questions, you just assume that everything's working almost nine times out of 10, it's the simple, easy solution to a problem. You're just too busy thinking of all the complex things that could go wrong and trying to solve all the hard problems first. And so I really try to help people think about, ask the why questions, ask, why is this important? Why do we need to do this now? Why, what would happen if we don't do this? If we did it this other way, what's the downside of doing it this other way? Really think through your options, 'cause it may take you 20, 30 minutes to kind of do a good analysis of a problem, but then your solution you're not going to spend weeks trying to troubleshoot when it doesn't work because you put the time upfront to think about it. So that's sort of the main reason why I like to ask the why and the how, because it forces you to think outside of your normal, my job is to take this cog and put it over here and fix this, right. And you don't want to be in that, that mode when you're solving complex problems because you overlook or you miss the simple things. >> Right. So you don't like the 'cause we've always done it that way? (both laughing) >> I do not. And I hear that a lot everywhere I've been in the industry and anywhere, any company you have those, this is the way we've always done it. >> Yeah, yeah. Just like the way we've always traveled, right. And the way we've always been educated and the way we've always consumed entertainment. It's like really? I wanted to (indistinct) >> I have learned though that there's a good, I like to understand the reason behind why we've always done it that way. So I do always ask that question. >> Right. >> I don't turn around on someone and get mad at them and you say, Oh, we can't we have to do it differently. I don't have the mindset of let's throw that out the window because I realized that over time something happened. It's like when I had younger kids, I always laugh because they put these warnings on those whatever they call them at the kids stand up in them. >> Right, the little, the little (indistinct) >> Don't put them on top of the stairs right. These stupid little statements are written on there. And I always thought I was dumb. And if somebody told me, well that's because somebody put their kid near the pool and they drown. >> Right, right. >> You have to kind of point out the obvious to people and so, >> Yeah. >> I don't think it's that dangerous of a situation and in the work environment, but hopefully we're not making the same mistakes that have been prevented by not allowing just the, not because we've done it this way before modeled it to go forward. >> Right, right now we have a rule around here too. There's a reason we have every rules is because somebody blew it at some point in time. That's why we have the rule that I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about automation, right? 'Cause automation is such a big and important piece of this whole story especially as these systems scale, scale, scale. And we know that people are prone to errors. I mean, I had seen that story about the cleaner accidentally unplugging things. We all know that people fat fingers, copy and paste is not used as universally as it should be. But I wonder if you could share, how important automation is. And I know you've talked a lot about how people should think about automate automation and prioritizing automation and helping use automation to both make people more productive but also to prioritize what the people should be working on as well as lowering the error rate on stuff that they probably shouldn't be doing anyway. >> Exactly, yeah automation to me is, as you've heard me say before is it's something that is probably almost as big of a key tenet as open source should be, right? It's one of those foundational things that it really helps you to get rid of some of that churn and some of the toil that you run into in a production environment where you're trying to always figure out what went wrong and why did this system not work on this point in time and this day and this deployment, and it's almost to your point always a fat finger, someone deleted an IP address from the IPAM system. There's all kinds of errors that you can people can tell you about that have happened. But to the root of your question is automation needs to be thought about from three different primary areas in my view, in my experience. The first one is the infrastructure as code, software defined infrastructure, right. So the networking teams and the storage teams and the security teams are probably the furthest behind in adopting automation in in their jobs, right. And their jobs are probably the most critical pieces of the infrastructure, right? And so those are, those are pieces that I really highly encouraged them to think about how can they automate those areas. The second piece is I think is equally as important as the infrastructure piece is the application side. When I first joined multiple enterprises in the past, the test coverage is in the low 10's to 20%, right. And your test coverage is a direct correlation to how well your application is going to behave and production in terms of failures, right? So if you have low test coverage, you're going to have high failure rates. It's sort of over over all types of industries every study has shown that, right. So getting your test coverage up and testing the right things not just testing to have test coverage right. >> But actually. >> Right, right. >> Thinking through your user stories and acceptance criteria and having good test is really, really important. So you have those two bookends, right. And in between, I think it's important that you look at how you connect to these services, these distributed systems we talked about in the opening right. If you fully automate your infrastructure and fully automate your application development and delivery, that's great. But if in the middle you have this gooey middle that doesn't really connect well doesn't really have the automation in place to ensure that your certificates are there that your security is in place. That middle piece can become really a problem from a security and from a availability issue. And so those those are the two pieces that I say really focus on is that gooey middle and then that infrastructure piece is really the two keys. >> Right, right. You've got another group of words that you use a lot. I want you to give us a little bit more color behind it. And that's talking to people to tell them that they need to spend more time on investigation. They need to do more experimentation. And then and the one that really popped out to me was it was retro to retrospective to not necessarily a postmortem which I thought is interesting. You say retrospective versus the postmortem, because this is an ongoing process for continuous improvement. And then finally, what seems drop dead dumb obvious is to iterate and deliver. But I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on how important it is to experiment and to investigate and to have those retrospectives. >> Yeah definitely. And then it kind of goes back to that culture we want to create in a Cloud Native world, right. We want to be open to thinking about how we can solve problems better, how we can have each iteration we want, to look at, how do we have a less toil, have less issues. How do we improve the, I liked kind of delight in your experience, how do you make your developers and your customers specific, but specifically how do you make your customers so happy with your service? And when you think about those sort of areas, right. You want to spend some portion of your time dedicated to how do I look at and investigate better ways of doing things or more improvements around the way my customer experience is being delivered. Asking your customers questions, right. You'd be surprised how how many customers don't ever get asked for their opinion on how something works, right. And they want to be asked, they'd love to give you feedback. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go do it that next iteration, right? The old adage I like to use is if Henry Ford had listened to his customers he would have tried to breed a faster horse, right? And so you have to kind of think about what you want to try to deliver as a product and as an organization but at the same time, that input is important. And I think, I say carve it out, because if you don't, we're so busy today and there's so much going on in our lives. If you don't dedicate and carve out some of that time and protect that time, you will never get to that, right. It's always a, I'll get to that next year. Maybe our next iteration I'll try, right. And so it's important to really hold that time as sacred and spend time every week, every couple of weeks, whatever it works out in the schedule, but actually put that in your calendar and block out that time and use it to really look at what's possible, what's relevant, what kind of improvements you can have. I think those are really the key the key takeaways I can have from that piece of it. And then, the last one you asked about, which I think is so important, is the retrospective, right. Always trying to get better and better at what you do is, is an engineer's goal, right? We never liked to fail. We never liked to do something twice, right? We don't want to, we want to learn the first time we make a mistake and not make it over and over again. So that those retrospectives and improving on what you're doing iteratively. And to the point you brought up and I like to bring this up a lot, 'cause I've been part not at MasterCard, but at other companies parts of companies that would talk a great game come up with great stories, say here's our plan. And then when we get ready to go to deliver it, we go and we reinvestigate the plan and see if there's a better plan. And then we get to a point where we're ready to go execute. And then we go back and start all over again, right. And you've got to deliver iteratively, if you don't, you're the point I like to always make is you're never going to be ready, right. It's like, when are you ready to have kids? You never ready to have kids, right. You just have to go and you'll learn as you go. You know so. >> Right, right, I love that. Well again, Ken, you have so much great stuff out there for technical people that want to dive in deep? So I encourage them just to do a simple YouTube or excuse me, YouTube search or Google search but I want to give you the last word. One word, I'm going to check the transcript when this thing is over that you've used probably more than any other word while we've been talking for the last few minutes is toil. And I think it's really interesting that it brings up and really highlights your empathy towards what you're trying to help developers avoid and what you're trying to help teams avoid so that they can be more productive. You keep saying, avoid the toil, get out of the toil, get out of this kind of crap that inhibits people from getting their job done and being creative and being inventive and being innovative. Where does that come from? And I just love that you keep reinforce it and just kind of your final perspective as we wrap on 2020 and another year of CNCF and clearly containers and Kubernetes and Cloud Native is continues to be on fire and on a tear. I just wonder if you can share a little bit of your perspective as a founding member as we kind of come to the end of 2020. >> Yeah definitely. Thanks again for having me. It's been a great, great discussion. I am a developer by background, by trade today, I still develop. I still contribute to open source and I've had this mantra pretty much my entire career that you have to get into the weeds and understand what everyone's experiencing in order to figure out how to solve the problems, right. You can't be in an ivory tower and look down and say, Oh, there's a problem, I'm going to go fix that. It just doesn't work that way. And most problems you try to solve in that model will be problems that no other team has really experienced. And there not going to be help, they're not going to be thankful that you solved the problem they don't have, right? They want you to solve a problem that they have. And so I think that that's sort of a key for the reason why I spent so much time talking about that as I live it every day. I understand it. I talk with my development community and with a broader community of developers at MasterCard and understand the pains that they're going through and try to help them every day with coming up with ways to help make their lives a lot easier. So it's important to me and to to all organizations out there and in all of the, in the world. So, CNCF its been great. It's still growing. I'm always looking for end users. I'd love to talk to you. Well, you can reach out to, to the CNCF if you'd like to learn more, our website has information on how to get connected to the end user community. We community within the CNCF that is not, it's a private community. So you don't have to worry about your information being shared. If you don't want people to know you belong to the community, you don't have to list that information. If you want to list it, you're welcome to list it. There's no expectations on you to contribute to open source, but we do encourage you to contribute, and are here to support that end user community any way we can. So thanks again for having us and looking forward to, to a great show in North America. >> All right well, thank you, Ken, for sharing your information sharing the insight, sharing the knowledge really appreciate it and great to catch up. All right. He's Ken, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with our ongoing coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 North America Digital. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)