(bright music) >> Okay, we're back in theCUBE. We said we were signing off for the night, but during the hallway track, we ran into old friend Stu Miniman who was the Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. Stu, friend of theCUBE done the thousands of CUBE interviews. >> Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for pulling me on, you and I hosted Red Hat Summit before. It's great to see Paul here. I was actually, I was talking to some of the Red Hatters walking around Boston. It's great to have an event here. Boston's got strong presence and I understand, I think was either first or second year, they had it over... What's the building they're tearing down right down the road here. Was that the World Trade Center? I think that's where they actually held it, the first time they were here. We hosted theCUBE >> So they moved up. >> at the Hines Convention Center. We did theCUBE for summit at the BCEC next door. And of course, with the pandemic being what it was, we're a little smaller, nice intimate event here. It's great to be able to room the hall, see a whole bunch of people and lots watching online. >> It's great, it's around the same size as those, remember those Vertica Big Data events that we used to have here. And I like that you were commenting out at the theater and the around this morning for the keynotes, that was good. And the keynotes being compressed, I think, is real value for the attendees, you know? 'Cause people come to these events, they want to see each other, you know? They want to... It's like the band getting back together. And so when you're stuck in the keynote room, it's like, "Oh, it's okay, it's time to go." >> I don't know that any of us used to sitting at home where I could just click to another tab or pause it or run for, do something for the family, or a quick bio break. It's the three-hour keynote I hope has been retired. >> But it's an interesting point though, that the virtual event really is driving the physical and this, the way Red Hat marketed this event was very much around the virtual attendee. Physical was almost an afterthought, so. >> Right, this is an invite only for in-person. So you're absolutely right. It's optimizing the things that are being streamed, the online audience is the big audience. And we just happy to be in here to clap and do some things see around what you're doing. >> Wonderful see that becoming the norm. >> I think like virtual Stu, you know this well when virtual first came in, nobody had a clue with what they were doing. It was really hard. They tried different things, they tried to take the physical and just jam it into the virtual. That didn't work, they tried doing fun things. They would bring in a famous person or a comedian. And that kind of worked, I guess, but everybody showed up for that and then left. And I think they're trying to figure it out what this hybrid thing is. I've seen it both ways. I've seen situations like this, where they're really sensitive to the virtual. I've seen others where that's the FOMO of the physical, people want physical. So, yeah, I think it depends. I mean, reinvent last year was heavy physical. >> Yeah, with 15,000 people there. >> Pretty long keynotes, you know? So maybe Amazon can get away with it, but I think most companies aren't going to be able to. So what is the market telling you? What are these insights? >> So Dave just talking about Amazon, obviously, the world I live in cloud and that discussion of cloud, the journey that customers are going on is where we're spending a lot of the discussions. So, it was great to hear in the keynote, talked about our deep partnerships with the cloud providers and what we're doing to help people with, you like to call it super cloud, some call it hybrid, or multi-cloud... >> New name. (crosstalk) Meta-Cloud, come on. >> All right, you know if Che's my executive, so it's wonderful. >> Love it. >> But we'll see, if I could put on my VR Goggles and that will help me move things. But I love like the partnership announcement with General Motors today because not every company has the needs of software driven electric vehicles all over the place. But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We've working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud, benefit what we do in the data center, it's that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats. >> So what's your take on all this? The EV and software on wheels. I mean, Tesla obviously has a huge lead. It's kind of like the Amazon of vehicles, right? It's sort of inspired a whole new wave of innovation. Now you've got every automobile manufacturer kind of go and after. That is the future of vehicles is something you followed or something you have an opinion on Stu? >> Absolutely. It's driving innovation in some ways, the way the DOS drove innovation on the desktop, if you remember the 64K DOS limit, for years, that was... The software developers came up with some amazing ways to work within that 64K limit. Then when it was gone, we got bloatware, but it actually does enforce a level of discipline on you to try to figure out how to make software run better, run more efficiently. And that has upstream impacts on the enterprise products. >> Well, right. So following your analogy, you talk about the enablement to the desktop, Linux was a huge influence on allowing the individual person to write code and write software, and what's happening in the EV, it's software platform. All of these innovations that we're seeing across industries, it's how is software transforming things. We go back to the mark end reasons, software's eating the world, open source is the way that software is developed. Who's at the intersection of all those? We think we have a nice part to play in that. I loved tha- Dave, I don't know if you caught at the end of the keynote, Matt Hicks basically said, "Our mission isn't just to write enterprise software. "Our mission is based off of open source because open source unlocks innovation for the world." And that's one of the things that drew me to Red Hat, it's not just tech in good places, but allowing underrepresented, different countries to participate in what's happening with software. And we can all move that ball forward. >> Well, can we declare victory for open source because it's not just open source products, but everything that's developed today, whether proprietary or open has open source in it. >> Paul, I agree. Open source is the development model period, today. Are there some places that there's proprietary? Absolutely. But I had a discussion with Deepak Singh who's been on theCUBE many times. He said like, our default is, we start with open source code. I mean, even Amazon when you start talking about that. >> I said this, the $70 billion business on open source. >> Exactly. >> Necessarily give it back, but that say, Hey, this is... All's fair in tech and more. >> It is interesting how the managed service model has sort of rescued open source, open source companies, that were trying to do the Red Hat model. No one's ever really successfully duplicated the Red Hat model. A lot of companies were floundering and failing. And then the managed service option came along. And so now they're all cloud service providers. >> So the only thing I'd say is that there are some other peers we have in the industry that are built off open source they're doing okay. The recent example, GitLab and Hashicorp, both went public. Hashi is doing some managed services, but it's not the majority of their product. Look at a company like Mongo, they've heavily pivoted toward the managed service. It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It's one of the things I spend most of my time talking on. >> I think Databricks is another interesting example 'cause Cloudera was the now company and they had the sort of open core, and then they had the proprietary piece, and they've obviously didn't work. Databricks when they developed Spark out of Berkeley, everybody thought they were going to do kind of a similar model. Instead, they went for all in managed services. And it's really worked well, I think they were ahead of that curve and you're seeing it now is it's what customers want. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you cover the database market pretty heavily. How many different open source database options are there today? And that's one of the things we're solving. When you look at what is Red Hat doing in the cloud? Okay, I've got lots of databases. Well, we have something called, it's Red Hat Open Database Access, which is from a developer, I don't want to have to think about, I've got six different databases, which one, where's the repository? How does all that happen? We give that consistency, it's tied into OpenShift, so it can help abstract some of those pieces. we've got same Kafka streaming and we've got APIs. So it's frameworks and enablers to help bridge that gap between the complexity that's out there, in the cloud and for the developer tool chain. >> That's really important role you guys play though because you had this proliferation, you mentioned Mongo. So many others, Presto and Starbursts, et cetera, so many other open source options out there now. And companies, developers want to work with multiple databases within the same application. And you have a role in making that easy. >> Yeah, so and that is, if you talk about the question I get all the time is, what's next for Kubernetes? Dave, you and I did a preview for KubeCon and it's automation and simplicity that we need to be. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we've got APIs." It's like Dave, we used to say, "We've got standards? Great." Everybody's implementation was a little bit different. So we have API Sprawl today. So it's building that ecosystem. You've been talking to a number of our partners. We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud native ecosystem, help our customers move faster. >> Yeah API's better than scripts, but they got to be managed, right? So, and that's really what you guys are doing that's different. You're not trying to own everything, right? It's sort of antithetical to how billions and trillions are made in the IT industry. >> I remember a few years ago we talked here, and you look at the size that Red Hat is. And the question is, could Red Hat have monetized more if the model was a little different? It's like, well maybe, but that's not the why. I love that they actually had Simon Sinek come in and work with Red Hat and that open, unlocks the world. Like that's the core, it's the why. When I join, they're like, here's a book of Red Hat, you can get it online and that why of what we do, so we never have to think of how do we get there. We did an acquisition in the security space a year ago, StackRox, took us a year, it's open source. Stackrox.io, it's community driven, open source project there because we could have said, "Oh, well, yeah, it's kind of open source and there's pieces that are open source, but we want it to be fully open source." You just talked to Gunnar about how he's RHEL nine, based off CentOS stream, and now developing out in the open with that model, so. >> Well, you were always a big fan of Whitehurst culture book, right? It makes a difference. >> The open organization and right, Red Hat? That culture is special. It's definitely interesting. So first of all, most companies are built with the hierarchy in mind. Had a friend of mine that when he joined Red Hat, he's like, I don't understand, it's almost like you have like lots of individual contractors, all doing their things 'cause Red Hat works on thousands of projects. But I remember talking to Rackspace years ago when OpenStack was a thing and they're like, "How do you figure out what to work on?" "Oh, well we hired great people and they work on what's important to them." And I'm like, "That doesn't sound like a business." And he is like, "Well, we struggle sometimes to that balance." Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that are, you know, they care more about the project than they do the business, but there's the overall view as to where we participate and where we productize because we're not creating IP because it's all an open source. So it's the monetizations, the relationships we have our customers, the ecosystems that we build. And so that is special. And I'll tell you that my line has been Red Hat on the inside is even more Red Hat. The debates and the discussions are brutal. I mean, technical people tearing things apart, questioning things and you can't be thin skinned. And the other thing is, what's great is new people. I've talked to so many people that started at Red Hat as interns and will stay for seven, eight years. And they come there and they have as much of a seat at the table, and when I talk to new people, your job, is if you don't understand something or you think we might be able to do it differently, you better speak up because we want your opinion and we'll take that, everybody takes that into consideration. It's not like, does the decision go all the way up to this executive? And it's like, no, it's done more at the team. >> The cultural contrast between that and your parent, IBM, couldn't be more dramatic. And we talked earlier with Paul Cormier about has IBM really walked the walk when it comes to leaving Red Hat alone. Naturally he said, "Yes." Well what's your perspective. >> Yeah, are there some big blue people across the street or something I heard that did this event, but look, do we interact with IBM? Of course. One of the reasons that IBM and IBM Services, both products and services should be able to help get us breadth in the marketplace. There are times that we go arm and arm into customer meetings and there are times that customers tell us, "I like Red Hat, I don't like IBM." And there's other ones that have been like, "Well, I'm a long time IBM, I'm not sure about Red Hat." And we have to be able to meet all of those customers where they are. But from my standpoint, I've got a Red Hat badge, I've got a Red Hat email, I've got Red Hat benefits. So we are fiercely independent. And you know, Paul, we've done blogs and there's lots of articles been written is, Red Hat will stay Red Hat. I didn't happen to catch Arvin I know was on CNBC today and talking at their event, but I'm sure Red Hat got mentioned, but... >> Well, he talks about Red Hat all time. >> But in his call he's talking backwards. >> It's interesting that he's not here, greeting this audience, right? It's again, almost by design, right? >> But maybe that's supposed to be... >> Hundreds of yards away. >> And one of the questions being in the cloud group is I'm not out pitching IBM Cloud, you know? If a customer comes to me and asks about, we have a deep partnership and IBM will be happy to tell you about our integrations, as opposed to, I'm happy to go into a deep discussion of what we're doing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. So that's how we do it. It's very different Dave, from you and I watch really closely the VMware-EMC, VMware-Dell, and how that relationship. This one is different. We are owned by IBM, but we mostly, it does IBM fund initiatives and have certain strategic things that are done, absolutely. But we maintain Red Hat. >> But there are similarities. I mean, VMware crowd didn't want to talk about EMC, but they had to, they were kind of forced to. Whereas, you're not being forced to. >> And then once Dell came in there, it was joint product development. >> I always thought a spin in. Would've been the more effective, of course, Michael Dell and Egon wouldn't have gotten their $40 billion out. But I think a spin in was more natural based on where they were going. And it would've been, I think, a more dominant position in the marketplace. They would've had more software, but again, financially it wouldn't have made as much sense, but that whole dynamic is different. I mean, but people said they were going to look at VMware as a model and it's been largely different because remember, VMware of course was a separate company, now is a fully separate company. Red Hat was integrated, we thought, okay, are they going to get blue washed? We're watching and watching, and watching, you had said, well, if the Red Hat culture isn't permeating IBM, then it's a failure. And I don't know if that's happening, but it's definitely... >> I think a long time for that. >> It's definitely been preserved. >> I mean, Dave, I know I read one article at the beginning of the year is, can Arvin make IBM, Microsoft Junior? Follow the same turnaround that Satya Nadella drove over there. IBM I think making some progress, I mean, I read and watch what you and the team are all writing about it. And I'll withhold judgment on IBM. Obviously, there's certain financial things that we'd love to see IBM succeed. We worry about our business. We do our thing and IBM shares our results and they've been solid, so. >> Microsoft had such massive cash flow that even bomber couldn't screw it up. Well, I mean, this is true, right? I mean, you think about how were relevant Microsoft was in the conversation during his tenure and yet they never got really... They maintained a position so that when the Nadella came in, they were able to reascend and now are becoming that dominant player. I mean, IBM just doesn't have that cash flow and that luxury, but I mean, if he pulls it off, he'll be the CEO of the decade. >> You mentioned partners earlier, big concern when the acquisition was first announced, was that the Dells and the HP's and the such wouldn't want to work with Red Hat anymore, you've sort of been here through that transition. Is that an issue? >> Not that I've seen, no. I mean, the hardware suppliers, the ISVs, the GSIs are all very important. It was great to see, I think you had Accenture on theCUBE today, obviously very important partner as we go to the cloud. IBM's another important partner, not only for IBM Cloud, but IBM Services, deep partnership with Azure and AWS. So those partners and from a technology standpoint, the cloud native ecosystem, we talked about, it's not just a Red Hat product. I constantly have to talk about, look, we have a lot of pieces, but your developers are going to have other tools that they're going to use and the security space. There is no such thing as a silver bullet. So I've been having some great conversations here already this week with some of our partners that are helping us to round out that whole solution, help our customers because it has to be, it's an ecosystem. And we're one of the drivers to help that move forward. >> Well, I mean, we were at Dell Tech World last week, and there's a lot of talk about DevSecOps and DevOps and Dell being more developer friendly. Obviously they got a long way to go, but you can't have that take that posture and not have a relationship with Red Hat. If all you got is Pivotal and VMware, and Tansu >> I was thrilled to hear the OpenShift mention in the keynote when they talked about what they were doing. >> How could you not, how could you have any credibility if you're just like, Oh, Pivotal, Pivotal, Pivotal, Tansu, Tansu. Tansu is doing its thing. And they smart strategy. >> VMware is also a partner of ours, but that we would hope that with VMware being independent, that does open the door for us to do more with them. >> Yeah, because you guys have had a weird relationship with them, under ownership of EMC and then Dell, right? And then the whole IBM thing. But it's just a different world now. Ecosystems are forming and reforming, and Dell's building out its own cloud and it's got to have... Look at Amazon, I wrote about this. I said, "Can you envision the day where Dell actually offers competitive products in its suite, in its service offering?" I mean, it's hard to see, they're not there yet. They're not even close. And they have this high say/do ratio, or really it's a low say/do, they say high say/do, but look at what they did with Nutanix. You look over- (chuckles) would tell if it's the Cisco relationship. So it's got to get better at that. And it will, I really do believe. That's new thinking and same thing with HPE. And, I don't know about Lenovo that not as much of an ecosystem play, but certainly Dell and HPE. >> Absolutely. Michael Dell would always love to poke at HPE and HP really went very far down the path of their own products. They went away from their services organization that used to be more like IBM, that would offer lots of different offerings and very much, it was HP Invent. Well, if we didn't invent it, you're not getting it from us. So Dell, we'll see, as you said, the ecosystems are definitely forming, converging and going in lots of different directions. >> But your position is, Hey, we're here, we're here to help. >> Yeah, we're here. We have customers, one of the best proof points I have is the solution that we have with Amazon. Amazon doesn't do the engineering work to make us a native offering if they didn't have the customer demand because Amazon's driven off of data. So they came to us, they worked with us. It's a lot of work to be able to make that happen, but you want to make it frictionless for customers so that they can adopt that. That's a long path. >> All right, so evening event, there's a customer event this evening upstairs in the lobby. Microsoft is having a little shin dig, and then serves a lot of customer dinners going on. So Stu, we'll see you out there tonight. >> All right, thanks you. >> Were watching a brewing somewhere. >> Keynotes tomorrow, a lot of good sessions and enablement, and yeah, it's great to be in person to be able to bump some people, meet some people and, Hey, I'm still a year and a half in still meeting a lot of my peers in person for the first time. >> Yeah, and that's kind of weird, isn't it? Imagine. And then we kick off tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Actually, Stephanie Chiras is coming on. There she is in the background. She's always a great guest and maybe do a little kickoff and have some fun tomorrow. So this is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Paul Gillin, who's my co-host. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll see you tomorrow. (bright music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back, this is The Cube's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman with Corey Quinn as my cohost, even though he says kucon. And joining us on this segment, we're not going debate how we pronounce certain things, but I will try to make sure that I get Bridget Kromhout correct. She is a Principle Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Thank you for coming back to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me again. This is fun! >> First of all I do have to say, the bedazzled shirt is quite impressive. We always love the sartorial, ya know, view we get at a show like this because there are some really interesting shirts and there is one guy in a three-piece suit. But ya know-- >> There is, it's the high style, got to have that. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Bringing some class to the joint. >> Wearing a suit is my primary skill. (laughing) >> I will tell you that, yes, they sell this shirt on the Microsoft company store. And yes, it's only available in unisex fitted. Which is to say much like Alice Goldfuss likes to put it, ladies is gender neutral. So, all of the gentleman who say, but I have too much dad bod to wear that shirt! I say, well ya know get your bedazzlers out. You too can make your own shirt. >> I say it's not dad bod, it's a father figure, but I digress. (laughing) >> Exactly! >> Alright, so Bridget you're doing some speaking at the conference. You've been at this show a few times. Tell us, give us a bit of an overview of what you're doing here and your role at Microsoft these days. >> Absolutely. So, my talk is tomorrow and I think that, I'm going to go with its a vote of confidence that they put your talk on the last day at 2:00 P.M. instead of the, oh gosh, are they trying to bury it? But no, it's, I have scheduled enough conferences myself that I know that you have to put some stuff on the last day that people want to go to, or they're just not going to come. And my talk is about, and I'm co-presenting with my colleague, Jessica Deen, and we're talking about Helm 3. Which is to say, I think a lot of times it would, with these open-sourced shows people say, oh, why do you have to have a lot of information about the third release of your, third major release of your project? Why? It's just an iterative release. It is, and yet there are enough significant differences that it's kind of valuable to talk about, at least the end user experience. >> Yeah, so it actually got an applause in the keynote, ya know. (Bridget laughing) There are certain shows where people are hootin' and hollerin' for every, different compute instance that that is released and you look at it a little bit funny. But at the keynote there was a singular moment where it was the removal of Tiller which Corey and I have been trying to get feedback from the community as to what this all means. >> It seems, from my perspective, it seemed like a very strange thing. It's, we added this, yay! We added this other thing, yay! We're taking this thing and ripping it out and throwing it right into the garbage and the crowd goes nuts. And my two thoughts are first, that probably doesn't feel great if that was the thing you spent a lot of time working on, but secondly, I'm not as steep in the ecosystem as perhaps I should be and I don't really know what it does. So, what does it do and why is everyone super happy to con sine it to the dub rubbish bin of history? >> Right, exactly. So, first of all, I think it's 100% impossible to be an expert on every single vertical in this ecosystem. I mean, look around, KubeCon has 7,000 plus people, about a zillion vendor booths. They're all doing something that sounds slightly, overlapping and it's very confusing. So, in the Helm, if you, if people want to look we can say there's a link in the show notes but there, we can, people can go read on Helm.sh/blog. We have a seven part, I think, blog series about exactly what the history and the current release is about. But the TLDR, the too long didn't follow the link, is that Helm 1 was pretty limited in scope, Helm 2 was certainly more ambitious and it was born out of a collaboration between Google actually and a few other project contributors and Microsoft. And, the Tiller came in with the Google folks and it really served a need at that specific time. And it was, it was a server-side component. And this was an era when the Roll by Stacks has control and Kubernetes was, well nigh not existent. And so there were a lot of security components that you kind of had to bolt on after the fact, And once we got to, I think it was Kubernetes 1.7 or 1.8 maybe, the security model had matured enough that instead of it being great to have this extra component, it became burdensome to try to work around the extra component. And so I think that's actually a really good example of, it's like you were saying, people get excited about adding things. People sometimes don't get excited about removing things, but I think people are excited about the work that went into, removing this particular component because it ends up reducing the complexity in terms of the configuration for anyone who is using this system. >> It felt very spiritually aligned in some ways, with the announcement of Open Telemetry, where you're taking two projects and combining them into one. >> Absolutely. >> Where it's, oh, thank goodness, one less thing that-- >> Yes! >> I have to think about or deal with. Instead of A or B I just mix them together and hopefully it's a chocolate and peanut butter moment. >> Delicious. >> One of the topics that's been pretty hot in this ecosystem for the last, I'd say two years now it's been service matched, and talk about some complexity. And I talk to a guy and it's like, which one of these using? Oh I'm using all three of them and this is how I use them in my environment. So, there was an announcement spearheaded by Microsoft, the Service Mesh Interface. Give us the high level of what this is. >> So, first of all, the SMI acronym is hilarious to me because I got to tell you, as a nerdy teenager I went to math camp in the summertime, as one did, and it was named SMI. It was like, Summer Mathematics Institute! And I'm like, awesome! Now we have a work project that's named that, happy memories of lots of nerdy math. But my first Unix system that I played with, so, but what's great about that, what's great about that particular project, and you're right that this is very much aligned with, you're an enterprise. You would very much like to do enterprise-y things, like being a bank or being an airline or being an insurance company, and you super don't want to look at the very confusing CNCF Project Map and go, I think we need something in that quadrant. And then set your ships for that direction, and hopefully you'll get to what you need. And it's especially when you said that, you mentioned that, this, it basically standardizes it, such that whichever projects you want to use, whichever of the N, and we used to joke about JavaScript framework for the week, but I'm pretty sure the Service Mesh Project of the week has outstripped it in terms of like speed, of new projects being released all the time. And like, a lot of end user companies would very much like to start doing something and have it work and if the adorable start-up that had all the stars on GitHub and the two contributors ends up, and I'm not even naming a specific one, I'm just saying like there are many projects out there that are great technically and maybe they don't actually plan on supporting your LTS. And that's fine, but if we end up with this interface such that whatever service mesh, mesh, that's a hard word. Whatever service mesh technology you choose to use, you can be confident that you can move forward and not have a horrible disaster later. >> Right, and I think that's something that a lot of developers when left to our own devices and in my particular device, the devices are pretty crappy. Where it becomes a, I want to get this thing built, and up and running and working, and then when it finally works I do a happy dance. And no one wants to see that, I promise. It becomes a very different story when, okay, how do you maintain this? How do you responsibly keep this running? And it's, well I just got it working, what do you mean maintain it? I'm done, my job is done, I'm going home now. It turns out that when you have a business that isn't being the most clever person in the room, you sort of need to have a longer term plan around that. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And it's nice to see that level of maturation being absorbed into the ecosystem. >> I think the ecosystem may finally be ready for it. And this is, I feel like, it's easy for us to look at examples of the past, people kind of shake their heads at OpenStack as a cautionary tale or of Sprawl and whatnot. But this is a thriving, which means growing, which means changing, which means very busy ecosystem. But like you're pointing out, if your enterprises are going to adapt some of this technology, they look at it and everyone here was, ya know, eating cupcakes or whatever for the Kubernetes fifth birthday, to an enterprise just 'cause that launched in 2014, June 2014, that sounds kind of new. >> Oh absolutely. >> Like, we're still, we're still running that mainframe that is still producing business value and actually that's fine. I mean, I think this maybe is one of the great things about a company like Microsoft, is we are our customers. Like we also respect the fact that if something works you don't just yolo a new thing out into production to replace it for what reason? What is the business value of replacing it? And I think for this, that's why this, kind of Unix philosophy of the very modular pieces of this ecosystem and we were talking about Helm a little earlier, but there's also, Draft, Brigade, etc. Like the Porter, the CNET spec implementation stuff, and this Cloud Native application bundles, that's a whole mouthful. >> Yes, well no disrespect to your sparkly shirt, but chasing the shiny thing, and this is new and exciting is not necessarily a great thing. >> Right? >> I heard some of the shiny squad that were on the show floor earlier, complaining a little bit about the keynotes, that there haven't been a whole lot of new service and feature announcements. (Bridget laughing) And my opinion on that is feature not bug. I, it turns out most of us have jobs that aren't keeping up with every new commit to an open-source project. >> I think what you were talking about before, this idea of, I'm the developer, I yolo'd out this co-load into production, or I yolo'd this out into production. It is definitely production grade as long as everything stays on the happy path, and nothing unexpected happens. And I probably have air handling, and, yay! We had the launch party, we're drinkin' and eatin' and we're happy and we don't really care that somebody is getting paged. And, it's probably burning down. And a lot of human misery is being poured into keeping it working. I like to think that, considering that we're paying attention to our enterprise customers and their needs, they're pretty interested in things that don't just work on day one, but they work on day two and hopefully day 200 and maybe day 2000. And like, that doesn't mean that you ship something once and you're like, okay, we don't have to change it for three years. It's like, no, you ship something, then you keep iterating on it, you keep bug fixing, you keep, sure you want features, but stability is a feature. And customer value is a feature. >> Well, Bridget I'm glad you brought that up. Last thing I want to ask you 'cause Microsoft's a great example, as you say, as a customer, if you're an Azure customer, I don't ask you what version of Azure you're running or whether you've done the latest security patch that's in there because Microsoft takes care of you. Now, your customers that are pulled between their two worlds is, oh, wait, I might have gotten rid of patch Tuesdays, but I still have to worry and maintain that environment. How are they dealing with, kind of that new world and still have, certain things that are going to stay the old way that they have been since the 90's or longer? >> I mean, obviously it's a very broad question and I can really only speak to the Kubernetes space, but I will say that the customers really appreciate, and this goes for all the Cloud providers, when there is something like the dramatic CVE that we had in December for example. It's like, oh, every Kubernetes cluster everywhere is horribly insecure! That's awesome! I guess, your API gateway is also an API welcome mat for everyone who wants to, do terrible things to your clusters. All of the vendors, Microsoft included, had their managed services patched very quickly. They're probably just like your Harple's of the world. If you rolled your own, you are responsible for patching, maintaining, securing your own. And this is, I feel like that's that tension. That's that continuum we always see our customers on. Like, they probably have a data center full of ya know, veece, fear and sadness, and they would very much like to have managed happiness. And that doesn't mean that they can easily pickup everything in the data center, that they have a lease on and move it instantly. But we can work with them to make sure that, hey, say you want to run some Kubernetes stuff in your data center and you also want to have AKS. Hey, there's this open-source project that we instantiated, that we worked on with other organizations called Vertual Kubelet. There was actually a talk happening about it I think in the last hour, so people can watch the video of that. But, we have now offered, we now have Virtual Node, our product version of it in GA. And I think this is kind of that continuum. It's like, yes of course, you're early adapters want the open-source to play with. Your enterprises want it to be open-source so they can make sure that their security team is happy having reviewed it. But, like you're saying, they would very much like to consume a service so they can get to business value. Like they don't necessarily want to, take, Kelsey's wonderful Kubernetes The Hard Way Tutorial and put that in production. It's like, hmm, probably not, not because they can't, these are smart people, they absolutely could do that. But then they spent their, innovation tokens as, the McKinley blog post puts it, the, it's like, choose boring technology. It's not wrong. It's not that boring is the goal, it's that you want the exciting to be in the area that is producing value for your organization. Like that's where you want most of your effort to go. And so if you can use well vetted open-source that is cross industry standard, stuff like SMI that is going to help you use everything that you chose, wisely or not so wisely, and integrate it and hopefully not spend a lot of time redeveloping. If you redevelop the same applications you already had, its like, I don't think at the end of the quarter anybody is getting their VP level up. If you waste time. So, I think that is, like, one of the things that Microsoft is so excited about with this kind of open-source stuff is that our customers can get to value faster and everyone that we collaborate with in the other clouds and with all of these vendor partners you see on the show floor, can keep the ecosystem moving forward. 'Cause I don't know about you but I feel like for a while we were all building different things. I mean like, instead of, for example, managed services for something like Kubernetes, I mean a few jobs that would go out was that a start up that we, we built our own custom container platform, as one did in 2014. And, we assembled it out of all the LEGOs and we built it out of I think Docker and Packer and Chef and, AWS at the time and, a bunch of janky bash because like if someone tells you there's no janky bash underneath your home grown platform, they are lying. >> It's always a lie, always a lie. >> They're lying. There's definitely bash in there, they may or may not be checking exit codes. But like, we all were doing that for a while and we were all building, container orchestration systems because we didn't have a great industry standard, awesome! We're here at KubeCon. Obviously Kubernetes is a great industry standard, but everybody that wants to chase the shiny is like but surface meshes. If I review talks for, I think I reviewed talks for KubeCon in Copenhagen, and it was like 50 or 60 almost identical service mesh talk proposals. And it's like, and then now, like so that was last year and now everyone is like server lists and its like, you know you still have servers. Like you don't add sensation to them, which is great, but you still have them. I think that that hype train is going to keep happening and what we need to do is make sure that we keep it usable for what the customers are trying to accomplish. Does that make sense? >> Bridget, it does, and unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for sharing everything with our audience here. For Corey, I'm Stu, we'll be back with more coverage. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas: It's theCUBE covering AWS reInvent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. 45,000 people here at Amazon Web Services reInvent. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guests are Barry Russell, general manager and business development of Amazon Web Services marketplace, growing like a weed, and Chad Whalen, who is the global Vice President of Public Cloud for F5, guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Barry, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So, I mean, just, you can kinda see it now. Clear as day, no more, I mean, Andy says, "We're okay to be misunderstood." That quote, okay, no one's gonna misunderstand the Marketplace. >> Barry: I think it's pretty clear. >> You get in there, and you make money. It's pretty straightforward. >> Barry: Reducing a bunch of friction for customers. >> What's the current pitch, I mean, because this sounds like an easy sell at this point, what's the real benefits? Because, more of services are coming in. You got composability. What's the current state of the Marketplace? >> Yeah, you know, I think it's a couple of things. Uh, it's about selection and customer choice, so we've really grown the catalog, in terms of number of listings that are available and now more than 4200 listings in the catalog, and we announced three key features that we launched on Tuesday: AWS private link which enables SAS products to be run in a VPC. We announced Private Image Build that allows enterprise customers to run their own hardened OS underneath an image, and then we announced Enterprise Contract to reduce friction in the procurement process between large enterprise customers and software vendors. >> Okay, so I gotta ask, the AWS question: What was the working backwards document on this? Was it a main request from the customers? What was the main driver for some of these features because it sounds like they want to be cloud native, but, yet, they still gotta get that migration over, or was it something else, what was the driver? >> The driver was customer feedback. We went out, and we interviewed hundreds of customers over the last 12 months before we started building some of these features, and, without a doubt, they told us they wanted broader selection, broader deployment options, and to reduce friction around the contracting process, and then we just started building, and, over the course of the last nine to 10 months, that's what we've delivered. >> Awesome, all right, F5, you guys are in the Marketplace. You're partnered with AWS. What's your relationship with AWS, how's that going? >> Oh, I would say our relationship with AWS is fantastic. I mean, they're obviously the innovator in the Cloud space. Public Cloud is a strategic imperative for F5. They're at the vanguard of really the innovation of what's taking place in Public Cloud, and Marketplace is that fantastic medium to reach market, and, so, we really have the premise around meeting our customers how and when they want to be met. Marketplace is an excellent vehicle for us to do that, and we've enjoyed a lot of success with launch. >> How has your customers' consumption changed with the Cloud 'cause I can only imagine that, as they look at the mix of how they're gonna consume technology, they want some Cloud. How did you guys hone in on AWS? What was the real factor there? Was is acquisition of the technology? Was it the performance, what was some of the key things? >> You know, I think it's all about really reducing the friction in the process, right? Our customers are moving to the Cloud to have real-time agility and velocity in their business. What we get out of Marketplace is a fantastic set of options from a commercial construct. This solved the customer requirements. If it's going to be at development, we do it on a utility by the hour. When you start to go into production, we can do it in a subscription or a BYOL, so it's really about what application is there permanence and what's the best outcome for the customer, and we have all of that in front of us in multi-year agreements or otherwise leverage in this vehicle. >> So they're tailoring the products, basically. >> Absolutely. >> It sounds like customers are looking at this tailored model, whatever their needs are. They don't wanna be forced into a. >> Correct. >> Certain use case, they can just kind of mix and match. >> Yup, absolutely. >> Yeah, Barry, you know, think networking security have been spaces that I've seen really exploding in this ecosystem over the last couple a years. It, building off of what John was say, I mean, how much of it is custom stuff? You know, things that they're coming, working with Amazon versus just, you know, oh, it's the everything store where I can go get pieces? >> Well, we work with each vendor that lists in the catalog. We have a SA team, Solution Architect team, to work with them on the optimal architecture, be that an omni-based, API-based, and SAS-based, and then we give that vendor and their product development teams the ability to price those products in utility consumption model metered, for example, on the amount of data or band-width consumed, multi-year contracts that are publicly priced or negotiated behind the scenes. So, both in the innovation and the engineering and how the customer actually deploys the product, we innovate on pricing and consumption models to match those deployment options, and we give vendors, all vendors, that enter the catalog, whether they're open-source or commercial products, like F5, the option to use all of those features. >> Yeah, Chad, I think back to, you know, there was the wave of like software, you know, happening kind of networking and secured and everything, but, you know, you've always been in kind of the application delivery portion of this. How is Cloud accelerating your customers' journey and impacting how fast you need to change inside at F5? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think that because Public Cloud is such a fantastic vehicle for our customers it was really customers-focused, right? So, when you work back from what the customer wants both in terms of how you orchestrate, how you automate, and then with the commercial construct is then they can use it in a best-fit application, and that's really the grounding point for us, and, when we get friction, any time you have a new medium there's going to be friction points and learning points. We've worked in concert with AWS, Marketplace in particular, about solving these ways, whether it's in private offers or custom negotiated offers specifically for customers to meet their needs from an economic and a delivery standpoint. >> I gotta ask the question 'cause it always pops into my head, especially at this reInvent, the pace of services being released, Lambda, Serverless, you can just see it coming. It's going to put more pressure under the hood for automation, that heavy lifting that's Dev Ops, as we know, right, so no new news there. The question is what does it mean for the Marketplace 'cause now you're gonna be under a lot of pressure to integrate a lot of these plumbing and or, abstracted away dev ops-like tools that developers don't wanna provision, so you have the automate so that seems like a challenge. How are you guys dealing with that? How do you make Lambda sing? How do you guys make this thing go smoother? >> Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, one of the challenges that you get in, when you get into what I would say Cloud Sprawl, within an organization, is how do you maintain the governance and compliance of those workloads? And so we're really lookin' at it from that basis. We want to give as much flexibility into the model while still maintaining what was designed from the beginning, and so our customers wanna use the rules. They wanna have that portability into Public Cloud so they have the assurance. The underlying technologies are just the delivery vehicles, whether it's containers or Lambda or whatever in a server-less architecture, we're focused really on making sure that we have that ubiquity of posture across the asset wherever that asset is. >> Jeff: Makes your sources work together properly. >> Absolutely. >> Barry, what's the trends that you're seeing in the Marketplace? I mean, obviously, there's a lot of growth. Lot of data, and one of the things that I love about this reInvent is they're servicing this new playbook of, hey, use the data, your own data. We saw a new relic had a great report, Sumo Logic kind of report, that basically anonymizes the data, but they're using real data and Verner will talk about this at the keynote. What data can you share about the Marketplace that shows some trends that indicates or allows us to read the tea leaves of what's gonna happen next? >> Well, I think the customer growth stat that we shared, in terms of active monthly customers, we've gone from a hundred active monthly customers we announced last reInvent last year when we were here to now 160,000 active customers using the Marketplace, so we see steady growth. We see growth and adoption from the enterprise, and customers like Shell and Thomson Reuters, that we announced were part of Enterprise contracts on Tuesday, really beginning to think about using the Marketplace to go from traditional procurement moving to digital procurement model allows their IT organizations' dev ops teams to move much fast when pairing with services like a Kinesis, like an S3, like a Red Shift, when they're matching third party software with an AWS-native service. >> Jeff: Are you happy with things right now? Pretty much looking pretty good! >> I'm happy. >> Jeff: Middle of the fairway. >> I think it's been a fantastic show! (laughing) >> I'm happy, F5 has been a great partner of ours in the Marketplace, I'm a happy camper. >> Jeff: What's next? >> What's next? I think what's next for us next year is continuing to grow the Enterprise contract that we deployed, so we started with a small set of customers and vendors that participated to help us arrive at that contract that they both could use, and, I think that over the course of the next 12 months, we really need to think about the types of customers and vendors that enter that program. >> All right, Barry Russell and Chad Whalen with F5. Barry will be back on our next segment with another partner. A lot of partner goodness here. Amazon's ecosystem's exploding, and there's a lot of value to be had by all. That's theCUBE bringing you some content value on our third day live coverage. 45,000 people here this year at Amazon Webster's reInvent. More after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back. (techno music)