>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is "Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante". >> Black Hat 22 was held in Las Vegas last week, the same time as theCUBE Supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cyber and openly discusses its hard truths. It's a conference that's attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they've discovered, and, of course, by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, sessions, and data from a recent Black Hat Attendees Survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa, and we'll end with the discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the supercloud. Now, I personally did not attend, but as I said at the top, we reviewed a lot of content from the event which is renowned for its hundreds of sessions, breakouts, and strong technical content that is, as they say, unvarnished. Chris Krebs, the former director of Us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, he gave the keynote, and he spoke about the increasing complexity of tech stacks and the ripple effects that that has on organizational risk. Risk was a big theme at the event. Where re:Inforce tends to emphasize, again, the positive state of cybersecurity, it could be said that Black Hat, as the name implies, focuses on the other end of the spectrum. Risk, as a major theme of the event at the show, got a lot of attention. Now, there was a lot of talk, as always, about the expanded threat service, you hear that at any event that's focused on cybersecurity, and tons of emphasis on supply chain risk as a relatively new threat that's come to the CISO's minds. Now, there was also plenty of discussion about hybrid work and how remote work has dramatically increased business risk. According to data from in Intel 471's Mark Arena, the previously mentioned Black Hat Attendee Survey showed that compromise credentials posed the number one source of risk followed by infrastructure vulnerabilities and supply chain risks, so a couple of surveys here that we're citing, and we'll come back to that in a moment. At an MIT cybersecurity conference earlier last decade, theCUBE had a hypothetical conversation with former Boston Globe war correspondent, Charles Sennott, about the future of war and the role of cyber. We had similar discussions with Dr. Robert Gates on theCUBE at a ServiceNow event in 2016. At Black Hat, these discussions went well beyond the theoretical with actual data from the war in Ukraine. It's clear that modern wars are and will be supported by cyber, but the takeaways are that they will be highly situational, targeted, and unpredictable because in combat scenarios, anything can happen. People aren't necessarily at their keyboards. Now, the role of AI was certainly discussed as it is at every conference, and particularly cyber conferences. You know, it was somewhat dissed as over hyped, not surprisingly, but while AI is not a panacea to cyber exposure, automation and machine intelligence can definitely augment, what appear to be and have been stressed out, security teams can do this by recommending actions and taking other helpful types of data and presenting it in a curated form that can streamline the job of the SecOps team. Now, most cyber defenses are still going to be based on tried and true monitoring and telemetry data and log analysis and curating known signatures and analyzing consolidated data, but increasingly, AI will help with the unknowns, i.e. zero-day threats and threat actor behaviors after infiltration. Now, finally, while much lip service was given to collaboration and public-private partnerships, especially after Stuxsnet was revealed early last decade, the real truth is that threat intelligence in the private sector is still evolving. In particular, the industry, mid decade, really tried to commercially exploit proprietary intelligence and, you know, do private things like private reporting and monetize that, but attitudes toward collaboration are trending in a positive direction was one of the sort of outcomes that we heard at Black Hat. Public-private partnerships are being both mandated by government, and there seems to be a willingness to work together to fight an increasingly capable adversary. These things are definitely on the rise. Now, without this type of collaboration, securing the supercloud is going to become much more challenging and confined to narrow solutions. and we're going to talk about that little later in the segment. Okay, let's look at some of the attendees survey data from Black Hat. Just under 200 really serious security pros took the survey, so not enough to slice and dice by hair color, eye color, height, weight, and favorite movie genre, but enough to extract high level takeaways. You know, these strongly agree or disagree survey responses can sometimes give vanilla outputs, but let's look for the ones where very few respondents strongly agree or disagree with a statement or those that overwhelmingly strongly agree or somewhat agree. So it's clear from this that the respondents believe the following, one, your credentials are out there and available to criminals. Very few people thought that that was, you know, unavoidable. Second, remote work is here to stay, and third, nobody was willing to really jinx their firms and say that they strongly disagree that they'll have to respond to a major cybersecurity incident within the next 12 months. Now, as we've reported extensively, COVID has permanently changed the cybersecurity landscape and the CISO's priorities and playbook. Check out this data that queries respondents on the pandemic's impact on cybersecurity, new requirements to secure remote workers, more cloud, more threats from remote systems and remote users, and a shift away from perimeter defenses that are no longer as effective, e.g. firewall appliances. Note, however, the fifth response that's down there highlighted in green. It shows a meaningful drop in the percentage of remote workers that are disregarding corporate security policy, still too many, but 10 percentage points down from 2021 survey. Now, as we've said many times, bad user behavior will trump good security technology virtually every time. Consistent with the commentary from Mark Arena's Intel 471 threat report, fishing for credentials is the number one concern cited in the Black Hat Attendees Survey. This is a people and process problem more than a technology issue. Yes, using multifactor authentication, changing passwords, you know, using unique passwords, using password managers, et cetera, they're all great things, but if it's too hard for users to implement these things, they won't do it, they'll remain exposed, and their organizations will remain exposed. Number two in the graphic, sophisticated attacks that could expose vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure, again, consistent with the Intel 471 data, and three, supply chain risks, again, consistent with Mark Arena's commentary. Ask most CISOs their number one problem, and they'll tell you, "It's a lack of talent." That'll be on the top of their list. So it's no surprise that 63% of survey respondents believe they don't have the security staff necessary to defend against cyber threats. This speaks to the rise of managed security service providers that we've talked about previously on "Breaking Analysis". We've seen estimates that less than 50% of organizations in the US have a SOC, and we see those firms as ripe for MSSP support as well as larger firms augmenting staff with managed service providers. Now, after re:Invent, we put forth this conceptual model that discussed how the cloud was becoming the first line of defense for CISOs, and DevOps was being asked to do more, things like securing the runtime, the containers, the platform, et cetera, and audit was kind of that last line of defense. So a couple things we picked up from Black Hat which are consistent with this shift and some that are somewhat new, first, is getting visibility across the expanded threat surface was a big theme at Black Hat. This makes it even harder to identify risk, of course, this being the expanded threat surface. It's one thing to know that there's a vulnerability somewhere. It's another thing to determine the severity of the risk, but understanding how easy or difficult it is to exploit that vulnerability and how to prioritize action around that. Vulnerability is increasingly complex for CISOs as the security landscape gets complexified. So what's happening is the SOC, if there even is one at the organization, is becoming federated. No longer can there be one ivory tower that's the magic god room of data and threat detection and analysis. Rather, the SOC is becoming distributed following the data, and as we just mentioned, the SOC is being augmented by the cloud provider and the managed service providers, the MSSPs. So there's a lot of critical security data that is decentralized and this will necessitate a new cyber data model where data can be synchronized and shared across a federation of SOCs, if you will, or mini SOCs or SOC capabilities that live in and/or embedded in an organization's ecosystem. Now, to this point about cloud being the first line of defense, let's turn to a story from ETR that came out of our colleague Eric Bradley's insight in a one-on-one he did with a senior IR person at a manufacturing firm. In a piece that ETR published called "Saved by Zscaler", check out this comment. Quote, "As the last layer, we are filtering all the outgoing internet traffic through Zscaler. And when an attacker is already on your network, and they're trying to communicate with the outside to exchange encryption keys, Zscaler is already blocking the traffic. It happened to us. It happened and we were saved by Zscaler." So that's pretty cool. So not only is the cloud the first line of defense, as we sort of depicted in that previous graphic, here's an example where it's also the last line of defense. Now, let's end on what this all means to securing the supercloud. At our Supercloud 22 event last week in our Palo Alto CUBE Studios, we had a session on this topic on supercloud, securing the supercloud. Security, in our view, is going to be one of the most important and difficult challenges for the idea of supercloud to become real. We reviewed in last week's "Breaking Analysis" a detailed discussion with Snowflake co-founder and president of products, Benoit Dageville, how his company approaches security in their data cloud, what we call a superdata cloud. Snowflake doesn't use the term supercloud. They use the term datacloud, but what if you don't have the focus, the engineering depth, and the bank roll that Snowflake has? Does that mean superclouds will only be developed by those companies with deep pockets and enormous resources? Well, that's certainly possible, but on the securing the supercloud panel, we had three technical experts, Gee Rittenhouse of Skyhigh Security, Piyush Sharrma who's the founder of Accurics who sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, who's the former Head of Product at VMware. Now, John Furrier asked each of them, "What is missing? What's it going to take to secure the supercloud? What has to happen?" Here's what they said. Play the clip. >> This is the final question. We have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll bring you guys back for sure after the event. What one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation and then the challenges for supercloud? Because remember, the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SaaS. They want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think, each of you? >> So I can start, and extending to the previous conversation, I think we need a consortium. We need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate on supercloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS, Slash, or TCP or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern, and that pattern is what is required for supercloud, in my opinion. Otherwise, security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything, and so on and so forth. It's not going to be possible. So they need a framework. They need a consortium, and this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements, and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or severe findings. So that's, in my opinion, should be the model. >> Great, well, thank you, Gee. >> Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model. We've seen in cloud that the scale matters, and once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coalesce around either a vendor, a business model, or whatnot to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry, I think, is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >> I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look, again, history repeating itself. The internet sort of came together around set of IETF, RSC standards. Everybody embraced and extended it, right? But still, there was, at least, a baseline, and I think at that time, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves, right? And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys, like Google, let's take an example. They're not going to win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody together. >> Okay, so Gee's point about a business model is, you know, business model being missing, it's broadly true, but perhaps Snowflake serves as a business model where they've just gone out and and done it, setting or trying to set a de facto standard by which data can be shared and monetized. They're certainly setting that standard and mandating that standard within the Snowflake ecosystem with its proprietary framework. You know, perhaps that is one answer, but Tony lays out a scenario where there's a collaboration mindset around a set of standards with an ecosystem. You know, intriguing is this idea of a consortium or a framework that Piyush was talking about, and that speaks to the collaboration or lack thereof that we spoke of earlier, and his and Tony's proposal that the cloud providers should lead with the security vendor ecosystem playing a supporting role is pretty compelling, but can you see AWS and Azure and Google in a kumbaya moment getting together to make that happen? It seems unlikely, but maybe a better partnership between the US government and big tech could be a starting point. Okay, that's it for today. I want to thank the many people who attended Black Hat, reported on it, wrote about it, gave talks, did videos, and some that spoke to me that had attended the event, Becky Bracken, who is the EIC at Dark Reading. They do a phenomenal job and the entire team at Dark Reading, the news desk there, Mark Arena, whom I mentioned, Garrett O'Hara, Nash Borges, Kelly Jackson, sorry, Kelly Jackson Higgins, Roya Gordon, Robert Lipovsky, Chris Krebs, and many others, thanks for the great, great commentary and the content that you put out there, and thanks to Alex Myerson, who's on production, and Alex manages the podcasts for us. Ken Schiffman is also in our Marlborough studio as well, outside of Boston. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hoff is our Editor-in-Chief at SiliconANGLE and does some great editing and helps with the titles of "Breaking Analysis" quite often. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search for "Breaking Analysis Podcasts". I publish each on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me, get in touch with me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts, and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

>>Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22. This is the Cube's live presentation streaming out virtually our inaugural event, kind of a pilot I'm John Furo of the cube with Dave ante. Got a great panel here to discuss the enablers and blockers question mark for superclouds. We got, we got kit Culbert, CTO of VMware basketball, Gor CEO platform nine, and has Pani who is the CEO of RA systems. We got a mix of the big leader, VMware and the upstart companies growing into the same space, all cloud native friends of the cube. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>You. >>Start. All right. So there's no debate cloud native is booming. We see that clearly Kubernetes became a unifying force. It's an ops layer kind of almost like a kind of a midline between dev and ops DevSecOps is happening at scale. What are the blockers and what are the enablers for super cloud? What do we need? Let's see what do get your take? >>Sure. So UN I spoke about this a little bit in, at New York summit, the big trend I'm seeing, and it's, it's a blocker that's being sort of taken care of by enterprises, which is, you know, until very recently, Kubernetes was effectively a project that NA would take on. They'd try things out, they'd go to the cloud, they'd spin things up. And then the next team would come and they'd do the same things. And there was no consistency. There was no ization, it's a mess, right? It's all over the place. Some things are moving fast. Some things are not going fast and this is not how enterprises do business, right? That's not how things work. Traditionally enterprises have had it organizations that create standards, right? So those it organizations now kind of are starting to think like a platform organization. So centrally come up with the right framework for all application teams to consume infrastructure, modern infrastructure. So I'm not using the word Kubernetes here because Kubernetes is an enabler. We are a Kubernetes company, obviously, but it's about modern applications, modern infrastructure. So stepping back and thinking about it as to how an enterprise will do this across the board is the right answer. And I'm seeing this happen in a pretty significant way across all the large enterprises I talked to. >>That's why you've had a great career. And we talked before you came on Opia you did a turnaround there, we, you even go back to the old days of the web web 1.0 and early software. You've seen the movie before. >>Yes. >>You know, complexity is not solved way more complexity. This is kind of the old enterprise way. And they don't want that. They've seen the benefits of self-service. They see architecture and standards as being an enabler. Where are we in here in the market? Is, are we positioned in your opinion for customers to get the value of a super cloud? >>Absolutely. So if you think about, first of all, I think the topic of cloud native developers and app developers picking containers and Kubernetes, that's a done deal, right? That has already happened. So every cloud native developer is already using these tools. Now, I think as has been discussed today in you, in the earlier sessions, is, are the operations and infrastructure catching up or they're lagging behind, right? As more and more developers are using multi-cloud technologies, enterprises are creating a choice, I think operations and what we also strongly believe that's actually part of the name of our company is, is a platform. The platform of which a company uses to transform itself to be cloud native is the big opportunity. I don't think it's a blocker, but it's a huge opportunity. And I think this is where, you know, as you can't stop developers from developing on different clouds, private, public, multi edge, that's gonna happen. Innovation is gonna continue. But then how does the infrastructure in the platform make it seamless? Right? And almost treat all these different clouds as a single pan super cloud platform. That's I think is the >>Opportunity. So we in a platform more than with other companies, or is there one unified platform called cloud native? We know customers been buying tools from security they're they got so many tools in, in their tools shed, so to speak. What is that platform? I mean, is it more unique, fragmentation? Is it unified? >>I mean, if you think about it, a couple of it's a combination of tools that are stitched together to reach a purpose, right? So if you think about, you know, APIs continued APIs that's been discussed earlier today, I think that's, that should be standardized. The other thing is always on monitoring because I think that's a very key aspect. Once you build it, then as the enterprises are using it, the always on monitoring becomes. So I think it's a combination of capabilities that are stitched together to enable the acceleration for companies to become cloud native. >>I, I have a thought on a blocker. None of you guys are gonna like it. Oh, maybe you can come. Maybe some of you guys probably won't but comment, but maybe John will. I think AWS is a blocker to Supercloud cuz they, they don't want those cross cloud service. It's like they, they, for years they wouldn't even say multicloud. The first time I heard it was in Boston three weeks ago, I actually heard it. So Hey, you see, >>You know, I'm gonna disagree with that. Okay. >>But, but okay, go ahead. All >>So we'll get their reaction. So my, we just heard from the last panel that the security should be leading the consortium. Yeah. Because they're, they're not the enemy they're actually, >>Maybe they should be >>Well back in the old web days, when standards were driving things, you had a common enemy, proprietary NASAs, proprietary networking stack. So the evil empire was at and T that's owned Unix. If you remember, they copyright that. >>So you think they're greasing the skids for, >>I think Supercloud, I think the hyperscalers could cuz they're driving the CapEx, they're providing the value. So in my opinion, Amazon and Azure, whoever does the right thing first can win every, maybe >>This is how Google could catch up >>It. It could be a, it could be a Slingshot move. It could, you know, boomerang, someone to the front of the line or extend. Amazon's already huge lead. So if I'm AWS, if I'm Adam Slosky and I'm talking to Andy Jassy, he says, how am I gonna differentiate myself? I'd say, I'm gonna come in and own multicloud. I'm gonna own Supercloud we are the Supercloud and you work with AWS's primitives in a way that makes services work. I would go for that. I'd be like, okay, show me more. What do you >>Think? I, I, I don't think think any one company is going to be a super cloud because I think yes, there is going to be a lot of workloads on public clouds, but there's a huge amount of workloads at the enterprise at the edge at the store. I think those will continue for various reasons, whether it's data, sovereignty regulations. So I think it's going to be a combination. Everybody's not gonna go to one, you know, cloud, it's going to be an amalgamation. >>Okay. But I I've argued that snowflake is a form of a super data cloud and a very specific use case, you know, Aviatrix is trying to be a network, you know, layer and you know, sneak in a security, let me on and on, on a lot of small you get, you get super cloud stove pipes, but, but nonetheless you're, you're still abstracting. I mean, we've this industry attractions, right? >>Well this, this concept I completely agree with, right? This idea that, so, so one of the, my is that right now enterprises buy 500 different technologies and they have to become PhDs in 500 different things. It's just never gonna happen skills issue, which is no way. Right. So what's gonna happen is all of these providers are gonna essentially become managed service providers. Cloud is in manifestation of that. Snowflake is a ation data breaks is a manifestation of that. Right? So in our general industry, there's gonna be a handful of platforms. Right. And they're gonna work across these clouds. Amazon may have one too. Right? Look, they, they, they, for the longest time sort of ignored OnPrem, but now they have something called SSA, which runs on Preem. Right. Why, why would they bother? Because, well, obviously there's a lot of money to be made in a data center as well. >>So I, my sense is they get it completely understand and appreciate that there's other things outside of Amazon. But in terms of what Bosco was talking about, my sense is, you know, these multiple platforms will come about. And to the point we were making earlier about standardization and I, I mean, is it gonna be one company or is it gonna be standards that everybody will else will adopt? There's a topic that the three of us have talked about before, which is this vCenter for Kubernetes. Right. And all due respect to kit. Right. My sense is that there there's gonna be multiple companies that are gonna start working towards a vCenter for Kubernetes. And it is right. I mean, that's how I've, I mean, I've been thinking about this before and a half years, including >>VMware. >>Yeah. And you know, and we, we should compare notes. Right. But what's gonna happen is there was a, there was a distinct advantage VMware had back in the day because ESX was their product. Right. And that was a standard right now. What's the ESX in the new it's sort of Kubernetes, right. I mean, it's on bare metal for the most part or whatever VMs. So that's a standard, that's got standardized APIs, the things around it are standardized APIs. So what is the unfair advantage that one company has other than execution? >>Nothing. Well also composability if you over rotate on Kubernetes, for example, and not take advantage of say C two, for instance. Totally, >>Totally. >>It's a mix and match. >>Yeah. But I think, I think if you get too focused on Kubernetes, it's a means to an end. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it it's a mean to end end. And I think all these tools, there's a lot of standardization happening that's gonna happen. Right. And no one vendor is gonna control that. Right. It's it's going to be, it's gonna continue. I think how you bring these together and orchestrate right. And manage the service. Because I think that if you think about the lack of skills to keep up with the operations and platforms is one of the largest inhibitors right now for enterprises to move as fast as they want to become cloud native. >>And you have the shiny new toy problem kit where people just go and grab it. You know, Keith Townsend has a, as a quote, he says, look, we essentially move at the speed of the CIO or else we're going too fast or too slow. So, so the, to, to the point about the new toy now I've got new skills. >>Yep. Well, so this has been a really good discussion. And I think so there's a couple of things, right. Going back to the, the paper that we wrote, right. How we have these different sort of layers of multi-cloud services or, or categories of multi-cloud services. And it's exactly to capture some of the ex different examples you just mentioned. And yeah, the challenge is that each of them by themselves are a little bit of an island today. Like you don't have that extra level of integration. And so what the platform teams typically do is try to add that extra glue to make the experience more seamless for the, the, the, you know, developers at that company. And so like, you know, for instance, things like identity. So the nice thing about going to a single public cloud is that there's one, usually one identity system for everything. And that's great. All the different services roles are, you know, are back all that. Stuff's all centralized, but you don't have that when you're going across many different multicloud services. So what does that look like? So I think there's some of these different crosscutting concerns that we need to look at how we standardize on as an industry. And that's, again, one of the things >>You felt that part. And I think, I think also the other key thing is yes, you can always say I'll put everything in one world, world garden and I'm done. Yeah. Okay. But that's not the reality because at some point you need, the flexibility and cost comes into play and flexibility to move comes into play. And I think that is a key factor. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. And so like, so then the question is, what degrees of freedom do you give yourself there? And I think that's the architectural question is how you, how do you design it? What sort of abstractions do you leverage? And I think that goes back to some of our discussion before, which is, do you directly go on top of a native cloud service or do you use a multi-cloud service? >>But I think it's a combination of, I don't think it's either or no, it's not, it's not an either or you have to have the ability to choose a public cloud or do it private. Yeah. At the same time you don't change. It's like a common dictionary, right. You're not gonna change every time the accent changes, you know? So that's, >>So here's a question for you guys. So what has to happen for super clouds, be existing assume that AWS and Azure and Google, aren't gonna sit still assume that maybe they normalize into some sort of swim lane or position that they have to rationalize. What, assuming they're not gonna sit still, what has to happen for super clouds to, to actually work >>Well? Well, I think, you know, really quick going back to the platform team point, I would say that the platform teams at various companies, and we got one at VMware two, they're creating a rudimentary form of a super cloud. Right. Cause they, you know, absolutely like if, if they are supporting multiple clouds, like all the things they're stitching together and all that work, that is a super cloud. The problem is that there's not really a standard approach or architecture or reusable things to enable that. I think that's really what's missing. >>Yeah. But I think the key here is standard us reusable. Because for example, we have customers who are in doesn't matter where they are, some of their loads are in public cloud. Some are in private, some are at the edge, but they're still using the same platform. Yeah. Right. So it is a standard open source based technology. So it is standard. There's no lock in for them from an infrastructure point of view. Yep. And it gives them the flexibility because certain apps, you wanna put it on the public cloud, certain apps, you do not, you need the, I mean, for example, some of the AI, I think earlier discussion that was going on about chips and AI and ML workloads. I mean, think about moving all of that to a public cloud, to, and I think a lot of machine learning and AI applications are going to happen where the data is getting created at the edge. Yeah. At the edge >>Public cloud. It's not gonna happen cloud. It's gonna be real time in, >>It's gonna the end time. And so therefore you have to decide based on your workload, what are you gonna move all the way to a public cloud? And what are you need to do to make business decisions at this spot where the data is created? >>That's a huge disruptor potentially to Supercloud. This is a whole new architecture that emerges at the edge with a whole new set of economics. I >>Think the edge is gonna be like massively disruptive. >>I think it's gonna think about, if you think about the edge, go beyond just the classic definition of edge. Think about branches in stores, retail stores. Yeah. Right. I mean, you cannot shut down retail store because you lost connectivity to the network or something you still have to serve your company >>Edge is a disruptive enabler. I think it's gonna change potentially change the position of the players in the business. Whoever embraces the edge. >>Yeah. Maybe going back to the question that you had asked before, which is what is, what is a framework for a super cloud? So you said something that is important, which is your team's burning one. Yeah. I met that team. Actually. They seem to be very sharp guys. >>They're they're mine. They're my are great. They're awesome. >>We got a deal going on here. Yeah. >>I tried. We have >>It. >>So this is the interesting part, right? So I will pause it that the super cloud of the future will be a company that owns zero servers and no network. >>Okay. >>That's gonna happen. Okay. So I just kind of it's >>Full point you >>Made before I made that point just about the public cloud, just so Mr. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that really interesting. Not >>We that, so I've thought about this a long time that in my opinion, and I've, I'm, I'm sure I've said this to you, John, that, you know, the one company that I've always believed has the best shot at doing this well is actually VMware because that's the one company that's, you know, that there's, there's no, you know, infrastructure back haul. Right. You know, that you're carrying, but, but in terms of thinking and getting there, you know, being, being a company that can do it is not the same as being the company who has done it. That's a, there's a distance, but >>I have to defend that now because hyperscalers are not gonna be able to super cloud. They're not now it's hype. See, agreed, great point. Public clouds will be part of the super cloud. Yeah, totally. But they will not, the hyperscalers are not building super clouds. Totally. They're blocking it. Right. Yeah. >>They're enabling it. >>We agree on >>No, they're enabling >>Because it's, it's not in there to their advantage. Right. Look, the, the snowflake example you gave is the pivotal example in this conversation. Yep. Right. Why does snowflake exist at all when Redshift exists and all these other things exist because they provide value that is beyond a single clouds purview. Right. And at that point, just step back from our platforms and what we sell. Forget about that for a minute. Right. It's it's about, look, I think, I think this, we are, this market is early, we're out early, right. 10 years from now, what will a company look like? That actually solves a superly problem they're gonna solve for yeah. Kubernetes, whatever. Right. But they're gonna solve for truly modern applications. >>Yeah. They're gonna refactor application that has new economics new value, right. >>At that point, this idea of edge and cloud, forget about it. Right. This is all distribution issues, right. It doesn't really matter. Is it retail or not? Yeah, absolutely. These are places, but, but the way, the right way to think about this is not about edge versus cloud, right? This is about an app. Sometimes it needs to run in one location and it's good enough. Sometimes it needs to run in 10,000 locations and, and it's a distribution issue. I've always believed there's this idea of edge versus cloud. This is BS, right? Because it, it is a cloud over a different size. Sure. But, but I'm making a slightly different point. Sure. Which is, it's a distribution problem. Right. If you step back and think about distribution, my app could run in Azure or AWS or in a retail store, in a branch or whatever. Right. >>And once that is done, the question is, how am I in, in making all this happen? There was a point made in the prior conversation, in the, in the session about a database kind of popping up in the place where I needed to run. Okay. Nobody does that today, by the way. Right. At least truly well right about that, sir, that will come. Right? Yeah. But when that comes, my application is a conglomerate of compute data. I don't know a, a service bus and network and all these things and they will all kind of pop together. That company does not exist >>Today. Well, we'll, we will be documenting which we have more time. We're gonna document it. We have to unfortunately stop this panel because it's awesome. We can go for another hour. Sure. Let's bring you guys back, but that's it. The super cloud of the future will look like something and we're gonna debate it. And speaking of snowflake, we have the co-founder here next to sit down with us to talk about what he thinks about this super cloud. He, he probably heard the comment, come back more coverage. This break with the co-founder of snowflake after the short break. >>Do thank you.

(soft music) >> Welcome back everyone, is Supercloud 22 live in the Palo Alto office. Our stage performance we're streaming virtually it's our pilot event, our inaugural event, Supercloud 22. I'm John fury, with my coach Dave Vellante. Got a featured Keynote conversation with Kit Colbert. Who's the CTO of VMware, got to delay it all out. Break it down, Kit, great to see you. Thanks for joining us for Supercloud 22 our inaugural event. >> Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So we had great distinguished panels coming up through. We heard Victoria earlier to the Keynote. There's a shift happening. The shift has happened that's called cloud. You just published a white paper that kind of brings out these new challenges around the complexity of how companies want to run their business. >> Yep. >> It's not born in the cloud, it's cloud everywhere. Seems to be the theme. What's your take on Supercloud? what's the roadmap for multicloud? >> Yeah, well, the reason that we got interested in this was just talking to our customers and the reality is everybody is using multiple clouds today, multiple public clouds, they got things on-prem, they got stuff at the edge. And so their applications are essentially distributed everywhere. And the challenges they start running into there is that there's just a lot of heterogeneity there. There's like different APIs, different capabilities, inconsistencies, incompatibility, in terms of workload, placement, data, migration, security, as we just heard about, et cetera. And so I think everyone's struggling with trying to figure out how do I drive consistency across all that diversity and what sort of consistency do I want? And one of the things that became really interesting in our conversations with customers is that there is no one size fits all that different folks are in different places. And the types of consistency that they want to prioritize will be different based on their individual business requirements. And so this started forming a picture for us saying, okay, what we need are a set of capabilities of multi-cloud cross cloud services that deliver that consistency across all the different environments where applications may be running. And that is what formed the early thinking and sort of the paper that we wrote on it, as well as some of the work and that I think eventually leads to this vision of Supercloud, right? 'Cause I think you guys have the right idea, which is, hey, how does all this stuff come together? And what does that bigger picture look like? And so I think between the sort of the native services that are there individually for each cloud that offer great value by the way, and people definitely should be taking advantage of in addition to another set of services, which are multi-cloud that go across clouds and provide that consistency, looking at that together. That's my picture where super cloud is. >> So the paper's called, the era of multi-cloud services arrive, VMware executive outlook for IT, leaders and decision makers, I'm sure you can get on your website. >> Yep. >> And in there, you talked about, well, first of all, I think you would agree that multicloud has fundamentally been a symptom of multi-vendor or M&A, I mean, you talked about that in the paper, right? >> Yeah. >> It was never really a strategy. It was just like, hey, we woke up in the 2020s and here we are with multiple clouds, right? >> Yeah, it was one of those situations where most folks that we talked to didn't plan to be multi-cloud now that's changed a little bit in the past year or two. >> Sure. >> But certainly in the earlier days of cloud, people would go all in saying, hey, I'm going to go all in on one, one of the major hyperscalers and go for it there. And that's great and offers a lot of advantages, right? There is internal consistency there. There's usually pretty good integration between their services so on and so forth. The problem though that you start facing is that to your point, acquisitions, you acquire companies using a different cloud. Okay, now I got two different clouds or sometimes you have the phenomenon of shadow IT, still happening where some random line of business is going to go off and use a different cloud for whatever reason. The other thing that we've seen is that over time that you may have standardized on one, but then over time technology changes, another cloud makes major advancements in the state of the art, or let's say in machine learning and you say, hey, I want to go to this other cloud for that. So what we start to see is that people now are choosing public clouds based on best of breed service capabilities, and that they're going to make those decisions that fairly fine grained manner, right? Sometimes down to the team, the line of business, et cetera. And so this is where customers and companies find themselves. Now it's like, oh boy, now have all these clouds. And what's happened is that they kind of dealt with it in an ad hoc manner. They would spin up individual operations teams, security teams, et cetera, that specialized in each of the clouds. They had knowledge about how to do that. But now people found that, okay, I'm duplicating all this. There's not really consistency in my approach here. Is there a better way? And I think this is, again, the advent of a lot of the thinking of multi-cloud services and Supercloud. >> And I think one of the things too, in listening to you talk is that the old model used to be, solve complexity with more complexity. Okay, and customers don't want that from what we're observing. And what you're saying is they've seen the benefits of DevOps, DevSecOps. So they know the value. >> Yep. >> 'Cause they've been on, say one native cloud. Now they say, okay, I'm on premise and we heard from Victoria said, there's a lot of private cloud going on, but essentially makes that another cloud, out by default as well. So hybrid is multicloud. >> Hybrid is a subset, yeah. Hybrid is like, we kind of had this evolution of thinking, right? Where you kind of had all the sort of different locations. And then I think hybrid was attempt to say, okay, let's try to connect one location or a set of locations on premises with a public cloud and have some level of consistency there. But really what we look at here with multicloud or Supercloud is that that's really a generalization of that. And we're not talking about one or two locations on prem in one cloud. We're talking about everything now. And moreover, I think hybrid cloud tended to focus a lot on sort of core infrastructure and management. This looks across the board, we're talking about security, we're talking about application development, talking about end user experience. Things like Zero Trust. We're talking about infrastructure, data. So it goes much, much broader, I think than when we talked about hybrid cloud a few years ago. >> So in your paper you've essentially, Kit, laid out an early framework. >> Yep. >> Let's call it for what we call Supercloud, what you call cross cloud services. So what do you see as the technical enablers that are, the salient aspects of again multi-cloud or Supercloud? >> Yep. Well, so for me it comes down to, so, okay, taking a step back. So we have this problem, right? Where you have a lot of diversity across different clouds and customers are looking for some levels of consistency. But as I said, rarely do I see two customers that want exactly the same types of consistency. And so what we're trying to do is step back. And first of all, establish a taxonomy and by that I mean, one of the different types of consistency that you might want. And so there's things around infrastructure consistency, security consistency, software supply chain security is probably the top of mind one that I hear from customers. Application and application services of things like databases, messaging streaming services, AIML services, et cetera, and user capabilities and then of course, data as well. And so in the paper we say, okay, here's these kind of five areas of consistency. And that's the first piece, the second one then turns more to an architectural question of what exactly is a multi-cloud service. What does that mean for a cloud service to be multi-cloud and what are the properties there? So essentially we said, okay, we see three different types of those. There's one where that service could run on a single cloud, but could support multiple clouds. So think about for instance, a service that does cost analysis. Now it may have maybe executing on AWS let's say, but it could do cost analysis for Azure or Google or AWS or anybody, right? So that's the first type. The second type is a bit more advanced where now you're saying, I can actually instantiate that same service into multiple clouds. And we see that oftentimes with things like databases that have a lot of performance latency, et cetera, requirements, and that you can't be accessing that database remotely, that doesn't, from a different cloud, that's going to be too slow. You have it on the same cloud that you're in. And so again, you see various vendors out there, implementing that, where that database can be instantiated wherever you'd like. And then the third one would be going even further. And this is where we really get into some of the much more difficult use cases where customers want a workload to be on prem. And sometimes, especially for those that are very regulatory compliant, they may need even in an air gap or disconnected environment. So there, can you take that same service, but now run it without your operators, being able to manage it 24/7. So those are the three categories. So are a single cloud supporting, single cloud instance supporting multiple clouds, multi-cloud instance, multi-cloud instance disconnected. >> So you're abstracting you as the the R&D arm you're abstracting that complexity. How do you handle this problem where you've got one cloud maybe has a better service than the other clouds? Do you have to devolve to the lowest common denominator or? How do you mask that? >> Well, so that's a really good question and we've debated it and there's been a lot of thought on it. Our current point of view is that we really want to leave it, up to the company themselves to make that decision. Again, cause we see different use cases. So for instance, I talk to customers in the defense sector and they are like, hey, if a foreign adversary is attacking one of these public cloud that we're in, we got to be able to evacuate our applications from there, sometimes in minutes, right? In order to maintain our operational capabilities. And so there, there does need to be at least common denominator approach just because of that requirement. I see other folks, you look at the financial banking industries they're also regulated. I think for them, it's oftentimes 90 days to get out of the cloud, so they can do a little bit of re-architecture. You got times rolled the sleeves and change some things. So maybe it's not quite as strict. Whereas other companies say, you know what? I want to take advantage of these best of breed services native to the clouds. So we don't try to prescribe a certain approach there, but we say, you got to align it with what your business requirements are. >> How about the APIs layer? So one of the things we've said is that we felt like a super pass was a requirement of the Supercloud because it's a purpose built pass that helps you with that objective, whatever that is. And you say in the paper for developers each cloud provider has unique infrastructure interfaces and APIs that add work and slow the pace of their releases for operators. Each additional cloud increases the complexity of their architecture, fragmenting security, performance optimization and cost management. So are you building a super pass? What's your philosophy? Victoria said, we want to have our cake, we want to eat at two and we want to lose weight. So how do you do that? >> Yeah, so I think it's, so first things first, what the paper is trying to present in the end is really sort of an architectural point of view on how to approach this, right? And then, yeah, we at VMware, we've got a lot of solutions, towards some of those things, but we also realize we can't do everything ourselves, right? The space is too large. So it's very much a partner strategy there. Now that being said, on things like on the past side, we are doing a lot for instance around Tanzu, which is our modern apps portfolio products. And the focus there really is to, yes, provide some of that consistency across different clouds, enabling customers to take advantage of either cross cloud paths type services or cloud native or native cloud services, I should say. And so we really give customers that choice. And I think that's for us where it's at, because again, we don't see it as a one size fits for all. >> So there's your cake at edit to too. So you're saying the developer experience can be identical across clouds. >> Yep. >> Unless the developers don't want it to be. >> Yeah, and maybe the team makes that decision. Look there's a lot of reasons why you may want to make that or may not. The reality is that these native cloud services do add a lot of value and oftentimes are very easy to consume, to get started with, to get going. And so trade off you got to think about, and I don't think there's a right answer. >> So Kit, I got to ask on you. You said you can't do it alone. >> Yeah. >> VMware, I know for a fact, you guys have been working on this for many, many years. >> Yep. >> (indistinct) remember, I interviewed him in 2016 when he did the deal with AWS with Andy Jassy that really moved the needle. Things got really great from there with VMware. So would you be open to a consortium to oversee cause you guys have a lot of investment in this as a company, but I also don't hear you trying to do the lock in thing. So yeah, would you guys be open to a consortium to kind of try to figure out what these buildings blocks look like? Or is it a bag of Legos what people want? >> Absolutely, and you know what we offer in the paper is really just a starting point. It's pretty simple, we're trying to define a few basic of the taxonomy and some outlines sketches if you will, of what that architectural picture might look like. But it's very much that like just a starting point, and this is not something we can do alone. This is something that we really need the entire industry to rally around. Cause again, I think what's important here are standards. >> Yeah. >> That there's got to be, this sort of decomposition of functionality, breakdown in the different, sort of logical layers of functionality. What do those APIs or interfaces look like? How do we ensure interoperability? Because we do want people to be able to get the best of breed, to be able to bring together different vendor solutions to enable that. >> And I was watching, it was had a Silicon a day just last week, talking about their advances in Silicon. What's you guys position on that because you're seeing the (indistinct) as players, almost getting more niche and more better at the hardware matters more, Silicon speed, latency GPUs, So that seems to me be an enabler opportunity for the ecosystem to innovate at the past and SAS relationship. Where do you guys see? Where are you guys strong and where do you need work to do on? If you had to say there was some white space at VMware like say, hey, we own this area. We we're solid here. Here's some white spaces that VMware could use some help with. >> Yeah, well I think the infrastructure space, you just mentioned is clearly one that we've been focused on for a long time. We're expanding into the modern app space, expanding into security. We've been strong and end user for a while. So a lot of the different multi-cloud capabilities we've actually been to your point developing for a while. And I think that's exactly, again, what went into this like what we started noticing was all of our different product teams were reacting to the same thing and we weren't necessarily talking about it together yet. >> Like what? >> Well, this whole challenge of multiple clouds of dealing with that heterogeneity of wanting choice and flexibility into where to place a workload or where to place a virtual desktop or whatever it might be. And so each of the teams was responding individually to that customer feedback. And so I think what we recognized was like, hey, let's up level this, and what's the bigger picture. And what's the sort of common architecture across all of it, right? So I think that's what the really interesting aspect here was is that this is very much driven by what we're hearing directly from customers. >> You kind of implied just recently that the paper was pretty straightforward, pretty basic, early days, but it's well thought out. And one of the things you talked about was the type of multi-cloud services. >> Yep. >> You had data plan and user services, security infrastructure, which is your wheelhouse and application services. >> Yep. >> And you sort of went to detail defining those where is management and all that. So these are the ones you're going after. What about management? What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question we debated this for a long time. Does management actually get a separate sort of layer that we could add a six one perhaps, or is it sort of baked in to the different ones? And we kind of went with the ladder where it sort of baked in there's infrastructure management, there's modern app management, there's management and users. It's kind of management for each security obviously. So we see a lot of different management plans, control plans across each of those different layers. Now does there need to be a separate one that has its own layer? Arguably yes, I mean, I think there are good arguments for that, and this is exactly why we put this out there though, is to like get people to read it, people to give give us feedback. And going back to the consortium idea, let's come together as a group of practitioners across the industry to really figure out an industry viewpoint on this. >> So what are the trade offs there? So what would be the benefit of having that separate layer? I presume it's simpler to do it the way you've done it, but what would be the benefit of having a separate. >> Yeah, I think it was probably more about simplicity to start with, like you could imagine like 20 different layers. and maybe that's where it's going to go, but also I think it's how do you define the layer? And for us it was more around sort of some of these functional aspects as an infrastructure versus application level versus end user and management is more of a commonality across those. But again, I could see our arguments be made. >> Logical place to start. >> Yeah. >> The other thing you said in here multi-cloud application services can route request for a particular service such as a database and deploy the service on the correct individual cloud, using the most appropriate technology for the use case, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yep. >> That to me, sounds like a metadata problem. And so can you talk about how you you've approach that? You mentioned AWS RDS, great examples as your sequel on Oracle Database, et cetera, et cetera and multiple endpoint. How do you approach that? >> Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of different approaches there. And so again, so the idea is that, and I know there's been reference to sort of like the operating system for Supercloud. What does that look like, right? But I think it totally, we don't actually use that term, but I do like the concept of an operating system. 'Cause a lot of things you just talk about there, these are things operating systems. Do you got to have a scheduler? And so you look across many different clouds and you got to figure out, okay, where do I actually want in this case, let's say a database instance to go and be provisioned. And then really it's up to, I think the vendor or in this case, the multi-cloud service creator to define how they want to want to do that. They could leverage the native cloud services or they could build their own technology. Which a lot of the vendors are doing. And so the point though, is that really you get this night from a end user standpoint, it goes back to your complexity, simplicity question, you get the simplicity of a single API that the implementation you don't really need to deal with. 'Cause you're like, I'm getting a service and I need the database and has certain properties and I want it here versus there versus wherever. But it's up to that multi-cloud service to figure out a lot of those implementation specifics. >> So are you the Supercloud OS? >> I think it is VMware's goal to become the Supercloud OS for sure. But like any good operating system, as we said, like it's all about applications, right? So you have a platform point of view, but you got to partner widely. >> And you got to get the hardware relationship. >> Yes. >> The Silicon chips. >> Yep. >> Right. >> Yeah, and actually that was a good point. I want to go back to that one. 'Cause you mentioned that earlier, the innovation that we're seeing, things like arm processors and like graviton and a lot of these things happening. And so I think that's another really interesting area where you're seeing tremendous innovation there in the public cloud. One of the challenges though for public cloud is actually at scale and that it takes longer to release newer hardware at that scale. So in some cases, if you want bleeding edge stuff, you can't go with public cloud 'cause it's just not there yet, right? So that's again, another interesting thing where you... >> Well, some will say that they launch 5,000 new services, every year at AWS. >> No, but I'm talking, >> They have some bleeding edge stuff. >> Well, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, let me clarify, let me clarify. I'm not talking about the software, I'm talking about the hardware side. >> Okay, got it, okay. >> Like the Silicon? >> Yeah, like the latest and greatest GPU, FBGA. >> Why can't they? >> 'Cause cause they do like tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them. >> Oh just because it's just so many. >> It's a scale. Yeah, that's the point, right? >> Right. >> And it's fundamental to the model in terms of how big they are. And so that's why we do see some customers who need, who have very specialized hardware requirements, need to do it in the private cloud, right on prem or possibly a colo. >> Or edge. >> Or edge. >> Edge is a great example of... >> But we often see, again, people like the latest bleeding edge GPUs, whatever they are, even something a bit more experimental that they're going to go on on prem for that. >> Yeah. >> And so look, do not want to disparage the public cloud, please don't take that away. It's just an artifact when it gets to heart, like software they can scale and they do (indistinct). >> Well it's context of the OS conversation, OS has to right to hardware and enable applications. >> Where I was getting caught up in that is Kit, is they're all developing their own Silicon and they're developing it, most of it's arm based and they're developing at a much, much faster cycle. They can go from design to tape out much faster than Intel historically has. And you're seeing it. >> Intel just posted along. >> Yeah, I think if you look at the overall system, you're absolutely right. >> Yeah, but it's the deployment because of the scale 'cause at one availability zone and another and another region and that's. >> Well, yeah, but so counter point to what I just said would be, hey, like they have very well controlled environments, very well controled system. So they don't need to support a million different configuration settings or whatever they've got theirs that they use, right? So from a system standpoint and so forth. Yeah, I agree that there's a lot they can do there. I was speaking specifically, to different types of hardware accelerators being a bit of a (indistinct). >> If it's not in the 5,000 services that they offer, you can't get it, whereas on-prem you can say, I want that, here it is. >> I'm not saying that on-prem is necessarily fundamentally better in any way. I'm just saying for this particular area >> It's use case driven. >> It is use, and that's the whole point of all this, right? Like and I know a lot of people in their heads associate VMware with on-prem, but we are not dogmatic at all. And you know, as you guys know, but many people may not like we partner with all the public cloud hyperscalers. And so our point of view is very much, much more nuance saying, look, we're happy to run workloads wherever you want to. In fact, that's what we hear from customers. They want to run them everywhere, but it's about finding the right tool for the right job. And that's what really what this multi-cloud approach. >> Yeah, and I think the structural change of the virtualization hypervisor this new shift to V2 Supercloud, this something happening fundamentally that's use case driven, it's not about dogma, whatever. I mean, cloud's great. But native clouds have the pros and cons. >> And I would say that Supercloud, prerequisite for Supercloud has got to be running in a public cloud. But I'd say it also has to be inclusive of on-prem data. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And you're not going to just move all that data into prem, maybe in the fullness of time, but I don't personally believe that, but you look at what Goldman Sachs has done with AWS they've got their on-prem data and they're connecting to the AWS cloud. >> Yep. >> What Walmart's doing with Azure and that's going to happen in a lot of different industries. >> Yeah. >> Well I think security will drive that too. We had that conversation because no one wants to increase the surface area. Number one, they want complexity to be reduced and they want economic benefits. That's the super cloud kind of (indistinct). >> It's a security but it's also differentiatable advantage that you actually have on prem that you don't necessarily. >> Right, well, we're going to debate this now, Kit, thank you for coming on and giving that Keynote, we're going to have a panel to debate and discuss the blockers that enablers to Supercloud. And there are some enablers and potentially blockers. >> Yep, absolutely. >> So we'll get, into that, okay, up next, the panel to discuss, blockers and enablers are Supercloud after this quick break. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone to CUBE Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great influencer, Cloud Cloud RRT segment with Sarbjeet Johal, Cloud influencer, Cloud economist, Cloud consultant, Cloud advisor. Sarbjeet, welcome back, CUBE alumni. Good to see you. >> Thanks John and nice to be here. >> Now, what's your title? Cloud consultant? Analyst? >> Consultant, actually. Yeah, I'm launching my own business right now formally, soon. It's in stealth mode right now, we'll be (inaudible) >> Well, I'll just call you a Cloud guru, Cloud influencer. You've been great, friend of theCUBE. Really powerful on social. You share a lot of content. You're digging into all the trends. Supercloud is a thing, it's getting a lot of traction. We introduced that concept last reinvent. We were riffing before that. As we kind of were seeing the structural change that is now Supercloud, it really is kind of the destination or outcome of what we're seeing with hybrid cloud as a steady state into the what's now, they call multicloud, which is kind of awkward. It feels like it's default. Like multicloud, multi-vendor, but Supercloud has much more of a comprehensive abstraction around it. What's your thoughts? >> As you said, as Dave says that too, the Supercloud has that abstraction built into it. It's built on top of cloud, right? So it's being built on top of the CapEx which is being spent by likes of AWS and Azure and Google Cloud, and many others, right? So it's leveraging that infrastructure and building software stack on top of that, which is a platform. I see that as a platform being built on top of infrastructure as code. It's another platform which is not native to the cloud providers. So it's like a kind of cross-Cloud platform. That's what I said. >> Yeah, VMware calls it that cloud-cross cloud. I'm not a big fan of the name but I get what you're saying. We had a segment on earlier with Adrian Cockcroft, Laurie McVety and Chris Wolf, all part of the Cloud RRT like ourselves, and you've involved in Cloud from day one. Remember the OpenStack days Early Cloud, AWS, when they started we saw the trajectory and we saw the change. And I think the OpenStack in those early days were tell signs because you saw the movement of API first but Amazon just grew so fast. And then Azure now is catching up, their CapEx is so large that companies like Snowflake's like, "Why should I build my own? "I just sit on top of AWS, "move fast on one native cloud, then figure it out." Seems to be one of the playbooks of the Supercloud. >> Yeah, that is true. And there are reasons behind that. And I think number one reason is the skills gravity. What I call it, the developers and/or operators are trained on one set of APIs. And I've said that many times, to out compete your competition you have to out educate the market. And we know which cloud has done that. We know what traditional vendor has done that, in '90s it was Microsoft, they had VBS number one language and they were winning. So in the cloud era, it's AWS, their marketing efforts, their go-to market strategy, the micro nature of the releasing the micro sort of features, if you will, almost every week there's a new feature. So they have got it. And other two are trying to mimic that and they're having low trouble light. >> Yeah and I think GCP has been struggling compared to the three and native cloud on native as you're right, completely successful. As you're caught up and you see the Microsoft, I think is a a great selling point around multiple clouds. And the question that's on the table here is do you stay with the native cloud or you jump right to multicloud? Now multicloud by default is kind of what I see happening. We've been debating this, I'd love to get your thoughts because, Microsoft has a huge install base. They've converted to Office 365. They even throw SQL databases in there to kind of give it a little extra bump on the earnings but I've been super critical on their numbers. I think their shares are, there's clearly overstating their share, in my opinion, compared to AWS is a need of cloud, Azure though is catching up. So you have customers that are happy with Microsoft, that are going to run their apps on Azure. So if a customer has Azure and Microsoft that's technically multiple clouds. >> Yeah, true. >> And it's not a strategy, it's just an outcome. >> Yeah, I see Microsoft cloud as friendly to the internal developers. Internal developers of enterprises. but AWS is a lot more ISV friendly which is the software shops friendly. So that's what they do. They just build software and give it to somebody else. But if you're in-house developer and you have been a Microsoft shop for a long time, which enterprise haven't been that, right? So Microsoft is well entrenched into the enterprise. We know that, right? >> Yeah. >> For a long time. >> Yeah and the old joke was developers love code and just go with a lock in and then ops people don't want lock in because they want choice. So you have the DevOps movement that's been successful and they get DevSecOps. The real focus to me, I think, is the operating teams because the ops side is really with the pressure vis-a-vis. I want to get your reaction because we're seeing kind of the script flip. DevOps worked, infrastructure's code has worked. We don't yet see security as code yet. And you have things like cloud native services which is all developer, goodness. So I think the developers are doing fine. Give 'em a thumbs up and open source's booming. So they're shifting left, CI/CD pipeline. You have some issues around repo, monolithic repos, but devs are doing fine. It's the ops that are now have to level up because that seems to be a hotspot. What's your take? What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if you say you agree, why? >> Yeah, I think devs are doing fine because some of the devs are going into ops. Like the whole movement behind DevOps culture is that devs and ops is one team. The people who are building that application they're also operating that as well. But that's very foreign and few in enterprise space. We know that, right? Big companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, those guys can do that. They're very tech savvy shops. But when it comes to, if you go down from there to the second tier of enterprises, they are having hard time with that. Once you create software, I've said that, I sound like a broken record here. So once you create piece of software, you want to operate it. You're not always creating it. Especially when it's inhouse software development. It's not your core sort of competency to. You're not giving that software to somebody else or they're not multiple tenants of that software. You are the only user of that software as a company, or maybe maximum to your employees and partners. But that's where it stops. So there are those differences and when it comes to ops, we have to still differentiate the ops of the big companies, which are tech companies, pure tech companies and ops of the traditional enterprise. And you are right, the ops of the traditional enterprise are having tough time to cope up with the changing nature of things. And because they have to run the old traditional stacks whatever they happen to have, SAP, Oracle, financial, whatnot, right? Thousands of applications, they have to run that. And they have to learn on top of that, new scripting languages to operate the new stack, if you will. >> So for ops teams do they have to spin up operating teams for every cloud specialized tooling, there's consequences to that. >> Yeah. There's economics involved, the process, if you are learning three cloud APIs and most probably you will end up spending a lot more time and money on that. Number one, number two, there are a lot more problems which can arise from that, because of the differences in how the APIs work. The rule says if you pick one primary cloud and then you're focused on that, and most of your workloads are there, and then you go to the secondary cloud number two or three on as need basis. I think that's the right approach. >> Well, I want to get your take on something that I'm observing. And again, maybe it's because I'm old school, been around the IT block for a while. I'm observing the multi-vendors kind of as Dave calls the calisthenics, they're out in the market, trying to push their wears and convincing everyone to run their workloads on their infrastructure. multicloud to me sounds like multi-vendor. And I think there might not be a problem yet today so I want to get your reaction to my thoughts. I see the vendors pushing hard on multicloud because they don't have a native cloud. I mean, IBM ultimately will probably end up being a SaaS application on top of one of the CapEx hyperscale, some say, but I think the playbook today for customers is to stay on one native cloud, run cloud native hybrid go in on OneCloud and go fast. Then get success and then go multiple clouds. versus having a multicloud set of services out of the gate. Because if you're VMware you'd love to have cross cloud abstraction layer but that's lock in too. So what's your lock in? Success in the marketplace or vendor access? >> It's tricky actually. I've said that many times, that you don't wake up in the morning and say like, we're going to do multicloud. Nobody does that by choice. So it falls into your lab because of mostly because of what MNA is. And sometimes because of the price to performance ratio is better somewhere else for certain kind of workloads. That's like foreign few, to be honest with you. That's part of my read is, that being a developer an operator of many sort of systems, if you will. And the third tier which we talked about during the VMworld, I think 2019 that you want vendor diversity, just in case one vendor goes down or it's broken up by feds or something, and you want another vendor, maybe for price negotiation tactics, or- >> That's an op mentality. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And that's true, they want choice. They want to get locked in. >> You want choice because, and also like things can go wrong with the provider. We know that, we focus on top three cloud providers and we sort of assume that they'll be there for next 10 years or so at least. >> And what's also true is not everyone can do everything. >> Yeah, exactly. So you have to pick the provider based on all these sort of three sets of high level criteria, if you will. And I think the multicloud should be your last choice. Like you should not be gearing up for that by default but it should be by design, as Chuck said. >> Okay, so I need to ask you what does Supercloud in my opinion, look like five, 10 years out? What's the outcome of a good Supercloud structure? What's it look like? Where did it come from? How did it get there? What's your take? >> I think Supercloud is getting born in the absence of having standards around cloud. That's what it is. Because we don't have standards, we long, or we want the services at different cloud providers, Which have same APIs and there's less learning curve or almost zero learning curve for our developers and operators to learn that stuff. Snowflake is one example and VMware Stack is available at different cloud providers. That's sort of infrastructure as a service example if you will. And snowflake is a sort of data warehouse example and they're going down the stack. Well, they're trying to expand. So there are many examples like that. What was the question again? >> Is Supercloud 10 years out? What does it look like? What's the components? >> Yeah, I think the Supercloud 10 years out will expand because we will expand the software stack faster than the hardware stack and hardware stack will be expanding of course, with the custom chips and all that. There was the huge event yesterday was happening from AWS. >> Yeah, the Silicon. >> Silicon Day. And that's an eyeopening sort of movement and the whole technology consumption, if you will. >> And yeah, the differentiation with the chips with supply chain kind of herding right now, we think it's going to be a forcing function for more cloud adoption. Because if you can't buy networking gear you going to go to the cloud. >> Yeah, so Supercloud to me in 10 years, it will be bigger, better in the likes of HashiCorp. Actually, I think we need likes of HashiCorp on the infrastructure as a service side. I think they will be part of the Supercloud. They are kind of sitting on the side right now kind of a good vendor lost in transition kind of thing. That sort of thing. >> It's like Kubernetes, we'll just close out here. We'll make a statement. Is Kubernetes a developer thing or an infrastructure thing? It's an ops thing. I mean, people are coming out and saying Kubernetes is not a developer issue. >> It's ops thing. >> It's an ops thing. It's in operation, it's under the hood. So you, again, this infrastructure's a service integrating this super pass layer as Dave Vellante and Wikibon call it. >> Yeah, it's ops thing, actually, which enables developers to get that the Azure service, like you can deploy your software in sort of different format containers, and then you don't care like what VMs are those? And, but Serverless is the sort of arising as well. It was hard for a while now it's like the lull state, but I think Serverless will be better in next three to five years on. >> Well, certainly the hyperscale is like AWS and Azure and others have had great CapEx and investments. They need to stay ahead, in your opinion, final question, how do they stay ahead? 'Cause, AWS is not going to stand still nor will Azure, they're pedaling as fast as they can. Google's trying to figure out where they fit in. Are they going to be a real cloud or a software stack? Same with Oracle. To me, it's really, the big race is now with AWS and Azure's nipping at their heels. Hyperscale, what do they need to do to differentiate going forward? >> I think they are in a limbo. They, on one side, they don't want to compete with their customers who are sitting on top of them, likes of Snowflake and others, right? And VMware as well. But at the same time, they have to keep expanding and keep innovating. And they're debating within their themselves. Like, should we compete with these guys? Should we launch similar sort of features and functionality? Or should we keep it open? And what I have heard as of now that internally at AWS, especially, they're thinking about keeping it open and letting people sort of (inaudible)- >> And you see them buying some the Cerner with Oracle that bought Cerner, Amazon bought a healthcare company. I think the likes of MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, are perfect examples of what we'll see I think on the AWS side. Azure, I'm not so sure, they like to have a little bit more control at the top of the stack with the SaaS, but I think Databricks has been so successful open source, Snowflake, a little bit more proprietary and closed than Databricks. They're doing well is on top of data, and MongoDB has got great success. All of these things compete with AWS higher level services. So, that advantage of those companies not having the CapEx investment and then going multiple clouds on other ecosystems that's a path of customers. Stay one, go fast, get traction, then go. >> That's huge. Actually the last sort comment I want to make is that, Also, that you guys include this in the definition of Supercloud, the likes of Capital One and Soner sort of vendors, right? So they are verticals, Capital One is in this financial vertical, and then Soner which Oracle bar they are in this healthcare vertical. And remember in the beginning of the cloud and when the cloud was just getting born. We used to say that we will have the community clouds which will be serving different verticals. >> Specialty clouds. >> Specialty clouds, community clouds. And actually that is happening now at very sort of small level. But I think it will start happening at a bigger level. The Goldman Sachs and others are trying to build these services on the financial front risk management and whatnot. I think that will be- >> Well, what's interesting, which you're bringing up a great discussion. We were having discussions around these vertical clouds like Goldman Sachs Capital One, Liberty Mutual. They're going all in on one native cloud then going into multiple clouds after, but then there's also the specialty clouds around functionality, app identity, data security. So you have multiple 3D dimensional clouds here. You can have a specialty cloud just on identity. I mean, identity on Amazon is different than Azure. Huge issue. >> Yeah, I think at some point we have to distinguish these things, which are being built on top of these infrastructure as a service, in past with a platform, a service, which is very close to infrastructure service, like the lines are blurred, we have to distinguish these two things from these Superclouds. Actually, what we are calling Supercloud maybe there'll be better term, better name, but we are all industry path actually, including myself and you or everybody else. Like we tend to mix these things up. I think we have to separate these things a little bit to make things (inaudible) >> Yeah, I think that's what the super path thing's about because you think about the next generation SaaS has to be solved by innovations of the infrastructure services, to your point about HashiCorp and others. So it's not as clear as infrastructure platform, SaaS. There's going to be a lot of interplay between this levels of services. >> Yeah, we are in this flasker situation a lot of developers are lost. A lot of operators are lost in this transition and it's just like our economies right now. Like I was reading at CNBC today, and here's sort of headline that people are having hard time understanding what state the economy is in. And so same is true with our technology economy. Like we don't know what state we are in. It's kind of it's in the transition phase right now. >> Well we're definitely in a bad economy relative to the consumer market. I've said on theCUBE publicly, Dave has as well, not as aggressive. I think the tech is still in a boom. I don't think there's tech bubble at all that's bursting, I think, the digital transformation from post COVID is going to continue. And this is the first recession downturn where the hyperscalers have been in market, delivering the economic value, almost like they're pumping on all cylinders and going to the next level. Go back to 2008, Amazon web services, where were they? They were just emerging out. So the cloud economic impact has not been factored into the global GDP relationship. I think all the firms that are looking at GDP growth and tech spend as a correlation, are completely missing the boat on the fact that cloud economics and digital transformation is a big part of the new economics. So refactoring business models this is continuing and it's just the early days. >> Yeah, I have said that many times that cloud works good in the bad economy and cloud works great in the good economy. Do you know why? Because there are different type of workloads in the good economy. A lot of experimentation, innovative solutions go into the cloud. You can do experimentation that you have extra money now, but in the bad economy you don't want to spend the CapEx because don't have money. Money is expensive at that point. And then you want to keep working and you don't need (inaudible) >> I think inflation's a big factor too right now. Well, Sarbjeet, great to see you. Thanks for coming into our studio for our stage performance for Supercloud 22, this is a pilot episode that we're going to get a consortium of experts Cloud RRT like yourselves, in the conversation to discuss what the architecture is. What is a taxonomy? What are the key building blocks and what things need to be in place for Supercloud capability? Because it's clear that if without standards, without defacto standards, we're at this tipping point where if it all comes together, not all one company can do everything. Customers want choice, but they also want to go fast too. So DevOps is working. It's going the next level. We see this as Supercloud. So thank you so much for your participation. >> Thanks for having me. And I'm looking forward to listen to the other sessions (inaudible) >> We're going to take it on A stickers. We'll take it on the internet. I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more Supercloud 22 coverage, here at the Palo Alto studios in one minute. (bright music)

(light music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here Palo Alto for a big event. Supercloud 22, we've got a great ecosystem conversation here. Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO, Prosimo. Ramesh, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So, I wanted to bring you in because we've had previous CUBE conversations around cloud networking, latency, you also have some, some pedigree, Viptela. The folks in the industry know that's been a deep tech company. >> Yep. >> You have been around the block. You've seen the movie before. You've seen the tech trends. You've seen the hype. You've seen the fluff. Where's the meat on the bone with Supercloud in your opinion? >> So it, it starts with what enterprises are struggling with, right? And if you take a very simple example, it's actually quite fresh in my mind because I was just having this conversation this morning. A large bank has an application sitting in AWS, right? And they have to provide the application access to the treasury, to their suppliers, to ticker feeds, to all their downstream partners, and so on and so forth. Guess what? They don't control, where all those things are. They're in very different regions and very different clouds. And so you, whether you like it or not, you have a problem here, right? And so it starts with, for the particular bank, what are the capabilities that they need, right? And so AWS provides a whole host of native capabilities, but they still need to build a few more things on top. So going by, essentially the definition of Supercloud, even within a single cloud you need to build a few more capabilities on top. That gets worsened by the fact that now you need to provide access to various other clouds, various other regions and, and so forth. So, whether we like it or not, this movie is here to stay. >> What's the difference between Supercloud and multi-cloud? Because multi-cloud, I've been saying, is not necessarily a market yet. >> Correct, yes. So, Supercloud is essentially the cloud native capabilities provided by the hyperscalers, get you probably 30, 40% of the way, right? But then, in order to deliver on a care about, right? In our case, from a cloud networking standpoint, that is experience, that's performance, reliability, zero trust access, and then so forth. You have to take that a little bit further, and so we have vendors, like us, that actually build capabilities on top of the hyperscalers, right? Now, even if you think of a single cloud, how you build that is different on AWS than it's on Azure, than on GCP. But do the customers care? No, they want to be able to consume it in exactly the same way across all of them. So, whether it's multi-cloud or a single cloud, you have a problem that is white space on top of the hyperscalers capabilities that you just need to build. >> And what problems is it solving today? Because again, I, again, multi-cloud, I've yet seen the problem. I kind of get what's happening. Multiple clouds do exist. Use cases matter, maybe best debri, but they're standalone. They're not really interoperating, so to speak. So people have been successful on, on public cloud. >> That's correct, yes. >> For use cases? >> Absolutely. So even if you take a single cloud, for example, right? You have multiple problems to, to address. So let's take the example of, I have users coming from various different regions, around the globe, and I have apps that are spread, maybe not across like all clouds, but single cloud, maybe multiple regions, right? Now, I have a reach problem, which is, I need to go from where the user is to where the application is sitting. I have an experience problem because if my spinning wheel shows up, I'm going to go crazy. I have a security problem because I want to make sure it's only me that have access to it, right? But does the cloud provider solve for this entirely? No, they give you the nuts, the bolts, or what we call ours essentially, what you need is a, is a latte. They give you really nice coffee beans, not just one flavor, 20 flavors of those. They give you raw sugar and a few other things. They give you five different flavors of milk, but you got to make your own latte. So, that's what we do. >> And this is where the infrastructure transformation's happening. >> Exactly. >> And the super paz layer, as Dave Vellante and I have talked about in cloud, is you have to integrate a native cloud. >> Correct. >> Which is beautiful. It's integrated, everything works together, there's a lot of lattes to be made or espressos. >> Exactly. >> I mean, tons of great things there. So, big check marks, double check, gold star for AWS. >> Correct. >> All good. Now, on premises, we've found that hybrid is a steady state. >> Exactly. >> Okay, that's cloud operations. Now, you got the edge. Where does the Supercloud strategy come in? For the folks watching there, it's like, "Hey, okay, I get that." "But I don't want to just buy into another vendor's hype." >> Absolutely. >> "I got to build my own cloud," to your point about the lattes. >> Correct. >> They have to make their own infrastructure an application environment to power the developer. >> Exactly. And, and hybrid is here to stay as, as you pointed out, right, John? So, I have my data center and let's say when most folks start out they start to like a single region of a single cloud, right? And what are you most concerned about there? Hey, can I migrate? Can I start to build applications in the public cloud, right? And all you care about is can you talk back into my data center? Like, as long as some basic hygiene is there that's all they care about, right? The problem happens when you go from, kind of, the first five EC2 instances to 50 to a hundred, then you have a few other things that you need to care about, right? That's really kind of where the, the Supercloud capabilities start to come in, right? Because you have the cloud native things you can make that work for the first few days, but then after that you need augmented capabilities. >> So Ramesh, some people will say, "Hey, John, Supercloud okay, it's funny, ha ha ha." But isn't it just SAS? >> No, SAS is a delivery mechanism, right? And so, so there is the capability and that is how do you want to consume, right? And so capabilities or cloud native capabilities or piece of software capabilities or (unintelligible) cluster form factor and so forth. How do you want to consume? Maybe it's a package form factor, it is a size, it could even be passive if it's sitting in the, in the element, and then so forth, right? And so you really want to distinguish those two. And, and, and that's how we see the, the industry evolve. >> Can Superclouds be specialty clouds? Like is Snowflake a Supercloud? Is Goldman Sachs financial cloud a Supercloud? >> Absolutely, right. So Supercloud is not like a, a conglomeration of multiple capabilities, right? It can be for a specific use case, it can be for a specific functionality. So we, we consider our capabilities by the definition as a Supercloud in, in networking, right? In cloud networking, in Prosimo. So, does that solve the entirety of what I want to do in the cloud? No, absolutely not. There's data, there's computers, a whole bunch of other things, but for a specialty you do have some Supercloud. >> Yeah, in fact, I had a note here. I was going to ask you will, when will there be specialty clouds, apps, identity, data, security, nteworking, we will see those? >> Absolutely, yeah. And, and those are slowly starting to brew, right? So you have, you have identity as one, you have networking as one, you have the zero trust piece as, as another one, you have data as a, as another one. So when all these things come together, absolutely. That's what, that's what enterprise customers care about. >> So I love infrastructure as code, that drove a lot of the evolution and revolution of DevOps. When are we going to see security as code and network as code? Or is it there? >> No networkers code, for sure. It's already, it's already there. It's probably in its early innings, I would say, but we are starting to see that already. The reason for that is really simple. Enough CIOs have yelled at their networking teams to say, "my app guys can get this done three," "four times a day, you get this done once a week." Right? And so, that has actually driven quite a bit of innovation, >> It's slow, >> It's slow, right? And so that's driven quite a bit of innovation. It all starts with, hey, can I build a Terraform provider and then just integrate into Terraform? But it doesn't, it doesn't stop there, right? There's a whole bunch of additional capabilities, a day in troubleshooting, a whole bunch of things that need to come together. But I would say networkers code has already started to, to, to take ship. >> Which, that's a great point about specialty clouds. What about vertical clouds too? 'Cause you got insurance, oil and gas, FinTech. Both sides of the stack can have specialty clouds. >> Absolutely, yeah. So, it, what's driving specialty clouds, right? Some of it is compliance, mainly because you just have to shard the data, and when you shard the data, the entirety gets, gets sharded, right? Some of it driven by use case, because some are a little more serverless, service mesh and intelligence focused, some are a little more infrastructure focused. So you do see that taking off. I would say we've seen a whole lot more, kind of, on the horizontal side, less on the vertical side, but that's really happening, right? >> Yeah, I think that, to me, indicates a Supercloud. The fact that the diversity of the application on the clouds themselves, someone could be spending, say, Liberty Mutual or Goldman Sachs. They were once spending that as CapEx. >> Exactly. >> Now it's OPEX, so they become a service provider. So, if you have scale with data and expertise, you become a Supercloud by default. And you don't have to pay for the CapEx, >> Yeah. You're already paying in. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And that's what snowflake basically did with data warehouse. >> That's right, yeah. >> I mean they're basically a data warehouse. Refactored on the cloud and then go, "whoa, let's go to Azure." >> Yeah. And, and where does that data decide do you ask that question? No, right? You just assume that, hey, retrospective of it's a single cloud, multiple regions, it's there. If it's stretched to multiple clouds, yes, it's just there, but you, you talk about like that. >> In our cloud already panel earlier, we talked about how companies are going fast on one native cloud, 'cause they don't want to have multiple development teams and different ops teams. They go all in say, hey, mostly AWS wins this, unless it's specially Azure productivity software or SQL database, go hard in on Amazon, get speed and velocity, get that flywheel, win, get scale, get value. Then go to Azure, provide that same value to that marketplace and other clouds. Then the next dot to connect is, can the customer have the same experience across the clouds? That's where it gets interesting. What's your thoughts on that? >> Actually, it gets interesting even when they go from a single cloud in a single region to multiple regions, right? And the, the more spread out the regions are, you have requirements around application performance, application experience and so forth. So, suddenly the networking conversation starts to become an experience and a performance conversation. The security conversation starts to become a zero trust conversation and so forth. And so you, you do see that, that interesting shift that's happening. >> Of course. >> Exactly. And then that gets worsened by the fact that now you have multiple clouds, multiple regions, and then... >> So you got regions, clouds, >> and then you have edge locations now. >> And edge. >> You mentioned edge. >> This, this is why I think multi-cloud is BS, because this is all coming so fast. You got to get your Supercloud first. >> Exactly. >> Then you extend into, what it looks like a multi-vendor or multifaceted environment that should be automated by that time. >> Exactly. >> So it's evolutionary, we're not there yet. >> Exactly. >> So you agree, no market yet? >> That's right, yes. So unless it's like the super large enterprises where we have seen a really good mix of multiple different clouds or super large enterprises where each business unit is free to choose the cloud of their choice for the application developers because they just like a certain cloud, right? >> Or negotiations. >> Or negotiations, right? Exactly, so there you find yourself in a healthy mix. It's not like you're 80, 10, 10. It's, it's a healthy mix of three different clouds, right? But vast majority of the enterprises, they have a concerted strategy, I have a primary cloud 'cause that's where two, two big CEOs shake hands and assign multi billion dollar deals, right? >> It's just a song with Howie Shute, who's now a Zscaler, former VMware. Probably know Howie, he's a legend in the community as well. We were talking about the old days of the data center and you remember that? We'll go back to our, into our, you know, historical views of experience. Back when the data center became popular this was the glass house. Mainframes to mini computers. It became a complex environment. You had to have pretty much a PhD or serious networking or some sort of technical background. And then IT was born, the local area networks, the mini computers, and the PCs change that dynamic. IT was born. Okay, and let's just say it, most IT guys aren't PhDs. >> Exactly. >> So what's happened there is democratization and the operations side of that wave. We're kind of going th&rough it now, don't ya think, with cloud? Like, you got to be super smart to wrangle the data. I mean, some of the data pipelining stuff is super complex, after Snowflake and data bricks. >> Absolutely. And largely depends on the maturity, right? Like, so once you pass a certain scale in the cloud the care abouts start to be very different. The care abouts are, how can I operate this at scale? Because I might have started off with a relatively inefficient infrastructure, right? But now if I start to operate that at scale with like thousands of VPCs and so forth, somebody is looking at an AWS bill there and going, "ah, no, no, no, we're not going to do that." >> We're getting to the good part now. So, so here's where I wanted to get to, 'Cause we're kind of getting there, The proof points of Supercloud is IT like operations, >> Correct. >> Easy. >> Yep. >> Not overstaffed and maybe an SRE model one too many. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What are the proof points do you see that would be evidence that Supercloud is working? >> So in a well functional model where we have seen enterprises take the applications that they care about and then move that into the public cloud or build it organically. If they have staffed their team, I think a good leading indicator is that they have staffed the team so that there are a bunch of guys who understand what it means for cloud native capabilities. There are a bunch of guys who then put it together and then you look at the care abouts, right? Ultimately at the end of the day, the goal, if you go higher up in the layers, is it about application experience? Is it about kind of reducing the blast radius of my security? Is it about my data cleanliness and, and hygiene? You don't care about kind of how the pipelining works underneath the covers or how do I put a transit gateway and this and that together? No, that's not what you care about. You care about kind of the outcomes and, and- >> Palmer (unintelligible) that VMware, when he was there. You just say the hardened top, no one talks about what's in an Intel processor. I mean it's just works. >> Exactly, yeah. And it's what applications you build on top of that Intel processor that actually makes it more powerful, right? And so the first evidence I would say is kind of how is the team structured? The second evidence would be kind of what, what are the care abouts for the guys that are building these applications, right? Because even the application developers more than the application, they care about kind of, is it helping? Is it delivering on the experience? Is it being used the way it's supposed to? >> Is it value? >> Exactly, right? And those are not areas that the cloud providers are solely focused on, right? Like you don't see an AWS or an Azure dashboard show that particular thing for the entirety of the application, they'll tell you for the ATR services that you, that you use, here's the SLA for each one of these services. >> And that's where the customer has to build it. >> Exactly right. Now, does that give you the full picture? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to pull this together. Somebody has to aggregate this together and then make sense as to whether this is working or not, right? So whether you call it Supercloud, or whether you call it kind of the care abouts on top of the cloud native stuff, they're all the same. I'm glad you guys came up with a, with a name for this. And I think it's going to be here to stay. >> Well, thank you for sharing your expertise. You got a great background in this area and you got, I think you guys are right on the front wave of this new change. I think a little bit early, but that's good, but don't be too early. >> Yeah, exactly. No, and, and, and that's really important, right, John? So, you don't want to be too early. You certainly don't want to be too late, but at the same time, the pace at which things are evolving are fast enough that you, you will see. I think when, if we have this conversation even three months from now, it might be a very different conversation. >> Yeah, people want to go fast and they don't want to get stuck with a vendor. They made a bad choice that slows 'em down 'cause they got problems to solve, things to build. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Ramesh, thanks for coming on, Supercloud 22, we're breaking it all down. We're exposing it out to everyone. We're discussing it. We're going to challenge it. But ultimately it is a thing. Supercloud 22. Thanks for watching. >> Wonderful, thanks John. (light music)

(electronic music) >> Welcome back to our studios in Palo Alto, California. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with John Furrier, who is taking a quick break. You know, in one of the early examples that we used of so called super cloud was Snowflake. We called it a super data cloud. We had, really, a lot of fun with that. And we've started to evolve our thinking. Years ago, we said that data was going to form in the cloud around industries and ecosystems. And Benoit Dogeville is a many time guest of theCube. He's the co-founder and president of products at Snowflake. Benoit, thanks for spending some time with us, at Supercloud 22, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. >> So, you know, like I said, we've had some fun with this meme. But it really is, we heard on the previous panel, everybody's using Snowflake as an example. Somebody how builds on top of hyper scale infrastructure. You're not building your own data centers. And, so, are you building a super data cloud? >> We don't call it exactly that way. We don't like the super word, it's a bit dismissive. >> That's our term. >> About our friends, cloud provider friends. But we call it a data cloud. And the vision, really, for the data cloud is, indeed, it's a cloud which overlays the hyper scaler cloud. But there is a big difference, right? There are several ways to do this super cloud, as you name them. The way we picked is to create one single system, and that's very important, right? There are several ways, right. You can instantiate your solution in every region of the cloud and, you know, potentially that region could be AWS, that region could be GCP. So, you are, indeed, a multi-cloud solution. But Snowflake, we did it differently. We are really creating cloud regions, which are superimposed on top of the cloud provider region, infrastructure region. So, we are building our regions. But where it's very different is that each region of Snowflake is not one instantiation of our service. Our service is global, by nature. We can move data from one region to the other. When you land in Snowflake, you land into one region. But you can grow from there and you can, you know, exist in multiple cloud at the same time. And that's very important, right? It's not different instantiation of a system, it's one single instantiation which covers many cloud regions and many cloud provider. >> So, we used Snowflake as an example. And we're trying to understand what the salient aspects are of your data cloud, what we call super cloud. In fact, you've used the word instantiate. Kit Colbert, just earlier today, laid out, he said, there's sort of three levels. You can run it on one cloud and communicate with the other cloud, you can instantiate on the clouds, or you can have the same service running 24/7 across clouds, that's the hardest example. >> Yeah. >> The most mature. You just described, essentially, doing that. How do you enable that? What are the technical enablers? >> Yeah, so, as I said, first we start by building, you know, Snowflake regions, we have today 30 regions that span the world, so it's a world wide system, with many regions. But all these regions are connected together. They are meshed together with our technology, we name it Snow Grid, and that makes it hard because, you know, Azure region can talk to a WS region, or GCP regions, and as a user for our cloud, you don't see, really, these regional differences, that regions are in different potentially cloud. When you use Snowflake, you can exist, your presence as an organization can be in several regions, several clouds, if you want, geographic, both geographic and cloud provider. >> So, I can share data irrespective of the cloud. And I'm in the Snowflake data cloud, is that correct? I can do that today? >> Exactly, and that's very critical, right? What we wanted is to remove data silos. And when you insociate a system in one single region, and that system is locked in that region, you cannot communicate with other parts of the world, you are locking data in one region. Right, and we didn't want to do that. We wanted data to be distributed the way customer wants it to be distributed across the world. And potentially sharing data at world scales. >> Does that mean if I'm in one region and I want to run a query, if I'm in AWS in one region, and I want to run a query on data that happens to be in an Azure cloud, I can actually execute that? >> So, yes and no. The way we do it is very expensive to do that. Because, generally, if you want to join data which are in different region and different cloud, it's going to be very expensive because you need to move data every time you join it. So, the way we do it is that you replicate the subset of data that you want to access from one region from other region. So, you can create this data mesh, but data is replicated to make it very cheap and very performing too. >> And is the Snow Grid, does that have the metadata intelligence to actually? >> Yes, yes. >> Can you describe that a little? >> Yeah, Snow Grid is both a way to exchange metadata. So, each region of Snowflake knows about all the other regions of Snowflake. Every time we create a new region, the metadata is distributed over our data cloud, not only region knows all the region, but knows every organization that exists in our cloud, where this organization is, where data can be replicated by this organization. And then, of course, it's also used as a way to exchange data, right? So, you can exchange data by scale of data size. And I was just receiving an email from one of our customers who moved more than four petabytes of data, cross region, cross cloud providers in, you know, few days. And it's a lot of data, so it takes some time to move. But they were able to do that online, completely online, and switch over to the other region, which is very important also. >> So, one of the hardest parts about super cloud that I'm still trying to struggling through is the security model. Because you've got the cloud as your sort of first line of defense. And now we've got multiple clouds, with multiple first lines of defense, I've got a shared responsibility model across those clouds, I've got different tools in each of those clouds. Do you take care of that? Where do you pick up from the cloud providers? Do you abstract that security layer? Do you bring in partners? It's a very complicated. >> No, this is a great question. Security has always been the most important aspect of Snowflake sense day one, right? This is the question that every customer of ours has. You know, how can you guarantee the security of my data? And, so, we secure data really tightly in region. We have several layers of security. It starts by creating every data at rest. And that's very important. A lot of customers are not doing that, right? You hear of these attacks, for example, on cloud, where someone left their buckets. And then, you know, you can access the data because it's a non-encrypted. So, we are encrypting everything at rest. We are encrypting everything in transit. So, a region is very secure. Now, you know, from one region, you never access data from another region in Snowflake. That's why, also, we replicate data. Now the replication of that data across region, or the metadata, for that matter, is really our least secure, so Snow Grid ensures that everything is encrypted, everything is, we have multiple encryption keys, and it's stored in hardware secure modules, so, we bit Snow Grid such that it's secure and it allows very secure movement of data. >> Okay, so, I know we kind of, getting into the technology here a lot today, but because super cloud is the future, we actually have to have an architectural foundation on which to build. So, you mentioned a bucket, like an S3 bucket. Okay, that's storage, but you also, for instance, taking advantage of new semi-conductor technology. Like Graviton, as an example, that drives efficiency. You guys talk about how you pass that on to your customers. Even if it means less revenue for you, so, awesome, we love that, you'll make it up in volume. And, so. >> Exactly. >> How do you deal with the lowest common denominator problem? I was talking to somebody the other day and this individual brought up what I thought was a really good point. What if we, let's say, AWS, have the best, silicon. And we can run the fastest and the least expensive, and the lowest power. But another cloud provider hasn't caught up yet. How do you deal with that delta? Do you just take the best of and try to respect that? >> No, it's a great question. I mean, of course, our software is extracting all the cloud providers infrastructure so that when you run in one region, let's say AWS, or Azure, it doesn't make any difference, as far as the applications are concerned. And this abstraction, of course, is a lot of work. I mean, really, a lot of work. Because it needs to be secure, it needs to be performance, and every cloud, and it has to expose APIs which are uniform. And, you know, cloud providers, even though they have potentially the same concept, let's say block storage, APIs are completely different. The way these systems are secure, it's completely different. There errors that you can get. And the retry mechanism is very different from one cloud to the other. The performance is also different. We discovered that when we starting to port our software. And we had to completely rethink how to leverage block storage in that cloud versus that cloud, because just off performance too. And, so, we had, for example, to stripe data. So, all this work is work that you don't need as an application because our vision, really, is that application, which are running in our data cloud, can be abstracted for this difference. And we provide all the services, all the workload that this application need. Whether it's transactional access to data, analytical access to data, managing logs, managing metrics, all of this is abstracted too, so that they are not tied to one particular service of one cloud. And distributing this application across many region, many cloud, is very seamless. >> So, Snowflake has built, your team has built a true abstraction layer across those clouds that's available today? It's actually shipping? >> Yes, and we are still developing it. You know, transactional, Unistore, as we call it, was announced last summit. So, they are still, you know, work in progress. >> You're not done yet. >> But that's the vision, right? And that's important, because we talk about the infrastructure, right. You mention a lot about storage and compute. But it's not only that, right. When you think about application, they need to use the transactional database. They need to use an analytical system. They need to use machine learning. So, you need to provide, also, all these services which are consistent across all the cloud providers. >> So, let's talk developers. Because, you know, you think Snowpark, you guys announced a big application development push at the Snowflake summit recently. And we have said that a criterion of super cloud is a super paz layer, people wince when I say that, but okay, we're just going to go with it. But the point is, it's a purpose built application development layer, specific to your particular agenda, that supports your vision. >> Yes. >> Have you essentially built a purpose built paz layer? Or do you just take them off the shelf, standard paz, and cobble it together? >> No, we build it a custom build. Because, as you said, what exist in one cloud might not exist in another cloud provider, right. So, we have to build in this, all these components that a multi-application need. And that goes to machine learning, as I said, transactional analytical system, and the entire thing. So that it can run in isolation physically. >> And the objective is the developer experience will be identical across those clouds? >> Yes, the developers doesn't need to worry about cloud provider. And, actually, our system will have, we didn't talk about it, but a marketplace that we have, which allows, actually, to deliver. >> We're getting there. >> Yeah, okay. (both laughing) I won't divert. >> No, no, let's go there, because the other aspect of super cloud that we've talked about is the ecosystem. You have to enable an ecosystem to add incremental value, it's not the power of many versus the capabilities of one. So, talk about the challenges of doing that. Not just the business challenges but, again, I'm interested in the technical and architectural challenges. >> Yeah, yeah, so, it's really about, I mean, the way we enable our ecosystem and our partners to create value on top of our data cloud, is via the marketplace. Where you can put shared data on the marketplace. Provide listing on this marketplace, which are data sets. But it goes way beyond data. It's all the way to application. So, you can think of it as the iPhone. A little bit more, all right. Your iPhone is great. Not so much because the hardware is great, or because of the iOS, but because of all the applications that you have. And all these applications are not necessarily developed by Apple, basically. So, we are, it's the same model with our marketplace. We foresee an environment where providers and partners are going to build these applications. We call it native application. And we are going to help them distribute these applications across cloud, everywhere in the world, potentially. And they don't need to worry about that. They don't need to worry about how these applications are going to be instantiated. We are going to help them to monetize these applications. So, that unlocks, you know, really, all the partner ecosystem that you have seen, you know, with something like the iPhone, right? It has created so many new companies that have developed these applications. >> Your detractors have criticized you for being a walled garden. I've actually used that term. I used terms like defacto standard, which are maybe less sensitive to you, but, nonetheless, we've seen defacto standards actually deliver value. I've talked to Frank Slootman about this, and he said, Dave, we deliver value, that's what we're all about. At the same time, he even said to me, and I want your thoughts on this, is, look, we have to embrace open source where it makes sense. You guys announced Apache Iceberg. So, what are your thoughts on that? Is that to enable a developer ecosystem? Why did you do Iceberg? >> Yeah, Iceberg is very important. So, just to give some context, Iceberg is an open table format. >> Right. >> Which was first developed by Netflix. And Netflix put it open source in the Apache community. So, we embraced that open source standard because it's widely used by many companies. And, also, many companies have really invested a lot of effort in building big data, Hadoop Solutions, or DataX Solution, and they want to use Snowflake. And they couldn't really use Snowflake, because all their data were in open format. So, we are embracing Iceberg to help these companies move through the cloud. But why we have been reluctant with direct access to data, direct access to data is a little bit of a problem for us. And the reason is when you direct access to data, now you have direct access to storage. Now you have to understand, for example, the specificity of one cloud versus the other. So, as soon as you start to have direct access to data, you lose your cloud data sync layer. You don't access data with API. When you have direct access to data, it's very hard to sync your data. Because you need to grant access, direct access to tools which are not protected. And you see a lot of hacking of data because of that. So, direct access to data is not serving well our customers, and that's why we have been reluctant to do that. Because it is not cloud diagnostic. You have to code that, you need a lot of intelligence, why APIs access, so we want open APIs. That's, I guess, the way we embrace openness, is by open API versus you access, directly, data. >> iPhone. >> Yeah, yeah, iPhone, APIs, you know. We define a set of APIs because APIs, you know, the implementation of the APIs can change, can improve. You can improve compression of data, for example. If you open direct access to data now, you cannot evolve. >> My point is, you made a promise, from governed, security, data sharing ecosystem. It works the same way, so that's the path that you've chosen. Benoit Dogeville, thank you so much for coming on theCube and participating in Supercloud 22, really appreciate that. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, we'll be right back with our next segment, right after this short break. (electronic music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22, this is the cube studio's live performance. We streaming virtually@siliconangledotcomandthecube.net. I'm John for host the cube at Dave Alane with a distinguished panel talking about securing the Supercloud all cube alumni G written house was the CEO of Skyhigh security, Peter Sharma founder of, of QX sold to tenable and Tony qua who's investor. Co-founder former head of product at VMware chance. Thanks for coming on and to our, in all girls super cloud pilot event. >>Good to see you guys big topic. >>Okay. So before we get into secure in the cloud, one of the things that we were discussing before we came on camera was how cloud, the relationship between cloud and on premise and multi-cloud and how Supercloud fits into that. At the end of the day, security's driving a lot of the conversations at the op side and dev shift left is happening. We see that out there. So before we get into it, how do you guys see super cloud Tony? We'll start with you. We'll go down the line. What is Supercloud to you? >>Well, to me, super cloud is really the next evolution, the culmination of the services coming all together, right? As a application developer today, you really don't need to worry about where this thing is. Sit sitting or what's the latency cuz cuz the internet is fast enough. Now I really wanna know what services something provides. What, how do I get access to it now? Security. We'll talk about that later. That that becomes a, a big issue because of the fragmentation of how security is implemented across all the different vendors. So to me it's an IP address I program to it and you know, off we go, but there's a lot of >>You like that pipe happens >>Iceberg chart, right? Like I'm the developer touching the APIs up there. There's a bunch of other things. BU service. >>Okay. Looking forward again. Gee, what's your take? Obviously we've had many conversations on the cube. What's your super cloud update. >>Yeah, so I, I view it as just an extension of what we see today before like maybe 10 years ago we were mashing up applications built on other SAS applications and whatnot. Now we're just extending that down to further primitives, not, we don't really care where our mashup resides, what cloud platform, where it sits to Tony's point, as long as you have an IP address. But beyond that, we're just gonna start to get little micro services and deeper into the applications. >>BP, what should you take? >>I think, I think super cloud to me is something that don't don't exist. It exists only on my laptop. That's the super cloud means to me. I know it takes a lot behind the scene to get that working of and running. But, but essentially, essentially that the everything having be able to touch physically versus not being able to touch anything is super cloud to me. >>So we, what Victoria was saying. Yeah, we see serverless out there, all these cool things happening. Exactly. And you look at the, some of the successful companies that have come in, I call V two cloud. Some are, some are saying the next gen, they're all building on top of the CapEx. I mean, if, why would you not wanna leverage all that work AWS is doing and now Azure, and obviously Google's out there and you got other, other, other clouds out there. But in terms of AWS as a hyperscaler, they're spending all the money and they're getting better. They're getting lower level. We're talking about some of that yesterday, data bricks, snowflake, Goldman Sachs there's industry clouds that could be powerhouse service providers to themselves and their vertical. Then you got specialty clouds. Like there could be a data cloud, there could be an identity cloud. So yeah. How does this sort itself out? How do you guys see that? Because can they coexist? >>But I think they have to right, because I, I think, you know, eventually organizations will get big enough where they can be strong and really market leading in multiple segments. But if you think about what it takes to really build a massive scaled out database company that, that DNA doesn't just overnight translate to identity or translate to video, it takes years to build that up. So in the meantime, all these guys have to understand that they are one part of the service stack to power the next gen solutions. And if they don't play well with each other, then you're gonna have a problem. >>So security, I think is one of the hardest problems of, of super cloud. And not only do you have too many tools and a lack of talent, but you've now got this new first line of defense, which is the cloud. And the problem is you've got multiple clouds. So you've got multiple first lines of defense with multiple cloud provider tools. And then the CISO, I guess, is the next line of defense with the application development team. You know, there to be the pivot point between strategy and execution. And I guess audit is the third line of the defense. So it's an even more complicated environment. So gee, how do you see that CSO role changing and, and can there actually be a unified security layer in Supercloud? >>Yeah, so I believe that that they can be, the role is definitely changing because now a CSO actually has to have a basic understanding of how clouds work, the dependency of clouds on the, on the business that they serve. And, and this is to your point, not only do we have these new lines and opening up in a tax surface, but they're coupled together. So we have supply chain type connections between this. So there's a coherence across these systems that a CISO has to kind of think about not only these Bo cloud boundaries, but the trust boundaries between them. So classic example visibility, wh what, where are these things and what are the dependencies in my business then of course you mentioned compliance. Am I regulatory? And then of course protecting and responding to this, >>You know? Yeah. The, the, the supply chain piece that you just mentioned. I mean, I feel like there's like these milestones stocks, net was a milestone, you know, obvious obviously log four J was another one, the supply chain hack with solar winds. Yep. You know, it's just, the adversary just keeps getting stronger and stronger and, and, and more agile. So, so is this a data? Do we solve this as a data problem? Is it, you know, you can't just throw more infrastructure at it. What are your thoughts >>For it? I think, you know, great, great point that you're brought up. We need to look at things very fundamentally. What is happening is security has the most difficult job in the cloud, especially super cloud. The poor guys are managing some, managing something or securing something that they can't govern, right? Your, your custodian of the cloud as your developers and DevOps, they are the ones who are defining, creating, destroying things in the cloud. And that guy sitting at the end of the tunnel, looking at things that what he gets and he has to immediately respond. That's why it has to be fundamentally solve. Number one, we talked about supply chain. We talked about the, the, the stuck net to wanna cry, to sort of wins, to know the most recent one on the pipeline. Once the interesting phenomena is that the way industry has moved super cloud, the attackers are also moving them super attackers, right? They have stopped. They have not stopped, but they have started slowly moving to the left, which is the governance part. So they have started attacking your source code, you know, impersonating the codes, replacing the binary, finding one is there. So if they can, if the cloud is built so early, why can't I go early and, and, and inject myself. >>So super hackers is coming to super thinking Hollywood right now. I mean, that brings up a good point. I mean, this whole trust thing is huge. I mean, I hear zero trust. I think, wait a minute, that's not the conference I was just at, we went to, we managed, we work with DockerCon and they were talking about trust services. Yeah. So supply chain source code has trust brokering going on. And yet you got zero trust, which is which are they contextually different? I mean, what, what, >>What, from my perspective, though, the same in that zero trust is a framework that starts with minimum privileges and then build up those privileges over time. Normally in today's dialogue, zero trust is around access. I'm not having a broad access. I'm having a narrow access around an application, but you can also extend those principles to usage. What can, how much privilege do I have within an application? I have to build up my trust to enhance and, and get extended privileges within an application. Of course you can then extend this naturally to applications, APIs, applications, talking with each other. And so by you, you have to restrict the attack surface that is based on a trust model fundamentally. And then to your point, I mean, there's always this residual that you have to deal with afterwards. >>So, so super cloud implies more surface area. You're talking about private. So here we go. So how, and by the way, the AWS was supposed to be at this conference. They said they couldn't make it. They had a schedule issue, but they wanted to be here, but I would ask them, how do you differentiate AWS going forward? Do you go IAS all the way? Do you release the pass layer up? How does this solve? Because you have native clouds that are doing great, the complexity on super cloud, and multi-cloud has to be solved. >>Let me offer maybe a different argument. So if you think about we're all old enough to see the history sort of re pendulum shift and it shifting back in a way, if you're arguing that this culmination of all these services in the form of cloud today, essentially moving up stack, then really this is a architectural pattern that's emerging, right? And therefore there needs to be a super cloud, almost operating system. So operating systems, if you build one before you need a scheduler, you need process handler, you need process isolation, you need memory storage, compute all that together. Now that is our sitting in different parts of the internet. And, and there is no operating system. Yes. And that's the gap, right? And so if you don't even have an operating system, how do you implement security? And that's the pain. Yeah, because today it's one off, directly from service to service. Like how many times can you set up SAML orchestration? You can have an entire team doing that, right. If that's, that's what you have to do. So I think that's ultimately the gap and, and we're sort of just revolving around this concept that there's missing an operating system for superpower. >>It's like Maribel Lopez said in the previous panel that Lord of the rings, there will be no one ring rule the ball. Right. Probably there is needs one. Oh yeah. But, but, but, so what happens? So again, security's the hardest problem. So Snowflake's gotta implement its security, you know, data bricks with an open source model has to implement its security. So there's these multiple security models. You talk about zero trust, which I, if, if I infer what you said, gee, it's essentially, if you don't have privilege access, you don't get access. Yeah. Right. If you, okay. Okay. So that's the framework. Fine. And then you gotta earn it over time. Yeah. Now companies like Amazon, they have the, the talent and the skills to implement that zero trust framework. Exactly. So, so the, the industry, you, you guys with the R and D have to actually ultimately build that, that super cloud framework, don't you? >>Yeah. But I would just look all of the major cloud providers, the ones you mentioned and more will have their own framework within their own environment. Right? Yeah. The problem is with super cloud, you're extending it across multiple ones. There's no standards. There's no easy way to integrate that. So now all of that is left to the developer who is like throwing out code as fast as they can >>Is their, their job is to abstract that, I mean, they've gotta secure the, the run time, they gotta secure the container. >>You have to >>Abstract it. Right. Okay. But, but they're not security pros or ops. >>Exactly. They're haves. >>But to, but to G's point, right. If everyone's implementing their own little Z TNA, then inherently, there's a blind trust between two vendors. Right. That has to >>Be, >>That has to be >>Established. That's implicit. You're saying, >>Yeah. But, but it's, it's contractual, it's not technology. Right. Because I'm turning something out in my cloud, you're turning out something in your cloud that says we've got something, some token exchange, which gives us trust. But what happens if that breaks down and whatever happens to the third party comes in? I think that's the problem. >>Yeah. In fact, in fact, the, if I put the, you know, combine one of those commons, the zero trust was build, keeping identity authentication, then authorization in mind, right? Yeah. This needs to be extended because the zero test definition now probably go into integrity. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. I authenticated. I worked well with Tony in the past, but how do I know that something has changed on the Tony's side? Yeah, exactly. Right, right. That, that integrity is going to be very, very foundational. Given developers are building those third party libraries, those source code pumping stuff. The only way I can validate is, Hey, what has changed? >>And then throw edge into the equation, John and IOT and machine to machine. Exactly. It's just, >>Well, >>Yeah. I think, I think we have another example to build on Tony's operating system model. Okay. And that is the cloud access service broker model for SAS. So we, we have these services sitting out there, we've brokered them together. They're normally on user policies. What I can have access to what I can do, what I can't do, but that can be extended down to services and have the same kind of broker arrangement all through APIs. You have to establish that trust and the, and the policies there, and they can be dynamic and all of this stuff. But you can from an, either an operating system or a SAS interaction and integration model come to these same kind of points. So who >>Builds the, the, the secure Supercloud? Is it new guys like you? Is it your old company giants like Palo Alto? Who, who actually builds the and secures the Supercloud it sounds like it's an ecosystem. >>Yeah. It is an ecosystem. Absolutely. It's an ecosystem. >>Yeah. There's no one security Supercloud >>As well. No, but I, I do think there's one, there's one difference in that historically security has always focused on that shiny object. The, the, the, a particular solution to a particular threat when you're dealing with a, a cloud or super cloud, like the number of that is incalculable. So you have to come into some sort of platform. And so you will see if it's not one, you know, a finite number of platform type solutions that are trying to solve this on behalf of the >>Customer. That to your point, then get connected. >>I think it's gonna be like Unix, right? Like how many flavors of Unix were there out there? All of them 'em had a scheduler. All of them had these processes. All of them had their little compilers. You can compile to that system, target to that system. And for a while, it's gonna be very fragmented until multiple parties decide to converge. >>Right? Well, this is, this is the final question we have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll we'll bring you guys back for sure. After the event, what one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation than the challenges for Supercloud. Because remember the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SA they want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think each of you? >>So I, I can start and extending to the previous conversation. I think we need a consortium. We need, we need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate in super cloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS slash or GCP, or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern. And that pattern is what is required for super cloud. In my opinion, otherwise security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything and so on. So forth, it's not gonna be possible. So they need a, they need a framework. They need a consortium. And it, this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers, because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or findings. So that's, in my opinion is, should be the model. >>Well, thank you G >>Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model we've seen in cloud that the scale matters. And once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coals around either a vendor, a business model, whatnot, to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry I think is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >>I, I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look again, history repeating itself, the internet sort of came together around set of I ETF, RSC standards, everybody embraced and extended it. Right. But still there was at least a baseline. Yeah. And I think at that time, the, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves. Right. And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys like Google, let's take an example. They're not gonna win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring, bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody >>Together. Guys, this has been fantastic. I mean, I would just chime in back in the day, those was proprietary nosis proprietary network protocols. You had kind of an enemy to rally around. I'm not sure. I see an enemy out here right now. So the clouds are doing great. Right? So it's a tough one, but I think super OS super consortiums, super business models are gonna emerge. Thanks so much for spending the time. Great conversation. Thank you for having us to bring, keep going hour superclouds here in Palo Alto, live coverage stream virtually I'm John with Dave. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage. This break.

(bright music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante, with the opening keynote conversation with Vittorio Viarengo. He's the Vice President of Cross-Cloud at VMware, Cube Alumni. Vittorio, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, my pleasure. >> So you're kicking off the Supercloud event. Again, a pilot. Again, we were texting just a few months ago around some of the momentum. You identified this right away. You saw it, you saw the momentum. What's the reality around supercloud? What's your perspective? >> Well, I think that we have to go back to the history of IT, over the last ever. I feel like in IT, we're always running after the developers. The developers, they're smart. They go for the path of least resistance, and they create innovations, and then the entire stacks moves around, and if you look at developers over the last, you know, 15 years, they've been going to the cloud, right? And the reason they're going for the cloud is, you now, they say software is eating the world. Is really who builds software? Developers, so I think it's developers are eating the world, and so initially, there was one game in town, so they went with AWS, but eventually, we got the multiple clouds, and now, the reality is that the applications there, it's how we make money, how we save money. They're running on multiple cloud, the 75% of the companies running on multiple clouds today, and so, I think that creates the new computing platform for the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years, and I think that that multi-cloud world brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked, but also some challenges, and it's prime to a simplification, and that's where we're trying. >> One of the things we observe is this abstraction layer across clouds to create a consistent experience for customers, and very importantly, as you point out, developers. So when you think about the history of abstractions, we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s, which is really different, as you pointed out, that we had in the 2010s, where there was really, you know, one main cloud. Now, you have all these clouds. What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions? >> Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction to unleash the next level of growth, right? I grew up as a... I started my career as a C++ developer. So initially, you know, on Windows, if you wanted to open a window on the screen, you had to write 200 lines of code. Then the MFC library came in, and now, you still have to be a C++ developer, but now, with a one line of code, you can initiate, open the yellow world and start to build your applications, but it's only when Visual Basic comes along, then now, we get five millions developers building applications that are 20 years later, we're still using, okay? And then the list goes on and on, and in the application integration, we used to look at the bytes on the bus and say, "Okay, this is the customers, and we're going to map it to SAP," and then we went one level higher with SOA and web services and the rest of history, and then unleashed tremendous, you know, growth and look at, you know, how we now, you know, we be able to throw APIs, integrate anything, and so then the ultimate example of abstraction is virtualization. We made all these different servers and networking and storage look like one, and now, you know, and the business never cares if you're running SAP back on-prem on HP or some other piece of hard drive. They care that it runs, right? And so I think that now, we need to bring a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only abstracts the low level APIs at the highest level, but also uniforms and unify the APIs and the way do management and security across multiple cloud. >> Let's unpack that because I think the virtualization angle is interesting 'cause with virtualization enabled AWS. If you look at AWS' success, virtualization, the Hypervisor, got them going, and that established that value. Now, the new structural change is happening. How do you define that specifically? What is supercloud in your mind? >> So in our mind, supercloud is a set of cloud native services that, first of all... Let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization. Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem and is no wonder that AWS and Azure, they did it on their cloud, right? But the lingo franca of the cloud is not the virtualization layer. That's taken, it's hidden. It's down there, it just does its thing. The lingo franca of cloud is microservices, API, Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and one would think, "Okay, now, we have Kubernetes, life is good. I just, you know, deploy on- Well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution, and so to us, the supercloud is the ability to take, to factor out the common things that you can do across cloud and give you a single pane or glass to manage your application and single pipeline so you can build your application once and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds, and then, basically, factor out the other two important things with the security and observability of the application. >> One of the trade-offs of abstraction, you go back to the mainframe. They had to squeeze out the performance overheads. VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it. So are we going to see that across clouds with multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. Are you going to see a trade-off? What trade-off do you see that the industry, technically, has to attack? >> Abstractions are always about trade-offs, right? You're trading off the speed. You know, I'm writing C++ code goes really fast for scale. You know, now, I have five million developers writing applications, but I think, eventually, what happens is that or you're trading off specialized skills for, you know, more valuable skills, and if I had a dollar every time I heard, "Oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization," well, or the JVM is too slow, but guess what? How many Java developers, how many Java application are running out on the JVM? So I think, eventually, there will be trade-offs, but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like how much value are you getting in terms of scales and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off you were making on the lower level. >> On the evolution of hybrid cloud, 'cause right now, hybrid cloud is a steady state. People see that clearly, you know, on-premise and Edge, right around the corner. Public native cloud, there's benefits to be in the native cloud. How does multi-cloud fit? 'Cause by default, people have multiple clouds. If they run on Azure, they probably have some sort of productivity software with Microsoft or other Microsoft products, but it's best to breed. It's not yet connected. So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing. It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds, yet some people are thinking about it. So we think, and I think you might agree, that multi-cloud will happen, multiple clouds in the sense of workloads running seamlessly. Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future? (men laugh) >> So there is a lot of unpack there. First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that because most customers are operating their on-prem as the cloud, so the moment you have your on-prem cloud and AWS, your multi-cloud, so 75%, 85% going to 85%- >> You mean Private Cloud on-premise cloud operations? >> Yeah, and then you have another cloud, you're already multi-cloud. >> I'm assuming the experiences is identical, right? That's the assumption you- >> Well, initially, it's not identical, right? That's why you need a supercloud, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And most customers though are in denial, meaning that I see them being in five stages of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud. One is denial. We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud. We're standardized. The second one is euphoria. Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go. All these developers are happy to do whatever they want, and then the third one is like, holy crap. They got the first bill. They realize that the security share responsibility model to deal with. They realize that somebody is to deploy this application and manage the application. Nobody does it for them, and then they go into like, (indistinct). Okay, now, we need to do something about this, right? It's a new normal, and then you end up with the enlightment, right? Now, we're really being productive and strategic about how we use multi-cloud. Very, very few customers are in that stage. Most customers are still within the denial and the new normal, and within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as, "Okay, I have an application here, an application there. Okay, great, big deal." The next level is, "Okay, I have an application here that uses a pieces of a service of an application over there. Okay, now, I'm coordinating application. I'm using microservices," and then the third stage is like, "Okay, I am designing my application to use multiple services or multiple cloud because each uses differentiated features of that particular cloud." >> Is it part of the problem too, Vittorio, that the industry, the technology industry, you guys have not caught up. The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem. What's VMware doing to solve that problem? >> So we have seen this coming four or five years ago, right? That's why we acquired Pivotal, and then we made a number of acquisition around it because we saw that... Well, let's go back. What is VMware DNA? If you look, I've been running engineering, product management in the company then I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side, but I've seen, and I sweat with those engineers, and when I look at those engineers, these people know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and deliver value, and so if we go back to, you know, on-prem, we did it with virtualization. In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction, which is, you know, at the APIs at the... And so over the last five years, we built what we believe is very comprehensive portfolio that unified how you build, you run, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. No Hypervisor required. >> So that's the game changer right there. So let me ask you a question. How does the choice factor come in because can VMware do all this or do they need to rely on partners? Because most customers have HashiCorp and other companies in there doing services for them as well. So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach? Can you do it alone or are you going to need help from the ecosystem? >> First of all, if you look at the success of your event today, look how many vendors from multiple backgrounds and multiple level of the stack that are coming together to talk about the supercloud. So that to me is success already, and, of course, there are tremendous companies that are going to deliver fantastic value for, you know, management like HashiCorp or security and the development experience. Our approach is to bring them together as an integrated platform, and I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles, the investment to be able to pull that off. >> Okay, you saw Keith Townsend. He had that very cool blackboard, and he called, this was maybe eight or nine months ago, he called the supercloud and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational. When is this going to be real? >> I think it's absolutely real today in some of the pieces. Right, there's always an aspiration. You have to look at a company like VMware as a company that looks out five, 10 years, right? You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know, which is a technical visionary, and so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud, and we invested in first part of the stack. What is it? How to build applications natively in the cloud using Tanzu. So with Tanzu, you can build application, manage Kubernetes cluster, secure, creating this service match, and so that's the reality today. Then on the next step is security. We recently announced our security approach. We have a very peculiar position in the stack to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint, not just, you know, in the application, but in between, right? By looking at all the Hypervisor, if you're using Hypervisor. You looking at East-West traffic with NSX and cross cloud networks, and so these are the three main places that are in place today, right? And then I cannot spoil our user conference coming in a couple of weeks where we're going to make more announcement around the supercloud, which we called cross-cloud services. >> Vittorio, I remember in 2016, I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu when they announced the deal with VMware. VMware and AWS had the relationship, and you're running on the cloud on AWS VMware, and you look at what's happened since, and this is where the supercloud conversation starts to kick in where Amazon's really good at moving bits around and optimizing the power and the silicon of the infrastructure, which means that the higher level services are going to be much more open for people to innovate around. So Dave calls it, the super pass. This area platform is a service to change the SaaS game. So I have to ask you, how do you see the SaaS game changing with supercloud? Because if you have a Private Cloud or Edge, you're now multiple clouds, technically, as you pointed out. How has that changed the SaaS configuration? Because SaaS and IaaS and PaaS had great relationships in native clouds to solve problems. Now, you have the multi-cloud. How do you see this platform as a service area changing or maybe enabling? >> So I think that that's where the innovation, the ability to aggregate common... Because look, there is a reason why people use multiple cloud, right? They choose it because they have differentiated features. So we don't want to ever hide those features, like if you're using Google, because you need AI capabilities, absolutely. We don't want to prevent that, right? But at the PaaS level, you know, when you are orchestrated these microservices, you don't want to do it in five different ways, right? So those are the areas where I think are prime for aggregation and simplification. How you, you know, look at all this Kubernetes environment and being able to monitor your application and force security policies, both from a resource consumption, this group of developers can only use this many resources, but also a run time that you don't run out of like, you know, you get that bill shock, and so those are the areas where I think there's this more ability for us to innovate and deliver value, not at the lower level which is taken by the- >> So you try to have your cake and eat it too, which is if you can pull that off it's game over, right? You have a specific set of cross-cloud services that are unique and value added that are differentiable in the industry, but at the same time, you're trying to give access to developers, if in fact, they want access to those primitives, right? >> Yeah. >> That's a bold aspiration. >> Well, we want to have the cake, eat it, and lose weight. (men laugh) But seriously, I think, going back to your point about the ecosystem, of course, we're not going to do it alone, right? If we were doing it alone, there is not a market, right? And so I think that the market is so big and the area of challenges for IT is so large that there's room for many companies to add value, and I think that, as I said, our approach is to, you know, we're a platform company, right? So you're going to find tremendous companies that will solve one problem for multiple clouds. You're going to find the hyperscaler that have a platform approach for one cloud. We like to think that we can position ourself in that two by two as the company that has a platform approach across multiple clouds. >> You know, it's great. That's where we've known each other for a long time. It's 12 years of "CUBE" coverage. Watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work, watching cloud native kind of go that next level's been fun to watch, and the developers have had a great run. I mean, open sources booming, developer goodness is out there. People are shifting left, a lot of great stuff going with containers and Kubernetes. So looking good on the developer experience front right now, and I think it's only going to get better, but developers don't think about locking. They just want to get the job done. Move on to the next line of code. It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying, "Hey, we love this, too, but we got to align with the developer." Level up, so to speak. So ops and security teams are saying, "Hey, I got to run this with automation with the higher level services." So there seems to be a focus around the supercloud conversation around ops teams. This is your wheelhouse, VMware. You guys do a lot of IT operations and things of that nature. How do you see that and what's the message cross-cloud brings to and supercloud brings to the development teams and the ops teams who are really going to be doing DevOps together and/or faster? >> I think if you go back to what where we started, right? Developers run the show, and I think there's been a little bit of inertia in IT organization on the op side and the security side in catching up to see how to catch up to where developers are, right? And with the DevOps revolution, if operators don't really understand what the developers need and get ahead of that, they're going to be left behind. So I'll give you an example, like SMB Global, one of our customers, their band runs their operation. Basically, told me I had to sit down and figure out what these developers were doing because I was being left behind and then or Cerner, one of our partners and customers, same thing they say, okay, we sat down. We realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers and set those guard rails, right? These are the Kubernetes environment you want to use? Okay, this is how we're going to set them up. This is want to make sure that we shift left security, that we have a single pipeline that feeds that, and Cerner, using our technology was able to... They made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler, was going to go unnamed to another hyperscaler, It was going to go unnamed, and they managed to change all the deployments in four hours. So that's the power of the supercloud, being able to say, "Hey, developers, do whatever you want, but these are the guard rails, and we're going to be able to like stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility, but also, make sure that operation and security, as a saying." >> Shift left shield right, basically. >> Awesome, awesome stuff. We've got 15 seconds. What is supercloud? What's the bumper sticker? >> The supercloud is a level of abstraction across any of the public clouds that allows developers to go fast, operators to make sense of what's happening, security to enforce security, and end users to access any application with a great user experience and security. >> And it's inclusive of on-prem. I'll just throw that in. (John laughs) >> All right, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're going to have a industry panel to talk about and debate Supercloud 22. We'll be right back after this break.

[digital Music] >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE," Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." We got a very special distinguished CUBE alumni here, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix. Great to see you. Thanks for coming by the show. >> Good to be here, John. >> We've had many conversations in the past about what you guys have done. Again, the perfect storm is coming, innovation. You guys are in an interesting position and the Supercloud kind of points this out. We've been discussing about how multi-cloud is coming. Everyone has multiple clouds, but there's real structural change happening right now in customers. Now there's been change that's happened, cloud computing, cloud operations, developers are doing great, but now something magical's happening in the industry. We wanted to get your thoughts on that, that's called Supercloud. >> Indeed. >> How do you see this shift? I mean, devs are doing great. Ops and security are trying to get cloud native. What's happening in your opinion? >> Yeah, in fact, we've been talking about something very, very similar. I like the term supercloud. We've been calling it hybrid multicloud essentially, but the point being, companies are running their applications and managing their data. This is lifeblood for them. And where do they sit? Of course, some of these will sit in the public cloud. Some of these are going to sit inside their data centers and some of these applications increasingly are going to run in edges. And now what most companies struggle with is every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, their edge is different and they then have a scarcity of staff. Operating models are different. Security is different. Everything about it is different. So to your point, people are using multiple clouds and multiple locations. But you need to think about cloud as an operating model and what the supercloud or hyper multicloud delivers is really a consistent model, consistent operating model. One way for IT teams to operate across all of these environments and deliver an agile infrastructure as a service model to their developers. So that from a company's managed point of view, they can run their stuff wherever they want to, completely with consistency, and the IT teams can help support that easily. >> You know, it's interesting. You see a lot of transformation, certainly from customers, they were paying a lot of operating costs for IT. Now CapEx is covered by, I mean, CapEx now is covered by the cloud, so it's OpEx. They're getting core competencies and they're becoming very fluent in cloud technologies. And at the same time the vendors are saying, "Hey, you know, buy our stuff." And so you have the change over, how people relate to each other, vendors and customers, where there's a shared model where, okay, you got use cases for the cloud and use cases on-premise, both CapEx, both technology. You mentioned that operating model, Where's the gap? 'Cause nobody wants complexity, and you know, the enterprise, people love to add, solve complexity with more complexity. >> That's exactly the problem. You just hit the nail on the head, which is enterprise software tends to be very complex. And fundamentally complexity has been a friend for vendors, but the point being, it's not a friend for a company that's trying to manage their IT infrastructure. It's an an enemy because complexity means you need to train your staff, you need very specialized teams, and guess what? Talent is perhaps the most scarce thing out there, right? People talk about, you know, in IT, they always talk about people, process, technology. There's plenty of technology out there, but right now there's a big scarcity of people, and I think that talent is a major issue. And not only that, you know, it's not that we have as many specialized people who know storage, who know compute, who know networking. Instead, what you're getting is a bunch of new college grads coming in, who have generalized skill sets, who are used to having a consumer like experience with their experience with software and applications, and they want to see that from their enterprise software vendors. >> You know, it's just so you mentioned that when the hyper converged, we saw that movie that was bringing things together. Now you're seeing the commoditization of compute storage and networking, but yet the advancement of higher level services and things like Kubernetes for orchestration, that's an operating opportunity for people to get more orchestration, but that's a trade off. So we're seeing a new trend in the supercloud where it's not all Kubernetes all the time. It's not all AWS all the time. It's the new architecture, where there's trade offs. How do you see some of these key trade offs? I know you talked to a lot of your customers, they're kind of bringing things together, putting things together, kind of a day zero mentality. What are some of those key trade offs and architectural decision points? >> So there's a couple of points there, I think. First is that most customers are on a journey of thoughts and their journey is, well, they want to have a modern infrastructure. Many of them have on-prem footprints, and they're looking to modernize that infrastructure. They're looking to adopt cloud operating models. They're looking to figure out how they can extend and leverage these public clouds appropriately. The problem is when they start doing this, they find that everything is different. Every little piece, every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, and this results in a lot of complexity. In some ways, we at Nutanix solved this problem within data centers by converging separate silos of high computer storage and network. That's what we did with HCI. And now this notion of supercloud is just simply about converging different clouds and different data. >> Kind of the same thing. >> And on-prem and edges, right? Trying to bring all of these together rather than having separate teams, separate processes, separate technologies for every one of these, try to create consistency, and it makes life a lot simpler and easier. >> Yeah, I wanted to connect those dots because I think this is kind of interesting with the supercloud was, you get good at something in one cloud, then you bring that best practice and figure out how to make that work across edge and on-premise, which is, I mean, basically cloud operations. >> Exactly. It's cloud operations, which is why we say it's a cloud is an operating model. It's a way you operate your environment, but that environment could be anywhere. You're not restricted to it being in the public cloud. It's in your data center, that's in the edges. >> Okay, so when I hear about substrates, abstraction layers, I think two things, innovation cause you extract away complexity, then I also think about from the customer's perspective, maybe, lock-in. >> Yes. >> Whoa, oh, promises, promises. Lock in is a fear and ops teams and security teams, they know the downside of lock-in. >> Yes. >> Choice is obviously important. Devs don't care. I mean, like, whatever runs the software, go faster, but ops and security teams, they want choice, but they want functionality. So, what's that trade off? Talk about this lock-in dynamic, and how to get around. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's been some of the fundamental tenants of what we do. I mean, of course, people don't like lock-in, but they also want simplicity. And we provide both. Our philosophy is we want to make things as simple as possible. And that's one of the big differentiators that we have compared to other players. Our whole mission inside the company is to make things simple. But at the same time, we also want to provide customers with that flexibility and every layer in the stack, you don't want to lock to your point. So, if at the very bottom hardware, choice of hardware. Choice of hardware could be any of the vendors you work with or public cloud, Bare Metal. When you look at hypervisor, lots of choices. You got VMware, you got our own Ahv, which is KBM-based open source hypervisor, no lock-in there, provide complete flexibility. Then we have a storage stack, a distributor storage stack, which we provide. And then of course layers about that. Kubernetes, pick your Kubernetes, runtime of choice. Pick your Kubernetes, orchestrator and management of choice. So our whole goal is to provide that flexibility at every layer in the stack, allowing the customer to make the choice. They can decide how much they want to go with the full stack or how much they want to go piecemeal it, and there's a trade off there. And they get more flexibility, but at the cost of a little bit more complexity, and that, I think, is the trade off that each customer has to weigh. >> Okay, you guys have been transforming for many, many years. We've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE to software. >> Yes. >> I know you have hardware as well, but also software services. And you've been on the cloud bandwagon years ago, and now you made a lot of progress. What's the current strategy for you guys? How do you fit in? 'Cause public cloud has great use cases, great examples of success there, but that's not the only game in town. You've got on-premise and edge. What are you guys doing? What specifically are customers leaning on you for? How are you providing that value? What's the innovation strategy? >> Very simply, we provide a cloud software platform today. We don't actually sell anymore hardware. They're not on our books anymore. We're a pure software company. So we sell a cloud soft platform on top of which our customers can run all their applications, including the most mission critical applications. And they can use our platform wherever, to your point, on the supercloud. I keep coming back to that. We started out with our on-prem genes. That's where we started. We've extended that to Azure and AWS. And we are extending, of course, we've always been very strong when it came to the edge and extending that out to the edge. And so today we have a cloud platform that allows our customers to run these apps, whatever the apps may be, and manage all their data because we provide structured and unstructured data, blocks, files, objects, are all part of the platform. And we provide that in a consistent way across all of these locations, and we deliver the cloud operating model. >> So on the hardware thing, you guys don't have hardware anymore. >> We don't sell hardware anymore. We work with a whole range of hardware partners, HP, Dell, Supermicro, name it, Lenovo. >> Okay, so if I'm like a Telco and I want to build a data center at my tower, which could be only a few boxes, who do I buy that from? >> So you buy the software from us and you can buy the hardware from your choice of hardware partners. >> So yeah, whoever's selling the servers at that point. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so you send on the server. >> Yeah, we send on the server. >> Yeah, sound's good. So no hardware, so back to software that could transfer. How's that going, good? >> It's gone very well because, you know, we made two transformations. One is of course we were selling appliances when we started out, and then we started selling software, and now it's all fully subscription. So we're 100% subscription company. So our customers are buying subscriptions. They have the flexibility to get whatever duration they want. Again, to your philosophy, there's no lock-in. There is no long term lock-in here. We are happy if a customer chooses us for a year versus three years, whatever they like. >> I know that you've been on the road with customers this summer. It's been great to get out and see people in person. What are you learning? What are they viewing? What's their new Instagram picture of Nutanix? How do they see you? And how do you want them to see you? >> What they've seen us in the past has been, we created this whole category of HCI, Hyperconverged Infrastructure. They see us as a leader there and they see us as running some of their applications, not necessarily all their applications, especially at the very big customers. In the smaller customers, they run everything on us, but in the bigger customers, they run some workload, some applications on us. And now what they see is that we are now, if taking them on the journey, not only to run all their applications, whatever, they may be, including the most mission critical database workloads or analytics workloads on our platform, but also help them extend that journey into the public cloud. And so that's the journey we are on, modernized infrastructure. And this is what most of our customers are on. Modernizing the infrastructure, which we help and then creating a cloud operating model, and making that available everywhere. >> Yeah, and I think one, that's a great, and again, that's a great segue to supercloud, which I want to get your thoughts on because AWS, for example, spent all that CapEx, they're called the hyperscaler. They got H in there and that's a hyperscale in there. And now you can leverage that CapEx by bringing Nutanix in, you're a hyperscale-like solution on-premise and edge. So you take advantage of both. >> Absolutely. >> The success. >> Exactly. >> And a trajectory of cloud, so your customers, if I get this right, have all the economies of scale of cloud, plus the benefits of the HCI software kind of vibe. >> Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples how this plays out in the real world based on all my travels here. >> Yeah, please do. So we just put out a case study on a customer called FSP. They're a betting company, online betting company based out of the UK. And they run on our platform on-prem, but what they saw was they had to expand their operations to Asia and they went to Taiwan. And the problem for them was, they were told they had to get in business in Taiwan within a matter of a month, and they didn't know how to do it. And then they realized that they could just take the exact same software that they were running on our platform, and run it in an AWS region sitting in Taiwan. And they were up in business in less than a month, and they had now operations ready to go in Asia. I mean, that's a compelling business value. >> That's agile, that's agile. >> Agile. >> That's agile and a great... >> Versus the alternative would be weeks, months. >> Months, first of all, I mean, just think about, they have to open a data center, which probably takes them, they have to buy the hardware, which, you know, with supply chain deliveries, >> Supply chain. and God knows how long that takes. >> Oh God, yeah. >> So compared to all that here, they were up and running within a matter of a month. It's a, just one example of a very compelling value proposition. >> So you feel good about where you guys are right now relative to these big waves coming? >> Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of big waves coming and. >> What are the biggest ones that you see? >> Well, I mean, I think there's clearly one of the big ones, of course, out there is Broadcom buying VMware or potentially buying VMware and great company. I used to work there for many years and I have a lot of respect for what VMware has done for the industry in terms of virtualization of servers and creating their entire portfolio. >> Is it true you're hiring a lot of VMware folks? >> Yes, I mean a lot of them coming over now in anticipation, we've been hiring our fair share, but they're going other places too. >> A lot of VMware alumni at Nutanix now. >> Yes, there are certainly, we have our share of VMware alumni. We also have a share of alumni from others. >> We call the V mafia, by the way. (laughs) >> I dunno about the V mafia, but. But it's a great company, but I think right now a lot of customers are wondering what's going to happen, and therefore, they are looking at potentially what are the other alternatives? And we are very much front and center in that discussions. >> Well, Dave Alante and I, and the team have been very bullish on on-premise cloud operations. You guys are doing there. How would you describe the supercloud concept to a customer when they say, "Hey, what's the supercloud? "It's becoming a thing. "How would you describe what it is and the benefits?" >> Yeah, and I think the first thing is to tell them, what problem are you looking to solve? And the problem for them is, they have applications everywhere. They have data everywhere. How do their teams run and deal with all of this? And what they find is the way they're doing it today is different operating platform for every one of these. If you're on Amazon, it's one platform. If you're an Azure, it's another. If you're on-prim, it's a third. If you want to go to the edge, probably fourth, and it's a messy, complex thing for their IT teams. What a supercloud does is essentially unify all of these into a consistent operating model. You get a cloud operating model, you get the agility and the benefits, but with one way of handling your compute storage network needs, one way of handling your security policies, and security constructs, and giving you that, so such a dramatic simplification on the one side, and it's a dramatic enabler because it now enables you to run these applications wherever you want completely free. >> Yeah. It really bridges the cloud native. It kind of the interplay on the cloud between SAS and IAS, solves a lot of problems, highly integrated, that takes that model to the complexity of multiple environments. >> Exactly. >> That's a super cool environment. >> (John speaks over Rajiv) Across any environment, wherever. It's changing this thing from cloud being associated with the public cloud to cloud being available everywhere in a consistent way. >> And that's essentially the goodness of cloud, going everywhere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but that extension is what you call a supercloud. >> Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. I know you're super valuable, and you got a company to run. One final question for you. The edge is exploding. >> Yes. >> It's super dynamic. We kind of all know it's there. The industrial edge. You got the IOT edge and just the edge in general. On-premise, I think, is hybrid, it's the steady state, looking good. Everything's good. It's getting better, of course, things with cloud native and all that good stuff. What's your view of the edge? It's super dynamic, a lot of shifting, OT, IT, that's actually transformed. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Huge industrial thing. Amazon is buying, you know, industrial robots now. >> Yes. >> Space is around the corner, a lot of industrial advance with machine learning and the software side of things, so the edge is exploding. >> Yeah, you know, and I think one of the interesting things about that exploding edge is that it tends to be both compute and data heavy. It's not this notion of very thin edges. Yes, you've got thin edges too, of course, which may just be sensors on the one hand, but you're seeing an increased need for compute and storage at the edges, because a lot of these are crunching, crunching applications that require a crunch and generate a lot of data, crunch a lot of data. There's latency requirements that require you and there's even people deploying GPUs at the edges for image recognition and so forth, right? So this is. >> The edge is the data center now. >> Exactly. Think of the edge starting to look at the edge of the mini data center, but one that needs to be highly automated. You're not going to be able to put people at every one of these locations. You've got to be able to do all your services, lifecycle management, everything completely remove. >> Self-healing, all this good stuffs. >> Exactly. It has to be completely automated and self-healing and upgradeable and you know, life cycle managed from the cloud, so to speak. And so there's going to be this interlinkage between the edge and the cloud, and you're going to actually, essentially what you need is a cloud managed edge. >> Yeah, and this is where the super cloud extends, where you can extend the value of what you're building to these dynamically new emerging, and it's just the beginning. There'll be more. >> Oh, there's a ton of new applications emerging there. And I think that's going to be, I mean, there's people out there who code that half of data is going to be generated at the edge in a couple of years. >> Well, Rajiv, I am excited that you can bring the depth of technical architectural knowledge to the table on supercloud, as well as run a company. Congratulations on your success, and thanks for sharing with us and being part of our community. >> No, thank you, John, for having me on your show. >> Okay. Supercloud 22, we're continuing to open up the conversation. There is structural change happening. We're going to watch it. We're going to make it an open conversation. We're not going to make a decision. We're going to just let everyone discuss it and see how it evolves and on the best in the business discussing it, and we're going to keep it going. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, your host of "The Cube." We're here for a live performance in studio bringing all the thought leaders around this concept of Supercloud, which is a consortium of the smartest people in the industry, the the Cloudaratti some say, or just people in the field building out next generation Cloud technologies for businesses, for the industry, you know, software meets infrastructure at scale and platforms. All great stuff. We have an expert here, Cube alumni and friend of ours, Howie Xu, VP of machine learning and AI at Zscaler, hugely successful company, platform, whatever you want to call it. They're definitely super clouding in their own. Howie, great to see you. Thanks for spending time with us to unpack and grock the direction of the industry that we see. We call it Supercloud. >> Hey, John, great to be back. I'm expecting a nice very educational and interesting conversation here again. >> Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I love talking with you about is you're deep on the technology side, as well as you got the historian view like we do. We've seen the movies before, we've seen the patterns, and now we're seeing structural change that has happened, that's cloud. Thank you very much, AWS. And as your GCP and others. Now we're seeing structural change happening in real time and we want to talk about it as it's happening. This is the purpose of this event. And that is that Cloud is one. Okay, great Cloud operations, on premises and Edge are emerging. Software is open source. It's the perfect storm for innovation and new things are emerging. You're seeing companies like Snowflake, and Databricks, and Zscaler all building great products. But now it's not one thing anymore. It's a lot of things going on. So what is your take on Supercloud? How do you see this evolving? What is some of the structural change that's happening in your mind? >> Yeah, so when you first reached out a few weeks ago about this event, I was like, "Hey, what is Supercloud." I know you tweeted a little bit here and there, but I never really, you know, double clicked, right. So I actually listened to some of your episodes you know, the previous conversations. You know, I would say the way you define Supercloud is it's not just the multi-cloud. The multi-Cloud is probably one aspect of it, right. You know, it's actually more beyond that, right. You know, a little bit, you know, towards past, a little bit more towards the flexibility, and then, you know, including, and also you want to include the on-prem, the edge, not just the Big 3 cloud, right. So there is a lot of the, let's say hybrid, more inclusive, right. So, the way I look at it is it's now very different from my imagination of where the Cloud would be, should be 10, 12 years ago. Because, you know, at that time it was, you know, on-prem dominant and then we say, hey, let's go cloud. I never for a second thought, you know, we would've ditch the on-prem completely, right. You know, on-prem has its own value. It's own kind of characteristics we wanted to keep, right. But the way we went for the last 10 years is, hey, Cloud, Cloud everywhere. We embrace Cloud. You know, the way I look at architecture is always very much like a pendulum, right? We swung from decentralized in the mainframe days, you know back in the days, to more distributed, right, PC, kind of a architecture, you know, servers in your own data center. And then to the now, the Cloud, the Big 3 Cloud in particular, right. I think in the next 10, 15, 20 years, it will swing back to more decentralized, more distributed architecture again. Every time you have a swing, because there is some fundamental reason behind that, we all knew the reason behind the current swing to the Cloud. It's because hey, the on-prem data center was too complex, right. You know, too expensive, right. You know, it would've take at least the six months to get any business application going, right. So compared to Cloud, a swipe a credit card, frictionless, you know, pay as you go, it's so great. But I think we are going to see more and more reason for people to say, "Hey, I need a architecture the other way around because of the decentralized the use case," right. Web3 is one example. Even though Web3 is still, you know, emerging right, very, very early days. But that could be one reason, right? You mentioned the Zscaler is kind of a Supercloud of its own, right? We always embrace public Cloud, but a lot of the workloads is actually on our own, you know, within our own data center. We take advantage of the elasticity of the public Cloud, right. But we also get a value, get a performance of our private Cloud. So I want to say a company like Zscaler taking advantage of the Supercloud already, but there will be more and more use cases taking advantage. >> And the use cases are key. Let me just go back and share something we had on the panel earlier in the day, the Cloudaratti Panel. Back in 2008, a bunch of us were getting together and we kind of were riffing, oh yeah, the future's going to be web services and Clouds will talk to each other, workloads can work across this (indistinct) abstraction layer, APIs is going to be talking to each other. A little bit early but we tried to think about it in terms of the preferred architecture. Okay, way too early. Yeah. AWS was just getting going, really kind of pumping on all cylinders there, getting that trajectory up. But it was use case driven. The nirvana never happened. I mean, we were talking Supercloud back then with the Cloudaratti group and we were thinking, okay, hey this is cool. But it was just an evolutionary thing. So I want to get your reaction. Today, the use cases are different. It's not just developers deploying on public Cloud to get all those greatness and goodness of the Cloud, to your point about Zscaler and others, there's on premises use cases and edge use cases emerging. 5g is right there. That's going to explode. So, the use cases now are all Cloud based. Again, this is an input into what we're seeing around Supercloud. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? And how do you see that evolving so that the methodologies and all the taxonomies are in place for the right solution? >> Right, I mean, you know, some of the use cases are already here, you know, have been here for the last few years. And again, I mentioned a Zscaler, right. The reason that a Zscaler needs the on-prem version of it is because it's impossible to route all the traffic to the Big 3 Cloud, because they're still far away. Sometimes you need the presence much closer to you in order for you to get the level of the performance latency you want, right. So that's why Zscaler has, you know, so many data center of our own instead of leveraging the public Cloud, you know, for most part. However, public Cloud is still super important for Zscaler. I can tell you a story, right. You know, two years ago, you know, at the beginning of the pandemics, everyone started working from home suddenly, right. You are talking about Fortune 500 companies with 200,000 employees, suddenly having 200,000 employees working from home. Their VPN architecture is not going to support that kind of the workload, right? Even Zscaler's own architecture or the presence is not enough. So overnight we just, having so many new workloads, to support this work from home, the zero trust network for our customers, literally overnight. So it wouldn't have happened without public Cloud. So we took advantage of the public Cloud. Yet at the same time, for many, many use cases that Zscaler is paying attention to in terms of the zero trust architecture, the latency, the latency guarantee aspect, the cost is so important. So we kind of take it advantage of both. >> Yeah, definitely. >> Today you may say, hey, you know, Zscaler is one of the, not a majority of the companies in terms of the Cloud adoption or public Cloud adoption, right. But I can say that, yeah, that's because it's more infrastructure, security infrastructure. It's a little bit different for some of the communication applications, right. Why not just support everything on the public Cloud? That's doable today. However, moving forward next to 5, 10, 15 years, we expect to see Web3 kind of the use cases to grow more and more. In those kind of decentralized use cases, I can totally see that we, you know, the on-prim presence is very important. >> Yeah. One of the things we're seeing with Supercloud that we're kind of seeing clarity on is that there's a lot of seamless execution around, less friction around areas that require a PhD or hard work. And you're seeing specialty Superclouds, apps, identity data security. You're also seeing vertical clouds, Goldman Sachs doing financial applications. I'm sure there'll be some insurance. People in these verse. Building on top of the CapEx on one Cloud really fast and moving to others. So that's clearly a trend. The interesting thing I want to get your thoughts on, Howie, on an architectural basis is in Cloud, public Cloud generally, SaaS depends on IAS. So there's an interplay between SaaS and the infrastructures of service and pass as well. But SaaS and IAS, they solve a lot of the problems. You mentioned latency. How do you see the interplay of these Superclouds that utilize the SaaS IS relationship to solve technical problems? So in architecturally, that's been a tight integration on these Clouds, but now as you get more complexity with Supercloud, how do you see SaaS applications changing? >> Yeah, I view the Supercloud is actually reduced the complexity. The reason I'm saying that is, think about it in the world where you have predominantly public Cloud kind of the architecture, right? 10 years ago, AWS has probably 20 services. Now they probably have, you know, more than 1,000 services. Same thing with Azure, same thing with GCP. I mean, who can make sense out of it, right. You know, if you just consume the eyes or the Big 3 Cloud service as is. You know, you need a PhD these days to make sense all of them. So the way I think about Supercloud or where, you know it is going, is it has to provide more simplicity, a better way for people to make sense out of it, right. Cause if I'm an architecture and I have to think, hey, this is a public Cloud, this is a multi-Cloud, and by the way, certain things need to be run on the on-prem. And how do I deal with the uniform nature of it? My mind would blow up. So I need a higher level abstraction. That higher level abstraction will hide the complexity of the where it is, which vendor. It will only tell me the service level, right. You know, we always say, you know, the Cloud is like electricity. I only wanted to know is that like 110 volt or 220, 240, whatever that is. I don't really want to know more than that, right. So I want to say a key requirement for the Supercloud is it's reduced the complexity, higher level abstraction. It has to be like that. >> And operational consistencies at the bottom. Howie, we have one minute left. I want to get your thoughts. I'd like you to share what you're working on that you're excited about. It doesn't have to be with Zscaler. As you see the Supercloud trend emerging, this is the next generation Cloud, Cloud 2.0, whatever we want to call it, it's happening. It's changing. It's getting better. What are you excited about? What do you see as really key inflection point variables in this big wave? >> Yeah. One of the things I really like, what I heard from you in the past about Supercloud is a Supercloud is not just a one Cloud or one vendor. It's almost like every company should have its own Supercloud, right. You're talking about JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs of the world, that they need to have their own Supercloud. Zscaler and their security vendors, they may have their own Cloud. So I think every Fortune 500, Fortune 2,000 companies will have its own Supercloud. So I'm excited about that. So why that's important? We also say that, you know, in the next 10, 20 years, AI machine learning is going to help us a lot, right. So without Supercloud, it's very hard to do AI machine learning. 'Cause if you don't have a place that you know where the data is, and then it's pretty hard. And in the context of Supercloud, I totally foresee that the AI model will follow the data. If the data is in the cloud, it will go there. If the data is on-prem, it will go there. And then the Supercloud will hide the complexity of it. So if you ask me, my passion is leveraging AI machine learning to change the world, but Supercloud will make that easier, right. If you think about why Google, Facebook of the world, are able to leverage AI better than 99% of the rest of the world, because they figure out the Supercloud for themselves, right. And I think now it's the time for the rest of the Fortune 500, of Fortune 2,000 company to figure out its own Supercloud strategy. What is my Supercloud? I need to have my own Supercloud. Each company needs to have its own Supercloud. That's how I see it. >> Howie, always great to have you on. Thanks so much for spending the time and weighing in on this really important topic. We're going to be opening this up. It's not over. We're going to continue to watch the change as it unfolds and get an open community perspective. Thank you so much for being a great expert in our network and community. We really appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having me. >> Okay. Okay, that's it. We'll be up with more coverage here, Supercloud event, after this short break. I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to the "Supercloud 22." I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." This is the Cloud-erati panel, the distinguished experts who have been there from day one, watching the cloud grow, from building clouds, and all open source stuff as well. Just great stuff. Good friends of "The Cube," and great to introduce back on "The Cube," Adrian Cockcroft, formerly with Netflix, formerly AWS, retired, now commentating here in "The Cube," as well as other events. Great to see you back out there, Adrian. Lori MacVittie, Cloud Evangelist with F5, also wrote a great blog post on supercloud, as well as Dave Vellante as well, setting up the supercloud conversation, which we're going to get into, and Chris Hoff, who's the CTO and CSO of LastPass who's been building clouds, and we know him from "The Cube" before with security and cloud commentary. Welcome, all, back to "The Cube" and supercloud. >> Thanks, John. >> Hi. >> All right, Lori, we'll start with you to get things going. I want to try to sit back, as you guys are awesome experts, and involved from building, and in the trenches, on the front lines, and Adrian's coming out of retirement, but Lori, you wrote the post setting the table on supercloud. Let's start with you. What is supercloud? What is it evolving into? What is the north star, from your perspective? >> Well, I don't think there's a north star yet. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote it, because I had a clear picture of this in my mind, but over the past, I don't know, three, four years, I keep seeing, in research, my own and others', complexity, multi-cloud. "We can't manage it. They're all different. "We have trouble. What's going on? "We can't do anything right." And so digging into it, you start looking into, "Well, what do you mean by complexity?" Well, security. Migration, visibility, performance. The same old problems we've always had. And so, supercloud is a concept that is supposed to overlay all of the clouds and normalize it. That's really what we're talking about, is yet another abstraction layer that would provide some consistency that would allow you to do the same security and monitor things correctly. Cornell University actually put out a definition way back in 2016. And they said, "It's an architecture that enables migration "across different zones or providers," and I think that's important, "and provides interfaces to everything, "makes it consistent, and normalizes the network," basically brings it all together, but it also extends to private clouds. Sometimes we forget about that piece of it, and I think that's important in this, so that all your clouds look the same. So supercloud, big layer on top, makes everything wonderful. It's unicorns again. >> It's interesting. We had multiple perspectives. (mumbles) was like Snowflake, who built on top of AWS. Jerry Chan, who we heard from earlier today, Greylock Penn's "Castles in the Cloud" saying, "Hey, you can have a moat, "you can build an advantage and have differentiation," so startups are starting to build on clouds, that's the native cloud view, and then, of course, they get success and they go to all the other clouds 'cause they got customers in the ecosystem, but it seems that all the cloud players, Chris, you commented before we came on today, is that they're all fighting for the customer's workloads on their infrastructure. "Come bring your stuff over to here, "and we'll make it run better." And all your developers are going to be good. Is there a problem? I mean, or is this something else happening here? Is there a real problem? >> Well, I think the north star's over there, by the way, Lori. (laughing) >> Oh, there it is. >> Right there. The supercloud north star. So indeed I think there are opportunities. Whether you call them problems or not, John, I think is to be determined. Most companies have, especially if they're a large enterprise, whether or not they've got an investment in private cloud or not, have spent time really trying to optimize their engineering and workload placement on a single cloud. And that, regardless of your choice, as we take the big three, whether it's Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, each of them have their pros and cons for various types of workloads. And so you'll see a lot of folks optimizing for a particular cloud, and it takes a huge effort up and down the stack to just get a single cloud right. That doesn't take into consideration integrations with software as a service, instantiated, oftentimes, on top of infrastructure of the service that you need to supplement where the obstruction layer ends in infrastructure of the service. You've seen most IS players starting to now move up-chain, as we predicted years ago, to platform as a service, but platforms of various types. So I definitely see it as an opportunity. Previous employers have had multiple clouds, but they were very specifically optimized for the types of workloads, for example, in, let's say, AWS versus GCP, based on the need for different types and optimized compute platforms that each of those providers ran. We never, in that particular case, thought about necessarily running the same workloads across both clouds, because they had different pricing models, different security models, et cetera. And so the challenge is really coming down to the fact that, what is the cost benefit analysis of thinking about multi-cloud when you can potentially engineer the resiliency or redundancy, all the in-season "ilities" that you might need to factor into your deployments on a single cloud, if they are investing at the pace in which they are? So I think it's an opportunity, and it's one that continues to evolve, but this just reminds me, your comments remind me, of when we were talking about OpenStack versus AWS. "Oh, if there were only APIs that existed "that everybody could use," and you saw how that went. So I think that the challenge there is, what is the impetus for a singular cloud provider, any of the big three, deciding that they're going to abstract to a single abstraction layer and not be able to differentiate from the competitors? >> Yeah, and that differentiation's going to be big. I mean, assume that the clouds aren't going to stay still like AWS and just not stop innovating. We see the devs are doing great, Adrian, open source is bigger and better than ever, but now that's been commercialized into enterprise. It's an ops problem. So to Chris's point, the cost benefit analysis is interesting, because do companies have to spin up multiple operations teams, each with specialized training and tooling for the clouds that they're using, and does that open up a can of worms, or is that a good thing? I mean, can you design for this? I mean, is there an architecture or taxonomy that makes it work, or is it just the cart before the horse, the solution before the problem? >> Yeah, well, I think that if you look at any large vendor... Sorry, large customer, they've got a bit of everything already. If you're big enough, you've bought something from everybody at some point. So then you're trying to rationalize that, and trying to make it make sense. And I think there's two ways of looking at multi-cloud or supercloud, and one is that the... And practically, people go best of breed. They say, "Okay, I'm going to get my email "from Google or Microsoft. "I'm going to run my applications on AWS. "Maybe I'm going to do some AI machine learning on Google, "'cause those are the strengths of the platforms." So people tend to go where the strength is. So that's multi-cloud, 'cause you're using multiple clouds, and you still have to move data and make sure they're all working together. But then what Lori's talking about is trying to make them all look the same and trying to get all the security architectures to be the same and put this magical layer, this unicorn magical layer that, "Let's make them all look the same." And this is something that the CIOs have wanted for years, and they keep trying to buy it, and you can sell it, but the trouble is it's really hard to deliver. And I think, when I go back to some old friends of ours at Enstratius who had... And back in the early days of cloud, said, "Well, we'll just do an API that abstracts "all the cloud APIs into one layer." Enstratius ended up being sold to Dell a few years ago, and the problem they had was that... They didn't have any problem selling it. The problem they had was, a year later, when it came up for renewal, the developers all done end runs around it were ignoring it, and the CIOs weren't seeing usage. So you can sell it, but can you actually implement it and make it work well enough that it actually becomes part of your core architecture without, from an operations point of view, without having the developers going directly to their favorite APIs around them? And I'm not sure that you can really lock an organization down enough to get them onto a layer like that. So that's the way I see it. >> You just defined- >> You just defined shadow shadow IT. (laughing) That's pretty- (crosstalk) >> Shadow shadow IT, yeah. >> Yeah, shadow shadow it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I mean, this brings up the question, I mean, is there really a problem? I mean, I guess we'll just jump to it. What is supercloud? If you can have the magic outcome, what is it? Enstratius rendered in with automation? The security issues? Kubernetes is hot. What is the supercloud dream? I guess that's the question. >> I think it's got easier than it was five, 10 years ago. Kubernetes gives you a bunch of APIs that are common across lots of different areas, things like Snowflake or MongoDB Atlas. There are SaaS-based services, which are across multiple clouds from vendors that you've picked. So it's easier to build things which are more portable, but I still don't think it's easy to build this magic API that makes them all look the same. And I think that you're going to have leaky abstractions and security being... Getting the security right's going to be really much more complex than people think. >> What about specialty superclouds, Chris? What's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think what Adrian is alluding to, those leaky abstractions, are interesting, especially from the security perspective, 'cause I think what you see is if you were to happen to be able to thin slice across a set of specific types of workloads, there is a high probability given today that, at least on two of the three major clouds, you could get SaaS providers that sit on those same infrastructure of the service clouds for you, string them together, and have a service that technically is abstracted enough from the things you care about to work on one, two, or three, maybe not all of them, but most SaaS providers in the security space, or identity space, data space, for example, coexist on at least Microsoft and AWS, if not all three, with Google. And so you could technically abstract a service to the point that you let that level of abstract... Like Lori said, no computer science problem could not be... So, no computer science problem can't be solved with more layers of abstraction or misdirection... Or redirection. And in that particular case, if you happen to pick the right vendors that run on all three clouds, you could possibly get close. But then what that really talks about is then, if you built your seven-layer dip model, then you really have specialty superclouds spanning across infrastructure of the service clouds. One for your identity apps, one for data and data layers, to normalize that, one for security, but at what cost? Because you're going to be charged not for that service as a whole, but based on compute resources, based on how these vendors charge across each cloud. So again, that cost-benefit ratio might start being something that is rather imposing from a budgetary perspective. >> Lori, weigh in on this, because the enterprise people love to solve complexity with more complexity. Here, we need to go the other way. It's a commodity. So there has to be a better way. >> I think I'm hearing two fundamental assumptions. One, that a supercloud would force the existing big three to implement some sort of equal API. Don't agree with that. There's no business case for that. There's no reason that could compel them to do that. Otherwise, we would've convinced them to do that, what? 10, 15 years ago when we said we need to be interoperable. So it's not going to happen there. They don't have a good reason to do that. There's no business justification for that. The other presumption, I think, is that we would... That it's more about the services, the differentiated services, that are offered by all of these particular providers, as opposed to treating the core IaaS as the commodity it is. It's compute, it's some storage, it's some networking. Look at that piece. Now, pull those together by... And it's not OpenStack. That's not the answer, it wasn't the answer, it's not the answer now, but something that can actually pull those together and abstract it at a different layer. So cloud providers don't have to change, 'cause they're not going to change, but if someone else were to build that architecture to say, "all right, I'm going to treat all of this compute "so you can run your workloads," as Chris pointed out, "in the best place possible. "And we'll help you do that "by being able to provide those cost benefit analysis, "'What's the best performance, what are you doing,' "And then provide that as a layer." So I think that's really where supercloud is going, 'cause I think that's what a lot of the market actually wants in terms of where they want to run their workloads, because we're seeing that they want to run workloads at the edge, "a lot closer to me," which is yet another factor that we have to consider, and how are you going to be moving individual workloads around? That's the holy grail. Let's move individual workloads to where they're the best performance, the security, cost optimized, and then one layer up. >> Yeah, I think so- >> John Considine, who ultimately ran CloudSwitch, that sold to Verizon, as well as Tom Gillis, who built Bracket, are both rolling in their graves, 'cause what you just described was exactly that. (Lori laughing) Well, they're not even dead yet, so I can't say they're rolling in their graves. Sorry, Tom. Sorry, John. >> Well, how do hyperscalers keep their advantage with all this? I mean, to that point. >> Native services and managed services on top of it. Look how many flavors of managed Kubernetes you have. So you have a choice. Roll your own, or go with a managed service, and then differentiate based on the ability to take away and simplify some of that complexity. Doesn't mean it's more secure necessarily, but I do think we're seeing opportunities where those guys are fighting tooth and nail to keep you on a singular cloud, even though, to Lori's point, I agree, I don't think it's about standardized APIs, 'cause I think that's never going to happen. I do think, though, that SaaS-y supercloud model that we were talking about, layering SaaS that happens to span all the three infrastructure of the service are probably more in line with what Lori was talking about. But I do think that portability of workload is given to you today within lots of ways. But again, how much do you manage, and how much performance do you give up by running additional abstraction layers? And how much security do you give up by having to roll your own and manage that? Because the whole point was, in many cases... Cloud is using other people's computers, so in many cases, I want to manage as little of it as I possibly can. >> I like this whole SaaS angle, because if you had the old days, you're on Amazon Web Services, hey, if you build a SaaS application that runs on Amazon, you're all great, you're born in the cloud, just like that generations of startups. Great. Now when you have this super pass layer, as Dave Vellante was riffing on his analysis, and Lori, you were getting into this pass layer that's kind of like SaaS-y, what's the SaaS equation look like? Because that, to me, sounds like a supercloud version of saying, "I have a workload that runs on all the clouds equally." I just don't think that's ever going to happen. I agree with you, Chris, on that one. But I do see that you can have an abstraction that says, "Hey, I don't really want to get in the weeds. "I don't want to spend a lot of ops time on this. "I just want it to run effectively, and magic happens," or, as you said, some layer there. How does that work? How do you see this super pass layer, if anything, enabling a different SaaS game? >> I think you hit on it there. The last like 10 or so years, we've been all focused on developers and developer productivity, and it's all about the developer experience, and it's got to be good for them, 'cause they're the kings. And I think the next 10 years are going to be very focused on operations, because once you start scaling out, it's not about developers. They can deliver fast or slow, it doesn't matter, but if you can't scale it out, then you've got a real problem. So I think that's an important part of it, is really, what is the ops experience, and what is the best way to get those costs down? And this would serve that purpose if it was done right, which, we can argue about whether that's possible or not, but I don't have to implement it, so I can say it's possible. >> Well, are we going to be getting into infrastructure as code moves into "everything is code," security, data, (laughs) applications is code? I mean, "blank" is code, fill in the blank. (Lori laughing) >> Yeah, we're seeing more of that with things like CDK and Pulumi, where you are actually coding up using a real language rather than the death by YAML or whatever. How much YAML can you take? But actually having a real language so you're not trying to do things in parsing languages. So I think that's an interesting trend. You're getting some interesting templates, and I like what... I mean, the counterexample is that if you just go deep on one vendor, then maybe you can go faster and it is simpler. And one of my favorite vendor... Favorite customers right now that I've been talking to is Liberty Mutual. Went very deep and serverless first on AWS. They're just doing everything there, and they're using CDK Patterns to do it, and they're going extremely fast. There's a book coming out called "The Value Flywheel" by Dave Anderson, it's coming out in a few months, to just detail what they're doing, but that's the counterargument. If you could pick one vendor, you can go faster, you can get that vendor to do more for you, and maybe get a bigger discount so you're not splitting your discounts across vendors. So that's one aspect of it. But I think, fundamentally, you're going to find the CIOs and the ops people generally don't like sitting on one vendor. And if that single vendor is a horizontal platform that's trying to make all the clouds look the same, now you're locked into whatever that platform was. You've still got a platform there. There's still something. So I think that's always going to be something that the CIOs want, but the developers are always going to just pick whatever the best tool for building the thing is. And a analogy here is that the developers are dating and getting married, and then the operations people are running the family and getting divorced. And all the bad parts of that cycle are in the divorce end of it. You're trying to get out of a vendor, there's lawyers, it's just a big mess. >> Who's the lawyer in this example? (crosstalk) >> Well... (laughing) >> Great example. (crosstalk) >> That's why ops people don't like lock-in, because they're the ones trying to unlock. They aren't the ones doing the lock-in. They're the ones unlocking, when developers, if you separate the two, are the ones who are going, picking, having the fun part of it, going, trying a new thing. So they're chasing a shiny object, and then the ops people are trying to untangle themselves from the remains of that shiny object a few years later. So- >> Aren't we- >> One way of fixing that is to push it all together and make it more DevOps-y. >> Yeah, that's right. >> But that's trying to put all the responsibilities in one place, like more continuous improvement, but... >> Chris, what's your reaction to that? Because you're- >> No, that's exactly what I was going to bring up, yeah, John. And 'cause we keep saying "devs," "dev," and "ops" and I've heard somewhere you can glue those two things together. Heck, you could even include "sec" in the middle of it, and "DevSecOps." So what's interesting about what Adrian's saying though, too, is I think this has a lot to do with how you structure your engineering teams and how you think about development versus operations and security. So I'm building out a team now that very much makes use of, thanks to my brilliant VP of Engineering, a "Team Topologies" approach, which is a very streamlined and product oriented way of thinking about, for example, in engineering, if you think about team structures, you might have people that build the front end, build the middle tier, and the back end, and then you have a product that needs to make use of all three components in some form. So just from getting stuff done, their ability then has to tie to three different groups, versus building a team that's streamlined that ends up having front end, middleware, and backend folks that understand and share standards but are able to uncork the velocity that's required to do that. So if you think about that, and not just from an engineering development perspective, but then you couple in operations as a foundational layer that services them with embedded capabilities, we're putting engineers and operations teams embedded in those streamlined teams so that they can run at the velocity that they need to, they can do continuous integration, they can do continuous deployment. And then we added CS, which is continuously secure, continuous security. So instead of having giant, centralized teams, we're thinking there's a core team, for example, a foundational team, that services platform, makes sure all the trains are running on time, that we're doing what we need to do foundationally to make the environments fully dev and operator and security people functional. But then ultimately, we don't have these big, monolithic teams that get into turf wars. So, to Adrian's point about, the operators don't like to be paned in, well, they actually have a say, ultimately, in how they architect, deploy, manage, plan, build, and operate those systems. But at the same point in time, we're all looking at that problem across those teams and go... Like if one streamline team says, "I really want to go run on Azure, "because I like their services better," the reality is the foundational team has a larger vote versus opinion on whether or not, functionally, we can satisfy all of the requirements of the other team. Now, they may make a fantastic business case and we play rock, paper, scissors, and we do that. Right now, that hasn't really happened. We look at the balance of AWS, we are picking SaaS-y, supercloud vendors that will, by the way, happen to run on three platforms, if we so choose to expand there. So we have a similar interface, similar capability, similar processes, but we've made the choice at LastPass to go all in on AWS currently, with respect to how we deliver our products, for all the reasons we just talked about. But I do think that operations model and how you build your teams is extremely important. >> Yeah, and to that point- >> And has the- (crosstalk) >> The vendors themselves need optionality to the customer, what you're saying. So, "I'm going to go fast, "but I need to have that optionality." I guess the question I have for you guys is, what is today's trade-off? So if the decision point today is... First of all, I love the go-fast model on one cloud. I think that's my favorite when I look at all this, and then with the option, knowing that I'm going to have the option to go to multiple clouds. But everybody wants lock-in on the vendor side. Is that scale, is that data advantage? I mean, so the lock-in's a good question, and then also the trade-offs. What do people have to do today to go on a supercloud journey to have an ideal architecture and taxonomy, and what's the right trade-offs today? >> I think that the- Sorry, just put a comment and then let Lori get a word in, but there's a lot of... A lot of the market here is you're building a product, and that product is a SaaS product, and it needs to run somewhere. And the customers that you're going to... To get the full market, you need to go across multiple suppliers, most people doing AWS and Azure, and then with Google occasionally for some people. But that, I think, has become the pattern that most of the large SaaS platforms that you'd want to build out of, 'cause that's the fast way of getting something that's going to be stable at scale, it's got functionality, you'd have to go invest in building it and running it. Those platforms are just multi-cloud platforms, they're running across them. So Snowflake, for example, has to figure out how to make their stuff work on more than one cloud. I mean, they started on one, but they're going across clouds. And I think that that is just the way it's going to be, because you're not going to get a broad enough view into the market, because there isn't a single... AWS doesn't have 100% of the market. It's maybe a bit more than them, but Azure has got a pretty solid set of markets where it is strong, and it's market by market. So in some areas, different people in some places in the world, and different vertical markets, you'll find different preferences. And if you want to be across all of them with your data product, or whatever your SaaS product is, you're just going to have to figure this out. So in some sense, the supercloud story plays best with those SaaS providers like the Snowflakes of this world, I think. >> Lori? >> Yeah, I think the SaaS product... Identity, whatever, you're going to have specialized. SaaS, superclouds. We already see that emerging. Identity is becoming like this big SaaS play that crosses all clouds. It's not just for one. So you get an evolution going on where, yes, I mean, every vendor who provides some kind of specific functionality is going to have to build out and be multi-cloud, as it were. It's got to work equally across them. And the challenge, then, for them is to make it simple for both operators and, if required, dev. And maybe that's the other lesson moving forward. You can build something that is heaven for ops, but if the developers won't use it, well, then you're not going to get it adopted. But if you make it heaven for the developers, the ops team may not be able to keep it secure, keep everything. So maybe we have to start focusing on both, make it friendly for both, at least. Maybe it won't be the perfect experience, but gee, at least make it usable for both sides of the equation so that everyone can actually work in concert, like Chris was saying. A more comprehensive, cohesive approach to delivery and deployment. >> All right, well, wrapping up here, I want to just get one final comment from you guys, if you don't mind. What does supercloud look like in five years? What's the Nirvana, what's the steady state of supercloud in five to 10 years? Or say 10 years, make it easier. (crosstalk) Five to 10 years. Chris, we'll start with you. >> Wow. >> Supercloud, what's it look like? >> Geez. A magic pane, a single pane of glass. (laughs) >> Yeah, I think- >> Single glass of pain. >> Yeah, a single glass of pain. Thank you. You stole my line. Well, not mine, but that's the one I was going to use. Yeah, I think what is really fascinating is ultimately, to answer that question, I would reflect on market consolidation and market dynamics that happens even in the SaaS space. So we will see SaaS companies combining in focal areas to be able to leverage the positions, let's say, in the identity space that somebody has built to provide a set of compelling services that help abstract that identity problem or that security problem or that instrumentation and observability problem. So take your favorite vendors today. I think what we'll end up seeing is more consolidation in SaaS offerings that run on top of infrastructure of the service offerings to where a supercloud might look like something I described before. You have the combination of your favorite interoperable identity, observability, security, orchestration platforms run across them. They're sold as a stack, whether it be co-branded by an enterprise vendor that sells all of that and manages it for you or not. But I do think that... You talked about, I think you said, "Is this an innovator's dilemma?" No, I think it's an integrator's dilemma, as it has always ultimately been. As soon as you get from Genesis to Bespoke Build to product to then commoditization, the cycle starts anew. And I think we've gotten past commoditization, and we're looking at niche areas. So I see just the evolution, not necessarily a revolution, of what we're dealing with today as we see more consolidation in the marketplace. >> Lori, what's your take? Five years, 10 years, what does supercloud look like? >> Part of me wants to take the pie in the sky unicorn approach. "No, it will be beautiful. "One button, and things will happen," but I've seen this cycle many times before, and that's not going to happen. And I think Chris has got it pretty close to what I see already evolving. Those different kinds of super services, basically. And that's really what we're talking about. We call them SaaS, but they're... X is a service. Everything is a service, and it's really a supercloud that can run anywhere, but it presents a different interface, because, well, it's easier. And I think that's where we're going to go, and that's just going to get more refined. And yes, a lot of consolidation, especially on the observability side, but that's also starting to consume the security side, which is really interesting to watch. So that could be a little different supercloud coming on there that's really focused on specific types of security, at least, that we'll layer across, and then we'll just hook them all together. It's an API first world, and it seems like that's going to be our standard for the next while of how we integrate everything. So superclouds or APIs. >> Awesome. Adrian... Adrian, take us home. >> Yeah, sure. >> What's your- I think, and just picking up on Lori's point that these are web services, meaning that you can just call them from anywhere, they don't have to run everything in one place, they can stitch it together, and that's really meant... It's somewhat composable. So in practice, people are going to be composable. Can they compose their applications on multiple platforms? But I think the interesting thing here is what the vendors do, and what I'm seeing is vendors running software on other vendors. So you have Google building platforms that, then, they will support on AWS and Azure and vice versa. You've got AWS's distro of Kubernetes, which they now give you as a distro so you can run it on another platform. So I think that trend's going to continue, and it's going to be, possibly, you pick, say, an AWS or a Google software stack, but you don't run it all on AWS, you run it in multiple places. Yeah, and then the other thing is the third tier, second, third tier vendors, like, I mean, what's IBM doing? I think in five years time, IBM is going to be a SaaS vendor running on the other clouds. I mean, they're already halfway there. To be a bit more controversial, I guess it's always fun to... Like I don't work for a corporate entity now. No one tells me what I can say. >> Bring it on. >> How long can Google keep losing a billion dollars a quarter? They've either got to figure out how to make money out of this thing, or they'll end up basically being a software stack on another cloud platform as their, likely, actual way they can make money on it. Because you've got to... And maybe Oracle, is that a viable cloud platform that... You've got to get to some level of viability. And I think the second, third tier of vendors in five, 10 years are going to be running on the primary platform. And I think, just the other final thing that's really driving this right now. If you try and place an order right now for a piece of equipment for your data center, key pieces of equipment are a year out. It's like trying to buy a new fridge from like Sub-Zero or something like that. And it's like, it's a year. You got to wait for these things. Any high quality piece of equipment. So you go to deploy in your data center, and it's like, "I can't get stuff in my data center. "Like, the key pieces I need, I can't deploy a whole system. "We didn't get bits and pieces of it." So people are going to be cobbling together, or they're going, "No, this is going to cloud, because the cloud vendors "have a much stronger supply chain to just be able "to give you the system you need. "They've got the capacity." So I think we're going to see some pandemic and supply chain induced forced cloud migrations, just because you can't build stuff anymore outside the- >> We got to accelerate supercloud, 'cause they have the supply. They are the chain. >> That's super smart. That's the benefit of going last. So I'm going to scoop in real quick. I can't believe we can call this "Web3 Supercloud," because none of us said "Web3." Don't forget DAO. (crosstalk) (indistinct) You have blockchain, blockchain superclouds. I mean, there's some very interesting distributed computing stuff there, but we'll have to do- >> (crosstalk) We're going to call that the "Cubeverse." The "Cubeverse" is coming. >> Oh, the "Cubeverse." All right. >> We will be... >> That's very meta. >> In the metaverse, Cubeverse soon. >> "Stupor cloud," perhaps. But anyway, great points, Adrian and Lori. Loved it. >> Chris, great to see you. Adrian, Lori, thanks for coming on. We've known each other for a long time. You guys are part of the cloud-erati, the group that has been in there from day one, and watched it evolve, and you get the scar tissue to prove it, and the experience. So thank you so much for sharing your commentary. We'll roll this up and make it open to everybody as additional content. We'll call this the "outtakes," the longer version. But really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, we'll be back with more "Supercloud 22" right after this. (bright upbeat music)

(light hearted music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud '22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got Ali Ghodsi here, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. Ali, Great to see you. Thanks for spending your valuable time to come on and talk about Supercloud and the future of all the structural change that's happening in cloud computing. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> Well, first of all, congratulations. We've been talking for many, many years, and I still go back to the video that we have in archive, you talking about cloud. And really, at the beginning of the big reboot, I called the post Hadoop, a revitalization of data. Congratulations, you've been cloud-first, now on multiple clouds. Congratulations to you and your team for achieving what looks like a billion dollars in annualized revenue as reported by the Wall Street Journal, so first, congratulations. >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> So I was talking to some young developers and I asked a random poll, what do you think about Databricks? Oh, we love those guys, they're AI and ML-native, and that's their advantage over the competition. So I pressed why. I don't think they knew why, but that's an interesting perspective. This idea of cloud native, AI/ML-native, ML Ops, this has been a big trend and it's continuing. This is a big part of how this change and this structural change is happening. How do you react to that? And how do you see Databricks evolving into this new Supercloud-like multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, look, I think it's a continuum. It starts with having data, but they want to clean it, you know, and they want to get insights out of it. But then, eventually, you'd like to start asking questions, doing reports, maybe ask questions about what was my revenue yesterday, last week, but soon you want to start using the crystal ball, predictive technology. Okay, but what will my revenue be next week? Next quarter? Who's going to churn? And if you can finally automate that completely so that you can act on the predictions, right? So this credit card that got swiped, the AI thinks it's fraud, we're going to deny it. That's when you get real value. So we're trying to help all these organizations move through this data AI maturity curve, all the way to that, the prescriptive, automated AI machine learning. That's when you get real competitive advantage. And you know, we saw that with the fans, right? I mean, Google wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for AI. You know, we'd be using AltaVista or something. We want to help all organizations to be able to leverage data and AI that way that the fans did. >> One of the things we're looking at with supercloud and why we call it supercloud versus other things like multi-cloud is that today a lot of the successful companies have started in the cloud have been successful, but have realized and even enterprises who have gotten by accident, and maybe have done nothing with cloud have just some cloud projects on multiple clouds. So, people have multiple cloud operational things going on but it hasn't necessarily been a strategy per se. It's been more of kind of a default reaction to things but the ones that are innovating have been successful in one native cloud because the use cases that drove that got scale got value, and then they're making that super by bringing it on premise, putting in a modern data stack, for the modern application development, and kind of dealing with the things that you guys are in the middle of with data bricks is that, that is where the action is, and they don't want to go, lose the trajectory in all the economies of scale. So we're seeing another structural change where the evolutionary nature of the cloud has solved a bunch of use cases, but now other use cases are emerging that's on premises and edge that have been driven by applications because of the developer boom, that's happening. You guys are in the middle of it. What is happening with this structural change? Are people looking for the modern data stack? Are they looking for more AI? What's the, what's your perspective on this supercloud kind of position? >> Look, it started with not AR on multiple clouds, right? So multi-cloud has been a thing. It became a thing 70, 80% of our customers when you ask them, they're more than one cloud. But then soon to start realizing that, hey, you know, if I'm on multiple clouds, this data stuff is hard enough as it is. Do I want to redo it again and again with different proprietary technologies, on each of the clouds. And that's when I started thinking about let's standardize this, let's figure out a way which just works across them. That's where I think open source comes in, becomes really important. Hey, can we leverage open standards because then we can make it work in these different environments, as we said so that we can actually go super, as you said, that's one. The second thing is, can we simplify it? You know, and I think today, the data landscape is complicated. Conceptually it's simple. You have data which is essentially customer data that you have, maybe employee data. And you want to get some kind of insights from that. But how you do that is very complicated. You have to buy data warehouse, hire data analysts. You have to buy, store stuff in the Delta Lake you know, get your data engineers. If you want streaming real time thing that's another complete different set of technologies you have to buy. And then you have to stitch all these together, and you have to do again and again on every cloud. So they just want simplification. So that's why we're big believers in this Delta Lakehouse concept. Which is an open standard to simplifying this data stack and help people to just get value out of their data in any environment. So they can do that in this sort of supercloud as you call it. >> You know, we've been talking about that in previous interviews, do the heavy lifting let them get the value. I have to ask you about how you see that going forward, Because if I'm a customer, I have a lot of operational challenges. Cause the developers are are kicking butt right now. We see that clearly. Open sources growing at, and continue to be great. But ops and security teams they really care about this stuff. And most companies don't want to spin up multiple ops teams to deal with different stacks. This is one big problem that I think that's leading into the multi-cloud viability. How do you guys deal with that? How do you talk to customers when they say, I want to have less complications on operations? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, it's easy for a developer to adopt all these technologies and new things are coming out all the time. The ops teams are the ones that have to make sure this works. Doing that in multiple different environments is super hard. especially when there's a proprietary stack in each environment that's different. So they just want standardization. They want open source, that's super important. We hear that all the time from them. They want open the source technologies. They believe in the communities around it. You know, they know that source code is open. So you can also see if there's issues with it. If there's security breaches, those kind of things that they can have a community around it. So they can actually leverage that. So they're the ones that are really pushing this, and we're seeing it across the board. You know, it starts first with the digital natives you know, the companies that are, but slowly it's also now percolating to the other organizations, we're hearing across the board. >> Where are we, Ali on the innovation strategies for customers? Where are they on the trajectory around how they're building out their teams? How are they looking at the open source? How are they extending the value proposition of Databricks, and data at scale, as they start to build out their teams and operations, because some are like kind of starting, crawl, walk, run, kind of vibe. Some are big companies, they're dealing with data all the time. Where are they in their journey? What's the core issues that they're solving? What are some of the use cases that you see that are most pressing in customer? >> Yeah, what I've seen, that's really exciting about this Delta Lakehouse concept is that we're now seeing a lot of use cases around real time. So real time fraud detection, real time stock ticker pricing, anyone that's doing trading, they want that to work real time. Lots of use cases around that. Lots of use cases around how do we in real time drive more engagement on our web assets if we're a media company, right? We have all these assets how do we get people to get engaged? Stay on our sites. Continue engaging with the material we have. Those are real time use cases. And the interesting thing is, they're real time. So, you know, it's really important that you that now you don't want to recommend someone, hey, you should go check out this restaurant if they just came from that restaurant, half an hour ago. So you want it to be real time, but B, that it's also all based on machine learning. These are a lot of this is trying to predict what you want to see, what you want to do, is it fraudulent? And that's also interesting because basically more and more machine learning is coming in. So that's super exciting to see, the combination of real time and machine learning on the Lakehouse. And finally, I would say the Lakehouse is really important for this because that's where the data is flowing in. If they have to take that data that's flowing into the lake and actually copy it into a separate warehouse, that delays the real time use cases. And then it can't hit those real time deadlines. So that's another catalyst for this Lakehouse pattern. >> Would that be an example of how the metrics are changing? Cause I've been looking at some people saying, well you can tell if someone's doing well there's a lot of data being transferred. And then I was saying, well, wait a minute. Data transfer costs money, right? And time. So this is interesting dynamic, in a way you don't want to have a lot of movement, right? >> Yeah, movement actually decreases for a lot of these real time use cases. 'Cause what we saw in the past was that they would run a batch processing to process all the data. So once they process all the data. But actually if you look at the things that have changed since the data that we have yesterday it's actually not that much. So if you can actually incrementally process it in real time, you can actually reduce the cost of transfers and storage and processing. So that's actually a great point. That's also one of the main things that we're seeing with the use cases, the bill shrinks and the cost goes down, and they can process less. >> Yeah, and it'd be interesting to see how those KPIs evolve into industry metrics down the road around the supercloud of evolution. I got to ask you about the open source concept of data platforms. You guys have been a pioneer in there doing great work, kind of picking the baton off where the Hadoop World left off as Dave Vellante always points out. But if working across clouds is super important. How are you guys looking at the ability to work across the different clouds with data bricks? Are you going to build that abstraction yourself? Does data sharing and model sharing kind of come into play there? How do you see this data bricks capability across the clouds? >> Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying, we just we're big fans of open source. We think that open source is a force in software. That's going to continue for, decades, hundreds of years, and it's going to slowly replace all proprietary code in its way. We saw that, it could do that with the most advanced technology. Windows, you know proprietary operating system, very complicated, got replaced with Linux. So open source can pretty much do anything. And what we're seeing with the Delta Lakehouse is that slowly the open source community is building a replacement for the proprietary data warehouse, Delta Lake, machine learning, real time stack in open source. And we're excited to be part of it. For us, Delta Lake is a very important project that really helps you standardize how you layout your data in the cloud. And when it comes a really important protocol called data sharing, that enables you in a open way actually for the first time ever share large data sets between organizations, but it uses an open protocol. So the great thing about that is you don't need to be a Databricks customer. You don't need to even like Databricks, you just need to use this open source project and you can now securely share data sets between organizations across clouds. And it actually does so really efficiently just one copy of the data. So you don't have to copy it if you're within the same cloud. >> So you're playing the long game on open source. >> Absolutely. I mean, this is a force it's going to be there if if you deny it, before you know it there's going to be, something like Linux, that is going to be a threat to your propriety. >> I totally agree by the way. I was just talking to somebody the other day and they're like hey, the software industry someone made the comment, the software industry, the software industry is open source. There's no more software industry, it's called open source. It's integrations that become interesting. And I was looking at integrations now is really where the action is. And we had a panel with the Clouderati we called it, the people have been around for a long time. And it was called the innovator's dilemma. And one of the comments was it's the integrator's dilemma, not the innovator's dilemma. And this is a big part of this piece of supercloud. Can you share your thoughts on how cloud and integration need to be tightened up to really make it super? >> Actually that's a great point. I think the beauty of this is, look the ecosystem of data today is vast, there's this picture that someone puts together every year of all the different vendors and how they relate, and it gets bigger and bigger and messy and messier. So, we see customers use all kinds of different aspects of what's existing in the ecosystem and they want it to be integrated in whatever you're selling them. And that's where I think the power of open source comes in. Open source, you get integrations that people will do without you having to push it. So us, Databricks as a vendor, we don't have to go tell people please integrate with Databricks. The open source technology that we contribute to, automatically, people are integrating with it. Delta Lake has integrations with lots of different software out there and Databricks as a company doesn't have to push that. So I think open source is also another thing that really helps with the ecosystem integrations. Many of these companies in this data space actually have employees that are full-time dedicated to make sure make sure our software works well with Spark. Make sure our software works well with Delta and they contribute back to that community. And that's the way you get this sort of ecosystem to further sort of flourish. >> Well, I really appreciate your time. And I, my final question for you is, as we're kind of unpack and and kind of shape and frame supercloud for the future, how would you see a roadmap or architecture or outcome for companies that are going to clearly be in the cloud where it's open source is going to be dominating. Integrations has got to be seamless and frictionless. Abstraction layer make things super easy and take away the complexity. What is supercloud to them? What does the outcome look like? How would you define a supercloud environment for an enterprise? >> Yeah, for me, it's the simplification that you get where you standardize an open source. You get your data in one place, in one format in one standardized way, and then you can get your insights from it, without having to buy lots of different idiosyncratic proprietary software from different vendors. That's different in each environment. So it's this slow standardization that's happening. And I think it's going to happen faster than we think. And I think in a couple years it's going to be a requirement that, does your software work on all these different departments? Is it based on open source? Is it using this Delta Lake house pattern? And if it's not, I think they're going to demand it. >> Yeah, I feel like we're close to some sort of defacto standard coming and you guys are a big part of it, once that clicks in, it's going to highly accelerate in the open, and I think it's going to be super valuable. Ali, thank you so much for your time, and congratulations to you and your team. Like we've been following you guys since the beginning. Remember the early days and look how far it's come. And again, you guys are really making a big difference in making a super cool environment out there. Thanks for coming on sharing. >> Thank you so much John. >> Okay, this is supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier stay with more for more coverage and more commentary after this break. (light hearted music)