(techno music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partner. >> Okay, welcome back everyone it's theCUBE live here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018 I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost Stu Miniman. So our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, the big story here is the transformation, the power of the network, it's becoming computable, it's a great, great story. Our next guest is Guru Chahal, who is the Vice President of Product, AVI Networks. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having me John and Stuart. It's a pleasure being here again. >> So we just talking before the camera came on about STO cause Stu wants to go there right away, but we've got to hold off on that, but service meshes is certainly going to be a great thing with Kubernetes and containers but the story here is the changing nature and power of the network. Suzzy, who you came on with DevNet, was talking about the success of DevNet has been a combination of great timing, of open-source, hitting the network but making the network programmable, opening up new innovations. This is a really big thing, I want to get your reaction to this because Europe tied into this trend big time. What does that mean for people that are watching this? They're trying to grok the new way. What is this intent-based network? What's this programmable network? Is it the iPhone, kind of moment where for networks, where new apps are coming that we've never seen before? Or is it something different? What's your take? >> That's such a great example John, so just a fundamental transformation that iPhone had on how we think about telephony in general, we're at that sort of moment in the network. And the reason for that, frankly, is how we deploy applications, how we design applications, and where we deploy applications has fundamentally changed. You know 20 years ago, you had one choice to deploy an application and it was that server, right over there, in your data center. And today you can do it as a container, or bare-metal server, a virtual machine, on-prem or one of hundreds of data centers, public cloud data centers all over the world. And then architecturally, everything is moving from these monoliths to microservices, or much more tiny and more manageable components, and what that does to the network is fundamentally different from what's been going on in the network for the past couple of decades. It elevates the position of the network from just connectivity, to something that is fundamental to how these services talk to each other unlike 100 things that live inside a box and talk to each other, now you have 100 things on the network talking to each other. So think about what that does to you from a availability strategy perspective, from a security strategy perspective, from a surface area of security, from a monitoring perspective, I mean the reason why you see, I mean walk the show floor here, so much innovation in the network and the reason for that is instead of an enterprise running 1000 applications, within the next few years each enterprise is going to be running 100,000 applications and their budget is not going up 100 times so you need innovation, you need automation and that's where the intent-based movement comes in. >> So new opportunities are going to be created, new wealth creation, more innovation. What are you guys doing? Take a minute to explain why you guys are here with your company? What are you contributing, what's your role in the ecosystem, what's your product differentiations? What's the story? >> Yeah, great, so we play in the application services space. If you think about the network traditionally people have thought about it as connectivity, which is layer two, layer three, and then network services are the services that the network offers to an application, that's load balancing, it's application security, SSL offload, it's web application firewall and so on. So services that are tied to the application that's basically what our company is about. So we have a fabric-based platform, software only, the fabric can be instantiated on bare-metal appliances, or containers, or virtual machines, all centrally managed, and it's intent-based which means it's policy-driven. So you go to a single place you say, "please I need load balancing capabilities "for this application, I need SSL "and I need to turn on my web application firewall." And no matter where the application is, in Azure, in AWS or on-prem, or a mainframe, the fabric is able to instantiate that service automatically infront without the operator having to worry about where is it, what do I need to do, do I have enough capacity, none of that. >> Guru, in Chuck Robbins' keynote on Monday you talked about kind of the old way, this kind of bespoke, it was silos, it was like, well, oh, you know we have the wiring guys over here doing the physical layer two, layer three, four through seven is over there. Today it's software, up and down the stack, you know, changes a lot, maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic as to how applications, you know intent-based networking really is having, the application doesn't just use, but it's heavily involved with the network. >> So here's the single biggest thing that's driving this change, applications used to be secondary for IT in some sense, certainly infrastructure teams, and infrastructure was primal. And I had my ADCs and load balancers here and my routers and my switches and so on, and this is my infrastructure, now let's figure out how to fit the application on my infrastructure. And that world is gone. That's the old way. You can't hug your load balancers anymore that's (laughs) if you do that today, those days are, if not gone, they're almost nearing an end. And increasingly the infrastructure is going to live for applications. The center world is my need as a business to role out an application quickly, to understand how people are interacting with that application, to make changes to it in real time, and all of infrastructure is now wrapping itself around that notion. So intent-based networking, in our case, intent-based application services is all about how can I, in an automated way, quickly deploy load balancing, application security for applications, no matter where they are, how can I monitor the applications in real time. That's really what the movement is about. >> Well, that's a great point. I'd like to just add and get your thoughts on this, and react to another concept, to add to that is that you've got all that happening, okay, that's because of the cloud and great new tech but then you factor in that the programming models are changing too, so the perfect storm is everything that you've said, but now the expectation of the developer-- >> API. >> With open source-- >> Everything is in API. >> Has to be programmable and it's like the classic, let infrastructure take care of it's business but no one's got to do all this manual work. This is a huge dynamic and I think the DevNet story this year at Cisco Live really puts an exclamation point on the fact that this has got traction. We kind of know, we see open-source but from the networking world it's a whole new, essentially greenfield opportunity. You agree with that? >> Totally, I mean you know there's in most of our largest customers, and by the way we didn't talk about our solar business side, but just to give you a quick flavor for what our customer base looks like we primarily sell to Global 2000, three of the top five banks in the US are our customers, two of the top five banks in ME are our customers, 20% of the Fortune 50 are our customers, we've replaced traditional load balancing solutions and so on. And the primary reason, the number one reason is automation. And by automation, everybody talks about automation, but by automation what our customers mean is infrastructure as API. Simple things. I want to capture all the packets going to that application and I want to do that with a single REST API, I want to talk to an IP endpoint and say here's the REST API, give me all the traffic. Can you do that in your network today? Our customers can. >> What's the alternative, if they don't use APIs? >> Oh yeah, so you've got two choices, one you walk into your data center, turn on the SPAN port take all that traffic, take it to some sort of a monitoring fabric blah, blah, blah, three days later if you're lucky you get traffic. Second approach, call AWS tell them to turn on the SPAN port, and good luck with that. (laughs) So, you know increasingly you frankly don't have much of a choice, you need infrastructure to be-- >> Scale is also a tsunami of data coming in so one time is a massive problem, that's never going to happen, so people are going to give up-- >> Number of events, number of alerts, you know it's speed. Talk about the top three trends that are going on in our customer base, speed, speed, and speed. >> Okay, you've got some great clients. Why are they going with you, and how does someone engage with you guys? What do they do? Do they just call you up and say bring in some software, do I get a box, is it software, how do I configure it, how do they onboard? How do you guys engage with your customers? >> Right, so why do they buy us? Three quick reasons, one amazing automation fabric-approach central management. Two, amazing analytics to your point about great events, we want to help our customers address this deluge of events and things that are happening in the data center and provide great insight, so that's all built in to the product. And three, much more cost effective. I mean these traditional solutions, believe it or not, that have been around for 20 years, they're not just traditional, as in legacy, they're also extremely expensive. Our competitors sell load balancers at 84% gross margins. You know how many of my customers run their businesses at 84% gross margins? Zero. So how can you afford that, right? So those are three big reasons why they buy. How they get engaged with us is they typically have a public cloud project, they'll say alright, like Adobe, "they'll say alright, we need to go to Azure, "move the applications right away." Well that's easy for the CIO to say, in practice, that's a beast, right. So they need to get in there, they need to figure out how am I going to meet application SLAs on Azure, how am I going to do application availability, or security, or monitor these, and they could do a Google search or something and get that connected with us. Two, we're a Cisco partner, Cisco resells us, and Cisco is everywhere. So when people approach their trusted vendor, like Cisco, and say, "Cisco, "I've got this public cloud issue, "a network monitorization issue "and load balancing is a consistent thorn "in my neck, like, what do we do?" And Cisco goes, "oh we've got a great partner, "we resell their technology, I'd love "to help you understand more, and then "they pull us in, and we close." >> Yeah, that's a great point Guru, one of the things we've been talking to a lot of customers, is how do I manage and deal with my network when I don't own a lot of the pieces of the network. And that's the story we've been hearing. Cisco talking about multi-cloud. Up on stage, Chuck Robbins brought Diane Greene out and talked a lot about Kubernetes and STO, we know AVI Networks, I've seen your team at theCUBE con show, John was just at the Copenhagen show, I unfortunately missed that one, I'll be back at the Seattle show. Talk about what your team is doing with Kubernetes and STO, and how does Cisco fit in to that discussion? >> Yes, we love that space it's actually, I think at this point, after public cloud after Azure and AWS in particular, and GCP as well. So after public cloud, is the fastest growing part of our business today and what we've been shipping for over two years now, is an enterprise-class service mesh targeted at, not just Kubernetes, but Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mesos or Consisto, and the beautiful thing is our fabric is just a fabric it can, the same fabric in one corner of the data center could be serving a traditional bare-metal application and another corner of our data center is serving a containerized, a Kubernetes application and what we do there is, we provide both North-South load balancing capabilities, as well as, the East-West load balancing capabilities for that entire cluster. And to give you a sense for scale, our largest customers, we've got large banks and technology companies running us in production with Kubernetes, at the other, at the highest end we've got customers running eight to ten clusters of somewhere between 50 to 100 nodes each. So we're talking about 500 to 1,000 nodes running in both public cloud and on-prem of Kubernetes where we are providing the distributed load balancing capabilities. >> Well that's great. So if you've been doing service mesh for two years, that's pre STO? How does that relate to the STO project? >> Yes, it is, and in sometimes it's still pre STO right, cause I love STO, on slides (laughs) but the era of STO is 2019 and maybe 2020. So it's going to take some time we love it because here's what happens today, this is the problem for solution providers like us, what happens is, we're forced to integrate with Kubernetes, the Kubernetes master service. At some point customers are like, "alright, so you're integrated with Kubernetes, "and this person is integrated, "and this other piece of software integrated." What STO does is it very cleanly separates the network policy from Kubernetes to STO. So we have to integrate only with STO and we are doing that integration right now. So from our perspective these are northbound orchestration systems and policies systems, once STO solidifies, and I expect sometime next year, maybe the middle of next year, maybe late next year, and we're ready for production and then you can continue to use us within the system. >> Yeah Guru, I'm going to have to say you're the hipster service mesh company then, right? You were doing it before it was cool. (Guru, Stu and John laugh) >> Yes and then perhaps we can move-- >> Alright so I got-- >> on to something else >> We love the STO is a total geek conversation but this is super important, I want to get you thoughts on this, I do agree it's definitely got some work to do but there's, it's the number one open-source project within the CNCF, so clearly there's a ton of interest. And a lot of the alpha geeks are going there they see great, great value there. Containers, check. Containers are great. Kubernetes, check, on a good path. STO is interesting cause its service meshes is a concept that kind of ties networking with apps and you guys are in the middle of this. What does that mean for the network engineer out there or for the company, why should they pay attention to this service mesh concept or STO and the role of mircoservices? Clearly microservices makes sense if you're APIing everything you want to have more services developing. but what's going on under the hood? Why is STO getting so much traction in your opinion? >> It's a very simple reason John. So this was my world as a network engineer. I had a few of these applications I would look at them, they're like my little puppy, and I would configure my entire network to support these applications. The world of microservices, and really this new world that we live in, I don't have one of these, I have 100 of these per application, so I have 100,000 of these floating around. I can't do it without using policy. Policy is at the root of all this, intent-based networking, declarative policies, STO, declarative policies, our platform, declarative policies. So the entire world of networking is moving away from, let me go to one of my 50 switches and configure the CLI, to let me define a set of ten policies that we will then apply to 100,000 applications, cause frankly, there's only ten different things I want to do. I don't want to configure a 100,000 endpoints. I just want to do ten things, that's something I can do as a human and that's really what's at the root of this. So it's really intent-based networking sort of at different layers. >> So there's been conversation, we've been obviously talking about this on theCUBE since day one here about, we believe the network engineer, the Cisco customer, if you will, or people getting all of these certifications, they're going to be so much more powerful because there's been a conversation in other press and media around the death of the network engineer (Guru laughs) We should, look they're the mainframe guy-- >> Which iteration of that are we on? 'Cause I hear that every five years. >> They better learn how to code so they don't lose their job. When actually, the network is getting more and more powerful, so what you're talking about, we think connects and validates that the network engineer, the one doing Cyber Ops, data center, service provider, industrial IOT, CCNA, CCIEs, these guys are going to be a fish to water when they hear words like policy, dynamic provisioning these are-- >> Automation, APIs. >> These are concepts they're used to. What's your thoughts on that because this is a kind of a new emerging connect point that DevNet's kind of pointed with DevNet Create and DevNet proper, what are you're thoughts? >> Yeah, listen I have tremendous empathy for our customer base, I used to be a customer on the other side a couple of decades ago, and there's this sort of fashion in Silicon Valley to come up with new innovations and then say, "oh, all those people, they're going to be left behind "and my technology is going to be awesome." I don't subscribe to that, the hunger I see in networking teams to continually add value is unparalleled today. The hunger I see for automation, for learning REST API, STKs, Python, Ansible, interacting with DevNet is unparalleled. And in some sense if that wasn't there, why would you have intent-based networking, why would a vendor like Cisco, a vendor like AVI emerge? Why would we build these amazing things if there wasn't a hunger for this? So, I think the network is going to be extremely important and most of the networking teams today will make that transition. I'm not going to discount the fact that there will be some who will want to hug their load balancers for the next 10 years, and I have bad news for them, there was a time when you could ride it out for five or 10 years before the next tech showed up. Those days are gone, man. The new tech shows up today and then you're like, "no, not going to happen for about 12 or 18 months." And then boom! Everything just changes. >> So what's your advice to that, of those networking engineers out there, those folks do, and that are going to be the power players in this new configuration? What should they do? >> Engage. >> Engage, be the person in the organization that brings in a new technology, never in my entire career, two decades now, have I seen individuals in networking teams at banks, at technology companies, at retailers, at grocery store companies, at radiology centers, you know, go out there and ask questions is there a better load balancer, is there a better switching solution, is there a better X, Y, Z, is there a better way to monitor my apps, and then pull in that, play around with that, call the vendor. You know, traditionally it never used to happen. So I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, and it's awesome it's great. It's a great opportunity to be, the timing is perfect. Alright, final question, actually two questions. What's up for next for you guys at AVI Networks on the road map, what's coming next? And then you're take on the show, what's the vibe, what's it like for the folks who didn't make it to Orlando, what'd they miss? >> So our vision is double down on multi-cloud, it's so real, all our customers, all, almost a 100%, are both on-prem and in AWS or Azure and we're continuing to invest in making that easier through the introduction of several sort of initiatives on the platform including SAS, including increased investments in security. So that's on our vision side. Invest in our partnership with Cisco, as I said Cisco is a reseller and now an investor in our last round of funding, so we're pretty excited about that. And they're excited about being close to a company that frankly, is seeing the kind of traction we're seeing. So that's what we're doing over the next three to five years. Show floor, I've got to say 80% of it sounds like, give me your data and I will provide you insights. And that's trivializing that a little bit but I think it goes back to the point, John, you made earlier, where things are moving so fast, so much is changing that there's just an increased excitement around technologies which help you automate, which help you provide better insight, which help you just manage this. >> And then final question, one more, it just popped into my head, got to get out there. Programmability, obviously we believe it is happening, APIs are happening, microservices are right around the corner, you guys are first-generation service mesh and production. What are some of those new apps we're going to see? If the network programmable is first-generation, like an iPhone was for telephony, what kinds of network apps, app-networking apps, are we going to see in the new paradigm that DevNet's pioneering? >> So, actually two kind of apps I'm already seeing in my customer base right now. The first one is self-service and provisioning apps. So as soon as the network becomes programmable the first thing networking teams do, this is a little bit counter intuitive, remember the old world where networking teams were like, "my network, don't touch it." The first thing they're doing now is, they're saying "oh, it's programmable? "Let me build a sandbox for you quickly. "You do it, don't call me. "Don't call me. "Just do your thing, if you hit " the bounds of the sandbox, then "call me and we'll talk about it." So, self-service automation provisioning is the first kind of applications I'm seeing emerging. And the second one is monitoring. You know the age-old problem, I don't know what's going on. So people are building these amazing solutions, I mean our, I thought people would be logging into our CLI or UI and getting insights. No, they're taking my data, right now I counted about 15 upstream solutions from Tetration, to Splunk, to other SIMs, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, they're exporting this wherever they can. And so those are the two classes. Self-service automation and monitoring. >> And this all is underpinning value for safe security monitoring and scripts is right around the corner. Anyway thanks for coming. Okay, AVI Networks' VP of Product here inside theCUBE day three, it's theCUBE coverage here. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman at Cisco Live in Orlando. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (techno music)