>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's TheCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker. And support from it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman, joined with Jim Kobielus, happy to have at the end of our two days of live coverage here of DockerCon 2017 on TheCUBE, we've got a practitioner and also what was one that did a great presentation in the keynote this morning, happy to welcome Swamy Kocherlakota who is the global head of Infrastructure and Operations with Visa, so Swamy welcome and what's in your wallet? >> Yes. I all have Visa cards in my wallet, right. >> In your container, here at DockerCon. >> That's a good one, Jim, I like that so we were really impressed, I tell you social media was lighting up, going through your case study, talking about how it's kind of the before very much a virtualized environment looks like many data centers I went through and that digital transformation if you will as to what you're doing. Before we get into kind of your case studies, tell us just a little bit about you, your role, how much you're flying around the world, with the Infrastructure and Ops. >> Right, so, I'm responsible for Visa Inc's Operations and Infrastructure, so my responsibility is to kind of run everything that's inside Visa that does the payment processing. So that's my responsibility. I travel a lot, we have a global team, Visa is a global company, so I'm on the road a lot. >> So, I love the case study you did today because it's always what we want to do as analysts is let's talk about the pain points, let's paint the before, how did everything go through and point the after, so we want to encapsulate a little bit of that and as I said highly virtualized environment, what was the pain point, what was the objective, I don't think any executive came down and said, "Hey containers are awesome, let's just do stuff because it sounds cool." What was the real business driver for what you were doing? >> Right so like I mentioned in the keynote the number one priority that we have for my organization is to make developers productive. We take this as a challenge where any employee, a developer who joins Visa, we want them to be able to write code and publish code into production on the same day. That's what we're aspiring to go. That was the driver. So we're looking at every minute of what it takes to get the provisioning and we're trying to streamline it so that we can deliver that vision quickly. >> Great and virtualized environment going to containerize, can you talk, how big a scope is this? Did it change your underlying infrastructure itself or can you maybe flesh that out a little bit for us? >> Right so when I talk about provisioning our, in general, managing operations for a large organization, a large enterprise, I look at it from two dimensions. One, the one-time provisioning. But then most of the challenges and the opportunities are in the life cycle, right? Yes virtualization solved the one-time provisioning, but we haven't really solved the managing the lifecycle. It still takes, even if it takes one day to create a provision, the virtual image, the pre provisioning tasks, post provisioning tasks, and care and feeding of it, whether it's patching and maintenance, doing tech refresh, it's still very intrusive and very painful. So when we looked at the whole problem we want to solve all of them at once and that's where the containerization and micro services attracted us. >> And Swamy, when this rolled out, I mean is this 100% your environment in this new one or have you been doing a phased approach? How does it look today? >> I wish it's 100%, but we are in the early stages, so we have one application, it is now a tower of success, and we have about five other application teams that are looking into it. And then we build more towers of success and then this becomes kind of like the part of the center offering. >> The initial implementation was a pilot, a showcase of the technology, or explain where the idea for this initial implementation came from. Was it driven from the business level or from the technical level? >> I'd say partnership between the application team and the infrastructure teams, the boundaries between the two teams are kind of blurrying. And at Visa one of the great things that we have is that we collaborate very well internally. So when we wanted to do have this mission of making developers productive on the same day, when an application team is going through the refactoring process we basically said, "Hey, maybe we can join forces" and we have a good collaboration and we said, "let's do it together". >> So there was a refactoring project already underway and then containers and Docker came into the overall equation essentially or that project. >> They both came at the same time, they both came at the same time. It's a perfect marriage at the time. The timing of when we want to do refactoring and the timing of when we want containers came at the same time. >> So you're saying it was a success and then essentially it was improved on internally within your development organization and other, other, tell us other, what other areas of Visa are likely to become containerized fairly soon in terms of before applications. >> There are about five other groups that we're looking at. That still is work in progress. The next use case that I'm excited about is the, kind of like the batch use case, right? That's about as much as I can say about the rest of the five are close. >> Understood. >> Swamy, there's a certain set of data services that you get when you have a virtualized environment. Can you talk to us a little bit about that difference going to containers as to how much was seamless, how much did you have to plan, I think about things like high availability security, that I'm sure important to you guys. >> Right see... Yeah, so the way we have done the implementation, used a kind of process the same high standards that we have with availability and security as well, in fact I would argue that availability is higher because now we have cemented those microservices in a way where we know exactly when we need the help of another service. And then we compare this so from an availability perspective, it's better than what we have today, which is already good, because we can scale up and down, we know when the system is going, needs more resources. And from a security perspective, even before the implementation we made sure that it is rock solid and it has the right controls for us. >> One of the slides we liked that you did in the presentation this morning was talking about utilization. We know that most companies are not utilizing most of it. First of all, forecasting what you're going to use, when you're going to use it, is really tough. You either overdo it, you under do it, you've got way too much gear sitting there. You're really transforming yourself to be an internal service provider, do you have any key metrics as to how much greater utilization, what that means to the business, just total cost that you need to be concerned with? >> Right. See the absolute numbers so far, we'd like to see our infrastructure be 90% utilized, 80% utilized, is kind of old school in my mind. >> Stu: That's audacious. >> That's your goal. >> Say that again? >> That's your goal. >> That's your target utilization. >> Well I don't have a target utilization. That's what I'm saying is that that, using a particular watermark as your target utilization is old school. It should be elastic. >> Stu: Oh okay it's old school. Yeah yeah. >> Because sometimes when we do campaigns, we don't know what type of a workload we will get, we just are focusing on just run enough and then only grow when you need, this is why we call it a just in time infrastructure. That way you only provision when you need it, when you're done with it, we'll do provision. With the microservices and how fast we can get the containers, you can do that. >> Okay how about the operational impact, what you're doing, how much retraining did you do, were there professional services you needed to have come in, was it changing roles or was there any change in headcount? I know it's just the one application you've done so far, but where is it today, what do you see as you roll this out further? >> From a operation perspective the skill set mix will change. Instead of having a eyes on glass when you have an operational issue, we are working in a predictive environment where you can proactively say that a particular outage can occur, so the skill set may change but in terms of the size and scale of the operation, at least the way that we are in, we don't see a whole lot of shift there. >> Swamy, were there any surprises when you rolled this out or anything that you look back that you say, "Okay well now when I go to the next five groups I'll be able to say, oh we'll do this faster, you need to plan this a little bit differently." What lessons learned can you share? >> Right, so there were four lessons learned that I mentioned and one is it's very important to have the right granularity for your service, right? When you take a monolithic service and then divide it into 10, 12 microservices, you got to make sure that the granularity is right, that's number one. And you don't want it to be overly granular, or you don't want to keep it monolithic. And the second thing is you are releasing that to microservices, however, from a memory perspective you have to make sure that you're not asking for a whole lot of memory as well. You cannot have the same heap size as if a big monolithic service. Microservices needs to have smaller footprint so it can run more and get the more utilization of your hardware. Because everything is memory bound. Even in your virtual environment it's not a CPU, it's all memory bound. >> Alright, Swamy, you've been interacting with a lot of people at the show, what's your take of the show so far, interaction with your peers, are you able to get, find a lot of other companies that are, have similar challenges that you can kind of share experiences with? >> So a couple of things that I liked about the announcement that Docker has made. One, the enhancements that they are making on the security are very valuable. And then the whole notion about secure supply chain is very relevant. And the second thing that I liked is how easy it is now to take a virtual workload and then putting them in the container. So I think the announcement that they made was attractive. As far as the Expo floor is concerned, we're not putting our workloads in public clouds anytime soon. We're still building private clouds and then hosting it inside, where a lot of people on the expo where they're offering services for the cloud. For example Datadog and stuff like that, I wish we had seen more on how to manage large container deployments from an Operations perspective and any innovation there. But I also haven't had a chance to completely sweep through the floor also. >> In the keynote I heard it was containers are everywhere you want to be. Did they take the tagline from Visa? Everywhere you want to be? >> Maybe. Maybe. I did not notice it, but yeah. >> Swamy, want to give you the final word, as you look out, things you're excited about in the ecosystem or anything, feedback that you'd give to be able to make your job easier, help you move this forward even more into your environment. >> I think the one thing that I would say is that in order to be able to transform an enterprise idea and take the innovation as rapidly as we would like to have every enterprise, the infrastructure and application teams have to partner. And the boundaries between them should be collapsed and they should innovate together, collaborate together. That I would say is number one. And number two, the ecosystem is becoming complex. It's difficult to navigate what should be, because for every single member of, or part of the ecosystem, you have more than one choice. So picking up the right stack is very important as well. >> Alright, well Swamy, really appreciate you joining us, sharing online and the really great kind of encapsulation notes. I had said early on in this wave of Docker it was like, "Oh maybe Docker can help free us from the infrastructure." But of course we know there's relationships, they need to go together, and as we're maturing that complexity is getting better. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much for joining us and sharing with this community and ours, Jim and I will be back with our wrap up here from the two days of live coverage. Thanks for watching TheCube. (soft techno music)

(soft techno upbeat music) >> Hi there. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Dave Villante with Paul Gillon. Reinvent day one and a half. We started last night, Monday, theCUBE after dark. Now we're going wall to wall. Today. Today was of course the big keynote, Adam Selipsky, kind of the baton now handing, you know, last year when he did his keynote, he was very new. He was sort of still getting his feet wet and finding his guru swing. Settling in a little bit more this year, learning a lot more, getting deeper into the tech, but of course, sharing the love with other leaders like Peter DeSantis. Tomorrow's going to be Swamy in the keynote. Adrian Cockcroft is here. Former AWS, former network Netflix CTO, currently an analyst. You got your own firm now. You're out there. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks. >> We heard you on at Super Cloud, you gave some really good insights there back in August. So now as an outsider, you come in obviously, you got to be impressed with the size and the ecosystem and the energy. Of course. What were your thoughts on, you know what you've seen so far, today's keynotes, last night Peter DeSantis, what stood out to you? >> Yeah, I think it's great to be back at Reinvent again. We're kind of pretty much back to where we were before the pandemic sort of shut it down. This is a little, it's almost as big as the, the largest one that we had before. And everyone's turned up. It just feels like we're back. So that's really good to see. And it's a slightly different style. I think there were was more sort of video production things happening. I think in this keynote, more storytelling. I'm not sure it really all stitched together very well. Right. Some of the stories like, how does that follow that? So there were a few things there and some of there were spelling mistakes on the slides, you know that ELT instead of ETL and they spelled ZFS wrong and something. So it just seemed like there was, I'm not quite sure just maybe a few things were sort of rushed at the last minute. >> Not really AWS like, was it? It's kind of remind the Patriots Paul, you know Bill Belichick's teams are fumbling all over the place. >> That's right. That's right. >> Part of it may be, I mean the sort of the market. They have a leader in marketing right now but they're going to have a CMO. So that's sort of maybe as lack of a single threaded leader for this thing. Everything's being shared around a bit more. So maybe, I mean, it's all fixable and it's mine. This is minor stuff. I'm just sort of looking at it and going there's a few things that looked like they were not quite as good as they could have been in the way it was put together. Right? >> But I mean, you're taking a, you know a year of not doing Reinvent. Yeah. Being isolated. You know, we've certainly seen it with theCUBE. It's like, okay, it's not like riding a bike. You know, things that, you know you got to kind of relearn the muscle memories. It's more like golf than is bicycle riding. >> Well I've done AWS keynotes myself. And they are pretty much scrambled. It looks nice, but there's a lot of scrambling leading up to when it actually goes. Right? And sometimes you can, you sometimes see a little kind of the edges of that, and sometimes it's much more polished. But you know, overall it's pretty good. I think Peter DeSantis keynote yesterday was a lot of really good meat there. There was some nice presentations, and some great announcements there. And today I was, I thought I was a little disappointed with some of the, I thought they could have been more. I think the way Andy Jesse did it, he crammed more announcements into his keynote, and Adam seems to be taking sort of a bit more of a measured approach. There were a few things he picked up on and then I'm expecting more to be spread throughout the rest of the day. >> This was more poetic. Right? He took the universe as the analogy for data, the ocean for security. Right? The Antarctic was sort of. >> Yeah. It looked pretty, >> yeah. >> But I'm not sure that was like, we're not here really to watch nature videos >> As analysts and journalists, You're like, come on. >> Yeah, >> Give it the meat >> That was kind the thing, yeah, >> It has always been the AWS has always been Reinvent has always been a shock at our approach. 100, 150 announcements. And they're really, that kind of pressure seems to be off them now. Their position at the top of the market seems to be unshakeable. There's no clear competition that's creeping up behind them. So how does that affect the messaging you think that AWS brings to market when it doesn't really have to prove that it's a leader anymore? It can go after maybe more of the niche markets or fix the stuff that's a little broken more fine tuning than grandiose statements. >> I think so AWS for a long time was so far out that they basically said, "We don't think about the competition, we are listen to the customers." And that was always the statement that works as long as you're always in the lead, right? Because you are introducing the new idea to the customer. Nobody else got there first. So that was the case. But in a few areas they aren't leading. Right? You could argue in machine learning, not necessarily leading in sustainability. They're not leading and they don't want to talk about some of these areas and-- >> Database. I mean arguably, >> They're pretty strong there, but the areas when you are behind, it's like they kind of know how to play offense. But when you're playing defense, it's a different set of game. You're playing a different game and it's hard to be good at both. I think and I'm not sure that they're really used to following somebody into a market and making a success of that. So there's something, it's a little harder. Do you see what I mean? >> I get opinion on this. So when I say database, David Foyer was two years ago, predicted AWS is going to have to converge somehow. They have no choice. And they sort of touched on that today, right? Eliminating ETL, that's one thing. But Aurora to Redshift. >> Yeah. >> You know, end to end. I'm not sure it's totally, they're fully end to end >> That's a really good, that is an excellent piece of work, because there's a lot of work that it eliminates. There's are clear pain points, but then you've got sort of the competing thing, is like the MongoDB and it's like, it's just a way with one database keeps it simple. >> Snowflake, >> Or you've got on Snowflake maybe you've got all these 20 different things you're trying to integrate at AWS, but it's kind of like you have a bag of Lego bricks. It's my favorite analogy, right? You want a toy for Christmas, you want a toy formula one racing car since that seems to be the theme, right? >> Okay. Do you want the fully built model that you can play with right now? Or do you want the Lego version that you have to spend three days building. Right? And AWS is the Lego technique thing. You have to spend some time building it, but once you've built it, you can evolve it, and you'll still be playing those are still good bricks years later. Whereas that prebuilt to probably broken gathering dust, right? So there's something about having an vulnerable architecture which is harder to get into, but more durable in the long term. And so AWS tends to play the long game in many ways. And that's one of the elements that they do that and that's good, but it makes it hard to consume for enterprise buyers that are used to getting it with a bow on top. And here's the solution. You know? >> And Paul, that was always Andy Chassy's answer to when we would ask him, you know, all these primitives you're going to make it simpler. You see the primitives give us the advantage to turn on a dime in the marketplace. And that's true. >> Yeah. So you're saying, you know, you take all these things together and you wrap it up, and you put a snowflake on top, and now you've got a simple thing or a Mongo or Mongo atlas or whatever. So you've got these layered platforms now which are making it simpler to consume, but now you're kind of, you know, you're all stuck in that ecosystem, you know, so it's like what layer of abstractions do you want to tie yourself to, right? >> The data bricks coming at it from more of an open source approach. But it's similar. >> We're seeing Amazon direct more into vertical markets. They spotlighted what Goldman Sachs is doing on their platform. They've got a variety of platforms that are supposedly targeted custom built for vertical markets. How do successful do you see that play being? Is this something that the customers you think are looking for, a fully integrated Amazon solution? >> I think so. There's usually if you look at, you know the MongoDB or data stacks, or the other sort of or elastic, you know, they've got the specific solution with the people that really are developing the core technology, there's open source equivalent version. The AWS is running, and it's usually maybe they've got a price advantage or it's, you know there's some data integration in there or it's somehow easier to integrate but it's not stopping those companies from growing. And what it's doing is it's endorsing that platform. So if you look at the collection of databases that have been around over the last few years, now you've got basically Elastic Mongo and Cassandra, you know the data stacks as being endorsed by the cloud vendors. These are winners. They're going to be around for a very long time. You can build yourself on that architecture. But what happened to Couch base and you know, a few of the other ones, you know, they don't really fit. Like how you going to bait? If you are now becoming an also ran, because you didn't get cloned by the cloud vendor. So the customers are going is that a safe place to be, right? >> But isn't it, don't they want to encourage those partners though in the name of building the marketplace ecosystem? >> Yeah. >> This is huge. >> But certainly the platform, yeah, the platform encourages people to do more. And there's always room around the edge. But the mainstream customers like that really like spending the good money, are looking for something that's got a long term life to it. Right? They're looking for a long commitment to that technology and that it's going to be invested in and grow. And the fact that the cloud providers are adopting and particularly AWS is adopting some of these technologies means that is a very long term commitment. You can base, you know, you can bet your future architecture on that for a decade probably. >> So they have to pick winners. >> Yeah. So it's sort of picking winners. And then if you're the open source company that's now got AWS turning up, you have to then leverage it and use that as a way to grow the market. And I think Mongo have done an excellent job of that. I mean, they're top level sponsors of Reinvent, and they're out there messaging that and doing a good job of showing people how to layer on top of AWS and make it a win-win both sides. >> So ever since we've been in the business, you hear the narrative hardware's going to die. It's just, you know, it's commodity and there's some truth to that. But hardware's actually driving good gross margins for the Cisco's of the world. Storage companies have always made good margins. Servers maybe not so much, 'cause Intel sucked all the margin out of it. But let's face it, AWS makes most of its money. We know on compute, it's got 25 plus percent operating margins depending on the seasonality there. What do you think happens long term to the infrastructure layer discussion? Okay, commodity cloud, you know, we talk about super cloud. Do you think that AWS, and the other cloud vendors that infrastructure, IS gets commoditized and they have to go up market or you see that continuing I mean history would say that still good margins in hardware. What are your thoughts on that? >> It's not commoditizing, it's becoming more specific. We've got all these accelerators and custom chips now, and this is something, this almost goes back. I mean, I was with some micro systems 20,30 years ago and we developed our own chips and HP developed their own chips and SGI mips, right? We were like, the architectures were all squabbling of who had the best processor chips and it took years to get chips that worked. Now if you make a chip and it doesn't work immediately, you screwed up somewhere right? It's become the technology of building these immensely complicated powerful chips that has become commoditized. So the cost of building a custom chip, is now getting to the point where Apple and Amazon, your Apple laptop has got full custom chips your phone, your iPhone, whatever and you're getting Google making custom chips and we've got Nvidia now getting into CPUs as well as GPUs. So we're seeing that the ability to build a custom chip, is becoming something that everyone is leveraging. And the cost of doing that is coming down to startups are doing it. So we're going to see many, many more, much more innovation I think, and this is like Intel and AMD are, you know they've got the compatibility legacy, but of the most powerful, most interesting new things I think are going to be custom. And we're seeing that with Graviton three particular in the three E that was announced last night with like 30, 40% whatever it was, more performance for HPC workloads. And that's, you know, the HPC market is going to have to deal with cloud. I mean they are starting to, and I was at Supercomputing a few weeks ago and they are tiptoeing around the edge of cloud, but those supercomputers are water cold. They are monsters. I mean you go around supercomputing, there are plumbing vendors on the booth. >> Of course. Yeah. >> Right? And they're highly concentrated systems, and that's really the only difference, is like, is it water cooler or echo? The rest of the technology stack is pretty much off the shelf stuff with a few tweets software. >> You point about, you know, the chips and what AWS is doing. The Annapurna acquisition. >> Yeah. >> They're on a dramatically different curve now. I think it comes down to, again, David Floyd's premise, really comes down to volume. The arm wafer volumes are 10 x those of X 86, volume always wins. And the economics of semis. >> That kind of got us there. But now there's also a risk five coming along if you, in terms of licensing is becoming one of the bottlenecks. Like if the cost of building a chip is really low, then it comes down to licensing costs and do you want to pay the arm license And the risk five is an open source chip set which some people are starting to use for things. So your dis controller may have a risk five in it, for example, nowadays, those kinds of things. So I think that's kind of the the dynamic that's playing out. There's a lot of innovation in hardware to come in the next few years. There's a thing called CXL compute express link which is going to be really interesting. I think that's probably two years out, before we start seeing it for real. But it lets you put glue together entire rack in a very flexible way. So just, and that's the entire industry coming together around a single standard, the whole industry except for Amazon, in fact just about. >> Well, but maybe I think eventually they'll get there. Don't use system on a chip CXL. >> I have no idea whether I have no knowledge about whether going to do anything CXL. >> Presuming I'm not trying to tap anything confidential. It just makes sense that they would do a system on chip. It makes sense that they would do something like CXL. Why not adopt the standard, if it's going to be as the cost. >> Yeah. And so that was one of the things out of zip computing. The other thing is the low latency networking with the elastic fabric adapter EFA and the extensions to that that were announced last night. They doubled the throughput. So you get twice the capacity on the nitro chip. And then the other thing was this, this is a bit technical, but this scalable datagram protocol that they've got which basically says, if I want to send a message, a packet from one machine to another machine, instead of sending it over one wire, I consider it over 16 wires in parallel. And I will just flood the network with all the packets and they can arrive in any order. This is why it isn't done normally. TCP is in order, the packets come in order they're supposed to, but this is fully flooding them around with its own fast retry and then they get reassembled at the other end. So they're not just using this now for HPC workloads. They've turned it on for TCP for just without any change to your application. If you are trying to move a large piece of data between two machines, and you're just pushing it down a network, a single connection, it takes it from five gigabits per second to 25 gigabits per second. A five x speed up, with a protocol tweak that's run by the Nitro, this is super interesting. >> Probably want to get all that AIML that stuff is going on. >> Well, the AIML stuff is leveraging it underneath, but this is for everybody. Like you're just copying data around, right? And you're limited, "Hey this is going to get there five times faster, pushing a big enough chunk of data around." So this is turning on gradually as the nitro five comes out, and you have to enable it at the instance level. But it's a super interesting announcement from last night. >> So the bottom line bumper sticker on commoditization is what? >> I don't think so. I mean what's the APIs? Your arm compatible, your Intel X 86 compatible or your maybe risk five one day compatible in the cloud. And those are the APIs, right? That's the commodity level. And the software is now, the software ecosystem is super portable across those as we're seeing with Apple moving from Intel to it's really not an issue, right? The software and the tooling is all there to do that. But underneath that, we're going to see an arms race between the top providers as they all try and develop faster chips for doing more specific things. We've got cranium for training, that instance has they announced it last year with 800 gigabits going out of a single instance, 800 gigabits or no, but this year they doubled it. Yeah. So 1.6 terabytes out of a single machine, right? That's insane, right? But what you're doing is you're putting together hundreds or thousands of those to solve the big machine learning training problems. These super, these enormous clusters that they're being formed for doing these massive problems. And there is a market now, for these incredibly large supercomputer clusters built for doing AI. That's all bandwidth limited. >> And you think about the timeframe from design to tape out. >> Yeah. >> Is just getting compressed It's relative. >> It is. >> Six is going the other way >> The tooling is all there. Yeah. >> Fantastic. Adrian, always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much. >> Yeah. >> Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thank you Paul. >> Cheers. All right. Keep it right there everybody. Don't forget, go to thecube.net, you'll see all these videos. Go to siliconangle.com, We've got features with Adam Selipsky, we got my breaking analysis, we have another feature with MongoDB's, Dev Ittycheria, Ali Ghodsi, as well Frank Sluman tomorrow. So check that out. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech, right back. (soft techno upbeat music)