hey welcome back to los angeles lisa martin here with the cube we are live at kubecon and cloudnativecon 21. it's been great to be here we've been broadcasting the last couple of days about 2 700 people joining us in person great buzz great energy i've got two guests here next joining me remotely please welcome it's reich the vp technologist at dell emc anivis iyer senior principal product manager at dell technologies gentlemen welcome to the program thanks for having us lisa thank you lisa and we're pleased that you're joining us today it's like let's go ahead and start with you let's talk we've seen a lot of of uptick and kubernetes it's been picking up a lot what are some of the things that you're seeing through your lens right that's a great question lisa so really we need to take a step back bobby into 2019 we just mentioned in-person conferences so back then we started to see a slow adoption of customers that are starting to play with kubernetes in their test environment maybe running some pocs but then the pandemic happened obviously and we started to see huge explosion in terms of adoption and accelerating the digital based projects for our customers so they're really starting to pick up kubernetes and use it heavily in their production and of course in addition to their test and dev environments as well and because of that adoption they started to think about other scenarios and other considerations that are relevant for their production environment which is based upon kubernetes things like disaster recovery availability all of those things that typically you don't worry about when you just run them in a small desk or a poc environment but are super critical for our customers and you know it's the largest storage company in the world we have the smallest company customers in the world but also the largest and the most demanding one it's a really huge adoption that needs to basically accelerate all of those aspects that belong to an enterprise environment that happens to run on kubernetes itself if ask do you see something similar yeah absolutely i agree with itzik and actually one of the brief stories actually i start out with is because a few years ago actually several years ago when i was taking a cab in new york remember the point-of-sale terminal was not working so you know you took my credit card just like use the magnetic spike so not having the technology access was like an inconvenience but it still could transact but now today's age when you look at digital transform trans digitally transformed companies starting with all these web companies like you know you've got like uber lyft and things like that but then you also have mainstream companies where the entire business is now taking over digital hence all these applications are the ones that are powering the entire business if you will and not having these applications available or these apps available uh will basically the business is gonna lose money and and that's and that's what is and the pandemic has only accelerated digital transformation right because everyone working from home and and also the customers are also remote so now you have the entire operation is just software is running the business pretty much every company is a technology company and then you have you know and then all these applications they are modernized so they are modernized in the way that they're not built to the traditional architectures they're now using you know microservices devops and agile these are three major aspects that kind of you know drove the new application modernized applications to build more complex applications and kubernetes has emerged as the sole platform that can you know kind of serve the underlying platform between all of these aspects and hence we see that you know kubernetes adoption has taken off a lot because pretty much every organization is running several projects within the enterprise including app modernization you know transformation of any kind of secondary kind of use cases iot you know the whole digital transformation story is kind of running on kubernetes and as sick was pointing out so now kubernetes are simmered as the key infrastructure as a service layer if you will or above the infrastructure service and it needs to consume storage and it needs to have you know all these traditional capabilities that were for uh for applications right i mean like uh disaster recovery uh having enterprise grade uh availability aspects like you know for this uh data protection things like that and that's sort of is and the enterprise capabilities are relatively i would say uh accelerating a lot earlier kubernetes was more on the non-enterprise aspects of the journey now we are seeing a lot more enterprise growth are you seeing your conversations within organizations elevate up the chain where kubernetes is concerned is this a c-level conversation or the understanding that from a competitive differentiation perspective from a modernization perspective it's the direction they need to go in yeah absolutely and for them you know vmware ran itself a couple of months ago about the reasons that are important for customers to run containers in production there were like ten tens of them but the number one reason is to accelerate software adoption and to basically write codes faster that's like the number one reason it's not about the technology itself you know technology is just an enabler and the enabler is to write the code as quickly as you could deploy it in test and dev quickly as you could run some qa cycles on it and release release release the code that's at the end of the day that's the main difference between the old way of the waterfall approach to the new way of agile approach which eventually got translated into the infrastructure layer itself it needs to accommodate those changes if you will well releasing code faster is going to enable organizations presumably in any industry to be able to develop and release products and services faster to the demanding consumer market i imagine that's absolutely correct we've all got spoiled by the smartphone industry we'll just expect a new version to be just deployed to your device almost every day now it's exactly the same it is we i think we carry that i think it's i think it's impossible not to carry that consumer expectation from our consumer life into our business life and we just expect that things are going to work that way because in our consumer lives they do i want to ask you guys about is that this question is directly for you talk to me about csi what is it besides a tv show i know you have a great answer for this and many spin-offs by the way right not just a single one csi right so let's take a step back into 2015. docker rebecca dockercon they sit on the stage and during the keynote and they explain that you should write your code in the 12 factor way resiliency should be built in into the containers themselves and you shouldn't care about storage persistency now we're in the storage industry for the best part of my life right now and storage persistence is important if a customer lose data that's a very bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well so it's all about the data nothing else really matters the data itself is the goal and so there was no data persistency back then you go here and we actually work with the startup that did just storage consistency for containers basically meaning the ability to provision a volume from storage array into kubernetes and kubernetes will know about this that style tab went busted but the need still existed and so into that need google came and they come up with this api called container storage interface short for csi that does exactly that it allows kubernetes administrator of the kubernetes api to consume storage from the underlying storage array so provision volumes map mapping volumes taking a snapshot of the volume and mapping those from those very basic capabilities now those capabilities are very basic and we now have customers that are telling us i need far more than just the ability to provision a volume for my kubernetes environments i need this volume to be protected i need this volume to be replicated and it is volume to be protected into a backup device all of those things that csi doesn't know to do today no we didn't know to do in the near future so what we did is we said right we're not going to reinvent the wheel that's csi we're not just going to repeat csi all over again we're going to extend csi with open source tools that will enable our customers to do all of those things that are just mentioned before so csm is container storage modules which is what we announced today and it's very high level it provides you i provided the capabilities to do the following the first one is the observability module so if you're monitoring your open source environments you are very very likely to use open source tools like graphing and commit use so we have this plugin that allows you to monitor your storage array with gofundme and prometus and really uh becomes the liaison point between the storage admin the kubernetes admin they can connect both to the console and each really understand the the entity that is not aware of i call it the two-way mirror base second module is the resiliency module kubernetes is very infant in terms of understanding storage it doesn't understand storage failure conditions and so our resiliency module run as the k3s is like a minimum version of kubernetes if you will which keeps monitoring both the storage array and the host and in case of a storage arrow it knows to act upon it and do things like volume unmapping and map those volumes to other surviving servers in the product center etc the other module is the replication module so back into 2015 uh customers are basically telling us today i want to use kubernetes but i also want to replicate the data to either a passive site or an active site and in case of a failure if my primary site goes down i want to fail over this kubernetes volumes and data to a remote site so literally within a click of a button you can fail over your kubernetes environment from site a to site b using the underlying storage array capabilities replication etc etc and the other module that we've also announced is the volume group snapshots so instead of just taking a single volume which is what csr is all about you can actually take multiple volume that belong to multiple micro services that at the end of the day running within those containers in order to really back up a service and not just the micro service itself so all of these modules and future modules that will come in the future as well belong to csm and csm for us is just the beginning it's everything that our most most the demanding customers want us to provide today and they are not willing to wait for csi to catch up base got it so we you've done a great job of explaining what csi is what it isn't what csm is and all the great things that were announced today let's talk about the data protection the security angle we've seen so much change in the security the threat landscape in the last 18 months we've seen ransomware become a household word the proliferation of ddos attacks and of course there's this scattered workforce that is still scattered talk to me about why data protection for kubernetes and what are some of the unique needs that that presents uh sure uh thanks lisa so um so when you look at the kubernetes landscape it originally started out with mostly the front-end aspects multi like you know like web tier type applications but as the landscape has evolved now we are seeing actually in the kubernetes community also there has been newer concepts like stateful sets for example which allows you to have more persistent type uh or basically they you know the application that have retained state and data uh in the kubernetes cluster and we are seeing a huge proliferation and that is also increasing you know across the board on uh for example everything from experimentation or like any kind of user experience kind of data the understanding about sessions you know what users like what they don't like to all critical operational aspects to transactional elements too all of them being brought into the kubernetes we are seeing organizations in various stages of the journey and then add on to the additional uh capabilities on the storage side as she was mentioning about csi and csm and are basically the ways for the kubernetes layer to consume these storage services so when you're building these modern applications uh the state is now preserved as part of the kubernetes and actually recently we had a case with one of the customers we've had and uh so they did not have data protection as part of their kubernetes and uh and you know and we are seeing this in several organizations where you have an it ops kind of a team and there is a devops team there's a two-speed it concept so devops teams a lot of time they do not take into consideration a lot of these uh you know disaster recovery and uh you know the data protection aspects as part of the design and then one of the customers just what happened and they lost you know data because the you know their systems crashed and it was not through ransomware luckily but it was through uh you know a general logical you know failure of hardware things like that and so they could not recover that so they had to go back and they had to like rest all the whole thing so they started investing in saying oh we need a ways to protect the data so that i can recover so data is all about recovery it's about you know making sure you can record to a certain point in time and also recovering in the minimal amount of time and the challenges that kubernetes adds on top of traditional application that you know the entire application definition in kubernetes is split across multiple of these smaller metadata aspects like the application itself will have labels they will have uh you know they'll have secrets they'll have config maps they'll have custom resource definitions they have all this additional metadata that make up the entire application not just the data so you need to have all of that captured in context in a cloud native fashion if you if you're trying to protect that kubernetes environment and that's kind of a little bit of a unique challenge and then from a security aspect that you alluded to from kubernetes yes there are been you know multiple security challenges that we see although we don't directly work on the front end on the uh on the prevention side but on the cure side data protection is an important aspect right i mean if you look at the open source community there is so much open source today and how do you know that the open source and the api that you're consuming is is coming from a valid source you need so there is all kinds of like different security solutions that kubernetes community offers to validate making sure the source code is good the apis are authenticated and you know authorized things like that so there is a lot of these but even despite that you know there is always ability for some attacks to sneak in and that's where data protection is providing that cure so in case something does happen and you have a ransomware attack i have a cyber security vault or i have data stored in a secure fashion in a panic room if you will that i can so my business like i was alluding to my earlier example the business depends on that data and that operational transactional customer data and you need to recover that and you need to store it in a secure place and that's sort of the whole aspect of that it's got to be recoverable that's the whole point guys thank you so much for joining me talking to me about what you're seeing from a kubernetes adoption acceleration perspective thank you for helping me learn a new definition of csi not a show or a spin-off and talk to us about what csm is and the things that you are the modules that you're announcing today we appreciate your candor and your time thank you lisa thanks for having us my pleasure for my guests i'm lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles at kubecon cloudbanditcon21 be right back dave nicholson will rejoin me with our next guest stay tuned you