>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great questions, Dave. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great question, Steve. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, and it does get disconnected on a regular basis. In fact, I forget the exact number, but some several dozen locations get disconnected daily just by virtue of the fact that there's construction going on and things are happening in the real world. When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

(upbeat synth intro music) >> Hey everyone and welcome to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago was, standing room only. The Solutions hall is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is Cloud Native at Scale. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers, structurally, will be transforming companies with just, they got to get powered somewhere. And, I think, the Cloud Native at Scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Kube alumnis. We're going to talk about Cloud Native at Scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture, should be great. >> All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here, as John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madhura Maskasky joins us, co-founder of Platform9. Sirish Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform9 joins us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Excited to be here >> So, talk to us. You guys have some news, Madhura, give us the sneak peak. What's going on? >> Definitely, we are very excited. So, we have John, not too long ago we spoke about our very new open source project called Arlon. And, we were talking about the launch of Arlon in terms of its first release and etcetera. And, just fresh hot of the press, we, Platform9 had its 5.6 release which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that we'd like to share as part of that. I think, the prominent one is, Platform9 added support for EKS Kubernetes cluster management. And, so, this is part of our vision of being able to add value, no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters, because, Kubernetes or cluster management, is increasingly becoming commodity. And, so, I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top, and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, DevOps solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments, with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So, towards that, key features in the 5.6 six release. First, is the very first package release of the product online, which is the open source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And, then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. >> I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this next, this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps, but, now, more than ever, you mentioned the application in Ops. You're seeing WebAssembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So, you're seeing a application tsunami coming. So, the pressure is okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. And, so, you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence trying to automate. So you got the automation, so you got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? what's in it for them right now? >> So it's, I think going back to what you just said, right, the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native, is always growing. So, it's not just a number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So, a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons, and operators, and extensions. Whereas, a different application may require something entirely different. And, now, you take this in an enterprise context, right. Like, we had a major media company that worked with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And, you now think about the breadth of applications, the hundreds of different applications being built. how do you consistently build, and compose, and manage, a large number of communities clusters with a a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. >> Scott Johnston just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now than in the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. >> And, that's where, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNCF ecosystem technologies. And, the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And, what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters, using templates, and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects, that are all very interesting and powerful. >> So Project Arlon really helping developers produce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. >> That's exactly right. >> Talk about the, the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What's does it turn into for a benefit standpoint? >> Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do Cloud Native at Scale faster, and while still keeping a very lean Ops team that is able to spend, let's say 70 plus percent of their time, caring for your actual business bread and butter applications, and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right. If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70% of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stoves etcetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal, because, that is your core key ingredient. But, what happens today in most enterprises is, because, of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling, being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70% plus, gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right. And, that is exactly what we are looking to solve, online. >> What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform9? What, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of like really inefficient infrastructure, or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So, someone needs to look at their environment and say, okay, maybe I should call platform9. What's it look like? >> So, we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One, is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically, 30 or more clusters already. These are the people that already know containers. They know, they've container wise... >> Savvy teams. >> They're savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because, now, the problem is how do I scale us? So, that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell, is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies that, as what I would call the mainstream enterprise. We're in Detroit in Motown, right, And, we're outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right. For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So, what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay. And, what does it take, to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve, is, because, we have technologies like Kube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but, while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So, I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern. And, the advanced savvy users, for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale. >> And, what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups, as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but, there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform9 is the right one for you, in the both of these groups. >> And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, to get started with existing applications that they have, on the infrastructure that they have. Number one. And, for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams. Especially, with the economy being the way it is, people are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people, right. So, that all of them are being asked to do more with less. And, our team, our technology, and our teams, help you do more with less. >> I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here, he is one of their engineer open source advocates. He's always on the ground pumping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services, with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on-premises. But Amazon's doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, If I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? >> Yeah, so, and it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is, Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So, customers are going to find the right home whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, AKS, GKE, or their own infrastructure, to run Kubernetes. And, so, where we want to be at, is, with a project like Arlon, Sirish spoke about the barbell strategy, on one end there is these advanced Kubernetes users, majority of them are running Kubernetes on AKS, right? Because, that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So, now, they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their DevTest, their staging, their production. And, that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform... >> So you come in and solve that. >> That is where we come in and we solve that. And it, you know, Amazon or EKS, doesn't give you tooling to solve that, right. It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. >> Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you got regions and locations... >> Exactly >> ...that's kind of a super cloud problem, we're seeing, opportunity problem, and opportunity is that, on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but, now, also, you got regions. >> That is absolutely right. You're on point John. And the way we solve it, is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a yaml file, you define exactly how for your DevTest environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS. And then you stamp it out. >> So let me, here's an analogy, I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, that's got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give 'em the sports car. You allow them to stay on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed, Edge, Global. >> I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to... ... they can focus on driving the car, rather than trying to build the car. >> You don't want people to stop, once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger. >> That's right. >> To accelerate that applications. >> Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time, and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. >> And we got four right behind us, so, we'll get them involved. So that's... >> But, you're not reinventing the wheel. >> We're not at all, because, what we are building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right. One, is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run Cloud Native private clouds. And, this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself. You really have to be a car builder, to be able to do this with our Platform9. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And, the other end is, we help you operate at scale, in the hyperscalers, right. Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem, or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently? And, how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? >> I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service. We previously mentioned up coming into KubeCon, but, here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, 'cause Intuit was on stage on the keynote, getting an award for their work. You know, Argo, it comes from Intuit. That ArgoCon was in Mountain View. You guys were involved in that. You guys were at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because, Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? >> I can talk about it. So, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes, is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, the infrastructure management story, right. So, we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We, really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, as part of this effort, in 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service, in its GA version, right. Because, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service, in our mind, is enabling you to run on one end, your infrastructure as a scale, through GitOps, and infrastructure as a code practices. And on the other end, your entire application fleet, at scale, right. And, just marrying the two, really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. >> But, and avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So, this is really solves that problem, mainly. >> That is exactly right. And if you think of it, the way those problems are solved today, is, kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CI/CD tools, like Argo CD is an excellent one. There's some other choices, which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But, that team, is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts, or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts, which are very difficult to manage. >> So, Arlon changes sure, as they change the complexity and also the sprawl. But, that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast, they're adding more capability. That's what trouble starts, right? >> I think in two ways, right. Like one is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common long-standing problems we've had, is, how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right. And, you've seen Argo's really get adopted by the application teams, but, it's now something that we are making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right. And, what that's going to do is, help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency, and improve the developer experience. Because, that's what it's all about, ultimately. >> And, I know that you just released 5.6 today, congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any, any customers that you've been able to talk to, or have early access? >> Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And, their feedback has been that this, basically, helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space, down to the infrastructure management teams, right. And, we are also hearing a lot of customers, that I would say, large scale public cloud users, saying, they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that's been the feedback, is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. >> Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question, for me, before I end up, for Lisa to ask her last question is, if you had to explain Platform9, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? >> If I take that? I would say that the reason why Platform9, the reason why we exist, is, putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today, historically, has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car, or you can enjoy the car, you really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe a 100 tech companies of the world, but, for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why Platform9 exists, is, we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. >> Why you cool and relevant? How would you say it? >> Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease, is going to be the key. And that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. >> With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madhura, for you, is, where can Devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? >> Absolutely. Go to platform9.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it right on the website. And, if they want to learn about Arlon, it's an open source GitHub project. Go to GitHub and find out more about it. >> Excellent guys, thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver Cloud Native at Scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John, and I, appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks so much >> Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. Just a minute. (light synth outro music)

>>Hello everyone and welcome back to Motor City, Michigan. We're live from the Cube and my name is Savannah Peterson. Joined this afternoon with my co-host John Ferer. John, how you doing? Doing >>Great. This next segment's gonna be awesome about application modernization, scaling pluses. This is what's gonna, how are the next generation software revolution? It's gonna be >>Fun. You know, it's kind of been a theme of our day today is scale. And when we think about the complex orchestration platform that is Kubernetes, everyone wants to scale faster, quicker, more efficiently, and our guests are here to tell us all about that. Please welcome to Char and Andy, thank you so much for being here with us. You were on the Red Hat OpenShift team. Yeah. I suspect most of our audience is familiar, but just in case, let's give 'em a quick one-liner pitch so everyone's on the same page. Tell us about OpenShift. >>I, I'll take that one. OpenShift is our ES platform is our ES distribution. You can consume it as a self-managed platform or you can consume it as a managed service on on public clouds. And so we just call it all OpenShift. So it's basically Kubernetes, but you know, with a CNCF ecosystem around it to make things more easier. So maybe there's two >>Lights. So what does being at coupon mean for you? How does it feel to be here? What's your initial takes? >>Exciting. I'm having a fantastic time. I haven't been to coupon since San Diego, so it's great to be back in person and see old friends, make new friends, have hallway conversations. It's, it's great as an engineer trying to work in this ecosystem, just being able to, to be in the same place with these folks. >>And you gotta ask, before we came on camera, you're like, this is like my sixth co con. We were like, we're seven, you know, But that's a lot of co coupons. It >>Is, yes. I mean, so what, >>Yes. >>Take us status >>For sure. Where we are now. Compare and contrast co. Your first co con, just scope it out. What's the magnitude of change? If you had to put a pin on that, because there's a lot of new people coming in, they might not have seen where it's come from and how we got here is maybe not how we're gonna get to the next >>Level. I've seen it grow tremendously since the first one I went to, which I think was Austin several years ago. And what's great is seeing lots of new people interested in contributing and also seeing end users who are trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of this great ecosystem that we have. >>Awesome. And the project management side, you get the keys to the Kingdom with Red Hat OpenShift, which has been successful. Congratulations by the way. Thank you. We watched that grow and really position right on the wave. It's going great. What's the update on on the product? Kind of, you're in a good, good position right now. Yeah, >>No, we we're feeling good about it. It's all about our customers. Obviously the fact that, you know, we have thousands of customers using OpenShift as the cloud native platform, the container platform. We're very excited. The great thing about them is that, I mean you can go to like OpenShift Commons is kind of a user group that we run on the first day, like on Tuesday we ran. I mean you should see the number of just case studies that our customers went through there, you know? And it is fantastic to see that. I mean it's across so many different industries, across so many different use cases, which is very exciting. >>One of the things we've been reporting here in the Qla scene before, but here more important is just that if you take digital transformation to the, to its conclusion, the IT department and developers, they're not a department to serve the business. They are the business. Yes. That means that the developers are deciding things. Yeah. And running the business. Prove their code. Yeah. Okay. If that's, if that takes place, you gonna have scale. And we also said on many cubes, certainly at Red Hat Summit and other ones, the clouds are distributed computer, it's distributed computing. So you guys are focusing on this project, Andy, that you're working on kcp. >>Yes. >>Which is, I won't platform Kubernetes platform for >>Control >>Planes. Control planes. Yes. Take us through, what's the focus on why is that important and why is that relate to the mission of developers being in charge and large scale? >>Sure. So a lot of times when people are interested in developing on Kubernetes and running workloads, they need a cluster of course. And those are not cheap. It takes time, it takes money, it takes resources to get them. And so we're trying to make that faster and easier for, for end users and everybody involved. So with kcp, we've been able to take what looks like one normal Kubernetes and partition it. And so everybody gets a slice of it. You're an administrator in your little slice and you don't have to ask for permission to install new APIs and they don't conflict with anybody else's APIs. So we're really just trying to make it super fast and make it super flexible. So everybody is their own admin. >>So the developer basically looks at it as a resource blob. They can do whatever they want, but it's shared and provisioned. >>Yes. One option. It's like, it's like they have their own cluster, but you don't have to go through the process of actually provisioning a full >>Cluster. And what's the alternative? What's the what's, what's the, what's the benefit and what was the alternative to >>This? So the alternative, you spin up a full cluster, which you know, maybe that's three control plane nodes, you've got multiple workers, you've got a bunch of virtual machines or bare metal, or maybe you take, >>How much time does that take? Just ballpark. >>Anywhere from five minutes to an hour you can use cloud services. Yeah. Gke, E Ks and so on. >>Keep banging away. You're configuring. Yeah. >>Those are faster. Yeah. But it's still like, you still have to wait for that to happen and it costs money to do all of that too. >>Absolutely. And it's complex. Why do something that's been done, if there's a tool that can get you a couple steps down the path, which makes a ton of sense. Something that we think a lot when we're talking about scale. You mentioned earlier, Tohar, when we were chatting before the cams were alive, scale means a lot of different things. Can you dig in there a little bit? >>Yeah, I >>Mean, so when, when >>We talk about scale, >>We are talking about from a user perspective, we are talking about, you know, there are more users, there are more applications, there are more workloads, there are more services being run on Kubernetes now, right? So, and OpenShift. So, so that's one dimension of this scale. The other dimension of the scale is how do you manage all the underlying infrastructure, the clusters, the name spaces, and all the observability data, et cetera. So that's at least two levels of scale. And then obviously there's a third level of scale, which is, you know, there is scale across not just different clouds, but also from cloud to the edge. So there is that dimension of scale. So there are several dimensions of this scale. And the one that again, we are focused on here really is about, you know, this, the first one that I talk about is a user. And when I say user, it could be a developer, it could be an application architect, or it could be an application owner who wants to develop Kubernetes applications for Kubernetes and wants to publish those APIs, if you will, and make it discoverable and then somebody consumes it. So that's the scale we are talking about >>Here. What are some of the enterprise, you guys have a lot of customers, we've talked to you guys before many, many times and other subjects, Red Hat, I mean you guys have all the customers. Yeah. Enterprise, they've been there, done that. And you know, they're, they're savvy. Yeah. But the cloud is a whole nother ballgame. What are they thinking about? What's the psychology of the customer right now? Because now they have a lot of choices. Okay, we get it, we're gonna re-platform refactor apps, we'll keep some legacy on premises for whatever reasons. But cloud pretty much is gonna be the game. What's the mindset right now of the customer base? Where are they in their, in their psych? Not the executive, but more of the the operators or the developers? >>Yeah, so I mean, first of all, different customers are at different levels of maturity, I would say in this. They're all on a journey how I like to describe it. And in this journey, I mean, I see a customers who are really tip of the sphere. You know, they have containerized everything. They're cloud native, you know, they use best of tools, I mean automation, you know, complete automation, you know, quick deployment of applications and all, and life cycle of applications, et cetera. So that, that's kind of one end of this spectrum >>Advanced. Then >>The advances, you know, and, and I, you know, I don't, I don't have any specific numbers here, but I'd say there are quite a few of them. And we see that. And then there is kind of the middle who are, I would say, who are familiar with containers. They know what app modernization, what a cloud application means. They might have tried a few. So they are in the journey. They are kind of, they want to get there. They have some other kind of other issues, organizational or talent and so, so on and so forth. Kinds of issues to get there. And then there are definitely the quota, what I would call the lag arts still. And there's lots of them. But I think, you know, Covid has certainly accelerated a lot of that. I hear that. And there is definitely, you know, more, the psychology is definitely more towards what I would say public cloud. But I think where we are early also in the other trend that I see is kind of okay, public cloud great, right? So people are going there, but then there is the so-called edge also. Yeah. That is for various regions. You, you gotta have a kind of a regional presence, a edge presence. And that's kind of the next kind of thing taking off here. And we can talk more >>About it. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I, as you know, as we know, we're very excited about Edge here at the Cube. Yeah. What types of trends are you seeing? Is that space emerges a little bit more firmly? >>Yeah, so I mean it's, I mean, so we, when we talk about Edge, you're talking about, you could talk about Edge as a, as a retail, I mean locations, right? >>Could be so many things edges everywhere. Everywhere, right? It's all around us. Quite literally. Even on the >>Scale. Exactly. In space too. You could, I mean, in fact you mentioned space. I was, I was going to >>Kinda, it's this world, >>My space actually Kubernetes and OpenShift running in space, believe it or not, you know, So, so that's the edge, right? So we have Industrial Edge, we have Telco Edge, we have a 5g, then we have, you know, automotive edge now and, and, and retail edge and, and more, right? So, and space, you know, So it's very exciting there. So the reason I tag back to that question that you asked earlier is that that's where customers are. So cloud is one thing, but now they gotta also think about how do I, whatever I do in the cloud, how do I bring it to the edge? Because that's where my end users are, my customers are, and my data is, right? So that's the, >>And I think Kubernetes has brought that attention to the laggards. We had the Laed Martin on yesterday, which is an incredible real example of Kubernetes at the edge. It's just incredible story. We covered it also wrote a story about it. So compelling. Cuz it makes it real. Yes. And Kubernetes is real. So then the question is developer productivity, okay, Things are starting to settle in. We've got KCP scaling clusters, things are happening. What about the tool chains? And how do I develop now I got scale of development, more code coming in. I mean, we are speculating that in the future there's so much code in open source that no one has to write code anymore. Yeah. At some point it's like this gluing things together. So the developers need to be productive. How are we gonna scale the developer equation and eliminate the, the complexity of tool chains and environments. Web assembly is super hyped up at this show. I don't know why, but sounds good. No one, no one can tell me why, but I can kind of connect the dots. But this is a big thing. >>Yeah. And it's fitting that you ask about like no code. So we've been working with our friends at Cross Plain and have integrated with kcp the ability to no code, take a whole bunch of configuration and say, I want a database. I want to be a, a provider of databases. I'm in an IT department, there's a bunch of developers, they don't wanna have to write code to create databases. So I can just take, take my configuration and make it available to them. And through some super cool new easy to use tools that we have as a developer, you can just say, please give me a database and you don't have to write any code. I don't have to write any code to maintain that database. I'm actually using community tooling out there to get that spun up. So there's a lot of opportunities out there. So >>That's ease of use check. What about a large enterprise that's got multiple tool chains and you start having security issues. Does that disrupt the tool chain capability? Like there's all those now weird examples emerging, not weird, but like real plumbing challenges. How do you guys see that evolving with Red >>Hat and Yeah, I mean, I mean, talking about that, right? The software, secure software supply chain is a huge concern for everyone after, especially some of the things that have happened in the past few >>Years. Massive team here at the show. Yeah. And just within the community, we're all a little more aware, I think, even than we were before. >>Before. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think the, so to step back, I mean from, so, so it's not just even about, you know, run time vulnerability scanning, Oh, that's important, but that's not enough, right? So we are talking about, okay, how did that container, or how did that workload get there? What is that workload? What's the prominence of this workload? How did it get created? What is in it? You know, and what, what are, how do I make, make sure that there are no unsafe attack s there. And so that's the software supply chain. And where Red Hat is very heavily invested. And as you know, with re we kind of have roots in secure operating system. And rel one of the reasons why Rel, which is the foundation of everything we do at Red Hat, is because of security. So an OpenShift has always been secure out of the box with things like scc, rollbacks access control, we, which we added very early in the product. >>And now if you kind of bring that forward, you know, now we are talking about the complete software supply chain security. And this is really about right how from the moment the, the, the developer rights code and checks it into a gateway repository from there on, how do you build it? How do you secure it at each step of the process, how do you sign it? And we are investing and contributing to the community with things like cosign and six store, which is six store project. And so that secures the supply chain. And then you can use things like algo cd and then finally we can do it, deploy it onto the cluster itself. And then we have things like acs, which can do vulnerability scanning, which is a container security platform. >>I wanna thank you guys for coming on. I know Savannah's probably got a last question, but my last question is, could you guys each take a minute to answer why has Kubernetes been so successful today? What, what was the magic of Kubernetes that made it successful? Was it because no one forced it? Yes. Was it lightweight? Was it good timing, right place at the right time community? What's the main reason that Kubernetes is enabling all this, all this shift and goodness that's coming together, kind of defacto unifies people, the stacks, almost middleware markets coming around. Again, not to use that term middleware, but it feels like it's just about to explode. Yeah. Why is this so successful? I, >>I think, I mean, the shortest answer that I can give there really is, you know, as you heard the term, I think Satya Nala from Microsoft has used it. I don't know if he was the original person who pointed, but every company wants to be a software company or is a software company now. And that means that they want to develop stuff fast. They want to develop stuff at scale and develop at, in a cloud native way, right? You know, with the cloud. So that's, and, and Kubernetes came at the right time to address the cloud problem, especially across not just one public cloud or two public clouds, but across a whole bunch of public clouds and infrastructure as, and what we call the hybrid clouds. I think the ES is really exploded because of hybrid cloud, the need for hybrid cloud. >>And what's your take on the, the magic Kubernetes? What made it, what's making it so successful? >>I would agree also that it came about at the right time, but I would add that it has great extensibility and as developers we take it advantage of that every single day. And I think that the, the patterns that we use for developing are very consistent. And I think that consistency that came with Kubernetes, just, you have so many people who are familiar with it and so they can follow the same patterns, implement things similarly, and it's just a good fit for the way that we want to get our software out there and have, and have things operate. >>Keep it simple, stupid almost is that acronym, but the consistency and the de facto alignment Yes. Behind it just created a community. So, so then the question is, are the developers now setting the standards? That seems like that's the new way, right? I mean, >>I'd like to think so. >>So I mean hybrid, you, you're touching everything at scale and you also have mini shift as well, right? Which is taking a super macro micro shift. You ma micro shift. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. It is a micro shift. That is, that is fantastic. There isn't a base you don't cover. You've spoken a lot about community and both of you have, and serving the community as well as your engagement with them from a, I mean, it's given that you're both leaders stepping back, how, how Community First is Red Hat and OpenShift as an organization when it comes to building the next products and, and developing. >>I'll take and, and I'm sure Andy is actually the community, so I'm sure he'll want to a lot of it. But I mean, right from the start, we have roots in open source. I'll keep it, you know, and, and, and certainly with es we were one of the original contributors to Kubernetes other than Google. So in some ways we think about as co-creators of es, they love that. And then, yeah, then we have added a lot of things in conjunction with the, I I talk about like SCC for Secure, which has become part security right now, which the community, we added things like our back and other what we thought were enterprise features needed because we actually wanted to build a product out of it and sell it to customers where our customers are enterprises. So we have worked with the community. Sometimes we have been ahead of the community and we have convinced the community. Sometimes the community has been ahead of us for other reasons. So it's been a great collaboration, which is I think the right thing to do. But Andy, as I said, >>Is the community well set too? Are well said. >>Yes, I agree with all of that. I spend most of my days thinking about how to interact with the community and engage with them. So the work that we're doing on kcp, we want it to be a community project and we want to involve as many people as we can. So it is a heavy focus for me and my team. And yeah, we we do >>It all the time. How's it going? How's the project going? You feel good >>About it? I do. It is, it started as an experiment or set of prototypes and has grown leaps and bounds from it's roots and it's, it's fantastic. Yeah. >>Controlled planes are hot data planes control planes. >>I >>Know, I love it. Making things work together horizontally scalable. Yeah. Sounds like cloud cloud native. >>Yeah. I mean, just to add to it, there are a couple of talks that on KCP at Con that our colleagues s Stephan Schemanski has, and I, I, I would urge people who have listening, if they have, just Google it, if you will, and you'll get them. And those are really awesome talks to get more about >>It. Oh yeah, no, and you can tell on GitHub that KCP really is a community project and how many people are participating. It's always fun to watch the action live to. Sure. Andy, thank you so much for being here with us, John. Wonderful questions this afternoon. And thank all of you for tuning in and listening to us here on the Cube Live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson. Look forward to seeing you again very soon.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe. (gentle music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (crowd chattering) >> Welcome back to The City That Never Sleeps. Lisa Martin and John Furrier in New York City for AWS Summit '22 with about 10 to 12,000 of our friends. And we've got two more friends joining us here today. We're going to be talking with Haseeb Budhani, one of our alumni, co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, and Kevin Coleman, senior manager for Go-to Market for EKS at AWS. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you very much for having us. Excited to be here. >> Isn't it great to be back at an in-person event with 10, 12,000 people? >> Yes. There are a lot of people here. This is packed. >> A lot of energy here. So, Haseeb, we've got to start with you. Your T-shirt says it all. Don't hate k8s. (Kevin giggles) Talk to us about some of the trends, from a Kubernetes perspective, that you're seeing, and then Kevin will give your follow-up. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the biggest trend I'm seeing on the enterprise side is that enterprises are forming platform organizations to make Kubernetes a practice across the enterprise. So it used to be that a BU would say, "I need Kubernetes. I have some DevOps engineers, let me just do this myself." And the next one would do the same, and then next one would do the same. And that's not practical, long term, for an enterprise. And this is now becoming a consolidated effort, which is, I think it's great. It speaks to the power of Kubernetes, because it's becoming so important to the enterprise. But that also puts a pressure because what the platform team has to solve for now is they have to find this fine line between automation and governance, right? I mean, the developers, you know, they don't really care about governance. Just give me stuff, I need to compute, I'm going to go. But then the platform organization has to think about, how is this going to play for the enterprise across the board? So that combination of automation and governance is where we are finding, frankly, a lot of success in making enterprise platform team successful. I think, that's a really new thing to me. It's something that's changed in the last six months, I would say, in the industry. I don't know if, Kevin, if you agree with that or not, but that's what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, definitely agree with that. We see a ton of customers in EKS who are building these new platforms using Kubernetes. The term that we hear a lot of customers use is standardization. So they've got various ways that they're deploying applications, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud and region. And they're really trying to standardize the way they deploy applications. And Kubernetes is really that compute substrate that they're standardizing on. >> Kevin, talk about the relationship with Rafay Systems that you have and why you're here together. And two, second part of that question, why is EKS kicking ass so much? (Haseeb and Kevin laughing) All right, go ahead. First one, your relationship. Second one, EKS is doing pretty well. >> Yep, yep, yep. (Lisa laughing) So yeah, we work closely with Rafay, Rafay, excuse me. A lot of joint customer wins with Haseeb and Co, so they're doing great work with EKS customers and, yeah, love the partnership there. In terms of why EKS is doing so well, a number of reasons, I think. Number one, EKS is vanilla, upstream, open-source Kubernetes. So customers want to use that open-source technology, that open-source Kubernetes, and they come to AWS to get it in a managed offering, right? Kubernetes isn't the easiest thing to self-manage. And so customers, you know, back before EKS launched, they were banging down the door at AWS for us to have a managed Kubernetes offering. And, you know, we launched EKS and there's been a ton of customer adoption since then. >> You know, Lisa, when we, theCUBE 12 years, now everyone knows we started in 2010, we used to cover a show called OpenStack. >> I remember that. >> OpenStack Summit. >> What's that now? >> And at the time, at that time, Kubernetes wasn't there. So theCUBE was present at creation. We've been to every KubeCon ever, CNCF then took it over. So we've been watching it from the beginning. >> Right. And it reminds me of the same trend we saw with MapReduce and Hadoop. Very big promise, everyone loved it, but it was hard, very difficult. And Hadoop's case, big data, it ended up becoming a data lake. Now you got Spark, or Snowflake, and Databricks, and Redshift. Here, Kubernetes has not yet been taken over. But, instead, it's being abstracted away and or managed services are emerging. 'Cause general enterprises can't hire enough Kubernetes people. >> Yep. >> They're not that many out there yet. So there's the training issue. But there's been the rise of managed services. >> Yep. >> Can you guys comment on what your thoughts are relative to that trend of hard to use, abstracting away the complexity, and, specifically, the managed services? >> Yeah, absolutely. You want to go? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, it's important to not kid ourselves. It is hard. (Johns laughs) But that doesn't mean it's not practical, right. When Kubernetes is done well, it's a thing of beauty. I mean, we have enough customer to scale, like, you know, it's like a, forget a hockey stick, it's a straight line up, because they just are moving so fast when they have the right platform in place. I think that the mistake that many of us make, and I've made this mistake when we started this company, was trivializing the platform aspect of Kubernetes, right. And a lot of my customers, you know, when they start, they kind of feel like, well, this is not that hard. I can bring this up and running. I just need two people. It'll be fine. And it's hard to hire, but then, I need two, then I need two more, then I need two, it's a lot, right. I think, the one thing I keep telling, like, when I talk to analysts, I say, "Look, somebody needs to write a book that says, 'Yes, it's hard, but, yes, it can be done, and here's how.'" Let's just be open about what it takes to get there, right. And, I mean, you mentioned OpenStack. I think the beauty of Kubernetes is that because it's such an open system, right, even with the managed offering, companies like Rafay can build really productive businesses on top of this Kubernetes platform because it's an open system. I think that is something that was not true with OpenStack. I've spent time with OpenStack also, I remember how it is. >> Well, Amazon had a lot to do with stalling the momentum of OpenStack, but your point about difficulty. Hadoop was always difficult to maintain and hiring against. There were no managed services and no one yet saw that value of big data yet. Here at Kubernetes, people are living a problem called, I'm scaling up. >> Yep. And so it sounds like it's a foundational challenge. The ongoing stuff sounds easier or manageable. >> Once you have the right tooling. >> Is that true? >> Yeah, no, I mean, once you have the right tooling, it's great. I think, look, I mean, you and I have talked about this before, I mean, the thesis behind Rafay is that, you know, there's like 8, 12 things that need to be done right for Kubernetes to work well, right. And my whole thesis was, I don't want my customer to buy 10, 12, 15 products. I want them to buy one platform, right. And I truly believe that, in our market, similar to what vCenter, like what VMware's vCenter did for VMs, I want to do that for Kubernetes, right. And that the reason why I say that is because, see, vCenter is not about hypervisors, right? vCenter is about hypervisor, access, networking, storage, all of the things, like multitenancy, all the things that you need to run an enterprise-grade VM environment. What is that equivalent for the Kubernetes world, right? So what we are doing at Rafay is truly building a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, like a kCenter. I've tried getting the domain. I couldn't get it. (Kevin laughs) >> Well, after the Broadcom view, you don't know what's going to happen. >> Ehh. (John laughs) >> I won't go there! >> Yeah. Yeah, let's not go there today. >> Kevin, EKS, I've heard people say to me, "Love EKS. Just add serverless, that's a home run." There's been a relationship with EKS and some of the other Amazon tools. Can you comment on what you're seeing as the most popular interactions among the services at AWS? >> Yeah, and was your comment there, add serverless? >> Add serverless with AKS at the edge- >> Yeah. >> and things are kind of interesting. >> I mean, so, one of the serverless offerings we have today is actually Fargate. So you can use Fargate, which is our serverless compute offering, or one of our serverless compute offerings with EKS. And so customers love that. Effectively, they get the beauty of EKS and the Kubernetes API but they don't have to manage nodes. So that's, you know, a good amount of adoption with Fargate as well. But then, we also have other ways that they can manage their nodes. We have managed node groups as well, in addition to self-managed nodes also. So there's a variety of options that customers can use from a compute perspective with EKS. And you'll continue to see us evolve the portfolio as well. >> Can you share, Haseeb, can you share a customer example, a joint customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Rafay and AWS are doing together? >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we announced a customer very recently on this very show, which is MoneyGram, which is a joint AWS and Rafay customer. Look, we have enough, you know, the thing about these massive customers is that, you know, not everybody's going to give us their logo to use. >> Right. >> But MoneyGram has been a Rafay plus EKS customer for a very, very long time. You know, at this point, I think we've earned their trust, and they've allowed us to, kind of say this publicly. But there's enough of these financial services companies who have, you know, standardized on EKS. So it's EKS first, Rafay second, right. They standardized on EKS. And then they looked around and said, "Who can help me platform EKS across my enterprise?" And we've been very lucky. We have some very large financial services, some very large healthcare companies now, who, A, EKS, B, Rafay. I'm not just saying that because my friend Kevin's here, (Lisa laughs) it's actually true. Look, EKS is a brilliant platform. It scales so well, right. I mean, people try it out, relative to other platforms, and it's just a no-brainer, it just scales. You want to build a big enterprise on the backs of a Kubernetes platform. And I'm not saying that's because I'm biased. Like EKS is really, really good. There's a reason why so many companies are choosing it over many other options in the market. >> You're doing a great job of articulating why the theme (Kevin laughs) of the New York City Summit is scale anything. >> Oh, yeah. >> There you go. >> Oh, yeah. >> I did not even know that but I'm speaking the language, right? >> You are. (John laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely. >> One of the things that we're seeing, also, I want to get your thoughts on, guys, is the app modernization trend, right? >> Yep. >> Because unlike other standards that were hard, that didn't have any benefit downstream 'cause they were too hard to get to, here, Kubernetes is feeding into real app for app developer pressure. They got to get cloud-native apps out. It's fairly new in the mainstream enterprise and a lot of hyperscalers have experience. So I'm going to ask you guys, what is the key thing that you're enabling with Kubernetes in the cloud-native apps? What is the key value? >> Yeah. >> I think, there's a bifurcation happening in the market. One is the Kubernetes Engine market, which is like EKS, AKS, GKE, right. And then there's the, you know, what, back in the day, we used to call operations and management, right. So the OAM layer for Kubernetes is where there's need, right. People are learning, right. Because, as you said before, the skill isn't there, you know, there's not enough talent available to the market. And that's the opportunity we're seeing. Because to solve for the standardization, the governance, and automation that we talked about earlier, you know, you have to solve for, okay, how do I manage my network? How do I manage my service mesh? How do I do chargebacks? What's my, you know, policy around actual Kubernetes policies? What's my blueprinting strategy? How do I do add-on management? How do I do pipelines for updates of add-ons? How do I upgrade my clusters? And we're not done yet, there's a longer list, right? This is a lot, right? >> Yeah. >> And this is what happens, right. It's just a lot. And really, the companies who understand that plethora of problems that need to be solved and build easy-to-use solutions that enterprises can consume with the right governance automation, I think they're going to be very, very successful here. >> Yeah. >> Because this is a train, right? I mean, this is happening whether, it's not us, it's happening, right? Enterprises are going to keep doing this. >> And open-source is a big driver in all of this. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> And I'll tag onto that. I mean, you talked about platform engineering earlier. Part of the point of building these platforms on top of Kubernetes is giving developers an easier way to get applications into the cloud. So building unique developer experiences that really make it easy for you, as a software developer, to take the code from your laptop, get it out of production as quickly as possible. The question is- >> So is that what you mean, does that tie your point earlier about that vertical, straight-up value once you've set up it, right? >> Yep. >> Because it's taking the burden off the developers for stopping their productivity. >> Absolutely. >> To go check in, is it configured properly? Is the supply chain software going to be there? Who's managing the services? Who's orchestrating the nodes? >> Yep. >> Is that automated, is that where you guys see the value? >> That's a lot of what we see, yeah. In terms of how these companies are building these platforms, is taking all the component pieces that Haseeb was talking about and really putting it into a cohesive whole. And then, you, as a software developer, you don't have to worry about configuring all of those things. You don't have to worry about security policy, governance, how your app is going to be exposed to the internet. >> It sounds like infrastructure is code. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Come on, like. >> (laughs) Infrastructure's code is a big piece of it, for sure, for sure. >> Yeah, look, infrastructure's code actually- >> Infrastructure's sec is code too, the security. >> Yeah. >> Huge. >> Well, it all goes together. Like, we talk about developer self-service, right? The way we enable developer self-service is by teaching developers, here's a snippet of code that you write and you check it in and your infrastructure will just magically be created. >> Yep. >> But not automatically. It's going to go through a check, like a check through the platform team. These are the workflows that if you get them right, developers don't care, right. All developers want is I want to compute. But then all these 20 things need to happen in the back. That's what, if you nail it, right, I mean, I keep trying to kind of pitch the company, I don't want to do that today. But if you nail that, >> I'll give you a plug at the end. >> you have a good story. >> But I got to, I just have a tangent question 'cause you reminded me. There's two types of developers that have emerged, right. You have the software developer that wants infrastructures code. I just want to write my code, I don't want to stop. I want to build in shift-left for security, shift-right for data. All that's in there. >> Right. >> I'm coding away, I love coding. Then you've got the under-the-hood person. >> Yes. >> I've been to the engines. >> Certainly. >> So that's more of an SRE, data engineer, I'm wiring services together. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people are like, they don't know who they are yet. They're in college or they're transforming from an IT job. They're trying to figure out who they are. So question is, how do you tell a person that's watching, like, who am I? Like, should I be just coding? But I love the tech. Would you guys have any advice there? >> You know, I don't know if I have any guidance in terms of telling people who they are. (all laughing) I mean, I think about it in terms of a spectrum and this is what we hear from customers, is some customers want to shift as much responsibility onto the software teams to manage their infrastructure as well. And then some want to shift it all the way over to the very centralized model. And, you know, we see everything in between as well with our EKS customer base. But, yeah, I'm not sure if I have any direct guidance for people. >> Let's see, any wisdom? >> Aside from experiment. >> If you're coding more, you're a coder. If you like to play with the hardware, >> Yeah. >> or the gears. >> Look, I think it's really important for managers to understand that developers, yes, they have a job, you have to write code, right. But they also want to learn new things. It's only fair, right. >> Oh, yeah. >> So what we see is, developers want to learn. And we enable for them to understand Kubernetes in small pieces, like small steps, right. And that is really, really important because if we completely abstract things away, like Kubernetes, from them, it's not good for them, right. It's good for their careers also, right. It's good for them to learn these things. This is going to be with us for the next 15, 20 years. Everybody should learn it. But I want to learn it because I want to learn, not because this is part of my job, and that's the distinction, right. I don't want this to become my job because I want, I want to write my code. >> Do what you love. If you're more attracted to understanding how automation works, and robotics, or making things scale, you might be under-the-hood. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, look under the hood all day long. But then, in terms of, like, who keeps the lights on for the cluster, for example. >> All right, see- >> That's the job. >> He makes a lot of value. Now you know who you are. Ask these guys. (Lisa laughing) Congratulations on your success on EKS 2. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Quick, give a plug for the company. I know you guys are growing. I want to give you a minute to share to the audience a plug that's going to be, what are you guys doing? You're hiring? How many employees? Funding? Customer new wins? Take a minute to give a plug. >> Absolutely. And look, I come see, John, I think, every show you guys are doing a summit or a KubeCon, I'm here. (John laughing) And every time we come, we talk about new customers. Look, platform teams at enterprises seem to love Rafay because it helps them build that, well, Kubernetes platform that we've talked about on the show today. I think, many large enterprises on the financial service side, healthcare side, digital native side seem to have recognized that running Kubernetes at scale, or even starting with Kubernetes in the early days, getting it right with the right standards, that takes time, that takes effort. And that's where Rafay is a great partner. We provide a great SaaS offering, which you can have up and running very, very quickly. Of course, we love EKS. We work with our friends at AWS. But also works with Azure, we have enough customers in Azure. It also runs in Google. We have enough customers at Google. And it runs on-premises with OpenShift or with EKS A, right, whichever option you want to take. But in terms of that standardization and governance and automation for your developers to move fast, there's no better product in the market right now when it comes to Kubernetes platforms than Rafay. >> Kevin, while we're here, why don't you plug EKS too, come on. >> Yeah, absolutely, why not? (group laughing) So yes, of course. EKS is AWS's managed Kubernetes offering. It's the largest managed Kubernetes service in the world. We help customers who want to adopt Kubernetes and adopt it wherever they want to run Kubernetes, whether it's in region or whether it's on the edge with EKS A or running Kubernetes on Outposts and the evolving portfolio of EKS services as well. We see customers running extremely high-scale Kubernetes clusters, excuse me, and we're here to support them as well. So yeah, that's the managed Kubernetes offering. >> And I'll give the plug for theCUBE, we'll be at KubeCon in Detroit this year. (Lisa laughing) Lisa, look, we're giving a plug to everybody. Come on. >> We're plugging everybody. Well, as we get to plugs, I think, Haseeb, you have a book to write, I think, on Kubernetes. And I think you're wearing the title. >> Well, I do have a book to write, but I'm one of those people who does everything at the very end, so I will never get it right. (group laughing) So if you want to work on it with me, I have some great ideas. >> Ghostwriter. >> Sure! >> But I'm lazy. (Kevin chuckles) >> Ooh. >> So we got to figure something out. >> Somehow I doubt you're lazy. (group laughs) >> No entrepreneur's lazy, I know that. >> Right? >> You're being humble. >> He is. So Haseeb, Kevin, thank you so much for joining John and me today, >> Thank you. >> talking about what you guys are doing at Rafay with EKS, the power, why you shouldn't hate k8s. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you as well. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. With John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at the AWS NYC Summit. John and I will be right back with our next guest, so stick around. (upbeat music) (gentle music)

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year, we noted in a breaking analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the idea or notion of multi-cloud. We've said for years that multi-cloud is really not a strategy but rather a symptom of multi-vendor. And we coined this term supercloud to describe an abstraction layer that lives above the hyperscale infrastructure that hides the underlying complexities, the APIs, and the primitives of each of the respective clouds. It interconnects whether it's On-Prem, AWS, Azure, Google, stretching out to the edge and creates a value layer on top of that. So our vision is that supercloud is more than running an individual service in cloud native mode within an individual individual cloud rather it's this new layer that builds on top of the hyperscalers. And does things irrespective of location adds value and we'll get into that in more detail. Now it turns out that we weren't the only ones thinking about this, not surprisingly, the majority of the technology ecosystem has been working towards this vision in various forms, including some examples that actually don't try to hide the underlying primitives. And we'll talk about that, but give a consistent experience across the DevSecOps tool chain. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon, Cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to share some recent examples and direct quotes about supercloud from the many Cube guests that we've had on over the last several weeks and months. And we've been trying to test this concept of supercloud. Is it technically feasible? Is it business rational? Is there business case for it? And we'll also share some recent ETR data to put this into context with some of the players that we think are going after this opportunity and where they are in their supercloud build out. And as you can see I'm not in the studio, everybody's got COVID so the studios shut down temporarily but breaking analysis continues. So here we go. Now, first thing is we uncovered an article from earlier this year by Lori MacVittie, is entitled, Supercloud: The 22 Answer to Multi-Cloud Challenges. What a great title. Of course we love it. Now, what really interested us here is not just the title, but the notion that it really doesn't matter what it's called, who cares? Supercloud, distributed cloud, someone even called it Metacloud recently, and we'll get into that. But Lori is a technologist. She's a developer by background. She works at F-Five and she's partial to the supercloud definition that was put forth by Cornell. You can see it here. That's a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers, et cetera. And that the supercloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate and terminate resources... And can span all major public cloud providers as well as private clouds. Now, of course, we would take that as well to the edge. So sure. That sounds about right and provides further confirmation that something new is really happening out there. And that was our initial premise when we put this fourth last year. Now we want to dig deeper and hear from the many Cube guests that we've interviewed recently probing about this topic. We're going to start with Chuck Whitten. He's Dell's new Co-COO and most likely part of the Dell succession plan, many years down the road hopefully. He coined the phrase multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And he provides a really good business perspective. He's not a deep technologist. We're going to hear from Chuck a couple of times today including one where John Furrier asks him about leveraging hyperscale CapEx. That's an important concept that's fundamental to supercloud. Now, Ashesh Badani heads products at Red Hat and he talks about what he calls Metacloud. Again, it doesn't matter to us what you call it but it's the ecosystem gathering and innovating and we're going to get his perspective. Now we have a couple of clips from Danny Allan. He is the CTO of Veeam. He's a deep technologist and super into the weeds, which we love. And he talks about how Veeam abstracts the cloud layer. Again, a concept that's fundamental to supercloud and he describes what a supercloud is to him. And we also bring with Danny the edge discussion to the conversation. Now the bottom line from Danny is we want to know is supercloud technically feasible? And is it a thing? And then we have Jeff Clarke. Jeff Clark is the Co-COO and Vice Chairman of Dell super experienced individual. He lays out his vision of supercloud and what John Furrier calls a business operating system. You're going to hear from John a couple times. And he, Jeff Clark has a dropped the mic moment, where he says, if we can do this X, we'll describe what X is, it's game over. Okay. So of course we wanted to then go to HPE, one of Dell's biggest competitors and Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at Hewlett Packet Enterprise. And so given Jeff Clarke's game over strategy, we want to understand how HPE sees supercloud. And the bottom line, according to Patrick Osborne is that it's real. So you'll hear from him. And now Raghu Raghuram is the CEO of VMware. He threw a curve ball at this supercloud concept. And he flat out says, no, we don't want to hide the underlying primitives. We want to give developers access to those. We want to create a consistent developer experience in that DevsSecOps tool chain and Kubernetes runtime environments, and connect all the elements in the application development stack. So that's a really interesting perspective that Raghu brings. And then we end on Itzik Reich. Itzik is a technologist and a technical team leader who's worked as a go between customers and product developers for a number of years. And we asked Itzik, is supercloud technically feasible and will it be a reality? So let's hear from these experts and you can decide for yourselves how real supercloud is today and where it is, run the sizzle >> Operative phrase is multi-cloud by default that's kind of the buzz from your keynote. What do you mean by that? >> Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, multiple public clouds, On-Premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was, it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an On-Premise cloud, On-Premise clouds are not going away, I mentioned edge clouds, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design as you heard. >> Really great question, actually, since you and I talked, Dave, I've been spending some time noodling just over that. And you're right. There's probably some terminology, something that will get developed either by us or in collaboration with the industry. Where we sort of almost have the next almost like a Metacloud that we're working our way towards. >> So we manage both the snapshots and we convert it into the Veeam portable data format. And here's where the supercloud comes into play. Because if I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere. I can move it from physical to virtual, to cloud, to another cloud, back to virtual, I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer. There are things that we do when we go between cloud some use BIOS, some use UEFI, but we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format, that's theirs, but we have it in backup format that we can move around and abstract workloads across all of the infrastructure. >> And your catalog is control in control of that. Is that right? Am I thinking about that the right way? >> Yeah it is, 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalog, Dave, the catalog is inside the backup. Yes. So here's, what's interesting about the edge, two things, on the edge you don't want to have any state, if you can help it. And so containers help with that You can have stateless environments, some persistent data storage But we not not only provide the portability in operating systems, we also do this for containers. And that's true. If you go to the cloud and you're using say EKS with relational database services RDS for the persistent data later, we can pick that up and move it to GKE or move it to OpenShift On-Premises. And so that's why I call this the supercloud, we have all of this data. Actually, I think you termed the term supercloud. >> Yeah. But thank you for... I mean, I'm looking for a confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. >> It is technically feasible and you can do it today. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that in what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> We have a number of platforms that are providing whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud they have an operational experience in the cloud and they now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality, we have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Electra and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proofpoint for it. >> Yeah. So I want to clarify something that you said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers. I use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to do. In fact, that's the last thing we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application. So that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the DevSecOp tool chain, the runtime environment which turns out to be Kubernetes and how you control the Kubernetes environment, how do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. And so really the VMware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements, number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. And number two, you can move faster. And number three, you can just spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we are trying to do. We are not... So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction. In terms of where are we? We are still, I would say, in the early stages. So if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these greenfield applications. And there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Kubernetes. There is still, Kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of Kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our Tanzu Application Platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time be entirely secure, et cetera. >> Well, look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds. They don't work together. Your data is siloed. It's locked up and it is expensive to move and make sense of it. So I think the word you and I were batting around before, this is an interconnected tissue. That's what the world needs. They need the clouds to work together as a single platform. That's the problem that we're trying to solve. And you saw it in some of our announcements here that we're starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. >> It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that CapEx investments. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the CapEx and then ultimately have the solutions machine learning as one area. You see some specialization with the clouds. But you start to see the rise of superclouds, Dave calls them, and that's where you can innovate on a cloud then go to the multiple clouds. Snowflakes is one, we see a lot of examples of supercloud... >> Project Alpine was another one. I mean, it's early, but it's its clearly where you're going. The technology is just starting to come around. I mean it's real. >> Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? >> Is that something that's, that supercloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective. >> I think it is. So for example Katie Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect which is another project. That's exactly part of the it's rationale, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers, using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the APEX console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them into tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So yes we are walking on all of those different aspects. >> Okay. Let's take a quick look at some of the ETR data. This is an X-Y graph. You've seen it a number of times on breaking analysis, it plots the net score or spending momentum on the Y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset on the X-axis, used to be called market share. I think that term was off putting to some people, but anyway it's an indicator of presence in the dataset. Now that red dotted line that's rarefied air where anything above that line is considered highly elevated. Now you can see we've plotted Azure and AWS in the upper right. GCP is in there and Kubernetes. We've done that as reference points. They're not necessarily building supercloud platforms. We'll see if they ever want to do so. And Kubernetes of course not a company, but we put 'em in there for context. And we've cherry picked a few players that we believe are building out or are important for supercloud build out. Let's start with Snowflake. We've talked a lot about this company. You can see they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. We see the data cloud as a supercloud in the making. You've got pure storage in there. They made the public, the early part of its supercloud journey at Accelerate 2019 when it unveiled a hybrid block storage service inside of AWS, it connects its On-Prem to AWS and creates that singular experience for pure customers. We see Hashi, HashiCorp as an enabling infrastructure, as code. So they're enabling infrastructure as code across different clouds and different locations. You see Nutanix. They're embarking on their multi-cloud strategy but it's doing so in a way that we think is supercloud, like now. Now Veeam, we were just at VeeamON. And this company has tied Dell for the number one revenue player in data protection. That's according to IDC. And we don't think it won't be long before it holds that position alone at the top as it's growing faster than in Dell in the space. We'll see, Dell is kind of waking up a little bit and putting more resource on that. But Veeam, they're a pure play vendor in data protection. And you heard their CTO, Danny Allan's view on Supercloud, they're doing it today. And we heard extensive comments as well from Dell that's clearly where they're headed, project Alpine was an early example from Dell technologies world of Supercloud in our view. And HPE with GreenLake. Finally beginning to talk about that cross cloud experience. I think it in initially HPE has been more focused on the private cloud, we'll continue to probe. We'll be at HPE discover later on the spring, actually end of June. And we'll continue to probe to see what HPE is doing specifically with GreenLake. Now, finally, Cisco, we put them on the chart. We don't have direct quotes from recent shows and events but this data really shows you the size of Cisco's footprint within the ETR data set that's on the X-axis. Now the cut of this ETR data includes all sectors across the ETR taxonomy which is not something that we commonly show but you can see the magnitude of Cisco's presence. It's impressive. Now, they had better, Cisco that is, had better be building out a supercloud in our view or they're going to be left behind. And I'm quite certain that they're actually going to do so. So we have a lot of evidence that we're putting forth here and seeing in the marketplace what we said last year, the ecosystem is take taking shape, supercloud is forming and becoming a thing. And really in our view, is the future of cloud. But there are always risks to these predictive scenarios and we want to acknowledge those. So first, look, we could end up with a bunch of bespoke superclouds. Now one supercloud is better than three separate cloud native services that do fundamentally the same thing from the same vendor. One for AWS, one for GCP and one for Azure. So maybe that's not all that bad. But to point number two, we hope there evolves a set of open standards for self-service infrastructure, federated governance, and data sharing that will evolve as a horizontal layer versus a set of proprietary vendor specific tools. Now, maybe a company like Veeam will provide that as a data management layer or some of Veeam's competitors or maybe it'll emerge again as open source. As well, and this next point, we see the potential for edge disruptions, changing the economics of the data center. Edge in fact could evolve on its own, independent of the cloud. In fact, David Floria sees the edge somewhat differently from Danny Allan. Floria says he sees a requirement for distributed stateful environments that are ephemeral where recovery is built in. And I said, David, stateful? Ephemeral? Stateful ephemeral? Isn't that an oxymoron? And he responded that, look, if it's not ephemeral the costs are going to be prohibitive. He said the biggest mistake the companies could make is thinking that the edge is simply an extension of their current cloud strategies. We're seeing that a lot. Dell largely talks about the edge as retail. Now, and Telco is a little bit different, but back to Floria's comments, he feels companies have to completely reimagine an integrated file and recovery system which is much more data efficient. And he believes that the technology will evolve with massive volumes and eventually seep into enterprise cloud and distributed data centers with better economics. In other words, as David Michelle recently wrote, we're about 15 years into the most recent cloud cycle and history shows that every 15 years or so, something new comes along that is a blind spot and highly disruptive to existing leaders. So number four here is really important. Remember, in 2007 before AWS introduced the modern cloud, IBM outpost, sorry, IBM outspent Amazon and Google and RND and CapEx and was really comparable to Microsoft. But instead of inventing cloud, IBM spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And so our view is that innovation rewards leaders. And while it's not without risks, it's what powers the technology industry it always has and likely always will. So we'll be watching that very closely, how companies choose to spend their free cash flow. Okay. That's it for now. Thanks for watching this episode of The Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who does some of the background research? Alex Morrison is on production and is going to compile all this stuff. Thank you, Alex. We're all remote this week. Kristen Nicole and Cheryl Knight do Cube distribution and social distribution and get the word out, so thank you. Robert Hof is our editor in chief. Don't forget the checkout etr.ai for all the survey action. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can check out all the breaking analysis podcasts. All you can do is search breaking analysis podcast so you can pop in the headphones and listen while you're on a walk. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. If you want to get in touch or DM me at DVellante, you can always hit me up into a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante. Thank you for watching this episode of break analysis, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, let's start things off Didi Dasgupta is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution off the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications and then most modern applications are, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering the change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the, the storage team of, and now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right back of the origins of UCS. I mean, we, you know, why the networking company builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our. And you know, we've been on this journey for about four years, but the software is called intersite. And, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices, but then we've evolved it the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one, one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does goes into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, he brought a platform. I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. And so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, you know, three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same in the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber talk software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how their assets work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it, it was pretty big boat invasion. Cause you know, the big change with SAS is your, as you're familiar, Dave is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out that we are in some ways eating our own dog food. Cause we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I, I of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right? Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control multi-tenants I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, or, you know, others who want to their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are there other SAS offerings, software vendors who have now become partners? Like we did not, we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem we partnered with a company called urbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, you know, w how we have gone about this. And it actually ducked a dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today, that we're announcing on the underside platform, where we're actually been announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on, on GC, on, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site, since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage VMs in, in a, in an instance. >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at know $2 or $3 depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing is become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades or liability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What Mike is the law doesn't mean? I think there's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So obligations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is data moving data is it's the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, on the edge colo public cloud doesn't matter, but you're basically going to see more customer droughts, more industry-specific clouds. You know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific. I think sovereign is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it comes to making good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, control. And the distributor cloud is also on edge is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey that will have their choice of workloads, data, you know, uptime, reliability, concerns. That's really what, what we are returning any of our customers. >>You know, I think I agree with you that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world a solid open, flexible, and flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some customers are fine with a SAS software, but as I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. So how they want to consume it. They want to, you know, a hundred percent, no sovereignty. We, we talked about. So, you know, job for a decent structure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage me to some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right. Thanks, Deedee. Always a pleasure to have you in the cube. Great to see you. >>You're >>Welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vollante. >> The rise of Kubernetes came about through a combination of forces that were, in hindsight, quite a long shot. Amazon's dominance created momentum for Cloud native application development, and the need for newer and simpler experiences, beyond just easily spinning up computer as a service. This wave crashed into innovations from a startup named Docker, and a reluctant competitor in Google, that needed a way to change the game on Amazon and the Cloud. Now, add in the effort of Red Hat, which needed a new path beyond Enterprise Linux, and oh, by the way, it was just about to commit to a path of a Kubernetes alternative for OpenShift and figure out a governance structure to hurt all the cats and the ecosystem and you get the remarkable ascendancy of Kubernetes. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we tapped the back stories of a new documentary that explains the improbable events that led to the creation of Kubernetes. We'll share some new survey data from ETR and commentary from the many early the innovators who came on theCUBE during the exciting period since the founding of Docker in 2013, which marked a new era in computing, because we're talking about Kubernetes and developers today, the hoodie is on. And there's a new two part documentary that I just referenced, it's out and it was produced by Honeypot on Kubernetes, part one and part two, tells a story of how Kubernetes came to prominence and many of the players that made it happen. Now, a lot of these players, including Tim Hawkin Kelsey Hightower, Craig McLuckie, Joe Beda, Brian Grant Solomon Hykes, Jerry Chen and others came on theCUBE during formative years of containers going mainstream and the rise of Kubernetes. John Furrier and Stu Miniman were at the many shows we covered back then and they unpacked what was happening at the time. We'll share the commentary from the guests that they interviewed and try to add some context. Now let's start with the concept of developer defined structure, DDI. Jerry Chen was at VMware and he could see the trends that were evolving. He left VMware to become a venture capitalist at Greylock. Docker was his first investment. And he saw the future this way. >> What happens is when you define infrastructure software you can program it. You make it portable. And that the beauty of this cloud wave what I call DDI's. Now, to your point is every piece of infrastructure from storage, networking, to compute has an API, right? And, and AWS there was an early trend where S3, EBS, EC2 had API. >> As building blocks too. >> As building blocks, exactly. >> Not monolithic. >> Monolithic building blocks every little building bone block has it own API and just like Docker really is the API for this unit of the cloud enables developers to define how they want to build their applications, how to network them know as Wills talked about, and how you want to secure them and how you want to store them. And so the beauty of this generation is now developers are determining how apps are built, not just at the, you know, end user, you know, iPhone app layer the data layer, the storage layer, the networking layer. So every single level is being disrupted by this concept of a DDI and where, how you build use and actually purchase IT has changed. And you're seeing the incumbent vendors like Oracle, VMware Microsoft try to react but you're seeing a whole new generation startup. >> Now what Jerry was explaining is that this new abstraction layer that was being built here's some ETR data that quantifies that and shows where we are today. The chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share which represents the pervasiveness in the survey set. So as Jerry and the innovators who created Docker saw the cloud was becoming prominent and you can see it still has spending velocity that's elevated above that 40% red line which is kind of a magic mark of momentum. And of course, it's very prominent on the X axis as well. And you see the low level infrastructure virtualization and that even floats above servers and storage and networking right. Back in 2013 the conversation with VMware. And by the way, I remember having this conversation deeply at the time with Chad Sakac was we're going to make this low level infrastructure invisible, and we intend to make virtualization invisible, IE simplified. And so, you see above the two arrows there related to containers, container orchestration and container platforms, which are abstraction layers and services above the underlying VMs and hardware. And you can see the momentum that they have right there with the cloud and AI and RPA. So you had these forces that Jerry described that were taking shape, and this picture kind of summarizes how they came together to form Kubernetes. And the upper left, Of course you see AWS and we inserted a picture from a post we did, right after the first reinvent in 2012, it was obvious to us at the time that the cloud gorilla was AWS and had all this momentum. Now, Solomon Hykes, the founder of Docker, you see there in the upper right. He saw the need to simplify the packaging of applications for cloud developers. Here's how he described it. Back in 2014 in theCUBE with John Furrier >> Container is a unit of deployment, right? It's the format in which you package your application all the files, all the executables libraries all the dependencies in one thing that you can move to any server and deploy in a repeatable way. So it's similar to how you would run an iOS app on an iPhone, for example. >> A Docker at the time was a 30% company and it just changed its name from .cloud. And back to the diagram you have Google with a red question mark. So why would you need more than what Docker had created. Craig McLuckie, who was a product manager at Google back then explains the need for yet another abstraction. >> We created the strong separation between infrastructure operations and application operations. And so, Docker has created a portable framework to take it, basically a binary and run it anywhere which is an amazing capability, but that's not enough. You also need to be able to manage that with a framework that can run anywhere. And so, the union of Docker and Kubernetes provides this framework where you're completely abstracted from the underlying infrastructure. You could use VMware, you could use Red Hat open stack deployment. You could run on another major cloud provider like rec. >> Now Google had this huge cloud infrastructure but no commercial cloud business compete with AWS. At least not one that was taken seriously at the time. So it needed a way to change the game. And it had this thing called Google Borg, which is a container management system and scheduler and Google looked at what was happening with virtualization and said, you know, we obviously could do better Joe Beda, who was with Google at the time explains their mindset going back to the beginning. >> Craig and I started up Google compute engine VM as a service. And the odd thing to recognize is that, nobody who had been in Google for a long time thought that there was anything to this VM stuff, right? Cause Google had been on containers for so long. That was their mindset board was the way that stuff was actually deployed. So, you know, my boss at the time, who's now at Cloudera booted up a VM for the first time, and anybody in the outside world be like, Hey, that's really cool. And his response was like, well now what? Right. You're sitting at a prompt. Like that's not super interesting. How do I run my app? Right. Which is, that's what everybody's been struggling with, with cloud is not how do I get a VM up? How do I actually run my code? >> Okay. So Google never really did virtualization. They were looking at the market and said, okay what can we do to make Google relevant in cloud. Here's Eric Brewer from Google. Talking on theCUBE about Google's thought process at the time. >> One interest things about Google is it essentially makes no use of virtual machines internally. And that's because Google started in 1998 which is the same year that VMware started was kind of brought the modern virtual machine to bear. And so Google infrastructure tends to be built really on kind of classic Unix processes and communication. And so scaling that up, you get a system that works a lot with just processes and containers. So kind of when I saw containers come along with Docker, we said, well, that's a good model for us. And we can take what we know internally which was called Borg a big scheduler. And we can turn that into Kubernetes and we'll open source it. And suddenly we have kind of a cloud version of Google that works the way we would like it to work. >> Now, Eric Brewer gave us the bumper sticker version of the story there. What he reveals in the documentary that I referenced earlier is that initially Google was like, why would we open source our secret sauce to help competitors? So folks like Tim Hockin and Brian Grant who were on the original Kubernetes team, went to management and pressed hard to convince them to bless open sourcing Kubernetes. Here's Hockin's explanation. >> When Docker landed, we saw the community building and building and building. I mean, that was a snowball of its own, right? And as it caught on we realized we know what this is going to we know once you embrace the Docker mindset that you very quickly need something to manage all of your Docker nodes, once you get beyond two or three of them, and we know how to build that, right? We got a ton of experience here. Like we went to our leadership and said, you know, please this is going to happen with us or without us. And I think it, the world would be better if we helped. >> So the open source strategy became more compelling as they studied the problem because it gave Google a way to neutralize AWS's advantage because with containers you could develop on AWS for example, and then run the application anywhere like Google's cloud. So it not only gave developers a path off of AWS. If Google could develop a strong service on GCP they could monetize that play. Now, focus your attention back to the diagram which shows this smiling, Alex Polvi from Core OS which was acquired by Red Hat in 2018. And he saw the need to bring Linux into the cloud. I mean, after all Linux was powering the internet it was the OS for enterprise apps. And he saw the need to extend its path into the cloud. Now here's how he described it at an OpenStack event in 2015. >> Similar to what happened with Linux. Like yes, there is still need for Linux and Windows and other OSs out there. But by and large on production, web infrastructure it's all Linux now. And you were able to get onto one stack. And how were you able to do that? It was, it was by having a truly open consistent API and a commitment into not breaking APIs and, so on. That allowed Linux to really become ubiquitous in the data center. Yes, there are other OSs, but Linux buy in large for production infrastructure, what is being used. And I think you'll see a similar phenomenon happen for this next level up cause we're treating the whole data center as a computer instead of trading one in visual instance is just the computer. And that's the stuff that Kubernetes to me and someone is doing. And I think there will be one that shakes out over time and we believe that'll be Kubernetes. >> So Alex saw the need for a dominant container orchestration platform. And you heard him, they made the right bet. It would be Kubernetes. Now Red Hat, Red Hat is been around since 1993. So it has a lot of on-prem. So it needed a future path to the cloud. So they rang up Google and said, hey. What do you guys have going on in this space? So Google, was kind of non-committal, but it did expose that they were thinking about doing something that was you know, pre Kubernetes. It was before it was called Kubernetes. But hey, we have this thing and we're thinking about open sourcing it, but Google's internal debates, and you know, some of the arm twisting from the engine engineers, it was taking too long. So Red Hat said, well, screw it. We got to move forward with OpenShift. So we'll do what Apple and Airbnb and Heroku are doing and we'll build on an alternative. And so they were ready to go with Mesos which was very much more sophisticated than Kubernetes at the time and much more mature, but then Google the last minute said, hey, let's do this. So Clayton Coleman with Red Hat, he was an architect. And he leaned in right away. He was one of the first outside committers outside of Google. But you still led these competing forces in the market. And internally there were debates. Do we go with simplicity or do we go with system scale? And Hen Goldberg from Google explains why they focus first on simplicity in getting that right. >> We had to defend of why we are only supporting 100 nodes in the first release of Kubernetes. And they explained that they know how to build for scale. They've done that. They know how to do it, but realistically most of users don't need large clusters. So why create this complexity? >> So Goldberg explains that rather than competing right away with say Mesos or Docker swarm, which were far more baked they made the bet to keep it simple and go for adoption and ubiquity, which obviously turned out to be the right choice. But the last piece of the puzzle was governance. Now Google promised to open source Kubernetes but when it started to open up to contributors outside of Google, the code was still controlled by Google and developers had to sign Google paper that said Google could still do whatever it wanted. It could sub license, et cetera. So Google had to pass the Baton to an independent entity and that's how CNCF was started. Kubernetes was its first project. And let's listen to Chris Aniszczyk of the CNCF explain >> CNCF is all about providing a neutral home for cloud native technology. And, you know, it's been about almost two years since our first board meeting. And the idea was, you know there's a certain set of technology out there, you know that are essentially microservice based that like live in containers that are essentially orchestrated by some process, right? That's essentially what we mean when we say cloud native right. And CNCF was seated with Kubernetes as its first project. And you know, as, as we've seen over the last couple years Kubernetes has grown, you know, quite well they have a large community a diverse con you know, contributor base and have done, you know, kind of extremely well. They're one of actually the fastest, you know highest velocity, open source projects out there, maybe. >> Okay. So this is how we got to where we are today. This ETR data shows container orchestration offerings. It's the same X Y graph that we showed earlier. And you can see where Kubernetes lands not we're standing that Kubernetes not a company but respondents, you know, they doing Kubernetes. They maybe don't know, you know, whose platform and it's hard with the ETR taxon economy as a fuzzy and survey data because Kubernetes is increasingly becoming embedded into cloud platforms. And IT pros, they may not even know which one specifically. And so the reason we've linked these two platforms Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift is because OpenShift right now is a dominant revenue player in the space and is increasingly popular PaaS layer. Yeah. You could download Kubernetes and do what you want with it. But if you're really building enterprise apps you're going to need support. And that's where OpenShift comes in. And there's not much data on this but we did find this chart from AMDA which show was the container software market, whatever that really is. And Red Hat has got 50% of it. This is revenue. And, you know, we know the muscle of IBM is behind OpenShift. So there's really not hard to believe. Now we've got some other data points that show how Kubernetes is becoming less visible and more embedded under of the hood. If you will, as this chart shows this is data from CNCF's annual survey they had 1800 respondents here, and the data showed that 79% of respondents use certified Kubernetes hosted platforms. Amazon elastic container service for Kubernetes was the most prominent 39% followed by Azure Kubernetes service at 23% in Azure AKS engine at 17%. With Google's GKE, Google Kubernetes engine behind those three. Now. You have to ask, okay, Google. Google's management Initially they had concerns. You know, why are we open sourcing such a key technology? And the premise was, it would level the playing field. And for sure it has, but you have to ask has it driven the monetization Google was after? And I would've to say no, it probably didn't. But think about where Google would've been. If it hadn't open source Kubernetes how relevant would it be in the cloud discussion. Despite its distant third position behind AWS and Microsoft or even fourth, if you include Alibaba without Kubernetes Google probably would be much less prominent or possibly even irrelevant in cloud, enterprise cloud. Okay. Let's wrap up with some comments on the state of Kubernetes and maybe a thought or two about, you know, where we're headed. So look, no shocker Kubernetes for all its improbable beginning has gone mainstream in the past year or so. We're seeing much more maturity and support for state full workloads and big ecosystem support with respect to better security and continued simplification. But you know, it's still pretty complex. It's getting better, but it's not VMware level of maturity. For example, of course. Now adoption has always been strong for Kubernetes, for cloud native companies who start with containers on day one, but we're seeing many more. IT organizations adopting Kubernetes as it matures. It's interesting, you know, Docker set out to be the system of the cloud and Kubernetes has really kind of become that. Docker desktop is where Docker's action really is. That's where Docker is thriving. It sold off Docker swarm to Mirantis has made some tweaks. Docker has made some tweaks to its licensing model to be able to continue to evolve its its business. To hear more about that at DockerCon. And as we said, years ago we expected Kubernetes to become less visible Stu Miniman and I talked about this in one of our predictions post and really become more embedded into other platforms. And that's exactly what's happening here but it's still complicated. Remember, remember the... Go back to the early and mid cycle of VMware understanding things like application performance you needed folks in lab coats to really remediate problems and dig in and peel the onion and scale the system you know, and in some ways you're seeing that dynamic repeated with Kubernetes, security performance scale recovery, when something goes wrong all are made more difficult by the rapid pace at which the ecosystem is evolving Kubernetes. But it's definitely headed in the right direction. So what's next for Kubernetes we would expect further simplification and you're going to see more abstractions. We live in this world of almost perpetual abstractions. Now, as Kubernetes improves support from multi cluster it will be begin to treat those clusters as a unified group. So kind of abstracting multiple clusters and treating them as, as one to be managed together. And this is going to create a lot of ecosystem focus on scaling globally. Okay, once you do that, you're going to have to worry about latency and then you're going to have to keep pace with security as you expand the, the threat area. And then of course recovery what happens when something goes wrong, more complexity, the harder it is to recover and that's going to require new services to share resources across clusters. So look for that. You also should expect more automation. It's going to be driven by the host cloud providers as Kubernetes supports more state full applications and begins to extend its cluster management. Cloud providers will inject as much automation as possible into the system. Now and finally, as these capabilities mature we would expect to see better support for data intensive workloads like, AI and Machine learning and inference. Schedule with these workloads becomes harder because they're so resource intensive and performance management becomes more complex. So that's going to have to evolve. I mean, frankly, many of the things that Kubernetes team way back when, you know they back burn it early on, for example, you saw in Docker swarm or Mesos they're going to start to enter the scene now with Kubernetes as they start to sort of prioritize some of those more complex functions. Now, the last thing I'll ask you to think about is what's next beyond Kubernetes, you know this isn't it right with serverless and IOT in the edge and new data, heavy workloads there's something that's going to disrupt Kubernetes. So in that, by the way, in that CNCF survey nearly 40% of respondents were using serverless and that's going to keep growing. So how is that going to change the development model? You know, Andy Jassy once famously said that if they had to start over with Amazon retail, they'd start with serverless. So let's keep an eye on the horizon to see what's coming next. All right, that's it for now. I want to thank my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research this week's topics and Alex Myerson on the production team, who also manages the breaking analysis podcast, Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on socials, so thanks to all of you. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. Don't forget to check out ETR website @etr.ai. We'll also publish. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and Silicon angle.com. You can get in touch with me, email me directly david.villane@Siliconangle.com or DM me at D Vollante. You can comment on our LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vollante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody. Thanks for watching. Stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcements. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the Cube. I'm here with Holger Mueller, who is an analyst at Constellation Research. And Matt Maccaux is the global field CTO of Ezmeral software at HPE. We're going to talk data. Gents, great to see you. >> Holger: Great to be here. >> So, Holger, what do you see happening in the data market? Obviously data's hot, you know, digital, I call it the force marks to digital. Everybody realizes wow, digital business, that's a data business. We've got to get our data act together. What do you see in the market is the big trends, the big waves? >> We are all young enough or old enough to remember when people were saying data is the new oil, right? Nothing has changed, right? Data is the key ingredient, which matters to enterprise, which they have to store, which they have to enrich, which they have to use for their decision-making. It's the foundation of everything. If you want to go into machine learning or (indistinct) It's growing very fast, right? We have the capability now to look at all the data in enterprise, which weren't able 10 years ago to do that. So data is main center to everything. >> Yeah, it's even more valuable than oil, I think, right? 'Cause with oil, you can only use once. Data, you can, it's kind of polyglot. I can go in different directions and it's amazing, right? >> It's the beauty of digital products, right? They don't get consumed, right? They don't get fired up, right? And no carbon footprint, right? "Oh wait, wait, we have to think about carbon footprint." Different story, right? So to get to the data, you have to spend some energy. >> So it's that simple, right? I mean, it really is. Data is fundamental. It's got to be at the core. And so Matt, what are you guys announcing today, and how does that play into what Holger just said? >> What we're announcing today is that organizations no longer need to make a difficult choice. Prior to today, organizations were thinking if I'm going to do advanced machine learning and really exploit my data, I have to go to the cloud. But all my data's still on premises because of privacy rules, industry rules. And so what we're announcing today, through GreenLake Services, is a cloud services way to deliver that same cloud-based analytical capability. Machine learning, data engineering, through hybrid analytics. It's a unified platform to tie together everything from data engineering to advance data science. And we're also announcing the world's first Kubernetes native object store, that is hybrid cloud enabled. Which means you can keep your data connected across clouds in a data fabric, or Dave, as you say, mesh. >> Okay, can we dig into that a little bit? So, you're essentially saying that, so you're going to have data in both places, right? Public cloud, edge, on-prem, and you're saying, HPE is announcing a capability to connect them, I think you used the term fabric. I'm cool, by the way, with the term fabric, we can, we'll parse that out another time. >> I love for you to discuss textiles. Fabrics vs. mesh. For me, every fabric breaks down to mesh if you put it on a microscope. It's the same thing. >> Oh wow, now that's really, that's too detailed for my brain, right this moment. But, you're saying you can connect all those different estates because data by its very nature is everywhere. You're going to unify that, and what, that can manage that through sort of a single view? >> That's right. So, the management is centralized. We need to be able to know where our data is being provisioned. But again, we don't want organizations to feel like they have to make the trade off. If they want to use cloud surface A in Azure, and cloud surface B in GCP, why not connect them together? Why not allow the data to remain in sync or not, through a distributed fabric? Because we use that term fabric over and over again. But the idea is let the data be where it most naturally makes sense, and exploit it. Monetization is an old tool, but exploit it in a way that works best for your users and applications. >> In sync or not, that's interesting. So it's my choice? >> That's right. Because the back of an automobile could be a teeny tiny, small edge location. It's not always going to be in sync until it connects back up with a training facility. But we still need to be able to manage that. And maybe that data gets persisted to a core data center. Maybe it gets pushed to the cloud, but we still need to know where that data is, where it came from, its lineage, what quality it has, what security we're going to wrap around that, that all should be part of this fabric. >> Okay. So, you've got essentially a governance model, at least maybe you're working toward that, and maybe it's not all baked today, but that's the north star. Is this fabric connect, single management view, governed in a federated fashion? >> Right. And it's available through the most common API's that these applications are already written in. So, everybody today's talking S3. I've got to get all of my data, I need to put it into an object store, it needs to be S3 compatible. So, we are extending this capability to be S3 native. But it's optimized for performance. Today, when you put data in an object store, it's kind of one size fits all. Well, we know for those streaming analytical capabilities, those high performance workloads, it needs to be tuned for that. So, how about I give you a very small object on the very fastest disk in your data center and maybe that cheaper location somewhere else. And so we're giving you that balance as part of the overall management estate. >> Holger, what's your take on this? I mean, Frank Slootman says we'll never, we're not going halfway house. We're never going to do on-prem, we're only in the cloud. So that basically says, okay, he's ignoring a pretty large market by choice. You're not, Matt, you must love those words. But what do you see as the public cloud players, kind of the moves on-prem, particularly in this realm? >> Well, we've seen lots of cloud players who were only cloud coming back towards on-premise, right? We call it the next generation compute platform where I can move data and workloads between on-premise and ideally, multiple clouds, right? Because I don't want to be logged into public cloud vendors. And we see two trends, right? One trend is the traditional hardware supplier of on-premise has not scaled to cloud technology in terms of big data analytics. They just missed the boat for that in the past, this is changing. You guys are a traditional player and changing this, so congratulations. The other thing, is there's been no innovation for the on-premise tech stack, right? The only technology stack to run modern application has been invested for a long time in the cloud. So what we see since two, three years, right? With the first one being Google with Kubernetes, that are good at GKE on-premise, then onto us, right? Bringing their tech stack with compromises to on-premises, right? Acknowledging exactly what we're talking about, the data is everywhere, data is important. Data gravity is there, right? It's just the network's fault, where the networks are too slow, right? If you could just move everything anywhere we want like juggling two balls, then we'd be in different place. But that's the not enough investment for the traditional IT players for that stack, and the modern stack being there. And now every public cloud player has an on-premise offering with different flavors, different capabilities. >> I want to give you guys Dave's story of kind of history and you can kind of course correct, and tell me how this, Matt, maybe fits into what's happened with customers. So, you know, before Hadoop, obviously you had to buy a big Oracle database and you know, you running Unix, and you buy some big storage subsystem if you had any money left over, you know, you maybe, you know, do some actual analytics. But then Hadoop comes in, lowers the cost, and then S3 kneecaps the entire Hadoop market, right? >> I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't agree. Sorry to jump on your history. Because the fascinating thing, what Hadoop brought to the enterprise for the first time, you're absolutely right, affordable, right, to do that. But it's not only about affordability because S3 as the affordability. The big thing is you can store information without knowing how to analyze it, right? So, you mentioned Snowflake, right? Before, it was like an Oracle database. It was Starschema for data warehouse, and so on. You had to make decisions how to store that data because compute capabilities, storage capabilities, were too limited, right? That's what Hadoop blew away. >> I agree, no schema on, right. But then that created data lakes, which create a data swamps, and that whole mess, and then Spark comes in and help clean it out, okay, fine. So, we're cool with that. But the early days of Hadoop, you had, companies would have a Hadoop monolith, they probably had their data catalog in Excel or Google sheets, right? And so now, my question to you, Matt, is there's a lot of customers that are still in that world. What do they do? They got an option to go to the cloud. I'm hearing that you're giving them another option? >> That's right. So we know that data is going to move to the cloud, as I mentioned. So let's keep that data in sync, and governed, and secured, like you expect. But for the data that can't move, let's bring those cloud native services to your data center. And so that's a big part of this announcement is this unified analytics. So that you can continue to run the tools that you want to today while bringing those next generation tools based on Apache Spark, using libraries like Delta Lake so you can go anything from Tableaux through Presto sequel, to advance machine learning in your Jupiter notebooks on-premises where you know your data is secured. And if it happens to sit in existing Hadoop data lake, that's fine too. We don't want our customers to have to make that trade off as they go from one to the other. Let's give you the best of both worlds, or as they say, you can eat your cake and have it too. >> Okay, so. Now let's talk about sort of developers on-prem, right? They've been kind of... If they really wanted to go cloud native, they had to go to the cloud. Do you feel like this changes the game? Do on-prem developers, do they want that capability? Will they lean into that capability? Or will they say no, no, the cloud is cool. What's your take? >> I love developers, right? But it's about who makes the decision, who pays the developers, right? So the CXOs in the enterprises, they need exactly, this is why we call the next-gen computing platform, that you can move your code assets. It's very hard to build software, so it's very valuable to an enterprise. I don't want to have limited to one single location or certain computing infrastructure, right? Luckily, we have Kubernetes to be able to move that, but I want to be able to deploy it on-premise if I have to. I want to deploy it, would be able to deploy in the multiple clouds which are available. And that's the key part. And that makes developers happy too, because the code you write has got to run multiple places. So you can build more code, better code, instead of building the same thing multiple places, because a little compiler change here, a little compiler change there. Nobody wants to do portability testing and rewriting, recertified for certain platforms. >> The head of application development or application architecture and the business are ultimately going to dictate that, number one. Number two, you're saying that developers shouldn't care because it can write once, run anywhere. >> That is the promise, and that's the interesting thing which is available now, 'cause people know, thanks to Kubernetes as a container platform and the abstraction which containers provide, and that makes everybody's life easier. But it goes much more higher than the Head of Apps, right? This is the digital transformation strategy, the next generation application the company has to build as a response to a pandemic, as a pivot, as digital transformation, as digital disruption capability. >> I mean, I see a lot of organizations basically modernizing by building some kind of abstraction to their backend systems, modernizing it through cloud native, and then saying, hey, as you were saying Holger, run it anywhere you want, or connect to those cloud apps, or connect across clouds, connect to other on-prem apps, and eventually out to the edge. Is that what you see? >> It's so much easier said than done though. Organizations have struggled so much with this, especially as we start talking about those data intensive app and workloads. Kubernetes and Hadoop? Up until now, organizations haven't been able to deploy those services. So, what we're offering as part of these GreenLake unified analytics services, a Kubernetes runtime. It's not ours. It's top of branch open source. And open source operators like Apache Spark, bringing in Delta Lake libraries, so that if your developer does want to use cloud native tools to build those next generation advanced analytics applications, but prod is still on-premises, they should just be able to pick that code up, and because we are deploying 100% open-source frameworks, the code should run as is. >> So, it seems like the strategy is to basically build, now that's what GreenLake is, right? It's a cloud. It's like, hey, here's your options, use whatever you want. >> Well, and it's your cloud. That's, what's so important about GreenLake, is it's your cloud, in your data center or co-lo, with your data, your tools, and your code. And again, we know that organizations are going to go to a multi or hybrid cloud location and through our management capabilities, we can reach out if you don't want us to control those, not necessarily, that's okay, but we should at least be able to monitor and audit the data that sits in those other locations, the applications that are running, maybe I register your GKE cluster. I don't manage it, but at least through a central pane of glass, I can tell the Head of Applications, what that person's utilization is across these environments. >> You know, and you said something, Matt, that struck, resonated with me, which is this is not trivial. I mean, not as simple to do. I mean what you see, you see a lot of customers or companies, what they're doing, vendors, they'll wrap their stack in Kubernetes, shove it in the cloud, it's essentially hosted stack, right? And, you're kind of taking a different approach. You're saying, hey, we're essentially building a cloud that's going to connect all these estates. And the key is you're going to have to keep, and you are, I think that's probably part of the reason why we're here, announcing stuff very quickly. A lot of innovation has to come out to satisfy that demand that you're essentially talking about. >> Because we've oversimplified things with containers, right? Because containers don't have what matters for data, and what matters for enterprise, which is persistence, right? I have to be able to turn my systems down, or I don't know when I'm going to use that data, but it has to stay there. And that's not solved in the container world by itself. And that's what's coming now, the heavy lifting is done by people like HPE, to provide that persistence of the data across the different deployment platforms. And then, there's just a need to modernize my on-premise platforms. Right? I can't run on a server which is two, three years old, right? It's no longer safe, it doesn't have trusted identity, all the good stuff that you need these days, right? It cannot be operated remotely, or whatever happens there, where there's two, three years, is long enough for a server to have run their course, right? >> Well you're a software guy, you hate hardware anyway, so just abstract that hardware complexity away from you. >> Hardware is the necessary evil, right? It's like TSA. I want to go somewhere, but I have to go through TSA. >> But that's a key point, let me buy a service, if I need compute, give it to me. And if I don't, I don't want to hear about it, right? And that's kind of the direction that you're headed. >> That's right. >> Holger: That's what you're offering. >> That's right, and specifically the services. So GreenLake's been offering infrastructure, virtual machines, IaaS, as a service. And we want to stop talking about that underlying capability because it's a dial tone now. What organizations and these developers want is the service. Give me a service or a function, like I get in the cloud, but I need to get going today. I need it within my security parameters, access to my data, my tools, so I can get going as quickly as possible. And then beyond that, we're going to give you that cloud billing practices. Because, just because you're deploying a cloud native service, if you're still still being deployed via CapEx, you're not solving a lot of problems. So we also need to have that cloud billing model. >> Great. Well Holger, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> It's very interesting to have the cloud qualities of subscription-based pricing maintained by HPE as the cloud vendor from somewhere else. And that gives you that flexibility. And that's very important because data is essential to enterprise processes. And there's three reasons why data doesn't go to the cloud, right? We know that. It's privacy residency requirement, there is no cloud infrastructure in the country. It's performance, because network latency plays a role, right? Especially for critical appraisal. And then there's not invented here, right? Remember Charles Phillips saying how old the CIO is? I know if they're going to go to the cloud or not, right? So, it was not invented here. These are the things which keep data on-premise. You know that load, and HP is coming on with a very interesting offering. >> It's physics, it's laws, it's politics, and sometimes it's cost, right? Sometimes it's too expensive to move and migrate. Guys, thanks so much. Great to see you both. >> Matt: Dave, it's always a pleasure. All right, and thank you for watching the Cubes continuous coverage of HPE's big GreenLake announcements. Keep it right there for more great content. (calm music begins)

(upbeat music) >> The Cloud essentially turned the data center into an API and ushered in the era of programmable infrastructure, no longer do we think about deploying infrastructure in rigid silos with a hardened, outer shell, rather infrastructure has to facilitate digital business strategies. And what this means is putting data at the core of your organization, irrespective of its physical location. It also means infrastructure generally and storage specifically must be accessed as sets of services that can be discovered, deployed, managed, secured, and governed in a DevOps model or OpsDev, if you prefer. Now, this has specific implications as to how vendor product strategies will evolve and how they'll meet modern data requirements. Welcome to this Cube conversation, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. And with me to discuss these sea changes is Ajay Singh, the Chief Product Officer of Pure Storage, Ajay welcome. >> Thank you, David, gald to be on. >> Yeah, great to have you, so let's talk about your role at Pure. I think you're the first CPO, what's the vision there? >> That's right, I just joined up Pure about eight months ago from VMware as the chief product officer and you're right, I'm the first our chief product officer at Pure. And at VMware I ran the Cloud management business unit, which was a lot about automation and infrastructure as code. And it's just great to join Pure, which has a phenomenal all flash product set. I kind of call it the iPhone or flash story super easy to use. And how do we take that same ease of use, which is a heart of a Cloud operating principle, and how do we actually take it up to really deliver a modern data experience, which includes infrastructure and storage as code, but then even more beyond that and how do you do modern operations and then modern data services. So super excited to be at Pure. And the vision, if you may, at the end of the day, is to provide, leveraging this moderate experience, a connected and effortless experience data experience, which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business, and by really leveraging and managing and winning with their data, because ultimately data is the new oil, if you may, and if you can mine it, get insights from it and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation in your head, and that's what be intended to help our customers to. >> So you joined earlier this year kind of, I guess, middle of the pandemic really I'm interested in kind of your first 100 days, what that was like, what key milestones you set and now you're into your second a 100 plus days. How's that all going? What can you share with us in and that's interesting timing because the effects of the pandemic you came in in a kind of post that, so you had experience from VMware and then you had to apply that to the product organization. So tell us about that sort of first a 100 days and the sort of mission now. >> Absolutely, so as we talked about the vision, around the modern data experience, kind of have three components to it, modernizing the infrastructure and really it's kudos to the team out of the work we've been doing, a ton of work in modernizing the infrastructure, I'll briefly talk to that, then modernizing the data, much more than modernizing the operations. I'll talk to that as well. And then of course, down the pike, modernizing data services. So if you think about it from modernizing the infrastructure, if you think about Pure for a minute, Pure is the first company that took flash to mainstream, essentially bringing what we call consumer simplicity to enterprise storage. The manual for the products with the front and back of a business card, that's it, you plug it in, boom, it's up and running, and then you get proactive AI driven support, right? So that was kind of the heart of Pure. Now you think about Pure again, what's unique about Pure has been a lot of our competition, has dealt with flash at the SSD level, hey, because guess what? All this software was built for hard drive. And so if I can treat NAND as a solid state drive SSD, then my software would easily work on it. But with Pure, because we started with flash, we released went straight to the NAND level, and as opposed to kind of the SSD layer, and what that does is it gives you greater efficiency, greater reliability and create a performance compared to an SSD, because you can optimize at the chip level as opposed to at the SSD module level. That's one big advantage that Pure has going for itself. And if you look at the physics, in the industry for a minute, there's recent data put out by Wikibon early this year, effectively showing that by the year 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, just the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk is going to be cheaper than hard disk. So this big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that's going to disrupt the hardest industry, already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next and then even the long tail is coming up over there. And so to end to that extent our lead, if you may, the introduction of QLC NAND, QLC NAND powerful competition is barely introducing, we've been at it for a while. We just recently this year in my first a 100 days, we introduced the flasher AC, C40 and C60 drives, which really start to open up our ability to go after the hybrid story market in a big way. It opens up a big new market for us. So great work there by the team,. Also at the heart of it. If you think about it in the NAND side, we have our flash array, which is a scale-up latency centric architecture and FlashBlade which is a scale-out throughput architecture, all operating with NAND. And what that does is it allows us to cover both structured data, unstructured data, tier one apps and tier two apps. So pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all flash data center, slowly but surely we're heading over there to the all flash data center based on demand economics that we just talked about, and we've done a bunch of releases. And then the team has done a bunch of things around introducing and NVME or fabric, the kind of thing that you expect them to do. A lot of recognition in the industry for the team or from the likes of TrustRadius, Gartner, named FlashRay, the Carton Peer Insights, the customer choice award and primary storage in the MQ. We were the leader. So a lot of kudos and recognition coming to the team as a result, Flash Blade just hit a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, kind of a leader by far in kind of the unstructured data, fast file an object marketplace. And then of course, all the work we're doing around what we say, ESG, environmental, social and governance, around reducing carbon footprint, reducing waste, our whole notion of evergreen and non-disruptive upgrades. We also kind of did a lot of work in that where we actually announced that over 2,700 customers have actually done non-disruptive upgrades over the technology. >> Yeah a lot to unpack there. And a lot of this sometimes you people say, oh, it's the plumbing, but the plumbing is actually very important too. 'Cause we're in a major inflection point, when we went from spinning disk to NAND. And it's all about volumes, you're seeing this all over the industry now, you see your old boss, Pat Gelsinger, is dealing with this at Intel. And it's all about consumer volumes in my view anyway, because thanks to Steve Jobs, NAND volumes are enormous and what two hard disk drive makers left in the planet. I don't know, maybe there's two and a half, but so those volumes drive costs down. And so you're on that curve and you can debate as to when it's going to happen, but it's not an if it's a when. Let me, shift gears a little bit. Because Cloud, as I was saying, it's ushered in this API economy, this as a service model, a lot of infrastructure companies have responded. How are you thinking at Pure about the as a service model for your customers? What's the strategy? How is it evolving and how does it differentiate from the competition? >> Absolutely, a great question. It's kind of segues into the second part of the moderate experience, which is how do you modernize the operations? And that's where automation as a service, because ultimately, the Cloud has validated and the address of this model, right? People are looking for outcomes. They care less about how you get there. They just want the outcome. And the as a service model actually delivers these outcomes. And this whole notion of infrastructure as code is kind of the start of it. Imagine if my infrastructure for a developer is just a line of code, in a Git repository in a program that goes through a CICD process and automatically kind of is configured and set up, fits in with the Terraform, the Ansibles, all that different automation frameworks. And so what we've done is we've gone down the path of really building out what I think is modern operations with this ability to have storage as code, disability, in addition modern operations is not just storage scored, but also we've got recently introduced some comprehensive ransomware protection, that's part of modern operations. There's all the threat you hear in the news or ransomware. We introduced what we call safe mode snapshots that allow you to recover in literally seconds. When you have a ransomware attack, we also have in the modern operations Pure one, which is maybe the leader in AI driven support to prevent downtime. We actually call you 80% of the time and fix the problems without you knowing about it. That's what modern operations is all about. And then also Martin operations says, okay, you've got flash on your on-prem side, but even maybe using flash in the public Cloud, how can I have seamless multi-Cloud experience in our Cloud block store we've introduced around Amazon, AWS and Azure allows one to do that. And then finally, for modern applications, if you think about it, this whole notion of infrastructure's code, as a service, software driven storage, the Kubernetes infrastructure enables one to really deliver a great automation framework that enables to reduce the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code. And we have, kudos to Charlie and the Pure storage team before my time with the acquisition of Portworx, Portworx today is truly delivers true storage as code orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes and in a multi-Cloud hybrid situation. So it can run on EKS, GKE, OpenShift rancher, Tansu, recently announced as the leader by giggle home for enterprise Kubernetes storage. We were really proud about that asset. And then finally, the last piece are Pure as a service. That's also all outcome oriented, SLS. What matters is you sign up for SLS, and then you get those SLS, very different from our competition, right? Our competition tends to be a lot more around financial engineering, hey, you can buy it OPEX versus CapEx. And, but you get the same thing with a lot of professional services, we've really got, I'd say a couple of years and lead on, actually delivering and managing with SRE engineers for the SLA. So a lot of great work there. We recently also introduced Cisco FlashStack, again, flash stack as a service, again, as a service, a validation of that. And then finally, we also recently did a announcement with Aquaponics, with their bare metal as a service where we are a key part of their bare metal as a service offering, again, pushing the kind of the added service strategy. So yes, big for us, that's where the buck is skating, half the enterprises, even on prem, wanting to consume things in the Cloud operating model. And so that's where we're putting it lot. >> I see, so your contention is, it's not just this CapEx to OPEX, that's kind of the, during the economic downturn of 2007, 2008, the economic crisis, that was the big thing for CFOs. So that's kind of yesterday's news. What you're saying is you're creating a Cloud, like operating model, as I was saying upfront, irrespective of physical location. And I see that as your challenge, the industry's challenge, be, if I'm going to effect the digital transformation, I don't want to deal with the Cloud primitives. I want you to hide the underlying complexity of that Cloud. I want to deal with higher level problems, but so that brings me to digital transformation, which is kind of the now initiative, or I even sometimes call it the mandate. There's not a one size fits all for digital transformation, but I'm interested in your thoughts on the must take steps, universal steps that everybody needs to think about in a digital transformation journey. >> Yeah, so ultimately the digital transformation is all about how companies are gain a competitive edge in this new digital world or that the company are, and the competition are changing the game on, right? So you want to make sure that you can rapidly try new things, fail fast, innovate and invest, but speed is of the essence, agility and the Cloud operating model enables that agility. And so what we're also doing is not only are we driving agility in a multicloud kind of data, infrastructure, data operation fashion, but we also taking it a step further. We were also on the journey to deliver modern data services. Imagine on a Pure on-prem infrastructure, along with your different public Clouds that you're working on with the Kubernetes infrastructures, you could, with a few clicks run Kakfa as a service, TensorFlow as a service, Mongo as a service. So me as a technology team can truly become a service provider and not just an on-prem service provider, but a multi-Cloud service provider. Such that these services can be used to analyze the data that you have, not only your data, your partner data, third party public data, and how you can marry those different data sets, analyze it to deliver new insights that ultimately give you a competitive edge in the digital transformation. So you can see data plays a big role there. The data is what generates those insights. Your ability to match that data with partner data, public data, your data, the analysis on it services ready to go, as you get the digital, as you can do the insights. You can really start to separate yourself from your competition and get on the leaderboard a decade from now when this digital transformation settles down. >> All right, so bring us home, Ajay, summarize what does a modern data strategy look like and how does it fit into a digital business or a digital organization? >> So look, at the end of the day, data and analysis, both of them play a big role in the digital transformation. And it really comes down to how do I leverage this data, my data, partner data, public data, to really get that edge. And that links back to a vision. How do we provide that connected and effortless, modern data experience that allows our customers to focus on their business? How do I get the edge in the digital transformation? But easily leveraging, managing and winning with their data. And that's the heart of where Pure is headed. >> Ajay Singh, thanks so much for coming inside theCube and sharing your vision. >> Thank you, Dave, it was a real pleasure. >> And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> 2020 was the most unpredictable year of our lives, a forced shutdown of global economies left everyone have the conclusion that the tech industry spending would decline and of course it did, but you'd hardly know it if you watch the stock market and the momentum of several well-positioned companies. Those firms that had products and services that catered to the pivot to work from home, SAS based solutions were focused on business resiliency and cloud saw huge growth. The forced match to digital turned a buzzword into reality overnight, where if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And one of the companies participating in that growth trend was Veeam. Veeam virtual is scheduled to take place on May 25th and 26th. And it's one of our favorite physical events and the Cube will be there again as a virtual participant. One of our traditions prior to VeeamON has always been to bring in an executive into the Cube and talk not only about what to expect at the show, but what's happening in the market. And with me is many times Cube alum Danny Allan is the chief technology officer at Veeam. Danny welcome is always great to see you. >> I am delighted to be here again. Disappointed it's virtual, but excited to talk with you. >> Yeah, me too. You know, it's coming. It's getting jabbed but you know, you look at the surprises here. I mean, look at the chip shortage, you know everybody thought, Oh, well stop ordering chips. I mean furniture, et cetera, cars. And it's just kind of crazy. What was your expectation going into the pandemic and what did you actually see looking back? >> Well, it's funny, you never know what's going to happen. And for the first few weeks I would say there's a lot of disruption because all of a sudden you have people who've been going into an office for a long time, working from home and you know, from an R&D perspective at Veeam those people weren't used to working from home. So there's a lot of uncertainty I'll say for the first three or four weeks but what very quickly picked up was the opportunity. I'll say to focus more specifically on delivering things for our customers. And one of the things obviously that just exploded was use of digital technologies like Slack and Microsoft teams. And as you say, Veeam was well positioned to help customers as they move towards this new normal, as they say. >> So what were some of the growth vectors that you guys saw specifically that were helping your customers going to get get through this time? >> Yeah well, people always associate Veeam with knowing data protection for the virtual environment but two things really stood out last year as our emerging markets. One was Office365, and I think that's due to the uptake of Microsoft teams. I mean, if you look at the Microsoft results, you can see that people are doing SaaS. And we were very well positioned to take advantage of that. Help customers move towards collaborating online. So that was a huge growth vector for us. And the second one was cloud. We had more data moving to cloud than ever before in Veeam history. And that continues on into 2021. >> You guys, well, yeah, let's talk more about that set SAS piece of your business. You were very early on in terms of SAS data protection. You kind of had to educate the market. People are like, well, why do I need to back up my SAS doesn't the cloud provider do that? And then you sort of you had to educate, so it was you were early and but it's really paid off. Maybe talk about how that trend has benefited some of your customers. >> Yeah. So if you go back four years, we didn't even have data protection for Office365. And over the last four years, we've emerged into the market leader the largest in protection for Office365. And as you say, it was about education. Early on people knew that they needed to protect exchange when they ran it on premises. And when they first went to the cloud there was this expectation of, Hey Microsoft or my provider will do that for me. And very quickly they realized that's not the case and there's still the same threats. It might not be hardware failure, but certainly misconfiguration or deleted items or ransomware in 2021, sorry, 2020 was massive. And so we do data protection for Exchange, for SharePoint online, for one drive, and most recently for Microsoft teams. And so that data protection obviously helps organizations as they adopt Office365 and SaaS technologies. >> I sent him my last breaking analysis. When you look at the ETR data, Veeam has been really steady. You know, some competitors spike up and come down, others, you know, maybe aren't doing so well or the larger established players don't have as much momentum. It just seems like Veeam even though you cross the billion dollar revenue mark, you've been able to keep that spending momentum up. And I think it's, I would observe it's a function of your ability to identify that the waves and ride those waves and anticipate them. We just talked about SAS, talked about virtualization. You were there cloud, we'll talk about that more as well, plus your execution. It seems like since the acquisition by insight you guys have continued to execute. I wonder if you could help the audience understand how do you think about the phases that Veeam has gone through in its ascendancy and where you're headed? >> Yeah. And so I look at it as three things, it's having the right product, but it's not just enough to have the right product, the right product it's the right timing and it's the right execution. So if you think about where Veeam started, it was all in data protection for vSphere, for the hypervisor. And that was right at the time when VMware was taking off and the modernized data center was being virtualized. And so that helped us grow, I'll say into a $600 million company, but then about four years ago, we see the ascendancy of SaaS and specifically Office365. And so, you know, we weren't first to market but I would argue the timing with the best product, with the right execution has turned that into a massive a very significant contribution to our bottom line. And then actually the third wave through 2020 is the adoption of cloud. We moved last year, 242 petabytes into cloud storage and already in the first quarter of 2021, we've moved to 100 petabytes. So there's this massive adoption or migration of data into the cloud. And Veeam has been positioned with the right product, at the right time, with the right execution, to take advantage of that. >> So I wonder if you could help us quantify that IDC data you know, the IDC did a good job quantifying the market. Maybe you could share with us sort of your position there, maybe some of the growth that we're seeing. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah. We have some very exciting results from the recent IDC report. So in the second half of 2020, we saw 17.9% year over year growth in our revenue. That was actually triple the closest competitor. And our sequential growth was over 21%. So massive growth and all of that is in the second half of the year, 563 million in revenue. So over a billion dollar company. So these aren't just, you know, 20% growth on small numbers. This is on a very significant number. And we see that continuing forward, we'll be announcing some things I'm sure at VMR coming up in a few weeks here, but that trend continues. And again, it's the right product, right time, with the right execution. >> Cloud continues to roll on. You're seeing, you know, solid weather. If you add them all up the big four 30 plus percent growth you're seeing Azure, even higher growth. You know, AWS is huge, Google growing, Google cloud, probably in the 60 to 70% range. So cloud still hot, it's kind of gone mainstream but there's still feels like there's a long way to go there. What's happening in cloud? You guys, again, leaning in, riding that wave. What can you tell us? >> We are leaning in, you're going to see some things coming up at Veeam related to that. But two things I would say, one is we're in the marketplace of all three of the major hyperscalers. So there's a Veeam backup for AWS, Veeam backup for Azure, and a Veeam backup for GCP. And not only is there products that are purpose-built for those clouds in the marketplace, all three of them have integrations to the core Veeam platform. And so this isn't just standalone products while it is in the marketplace, it's integrated into the full strategy around modern data protection for the organizations. And so I am thrilled about some of the things that we're going to be showing in there but we're leaning in very closely with those. We think we're in early days, like I say maybe first, second year, and it will be the next decade as they truly emerge into their dominant position. But even more than cloud if you asked me what I get excited about looking forward certainly cloud adoption is massive, but Kubernetes, that's what's enabling some of the models of both on-prem and cloud hosted. And we're clearly doing some things there as well. >> So I'm glad you brought that up because I think the first time I ever sort of stumbled into a company that was actually doing data protection for containers was out of a VeeamON event. It was one of your exhibitors. And I was like, Hmm, that's an interesting name. And yeah, of course he ended up buying the company. But so, you know, it's funny, right? Because containers have been around forever. And then when you started to see Kubernetes come to for, containers are really ephemeral they really didn't, you know, they weren't persistent but they didn't have state, but that's changing. I wonder if you could give us your perspective as to how you're thinking about that whole space. >> I truly believe that the third big wave of technology transformation, the first was around physical systems and mainframes and things. And then we went into the virtualized era. I think that the third world is not the cloud. I actually think it is containers. Now why containers? Because as you mentioned, Dave, they're a femoral, they're designed for the world of consumption. Everything else is designed for you, install it. And then you build to the high watermark. The whole thing about containers is that they're a femoral and they're built for the consumption model. The other thing about containers is that they're highly portable. So you can run it on premises with OpenShift but then you can move it to GKE or HKS or EKS or any of the big cloud platforms. So it definitely aligns with organization's desire to modernize and to choose the infrastructure of best choice. Now, at the same time, the reason why they haven't taken off I would argue as quickly as they could have is because they've been really complex, in early days the complexity of containers was very difficult, but the model, the platform or ecosystem is evolving, they are becoming more simple. And what is happening is IT operations teams are now considering the developer, their customer and they're building self-service models for the developers to be more productive. So I think of this as platform apps and certainly backup and security is a part of this but it is moving and we're seeing traction actually faster than it would have predicted in early 2020. >> Yeah. We've been putting forth this vision of a layer that abstracts the complexity of the underlying clouds whether it's on prem, across clouds, eventually the edge and containers are linchpin to enabling that. Let's talk about VeeamON 2021. Show us a little leg, give us a preview. >> So we always come with the excitement and we always come with showing a sneak peek of what's to come. So certainly we're going to celebrate some of the big successes. We brought version 11 to market earlier this year that had security capabilities around ransomware type, continuous data protection it at a whole lot of things. So we're going to celebrate some of the products have already recently launched but we're also going to give a sneak peek of what's coming over 2021. Now, if you ask me what that is, we talk an awful lot about cloud. So you should expect to see things around Veeam backup for AWS and Azure and GCP. You should expect to see things around our Kubernetes data protection with our casting Cape 10 product, you should expect to see evolution of capabilities with our SaaS data protection with Office365. So we're going to give a sneak peek of lots of things to come. And as always, we bring lots of innovation to the market. It's not just another checkbox theme has always said, how can we do it differently? How can we do a better? And then we're going to show that to our customers at VeeamON. >> Well, we're always super excited to participate in the Veeam community. We've always had a lot of fun. They're great events. Yes, it's virtual, but you guys always have an interesting spin on things and make it fun. It's May 25th and 26th. It starts at 9:00 AM Eastern time. You go to Veeam V-E-E-A-M.com and sign up, make sure you do that and check out all the content. The Cube of course will be there. I will be interviewing executives, customers, partners. There's tons of content for practitioners. And, you know, as always you guys got the great demos and always a few surprises. So Danny, really looking forward to that and really appreciate your time and the Cube today. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. Again, May 25th and 26th 9:00 AM. Eastern time, go to veeam.com and sign up. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)