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 over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

>>Hello, everyone. My name is Rick Pew. I'm a senior product manager at Mirant. This and I have been working on the Doctor Enterprise Container Cloud for the last eight months. Today we're gonna be talking about multi cloud kubernetes. So the first thing to kind of look at is, you know, is multi cloud rial. You know, the terms thrown around a lot and by the way, I should mention that in this presentation, we use the term multi cloud to mean both multi cloud, which you know in the technical sense, really means multiple public clouds and hybrid cloud means public clouds. And on Prem, uh, we use in this presentation will use the term multi cloud to refer to all different types of multiple clouds, whether it's all public cloud or a mixture of on Prem and Public Cloud or, for that matter, multiple on Prem clouds as doctor and price container. Cloud supports all of those scenarios. So it really well, let's look at some research that came out of flex era in their 2020 State of the cloud report. You'll notice that ah, 33% state that they've got multiple public and one private cloud. 53% say they've got multiple public and multiple private cloud. So if you have those two up, you get 86% of the people say that they're in multiple public clowns and at least one private cloud. So I think at this stage we could say that multi cloud is a reality. According to 4 51 research, you know, a number of CEO stated that the strong driver their desire was to optimize cost savings across their private and public clouds. Um, they also wanted to avoid vendor lock in by operating in multiple clouds and try to dissuade their teams from taking too much advantage of a given providers proprietary infrastructure. But they also indicated that there the complexity of using multiple clouds hindered the rate of adoption of doing it doesn't mean they're not doing it. It just means that they don't go assed fast as they would like to go in many cases because of the complexity. And here it Miranda's. We surveyed our customers as well, and they're telling us similar things, you know. Risk management, through the diversification of providers, is key on their list cost optimization and the democratization of allowing their development teams, uh, to create kubernetes clusters without having to file a nightie ticket. But to give them a self service, uh, cloud like environment, even if it's on prem or multi cloud to give them the ability to create their own clusters, resize their own clusters and delete their own clusters without needing to have I t. Or of their operations teams involved at all. But there are some challenges with this, with the different clouds you know require different automation. Thio provisioned the underlying infrastructure or deploy and operating system or deployed kubernetes, for that matter, in a given cloud. You could say that they're not that complicated. They all have, you know, very powerful consoles and a P I s to do that. But did you get across three or four or five different clouds? Then you have to learn three or four or five different AP ice and Web consoles in order to make that happen on in. That scenario is difficult to provide self service for developers across all the cloud options, which is what you want to really accelerate your application innovation. So what's in it for me? You know We've got a number of roles and their prizes developers, operators and business leaders, and they have somewhat different needs. So when the developer side the need is flexibility to meet their development schedules, Number one you know they're under constant pressure to produce, and in order to do that, they need flexibility and in this case, the flexibility to create kubernetes clusters and use them across multiple clouds. Now they also have C I C D tools, and they want them to be able to be normalized on automated across all of the the on prim and public clouds that they're using. You know, in many cases they'll have a test and deployment scenario where they'll want to create a cluster, deploy their software, run their test, score the tests and then delete that cluster because the only point of that cluster, perhaps, was to test ah pipeline of delivery. So they need that kind of flexibility. From the operator's perspective, you know, they always want to be able to customize the control of their infrastructure and deployment. Uh, they certainly have the desire to optimize their optics and Capex fans. They also want to support their develops teams who many times their their customers through a p I access for on Prem and public clouds burst. Scaling is something operators are interested in, and something public clouds can provide eso the ability to scale out into public clouds, perhaps from there on prem infrastructure in a seamless manner. And many times they need to support geographic distribution of applications either for compliance or performance reasons. So having you know, data centers all across the world and be able to specifically target a given region, uh, is high on their list. Business leaders want flexibility and confidence to know that you know, they're on prim and public cloud uh, deployments. Air fully supported. They want to be able, like the operator, optimize their cloud, spends business leaders, think about disaster recovery. So having the applications running and living in different data centers gives them the opportunity to have disaster recovery. And they really want the flexibility of keeping private data under their control. On on Prem In certain applications may access that on Prem. Other applications may be able to fully run in the cloud. So what should I look for in a container cloud? So you really want something that fully automates these cluster deployments for virtual machine or bare metal. The operating system, uh, and kubernetes eso It's not just deploying kubernetes. It's, you know, how do I create my underlying infrastructure of a VM or bare metal? How do I deploy the operating system? And then, on top of all that, I want to be able to deploy kubernetes. Uh, you also want one that gives a unified cluster lifecycle management across all the clouds. So these clusters air running software gets updated. Cooper Netease has a new release cycle. Uh, they come out with something new. It's available, you know, How do you get that across all of your clusters? That air running in multiple clouds. We also need a container cloud that can provide you the visibility through logging, monitoring and alerting again across all the clouds. You know, many offerings have these for a particular cloud, but getting that across multiple clouds, uh, becomes a little more difficult. The Doctor Enterprise Container cloud, you know, is a very strong solution and really meets many of these, uh, dimensions along the left or kind of the dimensions we went through in the last slide we've got on Prem and public clouds as of RG A Today we're supporting open stack and bare metal for the on Prem Solutions and AWS in the public cloud. We'll be adding VM ware very soon for another on Prem uh, solution as well as azure and G C P. So thank you very much. Uh, look forward, Thio answering any questions you might have and we'll call that a rap. Thank you. >>Hi, Rick. Thanks very much for that. For that talk, I I am John James. You've probably seen me in other sessions. I do marketing here in Miran Tous on. I wanted to to take this opportunity while we had Rick to ask some more questions about about multi cloud. It's ah, potentially a pretty big topic, isn't it, Rick? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, the devil's in the details and there's, uh, lots of details that we could go through if you'd like, be happy to answer any questions that you have. >>Well, we've been talking about hybrid cloud for literally years. Um, this is something that I think you know, several generations of folks in the in the I. A s space doing on premise. I s, for example, with open stack the way Miran Tous Uh does, um, found, um, you know, thought that that it had a lot of potential. A lot of enterprises believed that, but there were There were things stopping people from from making it. Really, In many cases, um, it required a very, ah, very high degree of willingness to create homogeneous platforms in the cloud and on the premise. Um, and that was often very challenging. Um, but it seems like with things like kubernetes and with the isolation provided by containers, that this is beginning to shift, that that people are actually looking for some degree of application portability between their own Prem and there and their cloud environments. And that this is opening up, Uh, you know, investment on interest in pursuing this stuff. Is that the right perception? >>Yeah. So let's let's break that down a little bit. So what's nice about kubernetes is through the a. P. I s are the same. Regardless of whether it's something that Google or or a W s is offering as a platform as a service or whether you've taken the upstream open source project and deploy it yourself on parameter in a public cloud or whatever the scenario might be or could be a competitor of Frances's product, the Kubernetes A. P I is the same, which is the thing that really gives you that application portability. So you know, the container itself is contained arising, obviously your application and minimizing any kind of dependency issues that you might have And then the ability to deploy that to any of the coup bernetti clusters you know, is the same regardless of where it's running, the complexity comes and how doe I actually spend up a cluster in AWS and open stack and D M Where and gp An azure. How do I build that infrastructure and and spin that up and then, you know, used the ubiquitous kubernetes a p I toe actually deploy my application and get it to run. So you know what we've done is we've we've unified and created A I use the word normalized. But a lot of times people think that normalization means that you're kind of going to a lowest common denominator, which really isn't the case and how we've attacked the the enabling of multi cloud. Uh, you know, what we've done is that we've looked at each one of the providers and are basically providing an AP that allows you to utilize. You know, whatever the best of you know, that particular breed of provider has and not, uh, you know, going to at least common denominator. But, you know, still giving you a ah single ap by which you can, you know, create the infrastructure and the infrastructure could be on Prem is a bare metal infrastructure. It could be on preeminent open stack or VM ware infrastructure. Any of the public clouds, you know, used to have a a napi I that works for all of them. And we've implemented that a p i as an extension to kubernetes itself. So all of the developers, Dev ops and operators that air already familiar operating within the, uh, within the aapi of kubernetes. It's very, very natural. Extension toe actually be able to spend up these clusters and deploy them >>Now that's interesting. Without giving away, obviously what? Maybe special sauce. Um, are you actually using operators to do this in the Cooper 90? Sense of the word? >>Yes. Yeah, we've extended it with with C R D s, uh, and and operators and controllers, you know in the way that it was meant to be extended. So Kubernetes has a recipe on how you extend their A P I on that. That's what we used as our model. >>That, at least to me, makes enormous sense. Nick Chase, My colleague and I were digging into operators a couple of weeks ago, and that's a very elegant technology. Obviously, it's a it's evolving very fast, but it's remarkably unintimidating once you start trying to write them. We were able toe to compose operators around Cron and other simple processes and just, >>you know, >>a couple of minutes on day worked, which I found pretty astonishing. >>Yeah, I mean, you know, Kubernetes does a lot of things and they spent a lot of effort, um, in being able, you know, knowing that their a p I was gonna be ubiquitous and knowing that people wanted to extend it, uh, they spent a lot of effort in the early development days of being able to define that a p I to find what an operator was, what a controller was, how they interact. How a third party who doesn't know anything about the internals of kubernetes could add whatever it is that they wanted, you know, and follow the model that makes it work. Exactly. Aziz, the native kubernetes ap CSTO >>What's also fascinating to me? And, you know, I've I've had a little perspective on this over the past, uh, several weeks or a month or so working with various stakeholders inside the company around sessions related to this event that the understanding of how things work is by no means evenly distributed, even in a company as sort of tightly knit as Moran Tous. Um, some people who shall remain nameless have represented to me that Dr Underprice Container Cloud basically works. Uh, if you handed some of the EMS, it will make things for you, you know, and this is clearly not what's going on that that what's going on is a lot more nuanced that you are using, um, optimal resource is from each provider to provide, uh, you know, really coherent architected solutions. Um, the load balancing the d. N s. The storage that this that that right? Um all of which would ultimately be. And, you know, you've probably tried this. I certainly have hard to script by yourself in answerable or cloud formation or whatever. Um, this is, you know, this is not easy work. I I wrote a about the middle of last year for my prior employer. I wrote a dip lawyer in no Js against the raw aws a piece for deployment and configuration of virtual networks and servers. Um, and that was not a trivial project. Um, it took a long time to get thio. Uh, you know, a dependable result. And to do it in parallel and do other things that you need to do in order to maintain speed. One of the things, in fact, that I've noticed in working with Dr Enterprise Container Cloud recently, is how much parallelism it's capable of within single platforms. It's It's pretty powerful. I mean, if you want to clusters to be deployed simultaneously, that's not hard for Doc. Aerated price container cloud to dio on. I found it pretty remarkable because I have sat in front of a single laptop trying to churn out of cluster under answerable, for example, and just on >>you get into that serial nature, your >>poor little devil, every you know, it's it's going out and it's ssh, Indian Terminals and it's pretending it's a person and it's doing all that stuff. This is much more magical. Um, so So that's all built into the system to, isn't it? >>Yeah. Interesting, Really Interesting point on that. Is that you know, the complexity isn't not necessarily and just creating a virtual machine because all of these companies have, you know, spend a lot of effort to try to make that as easy as possible. But when you get into networking, load balancing, routing, storage and hooking those up, you know, two containers automating that if you were to do that in terror form or answerable or something like that is many, many, many lines of code, you know, people have to experiment. Could you never get it right the first or second or the third time? Uh, you know, and then you have to maintain that. So one of the things that we've heard from customers that have looked a container cloud was that they just can't wait to throw away their answerable or their terror form that they've been maintaining for a couple of years. The kind of enables them to do this. It's very brittle. If if the clouds change something, you know on the network side, let's say that's really buried. And it's not something that's kind of top of mind. Uh, you know, your your thing fails or maybe worse, you think that it works. And it's not until you actually go to use it that you notice that you can't get any of your containers. So you know, it's really great the way that we've simplified that for the users and again democratizing it. So the developers and Dev ops people can create these clusters, you know, with ease and not worry about all the complexities of networking and storage. >>Another thing that amazed me as I was digging into my first, uh, Dr Price container Cloud Management cluster deployment was how, uh, I want I don't want to use the word nuanced again, but I can't think of a better word. Nuanced. The the security thinking is in how things air set up. How, um, really delicate the thinking about about how much credential power you give to the deploy. Er the to the seed server that deploys your management cluster as opposed thio Um uh or rather the how much how much administrative access you give to the to the administrator who owns the entire implementation around a given provider versus how much power the seed server gets because that gets its own user right? It gets a bootstrap user specifically created so that it's not your administrator, you know, more limited visibility and permissions. And this whole hierarchy of permissions is then extended down into the child clusters that this management cluster will ultimately create. So that Dev's who request clusters will get appropriate permissions granted within. Ah, you know, a corporate schema of permissions. But they don't get the keys to the kingdom. They don't have access to anything they don't you know they're not supposed to have access to, but within their own scope, they're safe. They could do anything they want, so it's like a It's a It's a really neat kind of elegant way of protecting organizations against, for example, resource over use. Um, you know, give people the power to deploy clusters, and basically you're giving them the power toe. Make sure that a big bill hits you know, your corporate accounting office at the end of the billing cycle, um so there have to be controls and those controls exist in this, you know, in this. >>Yeah, And there's kind of two flavors of that. One is kind of the day one that you're doing the deployment you mentioned the seed servers, you know, And then it creates a bastion server, and then it creates, you know, the management cluster and so forth, you know, and how all those permissions air handled. And then once the system is running, you know, then you have full access to going into key cloak, which is a very powerful open source identity management tool on you have dozens of, you know, granular permissions that you can give to an individual user that gives them permission to do certain things and not others within the context of kubernetes eso. It's really well thought out. And the defaults, you know, our 80% right. You know, there's very few people are gonna have to go in and sort of change those defaults. You mentioned the corporate directory. You know, hooks right upto l bap or active directory can suck everybody down. So there's no kind of work from a day. One perspective of having to go add. You know everybody that you can think of different teams and groupings of of people. Uh, you know, that's kind of all given from the three interface to the corporate directory. And so it just makes kind of managing the users and and controlling who can do what? Uh, really easy. And, you know, you know, day one day two it's really almost like our one hour to write because it's just all the defaults were really well thought out. You can deploy, you know, very powerful doctor and price container cloud, you know, within an hour, and then you could just start using it. And you know, you can create users if you want. You can use the default users. That air set up a time goes on, you can fine tune that, and it's a really, really nice model again for the whole frictionless democratization of giving developers the ability to go in and get it out of, you know, kind of their way and doing what they want to do. And I t is happy to do that because they don't like dozens of tickets and saying, you know, create a cluster for this team created cluster for that team. You know, here's the size of these guys. Want to resize when you know let's move all that into a self service model and really fulfill the prophecy of, you know, speeding up application development. >>It strikes me is extremely ironic that one of the things that public cloud providers bless them, uh, have always claimed, is that their products provide this democratization when in the experience, I think my own experience and the experience of most of the AWS developers, for example, not toe you know, name names, um, that I've encountered is that an initial experience of trying to start start a virtual machine and figuring out how to log into it? A. W s could take the better part of an afternoon. It's just it's not familiar once you have it in your fingers. Boom. Two seconds, right. But, wow, that learning curve is steep and precipitous, and you slip back and you make stupid mistakes your first couple 1000 times through the loop. Um, by letting people skip that and letting them skip it potentially on multiple providers, in a sense, I would think products like this are actually doing the public cloud industry is, you know, a real surface Hide as much of that as you can without without taking the power away. Because ultimately people want, you know, to control their destiny. They want choice for a reason. Um, and and they want access to the infinite services And, uh, and, uh, innovation that AWS and Azure and Google are all doing on their platforms. >>Yeah, you know, and they're solving, uh, very broad problems in the public clouds, you know, here were saying, you know, this is a world of containers, right? This is a world of orchestration of these containers. And why should I have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, whether it's a virtual machine or bare metal? You know, I shouldn't care if I'm an application developer developing some database application. You know, the last thing I wanna worry about is how do I go in and create a virtual machine? Oh, this is running. And Google. It's totally different than the one I was creating. An AWS I can't find. You know where I get the I P address in Google. It's not like it was an eight of us, you know, and you have to relearn the whole thing. And that's really not what your job is. Anyways, your job is to write data base coat, for example. And what you really want to do is just push a button, deploy a nor kiss traitor, get your app on it and start debugging it and getting it >>to work. Yep. Yeah, it's It's powerful. I've been really excited to work with the product the past week or so, and, uh, I hope that folks will look at the links at the bottoms of our thank you slides and, uh, and, uh, avail themselves of of free trial downloads of both Dr Enterprise Container, Cloud and Lens. Thank you very much for spending this extra time with me. Rick. I I think we've produced some added value here for for attendees. >>Well, thank you, John. I appreciate your help. >>Have a great rest of your session by bike. >>Okay, Thanks. Bye.

>> Hello, everyone. I'm Khalil Ahmad, Senior Director, Architecture at S&P Global. I have been working with S&P Global for six years now. Previously, I worked for Citigroup and Prudential. Overall, I have been part of IT industry for 30 years, and most of my professional career has been within financial sector in New York City metro area. I live in New Jersey with my wife and son, Daniel Khalil. I have a Master degree in software engineering from the University of Scranton, and Master in mathematics University of Punjab, Lahore. And currently I am pursuing TRIUM global Executive MBA. A joint program from the NYU Stern, LSE and HEC Paris. So today, I'm going to talk about building multi-cluster scalable container platform, supporting on-prem hybrid and multicloud use cases, how we leverage that with an S&P Global and what was our best story. As far as the agenda is concerned, I will go over, quickly the problem statement. Then I will mention the work of our core requirements, how we get solutioning, how Docker Enterprise helped us. And at the end, I will go over the pilot deployment for a proof of concept which we leverage. So, as far as the problem statement is concerned. Containers, as you all know, in the enterprise are becoming mainstream but expertise remains limited and challenges are mounting as containers enter production. Some companies are building skills internally and someone looking for partners that can help catalyze success, and choosing more integrated solutions that accelerate deployments and simplify the container environment. To overcome the challenges, we at S&P Global started our journey a few years back, taking advantage of both options. So, first of all, we met with all the stakeholder, application team, Product Manager and we define our core requirements. What we want out of this container platform, which supports multicloud and hybrid supporting on-prem as well. So, as you see my core requirements, we decided that we need first of all a roadmap or container strategy, providing guidelines on standards and specification. Secondly, with an S&P Global, we decided to introduce Platform as a Service approach, where we bring the container platform and provide that as a service internally to our all application team and all the Product Managers. Hosting multiple application on-prem as well as in multicloud. Third requirement was that we need Linux and Windows container support. In addition to that, we would also require hosted secure image registry with role based access control and image security scanning. In addition to that, we also started DevOps journey, so we want to have a full support of CI/CD pipeline. Whatever the solution we recommend from the architecture group, it should be easily integrated to the developer workstation. And developer workstation could be Windows, Mac or Linux. Orchestration, performance and control were few other parameter which we'll want to keep in mind. And the most important, dynamic scaling of container clusters. That was something we were also want to achieve, when we introduce this Platform as a Service. So, as far as the standard specification are concerned, we turn to the Open Container Initiative, the OCI. OCI was established in June 2015 by Docker and other leaders in the technology industry. And OCI operates under Linux Foundation, and currently contains two specification, runtime specification and image specification. So, at that time, it was a no brainer, other than to just stick with OCI. So, we are following the industry standard and specifications. Now the next step was, okay, the container platform. But what would be our runtime engine? What would be orchestration? And how we support, in our on-prem as well as in the multicloud infrastructure? So, when it comes to runtime engine, we decided to go with the Docker. Which is by default, runtime engine and Kubernetes. And if I may mention, DataDog in one of their public report, they say Docker is probably the most talked about infrastructure technology for the past few years. So, sticking to Docker runtime engine was another win-win game and we saw in future not bringing any challenge or issues. When it comes to orchestration. We prefer Kubernetes but that time there was a challenge, Kubernetes did not support Windows container. So, we wanted something which worked with a Linux container, and also has the ability or to orchestrate Windows containers. So, even though long term we want to stick to Kubernetes, but we also wanted to have a Docker swarm. When it comes to on-prem and multicloud, technically you could only support as of now, technology may change in future, but as of now, you can only support if you bring your own orchestration too. So, in our case, if we have control over orchestration control and not locked in with one cloud provider, that was the ideal situation. So, with all that, research, R&D and finding, we found Docker Enterprise. Which is securely built, share and run modern applications anywhere. So, when we come across Docker Enterprise, we were pleased to see that it meets our most of the core requirements. Whether it is coming on the developer machine, to integrating their workstation, building the application. Whether it comes to sharing those application, in a secure way and collaborating with our pipeline. And the lastly, when it comes to the running. If we run in hybrid or multicloud or edge, in Kubernetes, Docker Enterprise have the support all the way. So, three area one I just call up all the Docker Enterprise, choice, flexibility and security. I'm sure there's a lot more features in Docker Enterprise as a suite. But, when we looked at these three words very quickly, simplified hybrid orchestration. Define application centric policies and boundaries. Once you define, you're all set. Then you just maintain those policies. Manage diverse application across mixed infrastructure, with secure segmentation. Then it comes to secure software supply chain. Provenance across the entire lifecycle of apps and infrastructure through enforceable policy. Consistently manage all apps and infrastructure. And lastly, when it comes to infrastructure independence. It was easily forever lift and shift, because same time, our cloud journey was in the flight. We were moving from on-prem to the cloud. So, support for lift and shift application was one of our wishlist. And Docker Enterprise did not disappoint us. It also supported both traditional and micro services apps on any infrastructure. So, here we are, Docker Enterprise. Why Docker Enterprise? Some of the items in previous slides I mentioned. But in addition to those industry-leading platform, simplifying the IT operations, for running modern application at scale, anywhere. Docker Enterprise also has developer tools. So, the integration, as I mentioned earlier was smooth. In addition to all these tools, the main two components, the Universal Control Plane and the Docker Trusted Registry, solve lot of our problems. When it comes to the orchestration, we have our own Universal Control Plane. Which under the hood, manages Kubernetes and Docker swarm both clusters. So, guess what? We have a Windows support, through Docker swarm and we have a Linux support through Kubernetes. Now that paradigm has changed, as of today, Kubernetes support Windows container. So, guess what? We are well after the UCP, because we have our own orchestration tool, and we start managing Kubernetes cluster in Linux and introduce now, Windows as well. Then comes to the Docker Trusted Registry. Integrated Security and role based access control, made a very smooth transition from our RT storage to DTR. In addition to that, binary level scanning was another good feature from the security point of view. So that, these all options and our R&D landed the Docker Enterprise is the way to go. And if we go over the Docker Enterprise, we can spin up multiple clusters on-prem and in the cloud. And we have a one centralized location to manage those clusters. >> Khalil: So, with all that, now let's talk about how what was our pilot deployment, for proof of concept. In this diagram, you can see we, on the left side is our on-prem Data Center, on the right side is AWS, US East Coast. We picked up one region three zones. And on-prem, we picked up our Data Center, one of the Data Center in the United States of America, and we started the POC. So, our Universal Control Plane had a five nodes cluster. Docker Trusted Registry, also has a five node cluster. And the both, but in our on-prem Data Center. When it comes to the worker nodes, we have started with 18 node cluster, on the Linux side and the four node cluster on the Windows side. Because the major footprint which we have was on the Linux side, and the Windows use cases were pretty small. Also, this is just a proof of concept. And in AWS, we mimic the same web worker nodes, virtual to what we have on-prem. We have a 13 nodes cluster on Linux. And we started with four node cluster of Windows container. And having the direct connect from our Data Center to AWS, which was previously existing, so we did not have any connectivity or latency issue. Now, if you see in this diagram, you have a centralized, Universal Control Plane and your trusted registry. And we were able to spin up a cluster, on-prem as well as in the cloud. And we made this happen, end to end in record time. So later, when we deploy this in production, we also added another cloud provider. So, what you see the box on the right side, we just duplicate test that box in another cloud platform. So, now other orchestration tool, managing on-prem and multicloud clusters. Now, in your use case, you may find this little, you know, more in favor of on-prem. But that fit in our use case. Later, we did have expanded the cluster of Universal Control Plane and DTR in the cloud as well. And the clusters have gone and hundreds and thousands of worker nodes span over two cloud providers, third being discussed. And this solution has been working so far, very good. We did not see any downtime, not a single instance. And we were able to provide multicloud platform, container Platform as a Service for our S&P Global. Thank you for your time. If any questions, I have put my LinkedIn and Twitter account holder, you're welcome to ask any question

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this week's wiki bond cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we want to dig into the so called multi-cloud arena some of the questions we're getting from our community are what is a multi cloud did we really need it what problems does multi-cloud solve and importantly what problems does it create how is this thing called multi cloud likely to evolve and who are some of the key players to watch how do they stack up relative to each other you know recently I got a couple of interesting questions from a customer that says I have all this AI action going on and doing sophisticated modeling and this data lives and oh clouds all over the place how do I cross connect to the data and the workloads that are running on these clouds with the consistence this consistent experience of what our other customers doing another question came up in the community today is there a financial advantage to multi cloud or is it just about avoiding lock-in so I'm gonna take a stab at addressing these questions so first of all let's look at some of the noise that's going on in the marketplace and try to extract a little signal every vendor especially the ones who don't own a cloud are touting this thing called multi cloud and they tell us that customers want to avoid lock-in and organizations want seamless integration across clouds and they say we the vendor are uniquely qualified to deliver that capability although as you can see here in for a not everybody agrees because some feel that multi cloud is less secure more complicated in higher cost now the reality is that one two and three are true as is for a to a certain degree but generally I would say that multi cloud to date is more of a symptom of multi vendor then a clear strategy but that's beginning to change and there's a substantial opportunity out there for anyone to win so let's explore this a little bit and an exclusive sit-down with aunty Jessie prior to reinvent 2019 John Fourier got Jessie to talk about this trend here's what he said we have a large number of companies who have gone all-in on AWS and that's growing but there's gonna be other companies who decide that they're going to use multiple clouds for different reasons you wouldn't have to say that the vast majority of organizations pursuing cloud tend to pick a predominant provider that it's not a 50/50 scenario it's rather it's more like a 70/30 or 8020 or even a 90/10 faria went on to write somewhat paraphrasing I think Jesse in my view it's not hard to find the reasons for using multiple clouds right is M&A there's shadow IT there's developer preference but it's really not multi cloud by design it's just more of the same Enterprise IT mishmash that we've seen for decades so I generally have to say I agree with that but it is changing and I want to dig into that a bit so first let me recap the basic premise that we work off of first cloud is winning in the marketplace we know this building data centers is not the best use of capital unless you're a data center operator or a hyper scaler or you know maybe a SAS provider maybe so more and more work is going to continue to move to the cloud this was pretty much the first wave of cloud if you will a cloud of remote infrastructure services for very obvious workloads like web test dev analytics and certain SAS offerings the second wave of cloud which we've been talking about for 15 years was or should I say is a hybrid connecting remote cloud services to on-prem workloads and the third wave which is really hitting somewhat in parallel is this thing that we call multi cloud now it's not a perfect analogy but these multi generational waves remind us of the early days of networking now some of you may remember that years ago the industry was comprised of multiple dominant vendors that control their own proprietary network stacks for example IBM had SN a digital or deck had decnet all the many computer vendors had their own proprietary nets now in the early to mid-1980s the OSI model emerged with the objective of creating interoperability amongst all these different communication systems and the idea was we're going to standardize on protocols and the model had seven layers all the way from the physical layer through the application but really in reality was a pipe dream because we were way too complicated and and it sort of assumed that customers are gonna rip and replace their existing networks and then standardize on the OSI model now in reality that was never gonna happen however what it did is it open the door for new companies and you saw firms like Cisco and 3com emerged with tcp/ip and Ethernet becoming standardized and enabling connections between these systems and it totally changed the industry as we now know it so what does this have to do with multi-cloud well today you kind of have a similar situation with dominant public cloud leaders like AWS and azure and in this analogy they are the proprietary siloed networks of the past like IBM and digital they're more open obviously but still ultimately customers are going to put workloads on the right cloud for the right job and that includes putting work on Prem and connecting it to the public cloud with call it a substantially similar and ideally identical experience that's what we call hybrid now that's today's big wave and you're seeing it with Amazon's outposts and VMware and Amazon and Azure stack etc so while all this hybrid action is getting wired up customers are putting work into AWS and Azure and certainly Google and IBM cloud and the Oracle cloud and so forth now customers are wanting to connect across clouds with a substantially similar experience because that reduces cost and of course it speeds business outcomes that's what we call multi cloud now I'm not by any means suggesting that Amazon and Microsoft are gonna go the way of the mini computer vendors I don't believe that I think leaders today are much more savvy and tuned into how to surf the waves they're more paranoid and they're frankly just smarter than back in the 70s and 80s but it's not a rite of passage if they ignore the trends they will face challenges that could become driftwood so you're seeing the emergence of some of the moves from the vendor crowd the big whales connecting their infrastructure like AWS and VMware and Microsoft and Oracle quite interesting and IBM Red Hat with everybody cisco Dell HPE with everyone Google with anthos and a lot of other players all are trying to stake a claim in this hybrid and multi cloud world but you also have these emerging players that are innovators companies like CrowdStrike in security cumulant in the backup space and many dozens of well-funded players looking to grab a share of this multi cloud pie and it's worth pointing out that they're all kind of going gaga over kubernetes now of course this makes sense because kubernetes has emerged as a standard it's certainly very popular with developers why because it enables portability and allows them to package applications and of course all they're related to tendencies around those applications and then hand that app off for testing or deployment and it's gonna behave in the exact same way as when they ran it locally this we've seen and we know this but I want to share something I had a great conversation with Bernard golden yesterday and he made an excellent point about well you know kubernetes and containers he said this portability is a necessary but insufficient condition for multi cloud to succeed you still have to have an integrated management approach to security ID management monitoring performance reporting and end get into cross-training of people and skills etc ok I want to shift gears and as always I want to dig into these segments and bring in the et our perspective now pretty sure ETR is a lot of data on multi cloud from their ven meetings and other surveys but what I've done today is pulled some data that I'm using is indicators or proxies for multi cloud so I can't go out and buy me some multi cloud today it doesn't really exist in that form so what we have to do is highlight some of the trends in the data and draw some inferences from that so let's take a look at this chart what it shows is the relative position of a number of companies that my view are participating in the multi cloud arena the chart plots these companies showing net score or remember spending momentum on the y-axis and we've just opposed that to what's called market share on the x-axis market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set and what we've done is we've filtered on three sectors cloud container orchestration and container platforms using that as a proxy for multi cloud so these are buyers 791 of them as you can see by the end who are spenders in these three areas and we're isolating on select group of names and as a last filter we selected only companies with 50 or more results in the data set from this survey and we're using this as a multi cloud sector proxy so let me make a couple of comments here first I know kubernetes is not a company but ETR captures spending on kubernetes it's one of the hottest areas in the data set with a nearly 82% net score so we're capturing that as a reference point the next thing I want to say is you can see the big cloud players Azure and AWS and once again as in previous breaking analysis segments we see those two look they're leaders they're out the lead both companies showing very very strong momentum from a net score standpoint now AWS you might say why are you including a diversity if they don't explicitly have a multi cloud offering but in my view you cannot talk about multi cloud without including the leading cloud supplier you also see Google not so much in the market share of the big two but Google's showing strong net score we've talked about that before and they're very well positioned in multi cloud with anthos there behind their playing cloud agnostic to try to catch up again remember this is a proxy that we are running it's not necessarily a reflection of firms specific multi cloud offerings it's an indicator based on the filters that we've run now let's take a look at some of the others rubric the data protection specialists and CrowdStrike was a security darling they show some real strengths both have multi cloud offerings and they have strategies around their look at how she Corp they stand out as an important player in our view as they provide developer tooling to run secure and and deploy applications across clouds VMware cloud is I believe it's a vfc VMware cloud foundation and it's right there in the mix and you can also see fortunate in there as well executing from a security position I talked about them last week in my braking analysis they have a nice cloud portfolio and they're benefiting from execution strong execution let me call your attention to IBM in Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift look at their respective positions on this chart IBM spending velocity or net score is low but Red Hat has quite strong spending velocity and this is CEO Arvind Krishna's opportunity leverage IBM's large install based presence shown here as market share or pervasiveness and bring red hat to the right and leverage open shifts coolness to increase IBM's relevance and elevate it elevated spending velocity if arvind can make the kind of progress that i'm showing here in this picture he'll end up being CEO of the decade but that really is IBM's opportunity you can also see I put Oracle in the chart as well because of their multi cloud relationship with Microsoft which which I actually think has great potential for running mission-critical Oracle databases as I've noted many times I've you know IBM and Oracle both have clouds they're in the cloud game there are hyper scalar clouds but they have very large installed software franchises why is that important because it insulates them from the I ass ix knife fight and the pricing pressures that are putting forth by the hyper scalars the finally I have to mention Cisco I've said many times comes at multi cloud from a position of strength and networking and of course security they've got a huge market presence and not without challenges but they clearly are a player here ok now let's go on and look at some similar proxy data basically the same cut isolated on a few big players participating in multi cloud so again same cut as before but this is this shows a time series isolating on some of those Biggie's showing their net score or spending momentum in cloud and container related sectors that I talked about you got Azure leading GCP showing momentum IBM Red Hat with open shift and VMware all with solid net scores that are in the green cisco not as strong from a net score or spending velocity standpoint but it's shared in or presence in the data set is significant in this cut so two takeaways here really are one this is a wide-open race it's jump ball you really can't pick a winner yet and to each is gonna come at this from their own unique position of strength which brings me to how we see this space evolving this simple chart here really shows how we see the multi cloud infrastructure stack emerging starting at the bottom we show in the stack networking you gotta have networking to cross connect clouds and this is where cisco you has to win the day not optional for them some big players are going after the control plane including Microsoft arc Google with anthos VMware with tans ooh IBM Red Hat and we think eventually AWS is a possibility to enter that game on the data plane you got some big whales like Dell EMC you got NetApp you've got HPE at IBM the big storage players as well you have specialists like pure who's doing some interesting things in block in the cloud and cumulonimbus mention you have a bunch of companies like Veritas cohesive the rubric vMac TIFIA is gonna be in there CommVault I mentioned Klum EO before IBM is another one you got a whole bunch of folks in networking big portfolio plays from the likes of Cisco I said to network I met security from Cisco Palo Alto fortunate along with many of the security specialists we've highlighted in the past like CrowdStrike and there are many many others now on the leftmost side of this chart is really interesting we showed the full stack interconnects here we're referring to the direct cloud to cloud connections in functions up and down the entire stack examples here are AWS VMware yes that hybrid but also emerging at the edge and Microsoft and Oracle so the bottom line is we're seeing a battle brewing between the big companies with larger appetites gobbling up major portions of the market with integrated suites that are playing out within each layer of the stack competing with smaller and nimble players that are delivering best to breed function along those stack layers all right let me summarize so here are the questions that I said I would answer let's see how I did what the heck is multi cloud well let me first say it feels like everything in IT is additive what do I mean by that well we never get rid of stuff you keep things forever think about it the typical enterprise has multiple data centers they get many SAS providers more likely they have you know more than one Iast provider and they're starting to think about what should I do with the edge there is no standard for hybrid or multi cloud deployments you talk to 100 customers and you're gonna hear 120 or 150 or 300 different environments and several orders of magnitude of challenges that they face do we really need multi-cloud not an ideal world no we wouldn't need multi cloud but we talked about how we got here earlier how real is it how real is multi cloud now look companies use multiple clouds it's is it easy to do things across scope these clouds no so it's one of these problems that the industry is created that it can now make money fixing it's a vicious cycle I know but so goes the enterprise IT business what problems does it does multi-cloud solve and create look the goal of multi cloud should be that it creates more value than just the sum of the individual parts and that is clearly not happening yet in my opinion moving data around is a problem so ultimately the value comes from being able to bring cloud services to data that resides all over the place and as Bernard golden implied even with kubernetes the experience is far from seamless so we understand that technology created this problem and IT people processes and technology will be asked to clean up the crime scene as I often say it's a common story in enterprise tech we talked about how multi-cloud will evolve along a stack that it comprises specialists and big companies with very big appetites my opinion is that multi-cloud will evolve as a mishmash and vendor relationships the right tools for the right job the edge IT and OT tensions mergers and acquisitions these are gonna create even a bigger mess down the road we have well-funded companies that are exceedingly capable in this business and the leaders are gonna get their fair share cloud is a trillion-dollar market opportunity and there will not be in my opinion a winner-take-all and multi cloud so who wins like I've tried to lay out some of the leaders within different parts of the stack but there's way more to this story I do believe that the cloud players are well positioned why cuz they're they invented cloud EWS and others who followed right now Microsoft and Google are playing actively in that market but I definitely think AWS will I that space but I think VMware Red Hat IBM Cisco etc some of this from the respective positions of strength and I've sort of they have the added benefit of being cloud semi agnostic because generally they're not wed to a hyper scale cloud you know IBM as a cloud oracle as a cloud but it's on a hyper scale cloud and as always there's specialists that are gonna solve problems that are too small initially for the big whales to see so they get a leader lead bleed to market advantage but those opportunities can grow over time and allow these guys to reach escape velocity now so I'll say multi-cloud in and of itself is I believe an opportunity one that will be attacked from a position of strength within the stack and there are opportunities to be specialists up and down that stack the Akashi Corp alright this is Dave Volante for wiki bonds cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching this breaking analysis and remember these episodes are available as podcasts you can check it out as you're driving your car wherever you listen to two podcasts you can connect with me at David Villante at Silicon angle calm or at D Volante on Twitter or please comment on my LinkedIn posts thanks for watching everyone we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Announcer: From the Silicon ANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube conversation, eliminating barriers to enterprise multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is all the rage, all the buzz, it appears to be here and now David Chang is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Products and Co-Founder of Actifio and AppIQ, welcome back to The Cube, good to see you again. >> It's a pleasure to be here, thank you very much. >> You are very welcome, so eight years ago, you guys started this journey, the cloud was kind of new a little experimental, maybe put some stuff in the cloud and see what happens and then boom, all of a sudden it is become mainstream, your thoughts. >> Yeah it's been quite of a journey, I think when we initially started, we were focused around, all about making enterprise as efficient as possible, right. In the old traditional enterprise IT model, that resulted in net savings in terms of reduction to hardware, software, and so on and so forth. But in the cloud, now you're in a completely brand new category in terms of you're being charged on a per use basis. So all the technology we build out over the years just has a direct correlation to this new model of consumption that the cloud is enabling everybody to do. >> So if you think about when you started, platforms were really all mostly on prim, the definition of those platforms has really changed, it's sort of shifted from whether it's a server manufacturer or a storage type or maybe a networking type to the big cloud players, Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, Oracle's got a cloud, IBM's got a cloud, you see the China clouds emerge. How were you able, well first of all is that sort of an accurate view? That you guys had this sort of platform agnostic approach to your business and that platform has shifted. >> No that's absolutely true, I think we kind of walked into this by accident, because of some of the architectural advantages we kind of built into our infrastructure from the beginning. But, over the last eight years or so, our customer initially asked us how could we, Actifio, help them to enable them to go from a traditional IT to a private cloud type implementation. So we had a lot of traction in terms of the MSP's and private cloud implementations and that's where I would say four, five years ago, even now I would say we had a lot of traction and a lot of customers that came to Actifio for us to help them in that endeavor. But within the last four or five years we definitely see an acceleration of extending that infrastructure as a service platform from on-premise traditional IT to private cloud infrastructure now into the public cloud. So all the capability we kind of built, really applied very nicely to this new platform agnostic model regardless of where you want to go. >> Can we dig into that capability a little bit? What is it about your architecture, kind of your secret sauce, that makes you multi-lingual and maybe in this case, allows you to go from a world that is largely on prim, or managed hosted services, to one that's massive public cloud scale? >> If you think about it, the only thing that's constant as you move your application from IT, to private cloud, to public cloud, is the application, right. So from the beginning we had this very tight application focus, everything we do is from an application perspective. That really enabled us to play nicely, in terms of these platform shifts, from these one location to another, and fundamentally decouple the application and its data from the infrastructure. So now this normalization of this infrastructure really enabled our customer to make that switch very easily. >> So talk more about that, how do you do that, is it software code, is it architecture, give us some understanding. >> I think it's the approach that we take in terms of supporting of a lot of these data management and copy data functions. And it's really looking at the application data set as the entity that we want to focus on. And focusing on enabling the application as the entity that we add value. So what I mean by that is, if you look at a traditional Oracle database, say if you want to move that from a traditional, let's say an AIX type of environment into a Linux environment for your private infrastructure, so we really fundamentally decouple that application and enable you to very quickly migrate that information from that AIX infrastructure into a Linux environment. Then once that's done, our capability in terms, it's all software if you really, really enable us to kind of have a very efficient incremental tap to that database, and then move that information incrementally into the cloud. And once you're into the cloud, you can now make multiple virtual copies if you will, all consuming sort of the same amount of resources. So you have a drastic reduction in the capacity needed to do that. >> So it's your ability to essentially jailbreak the data from the siloed infrastructure, is that right? >> That's right, and I think four, five years ago we realized that cloud, the public cloud would be an infrastructure that we need to support in depth. So the engineering group has been looking at, for an application consumed cloud natively you have to understand a lot of new technology and new terminologies and new capability. Things like object storage, for example, is not something that a traditional application can consume readily, if you will, without going back and rewriting a lot of those applications. With Actifio, we enable our customers to not having to go back and retro-fit and rewrite these applications but be able to consume these new cloud technologies natively, so they can reap the value immediately versus having to go back and retro-fit their applications. >> One of the practitioners that we had on, of course very recently, Jake Burns was saying that even in AWS, the block storage really isn't kind of enterprise ready, friendly. I want to ask you a question about, if you think about the on-prim, you know block storage players that you guys eight years ago understood that you had to be compatible with, I'll use that term. Whether it was EMC, or Netapp, or IBM, or HP or whatever it was, were those block storage sort of interfaces, the entries and the exits all very similar and is it harder in the cloud or is it actually easier in the cloud, 'cause it's all sort of the API driven economy? I wonder if you could give us some insight there? >> I would say the foundation layer is much easier on the cloud. So as Jake was mentioning before, you don't have to order the hardware, hardware gets here, so the agility of this picture improves drastically when you move to the cloud. However, some of the cons of that, is a lot of the advanced features that you used to get on premise with these enterprise infrastructures, are no longer available on the public infrastructure. So in many ways, many of our customers, as they move into the cloud, a lot of the IT operational staff have to deal with a reduction in terms of capabilities or availability or time it takes to make that data, in terms of cloning and so on and so forth. So that's sort of, I think the challenges many of our customer are facing and that's where Actifio can help you with. >> Can we talk about this notion of rewriting apps, because in IT, if you have to rewrite the app, you got to freeze the code, if you freeze the code then you're enduring all this risk, you know if you have to freeze the code for N number of months, that's N number of months you can't keep up with your competition. So am I correct that your customers are not having to rewrite their apps, because of your ability to isolate sort of the data model? >> That's right >> And maybe you could talk about that a little bit and what impact it's had on your customer base. >> Yeah as you know, in the cloud, the economic is per use, and in the cloud the type of capacity you have to deal with tend to be in multiple categories, you have the EBS of the world which is relatively expensive compared with the object storage. So if you take just lift and ship, you enterprise the application model into the cloud where a lot, I would say most of your application data, is stored EBS, then you're not really fully utilizing the economics of the cloud. So how do you make effective use, in terms of minimizing the elastic block service on Amazon, versus the object storage capability that you have available. That is I think a difficult topic for a lot of the traditional enterprise applications doing the lift and ship, where you have to essentially go back and rewrite those applications to take advantage of the cloud native capability for you to really drive that availability and cost to the new level that you were expecting. >> So I've been in this storage business a long time, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to ask this question, but I have an architect here, a technologist, I'll ask you. When you think about block storage in the cloud, an EBS in particular, that was not Amazon's first announcement, did they announce that because they realized that they need to accommodate, you know block storage, to get more people from the enterprise or is there something specific about block storage that is here to stay forever? Another way of asking that is, can we run these applications on object storage? Is that the direction, thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a hybrid model, right. So what Actifio really enables our customer to do, is not really running your production on object storage, but a lot of the secondary sort of data cloning, data analytics, and DR type of use case, you can shift, I would say, reduce your usage of EBS block storage to object storage. So we think that's the low hanging fruit that enable our customer to move to the cloud faster, cheaper, and with better capabilities. I think longer term as our customers start to develop applications that's native to the cloud, it's probably more efficient for you to consume some of these cloud native capability directly, but we're talking about a lot of time and resources that not all organizations will be able to afford to a high percentage of their applications moving to-- >> So new applications might be rewritten to take advantage of object storage and what about things like performance or latency and recovery et cetera, do you see the block storage world being able to get there? To actually compete effectively with, or the object to compete effectively with block or is that? >> We believe so, because if you look at object storage it's now proven over the last, I would say six, seven years, it's the most scalable storage that's available to the industry period, right. That scalability also enable you to reduce any hot spots that you may have from a performance perspective. So what Actifio's engineering group has done, is really leverage that capability, the ability for you to fully utilize the full bandwidth of that entire object storage, and having multi-parallel streams of access into that. So the way we look at object storage, it's just another access protocol, if you think about it, you have block storage, you have iSCSI, Fibre Channel, you have NFS access protocols. Object is simply another protocol that enables you to have persistent storage. And what Actifio has done is really leverage the performance and scalability characteristic of this object storage to have our customers, in terms of realizing value from day one. >> Is it true to your DNA, you don't really care whatever the customer chooses you're going to support it? If the whole world goes object, great no problem. If the world stays mixed. >> I think for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a mix environment, but as Jake was mentioning before, it's all about optimization in terms of capability and cost. And object storage is a key piece of that equation we can really enable you to kind of tweak that knob to exactly what you're looking for. >> When customers make a move to the cloud, it's a migration, any migration is risky, how does Actifio generally, and your product specifically, reduce that risk? >> I think it's all about keeping it simple, right, so the ability for you to kind of lift and ship your applications without having to go back to rewrite, that's a huge value proposition, or a huge reduction in terms of risk that you can achieve in your environment. The ability for us, for Actifio to tap your into your enterprise IT existing production environment without a lot of sort of dangerous or latency effect, is a huge value we can bring to the table as well. Because Actifio from day one, is designed to be very efficient in terms of tapping your applications data while it's running, while it's in production, right. So the ability for us to incrementally do that and move that information into the cloud effectively for you to do that migration process, can drastically reduce your risk if you will. >> Let's talk about cost a little bit. We heard a lot from Jake about cost, in theory anyway, you guys can help optimize, not in theory, in actuality, you can help me get rid of stuff I always say. Talk about the optimization angle, how have your customers taken advantage of that, we heard from Jake, you have some other favorite examples you can maybe share with us David? >> Yeah so I think one of the key things, instead of doing, for example, if on a traditional IT perspective you want to keep data for a long time, you typically employ deduplication technology, right. Dedup technology typically works really well if you own the entire asset and you have sort of big servers, big number of cores, big memories, and so on and so forth. When you actually do a lift and ship of that technology, into the cloud environment, all of a sudden your price tag, in terms of what you charge on a monthly basis goes through the roof, because now every CPU cycle and every IO you generate to do that deduplication, now becomes very expensive, you're essentially charged on a per use basis into the cloud. So what Actifio has done, is really enable our customers to eliminate a lot of the cost in terms in doing that, in doing a lift and ship into the cloud, by enabling you to use leverage object storage directly without having to employ these expensive deduplication technology there as well, so that's one example. >> I want to talk about digital transformation a little bit, it's the buzzword, we go to a lot of conferences and every time you hear, oh digital transformation, Uber, Airbnb, you know blah, blah, blah. We tend to have these detailed storage discussions and product discussions, and it seems like it's really far away, but I want to run something by you and see if you can respond. Digital means data, right, if it's not data it's not digital, you guys are in the data business, we'd observe that the big digital players, the big internet players, their data driven, your conference upcoming, we're going to talk about that, it's called data driven, what does that mean? It means that data is at the heart of your enterprise and humans, human expertise is sort of surrounds that, but it's foundational is the data, most companies in the enterprise, human expertise is at the center and data's in silos and bolted on all over the place. You guys in a big way are a silo buster, you allow me to have sort of a comprehensive view of my virtual data store. Are you seeing that in your customer base, can you help enterprises who are scared to death that they're going to get disrupted, cross that digital divide and close the gap with the disrupters? >> Absolutely, so Actifio does not do AI for example, but what we really do is unlock the data you already have in your environment so it's absolutely free to be, so you can run analytics, you can run analytics on demand whether it's on your primary IT infrastructure, in a private data center, or in a public cloud. So by, if you think about it some of the biggest challenge our customer have in terms of going digital, is how do I fundamentally uncouple or decouple my data from the infrastructure that I'm running, right. Once I have that detachment of that data from my underlying infrastructure, now I'm free to move that information to anywhere I want, in terms of make use of that information, or to run analytics, to actually run a lot of the advanced algorithms that you could monetize that information for your business. So that acceleration or the agility we provide and the reduction of the number of copies for all these use cases, is at the center of what we can do for you for that use case. >> Or even move code, bring code to that data wherever it lives, because I may not want to move petabyte of data around, is that right? >> That's right. >> Okay, so data driven, so you can't be data driven unless you put data at the core of your enterprise, that's part of what you guys do. The conference is June 5th and 6th, it's called Data Driven, it's at the Fontainebleau in Miami. We did a Cube gig there a couple years ago, it was fantastic. Tell us about the event and what people can expect. >> We're very excited about the event, it's a really an industry wide event, we have many customers or many partners within the community coming in and sharing with the entire sort of industry around some of the best practices in terms of monetization of the data you already have, some of the best practices in terms of making the data self-service, some of the best practice in terms of leveraging sort of the best economics in terms of the private or public cloud to make effective use of that information. So we're very excited and like to see everyone there in June. >> Great David thanks so much for coming back in The Cube, really a pleasure, congratulations on all the success and good luck in June. >> Thank you very much, pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante, from our East Coast studios, we'll see you next time.