(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Raj Gossain, who's the Chief Product Officer at Alation. We have some news. Hello, Raj. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, it's great to be with you on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, good to see you. So, okay, we're going to talk about Alation Connected Sheets. You know, what is that? Talk to us about what it is, what it does, what it brings to customers. >> So we recognize, spreadsheets are really the dark matter of the data universe. And they're used by, over 78 million people use spreadsheets on a regular basis to drive critical business analysis. But there's a lot of challenges with spreadsheet usage. It brings risk to the organization. There's no visibility into where data comes from. And so we wanted to bring the power of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to business users where they spend most of their time. And that's in a tool that they love, and that's spreadsheets. And so we're launching a brand new product next week called Alation Connected Sheets. >> So talk more about that. So yes, I get the lineage issue, like where did-- who did this, where's this data come from? I got different data. But talk more about the problems that Alation Connected Sheets solves, specifically for customers. >> Yeah, so the big challenges that we see when we talk to data organizations is how do they understand where the data came from? Is it trusted? Is it reusable? Should it be used in this format? And if you look at where most users that use spreadsheets get the data to power their spreadsheets, maybe it's a CSV download from a database, and then you have no idea where the data came from and where it's going. Or even worse, it's copying and pasting data from other spreadsheets. And so if you take those problems, how can we bring trusted data from governed sources like Snowflake and Redshift and put it in the hands of spreadsheet users, and give them the power and flexibility of Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, but use trusted, reliable, well-governed data so that the data office feels great about them using spreadsheets and the end users, the business users, can take advantage of the tool that they know and love and do the work that they need to do quickly. >> So, okay. So I'm inferring from your comments there that you've got the ability to take data from you mentioned a couple, Snowflake and Redshift, other popular data warehouses. >> Yep. >> So talk about the key capabilities that you have, any specific features that we should know about. >> Sure. So, we built the leading data intelligence platform and the leading data catalog. And one of the benefits of that catalog is where you have visibility into all of the trusted, governed data sources that a data organization cares about, whether it's enterprise warehouses like Snowflake or Redshift, databases like SQL Server, Google BigQuery, what have you. So what we've done is we've brought the power of that data catalog directly into both Google Sheets as well as Excel. And the idea there is a user can log into their application, authenticate to Alation using the Alation Connected Sheets plugin into their spreadsheet tool, and browse those trusted data sets that are surfaced in the Alation catalog. They get trust signals, they get visibility into where this data came from. So lineage, insights, descriptive information. And then with one or two clicks, they can choose a data set from their warehouse, basically apply filtering conditions. So let's say I'm looking for customer data in Snowflake. I can find the right customer table. If I only want it for say, 2022, I can apply some filter conditions, I can reorder columns, push one button, authenticate to that data source. We want to maintain and ensure security is being applied, so only those users that have access to the warehouse can actually download that data set. But once they've authenticated, that data gets downloaded into their spreadsheet and there's a live connection that's maintained to that spreadsheet. So anytime you need to refresh the data, one push of a button and that data set gets updated. I can schedule the updates. So, you know, if I have to produce a report every Monday morning, I could have that data set refreshed at 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, or whatever schedule the user wants. And so it gives the user the data set they need, but the data organization, they can see where that data came from and they understand the lineage of the data as it is used in analysis in those spreadsheets themselves. >> So Raj, I know you're at the Super Bowl this week, a.k.a. re:Invent. >> Yes. >> And I know you got very close relationships with Snowflake, you've mentioned them a couple times with the data summit last spring. And I know you've done some integration work with those platforms and I'm sure others. So should we think of this as you're extending that sort of trust and governance out to spreadsheets, is that right? And stretching that out? >> That's exactly right. The way we talk about it is how do we bring data intelligence to business users in the tool that they know and love, which is the spreadsheet. And so, the data catalog and data intelligence platforms in general have really primarily been focused on servicing the needs of data users: data analysts, data scientists, data engineers. But you know, our vision, our aspiration at Alation is to really bring data intelligence to any business user. And so it's a big part of our strategy to make sure that the insights from the Alation catalog and platform can find their way into tools like Excel and Google Sheets. And so that's, what you highlighted, Dave, is exactly correct. We want to maximize the likelihood that a business user can have self-service access to trusted, governed data, do the work that they need to do, and ensure that the organization has a set of data assets in spreadsheets, frankly as opposed to liabilities, which is the way most data organizations look at spreadsheets is it's almost like a risk factor. We want to convert that risk, that liability, into an asset so that people can reuse data sets and they understand where this analysis is actually coming from. >> It's something that we've talked about for well over a decade on theCUBE. Is data an asset or is it a liability? >> Yeah, yeah. >> You obviously want to get value out of it, but if you can't share it, it's not trusted. So what people do is they lock it down and then that constricts value creation. >> Exactly. >> My understanding is this tech came out of an acquisition from a company, Kloudio. >> That's correct. >> Tell us about Kloudio. Why Kloudio? What's the fit there? >> Yeah, so Kloudio is a company, it's about five years old. We closed the acquisition of the company in March of this past year. And they had about 20 customers, 10 engineers. And we saw an opportunity with the spreadsheet tool that they'd created to really compliment our data intelligence strategy. And as you said, Dave, extend the value of data intelligence to business users. And so, we brought the Kloudio team into the fold. The thing I'm most excited about as a product guy, is within seven months of them joining Alation, we're actually shipping a brand new product that's going to drive revenue and meet the needs of tens of millions of users, ultimately. Like that's really our aspiration. And so, the tech they had was extremely modern. It reinforces the platform position that we have. You know, this microservices architecture that we've built Alation around, made it easy for that new team to come in and leverage existing APIs and capabilities from our platform and the tech that they brought into Alation to essentially connect the dots and deliver a brand new set of capabilities to an entirely new audience, to help our customers achieve their business objectives, which is really creating a data culture across their entire organization, inclusive of business users, not just, like I said, the data X users that are already taking advantage of solutions like Alation and cloud warehouses, et cetera. >> So I have two questions, follow up questions by me, and I think you might have answered the second one. The first one is what's the secret sauce behind Kloudio? How does the tech work? The second question is how does it fit into the Alation portfolio? How were you able to integrate it so quickly? Maybe that's the microservices architecture. But start with the secret sauce. What is it, what can you share with me? >> I think the thing that we saw with Kloudio that got us excited, and the fact that they, even though it was a small company, they had 20 customers, they were generating revenue, and they were delivering real value to business users, by really enabling business users to tap into the value of trusted, governed data, and frankly, get IT out of the way. You know, we almost refer to it as like smart self-service, which is, they could find a data asset and connect to that source, and just with a couple quick clicks, almost a low-code, no-code type of an experience, bring that sort of data into their spreadsheet so they could do the work that they needed to do. That opportunity, that tech that the Kloudio team had built out, the big gap that they had is, my goodness, what does it take to actually be aware of all the data sources that exist across an organization and connect to them? And that's what Alation does, right? That's why we built the platform that we built, so that we can basically understand all of a customer's data assets, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. And so it was a little bit of, you know, that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup analogy. The chocolate and the peanut butter coming together. The Alation platform, the Alation catalog, coupled with the technology that Kloudio brought to us really was sort of a match made in heaven. And it's allowed us to bring this new capability to market that really is value-add on top of the platform and catalog investments that our customers have already made. >> Yeah, so they had this magic pixie dust, but it was sort of isolated, and then you've integrated it into your catalog. And that's the second part of my question. How were you able to do that so quickly? >> So, we've been on this evolution, enhancing the the Alation data intelligence platform. We've moved to a microservices architecture, we're fully multi-tenant in the cloud. And the fact that we'd made those investments over the past few years gave us the opportunity to make it easy for an acquired business like Kloudio, or you know, perhaps a future acquisition, or third party developers leveraging APIs that we expose to make it easy for them to integrate into the Alation platform. And so, I think it's a bit of foresight. We recognize that in starting with the catalog, the opportunity was much bigger than just providing a data catalog. We've added data governance, we've built out this platform and we recognize that more and more users can and should be benefiting from data intelligence. And so I think those platform investments have paid significant dividends and accelerated our ability to deliver Alation Connected Sheets as quickly as we have. >> Sounds like a great acquisition, like a diamond in the rough. I mean, I love big these big mega acquisitions 'cause the media company can write about 'em, but I really love the high, high return. You know, low denominator, high value. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Where can people learn more about this? Maybe play around a little bit with it? >> Yeah, so we're going to be demoing Alation Connected Sheets at AWS re:Invent next week. And it's going to be available starting next week, so the 28th of November. And obviously you'll see it online, on social media, on our website as well. But folks that are going to be in Las Vegas next week, come to the Alation booth and you'll get a chance to see it directly. >> Awesome. Okay, Raj. Hey, thanks for spending some time with us today. Really appreciate it. >> Great, thanks so much, Dave. Great to see you. >> Hey, you're very welcome. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. And this episode two of season two is called "Data as Code," the ongoing series covering exciting new startups in the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Today, we're excited to be joined by Jon Dahl, who is the co-founder and CEO of MUX, a hot new startup building cloud video for developers, video with data. John, great to see you. We did an interview on theCube Conversation. Went into big detail of the awesomeness of your company and the trend that you're on. Welcome back. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So, video is everywhere, and video for pivot to video, you hear all these kind of terms in the industry, but now more than ever, video is everywhere and people are building with it, and it's becoming part of the developer experience in applications. So people have to stand up video into their code fast, and data is code, video is data. So you guys are specializing this. Take us through that dynamic. >> Yeah, so video clearly is a growing part of how people are building applications. We see a lot of trends of categories that did not involve video in the past making a major move towards video. I think what Peloton did five years ago to the world of fitness, that was not really a big category. Now video fitness is a huge thing. Video in education, video in business settings, video in a lot of places. I think Marc Andreessen famously said, "Software is eating the world" as a pretty, pretty good indicator of what the internet is actually doing to the economy. I think there's a lot of ways in which video right now is eating software. So categories that we're not video first are becoming video first. And that's what we help with. >> It's not obvious to like most software developers when they think about video, video industries, it's industry shows around video, NAB, others. People know, the video folks know what's going on in video, but when you start to bring it mainstream, it becomes an expectation in the apps. And it's not that easy, it's almost a provision video is hard for a developer 'cause you got to know the full, I guess, stack of video. That's like low level and then kind of just basic high level, just play something. So, in between, this is a media stack kind of dynamic. Can you talk about how hard it is to build video for developers? How is it going to become easier? >> Yeah, I mean, I've lived this story for too long, maybe 13 years now, when I first build my first video stack. And, you know, I'll sometimes say, I think it's kind of a miracle every time a video plays on the internet because the internet is not a medium designed for video. It's been hijacked by video, video is 70% of internet traffic today in an unreliable, sort of untrusted network space, which is totally different than how television used to work or cable or things like that. So yeah, so video is hard because there's so many problems from top to bottom that need to be solved to make video work. So you have to worry about video compression encoding, which is a complicated topic in itself. You have to worry about delivering video around the world at scale, delivering it at low cost, at low latency, with good performance, you have to worry about devices and how every device, Android, iOS, web, TVs, every device handles video differently and so there's a lot of work there. And at the end of the day, these are kind of unofficial standards that everyone's using. So one of the miracles is like, if you want to watch a video, somehow you have to get like Apple and Google to agree on things, which is not always easy. And so there's just so many layers of complexity that are behind it. I think one way to think about it is, if you want to put an image online, you just put an image online. And if you want to put video online, you build complex software, and that's the exact problem that MUX was started to help solve. >> It's interesting you guys have almost creating a whole new category around video infrastructure. And as you look at, you mentioned stack, video stack. I'm looking at a market where the notion of a media stack is developing, and you're seeing these verticals having similar dynamics with cloud. And if you go back to the early days of cloud computing, what was the developer experience or entrepreneurial experience, you had to actually do a lot of stuff before you even do anything, provision a server. And this has all kind of been covered in great detail in the glory of Agile and whatnot. It was expensive, and you had that actually engineer before you could even stand up any code. Now you got video that same thing's happening. So the developers have two choices, go do a bunch of stuff complex, building their own infrastructure, which is like building a data center, or lean in on MUX and say, "Hey, thank you for doing all that years of experience building out the stacks to take that hard part away," but using APIs that they have. This is a developer focused problem that you guys are solving. >> Yeah, that's right. my last company was a company called Zencoder, that was an API to video encoding. So it was kind of an API to a small part of what MUX does today, just one of those problems. And I think the thing that we got right at Zencoder, that we're doing again here at MUX, was building four developers first. So our number one persona is a software developer. Not necessarily a video expert, just we think any developer should be able to build with video. It shouldn't be like, yeah, got to go be a specialist to use this technology, because it should become just of the internet. Video should just be something that any developer can work with. So yeah, so we build for developers first, which means we spend a lot of time thinking about API design, we spend a lot of time thinking about documentation, transparent pricing, the right features, great support and all those kind of things that tend to be characteristics of good developer companies. >> Tell me about the pipe lining of the products. I'm a developer, I work for a company, my boss is putting pressure on me. We need video, we have all this library, it's all stacking up. We hired some people, they left. Where's the video, we've stored it somewhere. I mean, it's a nightmare, right? So I'm like, okay, I'm cloud native, I got an API. I need to get my product to market fast, 'cause that is what Agile developers want. So how do you describe that acceleration for time to market? You mentioned you guys are API first, video first. How do these customers get their product into the market as fast as possible? >> Yeah, well, I mean the first thing we do is we put what we think is probably on average, three to four months of hard engineering work behind a single API call. So if you want to build a video platform, we tell our customers like, "Hey, you can do that." You probably need a team, you probably need video experts on your team so hire them or train them. And then it takes several months just to kind of to get video flowing. One API call at MUX gives you on-demand video or live video that works at scale, works around the world with good performance, good reliability, a rich feature set. So maybe just a couple specific examples, we worked with Robin Hood a few years ago to bring video into their newsfeed, which was hugely successful for them. And they went from talking to us for the first time to a big launch in, I think it was three months, but the actual code time there was like really short. I want to say they had like a proof of concept up and running in a couple days, and then the full launch in three months. Another customer of ours, Bandcamp, I think switched from a legacy provider to MUX in two weeks in band. So one of the big advantages of going a little bit higher in the abstraction layer than just building it yourself is that time to market. >> Talk about this notion of video pipeline 'cause I know I've heard people I talk about, "Hey, I just want to get my product out there. I don't want to get stuck in the weeds on video pipeline." What does that mean for folks that aren't understanding the nuances of video? >> Yeah, I mean, it's all the steps that it takes to publish video. So from ingesting the video, if it's live video from making sure that you have secure, reliable ingest of that live feed potentially around the world to the transcoding, which is we talked a little bit about, but it is a, you know, on its own is a massively complicated problem. And doing that, well, doing that well is hard. Part of the reason it's hard is you really have to know where you're publishing too. And you might want to transcode video differently for different devices, for different types of content. You know, the pipeline typically would also include all of the workflow items you want to do with the video. You want to thumbnail a video, you want clip, create clips of the video, maybe you want to restream the video to Facebook or Twitter or a social platform. You want to archive the video, you want it to be available for downloads after an event. If it's just a, if it's a VOD upload, if it's not live in the first place. You have all those things and you might want to do simulated live with the video. You might want to actually record something and then play it back as a live stream. So, the pipeline Ty typically refers to everything from the ingest of the video to the time that the bits are delivered to a device. >> You know, I hear a lot of people talking about video these days, whether it's events, training, just want peer to peer experience, video is powerful, but customers want to own their own platform, right? They want to have the infrastructure as a service. They kind of want platform as a service, this is cloud talk now, but they want to have their own capability to build it out. This allows them to get what they want. And so you see this, like, is it SaaS? Is it platform? People want customization? So kind of the general purpose video solution does it really exist or doesn't? I mean, 'cause this is the question. Can I just buy software and work or is it going to be customized always? How do you see that? Because this becomes a huge discussion point. Is it a SaaS product or someone's going to make a SaaS product? >> Yeah, so I think one of the most important elements of designing any software, but especially when you get into infrastructure is choosing an abstraction level. So if you think of computing, you can go all the way down to building a data center, you can go all the way down to getting a colo and racking a server like maybe some of us used to do, who are older than others. And that's one way to run a server. On the other extreme, you have just think of the early days of cloud competing, you had app engine, which was a really fantastic, really incredible product. It was one push deploy of, I think Python code, if I remember correctly, and everything just worked. But right in the middle of those, you had EC2, which was, EC2 is basically an API to a server. And it turns out that that abstraction level, not Colo, not the full app engine kind of platform, but the API to virtual server was the right abstraction level for maybe the last 15 years. Maybe now some of the higher level application platforms are doing really well, maybe the needs will shift. But I think that's a little bit of how we think about video. What developers want is an API to video. They don't want an API to the building blocks of video, an API to transcoding, to video storage, to edge caching. They want an API to video. On the other extreme, they don't want a big application that's a drop in white label video in a box like a Shopify kind of thing. Shopify is great, but developers don't want to build on top of Shopify. In the payments world developers want Stripe. And that abstraction level of the API to the actual thing you're getting tends to be the abstraction level that developers want to build on. And the reason for that is, it's the most productive layer to build on. You get maximum flexibility and also maximum velocity when you have that API directly to a function like video. So, we like to tell our customers like you, you own your video when you build on top of MUX, you have full control over everything, how it's stored, when it's stored, where it goes, how it's published, we handle all of the hard technology and we give our customers all of the flexibility in terms of designing their products. >> I want to get back some use case, but you brought that up I might as well just jump to my next point. I'd like you to come back and circle back on some references 'cause I know you have some. You said building on infrastructure that you own, this is a fundamental cloud concept. You mentioned API to a server for the nerds out there that know that that's cool, but the people who aren't super nerdy, that means you're basically got an interface into a server behind the scenes. You're doing the same for video. So, that is a big thing around building services. So what wide range of services can we expect beyond MUX? If I'm going to have an API to video, what could I do possibly? >> What sort of experience could you build? >> Yes, I got a team of developers saying I'm all in API to video, I don't want to do all that transit got straight there, I want to build experiences, video experiences on my app. >> Yeah, I mean, I think, one way to think about it is that, what's the range of key use cases that people do with video? We tend to think about six at MUX, one is kind of the places where the content is, the prop. So one of the things that use video is you can create great video. Think of online courses or fitness or entertainment or news or things like that. That's kind of the first thing everyone thinks of, when you think video, you think Netflix, and that's great. But we see a lot of really interesting uses of video in the world of social media. So customers of ours like Visco, which is an incredible photo sharing application, really for photographers who really care about the craft. And they were able to bring video in and bring that same kind of Visco experience to video using MUX. We think about B2B tools, videos. When you think about it, all video is, is a high bandwidth way of communicating. And so customers are as like HubSpot use video for the marketing platform, for business collaboration, you'll see a lot of growth of video in terms of helping businesses engage their customers or engage with their employees. We see live events obviously have been a massive category over the last few years. You know, we were all forced into a world where we had to do live events two years ago, but I think now we're reemerging into a world where the online part of a conference will be just as important as the in-person component of a conference. So that's another big use case we see. >> Well, full disclosure, if you're watching this live right now, it's being powered by MUX. So shout out, we use MUX on theCUBE platform that you're experiencing in this. Actually in real time, 'cause this is one application, there's many more. So video as code, is data as code is the theme, that's going to bring up the data ops. Video also is code because (laughs) it's just like you said, it's just communicating, but it gets converted to data. So data ops, video ops could be its own new category. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I have a couple thoughts on that. The first thought is, video is a way that, because the way that companies interact with customers or users, it's really important to have good monitoring and analytics of your video. And so the first product we ever built was actually a product called MUX video, sorry, MUX data, which is the best way to monitor a video platform at scale. So we work with a lot of the big broadcasters, we work with like CBS and Fox Sports and Discovery. We work with big tech companies like Reddit and Vimeo to help them monitor their video. And you just get a huge amount of insight when you look at robust analytics about video delivery that you can use to optimize performance, to make sure that streaming works well globally, especially in hard to reach places or on every device. That's we actually build a MUX data platform first because when we started MUX, we spent time with some of our friends at companies like YouTube and Netflix, and got to know how they use data to power their video platforms. And they do really sophisticated things with data to ensure that their streams well, and we wanted to build the product that would help everyone else do that. So, that's one use. I think the other obvious use is just really understanding what people are doing with their video, who's watching what, what's engaging, those kind of things. >> Yeah, data is definitely there. You guys mentioned some great brands that are working with you guys, and they're doing it because of the developer experience. And I'd like you to explain, if you don't mind, in your words, why is the MUX developer experience so good? What are some of the results you're seeing from your customers? What are they saying to you? Obviously when you win, you get good feedback. What are some of the things that they're saying and what specific develop experiences do they like the best? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that the most gratifying thing about being a startup founder is when your customers like what you're doing. And so we get a lot of this, but it's always, we always pay attention to what customers say. But yeah, people, the number one thing developers say when they think about MUX is that the developer experience is great. I think when they say that, what they mean is two things, first is it's easy to work with, which helps them move faster, software velocity is so important. Every company in the world is investing and wants to move quickly and to build quickly. And so if you can help a team speed up, that's massively valuable. The second thing I think when people like our developer experience is, you know, in a lot of ways that think that we get out of the way and we let them do what they want to do. So well, designed APIs are a key part of that, coming back to abstraction, making sure that you're not forcing customers into decisions that they actually want to make themselves. Like, if our video player only had one design, that that would not be, that would not work for most developers, 'cause developers want to bring their own design and style and workflow and feel to their video. And so, yeah, so I think the way we do that is just think comprehensively about how APIs are designed, think about the workflows that users are trying to accomplish with video, and make sure that we have the right APIs, make sure they're the right information, we have the right webhooks, we have the right SDKs, all of those things in place so that they can build what they want. >> We were just having a conversation on theCUBE, Dave Vellante and I, and our team, and I'd love to get you a reaction to this. And it's more and more, a riff real quick. We're seeing a trend where video as code, data as code, media stack, where you're starting to see the emergence of the media developer, where the application of media looks a lot like kind of software developer, where the app, media as an app. It could be a chat, it could be a peer to peer video, it could be part of an event platform, but with all the recent advances, in UX designers, coders, the front end looks like an emergence of these creators that are essentially media developers for all intent and purpose, they're coding media. What's your reaction to that? How do you see that evolving? >> I think the. >> Or do you agree with it? >> It's okay. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well, I think a couple things. I think one thing, I think this goes along through saying, but maybe it's disagreement, is that we don't think you should have to be an expert at video or at media to create and produce or create and publish good video, good audio, good images, those kind of things. And so, you know, I think if you look at software overall, I think of 10 years ago, the kind of DevOps movement, where there was kind of a movement away from specialization in software where the same software developer could build and deploy the same software developer maybe could do front end and back end. And we want to bring that to video as well. So you don't have to be a specialist to do it. On the other hand, I do think that investments and tooling, all the way from video creation, which is not our world, but there's a lot of amazing companies out there that are making it easier to produce video, to shoot video, to edit, a lot of interesting innovations there all the way to what we do, which is helping people stream and publish video and video experiences. You know, I think another way about it is, that tool set and companies doing that let anyone be a media developer, which I think is important. >> It's like DevOps turning into low-code, no-code, eventually it's just composability almost like just, you know, "Hey Siri, give me some video." That kind of thing. Final question for you why I got you here, at the end of the day, the decision between a lot of people's build versus buy, "I got to get a developer. Why not just roll my own?" You mentioned data center, "I want to build a data center." So why MUX versus do it yourself? >> Yeah, I mean, part of the reason we started this company is we have a pretty, pretty strong opinion on this. When you think about it, when we started MUX five years ago, six years ago, if you were a developer and you wanted to accept credit cards, if you wanted to bring payment processing into your application, you didn't go build a payment gateway. You just probably used Stripe. And if you wanted to send text messages, you didn't build your own SMS gateway, you probably used Twilio. But if you were a developer and you wanted to stream video, you built your own video gateway, you built your own video application, which was really complex. Like we talked about, you know, probably three, four months of work to get something basic up and running, probably not live video that's probably only on demand video at that point. And you get no benefit by doing it yourself. You're no better than anyone else because you rolled your own video stack. What you get is risk that you might not do a good job, maybe you do worse than your competitors, and you also get distraction where you've just taken, you take 10 engineers and 10 sprints and you apply it to a problem that doesn't actually really give you differentiated value to your users. So we started MUX so that people would not have to do that. It's fine if you want to build your own video platform, once you get to a certain scale, if you can afford a dozen engineers for a VOD platform and you have some really massively differentiated use case, you know, maybe, live is, I don't know, I don't have the rule of thumb, live videos maybe five times harder than on demand video to work with. But you know, in general, like there's such a shortage of software engineers today and software engineers have, frankly, are in such high demand. Like you see what happens in the marketplace and the hiring markets, how competitive it is. You need to use your software team where they're maximally effective, and where they're maximally effective is building differentiation into your products for your customers. And video is just not that, like very few companies actually differentiate on their video technology. So we want to be that team for everyone else. We're 200 people building the absolute best video infrastructure as APIs for developers and making that available to everyone else. >> John, great to have you on with the showcase, love the company, love what you guys do. Video as code, data as code, great stuff. Final plug for the company, for the developers out there and prospects watching for MUX, why should they go to MUX? What are you guys up to? What's the big benefit? >> I mean, first, just check us out. Try try our APIs, read our docs, talk to our support team. We put a lot of work into making our platform the best, you know, as you dig deeper, I think you'd be looking at the performance around, the global performance of what we do, looking at our analytics stack and the insight you get into video streaming. We have an emerging open source video player that's really exciting, and I think is going to be the direction that open source players go for the next decade. And then, you know, we're a quickly growing team. We're 60 people at the beginning of last year. You know, we're one 50 at the beginning of this year, and we're going to a add, we're going to grow really quickly again this year. And this whole team is dedicated to building the best video structure for developers. >> Great job, Jon. Thank you so much for spending the time sharing the story of MUX here on the show, Amazon Startup Showcase season two, episode two, thanks so much. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This is season two, episode two, the ongoing series cover the most exciting startups from the AWS Cloud Ecosystem. Talking data analytics here, video cloud, video as a service, video infrastructure, video APIs, hottest thing going on right now, and you're watching it live here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Dockercon live 2020. Brought to you by, Docker, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to the DockerCon 2020, #DockerCon20. This is The Cube virtual coverage with Docker on their event here. And we're in the studio in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, we're here with a great guest to talk about Docker Desktop, the Microsoft relationship, and the key news that's coming out. Ben De St Paer-Gotch is the product manager for Docker Desktop. Ben, great for coming on, thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So obviously, this is a virtual conference, we wish we could be in person, but given the state of affairs we're going to do remotely, but the momentum Docker has is phenomenal, it's always been great with containers. It's the number one downloaded app around for developers. Microsoft just had their Build conference, which was again virtual as well, or digital, as they say, it's interchangeable. But clear momentum now with Docker as containers actually is the standard, you guys are doing great. What's the key news out of the Microsoft world for people who missed it last week with MS Build? >> Yeah, so last year at Build, Microsoft announced WSO2 to the Windows subsystem with Linux two. (mumbles) The mapping between the windows (mumbles) Which, went really well but it just didn't provide the same centered needed Linux experience. Last year, they announced Windows subsystem Linux two, (Provides an actual Linux one on windows machine, and we've been working hard with Microsoft over the last year to integrate proper desktop as a main desktop application for working with containers with WSO2. A build this year, Microsoft has gone on and announced that WSO2 is going to have a few new features, and it's going to have new features. (mumbles) Mention Linux graphical, Linux applications, you can access the file system, the installation is going to become a slicker which I guess I'm the most excited about that pitch. But the most exciting announcement is, they will be bringing GPU support to WSO2 which means that we will be able to provide and give you support through Docker desktop or container workloads that peoples are working on. And now we're launching Gray and Agua through containers and docks and desktops and Windows which is really cool because we haven't been able to do that before. >> So is this the first GPU support on Microsoft Windows for Docker, with Docker? >> It's, yeah, it's the first GPU Support for Docker Desktop or Mac or Windows. So, previously the hypervisor hasn't passed through the GPU, pretty much, which meant that we couldn't access it from Docker desktop. So Docker desktop isn't about a lightweight VM we sorts of plumb all that in for you. But we're limited about what we could get access to from the hypervisor, Microsoft putting this through and giving us access for the first time, we can actually, we can go. >> Not to go on a side tangent here, but you know, all these virtual events, and I was watching some of the build stuff as well, as well as us immediate streamers and doing stuff, you can see people's home rigs. And you talk to any Developer, video streamer, or anyone who is working remotely, if you don't have the best GPU's in there, I mean, this has just become, I mean, quite frankly, you need the GPU's. So this is important, it's not only from a vanity standpoint performance. Having that support, I'm going to want the best GPU's, I'm always going to be upgrading my machine for that extra power. What's the impact? What does it mean for me as a Developer? Does it increase stuff? What's the bottom line? >> As a Developer, it means you actually have access to it. So, especially when you're doing workloads on the CPU, you've got minimum amounts of power utilization you can do. When you're running workloads for an L Development, you have a lot of power up process you've got to log, to do your mobile training. So, in an element cycle, you're likely to have your application which you're going to use to produce a modeling, you're going to have training data. Taking that training data and producing a model requires lots of panel processing which is an enormous calculations in producing with finer waitings. Doing that on a CPU has to be done on a serial fashion rather than parallel, which is huge and intensive and takes a really long time. Whereas on a GPU, you can do all of that in parallel which massively reduces the amount of time it will take to run those training functions. Either just straight up in Linux or running them in a container, which as the more of people are looking at running container with workloads, it's how I first, the first team that I was on actually used Docker. I was working in Amazon Alexa, and my team picked up the opportunity to run our workload in container. And that was my first experience, so even though my team backed down, so I could see the system. >> Yeah, ML workloads automations could be critical of that performance. Okay, let's get into some of the momentum with Microsoft, you guys have obviously, builds over, we're here now at DockerCon, there's news. Could you share some of the tidbits for what's being talked about now with Docker and DockerCon. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, along with everything else we've been doing, we've been partnering with Microsoft trying to make the best experience generally with Docker desktop, and with WSO2 and with the VSCO. I've been working closely with Microsoft guys to actually try and improve our experience in Windows as it is today, and to improve some of those integrations with VSCO, and also working with the VSCO team on the Docker plugin for VSCO to give our feedback, and to hear feedback from those guys on the errors and issues they're seeing with Docker desktop and to really try to produce the best experience we can on Windows. End to end, from very front end running all the way through that first push, that first run on the cloud using Docker. >> So what is some of the new product management processes and customer support things that you guys are doing? This comes up a lot, obviously, we had a great conversation around shift left with security. That's great news there. You start to see a lot of this added value for Developers, wanted their support right? So how do I get things I need, and from a customer standpoint? It's kind of a moving train this world and it's only getting better and better from a Developer standpoint. But there's more complexity, it's got to be abstract the way you've got, you know, this new abstraction layers developing. You've got a lot of automation. How does the customer get the support they need in the same agile way that Developers are cranking out code? >> It's a really good question, it's something I think we're still working on as well. So, we're trying to working out and one of the big things I'm trying to work out is, how to make it easier for people to get started with Docker, and how do we also make sure with the things we build, we don't leave a cliff edge instead of a lining path. You don't get to a certain point in an easy process, and then the next step, takes you straight off a cliff, so that's not useful for anyone. So, producing those parts and those ways for people to learn and actually progress is something we're really trying to work out. How to make it natural from the first experience all the way through. From an actual support perspective, the other thing we're looking at, is we're trying to do more things in the open. We're really trying at Docker to bring as many of the new features and pieces we're developing which we have to do that in the open with community visibility, so that if people really want it fixed, they can open the PR and they can help us out. And then the last thing that my team really stood out was our Docker of having actions. As creators, someone already finished, could you do this? Someone else had a PR and emerged it. So, to a certain extent, you've got your one side which had you on board and this ever growth spiral and you keep learning. The other side is how'd you fix the board when you find an issue? In that one, we're really trying to work with the community, a lot more than we have in the last couple of years. >> Awesome, some folks watching, hit him up on Twitter, he's the Product Manager for Docker Desktop among other things. You guys are very transparent, you've got your Twitter handle on the lower third. People can chime in or just jump on the chat, we'll follow up and get you the info. Final question for you Ben, as you look at this reality we're in, there's kind of a holistic kind of moment now where people kind of realizing the new realities here. You're looking at the.. you get the keys to the kingdom with Docker Desktop, okay. You got some momentum with Microsoft, the developer role is moving fast and fast as the head room increases for capabilities with automation. And I know you mentioned a few of those things. GPU is now available. What's the future look like for these Developers? The next short, medium and long term? What's your view as you look out over the landscape because you've got to look at the product roadmap, your engagement with the community. Can you share some insight into how you're thinking about Docker Desktop going forward? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think what really interesting point as you say, which is that, if you look at sort of a lot of the Developer side of things that have sort of come out in the last like six months, six to eighteen months. The things I see, I see daily like you mention, things like orchestrating for containers gaining momentum. If you think about crossing the Kaizen model, we're just passed the early Dockers now. We're kind of into the early majority, but we're going to start to move over the next few years into the late majority. What that really means is that people here have been using one of two of these technologies. Maybe you've been using cloud, maybe you've been using Edge, maybe you've been using containers, maybe you've been using CICD, maybe you are using Expiration, maybe you're not. Maybe you've got a Microservice application, maybe it's a little bit of a mole rat. What we're really going to see is, you're going to start to see, all of these changes intersecting and overlapping. And people who have started to pick up model two of these will start to pick up all of them. And that's probably going to happen as we move into the majority of users. So from a what's coming instead of a lot of those thing that you see in best practice in the ideal Developer setup, so a beautiful CICD, a more of an orchestrated environment, Microservice architecture, we're going to see a lot more of that becoming the norm. But I think along with that, we'll also see a level of recognition coming along that a single Microservice alone doesn't provide value. And that's it's going to be some of those groups of services that will provide the user outcome. And that's where my focus is at the end which is you know, an authentication service is great but it doesn't provide value unless you give access to something as authentic. >> It's been issued that the new Docker is all about Developer experience. This is really the core mission. I mean, since the sale of the piece of morantis, Docker has retrenched and reinvented, but stayed core to its principles. Just share with the Developers who've been watching that are coming back into the ecosystem, what is this new Docker vibe? Share your thoughts. >> The new Docker vibe is about working in the open, and it's about solving problems for Developments. The original goal of Docker was to make it easy to pack and ship. It was to reduce Developer friction. As we move more into, sort of, the enterprise space, we worry more about Ops and DevOps. We're not trying to re-focus on Developer and if you sort of think there's two parts to the Developer life cycle, where you've got your work, where you're doing your creative work, where you're writing code. And then you've sort of got your part of the inner loop. And then you've got your part where you're trying to get that code out to production, you're trying to get your value to someone else. Instead of your outer loop, we're really trying to focus on the inner loop And sort of our mantra is that any bit for a Developer should spend as much as their time as possible creating new and exciting things and we're onto those holes that reduce those boring, Monday, repetitive tasks, that we're really trying to work out how we take those boring repetitive pieces and how do we make them just vanish like magic from new users or how do we reduce the friction for the experience from users? From both desktop and hub, we're really trying to bring those two together to achieve that. >> You know what's great about folks who have been in the class since day one. All of us have scar tissue experiences, you know the one thing that's constant is constant change. And one of the things that you guys have done at Docker, and hats off to the whole, you know, original team, is that brand of Docker has symbolized quality openness, and set the standard, I mean, if you look back and containers were really coming around, it's not a new concept. But Docker really set the industry on this path and it's been great to follow every DockerCon at TheCube coverage, but more importantly, as the demand for Developers to build these next wave of Cambrian explosion of applications. It's going to be more important than ever to have more of these abstractions, more of these tools in this real time, more Developers experience because there's more building going on. And it's not just one cloud, it's all clouds, it's all things. >> Yeah, I think it was like when IDC analyzed the future report a couple years ago, I think it was maybe the 2018 one. They said that maybe 2017. They said to date, we've built 500 millions applications worldwide and by 2023, we'll build another 500 million. The rate of creation is just insane, it's exponential growth of us producing more and more applications and connecting more and more devices to do them. The sheer volume of creation and the rate of new technology supporting, even with the rate of companies adopting, I guess more of a warm cloud. I think it's like 60 percent of companies are now more than one cloud provider. Maybe even more, maybe it's like 80 percent. It's ridiculous. >> I was just having this debate on Twitter about this multi-cloud. Someone tried to call us out saying, "Oh you guys were pooing on multi-cloud in 2016 and 18." I go "Look at, no one was Pooping on multi-cloud, it didn't exist." I had multiple clouds but there was no real use case. Now you're starting to see the use cases, where yeah, I had multiple clouds and I got Azure here, I got this over here. But no one wakes up and spreads their workloads wrong. This is going back a few years. Certainly the hybrid was developing, but I think now you're starting to see with networking and some of these inter-operable dynamics, you start to see innovation pockets in wide spaces in large market opportunities for start-ups and companies to thread the clouds together at the right place. So I think multi-cloud is becoming apparent from a use case stand point. Still a ton of work to do, I mean direct connects, got SLA's, I mean all kinds of stuff at the networking level but it is real. It's going to be one of those realities that everyone has, at least one or two, if not three. It could be optimization, this is what Developers do right? Solve problems. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean if nothing else, I've encounter a couple of companies even just where redundancy is handled by multi-cloud strategy. If you want to achieve more nines and you're just balancing workloads between two clouds. >> I mean, the Zoom news was really a testament to that because everyone got into a twist over that. Oh Zoom moves off Amazon, no they didn't move off Amazon, they went to Oracle, they got Adge, they're everywhere. Why wouldn't they be? They need to pass it, they fail over, they need fall tolerance, I mean, these are basic distributing computing concepts that is one on one. You've got to have these co-locations. And optimization for those clouds and the apps on Microsoft as well, so why wouldn't you do it? >> Exactly. And that's that hybrid, that multi-cloud, compounding that some of which you said earlier, that over changes when you're looking at how you go to CICD, how you're bundling these applications, creating more applications than ever. Coming back, sort of, with more AI workloads, much like GPU and you combine that with, sort of, last in the growth of age devices as well. It sort of makes for a really interesting future. And Docker is sort of, that summation SOV, what we're using to frame how we're thinking about our product and what we should be building. >> Great, for the audience out there, hit him up on Twitter, Ben's available, they're out in the open, if you're interested in how Docker makes life easier on the Windows platform, with the GPU support, they've got security now built in, shifting left. Give these guys a call and of course, we love the mission, out in the open. It's theCUBE's mission as well and great to chat with you. Ben, thanks for spending the time with me today. >> Been an absolute pleasure, thank you for having me. >> Okay, just TheCube's coverage, the virtual Cube with DockerCon co-creating together out in the open. DockerCon20, #Docker20, I'm John Fer with TheCube, stay tuned for our next segment, and thanks for watching. (ambient music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon LIVE 2020, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon LIVE 2020. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Deepak Singh. He's the vice president of compute services at Amazon Web Services. Deepak, great to see you. >> Likewise, hi, Stu. Nice to meet you again. >> All right, so for our audience that hasn't been in your previous times on theCUBE, give us a little bit about, you know, your role and your organization inside AWS? >> Yeah, so I'm, I've been part of the AWS compute services world from, for the last 12 years in various capacities. Today, I run a number of teams, all our container services, our Linux teams, I also happen to run a high performance computing organization, so it's a nice mix of all the computing that our customers do, especially some of the more new and large scale compute types that our customers are doing. >> All right, so Deepak, obviously, you know, the digital events, we understand what's happening with the global pandemic. DockerCon was actually always planned to be an online event but I want to understand, you know, your teams, how things are affecting, we know distributed is something that Amazon's done, but you have to cut up those two pizza and send them out to the additional groups or, you know, what advice are you giving the developers out there? >> Yeah, in many ways, obviously, how we operate has changed. We are at home, maybe I think with our families. DockerCon was always going to be virtual, but many other events like AWS Summits are now virtual so, you know, in some ways, the teams, the people that get most impacted are not necessarily the developers in our team but people who interact a lot with customers, who go to conferences and speak and they are finding new ways of being effective and being successful and they've been very creative at it. Our customers are getting very good at working with us virtually because we can always go to their site, they can always come to Seattle, or run of other sites for meeting. So we've all become very good at, and disciplined at how do you conduct really nice virtual meetings. But from a customer commitment side, from how we are operating, the things that we're doing, not that much has changed. We still run our projects the same way, the teams work together. My team tends to do a lot of happy things like Friday happy hours, they happen to be all virtual. I think last time we played, what word, bingo? I forget exactly what game we played. I know I got some point somewhere. But we do our best to maintain sort of our team chemistry or camaraderie but the mission doesn't change which is our customers expect us to keep operating their services, make sure that they're highly available, keep delivering new capabilities and I think in this environment, in some ways that's even more important than ever, as customer, as the consumer moves online and so much business is being done virtually so it keeps us on our toes but it's been an adjustment but I think we are all, not just us, I think the whole world is doing the best that they can under the circumstances. >> Yeah, absolutely, it definitely has humanized things quite a bit. From a technology standpoint, Deepak, you know, distributed systems has really been the challenge of you know, quite a long journey that people have been going on. Docker has played, you know, a really important role in a lot of these cloud native technologies. It's been just amazing to watch, you know, one of the things I point to in my career is, you know, watching from those very, very early days of Docker to the Cambrian explosion of what we've seen container based services, you know, you've been part of it for quite a number of years and AWS had many services out there. For people that are getting started, you know, what guidance do you give them? What do they understand about, you know, containerization in 2020? >> Yeah, containerization in 2020 is quite a bit different from when Docker started in 2013. I remember speaking at DockerCon, I forget, that's 2014, 2015, and it was a very different world. People are just trying to figure out what containers are that they could package code in deeper. Today, containers are mainstream, it is more customers or at least many customers and they are starting to build new applications, probably starting them either with containers or with some form of server technology. At least that's the default starting point but increasingly, we also seen customers with existing applications starting to think about how do they adapt? And containers are a means to an end. The end is how can we move faster? How can we deliver more quickly? How can our teams be more productive? And how can you do it more, less expensively, at lower cost? And containers are a big part, important and critical piece of that puzzle, both from how customers are operating their infrastructure, that there's a whole ecosystem of schedulers and orchestration and security tools and all the things that an enterprise need to deliver applications using containers that they have built up. Over the last few years, you know, we have multiple container services that meet those needs. And I think that's been the biggest change is that there's so much more. Which also means that when you're getting started, you're faced with many more options. When Docker started, it was this cute whale, Docker run, Docker build Docker push, it was pretty simple, you could get going really quickly. And today you have 500 different options. My guidance to customers really is, boils down to what are you trying to achieve? If you're an organization that's trying to corral infrastructure and trying to use an existing VM more effectively, for example, you probably do want to invest in becoming experts at schedulers and understanding orchestration technologies like ECS and EKS work but if you just want to run applications, you probably want to look at something like Fargate or more. I mean, you could go towards Lambda and just run code. But I think it all boils down to where you're starting your journey. And by the way, understanding Docker run, Docker build and Docker push is still a great idea. It helps you understand how things work. >> All right, so Deepak, you've already brought up a couple of AWS services of, you know, talk about the options out there, that you can either run on top of AWS, you have a lot of native services, you know, ECS, EKS, you mentioned, Fargate there, and very broad ecosystem in space. Could you just, you know, obviously, there are entire breakout sessions to talk about , the various AWS services, but you know, give us that one on one level as to what to understand for container service by AWS. >> Yeah, and these services evolved organically and we launched the Amazon Elastic Container Service or ECS in preview in November or whenever re:Invent was that year in 2014, which seems ages ago in the world of containers but in the end, our goal is to give our customers the most choice, so that they can solve problems the way they want to solve them. So Amazon ECS is our native container orchestration service, it's designed to work with and the rest of the AWS ecosystem. So it uses VPC for networking, it uses IAM identity, it uses ALB for load balancing, other than just good examples, some examples of how it works. But it became pretty clear over time that there was a lot of customers who were investing in communities, very often starting in their own data centers. And as they migrated onto the cloud, they wanted to continue using the same tool plane but they also wanted to not have to manage the complexity of communities control planes, upgrades. And they also wanted some of the same integrations that they were getting with ECS and so that's where the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or EKS comes in, which is, okay, we will manage a control plane for you. We will manage upgrades and patches for you. You focus on building your applications in Kubernetes way, so it embraces Kubernetes. It has, invokes with all the Kubernetes tooling and gives you a Kubernetes native experience, but then also ties into the broad AWS ecosystem and allows us to take care of some of the muck that many customers quite frankly don't and shouldn't have to worry about. But then we took it one step further and actually launched the same time as EKS and that's, AWS Fargate, and Fargate was, came from the recognition that we had, actually, a long time ago, which is, one of the beauties of EC2 was that customers never had, had to stop, didn't have to worry about racking and stacking and where a server was running anymore. And the idea was, how can we apply that to the world of containers. And we also learned a little bit from what we had done with Lambda. And we took that and took the server layer and took it out of the way. Then from a customer standpoint, all you're launching is a pod or a task or a service and you're not worrying about which machines I need to get, what types of machines I need to get. And the operational simplicity that comes with it is quite remarkable and quite finding not that, surprisingly, our customers want us to keep pushing the boundary of the kind operational simplicity we can give them but Fargate serves a critical building block and part of that, and we're super excited because, you know, today by far when a new customer, when a customer comes and runs a container on AWS the first time they pick Fargate, we're usually using ECS because EKS and Fargate is much newer, but that is a default starting point for any new container customer on AWS which is great. >> All right, well, you know, Docker, the company really helped a lot with that democratization, container technologies, you know, all those services that you talked about from AWS. I'm curious now, the partnership with Docker here, you know, how do some of the AWS services, you know, fit in with Docker? I'm thinking Docker Desktop probably someplace that they're, you know, or some connection? >> Yeah, I think one of the things that Docker has always been really good at as a company, as a project, is understanding the developer and the fact that they start off on a laptop. That's where the original Docker experience that go well, and Docker Desktop since then and we see a ton of Docker Desktop customers have used AWS. We also learned very early on, because originally ECS CLI supported Docker Compose. That ecosystem is also very rich and people like building Docker files and post files and just being able to launch them. So we continue to learn from what Docker is doing with Docker Desktop. We continue working with them on making sure that customizing the Docker Compose and Docker Desktop can run all their services and application on AWS. And we'll continue working with Docker, the company, on how we make that a lot easier for our customers, they are our mutual customers, and how we can learn from their simplicity that Docker, the simplicity that Docker brings and the sort of ease of use the Docker bring for the developer and the developer experience. We learn from that for our own services and we love working with them to make sure that the customer that's starting with Docker Desktop or the Docker CLI has a great experience as they move towards a fully orchestrated experience in the cloud, for example. There's a couple of other areas where Docker has turned out to have had foresight and driven some of our thinking. So a few years ago, Docker released this thing called containerd, where they took out their container runtime from inside the bigger Docker engine. And containerd has become a very important project for us as well as, it's the underpinning of Fargate now and we see a lot of interest from customers that want to keep building on containerd as well. And it's going to be very interesting to see how we work with Docker going forward and how we can continue to give our customers a lot of value, starting from the laptop and then ending up with large scale services in the cloud. >> Very interesting stuff, you know, interesting. Anytime we have a conversation about Docker, there's Docker the technology and Docker the company and that leads us down the discussion of open-source technologies . You were just talking about, you know, containerd believe that connects us to Firecracker. What you and your team are involved in, what's your viewpoint is the, you know, what you're seeing from open-source, how does Amazon think of that? And what else can you share with the audience on this topic? >> Yeah, as you've probably seen over the last few years, both from our work in Kubernetes, with things like Firecracker and more recently Bottlerocket. AWS gets deeply involved with open-source in a number of ways. We are involved heavily with a number of CNCF projects, whether it be containerd, whether it be things like Kubernetes itself, projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, the service mesh world with Envoy and with the containerd project. So where containerd fits in really well with AWS is in a project that we call firecracker-containerd. They're effectively for Fargate, firecracker-containerd as we move Fargate towards Firecracker becomes out of the container in which you run containerd. It's effectively the equivalent of runC in a traditional Docker engine world. And, you know, one of the first things we did when Firecracker got rolled out was open-source the firecracker-containerd project. It's a go project and the idea was it's a great way for people to build VM like isolation and then build sort of these serverless container architectures like we want to do with Fargate. And, you know, I think Firecracker itself has been a great success. You see customer, you know, companies like Libvirt integrating with Firecracker. I've seen a few other examples of, sometimes unbeknownst to us, of people picking a Firecracker and using it for very, very interesting use cases and not just on AWS in other places as well. And we learnt a lot from that that's kind of why Bottlerocket is, was released the way it was. It is both a product and a project. Bottlerocket, the operating system is an open-source project. It's on GitHub, it has all the building tooling, you can take it and do whatever you want with it. And then on the AWS side, we will build and publish Bottlerocket armies, Amazon machine images, we will support them on AWS and there it's a product. But then Bottlerocket the project is something that anybody in the world who wants to run a minimal operating system can choose to pick up. And I think we've learnt a lot from these experiences, how we deal with the community, how we work with other people who are interested in contributing. And you know, Docker is one of the, the Docker open-source pieces and Docker the company are both part of the growing open-source ecosystem that's coming from AWS, especially on the container world. So it's going to be very interesting. And I'll end with, containerization has started impacting other parts of AWS, as well as our other services are being built, very often through ECS and EKS, but they're also influencing how we think about what capabilities we need to build into the broader container ecosystem. >> Yeah, Deepak, you know, you mentioned that some of the learnings from Lambda has impacted the services you're doing on the containerization side. You know, we've been watching some of the blurring of the lines between another container world and the containerization world. You know, there's some open-source projects out there, the CNCS working on things, you know, what's the latest, as you see kind of containerization and serverless and you know, where do you see them going forward? >> This is that I say that crystal balls are not my strong suite. But we hear customers, customers often want the best of both world. What we see very often is that customers don't actually choose just Fargate or just Lambda, they'll choose both. Where for different pieces of their architecture, they may pick a different solution. And sometimes that's driven by what they know, sometimes driven by what fits into their need. Some of the lines blur but they're still quite different. Lambda, for example, as a very event driven architecture, it is one process at a time. It has all these event hooks into the rest of AWS that are hard to replicate. And if that's the world you want to live in or benefit from, you're going to use lambda. If you're running long running services or you want a particular size that you don't get in Lambda or you want to take a more traditional application and convert it into a more modern application, chances are you're starting on Fargate but it fits in really well you have an existing operational model that fits into it. So we see applications evolving very interestingly. It's one reason why when we build a service mesh, we thought forward instead. It is almost impossible that we will have a world that's 100% containers, 100% Lambda or 100% EC2. It's going to be some mix of all of these. We have to think about it that way. And it's something that we constantly think about is how can we do things in a way that companies aren't forced to pick one way to it and "Oh, I'm going to build on Fargate" and then months later, they're like, "Yeah, we should have probably done Lambda." And I think that is something we think a lot about, whether it's from a developer's experience side or if it's from service meshes, which allow you to move back and forth or make the mesh. And I think that is the area where you'll see us do a lot more going forward. >> Excellent, so last last question for you Deepak is just give us a little bit as to what, you know, industry watchers will be looking at the container services going forward, next kind of 12, 18 months? >> Yeah, so I think one of the great things of the last 18 months has been that type of application that we see customers running, I don't think there's any bound to it. We see everything from people running microservices, or whatever you want to call decoupled services these days, but are services in the end, people are running, most are doing a lot of batch processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence that work with containers. But I think where the biggest dangers are going to come is as companies mature, as companies make containers, not just things that they build greenfield applications but also start thinking about migrating legacy applications in much more volume. A few things are going to happen. I think we'll be, containers come with a lot of complexity right now. I think you've, if you've seen my last two talks at re:Invent along with David Richardson from the Lambda team. You'll hear that we talk a lot about the fact that we see, we've made customers think about more things than they used to in the pre container world. I think you'll see now that the early adopter techie part has done, cloud has adopted containers and the next wave of mainstream users is coming in, you'll see more attractions come on as well, you'll see more governance, I think service meshes have a huge role to play here. How identity works or this fits into things like control tower and more sort of enterprise focused tooling around how you put guardrails around your containerized applications. You'll see it two or three different directions, I think you'll see a lot more on the serverless side, just the fact that so many customers start with Fargate, they're going to make us do more. You'll see a lot more on the ease of use developer experience of production side because you started off with the folks who like to tinker and now you're getting more and more customers that just want to run. And then you'll see, and that's actually a place where Docker, the company and the project have a lot to offer, because that's always been different. And then on the other side, you have the governance guardrails, and how is going to be in a compliant environment, how am I going to migrate all these applications over so that work will keep going on and you'll more and more of that. So those are the three buckets I'll use, the world can surprise us and you might end up with something completely radically different but that seems like what we're hearing from our customers right now. >> Excellent, well, Deepak, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us again on theCUBE. >> No, always a pleasure Stu and hopefully, we get to do this again someday in person. >> Absolutely, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching theCUBE. >> Deepak: Yep, thank you. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Woman: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the Cube studios in Palo Alto, California for another Cube Conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. One of the biggest challenges that every enterprise face as they try to keep up with competitors today, is how to introduce the speed of adding new digital services, new digital capabilities, new types of customer experience, new types of operational challenges, et cetera, but do so in a way that retains the safety that's associated with traditional ways of doing IT. That leads to a set of tensions that exist between how DevOps, which is really driving that new speed equation, and security, which has been historically the locus of thinking about how to ensure that assets, digital assets don't get misappropriated by the business and by bad actors. So the big challenge is how can we bring people, the technology, and the processes together so we can achieve both the speed as well as the safety that are required to really drive business forward. So to have that conversation, we're joined by a great CEO today, Dan Hubbard who's the CEO of Lacework. Dan, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So let's start by getting a little bit of about Lacework. Tell us a little bit about Lacework. >> Sure, yeah, so Lacework we're really excited. Recently we raised another round of funding which is going to really allow us to focus totally on this problem which is how do we balance speed and safety in how we secure these modern architectures and infrastructure in cloud security? >> All right, so let's talk about, I mentioned up front that this notion of speed and safety, it's more than just a technology problem. It goes deep into how businesses run their enterprise today. What is the experiences that you see your customers having as they conceive of how to move forward to this new world? >> Yeah, so for cloud migrants what's happening is the development groups and applications are moving to the cloud at a very rapid rate, and every company that they're buying is cloud born, and they're moving at a really quick rate, and they're leaving security behind. So from the people aspect, the security people need to get involved with the developers to figure out how they can work in this, you know coexist in an environment that allows them to deliver obviously both security and speed, or speed and safety. >> So the problem is essentially that we need to move fast as a consequence of competition, and technology change, and achieving, you know being more opportunistic which is a fundamental tenet of agile and business today, but we need to do so in a way that provides the set of assurances that are required by compliance, by law, by new privacy regulations. How are you seeing customers solve this problem generally? How are they even thinking about solving it. >> Yeah, so I think the first thing is how they're not succeeding which is, you know, typically they go to their incumbent vendors, security vendors, and attempt to apply something that is not purpose fit for this new infrastructure, being in cloud and cloud native. So things like taking a firewall and calling it a cloud firewall isn't working. Things like taking traditional technologies like antivirus or next generation antivirus is not working. And what we're seeing working is when you really step back and they really start to understand how people are building and developing their code, pushing it out. What is that build time to runtime environment look like, and what are the services their using, and they need to apply some relatively fundamental security practices to it. How do I get visibility over time in real time? How do I attain compliance that is important to my company, PCI, SOC2, NIST, you know HIPAA, whatever is important to you, and then how can I assure that we haven't had a breach, and if we do, how can we triage that breach? >> So in man respects we are trying to bring tried and true security concepts to this new world, but we need to do so in a way that doesn't drag along the technology limitations or that technologies were necessarily applied to securing an old style of infrastructure. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know there's a number of things in technologies that are really critical here, but also on the people side. You know we can't bring over some of the old processes, for example change control windows. You can't have a change control window in something that's running, and you're pushing code a thousand times a day. There is no change control window. You're just doing it all the time, but you need to do things in a way that is mapping to the automation and the scale that's happening. In order to do that, you need definitely some technology, and people, and processes. >> So it sounds like what you're suggesting is we have to incorporate security directly into the DevOps process so that we at least feature some notion of a Pareto principle where each new push is at least as secure as the previous one, but ideally we're making things more secure as we go along. >> Yeah, I mean understanding change is really critical because things are changing so quickly. You know what we're seeing in a lot of companies is a shift over to security as a governance and tooling org., and then security engineering which is baked within DevOps teams. Whether it is a guild of people that are connected to the application developers, or right within the stand up, or the group directly. >> But if I think about kind of the outcome of DevOps, the outcome of DevOps really is this kind of more modern approach to thinking about technology resources. Service is a term that's thrown and it means a lot of things to a lot of people, but to a DevOps person, they create something that can then be used as a service by other folks within the organization. One of the fundamental challenges here it seems to me is that historically we've tried to secure the server, or the PC, or the network, or the perimeter, or whatever else it might be, but really this cloud native approach is securing some outcome, some capability, and that's really increasingly what we've got to focus on whether we call it a service or something else. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely, and you know I think we spent years kind of surrounding the applications in the development, really partly because we may have not been involved, so it was great. We had firewalls, we had defense in depth, multiple layers that we added on top of the next layer, and everything else, and really what needs to happen, it needs to be integrated. And you know, in order to integrate into the services world, it needs to be as a service. So your security needs to be a service that isn't surrounding, it's actually integrating directly, and that's partly from a process perspective, also from a people as we talked about, but also as a technology. It's got to be really baked into the solution. >> So one of the things we've seen in our research of Wikibon is that there are, as we think about how to introduce these new capabilities into this kind of DevOps culture, this DevOps approach to building new IT assets, new business capabilities, that if the solution itself doesn't correspond to a way that DevOps works, it itself gets abandoned. I mean it might integrate at some point in time in the future, but if it doesn't naturally fit into how things operate or how things evolve, then it gets abandoned. How would this new class of security products or services look so that DevOps picks it up, gets the best IP associated with the best security today? >> I think the first one is it can't be intrusive. So you know when you talk about blocking and tackling, it needs to be more about building and engineering than blocking. So you really need to make sure that you're not going to adversely or inadvertently affect the application and the service that's being run. So it's really important to the company. And anytime you introduce that, you're going to get blocked out, or your not going to be involved. The other is that it needs to pair to the tooling that is there. For example, you know our service integrates DarkLink, to Jira, and PagerDuty, and Slack, you know, real modern ways that DevOps work. So it needs to be directly integrated, and lastly the service and the context need to deliver information that serves two audiences, the security people, and the DevOps people, because the DevOps people are often the ones that are triaging, or they know the application and the information, the infrastructure's code, and the security people may not. So they have to work together and provide both of those. >> So as we think about what a modern secure DevOps function's going to look like, give us kind of the picture of what it looks like in three years. How are they going to be working together, and what are they going to be using to do so? >> Yeah, so I don't think there's, like this isn't the end of the SISO. There's still going to be a SISO. It's a incredibly important role. I think they're going to move a little bit more towards governance, compliance, and tooling. They may have a tooling org. You know for us, it's more important that we interoperate with open source and the cloud providers than we do with other vendors. So having tooling to do that is really critical. >> Peter: Especially in the visibility side. >> Absolutely, yeah getting visibility's key, and then there's going to be more security engineers. These are people with DNA in security but also are coders, versus the real deep threat specific environment that we see today. You know I would argue there's probably more people that write code and understand assembler than there is in Python and Go. So you know DevOps people, they don't know what assembler is, or are using assembler, so that is still important. There are still attacks. You need to deconstruct them, you need to understand them, but there's a lot you need to do on the security engineering side, which is really how do I program this service? How do I automate and orchestrate it? >> So today this is kind of where we're going. It makes perfect sense, but that's not where a lot of organizations are today. You mentioned the difference between built in cloud and migrating to the cloud. Give us a little bit of insight, visibility into how some of those migrate to the cloud shops are taking this roadmap as they move forward. >> Yeah, it's super interesting you know? We have customers that span across cloud born, you know more startupy, very tech savvy, and then very traditional, very large Fortune 50 companies. In the latter they're doing a couple things. One is they're trying to figure out how do I migrate a traditional app that's been built in a way, not for the cloud, to the cloud. That's kind of one, and there's all kindsa reasons why you'd want to do that, scale, performance, reliability, et cetera. The second is that they're being told or have initiatives driven from the top called cloud first, which means that everything new has to be that way. It has to be cloud native, and it has to be delivered as a service. And then the last one is that when you actually are building an application, and you're a new company, you're probably going to get acquired by one of these larger companies, which means that a cloud migrant becomes a cloud native company by definition because the company's they're buying. So it kind of spans across those three areas. What we run into though is that especially if they buy a company, they're very modern in how they think. They've got very modern practices, and then the traditional security people are going, oh who are these, what is this new technology? How do we interoperate, how do we take our policies, our practices, our functional organization and map those together? So they're really startin' to figure it out. So I think we're kind of in this middle ground. There is very forward thinking companies that have moved more forward, but still it's very, very early, and we talk to customers, we run workshops with customers, and a lot of it, just bringing the teams together and understanding both worlds, and getting to know what are the DevOps, things that they're working on, what are the security people, how do we meet in the technology, and then in the process side. So It's a little bit all over right now, and I think it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, but I think down the road as people deploy things like Kubernetes and containers, and services that are built a little bit better with resiliency into them, it's going to be a more secure place. >> Dan Hubbard, CEO of Laceworks. Great conversation about speed and safety. Thanks for being on the Cube. >> Thank you very much, nice to be here. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris. Thank you very much for joining us. Until next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicone Valley, Palo Alto, California, Nick is a Cube conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to the Palo Alto Cube Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're here for great Cube conversation with Gilad Bracha who's a distinguished engineer at Shape Security, has a legacy in the programming world, one of the early folks working on Java, a variety of other great things: Small Talk, Newspeak, a variety of programming accomplishments. A legend in the industry, thanks for coming on. >> Well, thanks for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You know, one of the things we always talk about on the Cube is how I work for a company, they do this, they do this great, here's our differentiator, here's our advantage, a lot of marketing speak, and then we also do a lot of interviews around disruption, around cloud computing, getting to DevOps, network effect, changes of network, moving packets around store and compute, all the benefits of cloud computing but we don't really talk about the underlying languages that are driving all the changes and this is something that you're an expert in and I want to get your thoughts on this because, you know, computer science is at an all time high. You can't go to Berkeley, you see what's going on at Berkeley, the number one major is computer science, the data classes, dreams of starting a company, but computer science is changing a lot. More people are coding but does that mean there still more computer science going on? So, a lot of people are trying to understand where the future is going to be and underneath it all is the programming languages themselves. >> Yeah, well-- >> Your thoughts on computer science and the languages out there. >> So, too much to say. But computer science is a lot, there are trends and there's a lot of emphasis now on machine learning and things like that. And it's interesting because that affects, which language you use can make these tasks a lot easier or a lot harder. And we've, you see certain languages being picked up for that purpose and new languages being done for numerical stuff like Julia, people are using R, God forbid and it's really interesting to see that. To me, it's interesting because there's a whole set of languages, the APL family of languages which really go back to the early 60s. But they're just phenomenally designed for these kind of large arrays of data for doing mathematical operations in parallel on large arrays or multi-dimensional arrays, essentially, tensors, back before that word was used in programming. And there's huge potential for doing better in terms of programming with those things. So that is one new, not new but area that's been kind of coming alive again. >> Yeah. >> That's really cool. >> You know, it's interesting, too, you bring up a point. We were talking before we came on camera about Lisp and all these other cool science out there. With, now, the advent of unlimited compute with cloud and, now, kind of new connected devices, a lot of the old science is coming back into vogue because of some of the use cases. I mean, I remember when I graduated college in the 80s, we had departments that were actually called data processing departments. And they used data processing, that's what they did, they processed data. That's the number one use case today is processing data. So, a lot of the old is coming back because it's relevant in this new era. So, I got to ask you, what is your favorite science and computer science that you think is relevant? You mentioned APL, what concepts, we TensorFlow with Google, things like that coming back, you see machine learning and AI, these are not new concepts. >> Well, some of them, I mean-- >> What's your thoughts? >> Machine learning, definitely, there have been breakthroughs in the past, I don't know, 10, 15 years and but the basis of it, the beauty of this is the basis of this is the real hardcore math in calculus and statistics, that stuff is golden and wherever it applies throughout the universe and you look at reasoning about these things and it comes up again. That's the root of it all. Making it so that you can manipulate things closer to level you can with math is really challenge for programming languages, so that you don't spend your life dealing with, sort of, irrelevant, boring details, oh, this has to be lowercase, that has to be tab, this tool doesn't work on that operating system. Most of our effort as software engineers goes, we're dealing with junk, really, and we should try and abstract over that and get over that. >> What are some of the exciting things that get you excited for programming language because there's a lot more excitement, a lot more opportunities now; you're seeing you can stand up software very quickly these days, and so there's some really quick and dirty ways to get software written with languages. Some want more principle-based design languages that have all the integrated components. What's the trade-off, what are some of the things you like around the new trends? >> So I'll give you something that meets both of the criteria that is both very principled but actually makes it much easier to put something together. One of my favorite new things that have come in the past few years is a thing called Elm which is a language, essentially, the main application, so far, has been to build websites, essentially, UI that's targeting a website but it is a functional programming language but it is much more approachable than the traditional academic stuff, even though the ideas are basically the same, but they're very well engineered. Actually, better engineered in many respects than a lot of the traditional stuff that you see like the Haskells and OCamls and stuff. And it started for the web, so it's a different game but it's a joy to use, it has great error messages, it has a time traveling debugger which is one of my favorite hobby horses, so you can actually go back and roll the computation back to where a problem occurred. And that, kind of, is interesting because it meets both of those points. >> Talk about this live programming, you mentioned rolling back and this is around live programming. >> Yeah. >> This is an exciting area. >> Oh, yeah. >> Your thoughts on live programming because we're seeing collaboration where I can have a screen open. I saw a demo at Amazon Reinvent last year or year before where people can be in different parts of the world or different offices in the same building and coding the same, I get the collaboration piece but there's also live programming languages that have built-in compile that's changing the old ways of debugging. Your thoughts. >> Right, so, definitely, that is something that people who have a heritage in small talk or Lisp, kind of, remember those systems or, if they're very lucky, still get to use them. And the thing is that most program languages don't have that level of interactivity when you work with them as a developer because there is too much of a feedback loop between when you actually specify what you want to happen by writing code and when you actually see what actually happen when you run your code and it typically doesn't do remotely what you wanted it to. That feedback loop is too long 'cause you have to go through compiles and bills and whatever, and the idea of live programming is to shorten that so that you, ideally, instantly see you change something and you can see the output and the output gets changed accordingly and you don't have to wait and, in particular, you don't have to go and rerun your program, get to the same point where you were, especially when you're debugging, right? That's the beauty of fix and continue debugging which is sort of a small but important piece of live programming where you can basically go and change a function and, immediately, proceed with the computation. You don't have to restart, you don't have to get to where you were, recreate the state, make sure the heap is in the same thing and that just, A, it's productive, it saves time. It's just a joy to watch and play with this thing, it's much more tactile, you actually feel-- >> It's faster, too, you don't have to, all the steps involved, classic debugging, restart, do it all over again. >> It's faster and it's less error prone 'cause those steps, you make mistakes, you went through all these steps and you forgot one thing or whatever or you did something wrong and didn't notice and you chased some, you know, went on a wild goose chase trying to figure out a bug, so it really is a huge H to product, a huge help to productivity and it's just so much fun to work with these systems. >> Well, I got to get this question for you while you're here because I get this question all the time and it's common. A lot of the young kids want to program, they see the future, they know that coding is a good skill to have. What's your advice to parents out there or kids, whether they're in elementary, or high school, or college, that might have a focus on, say, you know, I'm a neuroscience major or I'm doing this but I want to learn how to code? What's your advice for how to learn how to code because I've seen, oh, learn Java, I'm like, okay-- >> God, no. >> Not really my first choice. >> Eat spinach. Do 50 push-ups. No, it's not that comfortable. >> No, no. >> Java's not my first choice for recomm-- >> It's also 50 push-ups and spinach are better for you. Java is actually possibly damaging, at an early age, you should not be doing that. >> Doing Java, in particular? >> No, no. >> Why is that, it's just too complex? >> Because it's a lot of irrelevant boiler plate. It's a lot of stuff that should've been obsolete before and will be obsolete by the time you, hopefully, get to work for real and it's painful and if you aren't really into it, it'll just turn you off of the whole field. >> What's going to get someone excited, is it Elm, is it gaming, is it some sort of-- >> Yeah, so, Elm is good because you can run it, you don't need much setup, you can run in a web browser. I'm a Smalltalker and I still love the Smalltalk systems and they're still, overall, is a complete programming experience, they're still unmatched. Except for list machines which are kind of hard to come by. And so, I'd focus on those-- >> People tend to talk about Python, they talk about some of these languages. If someone's going to tinker around, what's going to be the addictive, if someone's going to-- >> So, people get addicted to all kinds of things but I would-- >> In terms of a good-- >> I tend to avoid the mainstream. People tend to latch on to the mainstream because they think it's a good career move or whatever. My advice is, you get good, learn the fundamentals in the cleanest way possible, then the mainstream stuff will be easy, rather than focusing on it, 'cause there's so much irrelevant detail in those systems and the programming experience is not that great. So, try something a little less meaty, closure is a lisp that you can use and there's closure script as a version that runs on the web. Try Elm. Try Smalltalk. >> And all these languages, they can actually produce something of value? >> Yeah, they can definitely, I think, still 70% of the world's container traffic is still run by a Smalltalk application. >> Really, I did not know that. >> Yeah, well, few people do. In Smalltalk, you find that that sort of heyday, in some sense, for commercial applications was in the 90s or 80s, whatever, but replacing those applications, a typical story is, someone says, ah, we should use Java 'cause everybody's using Java and we can get lots of programmers and they spend a lot of money and the new application doesn't work 'cause they can't actually rebuild the thing they built in Smalltalk at any reasonable cost, at any reasonable reliability. So, there are a lot of those systems out there, Morgan Stanley's still running Capital, their Smalltalk system for managing money. So, yeah, you can certainly build things. >> Well, Gilad, I love your commentary here, so I love that you're not shy to hold back. I've got to get your thoughts on cryptocurrency and the Blockchain world. >> Oh, dear. >> A lot of different languages, you got Ethereum, you have, some say, oh, I'm going to use Linux. If you're using Java, we're going to import it in, Javascript supports it, so there's been kind of like this, every kind of crypto currency, Blockchain, has their own language for decentralized applications. Your general thoughts on this. >> So, there's a need for, to slow down and be more careful, all right. Ethereum lost God knows how much money. I've heard quotes but I don't know if it's 50 million or 150 million but a fair amount of money due to problems that were classical distributed programming problems and could have been avoided by, essentially, more careful design of language in the system. There's a pressure now to turn things out in a hurry, right? In the old days, these systems took years and years of research in their little corner and, now, everybody has to do something too fast and that hurts. And, often, it's people who don't have the expertise and the background 'cause there's lots of research on all kinds of problems and smart people get snippets of those and they don't quite know what they're doing. And I don't think there's a cure for that because the incentives are there but that's why we're seeing these problems. >> So be careful, the message is be careful. >> Be careful. >> But they're rushing, all this cash is rolling in, they got to have some language. >> Sure, as long it's not their 150 million dollars that they lost, that's fine, but someone was probably upset. >> And, by the way, the security problem was software-error based. >> Most of them are. >> So, this transitions into Shape Security where you're not working as a distinguished engineer, working on some hard problems. I know it's pretty confidential but you guys do power 200 million iOS apps, this is from the PR statement. >> Probably more by now but yeah. >> Past 24 hours, you blocked more than two billion fraudulent login attempts, two million legitimate attempts. Essentially, defending intrusion detects and seems to be the company's value properties, but I don't want to get too much into the company because you're, obviously, on the engineering side. But security from a programming language side is software and people. >> Mm-hm. >> Right, software gets bugs. >> And people make them worse. >> And people make mistakes. >> People make them worse. >> Yeah. >> This is the central process problem in security. Your thoughts in computer science. >> So, most of the time, I mean, Shape does real security and this is fascinating to me but, most of the time, I've been looking at security at the programming language level because, you know, still, I think 70% of intrusions often, not the intrusions but, basically, these big software fiasco security problems get down to array buffer overflows. Which is ridiculous 'cause this is problem that was solved decades ago. Why are we still dealing with this? That's because, you know, programming language design, the whole approach to security, access control lists, whatever, there was another approach which was capability-based. And these two grew up together in the 60 and the world, as typically, it makes the wrong choices, it takes what seems appealing in the short term and not what is sort of a more thorough thing. So, object capabilities is a really interesting way of looking at this thing. There are people working on putting some of this into Javascript so that you could use it somehow. Great work by Mark Miller and company at Agoric. I'll do a shout-out to them. So, I've usually been on that side of things, but real security, there's a lot more to it, that's just one small layer of things and, above that, there's all the humans and the multiple systems they build. The configurations, they're just mistakes, the things that happen through social engineering about which, basically, I don't know much about but I will say that making things simpler is key because that's why people make mistakes. Things are too complicated. Every piece of the system has some bunch of clever engineers who really think it through and make it really sophisticated but when you compose these, it becomes, no one understands, a thing that no one understands what's going on and we need to simplify. My work is to try to simplify at that programming language level which the typical languages people use are too complex. >> And this is really where the software always has holes in it and you just got to be on top of it and make it tight, as it were. >> Right, basically, you can't understand the consequences when you have too many moving parts, as it were, too many constructs in the programming language. The composition is endless and you can't, it's very hard to foresee how they're going to interact and what someone will come up with, eventually. Oh, you could use this to attack that. Or, this crates this bad scenario that people don't notice. And, really, there's no remedy to that. You can work and you should be careful, you should test things, you should verify, if you can, formally, but if you just try and keep it simple, clean abstractions that are very simple and composed well, you will simply avoid, by definition, most of these problems. >> Final talk track around open source. It's been well-documented that proprietary software that's funded by companies when kind of stopped and innovating, kind of, dies on the vine. Open source is great, got leverage, you get out in the open, yeah, it's great. So, open source has been growing like a weed over the past couple decades and, recently, it's been phenomenal. The open source people say, oh, security is better in open source. At the same time, you bring up the notion of language security and those programming languages. How do you see that rectifying itself? How is the security paradigm with open source going to be stabler? What do companies need to do because open source is being used everywhere. >> Open source is used everywhere for good reason but open source is not, by itself, a magic thing, right. It's still, you get problems, open source is also open to malicious contributors, to problems, and the systems are too big for, even though there are code reviews and everything, so it's a double-edged sword, in some respects and sometimes the quality just suffers. These are social organization and each one is different and they have problems, so I don't know that that is, it's good that you shine light on something, it tends to purify it, and certainly that's a great strength of open source that you cant have things buried in there that you don't know. By the same token, it is not a panacea because the other thing is someone has to fund this somehow. All the open source models have to find somewhere to keep this going. So it's a more complicated thing to pull off. >> Especially with all these appliances now, okay, which version of Linux are you running, do I review the code? How do people ensure the security know that whether it's an appliance, or a device, or phone, or anything and it doesn't have some sort of back door or security vulnerability? >> Well, backdoor, I don't-- >> Backdoor, side door. >> Or just code-- >> This is a conspiracy theory. >> Or poor code. >> Poor code, well, poor code, you know, the open source is full of poor code is the truth. And the other thing is that, one problem with the open source is it also makes it easier for people to attack it because they can see how it's engineered. So, there is a reason that secure systems tend to, actually, maintain a certain level of secrecy. So I wouldn't go overboard on the open source ideology that it's inherently more secure. It has the advantage that you can see what you're getting. It has the disadvantage that everyone, including your adversaries, can see that. >> You don't know that going in, buyer beware kind of philosophy. >> Yes. >> And so, ultimately, you need to trust, like, it always comes down to trust at some level 'cause there's no way you're going to verify the software or the hardware, the bits, the you know. You can have problems in the hardware, this is a big problem nowadays, actually, with certain vendors. I don't want to get into those political footballs but-- >> Yeah, super micro. >> Yeah, and so, you really have to see who, you do have to take a risk in who do you trust. Who has a reputation, who is responsible for things that have worked? And there are no easy answers and it's beyond my pay grade. >> Let me get your thoughts on Capital One because we know that story, as of this week and they're on an Amazon estuary bucket, firewall filtering failed, someone just stumbled into it. I mean, the person that hacked it wasn't like, probably, a famous hacker, she was bragging on Twitter and message groups like, saying, hey, I just got in. So, door's open, keys are running in the car, walked right to the safe, safe was open. >> So, I don't know anything about that incident specifically and, I mean, beyond what you and I have read on the web or somewhere-- >> That's a human error. >> But they're usually there's always, almost always human error involved. It's also why you need, sort of, it's like countermeasures, right, and counter, counter, countermeasures. You simply have to monitor, right? So that when something, when you have an intrusion, you check it, now, that's not easy but there are lots of clever things that people are doing. You can have security as an afterthought. It's really hard. That's generally the problem is that people don't think about it early enough. >> Final question before we break: What's the human problem that you see most with developers? 'Cause if humans make mistakes, which they do, what's the common mistake developers, programmers make when coding that could be avoided with just a little bit sharper focus? >> Well, it's not about focus but I'd say null pointer exceptions are the biggest, like, after array buffers, they're the other, Tony Hoare called it billion dollar mistake in 1980 in his award speech, I think. And we're talking now, it's probably a trillion dollars, right? And this is something that can be mechanically checked by the programming language and it's probably the number bang-for-a-buck feature that you might throw in. >> Just say no to null? >> Yeah. >> That's the philosophy. >> Yeah. >> Gilad, thanks for coming on the Cube, appreciate the conversation. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto at the Cube Studios. This has been a Cube Conversation, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Chief Data Officers Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the IBM CDO Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Paul Gillin. We're joined by Inderpal Bhandari, he is the Global Chief Data Officer at IBM. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, Inderpal. >> It's my pleasure. >> It's great to have you. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to talk, I want to start by talking a little bit about your own career journey. Your first CDO job was in the early 2000s. You were one of the first CDOs, ever. In the history of Chief Data Officers. Talk a little bit about the evolution of the role and sort of set the scene for our viewers in terms of what you've seen, in your own career. >> Yes, no thank you, December 2006, I became a Chief Data Officer of a major healthcare company. And you know, it turned out at that time there were only four of us. Two in banking, one in the internet, I was the only one in healthcare. And now of course there are well over 1,999 of us and the professions taken off. And I've had the fortune of actually doing this four times now. So leading a legacy in four different organizations in terms of building that organizational capability. I think initially, when I became Chief Data Officer, the culture was one of viewing data's exhaust. Something that we had to discard, that came out of the transactions that you were, that your business was doing. And then after that you would discard this data, or you didn't really care about it. And over the course of time, people had begun to realize that data is actually a strategic asset and you can really use it to drive not just the data strategy, but the actual business strategy, and enable the business to go to the next level. And that transitions been tremendous to watch and to see. I've just been fortunate that I've been there for the full journey. >> Are you seeing any consensus developing around what background makes for a good CDO? What are the skills that a CDO needs? >> Yeah, no that's a very, very good question. My view has been evolving on that one too, over the last few years, right, as I've had these experiences. So, I'll jump to the conclusion, so that you kind of, to answer your question as opposed to what I started out with. The CDO, has to be the change agent in chief, for the organization. That's really the role of the CDO. So yes, there's the technical sharps that you have to have and you have to be able to deal with people who have advanced technical degrees and to get them to move forward. But you do have to change the entire organization and you have to be adept at going after the culture, changing it. You can't get frustrated with all the push back, that's inevitable. You have to almost develop it as an art, as you move forward. And address it, not just bottom up and lateral, but also top down. And I think that's probably where the art gets the most interesting. Because you've got to push a for change even at the top. But you can push just so far without really derailing everything that you are trying to do. And so, I think if I have to pick one attribute, it would be that the CDO has to be the change agent in chief and they have to be adept at addressing the culture of the organization, and moving it forward. >> You're laying out all of these sort of character traits that someone has to be indefatigable, inspirational, visionary. You also said during the keynote you have six months to really make your first push, the first six months are so important. When we talk about presidents, it's the first 100 days. Describe what you mean by that, you have six months? >> So if a new, and I'm talking here mainly about a large organization like an IBM, a large enterprise. When you go in, the key observation is it's a functioning organization. It's a growing concern. It's already making money, it's doing stuff like that. >> We hope. >> And the people who are running that organization, they have their own needs and demands. So very quickly, you can just become somebody who ends up servicing multiple demands that come from different business units, different people. And so that's kind of one aspect of it. The way the organization takes over if you don't really come in with an overarching strategy. The other way the organizations take over is typically large organizations are very siloed. And even at the lower levels you who have people who developed little fiefdoms, where they control that data, and they say this is mine, I'm not going to let anybody else have it. They're the only one's who really understand that curve. And so, pretty much unless you're able to get them to align to a much larger cause, you'll never be able to break down those silos, culturally. Just because of the way it's set up. So its a pervasive problem, goes across the board and I think, when you walk in you've got that, you call it honeymoon period, or whatever. My estimate is based on my experience, six months. If you don't have it down in six months, in terms of that larger cause that your going to push forward, that you can use to at least align everybody with the vision, or you're not going to really succeed. You'll succeed tactically, but not in a strategic sense. >> You're about to undertake the largest acquisition in IBM's history. And as the Chief Data Officer, you must be thinking right now about what that's going to mean for data governance and data integration. How are you preparing for an acquisition that large? >> Yeah so, the acquisition is still got to work through all the regulations, and so forth. So there's just so much we can do. It's much more from a planning stand point that we can do things. I'll give you a sense of how I've been thinking about it. Now we've been doing acquisitions before. So in that since we do have a set process for how we go about it, in terms of evaluating the data, how we're going to manage the data and so forth. The interesting aspect that was different for me on this one is I also talked back on our data strategy itself. And tried to understand now that there's going to be this big acquisition of move forward, from a planning standpoint how should I be prepared to change? With regard to that acquisition. And because we were so aligned with the overall IBM business strategy, to pursue cognition. I think you could see that in my remarks that when you push forward AI in a large enterprise, you very quickly run into this multi-cloud issue. Where you've got, not just different clouds but also unprime and private clouds, and you have to manage across all that and that becomes the pin point that you have to scale. To scale you have to get past that pin point. And so we were already thinking about that. Actually, I just did a check after the acquisition was announced, asking my team to figure out well how standardized are we with Red Hat Linux? And I find that we're actually completely standardized across with Red Hat Linux. We pretty much will have use cases ready to go, and I think that's the facet of the goal, because we were so aligned with the business strategy to begin with. So we were discovering that pinpoint, just as all our customers were. And so when the cooperation acted as it did, in some extent we're already ready to go with used cases that we can take directly to our clients and customers. I think it also has to do with the fact that we've had a partnership with Red Hat for some time, we've been pretty strategic. >> Do you think people understand AI in a business context? >> I actually think that that's, people don't really understand that. That's was the biggest, in my mind anyway, was the biggest barrier to the business strategy that we had embarked on several years ago. To take AI or cognition to the enterprise. People never really understood it. And so our own data strategy became one of enabling IBM itself to become an AI enterprise. And use that as a showcase for our clients and customers, and over the journey in the last two, three years that I've been with IBM. We've become more, we've been putting forward more and more collateral, but also technology, but also business process change ideas, organizational change ideas. So that our clients and customers can see exactly how it's done. Not that i'ts perfect yet, but that too they benefit from, right? They don't make the same mistakes that we do. And so we've become, your colleagues have been covering this conference so they will know that it's become more and more clear, exactly what we're doing. >> You made an interesting comment, in the keynote this morning you said nobody understands AI in a business context. What did you mean by that? >> So in a business context, what does it look like? What does AI look like from an AI enterprise standpoint? From a business context. So excuse me I just trouble them for a tissue, I don't know why. >> Okay, alright, well we can talk about this a little bit too while he-- >> Yeah, well I think we understand AI as an Amazon Echo. We understand it as interface medium but I think what he was getting at is that impacting business processes is a lot more complicated. >> Right. >> And so we tend to think of AI in terms of how we relate to technology rather than how technology changes the rules. >> Right and clearly its such, on the consumers side, we've all grasped this and we all are excited by its possibilities but in terms of the business context. >> I'm back! >> It's the season, yes. >> Yeah, it is the season, don't want to get in closer. So to your question with regard to how-- >> AI in a business context. >> AI in a business context. Consumer context everybody understands, but in a business context what does it really mean? That's difficult for people to understand. But eventually it's all around making decisions. But in my mind its not the big decisions, it's not the decisions we going to acquire Red Hat. It's not those decisions. It's the thousands and thousands of little decisions that are made day in and night out by people who are working the rank and file who are actually working the different processes. That's what we really need to go after. And if you're able to do that, it completely changes the process and you're going to get just such a lot more out of it, not just terms of productivity but also in terms of new ideas that lead to revenue enhancement, new products, et cetera, et cetera. That's what a business AI enterprise looks like. And that's what we've been bringing forward and show casing. In today's keynote I actually had Sonya, who is one of our data governance people, SMEs, who works on metadata generation. Really a very difficult manual problem. Data about data, specifically labeling data so that a business person could understand it. Its all been done manually but now it's done automatically using AI and its completely changed the process. But Sonya is the person who's at the forefront of that and I don't think people really understand that. They think in terms of AI and business and they think this is going to be somebody who's a data scientist, a technologist, somebody who's a very talented technical engineer, but it's not that. It's actually the rank and file people, who've been working these business processes, now working with an intelligent system, to take it to the next level. >> And that's why as you've said it's so important that the CDO is a change agent in chief. Because it is, it does require so much buy-in from, as you say, the rank and file, its not just the top decision makers that you're trying to persuade. >> Yes, you are affecting change at all levels. Top down, bottom up, laterally. >> Exactly. >> You have to go after it across the board. >> And in terms of talking about the data, it's not just data for data's sake. You need to talk about it in terms that a business person can understand. During the keynote, you described an earlier work that you were doing with the NBA. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? And sort of how the data had to tell a story? >> Yes, so that was in my first go 'round with IBM, from 1990 through '97. I was with IBM Research, at the Watson Research Lab, as a research staff member. And I created this program called Advanced Scout for the National Basketball Association. Ended up being used by every team on the NBA. And it would essentially suggest who to put in the line up, when you're matching lines up and so forth. By looking at a lot of game data and it was particularly useful during the Playoff games. The major lesson that came out of that experience for me, at that time, alright, this was before Moneyball, and before all this stuff. I think it was like '90, '93, '92. I think if you Google it you will still see articles about this. But the main lesson that came out for me was the first time when the program identified a pattern and suggested that to a coach during a playoff game where they were down two, zero, it suggested they start two backup players. And the coach was just completely flabbergasted, and said there's no way I'm going to do this. This is the kind of thing that would not only get me fired, but make me look really silly. And it hit me then that there was context that was missing, that the coach could not really make a decision. And the way we solved it then was we tied it to the snippets of video when those two players were on call. And then they made the decision that went on and won that game, and so forth. Today's AI systems can actually fathom all that automatically from the video itself. And I think that's what's really advanced the technology and the approaches that we've got today to move forward as quickly as they have. And they've taken hold across the board, right? In the sense of a consumer setting but now also in the sense of a business setting. Where we're applying it pretty much to every business process that we have. >> Exciting. Well Inderpal, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, it was always a pleasure talking to you. >> It's my pleasure, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillin, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IBM CDO coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Good night everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are live here at VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kevin Gray is here as the director of product marketing for hybrid cloud platforms at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> OK, so, we're here talking cloud, everybody's cloud crazy, but it seems like, as Peter said, the technology has matured. >> Kevin: Yeah. >> And we're actually at a point where we can deliver what we've been talking about for the past five or six years. So how does that relate to what you guys have, what are you showing here at the event, and what are customers saying? >> Peter: Yeah, what are the announcements? What's happening? >> Well, one of the things we're announcing is enhancements to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. You've heard a lot at VMware about VMware Cloud Foundation with added support for the extract SDDC, which is our turnkey VMware cloud foundation platform. We've also enhanced support for VxRail, so we've added multi-site capabilities, so we now support up to four data center sites, and we've also added support for disaster recovery through Recover Point VM. We're also added support for native hybrid cloud, so with native hybrid cloud we now have a support for... we have a new turnkey platform for VxRail, and we're supporting our new access testing tool, which is really focused on helping developers, right? So what the access testing tool does is it really focuses on when companies are going through and really looking at re-factoring applications for things like when they're going to microservices, it has that ability to really go out and test to make sure the dependencies and services are still there. We also have a capability around called our Application Deployment Tool, which really pushes, as you look to push an application out to multiple instances of foundations of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you can actually help, it does that in one push. So if you look at PCF, you can use a CF pushkim, and push it out to multiple instances, and in this case, it'll do that in one step. >> So that's all the things that you've done on an individual announcements basis in the tools, but Kevin, let's step back. Let's take the customer's perspective for a second. When you summarize all this-- >> Right. >> So you're standing in front of a customer and you're saying to the customer, "We are pointing towards this vision." >> Right. >> "We want you to be here with us." What is that here? Where do you want them to be as you start to think about designing and priority for this broad portfolio that you have? >> So you heard Bob talk a little bit about sort of customers buying more outcomes, per se, and one of the things you'll see, with for instance our native hybrid cloud, is that ability to really get a repeatable process with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So if you look at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they're moving real fast, right? They have a release every 90 days, pretty much, and you need to be on the latest release within nine months-- >> Let me make sure that I understand this. >> When you say "repeatable process "with Pivotal Cloud Foundry," what you're talking about is that the organization, the shop, can think about developing an application in Pivotal, deploying it out on Cloud Foundry, and then running it on whatever underlying hybrid or conversion for structure that they might want and being able to do that over and over and over, so they can increase their focus on the application function that they're generatng. Is that basically what you mean? >> Absolutely, and-- >> So it's that level of repeatability. Focus on the business problem, build it, and then take the pain and suffering out of deploying it wherever it needs to be. >> Absolutely, and maintaining it. So if we look at large customers, as I mentioned, one large financial institution was looking at how do they do this repeatably across multiple data center sites, right? And how do they keep pace with that change over time, you know? That's not an easy process when you're moving really fast, and it's just one of those things where they tried to do it themselves for a while and realized it's better to buy that outcome than to try and create it on their own. >> You know, Dave, I was talking to a large user here on the show floor not too long ago, yesterday, in fact, about the fact that DevOps is not taking the world by storm the way that many people thought it might, and he identified specifically, one of the reasons is because there's not enough support from the technology companies to start packaging and organizing their capabilities, their technology set, their product sets, to support a DevOps mentality. It almost sounds, you haven't said this, Kevin, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it almost sounds as if what you guys are saying is, we're going to start designing and packaging and organizing our systems to support that sort of DevOps orientation so the system administrators can evolve in the way that they need to evolve as the business demands new change. >> Yeah, so if you look at our hybrid cloud platforms, they're really intended to be that easy button for deploying either a full vRealize Suite, vRealize Suites stacked in our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, or Pivotal Cloud Foundry for native hybrid cloud. Another thing we introduced this week was our ready systems. We have ready systems for VMware and we have ready systems for Pivotal. If you look at the VMware ready system, one of the things we found, for VMware, one of the things we found was that many customers, if you look at Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, it gives you a lot of benefits that a lot of our large enterprise customers are looking for, so, it supports multiple sites, it supports disaster protection, and it supports a turnkey platform where it's an engineered system, but for a lot of customers, it meant that you were always a couple of releases behind. So we give them that experience, right? And we make it a little bit, we give them an opportunity with the ready system to get that support from VMware, where we'll take on the HCI piece and support it. Same thing with native hybrid cloud and our Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Pivotal ready system, you know, they'll get their support from PCF, from Pivotal, but they'll build it on HCI. And we're also introducing a Pivotal ready system based on PKS. And I think PKS is interesting, simply because if you look at the Kubernetes environment and the work that's been done with Kubo, it's really a platform that's more likely where people are going to want to build, right? If you look at those people that are doing it, they want more control over, you know, their build process and their pipeline, and therefore they're more likely to build, and with the PKS system, the ready system based on Pivotal, Pivotal ready system, they can get that outcome. >> So at the end of the day it's all about changing the operating model, >> Kevin: Absolutely. >> And having a business impact. Peter, we were in our Palo Alto studio, and one of our clients was in, very prominent end user and market practitioner, saying if you can't change the operating model, you know, you might get a little bit of business benefit, but if you're a large company, you're never going to take a billion dollars of cost out. So my question is, what are you guys seeing, are you being able to affect the operating model, and can you share any of your favorite examples or even generic sort of proof points? >> Sure, absolutely. We had one customer, CICC, they're a large HR outsourcer in China, and by implementing Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, they were able to accelerate the time it took to get new application services by 60%. This is simply a means of taking IT out of the middle and really being able to accelerate delivery of-- >> Peter: We're taking certain tasks-- >> Exactly. >> Peter: That IT performs. It's not necessarily taking IT out, it's taking those low-value tasks out, right? >> Kevin: Absolutely. You know, self-service portal pieces, exactly, so-- >> Dave: And then maybe re-deploying those resources to higher-value activities. >> Kevin: Absolutely. Right. So those are the types of outcomes. We also see, if you look at Pivotal and some of the capabilities they have, if you look at sort of traditional IT infrastructure we see many customers moving to, you know, daily, weekly releases, as opposed to, if you think of a traditional model, it would be a much longer process, so that's the type of outcome we see as well. >> Dave: Well, one of the things you've been saying for years, I think Benioff stole it from you, is there's going to be way more SAAS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies to your point, everybody's now a software company, and they're releasing code on a constant basis, but they're not technology companies, so they need help, right? >> He might not have stolen it from me, but it's a nice validation point. And I think we said it before he did. >> Just kidding, Marc. Alright, Kevin, hey thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you. >> Appreciate it. Thanks. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Las Vegas Mandalay Bay. Day three, VMworld 2017. We'll be right back. >> Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my cohost John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, friend of theCUBE, James Watters SVP of Product at Pivotal. James, great to see you, and thanks for helping to get theCUBE to Cloud Foundry Summit. >> Yeah, I was just saying, this is the first time theCUBE is at CF Summit, so we're official now. We're all grown up. We're out in the daylight and you know you made it when theCUBE shows up, so excited to have you here. >> Absolutely. So a lot of things going on. We had Chip on talking about some of the big announcements. >> James: Yeah. >> From Pivotal's standpoint, what's some of the important milestones in releases happening. >> Yeah, I think in the simplest terms, the big new thing came out of our collaboration with Google is called Kubo, which is Kubernetes on BOSH. And I think that was a big move that got a lot of applause in the keynote when it was announced yesterday. And I think it shows two things. One is that Cloud Foundry really is going to embrace multiple ways of deploying artifacts and managing things, and that we're really the cloud native platform and willing to embrace container abstractions, app abstractions, data abstractions pretty uniquely, which is, there hasn't been another platform out there that embraces those with specialized ways of doing them. And I'm really excited about the customer response to that approach. >> Yeah, James, help us unpack that a little bit. So we look at the term seems this year, everybody, it's multi-cloud, we're all talking back-- >> James: Yeah. >> I think back to the days when we talked about platform as a service. One of the pieces was, oh, well, I should be able to have my application and move lots of places. That's what I heard when I talked about Cloud Foundry. When Docker came out everybody was like, oh PAS's dead, Docker's going to do this. When Kubernetes came out, oh wait, this takes the core value of what platform as a service has done. And today you're saying Kubo, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes with some BOSH, pulling it all together. Walk us through, 'cause it's nuanced. And there's pieces of that. So help us understand. >> Yeah, I like to say that even though sometimes you have open source communities have their own sense of identity, there's really not a god abstraction in cloud programming. Like there's not one abstraction that does it all. The simplest way you can see that is that people are interested in function as a service today. They're also interested in container as a service. Well, those two are not, they're not compatible. Right, like you don't deploy your whole Docker image to Amazon Lambda, but people are interested in both of those. And then, at the same time, there's this hyper growth of Spring Boot, which is, I think, the most efficient way of doing Java programming in the cloud, which is really at the core of our app abstraction. And so we see people, there's hyper growth, and function as a service, app as a service, especially with Spring Boot, and then also container. And I think the approach that we've had is beause there's not one god abstraction, that our platform needs to embrace all of those. And that actually, it's pretty intuitive, once you start using them, and you get beyond the slides and the buzz words. When to use one versus the other. And I think that's what users have been really excited about, is that Pivotal and Cloud Foundry communities embraced kind of that breadth, in terms of, different approaches to cloud native. Does that make sense to you, John? >> Yeah it's starting to, right? A lot of people like to do all or nothing about everything, right? >> James: Yeah. >> It's all going to be, we're going to be serverless by next year. And that doesn't make any sense at all. >> James: That's right. >> And so you have multiple programming models, like you said, multiple different kinds of abstractions, so when would somebody want to use, say containers, as a service, or container orchestration, versus some of the other application models. >> Yeah, it's a really, really great question. And I just had a really productive customer meeting this morning, where we went through that. They had some no-JS developers, that they said, look, these developers just want to get their code to production. They don't want to think about systems, they don't want to think about operating systems, they don't want to think about clusters. They're just like, here's my app, run it for me. And that's the core trick that Cloud Foundry's done the best of any platform in the world, which is CF Push, and so, for a no-JS developer, here's my app, run it for me, load balance it, health management, log aggregate it, give me quotas on my memory usage, everything. That's a good example of that. Then, they also had a team that was deploying Elasticsearch and some packaged applications. And they needed the level of control that Kubernetes in terms of pods, co-location, full control of a system image, the ability to do networking in certain ways, the ability to control storage. And you don't just take Elasticsearch and say here's my Elasticsearch tarball, run it for me. You actually start to set up a system, and that's where Kubernetes container as a service is perfect. Then the other question is how do you stitch those together, and you've seen the Kubernetes community adopt the Service broker API, the open Service Broker API out of Cloud Foundry, as a common way of saying, oh, I have an Elasticsearch over here, but I want to bind it to an application. Well, they use the CF services API. I think it's early days, but there's actually a coherent fabric forming across these different approaches, and it's also immediately intuitive. Like we didn't know, when we first conceived of adding Kubo to the mix, we didn't know what the educational level of education we have to provide, but it's been intuitive to every client I've talked so far, so that's fun for me to watch you say a few words like, oh, we get it. Yeah, we use that for this and this for this. >> All right, James, I have to up-level it a little bit, there. >> James: Little deep? >> You travel way more than I do. We kind of watch on social media. Prove me wrong, but i can't imagine when you're talking in the C-suite of a Fortune 100, pick your financial, or insurance company, that they are immersed in the languages and platform discussions that the hoodie crowd is. So where are you having those discussions? >> James: Yeah. >> One of the things, I come into the show and say Pivotal and Cloud Foundry are helping customers with that whole digital transformation. >> James: We are. >> And making that reality. So help us with that disconnect of, I'm down in the weeds trying to build this very complex stack, and the C-suite says, I want to be faster. >> I'll tell you what the C-suite has to solve. They've got to solve two things. One is they've got to deliver faster and more efficiently than ever before. That's their language, and our core app abstraction has been killer for digital transformation. Deliver apps faster, find your value line, and approach problems that way. They get that. That's why we've been succeeding economically, that's been a bit hit. But they also have another problem is, they want to retain talent, and when they're trying to retain talent some of those times, those folks are saying, well, we want little bit more control. We want to be able to use a container if we want, or think about something like Spring Cloud Data Flow to do high-end pipelines. And so they do care about having a partner in Pivotal and in Cloud Foundry, they can embrace those new trends. Because they've got to be able to not be completely top down in how they're enabling their organizations, while also encouraging efficiency. And so that's where the message of multiple abstractions really hits home for them, because they don't always want to referee some of the emerging trends and tech, and telling their team what they have to use. So by providing function, app, container, and data service, we can be the one partner that doesn't force that a priori in the discussion. Does that make sense? >> Is there friction ever, when saying, okay here, we've got this platform that actually is rather opinionated versus, hey, go choose everything open source and do whatever you want. I think that there's political boundaries between different parts of organization, this is a lot of what DevOps, I think, as a movement has been so important. Which is saying actually, you need to blur the political boundaries in the organization to get to faster end-to-end throughput and collaboration. So I think that's definitely a reality. At the same time, the ability that we've had to embrace these different approaches allows the level of empowerment that I think is appropriate. Like I think what we've been trying to do is not necessarily cater to a free-for-all, we've been saying, what are the right tools in the tool chest that people need to get their job done. So I think that's been very warmly received. So I guess I'd say that hasn't been a big problem for us. >> I want to ask you about the ecosystem. I think back when the ecosystem started, IBM, HPE, Cisco were big players. I come in this week, and it's Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and Pivotal still is, last time I checked it was what, 70% of the code base created by Pivotal. >> James: I think it's 60 or 55 now. >> The change in the ecosystem what that means, and what that means to kind of open source, open core. >> Yeah, so I think in addition to the Kubo work that we've done, the other big news this week is that Microsoft joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation. So, essentially the largest software company in the world-- >> Wait, wait, Microsoft loves open source, I hear. Did you hear that one? >> They do. >> I know, it's still shocking for a lot of us that have known Microsoft for a long time, don't you think? And I'm not trying to be facetious, they totally are involved, I've talked to lots of Microsoft people. Kudos to them, they're doing a really good job. Even if I look at the big cloud guys and throw in VMware in there, Microsoft is one of the leaders in participating and embracing open source. >> They are and I think Corey Sanders, who got on stage, announced this, he leads the Azure virtual machine service, and a lot of the other Azure services for them, I think that their strategy is they want to run every workload. Like if you talk to Corey about it, he's like, you got workload, we want to be your partner. And I think that's been the change at Microsoft, is once you go into cloud, it's sort of like Pivotal embracing multiple program abstractions, right, once you have a platform you want as much critical mass on it as you can. And I think that's really helped Microsoft embrace the open source community in a very pragmatic way. Because they are a business, a company, right? And I think open source is required to do business in software these days, right, like in a way that it wasn't 10 years ago. As you look at your customer set and multi-cloud, right? From the very beginning multi-cloud was baked into the concept of Cloud Foundry. Like you said, just push, right? >> James: Yeah. >> So what do you see as common patterns? We've talked to folks already who, on-prem. Obviously, you all are running your CF service in partnership, your main one, your partnership with Google, You work with Amazon, what do you see in customer base, right? >> Yeah, so, let me just share a little bit from a good customer. This is a prospect conversation more, like someone who's starting the journey. They were currently running on-prem, on an OpenStack environment, which had some cost of maintenance for them. They were considering also using their vServer environment, to maybe not have to do as much customization of OpenStack. But there were certain geographies that they wanted to get into. They didn't want to build data centers. And what they were confronting was, they'd have to go learn networking and app management on a couple different clouds they wanted to use. And what they liked about our CF Fabric, across that, was that they said, oh, this is one operating model for any of those clouds. And that's the pattern that we see is that companies want to have one cloud operating model while there's five major cloud players today. So like how do those two forces in the market combine? And I think that's where multi-cloud becomes powerful. It's not necessarily multi-cloud for it's own sake, but it is the idea that you can engage and use multiple resources from these different data center providers without having to completely change your whole organization around it. Because taking on, how you run vServer versus OpenStack is different, as you know, right? >> Right, right, and talking about change, right? You and I were together at VMware when you launched this thing. >> James: Yeah. >> And there was a profound kind of conceptual chasm to leap for the VMware operators to figure out what was going on here. >> James: Yeah. >> So in this new world of services operation in multi-cloud, how are you seeing people, how's the adoption going, you just launched, or the foundation's launched its new certification stuff, can you talk a little bit about the new skill set needed, or how you're seeing people, the people formerly known as sys admins are now actually doing cloud operations. >> Well, I'm not sure if you saw Pat Gelsinger's announcement at Dell World, Dell EMC World, about developer-ready infrastructure. And I think this is a critical evolution that our partnership with VMware is more important than ever. Which is they're now saying all of these people that have been doing traditional system administration, you need to now offer developer-ready infrastructure. And this is an infrastructure that all the networking and network micro segmentation rules need to be there, all of the great things that the VMware admins have provided before needs to be there, but it needs to be turnkey for a developer. That developer shouldn't just get what we had and 2009, when you and I were working there together, which is like, here's a virtual machine, go build the rest of the environment. It should look more like, here's my application, run it for me. Here's my container, run it for me. And so what we're seeing is a lot of people upping their game now. To say, oh, the new thing is providing these services for developers 'cause that ties into digital transformation, ties into what the business is doing, ties into productivity. So I'm seeing a Renaissance of sys admins having a whole new set of tools. So that makes me excited. And one of the cool things we're seeing, I'd love to get your opinion on this is, this cool operating ratio of, we've had our clients present. Their administers of Cloud Foundry instances are able to run tens of thousands of apps in containers with two to four to five people. And so now they've got this super power, which is like, hey bring as many of the applications as the business needs to me. I can go run 10,000 app containers with a small team of people with a good lifestyle. To me, that's actually kind of incredible to see that leverage. >> Yeah, I think it's a huge shift, right? 'Cause you aren't setting up the VLANs and the micro segmentation and the rest of the stuff. >> Yeah, it's not all by hand, and so now the idea with our NSX partnership, is I'm really excited about, fun to talk to you about it. We used to work in Building E and have lunch out there, is that when you provision a CF app, we're working with the NSX team that all the segmentation will align with the app permissions. And this is a big deal, because it used to be that the network team and the app team didn't really have a good conduit of communication. So now it's like, okay I'm going to bind my app to this data service. I want NSX to make sure that permission is followed. To me, that's going to be a revolution of getting the app, and the DevOps teams and the networking teams to work together, clearly. So I'm pumped about that. >> Running low on time. A couple of quick questions about Pivotal. Number one is, now that you're doing Kubo, could we expect to see Pivotal join the CNCF? So EMC is is joining the CNCF. We have friendly relations with the CNCF, I don't think that's at all out of the cards. I just know current, I don't have any news on that today. But we've been very friendly with them, and we started working with Google on that, so no immediate plans there, but we'd be open to that, I believe. >> Okay, and secondly, my understanding, the last announcement on revenue, you can't speak to the IPO or anything, James, above your pay grade, but $275 million in billing on PCF, did I get that right? What do you see is kind of the mix of how you're revenued, are you a software company, a services company? The big data versus the cloud piece. How do we look at Pivotal going forward? >> Yeah, what'd I say is I primarily oversee the Cloud Foundry portion of what we do. And services are an incredibly important part of our mix, Pivotal labs. When you think about this developer-ready infrastructure tend, like a lot of the way you organize your developers can change too. So we talked about how the sys admins jobs change. They gets this platform scale, well the developer's job has changed now, too. They have to learn how to do CICD, they've got to learn how to potentially turn around agile requirements from the business on a weekly basis versus every six months. So Pivotal labs has certainly been critical to that mix for us. But PCF in and of itself, has been a very successful software business. And I think, I believe can grow into the billions of dollars a year in software, and that's what kind of keeps me excited about every day. >> All right, James, I want to give you the final word. You speak to so many customers. >> James: A few. >> The whole digital transformation thing, what are you seeing? How do we help customers along that moving faster. >> That's a, it's a big topic. And the thing that's really interesting about what PCF does is, that it helps people change their organizations, not just their technology. And this has certainly happened in the vServer environment, right? Like it would change your organization, but we're even going higher, which is like, how are your developers organized? How operating teams organize. How you think about security. How you think about patching. Like the reason why I agree that it's transformative, is that it's not just a change of technology, it's these new technologies allow you to rebuild your organization end-to-end, of how it delivers business results. And that makes it both a humbling and an exciting time to be in the industry, because I personally, don't have all the answers every time. People ask about organizations and what to do there. Those are complex issues, but I think we've tried to partner with them to go on that journey together. >> Unfortunately, James, we're going to have to leave it there. We will definitely catch up with you at many more events later this year. And we'll be back with more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone Center at the AWS Summit. And I'm Lisa Martin, joined with my co-host Jeff Frick. We're very excited to have the chief architect and co-founder of Nextdoor, Prakash Janakiraman, on the program, welcome. >> Thank you for having me. >> For those of you who missed the keynote this morning, Prakash, you did a really fantastic keynote in the session that Werner did, and I loved how you positioned what Nextdoor is. If there's anyone out there that actually doesn't know, give us for those who didn't see the keynote just how you positioned it and talk to us about what you guys are doing, how you've achieved 70% of US neighborhoods covered, over 135,000 neighborhoods in the US. You're expanding globally. Give us in a few minutes this back story on Nextdoor. >> Yeah, so we think of Nextdoor as sitting kind of alongside Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. People are using Facebook to communicate with their friends and family all over the world, and Twitter to connect with people with whom they share common interests. And despite having hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of Twitter followers, in my own neighborhood I only knew a couple of my neighbors, and it's sort of unfortunate. Your neighbors are a great resource that you should know, right, in a local context. So we feel like Nextdoor is bringing back a sense of community to the neighborhood by connecting people in the medium that we use today, which is this virtual medium, online social networking. So we kind of sit alongside of those. And as you think about the difference between what Facebook has been able to do, or an Instagram or a SnapChat, they really leverage existing connections, and when most people don't know their neighbors we have our work cut out for us, because we need to go build those connections. And once those connections are built, they're really, really valuable, right? All of a sudden you didn't know how to find the local electrician or a handyman, or how to reunite with a lost pet, or what happened with this rash of break ins in the neighborhood. Or who do you go to if there's a natural disaster that's happening in your community? How do you band together? How do you even communicate with other people? And so we think we're bringing that basic connectivity to these neighborhoods. >> What was the secret sauce? Because obviously you can't just authorize integration to my contacts, because by definition they're not in my contacts. So how did you kind of crack that code? >> There were a couple of things. So number one was we made a very deliberate decision, we'll get to why this was important, to verify each of our members as being actual residents of a neighborhood community. In our parlance, a neighborhood is really a geographically bounded region. Every single neighborhood in the Nextdoor (mumbles) is started by one member. The member draws the neighborhood boundaries, and then subsequent members-- >> Jeff: They draw the boundaries. >> They do, they do. >> They define it. >> That's right. And so every member that joins has to actually prove that they're residents of the community, and that raises trust. And all these neighborhoods have grown because of word of mouth. People go out, they tell their neighbors, "Hey, you should come on to Nextdoor. "It's a great place for us to connect. "I just heard something interesting "that happened on Nextdoor." But then we also use a variety of different mechanisms to invite people that are a little unusual for internet companies. For example, we allow our members to send out postcard invitations, because again, they don't have phone numbers, they don't have emails or electronic correspondence. So we've had to resort to some non-traditional types of marketing to get the word out about Nextdoor. >> Don't share any secrets, but what percentage of new members come through a postcard sent by a neighbor? >> Well, not isolating postcards, the vast majority of our members are coming in because of a referral from another member, of which postcards are one of those mechanisms. >> Are one piece. >> Yeah. >> With all apps and stuff there's kind of the moment, right, the CNN moment, whatever, where things kind of catch. Is there a particular type of activity in the neighborhood that is the one that kind of catalyzes people where you get that little spike? >> Well, it depends. In a lot of different cases, I remember an example from really the early days of the company, a community in Woodside, California, which is just right down the road from here, a small child in that neighborhood had developed meningitis, and meningitis if you don't know is hugely contagious. It's really bad news. And so lots and lots of members got the word out about this, and that brought new members in because they were saying, "Well, wait a minute, what do I do about meningitis? "Do we need to get immunizations? "Do we need to do something else? "Do we need to quarantine our kids?" So sometimes it's bad news like that. In other cases it's good news, it's about neighborhood events, it's about bringing people together. One of our very first neighborhoods organized a Halloween party, a Halloween parade in their neighborhood, and they used Nextdoor to organize the entire thing, and they had like 50% participation in the neighborhood. It was a small neighborhood of 90 households, but to see all the kids, and them taking pictures and publishing them on Nextdoor, it created this connectivity that just didn't exist before, so. >> And that's such great point, because we are so used to be connecting with everything, and we think we're so connected, we all have over 500 LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers and Facebook friends, but it's very abstracted. It actually can be very isolating. So it seems like it probably was like a no brainer from an investment perspective to go, this is the, as you said in your keynote, paraphrase, this is the original social network. So talk to us about how you built that on AWS, how you've leveraged the power of AWS, the technologies, to gain what you have done so far. >> It's interesting, because prior to starting this company I was at Google, and we always felt like one of our technology advantages at Google was that we had near infinite computing resources, and that the computing resources were abstracted away from the developers so that they could just go in and build applications and not need to worry about what actually powered those applications under the hood. You said, "I needed some RAM. "I needed some disk. "I need some CPU," and boom, you're off to the races. So coming out of Google, and this is a long time ago now in 2008, seeing that AWS was just getting started with EC2 and S3, and that the playing field was leveled for developers in such a way that you no longer had to rack and stack servers, you didn't need to have a physical data center, you didn't have to have people managing that data center, and that you could use hardware as software really, you could interface with it as software, was hugely powerful. So we started out on EC2 and S3, and over time, and as we fast forward to today, we're using almost 30 different AWS services, including DynamoDB, ECS, Redshift, Kinesis, and so all of these components fit together in running our business. >> Right. Early lines, right, for AWS. It's a data center as an API is one of my favorites, just those little lines, but one of the, so security, all that stuff is kind of done talking about security for a publisher in the cloud, but one other thing that still is out there is at some point, you know, you rent, rent, rent, and at some point you pass a milestone where it's more economical to buy. Clearly you guys didn't buy. Netflix hasn't bought. There's plenty of cases, but from your point of view as a founder and a businessman, and also an operator, when you looked at that, has that ever come up in your discussion as your Amazon bills get bigger and bigger and bigger, and if so, kind of what's the internal discussion and why are you where you are today? >> So we, like a lot of startups, we really value speed and we want to focus on the things that we're really good at, and the things that we're good at are building great products. So we are so advantaged by the fact that we do not have to manage our own infrastructure, that we can use these component parts from which to build our applications, and nowhere is this more apparent than in prototyping new features, right? When you don't necessarily know if something is going to work, you don't want to go make a big investment in procuring resources for that. You want to just be able to spin something up on demand and try it out, and if it doesn't work you shut it back down. And so for us it's a TCO, total cost of ownership, type of question. And along with having on premises data centers and infrastructure comes overhead for maintenance and having teams that do that, and right now, for all of these neighborhoods that we support, 135,000 neighborhoods in the US, right, we only have two people that manage our underlying infrastructure, two dev-ops folks. >> And how many people do you have in the whole company? >> The entire company is about 150 people, and we have 60 of them in engineering, so we're a really, really, really lean team, and we're supporting massive scale with that small team because of the help of something like AWS. And this would've never been possible 10 years ago, so. >> And you'd rather spend that next marginal dollar on another developer, or marketing, or sales, or community, or something, than a piece of metal and a rack. >> We want to put that money towards making a better user experience for our users, and whether that means going into new communities, places where we aren't already, or improving engagement in communities where we already have the product, in either case that's a better dollar spent for us. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So along those lines, how do you do that? How are you taking user feedback and determining kind of what the next steps are even within the US, but also is there, as Andy Jessie actually talked about in his fireside chat, the GOs that they're expending, they're in 16 now, is there maybe a model to kind of follow along where AWS has a footprint? I'd love to know what that customer engagement is to help really refine that user experience. >> Yeah, there's a few different ways that we can get customer feedback. One is sort of implicit. So we have lots of data that we collect and look at and trying to understand like what features are really popular, what features are taking off, what features aren't really as popular as others, and we do a lot of A/B and split testing to understand how these features perform. But the other way is just good old fashioned qualitative feedback from our users. So we have a couple of different ways that we do that. One, we have a neighborhood operations team that's always in contact with our communities. We have leads in our communities that serve as sort of moderators and the folks that manage the community's activity, and so we lean on them heavily for feedback. And then we have a national leads forum where they all come together and they exchange their own experiences building their community. And from that, it's a treasure trove of information where we communicate with them, we participate in those forums, and then we build the features that we think that they want. >> It's funny, this theme of competing for speed, you're competing against time has come up a number of times today, in Werner's keynote, you mentioned it, it came up again in Andy's fireside chat. I thought it was interesting in your keynote piece how the measure of speed and deployment has so radically changed. It used to be one push a day was crazy. And you talked about a concept of democratization of deployment, which I thought was interesting. Because in the big data world we're always talking about democratizing big data, get it out of the hands of data scientists, let everybody make better decisions based on data, but you talked about democratization of deployments which I've never heard before. Wondering if you could share that story, because again, one a day, that's no longer the measure of success. >> No. So the way that we think about this and the reason that I call it democratization of deployment is as you invest more in automation and you turn down the kind of batching of releases together, the batches of commits together, you can now isolate their impact, and you can move faster by doing more frequent, smaller releases. And part of that is each developer is responsible for their own code going out to production. So what we've invested in is a lot of automation that makes it possible for any one of our developers to push a button, a metaphorical button, and actually push code out to the site, observe how that code performs, and then we can move onto the next one. So in the old world people would often hire a release engineer, and the release engineer's job was really to coordinate all of the activities of the developers, build packages, get them staged and ready for QA, and the overhead on that just does not scale well as a company gets bigger and bigger. And so what we've said is, "Listen developers, "you guys are responsible. "You guys know how your code works. "Let's make it possible for you "to minimize the amount of time "between you committing a piece of code "and that code being live to our users." And so that's what I kind of was talking about in terms of democratization of the release process, making sure that everyone can do it. >> What I thought just was fascinating is on one end everybody is talking about smaller, marginal units of compute and store, etc., right, and yet on the other hand you were basically doing, basically duplicating your entire production environment in kind of this red black strategy, build it up, make that one go, crash the other one. Build up a fresh one, make that one go, crash the old one, and leveraging what are basically infinite resources behind the AWS screen in a really innovative way that you could never do that with your own hardware. >> Well, a lot of credit goes to Netflix. We saw a presentation that they did a few years ago at Reinvent that inspired us to build our own kind of version of the red black deployment system. But again, because these resources are ephemeral, you can spin them up and shut them down, that's what makes any of that possible. So it's really, really awesome for us, because we're moving fast. In fact, I don't even know how many deploys we've done today, but every time a deploy is done we get a message in a Slack channel that says, "Hey, somebody pushed." And it says who the conductor of the train that actually pushed out the commit is, and so you have full accountability in this like living log of what's going on in your production environment, and anyone can do it. Even our interns are allowed to do it, and so it's really, really empowering for our developers to be able to do that. >> I was going to say, that was the word that I heard when you were talking earlier. It's really this empowerment, which is huge for productivity. And speaking of productivity, you guys have really achieved some pretty significant technology achievements that are presumably in this feedback circle going back and making the experience for your mother in law, your mom, probably my mom, even better. What are some of those technology achievements? You mentioned a few of them on the keynote. I'd love for our guests to hear some of those big things that you've achieved. >> Yeah, I think when we think about the technology stack there are two things that we're trying to do. Number one is build for our developers so that they can push features out faster, but then the second and the most important is that we improve the user experience for our users. And most recently, we've done a few different things. Number one is we've introduced this concept around personalization, and it's very lightweight at this point where we can try and understand, what is your experience? If you're not a parent, do you really care about play dates and all of the information about kids? If you don't have a pet, do you care about what's going on with pets? Do you not like the classified ads? And so we're starting to look at data, this is where the big data stack becomes very interesting, and say, "Okay, let's see if we can "match the content in your neighborhood "to the things that you're interested in," and sort of making a lot of investments in that area. And then the second is we're making a lot of investments in search, because we think a lot of people will come to Nextdoor with an intent in mind. They'll say, "Hey, you know what? "I need to find a handyman or a plumber." And what's the natural way to do that is to go into a search box and say, "Handyman," right, and look for handymen in your local community. And so we're making a lot of investments on both fronts that will make it easier for our users to get connected to the information that's most important to them. >> That personalization is so key because we sort of, as consumers and as people who expect things immediately, we want what we want, we want what's relevant. And we know a lot of companies, whether they're banks or whatnot, retailers, spend a tremendous amount of time and dollars investing to know how do I make this experience unique to Jeff, or unique to Prakash, or unique to Lisa. And so I think that there's so much capabilities. I have to ask you though, you must have the most connected neighborhood. You must have the best block parties. (laughing) >> Me personally? >> Yeah. >> You know, it's interesting. The product takes on the identity of each of our communities. And so in an urban community like in San Francisco I'll say that I still don't know all of my neighbors, but it's really, really comforting to know that I know by name and by face who they are even if I haven't had in person interactions. But one of the things that we always talk about, which is pretty cool, and it's happened to me in my own community, is we talk about this concept of bits that move atoms, and using our platform, which is really exchanging information electronically, to facilitate in person interactions, and those are the atoms. And it's definitely happened to me where I've seen someone on the street and I just say, "Hello," right, because I'm like, "Oh yeah, I saw your post. "Did you get your dog back? "Were you able to sell that television?" And so it's really interesting that this is actually happening, and ultimately that's our goal is to bring back that sense of community to neighborhoods and to make neighborhoods stronger and safer, and the way you do that is by connecting people in the community. >> Right, right. >> Absolutely. >> It's a neighborhood watch on steroids kind of, right? >> Totally, yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's fantastic. And I'm sure they would be blown away if they knew they were talking to the guy behind Nextdoor. >> Prakash: One of them. >> One of them. >> One of them. >> Well Prakash, thank you so much for sharing your story with us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> It's so exciting to get back to the original social network and really kind of, I love that. I think people might even be learning how to write again rather than type. >> My handwriting is terrible. >> We can only hope. >> Reaching, you're reaching there. >> Well Prakash, thank you so much. Continued success with Nextdoor. >> Thank you very much. >> We so much appreciate your time here. >> For my co-host Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. We're live here at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We're actually in the hang space, broadcast booth It's theCube's SilliconANGLE's flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Meneman, our next guest, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Great to see you again. Every VMworld, every year that we've done the VMworld, you've been on theCube. >> Well, it's always a pleasure. You guys are fun. You do your homework. I enjoy our time together, and I can't imagine VMworld without theCube. Look, we are really impressed with the vision you've laid out, because the number one question we get asked on theCube and in backchannels like CrowdChat and Twitter, is VMware ecosystem is looking for the straight and narrow, they want that, they want to see the path, the 90-mile stair if you will, so they can actually accelerate their business. >> Pat: Yeah. >> Can you laid that out, and just quickly review what your key points were for the folks that didn't capture the full keynote. >> Well, clearly we said, boy, we gave clear data with regard to what the cloud market looks like, what it's going to look like today, 2021, 2030, crossover points, and really the key summary of that is it's a complex world. It's going to be a multi-cloud environment for our customers, and they want to know, how do I not only build hybrid clouds, private clouds, and how do I take advantage of public clouds? And we gave a comprehensive view of what that looks like, the cross-cloud architecture. Here's a way that we can bring all cloud embodiments into a common framework. Cross-cloud architecture, two big components are part of it, build your private cloud, enable that as a service, that's a cloud foundation, bring it together, vSAN, vSphere, NSX, along with new lifecycle management capabilities, making that easy, do it as a service with IBM and our partnership that we announced there, but we expect many more of those with other vCloud Air Network partners, and then the cool new Cross-Cloud Services. Make those available, embrace any cloud, and then give our enterprise customers the tools to manage in this cross-cloud or multi-cloud environment. >> John: What's the catalyst for this announcement? Was it an epiphany, was it more that the market was ready for it? Because now, multi-cloud, but how you talk about it, any device anywhere, that's been the previous message. But now it catalyzes around this positioning. What was the moment of truth where you said okay, this is, we're going with this. It doesn't seem like you're betting the ranch on this, but it is betting the ranch on this in a way, because this is, as you said, the future, and it's going to be mostly your journey. So why did it come together? >> A couple of things happened. If you remember last year's VMworld, we did this little NSX demo where it says, we can connect NSX onto the cloud, you remember that? >> Yeah. >> Literally, Guido comes into Raghu and I, about two weeks before VMworld last night, and he says "we've got to work it. And can I demo it in my session?" Right, at the thing. Raghu looked at each other and he says, "Okay, let's do it. Let's see how people respond to it." So that was one catalyst. The second catalyst, we had a couple of customer meetings where the customer said to us, and he says, "This is my best. I'm doing this on Amazon, I'm exploring Azure over here, I've got a boatload of VMware, I'm doing this many- help me solve these problems. So it was clearly customer feedback, and there's a vibrant response we had from this little last-minute demo that we did at last year's VMworld, and sort of out of that, we said, "Let's really take this seriously. Let's go dive deeply into it." And as Guido said in the keynote, we've now talked to about a couple hundred customers and a huge response, and some, you know, usually when you do a cool new product, people say let me try that. In this case, the response we've gotten is, I need that now. I mean, it's a very definitive response. These are the kind of things I need to manage today's problems, so I guess Guido's already late in getting it done, so I've got to crack the whip harder and get this in the market. >> So it's not so much retooling, though we did talk about yesterday at the things, you're kind of mid-flight but you're adjusting to the market. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And clearly our cloud journey's been one where, you know, if you go back and I gave some of the data 2011, no one expected the public cloud to be where it was, where it is today. I mean, it clearly accelerated faster, some of the ease of use, efficiency characteristics, hey, this is a capability that nobody quite expected to grow this rapidly. And it's now permeated Enterprise customers who are starting to take advantage of it. But they don't have the tools to really take advantage of it. >> So some key leads we were reading yesterday in your keynote, you know we always like to read between the lines, kind of like the messaging inside of it. >> Sometimes you get it right, sometimes, you know. >> We get it right most of the time. Your comment, your sit-down with Michael Dell was really interesting, okay. Because this is an open ecosystem play. His first point was about open ecosystem. You've been banging on this from day one since you've been CEO of VMware, since the throw of the first pitch of the NetApp event that got viral with that jersey on. >> I went to the NetApp customer partner event last night, every year I'm there as well. Just like theCube, I go to the NetApp event. >> He could say that you have been hardcore about open ecosystem from day one, and with the merger now set for the 7th, the merger that you can transact on the 7th, you still want to be independent. The open ecosystem is super important to you, and Michael, I heard it right from his mouth. Share some color on why and how that's going to evolve. Will everyone have untempered access to VMware, will all partners have the same level of access and visibility? >> The simple answer is yes. We're going to continue exactly on that strategy as we go forward. And clearly I'm going to do more with Michael and the Dell team, you know, as we see that going forward. But it's incumbent upon us, even as we do more with Dell, that we lean in more aggressively to our HP, to our Lenovo, to our Fujitsu, and our other partners as well. So we see that as a critical part. And I say the VMware ecosystem is evolving. Five years ago, would you have had the cadre of security and networking vendors? No. Would you have expected to have all the system integrators? No. I mean, we're clearly expanding. Service provider partners, our ecosystem has broadened our product portfolio, it's becoming a broader statement as well. So that's a commitment. We're going to remain a platform play, an ecosystem play, and obviously, with Michael's comments onstage, he's cheering us on. He's saying, I'm going to grow my business with VMware faster, and I hope all of the other ecosystem partners grow faster than I do. >> Is this going to be a persona change? Because now, if you look at VMware's ecosystem, which has been robust, there's some good salivation going on, there's a change-up as the ecosystem shifts. vCenter was once the big thing, now you've got NSX and all this other stuff in the cloud. Is there a persona changeover in who the target customers are in the ecosystem? >> Well, clearly, I mean, the customer's the same. It remains sort of that IT buyer, which increasingly, as I talked about in the keynote, is becoming a business buyer, but it's that core IT Enterprise customer. We're not a consumer company, we're not an app company, we're an infrastructure company and we're going to satisfy that broadly across the industry. >> John: Yeah. >> But in that context, I mean, look at it. You know, over here we have the Internet of Things. Wow, you know, we have the NFV zone. We're having a broader and broader set of who is our ecosystem, and that's absolutely going to continue as we go forward because solutions to things that we do are permeating more and more of the entire business landscape as we go forward. It's a really fun time. You know, even though I like to joke with Michael that he was younger when I first met him. And against that, you know, he and I have both been at this for over three decades. But in many regards, it feels like we're just getting started. It really is a fun period. >> So Pat, the management suite has been a challenge for the industry in general. VMware has, as John said, strong presence with vCenter. As you start reaching out to some of these environments, why does VMware kind of have the right to think that it's going to be at the center of this discussion for some of your customers, especially as they talk about like Microsoft, they've got strong pieces there. Big partners like Intel, Amazon in the play, so why VMware? >> Well, I think there's a couple of aspects to it. And, who is better to be a neutral player, to enable people to have cloud freedom? Right? If you just start with that question, and we'd say hey, we enable people to have hardware freedom. It's in our ethos to have this platform play, to have a broader ecosystem, open APIs, it's what we do. And in the cloud world, hmm, Amazon, okay, they have a legitimate role. But are they going to be the best ones to do private and public, or enable Azure or AliCloud? I think we have a very legitimate position there to say, hey, we're a neutral player, we can be cross-player, cross-industry. Secondly, the technology assets that we have, what we demonstrated on stage yesterday with Guido, think if you didn't have NSX and vRealize and some of the storage assets? That was many, many years of engineering and we pulled all of those pieces together for a comprehensive demonstration of all of those pieces in nine months. That's because we have a rich set of technologies that we can bring to this Cross-Cloud Services. >> So VMware's got a pretty sophisticated stack there, lots of customer options. When we look at the cloud native states, things change a lot. You've got a lot of open source in there, most customers don't buy shrink-wrapped software, they take a lot of components, they tend to put some things together. There's been a little open source, but we've talked for many years about, open source isn't one of the primary revenue drivers for VMware. It's not kind of core to the business. Is that changing? How do you keep making money in the open source world? How do you compete? >> I think there's two different aspects to that that I'd like to, you know, one is, essentially our strategy is, enable these new environments on the VMware franchise. So what's my revenue model? I'm going to keep selling vSphere, I'm going to sell NSX, I'm going to sell vSAN, our management tools, et cetera, even as I add more open source components into those environments. And hey, I'm pretty happy. What's the price point of it going to be? It's free, if you're an Enterprise Plus customer. We're just adding it as another set of capabilities on top of it. It's all open source bits, you've, you know, Stu, have you downloaded it yet off GitHub? >> I have not. >> Pat: You have not? I'm disappointed to hear that. Get on it, right? Get back to work. >> You've got to code tonight, Stu. No party. >> Right? You know. Too much partying for you, Stu. But it's going to be available. We're engaging this open source community, in an open source way, but we're adding our industry rock-hard components, and that's important. Because enterprises are going to start deploying containerized applications. And then you're going to start asking questions. Are they secured? Are they managed? Do you have, like it said onstage, are they monitored? How are you going to network them? And all of the sudden, it's not going to be some lightweight stateless application, you're going to start saying, this is a better way to do stateful applications. What about resilience for that? Get back to the rock-hard questions that infrastructure guys know how to handle. So this is a way to saying yes to those problems but also saying yes to these cool new developer things as well. And in our sense, you know, we think we're well-positioned to go do it, but hey, some of it may be open source projects, and hey, we're showing that we're going to support those, we're going to deliver those, we're going to embrace those as well. So I'm sure that we hired Dirk Hohndel, a longtime friend. I hired him before at Intel, so now we brought him over here to VMware. Because we clearly see, we have to enhance our position overall in the open source community. Not a strong point for VMware in the past, and we're quite committed to changing that perception going forward. >> A lot of great code in the open source, but you mentioned those things about the infrastructure. I want to get back to that point. Those complex things. Automations now playing a big role, we saw the demo today with vSAN,Yanbing was just, one push of a button, a lot of policy, automatic policy automation, that's a great direction. >> Pat: Oh, yeah. >> So, I like that direction. But now I want to bring that back to Cross-Cloud. NSX with security and automation, and protection with the vSphere and then Cross-Cloud. How do you look at this? Because I know you're a strategist, so I think we'll get the strategist angle here. It's like the inter-networking data, I was riffing with Stu earlier about inter-networking has spawned because of all these networks needed to be connected together. And that became >> A whole industry. >> A huge industry. A lot of wealth created, a lot of innovation. Inter-clouding, or Cross-Cloud as you call it, is that dynamic. How do you play well? IBM's onstage, there's no Amazon onstage. I didn't see Microsoft. Are we going to see the other clouds come in to the fold, or are you going to go to them and partner with them? >> So let's, you know, one of the architectural principles of Cross-Cloud is public APIs. So I'm not requiring any unique support from Amazon and Azure, and that's an important statement as well, because now I go to a customer who's taken advantage of Amazon, and they can look at some of those Cross-Cloud Services and then says, well, what if Amazon doesn't support you in the future? And we say, these are standard APIs. They're supporting hundreds of customers on those APIs. It's important, right, that we're engaging with, I'll say, the way that the cloud is being presented to customers and giving them better tools to manage. Now that does not mean I'm not going to do more work in integrating more deeply and partnering with them. >> So does that support like the Amazon S3 API then? >> Pat: Of course. >> Okay. >> John: Well, Sling API's a little bit different. >> Management APIs is actually more appropriate to look at it in that respect as well. How do you spawn, how do you stop, how do you manage VMs, how do you do availability cells, those are the things more appropriate to a management tool in that regard. But those are public API, public interfaces, we're taking advantage of all of those. And we are going to work more closely with the Azures and the Amazons as well, we're going to invest in those partnerships. And there may be areas that we compete with them, but we're going to go do as much as we can, because that's what our customers are asking us to do. Give me better support for those environments, which workloads can I put there? Can I network? Can I secure? Maybe in some cases I don't want my groups using nonpub, or non, you know, multi-cloud APIs. Another case is, hey, I am fully comfortable saying, >> Pick the right cloud for the job kind of thing. >> Absolutely. Right >> Is your philosophy. So slinging APIs is pretty trivial relative to interfacing with the cloud, but the customer might want to go deeper, and, because that might create a complexity issue around, and also functionality might not be as robust as, say, deeper stack integration for data management and whatnot. Are you worried, or we're watching, certainly, like Microsoft, if they feel the proprietary aspect of their stack around data for instance, that's the holy grail, it can get sticky, but still be quote 'open' but not proprietary. >> Yeah. >> So the lock inspect is the lack of openness, per se, to say with data. >> And by the way, you know, I mean, in that respect, what we want to do is present to customers the tools that they can manage those decisions. For instance, a customer may say, hey, I love that machine learning API that Google offers. It's giving me a great competitive advantage, it's not available on any other cloud, and we're going to say, hey, it's proprietary API, if you use it and your data's there, you've picked that service, but we're still going to help you manage and secure it. Another workload, the customer might say, Hey, this workload, I want to make sure has multi-cloud landing zones associated with it. So we're going to help him manage those decisions as well, because if you stay in this domain, I can make it run anywhere, I'll be able to do cross-optimize it, maybe geo-optimize it, et cetera. So it's giving them the tools to manage those decisions. Because I think, hey, you know, Microsoft, they're going to do really well with things related to collaboration of 365. I think Google, I think they're going to do really well around data machine learning. IBM Enterprise, great cloud. Amazon, hey, they've won this round of the developer cloud. Each of them has sort of staked turfs that are very clear, they're going to present value to customers, and our view is, we're going to make those all more readily consumer, suitable for enterprises to run, manage, secure, and connect their workloads into those environments. And build the connectivity into their private clouds, their vCloud Air Networks, their manage clouds as well, that's what we can uniquely do. >> Amazon is going strong in the enterprise. I agree they've won the developer cloud, but they're aggressively going after the enterprise. Mainly Oracle for now, but I'm sure they might think about speech ed that you have. >> Oh, sure. Sure, absolutely. But, you know, in that space, moving a lightweight application, okay, done. Right, you do an OEF conversion, you're done, man, you sell it like that. Oh, you've got to move the full network configuration, IP address ability, right? I've got to deal with different- oh my gosh. Those are hard things to do. The easy stuff moves pretty easy. The hard stuff, okay, that's where we're at now as we address Enterprise customers, and you just don't pick those up and relocate those onto Amazon, Azure, or anyplace else. You know, that's really where the strength of VMware lies. >> So Pat, Dave Vellante is, you know, just at this point, he can't be here for the interview, so I'm a surrogate for him. >> I refuse this interview, not having Dave here. >> John: He says, Pat, I love you forever. That's what he says. >> He asked me to have your commentary on the new era of IT. Officially announced today, the Dell EMC deal, September 7th it will go down, you know, of course that has ramifications on VMware. HP split recently. Lots of, I mean, major signal changes to the industry. What's your take? >> Yeah, you know, as I described before, this is a very disruptive period of the IT industry. Consolidation of portions of it, we think as the hardware industry has matured, stabilized, you know, not growing, still cashflow rich but not growing, we think consolidation is a very natural phase of that industry's maturation. And against that, the Dell move, it's a very bold move given the size of it, but if you look at the cashflows of the companies, as Michael says, it's pretty easy math. It wasn't that hard to, you know, this is how much the cashflow is, this is how much the debt payment is, the math works. Do the deal. >> And Michael said, if you don't understand that VMware is hugely important to that, you don't understand the math. >> Right. For that, you know, clearly, having a controlling interest there, he gets it. We have a lot of growth potential as well, evaluation increase, potential strategic role, but he also realizes that the independence of VMware is critical as well. A software company is very different than a hardware company and our position in the industry, the ecosystem, he respects that greatly. We also think that we're far from done with disruptions elsewhere. We just saw Rackspace go private. Wow, you know, that's another structured shift. Changes in the structure of Citrix as a company, at Five, as they go through their transitions in this next phase of growth, Palo Alto, a good friend Mark McLaughlin, they're driving their software and service revenue growth from hardware. Lots of changes in the industry. Collectively, we look at those and we say, boy, this period of change, disruption, radical growth, consolidation of different places, VMware sits now at a very stable and comfortable place. I've got a great battle sheet, I've got a clear path in front of me, going back to the beginning of the interview, and, right, behind my battle sheet, is this huge turbo-charged engines that is cheering for our growth, distributing us, and even a bigger battle sheet behind us. So we sit in a very uniquely wonderful position. >> I have a final question for what a great, I know you've got another point, and thanks for, first of all, thanks for your time again. What's the biggest disruption that you're watching that's motivating you, whether it's lighting a fire under your feet, or just something that you see that's so epic, and get out for that next week, as you said, if you're not out for that next week, you're driftwood. >> Can I give you two? >> John: Yeah. >> So the one that I think is clearly the biggest is the shift to the public cloud. And I'll just say, that's why the Cross-Cloud announcement was so critical. Also, I wanted to demystify some of the numbers in the keynote. So we went out there and said, very specifically, this is where it's going to be, SaaS, and IaaS, and where it's going to be at different points in time, because I think there's been all sorts of numbers floating around the industry of what it's going to look like over time. But clearly, this public cloud's becoming a big deal. If we have to present ourselves as relevant and critical to our customers in that transition, so I'll say that's the one that we have to navigate through to really position VMware for the next couple decades. The other one that I point out is really, as we talked about, the IoT and the device picture. Wow, we're going to have more machine-connected devices in 2019, >> Love that stat, by the way. >> Than human-connected devices. And that presents enormous business opportunity, right, security threats and opportunities, data infrastructure to go with it, IT, as I would say, IT has left the nest. It's now permeated, >> And software's, a primary function of all the new software that has to be written to handle those situations. >> And in that sense, you want to say, even though I'm three and a half decades in the industry, it sort of feels like we're just getting started. >> You had a spring in your step until you had a cast on it, so you still, you've got to be careful you don't break down. As you get older, your bones get a bit more hard to recover. >> That's right. >> Pat, thanks so much for spending the time, great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure. >> Pat Gelsinger, inside theCube, here in VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. >> Mr. Vellante must be here next year. >> Dave, man date. Stu Miniman and I, Stu, you did good. You held your own. Pat, as usual, great. This is theCube, you're watching theCube at VMworld, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. (techno beat)