>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies: "Creating technologies that drive human progress." >> Good late afternoon from Barcelona, Spain at the Theater of Barcelona. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson of "theCUBE" covering MWC23. This is our third day of continuous wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. And you know we're going to be here tomorrow as well. We've been having some amazing conversations about the ecosystem. And we're going to continue those conversations next. Honore Labourdette is here, the VP global partner, Ecosystem Success Team, Telco Media and Entertainment at Red Hat. And Tony Jeffries joins us as well, a Senior Director of Product Management, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to have both of you here. So we're going to be talking about the evolution of the telecom stack. We've been talking a lot about disaggregation the last couple of days. Honore, starting with you, talk about the evolution of the telecom stock. You were saying before we went live this is your 15th at least MWC. So you've seen a lot of evolution, but what are some of the things you're seeing right now? >> Well, I think the interesting thing about disaggregation, which is a key topic, right? 'Cause it's so relative to 5G and the 5G core and the benefits and the features of 5G core around disaggregation. But one thing we have to remember, when you disaggregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way. And that's predominantly what we're doing in our partnership with Dell, is we're bringing those disaggregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of the new technology, at the same time taking out the complexity and making it easier for our Telco customers to deploy and to scale and to get much more, accelerate the time to revenue. So the trend now is, what we're seeing is two things I would say. One is how do we solve for the complexity with the disaggregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges? >> Tony, jump on in, talk about what you guys announced last week, Dell and Red Hat, and how it's addressing the complexities that Honore was saying, "Hey, they're there." >> Yeah. You know, our customers, our operators are saying, "Hey, I want disaggregation." "I want competition in the market." But at the same time who's going to support all this disaggregation, right? And so at the end of the day, there's going to be an operator that's going to have to figure this out. They're going to have an SLA that they're going to have to meet. And so they're going to want to go with a best-in-class partner with Red Hat and Dell, in terms of our infrastructure and their software together as one combined engineered system. And that's what we call a Dell Telecom infrastructure block for Red Hat. And so at the end of the day, things may go wrong, and if they do, who are they going to call for that support? And that's also really a key element of an engineered system, is this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one. Which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation, yeah. >> So what is the market, the go to market motion look like? People have loyalties in the IT space to technologies that they've embraced and been successful with for years and years. So you have folks in the marketplace who are diehard, you know, dyed red, Red Hat folks. Is it primarily a pull from them? How does that work? How do you approach that to your, what are your end user joint customers? What does that look like from your perspective? >> Sure, well, interestingly enough both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time, right? So we do have the brand with those Telco customers for these solutions. What we're seeing with this solution is, it's an emerging market. It's an emerging market for a new technology. So there's an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together. So our field sales teams will be motivated to, you know, take advantage of the solution for their customers, as will the Dell team. And I'll let Tony speak to the Dell, go to market. >> Yeah. You know, so we really co-sell together, right? We're the key partners. Dell will end up fulfilling that order, right? We send these engineered systems through our factories and we send that out either directly to a customer or to a OTEL lab, like an intermediate lab where we can further refine and customize that offer for that particular customer. And so we got a lot of options there, but we're essentially co-selling. And Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. So it's a really good mix. >> And I think, if I may, one of the key differentiators is the actual capabilities that we're bringing together inside of this pre-integrated solution. So it includes the Red Hat OpenShift which is the container software, but we also add our advanced cluster management as well as our Ansible automation. And then Dell adds their orchestration capability along with the features and functionalities of the platform. And we put that together and we offer capability, remote automation orchestration and management capabilities that again reduces the operating expense, reduces the complexity, allows for easy scale. So it's, you know, certainly it's all about the partnership but it's also the capabilities of the combined technology. >> I was just going to ask about some of the numbers, and you mentioned some of them. Reduction of TCO I imagine is also a big capability that this solution enables besides reducing OpEx. Talk about the TCO reduction. 'Cause I know there's some numbers there that Dell and Red Hat have already delivered to the market. >> Yeah. You know, so these infrastructure blocks are designed specifically for Core, or for RAN, or for the Edge. We're starting out initially in the Core, but we've done some market research with a company called ACG. And ACG has looked at day zero, day one and day two TCO, FTE hours saved. And we're looking at over 40 to 50% TCO savings over you know, five year period, which is quite significant in terms of cost savings at a TCO level. But also we have a lot of numbers around power consumption and savings around power consumption. But also just that experience for our operator that says, hey, I'm going to go to one company to get the best in class from Red Hat and Dell together. That saves a lot of time in procurement and that entire ordering process as well. So you get a lot of savings that aren't exactly seen in the FTE hours around TCO, but just in that overall experience by talking to one company to get the best of both from both Red Hat and Dell together. >> I think the comic book character Charlie Brown once said, "The most discouraging thing in the world is having a lot of potential." (laughing) >> Right. >> And so when we talk about disaggregating and then reaggregating or reintegrating, that means choice. >> Tony: Yeah. >> How does an operator approach making that choice? Because, yeah, it sounds great. We have this integration lab and you have all these choices. Well, how do I decide, how does a person decide? This is a question for Honore from a Red Hat perspective, what's the secret sauce that you believe differentiates the Red Hat-infused stack versus some other assemblage of gear? >> Well, there's a couple of key characteristics, and the one that I think is most prevalent is that we're open, right? So "open" is in Red Hat's DNA because we're an open source technology company, and with that open source technology and that open platform, our customers can now add workloads. They have options to choose the workloads that they want to run on that open source platform. As they choose those workloads, they can be confident that those workloads have been certified and validated on our platform because we have a very robust ecosystem of ISVs that have already completed that process with open source, with Red Hat OpenShift. So then we take the Red Hat OpenShift and we put it on the Dell platform, which is market leader platform, right? Combine those two things, the customers can be confident that they can put those workloads on the combined platform that we're offering and that those workloads would run. So again, it goes back to making it simpler, making it easy to procure, easy to run workloads, easy to deploy, easy to operate. And all of that of course equates to saving time always equates to saving money. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Oh, I thought you wanted to continue. >> No, I think Honore sort of, she nailed it. You know, Red Hat is so dominant in 5G, and what they're doing in the market, especially in the Core and where we're going into the RAN, you know, next steps are to validate those workloads, those workload vendors on top of a stack. And the Red Hat leader in the Core is key, right? It's instant credibility in the core market. And so that's one of the reasons why we, Dell, want to partner with with Red Hat for the core market and beyond. We're going to be looking at not only Core but moving into RAN very soon. But then we do, we take that validated workload on top of that to optimize that workload and then be able to instantiate that in the core and the RAN. It's just a really streamlined, good experience for our operators. At the end of the day, we want happy customers in between our mutual customer base. And that's what you get whenever you do that combined stack together. >> Were operators, any operators, and you don't have to mention them by name, involved in the evolution of the infra blocks? I'm just curious how involved they were in helping to co-develop this. I imagine they were to some degree. >> Yeah, I could take that one. So, in doing so, yeah, we can't be myopic and just assume that we nailed it the first time, right? So yeah, we do work with partners all the way up and down the stack. A lot of our engineering work with Red Hat also brings in customer experience that is key to ensure that you're building and designing the right architecture for the Core. I would like to use the names, I don't know if I should, but a lot of those names are big names that are leaders in our industry. But yeah, their footprints, their fingerprints are all over those design best practices, those architectural designs that we build together. And then we further that by doing those validated workloads on top of that. So just to really prove the point that it's optimized for the Core, RAN, Edge kind of workload. >> And it's a huge added value for Red Hat to have a partner like Dell who can take all of those components, take the workload, take the Red Hat software, put it on the platform, and deliver that out to the customers. That's really, you know, a key part of the partnership and the value of the partnership because nobody really does that better than Dell. That center of excellence around delivery and support. >> Can you share any feedback from any of those nameless operators in terms of... I'm even kind of wondering what the catalyst was for the infra block. Was it operators saying, "Ah, we have these challenges here"? Was it the evolution of the Telco stack and Dell said, "We can come in with Red Hat and solve this problem"? And what's been some of their feedback? >> Yeah, it really comes down to what Honore said about, okay, you know, when we are looking at day zero, which is primarily your design, how much time savings can we do by creating that stack for them, right? We have industry experts designing that Core stack that's optimized for different levels of spectrum. When we do that we save a lot of time in terms of FTE hours for our architects, our operators, and then it goes into day one, right? Which is the deployment aspect for saving tons of hours for our operators by being able to deploy this. Speed to market is key. That ultimately ends up in, you know, faster time to revenue for our customers, right? So it's, when they see that we've already done the pre-work that they don't have to, that's what really resonates for them in terms of that, yeah. >> Honore, Lisa and I happen to be veterans of the Cloud native space, and what we heard from a lot of the folks in that ecosystem is that there is a massive hunger for developers to be able to deploy and manage and orchestrate environments that consist of Cloud native application infrastructure, microservices. >> Right. >> What we've heard here is that 5G equals Cloud native application stacks. Is that a fair assessment of the environment? And what are you seeing from a supply and demand for that kind of labor perspective? Is there still a hunger for those folks who develop in that space? >> Well, there is, because the very nature of an open source, Kubernetes-based container platform, which is what OpenShift is, the very nature of it is to open up that code so that developers can have access to the code to develop the workloads to the platform, right? And so, again, the combination of bringing together the Dell infrastructure with the Red Hat software, it doesn't change anything. The developer, the development community still has access to that same container platform to develop to, you know, Cloud native types of application. And you know, OpenShift is Red Hat's hybrid Cloud platform. So it runs on-prem, it runs in the public Cloud, it runs at the edge, it runs at the far edge. So any of the development community that's trying to develop Cloud native applications can develop it on this platform as they would if they were developing on an OpenShift platform in the public Cloud. >> So in "The Graduate", the advice to the graduate was, "Plastics." Plastics. As someone who has more children than I can remember, I forget how many kids I have. >> Four. >> That's right, I have four. That's right. (laughing) Three in college and grad school already at this point. Cloud native, I don't know. Kubernetes definitely a field that's going to, it's got some legs? >> Yes. >> Okay. So I can get 'em off my payroll quickly. >> Honore: Yes, yes. (laughing) >> Okay, good to know. Good to know. Any thoughts on that open Cloud native world? >> You know, there's so many changes that's going to happen in Kubernetes and services that you got to be able to update quickly. CICD, obviously the topic is huge. How quickly can we keep these systems up to date with new releases, changes? That's a great thing about an engineered system is that we do provide that lifecycle management for three to five years through this engagement with our customers. So we're constantly keeping them up with the latest and the greatest. >> David: Well do those customers have that expertise in-house, though? Do they have that now? Or is this a seismic cultural shift in those environments? >> Well, you know, they do have a lot of that experience, but it takes a lot of that time, and we're taking that off of their plate and putting that within us on our system, within our engineered system, and doing that automatically for them. And so they don't have to check in and try to understand what the release certification matrix is. Every quarter we're providing that to them. We're communicating out to the operator, telling them what's coming up latest and greatest, not only in terms of the software but the hardware and how to optimize it all together. That's the beauty of these systems. These are five year relationships with our operators that we're providing that lifecycle management end to end, for years to come. >> Lisa: So last question. You talked about joint GTM availability. When can operators get their hands on this? >> Yes. Yes. It's currently slated for early September release. >> Lisa: Awesome. So sometime this year? >> Yes. >> Well guys, thank you so much for talking with us today about Dell, Red Hat, what you're doing to really help evolve the telecom stack. We appreciate it. Next time come back with a customer, we can dig into it. That'd be fun. >> We sure will, absolutely. That may happen today actually, a little bit later. Not to let the cat out the bag, but good news. >> All right, well, geez, you're going to want to stick around. Thank you so much for your time. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. This is Lisa Martin of theCUBE at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. We'll be back after a short break. (calm music)

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Lisa Martin: Good afternoon everyone. theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC23. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of four days of CUBE content. I know, it's amazing. We're going to have a great conversation next with DISH and Dell, talking about the value of automation and telecom for 5G. Please welcome Song Toh, Senior Director of Product Management Infrastructure Automation at Dell. And Sidd Chenumolu, VP of Technology Development at DISH. Guys, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure. >> So let's go ahead and start with you. We know that DISH is developing its own open cloud native 5G network from the ground up. Talk to us about before you were working with Dell, what the situation was like and why you brought Dell in to help drive the innovation. >> Ah, that's a good question. So, three years ago we started the journey, and one thing that was very clear to us is that we want to work with the partners who are going to be the leaders in this space. And it was very clear we are going to be in the cloud side- we are going to be in hybrid cloud, we are going to have our own data centers. Everything that we built is going to replicate a cloud model. 'Cause it was very, like we said, what is 5G? Fundamentally, if you think about 5G, right? Everyone says people talk about speeds. Okay, get it. But it's also about vertical industries. It's about customization of a network, application driven network. That's the way I call it, because if you walk around the floor right now, everyone's talking about monetization of 5G, everyone keeps doing enterprise. So you put two and two together, what do you get? That means you have to work with the leaders who have been serving enterprises forever, who know the enterprises' pain, they know all the problem statements. So we said, "okay, let's see who's out there and who can help us." And then obviously, Dell comes to the picture. So we had a good conversation, there was an alignment in where Dell wanted to go long-term, so we saw synergies. So we had a vision, we needed their help. They wanted to get into this space too. So there was an agreement, let's do it together. And it's been a good partnership since then. >> What were some of the challenges that you had at that time? Going, "we've got some challenges here, some risks, we want to move DISH forward and automate." Talk about some of those challenges that helped you understand, "Yeah, Dell's the right partner for this." >> Oh, first is when we started this, right? I'll be honest, I don't think we anticipated the complexity. We didn't know what we didn't know. So initially it was learning from Dell, who was more like teaching us, "this is what you're going to see, this is how it's going to look like". And then we started bringing the telco aspects on top of it. So it was not like, "I'm going to build a 5G". We said, "no, Dell, tell me what does the data center look like? Tell me the day-to-day challenges. How do you bring a server in? How the rack looks like, what are the connectivity?" So, learning, then you bring the telco as an application, it was not like a telco first. It was like a software first, infrastructure second, now you bring in the telco part of it. So, I mean, challenges I would say, right? Everything was new, pretty much across the board for us. It was not just one thing. We were doing Open RAN, which was a brand new cloud native, was completely new. 5G standalone was new. No one had done that before, and (mumbles) was hybrid cloud. So I think we were on a stool sitting on the, with the four legs, all were wobbly. (laughs) We made it. So, automation was definitely the key. We knew we had to go at a scale, because we are in FCC deployment, we are meeting like- we will be at covering 230 million pops by June of this year. So, aggressive timelines- >> Dave Nicholson: Wait, say that again. How many, so say that ag- how many? >> 230 million. >> And, pops being points of presence? >> No, sorry, population. U. S.- >> Oh, population. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Okay, okay. >> Okay. I'm sorry, I'm- >> So, very aggressive buildout for us. >> Wow. >> And automation has to be the key for it, because we just cannot- first is, we cannot scale a company. We are a startup. This wireless is a startup. That's how we started with a handful of people. We obviously hired a lot of people since then, but we said, "we will never be at the scale of the existing CSPs today." We can't. Time is not on our side, and we don't want to be at that scale anyway, 'cause we want to be nimble, move fast. So what do you need? Automation. Automation at every layer. And it's a journey. Never stops. >> No, it doesn't stop. >> Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, she's- >> Go ahead and get a question in. I don't want to hog. >> So when most people hear DISH, they think of streaming content, they think of alternative to cable provider. >> Sidd: Yeah. >> In that space. But just clarify for us all of the things that DISH is involved with today, and what DISH aspires to be involved with as we move forward. >> Good question. We want to be in the connectivity space. We want to connect everything. That's our goal, our mission statement. We started with the satellite, since then we moved on to the IPTV Sling, which is a leader. So we are not afraid to take risks, right? So what we own- we own satellites, we know content delivery very well. I think we are done there for many years. We agreed to that. Now we said, "now we understand wireless". What we want to do is, we want to deliver the data to the customers, and whether it could be videos, it could be audio data, like voice, anything, or it could be a machine. We just want to be in the connectivity space of connecting everything, and based on- you look around, right? It's all about connectivity. Everything requires connectivity. It's all about data monetization, and we want to be there in every aspect of it. >> Connectivity is almost the lifeblood these days of everything that we do, right? >> Sidd: Yep. >> Song: Indeed. >> And of every industry. Song, talk a little bit about the DISH Wireless use case. How some of their challenges in telco really maybe helped even Dell accelerate its presence in telco. >> Absolutely, right. I think one thing that Sidd mentioned, right, 230 million populations, but what does that translate to in terms of infrastructure deployment? 'Cause he said it's a startup. They started from not a whole lot in terms of coverage. So, in terms of 5G deployment, whether it's virtualized or open RAN, there needs to be distributed infrastructure that covers the entire United States, right? A certain percentage of the population is still a huge amount of coverage. So deploy tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of servers around the country, get them set up, get 'em configured, and maintain and monitor and meter all of that. We help DISH to essentially roll that out, get it going, and then they deploy their RAN workload on top. I mean, that's a very significant undertaking. We were very proud to be able to offer our Bare Metal Orchestrator to facilitate that, but ultimately their success is their success. We are there to help, right? We are partnered, and we- happy to definitely be able to say we got to a point that we are happy, you know, in claims of success there. >> Well, that's why we selected Dell. >> Thank you. (chuckles) >> Let's unpack a little bit of some of the successes, some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far, working with Dell. >> Let me give an example. Today we have an ability to upgrade, update, even swap a RAN vendor overnight. Entire market, unheard of overnight. Give me hours, I'll do the entire thing for you from scratch. We can instantiate entire data center racks remotely in a matter of minutes. Cannot do that without automation, and with the help- >> Lisa Martin: Couldn't do it before. >> We have curated an extraordinary, what you call orchestration mechanism of finely tuned data sets and pipelines. It's like a machine. It keeps spinning. It's very good. And again, not something that happened overnight. Took us several months to get there with a lot of our partners, and Dell was there. >> Song: Right. >> I'd be curious to get your perspectives, each of you, on some of the buzz that was going on around the show where the telecom, "plumbing providers"- >> Sidd: Yep. >> have complained about the content streaming through, and maybe they need to charge more for access, and Netflix hit back and said, "well, hold on a minute. You wouldn't have anything to deliver to your customers if it weren't for the content we are producing. Maybe we need licensing fees from you." >> Song: (chuckles) >> What is your view on that, in terms of this whole over the top conversation? DISH seems sort of, kind of in a hybrid position there. >> Well, it's a very complex question. I think everyone is struggling with it, so I'm not sure if I have the right answer for it. We are definitely unique because we own the content too. We want to offer- we probably may offer our own content over the wireless service. There is a pros and cons. I mean, purely from a, as a M&O service provider, it's a lot of effort and cost for us to deliver huge amount of bandwidth. But again, the networks are being built to handle huge capacity. So if you don't have video, what do we do? That's also a realistic question. I think there is a mechanism where the cost and the value both have to be shared. So that it's a win-win for everyone. It's not lopsided to one. And said, "you carry most of the cost", and I'm transparent, it doesn't work that way long term. And especially given the 5G side, with all the slicing capabilities and ability to offer QoS, better quality of experience, I think there's a value to be created here. >> If you look at the infrastructure necessary to drive all of these things- >> Right. >> We've seen, just go back to our own consumer experience with the internet. We've gone from text to images to video. >> Song: Right. >> To high definition video. >> Sidd: Yeah. >> To, is 8K video absurd? Do we really need to be able to handle that? What are the things that need to be supported as we move forward? Is it that we scale out into this world of billions and billions of things that are connected? Or are there these much bigger, fatter pipelines for things like 8K video or it a combination of the two? What is Dell thinking of when it thinks of the infrastructure that it builds and how you customize that- >> Song: Right. >> to address those things? What's on the horizon? >> Dave, I think that's a very good question, right? Certainly communication service providers like DISH has built out the capacity to handle the customers that they want to serve. But there's another aspect of this I think I'd like to add on top of the question you posed, it's not about say, 10, say a thousand streams of 8K. I would need to be able to handle that. I think the present challenge right now is really, say there's a sports stadium that you need to activate so that, not about everyone filming that sports game, it's about, "Hey, I got to tell my, whoever- I got a 10 seconds video clip that I got to share with my friends." It's also not about copyright. It's more about- >> Dave Nicholson: (laughs) >> can you as a provider- >> The NFL is listening. >> Exactly. Can you as a provider handle that service? Because otherwise your customers say, "oh, I got into the sports stadium, every time I could not even text my daughter." >> Dave Nicholson: Yeah. >> So, how do you then scale up the infrastructure as needed, the bandwidth as needed, and scale back down when it's not? Maybe, because the infrastructure can potentially be repurposed for a different workload too. That requires automation, right? From bottom to top, all the way, infrastructure - all the way up to the workload. And that's I think a question that people are starting to ask. I'm not sure. I mean, still you guys have thought about that too as a- >> I mean, instant gratification is the new thing, right? Everyone wants instant response, everyone feedback, everything. So connectivity is given. I do think there is a space for both billions of devices and the 8K and probably 16K in the future. It's going to happen in the technology walls. That's why I like, say, the 5G, and especially the way we architect our own network. We call it network of networks. I'm not designing a network that is only for one monolithic application or one stack only. We are actually programmable network, because I know network A is for 8K. Network B is for IOT, network C is for regular, network D is for something else. And the list can keeps on growing. I don't think we can stifle innovation at any level and said, "well you can't do this because we are not ready." World is going to move too fast. Technology is too fast for all of us. >> But do you have to prioritize? >> If there is a business for- it's all top-down driven, not much of a technology driven. If there's a business, someone said there's a value to be made, it's prioritized. >> What's your - Sidd, we'll stick with you, your observations. This is day three of MWC 23. Lot of talk here on disaggregation. A lot of talk about open RAN, a lot of talk about private 5G wireless networks, but also some controversy. You brought up the Netflix controversy. >> Dave: Yep. >> What are some of the messages that you've heard so far from this event - and then, Song, we'll ask you the same question - that excite you about the direction that the industry's going and where DISH Wireless stands within it? >> Yeah. I mean, I didn't have a chance to walk the floor, but for wherever I have been in the last two and a half days, one thing that stood out is people are no longer talking about gigabits capacity anymore. They're talking about monetization of the network. Everyone is talking APIs now. >> Lisa Martin: Yeah. >> That's the buzzword. If I said monetization, API- I got a beautiful network not tell me how to make money off it and how do I work with each other? It's no longer about "I want to own it all." What can I do to partner with A, partner with B? How can we all grow together? I think that's the theme that I see this year compared to the previous years, where it was always about like, "hey, build the best 5G network with the high speeds, big radios." I don't even see radios, by the way. >> Lisa Martin: (chuckles) >> Interesting. Yeah. So the actual, it's almost fascinating when you toil in obscurity to build these critical components and then people ignore you. So I feel for the radio people. >> Song: (laughs) Being a long-term infrastructure guy, what have you been seeing here that's interesting? >> Well, a few things that I feel quite excited about from the conversation I've had. One is, on the private mobility side, Lisa, as you said, I'm seeing certainly customers, partners, and even in the booth talking about what the use cases are, right? Rather than, "Hey, here's a cool technology." But actually, people talking about use cases now. And, with the communication service providers and the operators, I'm hearing - of course, I mean, Sidd's doesn't have that problem because it's building whole new, >> (chuckles) >> but there are other providers that are saying, "Hey, we acknowledge that we need to transform and we are on the way too", rather than saying, "can I not do it and still, you know, live with the modern world." So I feel that we always need to be ready to change, because the world, the market, and all other factors will cause us to either change or really to change. And I think we are changing. Open system is becoming more of a expected, you know, future. It's just how do we get there, right? What do we need to learn as we get there? And we're happy to provide the support as a partner, the automation technology, and even the solutions to enable that, from Dell's perspective. >> So DISH in particular? DISH Wireless. >> Yep. >> Despite the fact that everyone's heard of DISH. >> Song: Yeah. >> DISH has been around for a long time. Where you sit within DISH Wireless, you described it as a startup. You don't feel encumbered by a lot of the legacy things that maybe some other providers do. Is that a fair statement or are you having to navigate that? We call it ambidextrous management >> (laughs) >> in the CTO world, where it's like, got to keep the lights on, got to keep the existing revenue flowing, also got to innovate. How do you blend the two? Is that a challenge? >> Well, probably not a challenge for me. I'm on the wireless technology and architecture side, so I get to do the cool stuff. >> Dave Nicholson: Okay. >> Don't have to worry about day to day operations, some complexity or revenue. Someone else is managing that complex part. They let me play with my toys. >> Well played, well played. >> Guys, it's been great having you on the program talking about what DISH Wireless is doing with Dell. Thanks to Dell. We're going to be watching this space to see how you continue to innovate. Thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23. Stick around. Our next guest joins Dave and me in just a minute. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

(intro music plays) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, here in our Palo Alto Studio, with a live performance all day unpacking the wave of Supercloud. This is our second edition. Back for keynote review here is Vittorio Viarengo, talking about the hype and the reality of the Supercloud momentum. Vittorio, great to see you. You got a presentation. Looking forward to hearing the update. >> It's always great to be here on this stage with you guys. >> John Furrier: (chuckles) So the business imperative for cloud right now is clear and the Supercloud wave points to the builders and they want to break through. VMware, you guys have a lot of builders in the ecosystem. Where do you guys see multicloud today? What's going on? >> So, what we see is, when we talk with our customers is that customers are in a state of cloud chaos. Raghu Raghuram, our CEO, introduced this term at our user conference and it really resonated with our customers. And the chaos comes from the fact that most enterprises have applications spread across private cloud, multiple hyperscalers, and the edge increasingly. And so with that, every hyperscaler brings their own vertical integrated stack of infrastructure development, platform security, and so on and so forth. And so our customers are left with a ballooning cost because they have to train their employees across multiple stacks. And the costs are only going up. >> John Furrier: Have you talked about the Supercloud with your customers? What are they looking for when they look at the business value of Cross-Cloud Services? Why are they digging into it? What are some of the reasons? >> First of all, let's put this in perspective. 90, 87% of customers use two or more cloud including the private cloud. And 55%, get this, 55% use three or more clouds, right? And so, when you talk to these customers they're all asking for two things. One, they find that managing the multicloud is more difficult than the private cloud. And that goes without saying because it's new, they don't have the skills, and they have many of these. And pretty much everybody, 87% of them, are seeing their cost getting out of control. And so they need a new approach. We believe that the industry needs a new approach to solving the multicloud problem, which you guys have introduced and you call it the Supercloud. We call it Cross-Cloud Services. But the idea is that- and the parallel goes back to the private cloud. In the private cloud, if you remember the old days, before we called it the private cloud, we would install SAP. And the CIO would go, "Oh, I hear SAP works great on HP hardware. Oh, let's buy the HP stack", right? (hosts laugh) And then you go, "Oh, oh, Oracle databases. They run phenomenally on Sun Stack." That's another stack. And it wasn't sustainable, right? And so, VMware came in with virtualization and made everything look the same. And we unleashed a tremendous era of growth and speed and cost saving for our customers. So we believe, and I think the industry also believes, if you look at the success of Supercloud, first instance and today, that we need to create a new level of abstraction in the cloud. And this abstraction needs to be at a higher level. It needs to be built around the lingua franca of the cloud, which is Kubernetes, APIs, open source stacks. And by doing so, we're going to allow our customers to have a more unified way of building, managing, running, connecting, and securing applications across cloud. >> So where should that standardization occur? 'Cause we're going to hear from some customers today. When I ask them about cloud chaos, they're like, "Well, the way we deal with cloud chaos is MonoCloud". They sort of put on the blinders, right? But of course, they may be risking not being able to take advantage of best-of-breed. So where should that standardization layer occur across clouds? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Well, I also hear that from some customers. "Oh, we are one cloud". They are in denial. There's no question about it. In fact, when I met at our user conference with a number of CIOs, and I went around the room and I asked them, I saw the entire spectrum. (laughs) The person is in denial. "Oh, we're using AWS." I said, "Great." "And the private cloud, so we're all set." "Okay, thank you. Next." "Oh, the business units are using AWS." "Ah, okay. So you have three." "Oh, and we just bought a company that is using Google back in Europe." So, okay, so you got four right there. So that person in denial. Then, you have the second category of customers that are seeing the problem, they're ahead of the pack, and they're building their solution. We're going to hear from Walmart later today. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> So they're building their own. Not everybody has the skills and the scale of Walmart to build their own. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> So, eventually, then you get to the third category of customers. They're actually buying solutions from one of the many ISVs that you are going to talk with today. You know, whether it is Azure Corp or Snowflake or all this. I will argue, any new company, any new ISV, is by definition a multicloud service company, right? And so these people... Or they're buying our Cross-Cloud Services to solve this problem. So that's the spectrum of customers out there. >> What's the stack you're focusing on specifically? What is VMware? Because virtualization is not going away. You're seeing a lot more in the cloud with networking, for example, this abstraction layer. What specifically are you guys focusing on? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So, I like to talk about this beyond what VMware does, just 'cause I think this is an industry movement. A market is forming around multicloud services. And so it's an approach that pretty much a whole industry is taking of building this abstraction layer. In our approach, it is to bring these services together to simplify things even further. So, initially, we were the first to see multicloud happening. You know, Raghu and Sanjay, back in what, like 2016, 17, saw this coming and our first foray in multicloud was to take this sphere and our hypervisor and port it natively on all the hyperscaling, which is a phenomenal solution to get your enterprise application in the cloud and modernize them. But then we realized that customers were already in the cloud natively. And so we had to have (all chuckle) a religion discussion internally and drop that hypervisor religion and say, "Hey, we need to go and help our customers where they are, in a native cloud". And that's where we brought back Pivotal. We built tons around it. We shifted. And then Aria. And so basically, our evolution was to go from, you know, our hypervisor to cloud native. And then eventually we ended up at what we believe is the most comprehensive multicloud services solution that covers Application Development with Tanzu, Management with Aria, and then you have NSX for security and user computing for connectivity. And so we believe that we have the most comprehensive set of integrated services to solve the challenges of multicloud, bringing excess simplicity into the picture. >> John Furrier: As some would say, multicloud and multi environment, when you get to the distributed computing with the edge, you're going to need that capability. And you guys have been very successful with private cloud. But to be devil's advocate, you guys have been great with private cloud, but some are saying like, you guys don't get public cloud yet. How do you answer that? Because there's a lot of work that you guys have done in public cloud and it seems like private cloud successes are moving up into public cloud. Like networking. You're seeing a lot of that being configured in. So the enterprise-grade solutions are moving into the cloud. So what would you say to the skeptics out there that say, "Oh, I think you got private cloud nailed down, but you don't really have public cloud." (chuckles) >> [Vittorio Viarengo] First of all, we love skeptics. Our engineering team love skeptics and love to prove them wrong. (John laughs) And I would never ever bet against our engineering team. So I believe that VMware has been so successful in building a private cloud and the technology that actually became the foundation for the public cloud. But that is always hard, to be known in a new environment, right? There's always that period where you have to prove yourself. But what I love about VMware is that VMware has what I believe, what I like to call "enterprise pragmatism". The private cloud is not going away. So we're going to help our customers there, and then, as they move to the cloud, we are going to give them an option to adopt the cloud at their own pace, with VMware cloud, to allow them to move to the cloud and be able to rely on the enterprise-class capabilities we built on-prem in the cloud. But then with Tanzu and Aria and the rest of the Cross-Cloud Service portfolio, being able to meet them where they are. If they're already in the cloud, have them have a single place to build application, a single place to manage application, and so on and so forth. >> John Furrier: You know, Dave, we were talking in the opening. Vittorio, I want to get your reaction to this because we were saying in the opening that the market's obviously pushing this next gen. You see ChatGPT and the success of these new apps that are coming out. The business models are demanding kind of a digital transformation. The tech, the builders, are out there, and you guys have a interesting view because your customer base is almost the canary in the coal mine because this is an Operations challenge as well as just enabling the cloud native. So, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, your customer base, VMware customers. They've been in IT Ops for generations. And now, as that crowd moves and sees this Supercloud environment, it's IT again, but it's everywhere. It's not just IT in a data center. It's on-premises, it's cloud, it's edge. So, almost, your customer base is like a canary in the coal mine for this movement of how do you operationalize multiple environments? Which includes clouds, which includes apps. I mean, this is the core question. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. And I want to make this an industry conversation. Forget about VMware for a second. We believe that there are like four or five major pillars that you need to implement to create this level of abstraction. It starts from observability. If you don't know- You need to know where your apps are, where your data is, how the the applications are performing, what is the security posture, what is their performance? So then, you can do something about it. We call that the observability part of this, creating this abstraction. The second one is security. So you need to be- Sorry. Infrastructure. An infrastructure. Creating an abstraction layer for infrastructure means to be able to give the applications, and the developer who builds application, the right infrastructure for the application at the right time. Whether it is a VM, whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's microservices, and so on and so forth. And so, that allows our developers to think about infrastructure just as code. If it is available, whatever application needs, whatever the cost makes sense for my application, right? The third part of security, and I can give you a very, very simple example. Say that I was talking to a CIO of a major insurance company in Europe and he is saying to me, "The developers went wild, built all these great front office applications. Now the business is coming to me and says, 'What is my compliance report?'" And the guy is saying, "Say that I want to implement the policy that says, 'I want to encrypt all my data no matter where it resides.' How does it do it? It needs to have somebody logging in into Amazon and configure it, then go to Google, configure it, go to the private cloud." That's time and cost, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you need to have a way to enforce security policy from the infrastructure to the app to the firewall in one place and distribute it across. And finally, the developer experience, right? Developers, developers, developers. (all laugh) We're always trying to keep up with... >> Host: You can dance if you want to do... >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah, let's not make a fool of ourselves. More than usual. Developers are the kings and queens of the hill. They are. Why? Because they build the application. They're making us money and saving us money. And so we need- And right now, they have to go into these different stacks. So, you need to give developers two things. One, a common development experience across this different Kubernetes distribution. And two, a way for the operators. To your point. The operators have fallen behind the developers. And they cannot go to the developer there and tell them, "This is how you're going to do things." They have to see how they're doing things and figure out how to bring the gallery underneath so that developers can be developers, but the operators can lay down the tracks and the infrastructure there is secure and compliant. >> Dave Vellante: So two big inferences from that. One is self-serve infrastructure. You got- In a decentralized cloud, a Supercloud world, you got to have self-serve infrastructure, you got to be simple. And the second is governance. You mentioned security, but it's also governance. You know, data sovereignty as we talked about. So the question I have, Vittorio, is where does the customer start? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So I, it always depends on the business need, but to me, the foundational layer is observability. If you don't know where your staff is, you cannot manage, you cannot secure it, you cannot manage its cost, right? So I think observability is the bar to entry. And then it depends on the business needs, right? So, we go back to the CIO that I talked to. He is clearly struggling with compliance and security. >> Hosts: Mm hmm. >> And so, like many customers. And so, that's maybe where they start. There are other customers that are a little behind the head of the pack in terms of building applications, right? And so they're looking at these, you know, innovative companies that have the developers that get the cloud and build all these application. They are leader in the industry. They're saying, "How do I get some of that?" Well, the way you get some of that is by adopting modern application development and platform operational capabilities. So, that's maybe, that's where they should start. And so on and so forth. It really depends on the business. To me, observability is the foundational part of this. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, we've been on this conversation with you for over a year and a half now with Supercloud. You've been a leader in seeing the wave, you and Raghu and the team at VMware, among other industry leaders. This is our second event. If you're- In the minute and a half that we have left, when you get asked, "what is this Supercloud multicloud Cross-Cloud thing? What's it mean?" I mean, I mentioned earlier, the market, the business models are changing, tech's changing, society needs more economic value out of the cloud. Builders are out there. If someone says, "Hey, Vittorio, what's the bottom line? What's really going on? Why should I pay attention to this wave? What's going on?" How would you describe the relevance of Supercloud? >> I think that this industry is full of smart vendors and smart customers. And if we are smart about it, we look at the history of IT and the history of IT repeats itself over and over again. You follow the- He said, "Follow the money." I say, "Follow the developers." That's how I made my career. I follow great developers. I look at, you know, Kit Colbert. I say, "Okay. I'm going to get behind that guy wherever he is going." And I try to add value to that person. I look at Raghu and all the great engineers that I was blessed to work with. And so the engineers go and explore new territories and then the rest of the stacks moves around. The developers have gone multicloud. And just like in any iteration of IT, at some point, the way you get the right scales at the right cost is with abstractions. And you can see it everywhere from, you know, bits and bytes, integration, to SOA, to APIs and microservices. You can see it now from best-of-breed hyperscaler across multiple clouds to creating an abstraction layer, a Supercloud, that creates a unified way of building, managing, running, securing, and accessing applications. So if you're a customer- (laughs) A minute and a half. (hosts chuckle) If you are customers that are out there and feeling the pain, you got to adopt this. If you are customers that is behind and saying, "Maybe you're in denial" look at the customers that are solving the problems today, and we're going to have some today. See what they're doing and learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes and you can get there ahead of it. >> Dave Vellante: Gracely's Law, John. Brian Gracely. That history repeats itself and- >> John Furrier: And I think one of these, "follow the developers" is interesting. And the other big wave, I want to get your comment real quick, is that developers aren't just application developers. They're network developers. The stack has completely been software-enabled so that you have software-defined networking, you have all kinds of software at all aspects of observability, infrastructure, security. The developers are everywhere. It's not just software. Software is everywhere. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. Developers, developers, developers. The other thing that we can tell, I can tell, and we know, because we live in Silicon Valley. We worship developers but if you are out there in manufacturing, healthcare... If you have developers that understand this stuff, pamper them, keep them happy. (hosts laugh) If you don't have them, figure out where they hang out and go recruit them because developers indeed make the IT world go round. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, thank you for coming on with that opening keynote here for Supercloud 2. We're going to unpack what Supercloud is all about in our second edition of our live performance here in Palo Alto. Virtual event. We're going to talk to customers, experts, leaders, investors, everyone who's looking at the future, what's being enabled by this new big wave coming on called Supercloud. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. (ambient theme music plays)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here from the studios in the CUBE in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're featuring a startup, Astronomer. Astronomer.io is the URL, check it out. And we're going to have a great conversation around one of the most important topics hitting the industry, and that is the future of machine learning and AI, and the data that powers it underneath it. There's a lot of things that need to get done, and we're excited to have some of the co-founders of Astronomer here. Viraj Parekh, who is co-founder of Astronomer, and Paola Peraza Calderon, another co-founder, both with Astronomer. Thanks for coming on. First of all, how many co-founders do you guys have? >> You know, I think the answer's around six or seven. I forget the exact, but there's really been a lot of people around the table who've worked very hard to get this company to the point that it's at. We have long ways to go, right? But there's been a lot of people involved that have been absolutely necessary for the path we've been on so far. >> Thanks for that, Viraj, appreciate that. The first question I want to get out on the table, and then we'll get into some of the details, is take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. How did you guys get here? Obviously, multiple co-founders, sounds like a great project. The timing couldn't have been better. ChatGPT has essentially done so much public relations for the AI industry to kind of highlight this shift that's happening. It's real, we've been chronicalizing, take a minute to explain what you guys do. >> Yeah, sure, we can get started. So, yeah, when Viraj and I joined Astronomer in 2017, we really wanted to build a business around data, and we were using an open source project called Apache Airflow that we were just using sort of as customers ourselves. And over time, we realized that there was actually a market for companies who use Apache Airflow, which is a data pipeline management tool, which we'll get into, and that running Airflow is actually quite challenging, and that there's a big opportunity for us to create a set of commercial products and an opportunity to grow that open source community and actually build a company around that. So the crux of what we do is help companies run data pipelines with Apache Airflow. And certainly we've grown in our ambitions beyond that, but that's sort of the crux of what we do for folks. >> You know, data orchestration, data management has always been a big item in the old classic data infrastructure. But with AI, you're seeing a lot more emphasis on scale, tuning, training. Data orchestration is the center of the value proposition, when you're looking at coordinating resources, it's one of the most important things. Can you guys explain what data orchestration entails? What does it mean? Take us through the definition of what data orchestration entails. >> Yeah, for sure. I can take this one, and Viraj, feel free to jump in. So if you google data orchestration, here's what you're going to get. You're going to get something that says, "Data orchestration is the automated process" "for organizing silo data from numerous" "data storage points, standardizing it," "and making it accessible and prepared for data analysis." And you say, "Okay, but what does that actually mean," right, and so let's give sort of an an example. So let's say you're a business and you have sort of the following basic asks of your data team, right? Okay, give me a dashboard in Sigma, for example, for the number of customers or monthly active users, and then make sure that that gets updated on an hourly basis. And then number two, a consistent list of active customers that I have in HubSpot so that I can send them a monthly product newsletter, right? Two very basic asks for all sorts of companies and organizations. And when that data team, which has data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, data analysts get that request, they're looking at an ecosystem of data sources that can help them get there, right? And that includes application databases, for example, that actually have in product user behavior and third party APIs from tools that the company uses that also has different attributes and qualities of those customers or users. And that data team needs to use tools like Fivetran to ingest data, a data warehouse, like Snowflake or Databricks to actually store that data and do analysis on top of it, a tool like DBT to do transformations and make sure that data is standardized in the way that it needs to be, a tool like Hightouch for reverse ETL. I mean, we could go on and on. There's so many partners of ours in this industry that are doing really, really exciting and critical things for those data movements. And the whole point here is that data teams have this plethora of tooling that they use to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and interact with that data. And data orchestration, in our view, is really the heartbeat of all of those processes, right? And tangibly the unit of data orchestration is a data pipeline, a set of tasks or jobs that each do something with data over time and eventually run that on a schedule to make sure that those things are happening continuously as time moves on and the company advances. And so, for us, we're building a business around Apache Airflow, which is a workflow management tool that allows you to author, run, and monitor data pipelines. And so when we talk about data orchestration, we talk about sort of two things. One is that crux of data pipelines that, like I said, connect that large ecosystem of data tooling in your company. But number two, it's not just that data pipeline that needs to run every day, right? And Viraj will probably touch on this as we talk more about Astronomer and our value prop on top of Airflow. But then it's all the things that you need to actually run data and production and make sure that it's trustworthy, right? So it's actually not just that you're running things on a schedule, but it's also things like CICD tooling, secure secrets management, user permissions, monitoring, data lineage, documentation, things that enable other personas in your data team to actually use those tools. So long-winded way of saying that it's the heartbeat, we think, of of the data ecosystem, and certainly goes beyond scheduling, but again, data pipelines are really at the center of it. >> One of the things that jumped out, Viraj, if you can get into this, I'd like to hear more about how you guys look at all those little tools that are out. You mentioned a variety of things. You look at the data infrastructure, it's not just one stack. You've got an analytic stack, you've got a realtime stack, you've got a data lake stack, you got an AI stack potentially. I mean you have these stacks now emerging in the data world that are fundamental, that were once served by either a full package, old school software, and then a bunch of point solution. You mentioned Fivetran there, I would say in the analytics stack. Then you got S3, they're on the data lake stack. So all these things are kind of munged together. >> Yeah. >> How do you guys fit into that world? You make it easier, or like, what's the deal? >> Great question, right? And you know, I think that one of the biggest things we've found in working with customers over the last however many years is that if a data team is using a bunch of tools to get what they need done, and the number of tools they're using is growing exponentially and they're kind of roping things together here and there, that's actually a sign of a productive team, not a bad thing, right? It's because that team is moving fast. They have needs that are very specific to them, and they're trying to make something that's exactly tailored to their business. So a lot of times what we find is that customers have some sort of base layer, right? That's kind of like, it might be they're running most of the things in AWS, right? And then on top of that, they'll be using some of the things AWS offers, things like SageMaker, Redshift, whatever, but they also might need things that their cloud can't provide. Something like Fivetran, or Hightouch, those are other tools. And where data orchestration really shines, and something that we've had the pleasure of helping our customers build, is how do you take all those requirements, all those different tools and whip them together into something that fulfills a business need? So that somebody can read a dashboard and trust the number that it says, or somebody can make sure that the right emails go out to their customers. And Airflow serves as this amazing kind of glue between that data stack, right? It's to make it so that for any use case, be it ELT pipelines, or machine learning, or whatever, you need different things to do them, and Airflow helps tie them together in a way that's really specific for a individual business' needs. >> Take a step back and share the journey of what you guys went through as a company startup. So you mentioned Apache, open source. I was just having an interview with a VC, we were talking about foundational models. You got a lot of proprietary and open source development going on. It's almost the iPhone/Android moment in this whole generative space and foundational side. This is kind of important, the open source piece of it. Can you share how you guys started? And I can imagine your customers probably have their hair on fire and are probably building stuff on their own. Are you guys helping them? Take us through, 'cause you guys are on the front end of a big, big wave, and that is to make sense of the chaos, rain it in. Take us through your journey and why this is important. >> Yeah, Paola, I can take a crack at this, then I'll kind of hand it over to you to fill in whatever I miss in details. But you know, like Paola is saying, the heart of our company is open source, because we started using Airflow as an end user and started to say like, "Hey wait a second," "more and more people need this." Airflow, for background, started at Airbnb, and they were actually using that as a foundation for their whole data stack. Kind of how they made it so that they could give you recommendations, and predictions, and all of the processes that needed orchestrated. Airbnb created Airflow, gave it away to the public, and then fast forward a couple years and we're building a company around it, and we're really excited about that. >> That's a beautiful thing. That's exactly why open source is so great. >> Yeah, yeah. And for us, it's really been about watching the community and our customers take these problems, find a solution to those problems, standardize those solutions, and then building on top of that, right? So we're reaching to a point where a lot of our earlier customers who started to just using Airflow to get the base of their BI stack down and their reporting in their ELP infrastructure, they've solved that problem and now they're moving on to things like doing machine learning with their data, because now that they've built that foundation, all the connective tissue for their data arriving on time and being orchestrated correctly is happening, they can build a layer on top of that. And it's just been really, really exciting kind of watching what customers do once they're empowered to pick all the tools that they need, tie them together in the way they need to, and really deliver real value to their business. >> Can you share some of the use cases of these customers? Because I think that's where you're starting to see the innovation. What are some of the companies that you're working with, what are they doing? >> Viraj, I'll let you take that one too. (group laughs) >> So you know, a lot of it is... It goes across the gamut, right? Because it doesn't matter what you are, what you're doing with data, it needs to be orchestrated. So there's a lot of customers using us for their ETL and ELT reporting, right? Just getting data from other disparate sources into one place and then building on top of that. Be it building dashboards, answering questions for the business, building other data products and so on and so forth. From there, these use cases evolve a lot. You do see folks doing things like fraud detection, because Airflow's orchestrating how transactions go, transactions get analyzed. They do things like analyzing marketing spend to see where your highest ROI is. And then you kind of can't not talk about all of the machine learning that goes on, right? Where customers are taking data about their own customers, kind of analyze and aggregating that at scale, and trying to automate decision making processes. So it goes from your most basic, what we call data plumbing, right? Just to make sure data's moving as needed, all the ways to your more exciting expansive use cases around automated decision making and machine learning. >> And I'd say, I mean, I'd say that's one of the things that I think gets me most excited about our future, is how critical Airflow is to all of those processes, and I think when you know a tool is valuable is when something goes wrong and one of those critical processes doesn't work. And we know that our system is so mission critical to answering basic questions about your business and the growth of your company for so many organizations that we work with. So it's, I think, one of the things that gets Viraj and I and the rest of our company up every single morning is knowing how important the work that we do for all of those use cases across industries, across company sizes, and it's really quite energizing. >> It was such a big focus this year at AWS re:Invent, the role of data. And I think one of the things that's exciting about the open AI and all the movement towards large language models is that you can integrate data into these models from outside. So you're starting to see the integration easier to deal with. Still a lot of plumbing issues. So a lot of things happening. So I have to ask you guys, what is the state of the data orchestration area? Is it ready for disruption? Has it already been disrupted? Would you categorize it as a new first inning kind of opportunity, or what's the state of the data orchestration area right now? Both technically and from a business model standpoint. How would you guys describe that state of the market? >> Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, in some ways I think we're category creating. Schedulers have been around for a long time. I released a data presentation sort of on the evolution of going from something like Kron, which I think was built in like the 1970s out of Carnegie Mellon. And that's a long time ago, that's 50 years ago. So sort of like the basic need to schedule and do something with your data on a schedule is not a new concept. But to our point earlier, I think everything that you need around your ecosystem, first of all, the number of data tools and developer tooling that has come out industry has 5X'd over the last 10 years. And so obviously as that ecosystem grows, and grows, and grows, and grows, the need for orchestration only increases. And I think, as Astronomer, I think we... And we work with so many different types of companies, companies that have been around for 50 years, and companies that got started not even 12 months ago. And so I think for us it's trying to, in a ways, category create and adjust sort of what we sell and the value that we can provide for companies all across that journey. There are folks who are just getting started with orchestration, and then there's folks who have such advanced use case, 'cause they're hitting sort of a ceiling and only want to go up from there. And so I think we, as a company, care about both ends of that spectrum, and certainly want to build and continue building products for companies of all sorts, regardless of where they are on the maturity curve of data orchestration. >> That's a really good point, Paola. And I think the other thing to really take into account is it's the companies themselves, but also individuals who have to do their jobs. If you rewind the clock like 5 or 10 years ago, data engineers would be the ones responsible for orchestrating data through their org. But when we look at our customers today, it's not just data engineers anymore. There's data analysts who sit a lot closer to the business, and the data scientists who want to automate things around their models. So this idea that orchestration is this new category is right on the money. And what we're finding is the need for it is spreading to all parts of the data team, naturally where Airflow's emerged as an open source standard and we're hoping to take things to the next level. >> That's awesome. We've been up saying that the data market's kind of like the SRE with servers, right? You're going to need one person to deal with a lot of data, and that's data engineering, and then you're got to have the practitioners, the democratization. Clearly that's coming in what you're seeing. So I have to ask, how do you guys fit in from a value proposition standpoint? What's the pitch that you have to customers, or is it more inbound coming into you guys? Are you guys doing a lot of outreach, customer engagements? I'm sure they're getting a lot of great requirements from customers. What's the current value proposition? How do you guys engage? >> Yeah, I mean, there's so many... Sorry, Viraj, you can jump in. So there's so many companies using Airflow, right? So the baseline is that the open source project that is Airflow that came out of Airbnb, over five years ago at this point, has grown exponentially in users and continues to grow. And so the folks that we sell to primarily are folks who are already committed to using Apache Airflow, need data orchestration in their organization, and just want to do it better, want to do it more efficiently, want to do it without managing that infrastructure. And so our baseline proposition is for those organizations. Now to Viraj's point, obviously I think our ambitions go beyond that, both in terms of the personas that we addressed and going beyond that data engineer, but really it's to start at the baseline, as we continue to grow our our company, it's really making sure that we're adding value to folks using Airflow and help them do so in a better way, in a larger way, in a more efficient way, and that's really the crux of who we sell to. And so to answer your question on, we get a lot of inbound because they're... >> You have a built in audience. (laughs) >> The world that use it. Those are the folks who we talk to and come to our website and chat with us and get value from our content. I mean, the power of the opensource community is really just so, so big, and I think that's also one of the things that makes this job fun. >> And you guys are in a great position. Viraj, you can comment a little, get your reaction. There's been a big successful business model to starting a company around these big projects for a lot of reasons. One is open source is continuing to be great, but there's also supply chain challenges in there. There's also we want to continue more innovation and more code and keeping it free and and flowing. And then there's the commercialization of productizing it, operationalizing it. This is a huge new dynamic, I mean, in the past 5 or so years, 10 years, it's been happening all on CNCF from other areas like Apache, Linux Foundation, they're all implementing this. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to do this. >> Yeah, yeah. Open source is always going to be core to what we do, because we wouldn't exist without the open source community around us. They are huge in numbers. Oftentimes they're nameless people who are working on making something better in a way that everybody benefits from it. But open source is really hard, especially if you're a company whose core competency is running a business, right? Maybe you're running an e-commerce business, or maybe you're running, I don't know, some sort of like, any sort of business, especially if you're a company running a business, you don't really want to spend your time figuring out how to run open source software. You just want to use it, you want to use the best of it, you want to use the community around it, you want to be able to google something and get answers for it, you want the benefits of open source. You don't have the time or the resources to invest in becoming an expert in open source, right? And I think that dynamic is really what's given companies like us an ability to kind of form businesses around that in the sense that we'll make it so people get the best of both worlds. You'll get this vast open ecosystem that you can build on top of, that you can benefit from, that you can learn from. But you won't have to spend your time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting. You can do things that are just specific to your business. >> It's always been great to see that business model evolve. We used a debate 10 years ago, can there be another Red Hat? And we said, not really the same, but there'll be a lot of little ones that'll grow up to be big soon. Great stuff. Final question, can you guys share the history of the company? The milestones of Astromer's journey in data orchestration? >> Yeah, we could. So yeah, I mean, I think, so Viraj and I have obviously been at Astronomer along with our other founding team and leadership folks for over five years now. And it's been such an incredible journey of learning, of hiring really amazing people, solving, again, mission critical problems for so many types of organizations. We've had some funding that has allowed us to invest in the team that we have and in the software that we have, and that's been really phenomenal. And so that investment, I think, keeps us confident, even despite these sort of macroeconomic conditions that we're finding ourselves in. And so honestly, the milestones for us are focusing on our product, focusing on our customers over the next year, focusing on that market for us that we know can get valuable out of what we do, and making developers' lives better, and growing the open source community and making sure that everything that we're doing makes it easier for folks to get started, to contribute to the project and to feel a part of the community that we're cultivating here. >> You guys raised a little bit of money. How much have you guys raised? >> Don't know what the total is, but it's in the ballpark over $200 million. It feels good to... >> A little bit of capital. Got a little bit of cap to work with there. Great success. I know as a Series C Financing, you guys have been down. So you're up and running, what's next? What are you guys looking to do? What's the big horizon look like for you from a vision standpoint, more hiring, more product, what is some of the key things you're looking at doing? >> Yeah, it's really a little of all of the above, right? Kind of one of the best and worst things about working at earlier stage startups is there's always so much to do and you often have to just kind of figure out a way to get everything done. But really investing our product over the next, at least over the course of our company lifetime. And there's a lot of ways we want to make it more accessible to users, easier to get started with, easier to use, kind of on all areas there. And really, we really want to do more for the community, right, like I was saying, we wouldn't be anything without the large open source community around us. And we want to figure out ways to give back more in more creative ways, in more code driven ways, in more kind of events and everything else that we can keep those folks galvanized and just keep them happy using Airflow. >> Paola, any final words as we close out? >> No, I mean, I'm super excited. I think we'll keep growing the team this year. We've got a couple of offices in the the US, which we're excited about, and a fully global team that will only continue to grow. So Viraj and I are both here in New York, and we're excited to be engaging with our coworkers in person finally, after years of not doing so. We've got a bustling office in San Francisco as well. So growing those teams and continuing to hire all over the world, and really focusing on our product and the open source community is where our heads are at this year. So, excited. >> Congratulations. 200 million in funding, plus. Good runway, put that money in the bank, squirrel it away. It's a good time to kind of get some good interest on it, but still grow. Congratulations on all the work you guys do. We appreciate you and the open source community does, and good luck with the venture, continue to be successful, and we'll see you at the Startup Showcase. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks so much, John. Appreciate it. >> Okay, that's the CUBE Conversation featuring astronomer.io, that's the website. Astronomer is doing well. Multiple rounds of funding, over 200 million in funding. Open source continues to lead the way in innovation. Great business model, good solution for the next gen cloud scale data operations, data stacks that are emerging. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube conversation here from the studios of theCube in Palo Alto, California. John Furrier, your host. We're featuring a startup, Astronomer, astronomer.io is the url. Check it out. And we're going to have a great conversation around one of the most important topics hitting the industry, and that is the future of machine learning and AI and the data that powers it underneath it. There's a lot of things that need to get done, and we're excited to have some of the co-founders of Astronomer here. Viraj Parekh, who is co-founder and Paola Peraza Calderon, another co-founder, both with Astronomer. Thanks for coming on. First of all, how many co-founders do you guys have? >> You know, I think the answer's around six or seven. I forget the exact, but there's really been a lot of people around the table, who've worked very hard to get this company to the point that it's at. And we have long ways to go, right? But there's been a lot of people involved that are, have been absolutely necessary for the path we've been on so far. >> Thanks for that, Viraj, appreciate that. The first question I want to get out on the table, and then we'll get into some of the details, is take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. How did you guys get here? Obviously, multiple co-founders sounds like a great project. The timing couldn't have been better. ChatGPT has essentially done so much public relations for the AI industry. Kind of highlight this shift that's happening. It's real. We've been chronologicalizing, take a minute to explain what you guys do. >> Yeah, sure. We can get started. So yeah, when Astronomer, when Viraj and I joined Astronomer in 2017, we really wanted to build a business around data and we were using an open source project called Apache Airflow, that we were just using sort of as customers ourselves. And over time, we realized that there was actually a market for companies who use Apache Airflow, which is a data pipeline management tool, which we'll get into. And that running Airflow is actually quite challenging and that there's a lot of, a big opportunity for us to create a set of commercial products and opportunity to grow that open source community and actually build a company around that. So the crux of what we do is help companies run data pipelines with Apache Airflow. And certainly we've grown in our ambitions beyond that, but that's sort of the crux of what we do for folks. >> You know, data orchestration, data management has always been a big item, you know, in the old classic data infrastructure. But with AI you're seeing a lot more emphasis on scale, tuning, training. You know, data orchestration is the center of the value proposition when you're looking at coordinating resources, it's one of the most important things. Could you guys explain what data orchestration entails? What does it mean? Take us through the definition of what data orchestration entails. >> Yeah, for sure. I can take this one and Viraj feel free to jump in. So if you google data orchestration, you know, here's what you're going to get. You're going to get something that says, data orchestration is the automated process for organizing silo data from numerous data storage points to organizing it and making it accessible and prepared for data analysis. And you say, okay, but what does that actually mean, right? And so let's give sort of an example. So let's say you're a business and you have sort of the following basic asks of your data team, right? Hey, give me a dashboard in Sigma, for example, for the number of customers or monthly active users and then make sure that that gets updated on an hourly basis. And then number two, a consistent list of active customers that I have in HubSpot so that I can send them a monthly product newsletter, right? Two very basic asks for all sorts of companies and organizations. And when that data team, which has data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, data analysts get that request, they're looking at an ecosystem of data sources that can help them get there, right? And that includes application databases, for example, that actually have end product user behavior and third party APIs from tools that the company uses that also has different attributes and qualities of those customers or users. And that data team needs to use tools like Fivetran, to ingest data, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Databricks to actually store that data and do analysis on top of it, a tool like DBT to do transformations and make sure that that data is standardized in the way that it needs to be, a tool like Hightouch for reverse ETL. I mean, we could go on and on. There's so many partners of ours in this industry that are doing really, really exciting and critical things for those data movements. And the whole point here is that, you know, data teams have this plethora of tooling that they use to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and interact with that data. And data orchestration in our view is really the heartbeat of all of those processes, right? And tangibly the unit of data orchestration, you know, is a data pipeline, a set of tasks or jobs that each do something with data over time and eventually run that on a schedule to make sure that those things are happening continuously as time moves on. And, you know, the company advances. And so, you know, for us, we're building a business around Apache Airflow, which is a workflow management tool that allows you to author, run and monitor data pipelines. And so when we talk about data orchestration, we talk about sort of two things. One is that crux of data pipelines that, like I said, connect that large ecosystem of data tooling in your company. But number two, it's not just that data pipeline that needs to run every day, right? And Viraj will probably touch on this as we talk more about Astronomer and our value prop on top of Airflow. But then it's all the things that you need to actually run data and production and make sure that it's trustworthy, right? So it's actually not just that you're running things on a schedule, but it's also things like CI/CD tooling, right? Secure secrets management, user permissions, monitoring, data lineage, documentation, things that enable other personas in your data team to actually use those tools. So long-winded way of saying that, it's the heartbeat that we think of the data ecosystem and certainly goes beyond scheduling, but again, data pipelines are really at the center of it. >> You know, one of the things that jumped out Viraj, if you can get into this, I'd like to hear more about how you guys look at all those little tools that are out there. You mentioned a variety of things. You know, if you look at the data infrastructure, it's not just one stack. You've got an analytic stack, you've got a realtime stack, you've got a data lake stack, you got an AI stack potentially. I mean you have these stacks now emerging in the data world that are >> Yeah. - >> fundamental, but we're once served by either a full package, old school software, and then a bunch of point solution. You mentioned Fivetran there, I would say in the analytics stack. Then you got, you know, S3, they're on the data lake stack. So all these things are kind of munged together. >> Yeah. >> How do you guys fit into that world? You make it easier or like, what's the deal? >> Great question, right? And you know, I think that one of the biggest things we've found in working with customers over, you know, the last however many years, is that like if a data team is using a bunch of tools to get what they need done and the number of tools they're using is growing exponentially and they're kind of roping things together here and there, that's actually a sign of a productive team, not a bad thing, right? It's because that team is moving fast. They have needs that are very specific to them and they're trying to make something that's exactly tailored to their business. So a lot of times what we find is that customers have like some sort of base layer, right? That's kind of like, you know, it might be they're running most of the things in AWS, right? And then on top of that, they'll be using some of the things AWS offers, you know, things like SageMaker, Redshift, whatever. But they also might need things that their Cloud can't provide, you know, something like Fivetran or Hightouch or anything of those other tools and where data orchestration really shines, right? And something that we've had the pleasure of helping our customers build, is how do you take all those requirements, all those different tools and whip them together into something that fulfills a business need, right? Something that makes it so that somebody can read a dashboard and trust the number that it says or somebody can make sure that the right emails go out to their customers. And Airflow serves as this amazing kind of glue between that data stack, right? It's to make it so that for any use case, be it ELT pipelines or machine learning or whatever, you need different things to do them and Airflow helps tie them together in a way that's really specific for a individual business's needs. >> Take a step back and share the journey of what your guys went through as a company startup. So you mentioned Apache open source, you know, we were just, I was just having an interview with the VC, we were talking about foundational models. You got a lot of proprietary and open source development going on. It's almost the iPhone, Android moment in this whole generative space and foundational side. This is kind of important, the open source piece of it. Can you share how you guys started? And I can imagine your customers probably have their hair on fire and are probably building stuff on their own. How do you guys, are you guys helping them? Take us through, 'cuz you guys are on the front end of a big, big wave and that is to make sense of the chaos, reigning it in. Take us through your journey and why this is important. >> Yeah Paola, I can take a crack at this and then I'll kind of hand it over to you to fill in whatever I miss in details. But you know, like Paola is saying, the heart of our company is open source because we started using Airflow as an end user and started to say like, "Hey wait a second". Like more and more people need this. Airflow, for background, started at Airbnb and they were actually using that as the foundation for their whole data stack. Kind of how they made it so that they could give you recommendations and predictions and all of the processes that need to be or needed to be orchestrated. Airbnb created Airflow, gave it away to the public and then, you know, fast forward a couple years and you know, we're building a company around it and we're really excited about that. >> That's a beautiful thing. That's exactly why open source is so great. >> Yeah, yeah. And for us it's really been about like watching the community and our customers take these problems, find solution to those problems, build standardized solutions, and then building on top of that, right? So we're reaching to a point where a lot of our earlier customers who started to just using Airflow to get the base of their BI stack down and their reporting and their ELP infrastructure, you know, they've solved that problem and now they're moving onto things like doing machine learning with their data, right? Because now that they've built that foundation, all the connective tissue for their data arriving on time and being orchestrated correctly is happening, they can build the layer on top of that. And it's just been really, really exciting kind of watching what customers do once they're empowered to pick all the tools that they need, tie them together in the way they need to, and really deliver real value to their business. >> Can you share some of the use cases of these customers? Because I think that's where you're starting to see the innovation. What are some of the companies that you're working with, what are they doing? >> Raj, I'll let you take that one too. (all laughing) >> Yeah. (all laughing) So you know, a lot of it is, it goes across the gamut, right? Because all doesn't matter what you are, what you're doing with data, it needs to be orchestrated. So there's a lot of customers using us for their ETL and ELT reporting, right? Just getting data from all the disparate sources into one place and then building on top of that, be it building dashboards, answering questions for the business, building other data products and so on and so forth. From there, these use cases evolve a lot. You do see folks doing things like fraud detection because Airflow's orchestrating how transactions go. Transactions get analyzed, they do things like analyzing marketing spend to see where your highest ROI is. And then, you know, you kind of can't not talk about all of the machine learning that goes on, right? Where customers are taking data about their own customers kind of analyze and aggregating that at scale and trying to automate decision making processes. So it goes from your most basic, what we call like data plumbing, right? Just to make sure data's moving as needed. All the ways to your more exciting and sexy use cases around like automated decision making and machine learning. >> And I'd say, I mean, I'd say that's one of the things that I think gets me most excited about our future is how critical Airflow is to all of those processes, you know? And I think when, you know, you know a tool is valuable is when something goes wrong and one of those critical processes doesn't work. And we know that our system is so mission critical to answering basic, you know, questions about your business and the growth of your company for so many organizations that we work with. So it's, I think one of the things that gets Viraj and I, and the rest of our company up every single morning, is knowing how important the work that we do for all of those use cases across industries, across company sizes. And it's really quite energizing. >> It was such a big focus this year at AWS re:Invent, the role of data. And I think one of the things that's exciting about the open AI and all the movement towards large language models, is that you can integrate data into these models, right? From outside, right? So you're starting to see the integration easier to deal with, still a lot of plumbing issues. So a lot of things happening. So I have to ask you guys, what is the state of the data orchestration area? Is it ready for disruption? Is it already been disrupted? Would you categorize it as a new first inning kind of opportunity or what's the state of the data orchestration area right now? Both, you know, technically and from a business model standpoint, how would you guys describe that state of the market? >> Yeah, I mean I think, I think in a lot of ways we're, in some ways I think we're categoric rating, you know, schedulers have been around for a long time. I recently did a presentation sort of on the evolution of going from, you know, something like KRON, which I think was built in like the 1970s out of Carnegie Mellon. And you know, that's a long time ago. That's 50 years ago. So it's sort of like the basic need to schedule and do something with your data on a schedule is not a new concept. But to our point earlier, I think everything that you need around your ecosystem, first of all, the number of data tools and developer tooling that has come out the industry has, you know, has some 5X over the last 10 years. And so obviously as that ecosystem grows and grows and grows and grows, the need for orchestration only increases. And I think, you know, as Astronomer, I think we, and there's, we work with so many different types of companies, companies that have been around for 50 years and companies that got started, you know, not even 12 months ago. And so I think for us, it's trying to always category create and adjust sort of what we sell and the value that we can provide for companies all across that journey. There are folks who are just getting started with orchestration and then there's folks who have such advanced use case 'cuz they're hitting sort of a ceiling and only want to go up from there. And so I think we as a company, care about both ends of that spectrum and certainly have want to build and continue building products for companies of all sorts, regardless of where they are on the maturity curve of data orchestration. >> That's a really good point Paola. And I think the other thing to really take into account is it's the companies themselves, but also individuals who have to do their jobs. You know, if you rewind the clock like five or 10 years ago, data engineers would be the ones responsible for orchestrating data through their org. But when we look at our customers today, it's not just data engineers anymore. There's data analysts who sit a lot closer to the business and the data scientists who want to automate things around their models. So this idea that orchestration is this new category is spot on, is right on the money. And what we're finding is it's spreading, the need for it, is spreading to all parts of the data team naturally where Airflows have emerged as an open source standard and we're hoping to take things to the next level. >> That's awesome. You know, we've been up saying that the data market's kind of like the SRE with servers, right? You're going to need one person to deal with a lot of data and that's data engineering and then you're going to have the practitioners, the democratization. Clearly that's coming in what you're seeing. So I got to ask, how do you guys fit in from a value proposition standpoint? What's the pitch that you have to customers or is it more inbound coming into you guys? Are you guys doing a lot of outreach, customer engagements? I'm sure they're getting a lot of great requirements from customers. What's the current value proposition? How do you guys engage? >> Yeah, I mean we've, there's so many, there's so many. Sorry Raj, you can jump in. - >> It's okay. So there's so many companies using Airflow, right? So our, the baseline is that the open source project that is Airflow that was, that came out of Airbnb, you know, over five years ago at this point, has grown exponentially in users and continues to grow. And so the folks that we sell to primarily are folks who are already committed to using Apache Airflow, need data orchestration in the organization and just want to do it better, want to do it more efficiently, want to do it without managing that infrastructure. And so our baseline proposition is for those organizations. Now to Raj's point, obviously I think our ambitions go beyond that, both in terms of the personas that we addressed and going beyond that data engineer, but really it's for, to start at the baseline. You know, as we continue to grow our company, it's really making sure that we're adding value to folks using Airflow and help them do so in a better way, in a larger way and a more efficient way. And that's really the crux of who we sell to. And so to answer your question on, we actually, we get a lot of inbound because they're are so many - >> A built-in audience. >> In the world that use it, that those are the folks who we talk to and come to our website and chat with us and get value from our content. I mean the power of the open source community is really just so, so big. And I think that's also one of the things that makes this job fun, so. >> And you guys are in a great position, Viraj, you can comment, to get your reaction. There's been a big successful business model to starting a company around these big projects for a lot of reasons. One is open source is continuing to be great, but there's also supply chain challenges in there. There's also, you know, we want to continue more innovation and more code and keeping it free and and flowing. And then there's the commercialization of product-izing it, operationalizing it. This is a huge new dynamic. I mean, in the past, you know, five or so years, 10 years, it's been happening all on CNCF from other areas like Apache, Linux Foundation, they're all implementing this. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to do this. >> Yeah, yeah. Open source is always going to be core to what we do because, you know, we wouldn't exist without the open source community around us. They are huge in numbers. Oftentimes they're nameless people who are working on making something better in a way that everybody benefits from it. But open source is really hard, especially if you're a company whose core competency is running a business, right? Maybe you're running e-commerce business or maybe you're running, I don't know, some sort of like any sort of business, especially if you're a company running a business, you don't really want to spend your time figuring out how to run open source software. You just want to use it, you want to use the best of it, you want to use the community around it. You want to take, you want to be able to google something and get answers for it. You want the benefits of open source. You don't want to have, you don't have the time or the resources to invest in becoming an expert in open source, right? And I think that dynamic is really what's given companies like us an ability to kind of form businesses around that, in the sense that we'll make it so people get the best of both worlds. You'll get this vast open ecosystem that you can build on top of, you can benefit from, that you can learn from, but you won't have to spend your time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting. You can do things that are just specific to your business. >> It's always been great to see that business model evolved. We used to debate 10 years ago, can there be another red hat? And we said, not really the same, but there'll be a lot of little ones that'll grow up to be big soon. Great stuff. Final question, can you guys share the history of the company, the milestones of the Astronomer's journey in data orchestration? >> Yeah, we could. So yeah, I mean, I think, so Raj and I have obviously been at astronomer along with our other founding team and leadership folks, for over five years now. And it's been such an incredible journey of learning, of hiring really amazing people. Solving again, mission critical problems for so many types of organizations. You know, we've had some funding that has allowed us to invest in the team that we have and in the software that we have. And that's been really phenomenal. And so that investment, I think, keeps us confident even despite these sort of macroeconomic conditions that we're finding ourselves in. And so honestly, the milestones for us are focusing on our product, focusing on our customers over the next year, focusing on that market for us, that we know can get value out of what we do. And making developers' lives better and growing the open source community, you know, and making sure that everything that we're doing makes it easier for folks to get started to contribute to the project and to feel a part of the community that we're cultivating here. >> You guys raised a little bit of money. How much have you guys raised? >> I forget what the total is, but it's in the ballpark of 200, over $200 million. So it feels good - >> A little bit of capital. Got a little bit of cash to work with there. Great success. I know it's a Series C financing, you guys been down, so you're up and running. What's next? What are you guys looking to do? What's the big horizon look like for you? And from a vision standpoint, more hiring, more product, what is some of the key things you're looking at doing? >> Yeah, it's really a little of all of the above, right? Like, kind of one of the best and worst things about working at earlier stage startups is there's always so much to do and you often have to just kind of figure out a way to get everything done, but really invest in our product over the next, at least the next, over the course of our company lifetime. And there's a lot of ways we wanting to just make it more accessible to users, easier to get started with, easier to use all kind of on all areas there. And really, we really want to do more for the community, right? Like I was saying, we wouldn't be anything without the large open source community around us. And we want to figure out ways to give back more in more creative ways, in more code driven ways and more kind of events and everything else that we can do to keep those folks galvanized and just keeping them happy using Airflow. >> Paola, any final words as we close out? >> No, I mean, I'm super excited. You know, I think we'll keep growing the team this year. We've got a couple of offices in the US which we're excited about, and a fully global team that will only continue to grow. So Viraj and I are both here in New York and we're excited to be engaging with our coworkers in person. Finally, after years of not doing so, we've got a bustling office in San Francisco as well. So growing those teams and continuing to hire all over the world and really focusing on our product and the open source community is where our heads are at this year, so. >> Congratulations. - >> Excited. 200 million in funding plus good runway. Put that money in the bank, squirrel it away. You know, it's good to kind of get some good interest on it, but still grow. Congratulations on all the work you guys do. We appreciate you and the open sourced community does and good luck with the venture. Continue to be successful and we'll see you at the Startup Showcase. >> Thank you. - >> Yeah, thanks so much, John. Appreciate it. - >> It's theCube conversation, featuring astronomer.io, that's the website. Astronomer is doing well. Multiple rounds of funding, over 200 million in funding. Open source continues to lead the way in innovation. Great business model. Good solution for the next gen, Cloud, scale, data operations, data stacks that are emerging. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(rousing music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE's" day one coverage of Cloud Native Security Con 23. This is going to be an exciting panel. I've got three great guests. I'm Lisa Martin, you know our esteemed analysts, John Furrier, and Dave Vellante well. And we're excited to welcome to "theCUBE" for the first time, Yves Sandfort, the CEO of Comdivision Group, who's coming to us from Germany. As you know, Cloud Native Security Con is a global event. Everyone welcome Yves, great to have you in particular. Welcome to "theCUBE." >> Great to be here. >> Thank you for inviting me. >> Yves, tell us a little bit, before we dig into really wanting to understand your perspectives on the event and get Dave and John's feedback as well, tell us a little bit about you. >> So yeah, talking about me, or talking about Comdivision real quick. We are in the business for over 27 years already. We started as a SaaS company, then became more like an architecture and, and Cloud Native company over the last few years. But what's interesting is, and I think that's, that's, that's really interesting when we look at our industry. It hasn't really, the requirements haven't really changed over the years. It's still security. We still have to figure out how we deal with security. We still have to figure out how we deal with compliance and everything else. And I think therefore, it's more and more important that we take these items more seriously. Also, based on the fact that when we look at it, how development and other things happen nowadays, it's, it's, everybody says it's like open source. It's great because everybody can look into the code. We, I think the last few years have shown us enough example that that's not necessarily solving all the issues, but it's also code and development has changed rapidly when we look at the Cloud Native approach, where it's far more about gluing the pieces together, versus the development pieces. When I was actually doing software development 25 years ago, and had to basically build my code because I didn't have that much internet access for it. So it has evolved, but even back then we had to deal with security and everything. >> Right. The focus on security is, is incredibly important, and the focus keeps growing as you mentioned. This is, guys, and I want to get your perspectives on this. We're going to start with John. This is the first time Cloud Native Security Con is its own event being extracted from, and amplified from KubeCon. John, I want to understand from your perspective, break down the event, what you see, what you've heard, and Cloud Native Security in general. What does this mean to companies? What does it mean to customers? Is this a reality? >> Well, I think that's the topic we want to discuss, and I think Yves background, you see the VMware certification, I love that. Because what VMware did with virtualization, was abstract that from server virtualization, kind of really changed the game on things, and you start to see Cloud Native kind of go that next level of how companies will be operating their business, not just digital transformation, as digital transformation goes to completion, it's total business transformation where IT is everywhere. And so you're starting to see the trends where, "Okay, that's happening." Now you're starting to see, that's Cloud Native Con, or KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, or whatever show, or whatever way you want to look at it. But in, in the past decade, past five years, security has always been front and center as almost a separate thing, and, in and of itself, but the same thing. So you're starting to see the breakout of security conversations around how to make things work. So a lot of operational conversations around what used to be DevOps makes infrastructure as code, and that was great, that fueled that. Then DevSecOps came. So the Cloud Native next level, is more application development at scale, developers driving the standards with developer first thinking, shifting left, I get all that. But down in the lower ends of the stack, you got real operational issues. DNS we've heard in the keynote, we heard about the Colonel, the Lennox Colonel. Things that need to be managed and taken care of at a security level. These are like, seem like in the weeds, but you're starting to see that happen. And the other thing that I think's real about Cloud Native Security Con that's going to be interesting to watch, is Amazon has pretty much canceled all their re:Invent like shows except for two; Re:Invent, which is their annual conference, and Re:Inforce, which is dedicated to securities. So Cloud Native, Linux, the Linux Foundation has now breaking out Cloud Native Con and KubeCon, and now Cloud Native Security Con. They can't call it KubeCon because it's not Kubernetes, but it's like security focus. I think this is the beginning of starting to see this new developer driving, developers driving the standards, and it has it implications, what used to be called IT ops, and that's like the VMwares of the world. You saw all the stuff that was not at developer focus, but more ops, becoming much more in the application. So I think, I think it's real. The question is where does it go? How fast does it develop? So to me, I think it's a real trend, and it's worthy of a breakout, but it's not yet clear of where the landing zone is for people to start doing it, how they get started, what are the best practices. Machine learning's going to be a big part of this. So to me it's totally cool, but I'm not yet seeing the beachhead. So that's kind of my take. >> Dave, our inventor and host of breaking analysis, what's your take? >> So when you, I think when you zoom out, there's some, there's a big macro change that's been going on. I think when you look back, let's say 10, 12 years ago, the, the need for speed far trumped the, the, the security aspect, the governance, the data privacy. It was like, "Yeah, the risks, they're not that great compared to our opportunity." That has completely changed because the risks are now so much higher. And so what's happening, I think there's a, there's a major effort amongst CIOs and CISOs to try to make security not a blocker because it use to be, it still is. "Okay, I got this great initiative." Eh, give it to the SecOps pros, and let them take it for a while before we can go to market. And so a huge challenge now is to simplify, automate, AI comes in, the whole supply chain security, so the, so the companies can not be facing so much friction. And that is non-trivial. I don't think we're anywhere close there, but I think the goal is by, within the next several years, we're going to be in a position, that security, we heard today, is, wasn't designed in to the initial internet protocols. It was bolted on. And so increasingly, the fundamental architecture of the internet, the Cloud, et cetera, is, is seeing designed in security, and, and that is an imperative, or else business is going to come to a grinding halt. >> Right. It's no longer, the bolt no longer works. Yves, what's your perspective on Cloud Native Security, where it stands today? What's in it for customers, whether we're talking about banks, or hospitals, or retailers, what do you think? >> I think when we, when we look at security in the, in the modern world, is we need to as, as Dave mentioned, we need to rethink how we apply it. Very often, security in the past has been always bolted on in the end. If we continue to do that, it'll become more and more difficult, because as companies evolve, and as companies want to bring products and software to market in a much faster and faster way, it's getting more and more difficult if we bolt on the security process at the end. It's like, developers build something and then someone checks security. That's not going to work any longer. Especially if we also consider now the changes in the industry. We had Stack Overflow over the last 10 years. If I would've had Stack Overflow 15, 20, what, 25 years ago when I was a developer, it would've changed a hell lot. Looking at it now, and looking at it what we had in the last few weeks, it's like where nearly all of my team members say is like finally I don't need any script kiddies anymore because I can't go to (indistinct) who writes the code for me. Which is on one end great, because it enables us to solve certain problems in a much higher pace. But the challenge with that is, if the people who just copy and past that code, don't understand the implications of that code, we have a much higher risk continuously. And what people thought was, is challenging with Stack Overflow. Imagine that something in one of these AI engines, is actually going ballistic, and it creates holes in nearly every one of these applications. And trust me, there will be enough developers who are going to use these tools to develop codes, the same as students in university are going to take this to write their essays and everything else. And so it's really important that every developer team basically has a security person within their team, and not a security at the end. So we build something, we check it, go through QA, and then it goes to security. Security needs to be at the forefront. And I think that's where we see Cloud Native Security Con, where we see AWS. I saw it during re:Invent already where they said is like, we have reinforced next year. I think this becomes more and more of a topic, and I think companies, as much as it is become a norm that you have a firewall and everything else, it needs to become a norm that when you are doing software development, and every development team needs to have a security person on that needs to be trained. >> I love that chat comment Dave, 'cause you and I were talking about this. And I think that is going to be the issue. Do we need security chat for the chat bot? And there's like a, like a recursive model there. The biases are built in. I think, and I think our interview with the Palo Alto Network's co-founder, Dave, when he talked about zero trust as a structured way to start things, but he was referencing that with Cloud, there's a chance to rethink or do a do-over in security. So, I think this is kind of to me, where this is all going. And I think you asked Pat Gelsinger what, year 2013, 2014, can, is security a do over? I think we're in that do over time. >> He said yes. >> He said yes. (laughing) He was right. But yeah, eight years later... But this is, how do you, zero trust gives you some structure, but how do you organize and redo security? Because to me, I think that's what's happening here. >> And John you heard, Zuk at Palo Alto Network said, "Yeah, the, the words security and architecture, they don't go together historically." And so it is a total, total retake. >> Well is that because there's too many tools out there and- >> Yeah. For sure. >> Yeah, well, first of all, a lot of hardware. And then yeah, a lot of tools. You even see IIOT and industry 40, you see IOT security coming up as another stove pipe, and that's not the right approach. And, and so- >> Well let me, let me ask you a question Dave, and Yves, if you don't mind. 'Cause I was just riffing on this yesterday about this. In the ML space, you're seeing the ML models, you're seeing proprietary models versus open source. Is security going to go down this proprietary security methods and open source? Because that's interesting, because the CNCF is run by the the Linux Foundation. So you can almost maybe see a model where there's more proprietary security methods than open source. Or is it, is that a non-issue? >> I would, I would, let me, if I, if I jump in here first, I think the last, especially last five or 10 years have clearly shown the, the whole and, and I invested early on in the, in the end 90s in several open source startups in the Bay area. So, I'm well behind the whole open source idea and, and mid (indistinct) and others back then several times. But the point is, I think what we have seen is open source is not in general, more secure or less secure, because code is too complex nowadays. You have millions of lines of code, and it's not that either one way or the other is going to solve it. The ways I think we are going to look at it is more is what's the role to market, because only because something is open source doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be available for everyone. And the same for proprietary source from that perspective, even though everybody mixes licensing and payments and all that all the time, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. But I think as we are going through it, and when we also look at the industry, security industry over the last 10 plus years has been primarily hardware focused. And a lot of these vendors have done a good business out of selling hardware boxes, putting software on top of it. Whereas in reality, those were still X86 standard boxes in the end. So it was not that we had specific security ethics or anything like that in there anymore. And so overall, the question of the market is going to change. And as we are looking into Cloud Native, think about someone like an AWS, do you really envision them to have a hardware box of every supplier in their data center, and that in every availability zone in every region? Same for Microsoft, same for Google, etc? So we need to have new ways on how we can apply security. And that applies both on the backend services, but also on the front end side. >> And if I, and if I could chime in, I think the, the good, I think the answer is, is, is no and yes. And what I mean by that is if you take, antivirus and known malware, I mean pretty much anybody today can, can solve that problem, it's the unknown malware. So I think the yes part of the answer is yes, it's, it's going to be proprietary, but in the sense we're going to use open source tooling, and then apply that in a proprietary way with, with specific algorithms and unique architectures that are going to solve problems. For example, XDR with, with unknown malware. So, and that's the, that's the hard part. As somebody said, I think this morning at the keynote, it's, it's all the stuff that, that the SecOps team couldn't find. That's the really hard part. >> (laughs) Well the question will be will, is the new IP, the ability to feed ChatGPT some magical spelled insertion query string that does the job, that's unique, that might be the new IP, the the question to ask. >> Well, that's what the hackers are going to do. And I, they're on offense. (John laughs) And the offense knows what play is coming. So, they're going to start. >> So guys, let's take this conversation up a level. I want to get your perspectives on what's in this for me as a customer? We know security is a board level conversation. We talk about this all the time. We also know that they're based on, I think David, was the conversations that you and I had, with Palo Alto Networks at Ignite in December. There's a, there's a lack of alignment between the executives and the board from a security perspective. When we talk about Cloud Native Security, we all talked about the value in that, what's in it for customers? I want to get your perspectives on should this be a board level conversation, and if so, how do you advise organizations, whether it is a hospital, or a bank, or an organization that is really affected by things like ransomware? How should they be thinking about this from an organizational perspective? >> Well, I'll start first, because we had this conversation during our Super Cloud event last month, and this comes up a lot. And this is, the CEO board level. Yes it is a board level conversation for security, as is application development as in terms of transforming their business to be competitive, not to be on the wrong side of history with this wave coming. So I think that's more of a management. But the issue is, they tell their people, "Go do it." And they're like, 'cause they get sold on the idea of, "Hey, won't you transform your business, and everything's going to be data driven, and machine learning's going to power your apps, get new customers, be profitable." "Oh, sign me up for that." When you have to implement this, it's really hard. And I think the core issue is, where are companies in their life cycle of the ability to execute and architect this thing properly as Dave said, Nick Zuk said, "You can't have architecture and security, you need platforms." So, I think the re-platforming, and the re-factoring of business is a big factor, and that's got to get down into the, the organizational shifts and the people to do it. So are there skills? Do I do a managed service? How do I architect it? Are there more services? Are there developers doing applications that are going to be more agile? So, this is not an easy thing. And to move a business from IT operations that is proven, to be positioned for this enablement, is just really difficult. And it's expensive. And if you screw it up, you could be, could be on the wrong side of things. So, to me, that's the big issue is, you sell the dream and then you got to implement it. And that's really difficult. >> Yves, give us your perspective on, based on John's comments, how do organizations shift so dramatically? There's a cultural element there as well, but there's also organizations that are, have competitive competitors in the rear view mirror, and there's time to waste. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think that's exactly the point. It's like, as an organization, you need to take the decision between the time, the risk, and all the other elements we have into this game. Because you can try to achieve 100% security, but that's exactly the same as trying to, to protect gold or anything else 100%. It's most likely not going to be from a risk perspective anyway sensible. And that's the same from a corporational perspective. When you look at building new internet services, or IOT services, or any kind of new shopping experience or whatever else, you need to balance out between the risks and the advantages out of it. And you also need to be accepting that you potentially on the way make mistakes, but then it's more important than ever that you are able to quickly fix any mistakes, and to adjust to anything what's happening in the market. Because as we are building all these new Cloud Native applications, and build up all these skill sets, one of the big scenarios is we are far more depending on individual building blocks. These building blocks come out of open source communities, which have a much different way. When we look back in software development, back then we had application servers from Oracle, Web Logic, whatsoever, they had a release cycles of every three to six months. As now we have to deal with open source, where sometimes release cycles are on a four week schedule, in between security patches. So you need to be much faster in adopting that, checking that, implementing that, getting things to work. So there is a security stretch from that perspective. There is a speech stretch on the other thing companies have to deal with, and on the other side it's always a measurement between the risk, and the security you can afford. Because reality is, you will not be 100% protected no matter what you do. So, you need to balance out what you as an organization can actually build on. But I think, coming back also to the point, it's on the bot level nowadays. It's like nearly every discussion we have with companies nowadays as they move into the Cloud, especially also here in Europe where for the last five years, it was always, it's like "It's data privacy." Data privacy is no longer, I mean, yes, for certain people, it's still the point, but for many more people it's like, "How protected is my data?" "What do we do in case of ransomware attack?" "What do we do in case of a denial of service?" All of these things become more vulnerable, where in the past you were discussing these things with a becking page, or, or like a stock exchange. They were, it's like, "What the hell is going to happen if we have a denial of service?" Now all of the sudden, this now affects nearly everyone in their storefronts and everything else, because everything is depending on it. >> Yeah, I think you're right on. You think about how cultural change occurs, it's bottom ups or, bottom up, top down or middle out. And what, what's happened with security is the people in the security team cared about it, they were the, everybody said, "Oh, it's their problem." And then it just did an end run to the board, kind of mid, early last decade. And then the board sort of pushed that down. And the line of business is realizing, "Holy cow. My business, my EBIT can be dramatically affected by this, so I care." Now it's this whole house, cultural team sport. I know it's sort of a, a cliche, but it, it's true. Everybody actually is beginning to care about security because the risks are now so high, and it's going to affect not only the bottom line of the company, the bottom line of the business, their job, it's, it's, it's virtually everywhere. It's a huge cultural shift that we're seeing. >> And that's a big challenge for organizations in any industry. And Yves, you talked about ransomware service. Every industry across the globe is vulnerable to this. But how can, maybe John, we'll start with you. How can Cloud Native Security help organizations if they're able to embrace it, operationally, culturally, dial down some of the vulnerabilities that just seem to keep growing? >> Well, I mean that's the big question. The breaches are, are critical. The governances also could be a way that anchors down growth. So I think the balance between the governance compliance piece of it is key, but making the developers faster and more productive is the key to me. And I think having the security paradigm where they're not blockers, as Dave said, is critical. So I love the whole shift left, but now that we have more data focused initiatives around how that, you can use data to understand the security issues, I think data and security are together, and I think there's a going to be a data operating system model emerging, where data and security will be almost one thing. And that will be set up by the security teams, and the data teams together. And that will feed guardrails into the developer environment. So the developer should feel no pain at all in doing this. So I think the best practice will end up being what we're seeing with supply chain, security, with making sure code's verified. And you're going to see the container, security side completely address has been, and KubeCon, we just, I asked Scott Johnson, the CEO of Docker, and I asked him directly, "Are you guys all tight on container security?" He said, yes, but other people are suggesting that's not true. There's a lot of issues with the container security. So, there's all kinds of areas where there's holes. So Cloud Native is cool on one hand, and very relevant, but if it's not shored up, it's going to be a problem. But I, so I think that's where the action will be, at the developer pipeline, in the containers, and the data. So, that will be very relevant, and if companies nail that, they'll be faster, they'll have better apps, and that'll be the differentiator. And again, if they don't on this next wave, they're going to be driftwood. >> Dave, how do they prevent becoming driftwood? >> Well, I think Cloud has had a huge impact. And a Cloud's by no means a panacea, but let's face it, it's dramatically improved a lot of companies security posture. Now there's still that shared responsibility. Even though an S3 bucket is encrypted, it's still your responsibility to make sure that it doesn't get decrypted by somebody who has access to it. So there are things like that, but to Yve's earlier point, that can be, that's done through software now, it's done through best practices. Those best practices can be shared. So the way you, you don't become driftwood, is you start to, you step back, rethink that security architecture as we were talking about earlier, take advantage of the Cloud, take advantage of Cloud Native, and all the, the rapid pace of innovation that's occurring there, and you don't use, it's called before, The audit is the last line of defense. That's no longer a check box item. "Oh yeah, we're in compliance." It's, this is a business imperative, and because we're going to reduce our expected loss and reduce our business risk. That's part of the business case today. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge, critically important part of the business case. Yves, question for you. If you're in an elevator with a CEO, a CFO, and a CISO, and they're talking about security and Cloud Native Security, what's your value proposition to them on a, on a say a 32nd elevator ride? >> Difficult story. I think at the moment, the most important part is, we need to get people to work together, and we need to train people to work more much better together. I think that's the overall most important part for all of these solutions, because in the end, security is always a person issue. If, we can have the best tools in the industry, as long as we don't get all of these teams to work together, then we have a problem. If the security team is always seen as the end of the solution to fix everything, that's not going to work because they always are the bad guys in the game. And so we need to bring the teams together. And once we have the teams work together, I think we have a far better track on, on maintaining security. >> John and Dave, I want to get your perspectives on what Yves just said. In all the experience that the two of you have as industry analysts here on "theCUBE," Wikibon, Siliconangle Media. How do you advise organizations to get those teams together? As Eve said, that alignment is critical, but John, we'll start with you, then Dave go to you. What's your advice for organizations that need to align those teams and really don't have a lot of time to wait to do it? >> (chuckling) That's a great question. I think, I think that's everyone pays hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars to get that advice from these consultants, organizations out there doing the transformations. But I think it comes down to personnel and commitment. I think if there's a C-level commitment to the effort, you'll see the institutional structure change. So you can see really getting behind it with their, with their wallet and their, and their support of either getting more personnel to support and assist, or manage services, or giving the power to the teams to execute and doing it in a way that, that's, that's well known and best practices. Start small, build out the pilots, build the platform, and then start getting it right. And I think that's the key. Not the magic wand, the old model of rolling out stuff in, in six month cycles. It's really, get the proof points, double down and change the culture, but also execute and have real metrics. And changing the architecture, like having more penetration tests as a service. Doing pen tests is like a joke now. So that doesn't make any sense. You got to have that built in almost every day, and every minute. So, these kinds of new techniques have to be implemented and have to be tried. So that's why these communities are growing. That's why I like what open source has been doing, and I like the open source as the place to have these conversations, because that's where the action will be for new stuff. And I think people will implement open source like they did before, but with different ways, better testing, better supply chain on the software side, verifying code. So, I see open source actually getting a tailwind from this, not a headwind. So, I'm bullish on the open source piece here on, on all levels, machine learning- >> Lisa, my answer is intramural sports. And it's 'cause I think it's cultural. And what I mean by that, is you take your your best and brightest security, and this is what frankly, a lot of CISOs do, an examples is Lena Smart, MongoDB. Take your best and brightest security pros, make them captains of the intramural teams, and pair them up with pods of individuals across the organization, which is most people who don't know anything about security, and put them together, so that they can, they, so that the folks that understand security can, can realize how little people know, what, what, what, how, what the worst practices that are out there in the reverse, how they can cross pollinate. And they do that on a regular basis, I know at Mongo and other companies. And that kind of cultural assimilation is a starting point for how you get security awareness up to your question around making it a team sport. >> Absolutely critical. Yves, I want to kind of wrap things with you. We've got a couple of minutes left. When you're really looking at the Cloud Native community, the growth of it, we talked about earlier in the program, Cloud Native Security Con being now extracted and elevated out of KubeCon, what are your thoughts on the groundswell that this community is generating around Cloud Native Security, the benefits that organizations will achieve from it? >> I think overall, when we have these securities conferences, or these security arms a bit spread out and separated out of the main conference, it helps to a certain degree, because especially in the security space, when you look at at other like black hat or white hat conferences and things like that in the past, although they were not focused on Cloud Native, a lot of these security folks didn't feel well taken care of in any of the other conferences because they were always these, it's like they are always blocking us, they're always making us problems, and all these kinds of things. Now that we really take the Cloud Native piece and the security piece together, or like AWS does it with re:Inforce, I think we will see more and more that people understand is that security is a permanent topic we need to cover, but we need to bring different people together, because security also has compliance and a lot of other components in there. So we will see at these conferences moving forward, also a different audience. It's not going to be only the Cloud Native developers. And if I see some of these security audiences, I can't really imagine them to really be at KubeCon because there is too much other things going on. And you couldn't really see much of that at re:Invent because re:Invent by itself has become a complete monster of a conference. It covers too many topics. And so having this very, very important security piece separated, also gives the opportunity, I think, that we can bring in the security people, but also have the type of board level discussions potentially, between the leaders of the industry, to also discuss on how we can evolve, how we can make things better, and how, how we can actually, yeah, evolve our industry for it. Because let's face it, that threat is not going to go away. It's, it's a business. And one of the last security conferences I was on, on the ransomware part, it was one of the topics someone said is like, "Look, currently on average, it takes a hacker group roughly around they said 15 to 20 K to break into a company, and they on average make 100K. It's a business, let's face it. And it's a business we don't like. And ethically, it's no discussion that this is not good, but that's something which is happening. People are making money with it. And as long as that's going to go on, and we have enough countries where these people can hide, it's going to stay and survive. And so, with that being said, it's important for us to really build an industry around this. But I also think it's good that we have separate conferences. In the past we had more the RSA conference, which tried to cover all of these areas. But that is not really fitting Cloud Native and everything else. So I think it's good that we have these new opportunities, the Cloud Native one, but also what AWS brings up for someone. >> Yves, you just nailed it. It just comes down to simple math. It's a fraction. Revenue over cost. And if you could increase the hacker's cost, increase the denominator, their ROI will go down. And that is the game. >> Great point, Dave. What I'm hearing guys, and we can talk about technology for days and days. I know all of you. But there's, there's a big component that, that the elevation of Cloud Native Security, on its own as standalone is critical, as is the people component. You guys all talked about that. We talked about the cultural change necessary for that. Hopefully what we're seeing with Cloud Native Security Con 23, this first event is going to give us more insight over the next couple of days, and the next months or so, as to how this elevation, and how the people can come together to really help organizations from a math perspective as, as Dave talked about, really dial down the risks there, understand more of the vulnerabilities so that ransomware as a service is not as lucrative as it is today. Guys, so much appreciate your time, really breaking down Cloud Native Security, the value in it from different perspectives, and what your thoughts are on where it's going. Thanks so much for your time. >> All right. Thanks. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Yves. >> All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one coverage of Cloud Native Security Con 23. Thanks for watching. (rousing music)

(cheerful music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here in our Palo Alto studios talking to Greg Gibby, senior product manager, data center products from AMD, and Mohan Rokkam, technical marketing engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Mohan: Hello, hello. >> Greg: Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Good to see each of you. Just really quickly, I want to start out. Let us know a little bit about yourselves. Mohan, let's start with you. What do you do at Dell exactly? >> So I'm a technical marketing engineer at Dell. I've been with Dell for around 15 years now and my goal is to really look at the Dell powered servers and see how do customers take advantage of some of the features we have, especially with the AMD EPYC processors that have just come out. >> Greg, and what do you do at AMD? >> Yeah, so I manage our software-defined infrastructure solutions team, and really it's a cradle to grave where we work with the ISVs in the market, so VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, et cetera, to integrate the features that we're putting into our processors and make sure they're ready to go and enabled. And then we work with our valued partners like Dell on putting those into actual solutions that customers can buy and then we work with them to sell those solutions into the market. >> Before we get into the details on the 4th Generation EPYC launch and what that means and why people should care. Mohan, maybe you can tell us a little about the relationship between Dell and AMD, how that works, and then Greg, if you've got commentary on that afterwards, that'd be great. Yeah, Mohan. >> Absolutely. Dell and AMD have a long standing partnership, right? Especially now with EPYC series. We have had products since EPYC first generation. We have been doing solutions across the whole range of Dell ecosystem. We have integrated AMD quite thoroughly and effectively and we really love how performant these systems are. So, yeah. >> Dave: Greg, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say the other thing too is, is that we need to point out is that we both have really strong relationships across the entire ecosystem. So memory vendors, the software providers, et cetera, we have technical relationships. We're working with them to optimize solutions so that ultimately when the customer buys that, they get a great user experience right out of the box. >> So, Mohan, I know that you and your team do a lot of performance validation testing as time goes by. I suspect that you had early releases of the 4th Gen EPYC processor technology. What have you been seeing so far? What can you tell us? >> AMD has definitely knocked it out of the park. Time and again, in the past four generations, in the past five years alone, we have done some database work where in five years, we have seen five exit performance. And across the board, AMD is the leader in benchmarks. We have done virtualization where we would consolidate from five into one system. We have world records in AI, we have world records in databases, we have world records in virtualization. The AMD EPYC solutions has been absolutely performant. I'll leave you with one number here. When we went from top of Stack Milan to top of Stack Genoa, we saw a performance bump of 120%. And that number just blew my mind. >> So that prompts a question for Greg. Often we, in industry insiders, think in terms of performance gains over the last generation or the current generation. A lot of customers in the real world, however, are N - 2. They're a ways back, so I guess two points on that. First of all, the kinds of increases the average person is going to see when they move to this architecture, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's even more significant than a lot of the headline numbers because they're moving two generations, number one. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but then the other thing is the question to you, Greg. I like very long complicated questions, as you can tell. The question is, is it okay for people to skip generations or make the case for upgrades, I guess is the problem? >> Well, yeah, so a couple thoughts on that first too. Mohan talked about that five X over the generation improvements that we've seen. The other key point with that too is that we've made significant process improvements along the way moving to seven nanocomputer to now five nanocomputer and that's really reducing the total amount of power or the performance per watt the customers can realize as well. And when we look at why would a customer want to upgrade, right? And I want to rephrase that as to why aren't you? And there is a real cost of not upgrading. And so when you look at infrastructure, the average age of a server in the data center is over five years old. And if you look at the most popular processors that were sold in that timeframe, it's 8, 10, 12 cores. So now you've got a bunch of servers that you need in order to deliver the applications and meet your SLAs to your end users, and all those servers pull power. They require maintenance. They have the opportunity to go down, et cetera. You got to pay licensing and service and support costs and all those. And when you look at all the costs that roll up, even though the hardware is paid for just to keep the lights on, and not even talking about the soft costs of unplanned downtime, and, "I'm not meeting your SLAs," et cetera, it's very expensive to keep those servers running. Now, if you refresh, and now you have processors that have 32, 64, 96 cores, now you can consolidate that infrastructure and reduce your total power bill. You can reduce your CapEx, you reduce your ongoing OpEx, you improve your performance, and you improve your security profile. So it really is more cost effective to refresh than not to refresh. >> So, Mohan, what has your experience been double clicking on this topic of consolidation? I know that we're going to talk about virtualization in some of the results that you've seen. What have you seen in that regard? Does this favor better consolidation and virtualized environments? And are you both assuring us that the ROI and TCO pencil out on these new big, bad machines? >> Greg definitely hit the nail on the head, right? We are seeing tremendous savings really, if you're consolidating from two generations old. We went from, as I said, five is to one. You're going from five full servers, probably paid off down to one single server. That itself is, if you look at licensing costs, which again, with things like VMware does get pretty expensive. If you move to a single system, yes, we are at 32, 64, 96 cores, but if you compare to the licensing costs of 10 cores, two sockets, that's still pretty significant, right? That's one huge thing. Another thing which actually really drives the thing is we are looking at security, and in today's environment, security becomes a major driving factor for upgrades. Dell has its own setups, cyber-resilient architecture, as we call it, and that really is integrated from processor all the way up into the OS. And those are some of the features which customers really can take advantage of and help protect their ecosystems. >> So what kinds of virtualized environments did you test? >> We have done virtualization across primary codes with VMware, but the Azure Stack, we have looked at Nutanix. PowerFlex is another one within Dell. We have vSAN Ready Nodes. All of these, OpenShift, we have a broad variety of solutions from Dell and AMD really fits into almost every one of them very well. >> So where does hyper-converged infrastructure fit into this puzzle? We can think of a server as something that contains not only AMD's latest architecture but also latest PCIe bus technology and all of the faster memory, faster storage cards, faster nicks, all of that comes together. But how does that play out in Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure or HCI strategy? >> Dell is a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. We have the very popular VxRail line, we have the PowerFlex, which is now going into the AWS ecosystem as well, Nutanix, and of course, Azure Stack. With all these, when you look at AMD, we have up to 96 cores coming in. We have PCIe Gen 5 which means you can now connect dual port, 100 and 200 gig nicks and get line rate on those so you can connect to your ecosystem. And I don't know if you've seen the news, 200, 400 gig routers and switchers are selling out. That's not slowing down. The network infrastructure is booming. If you want to look at the AI/ML side of things, the VDI side of things, accelerator cards are becoming more and more powerful, more and more popular. And of course they need that higher end data path that PCIe Gen 5 brings to the table. GDDR5 is another huge improvement in terms of performance and latencies. So when we take all this together, you talk about hyper-converged, all of them add into making sure that A, with hyper-converged, you get ease of management, but B, just 'cause you have ease of management doesn't mean you need to compromise on anything. And the AMD servers effectively are a no compromise offering that we at Dell are able to offer to our customers. >> So Greg, I've got a question a little bit from left field for you. We covered Supercompute Conference 2022. We were in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and there was a lot of discussion of the current processor manufacturer battles, and a lot of buzz around 4th Gen EPYC being launched and what's coming over the next year. Do you have any thoughts on what this architecture can deliver for us in terms of things like AI? We talk about virtualization, but if you look out over the next year, do you see this kind of architecture driving significant change in the world? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It has the real potential to do that from just the building blocks. So we have our chiplet architecture we call it. So you have an IO die and then you have your core complexes that go around that. And we integrate it all with our infinity fabric. That architecture allows you, if we wanted to, replace some of those CCDs with specific accelerators. And so when we look two, three, four years down the road, that architecture and that capability already built into what we're delivering and can easily be moved in. We just need to make sure that when you look at doing that, that the power that's required to do that and the software, et cetera, and those accelerators actually deliver better performance as a dedicated engine versus just using standard CPUs. The other things that I would say too is if you look at emerging workloads. So data center modernization is one of the buzzwords in cloud native, right? And these container environments, well, AMD'S architecture really just screams support for those type of environments, right? Where when you get into these larger core accounts and the consolidation that Mohan talked about. Now when I'm in a container environment, that blast radius so a lot of customers have concerns around, "Hey, having a single point of failure and having more than X number of cores concerns me." If I'm in containers, that becomes less of a concern. And so when you look at cloud native, containerized applications, data center modernization, AMD's extremely well positioned to take advantage of those use cases as well. >> Yeah, Mohan, and when we talk about virtualization, I think sometimes we have to remind everyone that yeah, we're talking about not only virtualization that has a full-blown operating system in the bucket, but also virtualization where the containers have microservices and things like that. I think you had something to add, Mohan. >> I did, and I think going back to the accelerator side of business, right? When we are looking at the current technology and looking at accelerators, AMD has done a fantastic job of adding in features like AVX-512, we have the bfloat16 and eight features. And some of what these do is they're effectively built-in accelerators for certain workloads especially in the AI and media spaces. And in some of these use cases we look at, for example, are inference. Traditionally we have used external accelerator cards, but for some of the entry level and mid-level use cases, CPU is going to work just fine especially with the newer CPUs that we are seeing this fantastic performance from. The accelerators just help get us to the point where if I'm at the edge, if I'm in certain use cases, I don't need to have an accelerator in there. I can run most of my inference workloads right on the CPU. >> Yeah, yeah. You know the game. It's an endless chase to find the bottleneck. And once we've solved the puzzle, we've created a bottleneck somewhere else. Back to the supercompute conversations we had, specifically about some of the AMD EPYC processor technology and the way that Dell is packaging it up and leveraging things like connectivity. That was one of the things that was also highlighted. This idea that increasingly connectivity is critically important, not just for supercomputing, but for high-performance computing that's finding its way out of the realms of Los Alamos and down to the enterprise level. Gentlemen, any more thoughts about the partnership or maybe a hint at what's coming in the future? I know that the original AMD announcement was announcing and previewing some things that are rolling out over the next several months. So let me just toss it to Greg. What are we going to see in 2023 in terms of rollouts that you can share with us? >> That I can share with you? Yeah, so I think look forward to see more advancements in the technology at the core level. I think we've already announced our product code name Bergamo, where we'll have up to 128 cores per socket. And then as we look in, how do we continually address this demand for data, this demand for, I need actionable insights immediately, look for us to continue to drive performance leadership in our products that are coming out and address specific workloads and accelerators where appropriate and where we see a growing market. >> Mohan, final thoughts. >> On the Dell side, of course, we have four very rich and configurable options with AMD EPYC servers. But beyond that, you'll see a lot more solutions. Some of what Greg has been talking about around the next generation of processors or the next updated processors, you'll start seeing some of those. and you'll definitely see more use cases from us and how customers can implement them and take advantage of the features that. It's just exciting stuff. >> Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, we have a great year ahead of us. As we approach possibly the holiday seasons, I wish both of you well. Thank you for joining us. From here in the Palo Alto studios, again, Dave Nicholson here. Stay tuned for our continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. Thanks for joining us. (cheerful music)

>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Hello friends and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We are here at AWS re:Invent in the heat of day three. Very exciting time. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier here on theCUBE. John, what's your, what's your big hot take from the day? Just from today. >> So right now the velocity of content is continuing to flow on theCUBE. Thank you, everyone, for watching. The security conversations. Also, the cost tuning of the cloud kind of vibe is going on. You're hearing that with the looming recession, but if you look at the show it's the bulk of the keynote time spent talking is on data and security together. So Security, Security Lake, Amazon, they continue to talk about security. This next segment's going to be awesome. We have a multi-, eight-time CUBE alumni coming back and great conversation about security. I'm looking forward to this. >> Alumni VIP, I know, it's so great. Actually, both of these guests have been on theCUBE before so please welcome Dan and Haiyan. Thank you both for being here from F5. How's the show going? You're both smiling and we're midway through day three. Good? >> It's so exciting to be here with you all and it's a great show. >> Awesome. Dan, you having a good time too? >> It's wearing me out. I'm having a great time. (laughter) >> It's okay to be honest. It's okay to be honest. It's wearing out our vocal cords for sure up here, but it is definitely a great time. Haiyan, can you tell me a little bit about F5 just in case the audience isn't familiar? >> Sure, so F5 we specialize in application delivery and security. So our mission is to deliver secure and optimize any applications, any APIs, anywhere. >> I can imagine you have a few customers in the house. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, that's awesome. So in terms of a problem that, well an annoyance that we've all had, bots. We all want the anti-bots. You have a unique solution to this. How are you helping AWS customers with bots? Let's send it to you. >> Well we, we collect client side signals from all devices. We might study how it does floating point math or how it renders emojis. We analyze those signals and we can make a real time determination if the traffic is from a bot or not. And if it's from a bot, we could take mitigating action. And if it's not, we just forward it on to origin. So client side signals are really important. And then the second aspect of bot protection I think is understanding that bot's retool. They become more sophisticated. >> Savannah: They learn. >> They learn. >> They unfortunately learn as well. >> Exactly, yeah. So you have to have a second stage what we call retrospective analysis where you're looking over all the historical transactions, looking for anything that may have been missed by a realtime defense and then updating that stage one that real time defense to deal with the newly discovered threat. >> Let's take a step back for a second. I want to just set the table in the context for the bot conversation. Bots, automation, that's, people know like spam bots but Amazon has seen the bot networks develop. Can you scope the magnitude and the size of the problem of bots? What is the problem? And give a size of what this magnitude of this is. >> Sure, one thing that's important to realize is not all bots are bad. Okay? Some bots are good and you want to identify the automation from those bots and allow listed so you don't interfere with what they're doing. >> I can imagine that's actually tricky. >> It is, it is. Absolutely. Yeah. >> Savannah: Nuanced. >> Yeah, but the bad bots, these are the ones that are attempting credential stuffing attacks, right? They're trying username password pairs against login forms. And because of consumer habits to reuse usernames and passwords, they end up taking over a lot of accounts. But those are the bookends. There are all sorts of types of bots in between those two bookends. Some are just nuisance, like limited time offer bots. You saw some of this in the news recently with Ticketmaster. >> That's a spicy story. >> Yeah, it really is. And it's the bots that is causing that problem. They use automation to buy all these concert tickets or sneakers or you know, any limited time offer project. And then they resell those on the secondary market. And we've done analysis on some of these groups and they're making millions of dollars. It isn't something they're making like 1200 bucks on. >> I know Amazon doesn't like to talk about this but the cloud for its double edged sword that it is for all the greatness of the agility spinning up resources bots have been taking advantage of that same capability to hide, change, morph. You've seen the matrix when the bots attacked the ship. They come out of nowhere. But Amazon actually has seen the bot problem for a long time, has been working on it. Talk about that kind of evolution of how this problem's being solved. What's Amazon doing about, how do you guys help out? >> Yeah, well we have this CloudFront connector that allows all Amazon CloudFront customers to be able to leverage this technology very, very quickly. So what historically was available only to like, you know the Fortune 500 at most of the global 2000 is now available to all AWS customers who are using CloudFront just by really you can explain how do they turn it on in CloudFront? >> Yeah. So I mean CloudFront technologies like that is so essential to delivering the digital experience. So what we do is we do a integration natively. And so if your CloudFront customers and you can just use our bot defense solution by turning on, you know, that traffic. So go through our API inspection, go through our bot inspection and you can benefit from all the other efficiencies that we acquired through serving the highest and the top institutions in the world. >> So just to get this clarification, this is a super important point. You said it's native to the service. I don't have to bolt it on? Is it part of the customer experience? >> Yeah, we basically built the integration. So if you're already a CloudFront customer and you have the ability to turn on our bot solutions without having to do the integration yourself. >> Flick a switch and it's on. >> Haiyan: Totally. >> Pretty much. >> Haiyan: Yeah. >> That's how I want to get rid of all the spam in my life. We've talked a lot about the easy button. I would also like the anti-spam button if we're >> Haiyan: 100% >> Well we were talking before you came on camera that there's a potentially a solution you can sit charge. There are techniques. >> Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about the spam emails and I thought they just charge, you know 10th of a penny for every sent email. It wouldn't affect me very much. >> What's the, are people on that? You guys are on this but I mean this is never going to stop. We're going to see the underbelly of the web, the dark web continue to do it. People are harvesting past with the dark web using bots that go in test challenge credentials. I mean, it's just happening. It's never going to stop. What's, is it going to be that cat and mouse game? Are we going to see solutions? What's the, when are we going to get some >> Well it's certainly not a cat and mouse game for F5 customers because we win that battle every time. But for enterprises who are still battling the bots as a DIY project, then yes, it's just going to be a cat and mouse. They're continuing to block by IP, you know, by rate limiting. >> Right, which is so early 2000's. >> Exactly. >> If we're being honest. >> Exactly. And the attackers, by the way, the attackers are now coming from hundreds of thousands or even millions of IP addresses and some IPs are using one time. >> Yeah, I mean it seems like such an easy problem to circumnavigate. And still be able to get in. >> What are I, I, let's stick here for a second. What are some of the other trends that you're seeing in how people are defending if they're not using you or just in general? >> Yeah, maybe I'll add to to that. You know, when we think about the bot problem we also sort of zoom out and say, Hey, bot is only one part of the problem when you think about the entire digital experience the customer experiencing, right? So at F5 we actually took a more holistic sort of way to say, well it's about protecting the apps and applications and the APIs that's powering all of those. And we're thinking not only the applications APIs we're thinking the infrastructure that those API workloads are running. So one of the things we're sharing since we acquired Threat Stack, we have been busy doing integrations with our distributed cloud services and we're excited. In a couple weeks you will hear announcement of the integrated solution for our application infrastructure protection. So that's just another thing. >> On that Threat Stack, does that help with that data story too? Because it's a compliance aspect as well. >> Yeah, it helps with the telemetries, collecting more telemetries, the data story but is also think about applications and APIs. You can only be as secure as the infrastructure you're running on it, right? So the infrastructure protection is a key part of application security. And the other dimension is not only we can help with the credentials, staffing and, and things but it's actually thinking about the customer's top line. Because at the end of the day when all this inventory are being siphoned out the customer won't be happy. So how do we make sure their loyal customers have the right experience so that can improve their top line and not just sort of preventing the bots. So there's a lot of mission that we're on. >> Yeah, that surprise and delight in addition to that protection. >> 100% >> If I could talk about the evolution of an engagement with F5. We first go online, deploy the client side signals I described and take care of all the bad bots. Okay. Mitigate them. Allow list all the good bots, now you're just left with human traffic. We have other client side signals that'll identify the bad humans among the good humans and you could deal with them. And then we have additional client side signals that allow us to do silent continuous authentication of your good customers extending their sessions so they don't have to endure the friction of logging in over and over and over. >> Explain that last one again because I think that was, that's, I didn't catch that. >> Yeah. So right now we require a customer to enter in their username and password before we believe it's them. But we had a customer who a lot of their customers were struggling to log in. So we did analysis and we realized that our client side signals, you know of all those that are struggling to log in, we're confident like 40% of 'em are known good customers based on some of these signals. Like they're doing floating point math the way they always have. They're rendering emojis the way they always have all these clients that signals are the same. So why force that customer to log in again? >> Oh yeah. And that's such a frustrating user experience. >> So true. >> I actually had that thought earlier today. How many time, how much of my life am I going to spend typing my email address? Just that in itself. Then I could crawl back under the covers but >> With the biometric Mac, I forget my passwords. >> Or how about solving CAPTCHA's? How fun is that? >> How many pictures have a bus? >> I got one wrong the other day because I had to pick all the street signs. I got it wrong and I called a Russian human click farm and figured out why was I getting it wrong? And they said >> I love that you went down this rabbit hole deeply. >> You know why that's not a street sign. That's a road sign, they told me. >> That's the secret backdoor. >> Oh well yeah. >> Talk about your background because you have fascinating background coming from law enforcement and you're in this kind of role. >> He could probably tell us about our background. >> They expunge those records. I'm only kidding. >> 25, 30 years in working in local, state and federal law enforcement and intelligence among those an FBI agent and a CIA cyber operations officer. And most people are drawn to that because it's interesting >> Three letter agencies can get an eyebrow raise. >> But I'll be honest, my early, early in my career I was a beat cop and that changed my life. That really did, that taught me the importance of an education, taught me the criminal mindset. So yeah, people are drawn to the FBI and CIA background, but I really value the >> So you had a good observation eye for kind of what, how this all builds out. >> It all kind of adds up, you know, constantly fighting the bad guys, whether they're humans, bots, a security threat from a foreign nation. >> Well learning their mindset and learning what motivates them, what their objectives are. It is really important. >> Reading the signals >> You don't mind slipping into the mind of a criminal. It's a union rule. >> Right? It actually is. >> You got to put your foot and your hands in and walk through their shoes as they say. >> That's right. >> The bot networks though, I want to get into, is not it sounds like it's off the cup but they're highly organized networks. >> Dan: They are. >> Talk about the aspect of the franchises or these bots behind them, how they're financed, how they use the money that they make or ransomware, how they collect, what's the enterprise look like? >> Unfortunately, a lot of the nodes on a botnet are now just innocent victim computers using their home computers. They can subscribe to a service and agree to let their their CPU be used while they're not using it in exchange for a free VPN service, say. So now bad actors not, aren't just coming from you know, you know, rogue cloud providers who accept Bitcoin as payment, they're actually coming from residential IPs, which is making it even more difficult for the security teams to identify. It's one thing when it's coming from- >> It's spooky. I'm just sitting here kind of creeped out too. It's these unknown hosts, right? It's like being a carrier. >> You have good traffic coming from it during the day. >> Right, it appears normal. >> And then malicious traffic coming from it. >> Nefarious. >> My last question is your relationship with Amazon. I'll see security center piece of this re:Invent. It's always been day zero as they say but really it's the security data lake. A lot of gaps are being filled in the products. You kind of see that kind of filling out. Talk about the relationship with F5 and AWS. How you guys are working together, what's the status? >> We've been long-term partners and the latest release the connector for CloudFront is just one of the joint work that we did together and try to, I think, to Dan's point, how do we make those technology that was built for the very sophisticated big institutions to be available for all the CloudFront customers? So that's really what's exciting. And we also leverage a lot of the technology. You talked about the data and our entire solution are very data driven, as you know, is automation. If you don't use data, you don't use analytics, you don't use AI, it's hard to really sort of win that war. So a lot of our stuff, it's very data driven >> And the benefit to customers is what? Access? >> The customer's access, the customer's top line. We talked about, you know, like how we're really bringing better experiences at the end of the day. F5's mission is try to bring a better digital world to life. >> And it's also collaborative. We've had a lot of different stories here on on the set about companies collaborating. You're obviously collaborating and I also love that we're increasing access, not just narrowing this focus for the larger companies at scale already, but making sure that these companies starting out, a lot of the founders probably milling around on the floor right now can prevent this and ensure that user experience for their customers. throughout the course of their product development. I think it's awesome. So we have a new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent, and since you're alumni, I feel like you're maybe going to be a little bit better at this than some of the rookies. Not that rookies can't be great, but you're veterans. So I feel strong about this. We are looking for your 30-second Instagram reel hot take. Think of it like your sizzle of thought leadership from the show this year. So eventually eight more visits from now we can compile them into a great little highlight reel of all of your sound bites over the evolution of time. Who wants to give us their hot take first? >> Dan? >> Yeah, sure. >> Savannah: You've been elected, I mean you are an agent. A former special agent >> I guess I want everybody to know the bot problem is much worse than they think it is. We go in line and we see 98, 99% of all login traffic is from malicious bots. And so it is not a DIY project. >> 98 to 99%? That means only 1% of traffic is actually legitimate? >> That's right. >> Holy moly. >> I just want to make sure that everybody heard you say that. >> That's right. And it's very common. Didn't happen once or twice. It's happened a lot of times. And when it's not 99 it's 60 or it's 58, it's high. >> And that's costing a lot too. >> Yes, it is. And it's not just in fraud, but think about charges that >> Savannah: I think of cloud service providers >> Cost associated with transactions, you know, fraud tools >> Savannah: All of it. >> Yes. Sims, all those things. There's a lot of costs associated with that much automation. So the client side signals and multi-stage defense is what you need to deal with it. It's not a DIY project. >> Bots are not DIY. How would you like to add to that? >> It's so hard to add to that but I would say cybersecurity is a team sport and is a very data driven solution and we really need to sort of team up together and share intelligence, share, you know, all the things we know so we can be better at this. It's not a DIY project. We need to work together. >> Fantastic, Dan, Haiyan, so great to have you both back on theCUBE. We look forward to seeing you again for our next segment and I hope that the two of you have really beautiful rest of your show. Thank you all for tuning into a fantastic afternoon of coverage here from AWS re:Invent. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada and don't worry we have more programming coming up for you later today with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello friends and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 from the Venetian Expo in Vegas, baby. This show is absolutely packed. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, Dave this is day two, but really full day one of our wall to wall coverage on theCUBE. We've had great conversations the last half day this morning already, we've been talking with a lot of companies, a lot of Amazonians and some Amazonians that have left and gone on to interesting more things, which is what we're going to talk about next. >> Well, I'm excited about this segment because it's a really interesting space. You've got a search company who's gotten into observability and security and through our ETR partner our research, we do quarterly research and Elastic off the charts. Obviously they're the public company, so you can see how well they're doing. But the spending momentum on this platform is very, very strong and it has been consistently for quite some time. So really excited to learn more. >> The voice of the customer speaking loudly, from Elastic, its Chief Product Officer joins us, Ken Exner. Ken, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you, good to be here. >> Dave Vellante: Hey Ken. >> So a lot of us know about Elastic from Elastic Search but it's so much more than that these days. Talk about Elastic, what's going on now? What's the current product strategy? What's your vision? >> Yeah. So people know Elastic from the ELK Stack, you know Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana. Very, very popular open source projects. They've been used by millions of developers for years and years. But one of the things that we started noticing over the years is that people were using it for all kinds of different use cases beyond just traditional search. So people started using Elastic Search to search through operational data, search through logs, search through all kinds of other types of data just to find different answers. And what we started realizing is the customers were taking us into different spaces. They took us into log analytics they started building log management solutions. And we said, cool, we can actually help these customers by providing solutions that already do this for them. So it took us into observability, they took us into security, and we started building solutions for security and observability based on what customers were starting to do with the platform. So customers can still use the platform for any number of different use cases for how do you get answers added data or they can use our pre-built packaged solutions for observability and security. >> So you were a longtime Amazonian. >> I was. I was. >> Talk a little bit about some of the things that you did there and what attracted you to Elastic? 'Cause it's only been a couple months, right? >> I've been here three months, I think three months as of yesterday. And I was at AWS for 16 years. So I was there a long, long time. I was there pretty much from the beginning. I was hired as one of the first product managers in AWS. Adam Selipsky hired me. And it was a great run. I had a ton of fun, I learned a lot. But you know, after 16 years I was kind of itching to do something new and it was going to take something special because I had a great gig and enjoyed the team at AWS. But I saw in Elastic sort of a great foundational technology they had a lot of momentum, a huge community behind it. I saw the business opportunity where they were going. I saw, you know the business opportunity of observability and security. These are massive industries with tons of business problems. Customers are excited about trying to get more answers out of data about their operational environment. And I saw, you know, that customers were struggling with their operating environments and things were becoming increasingly complicated. We used to talk in AWS about, you know how customers want to move from monolithic applications to monoliths, but one of the secrets was that things were increasingly complicated. Suddenly people had all these different microservices they had all these different managed services and their operating environment got complicated became this constellation of different systems, all emitting data. So companies like Elastic were helping people find answers in that data, find the problems with their systems so helping tame that complexity. So I saw that opportunity and I said I want to jump on that. Great foundational technology, good community and building solutions that actually helped solve real problems. >> Right. >> So, before you joined you probably looked back, and said, let think about the market, what's happening in the market space. What were the big trends that you saw that sort of informed your decision? >> Well, just sort of the mountain of data that was sort of emerging. Adam Selipsky in his talk this morning began by talking about how data is just multiplying constant. And I saw this, I saw how much data businesses were drowning in. Operational data, security data. You know, if you're trying to secure your business you have all these different endpoints you have all these different devices, you have different systems that you need to monitor all tons of data. And companies like Elastic were helping companies sort of manage that complexity, helping them find answers in that. So, when you're trying to track intruders or trying to track you know, malicious activity, there's a ton of different systems you need to pay attention to. And you know, there's a bunch of data. It's different devices, laptops and phone devices and stuff that you need to pay attention to. And you find correlations across that to figure out what is going on in your network, what is going on in your business. And that was exciting to me. This is a company sort of tackling one of the hardest problems which is helping you understand your operating environment, helping you understand and secure your business. >> So everybody's getting into observability. >> Yep. >> Right, it's a very crowded space right now. First of all, you know it's like overnight it just became the hottest thing going. VCs were throwing money at it. Why was that and how were you guys different? >> Well, we began by focusing on log analytics because that was the core of what we were doing. But customers started using it beyond log analytics and started using it for APM and started using it for performance data. And what we realized is that we could do all this for customers. So we ended up, sort of overnight over the course of three years building that a complete observe observability suite. So you can do APM, you can do profiling, you can do tracing, sort of distributed tracing, you can do synthetic monitoring everything you want to do, wheel user wondering. >> Metrics? >> All of it, metrics, all of it. And you can use the same system for this. So this was sort of a powerful concept, not only is it the best in leading log system, it also provides everything you need for complete observability. And because it's based on this open platform you can extend it to a number of different scenarios. So this is important, a lot of the different observability companies provide you something that's sort of packaged and as long as you're trying to do what it wants to support, it's great. But with Elastic, you have this flexible data architecture that you can use for anything. So companies use it to monitor assembly lines, they use it to monitor dish networks, for example use it to not only manage their fleet of servers they also use it to manage all their devices. So 25 million desktop devices. So, you know, observability systems like that that can do a number of different scenarios, I think that's a powerful thing. It's not just about how do you manage your servers how do you manage the things that are simple. It's how do you manage anything? How do you get observability into anything. >> Multiple use cases. >> Sorry, when you say complete, okay you talked about all the different APM, log analytics tracing, metrics, and also end-to-end. >> Ken Exner: End-to-end, yeah. >> Could you talk about that component of complete? >> So, if you're trying to find an issue like you have some metric that goes into alarm. You want to have a metric system that has alarming. Once that metric goes in alarm you're going to want to dig into your log. So you're going to want it to take you to the area of your logs that has that issue. Once you gets to there, you're going to want to find the trace ID that takes you to your traces and looks at sort of profiling, distributed tracing information. So a system that can do all of that end-to-end is a powerful solution. So it not only helps you track things end-to-end across the different signals that you're monitoring, but it actually helps you remediate more quickly. And the other thing that Elastic does that is unique is a lot of ML in this. So not only helping you find the information but surfacing things before you even know of them. So anomaly detection for example, helps you know about something before you even realize that there was an issue. So you should pay attention to this because it's anomalous. So a lot of systems help you find something if you know what to look for. But we're trying to help you not only find the things that you know to look for, but help you find the things that you didn't even think to know about. >> And it's fair to say one of your differentiators is you're open, open source. I mean, maybe talk about the ELK stack a little bit and how that plays. >> Yeah, well, so the great thing about this is we've extended that openness to both security and to observability. An example of this on the security side is all the detection rules that you use for looking for intrusion all the detection rules are open source and there's an entire community around this. So if you wanted to create a detection rule you can publish an open source, there's a bunch in GitHub you can benefit from what the community is doing as well. So in the world of security you want to be supported by the entire community, everyone looking for the same kind of issues. And there's an entire community around Elastic that is helping support these detection rules. So that approach, you know wanting to focus on community is differentiating for us. Not just, we got you covered as long you use things from us you can use it from the entire community. >> Well there implies the name Elastic. >> Yeah >> Talk a little bit about the influence that the customer has in the product roadmap and the direction. You've talked a little bit in the beginning about customers were leading us in different directions. It sounds very Amazonian in terms of following the customers where they go. >> It does, it actually does, it was one of the things that resonated for me personally is the journey that Elastic took to observability and security was customer led. So, we started looking at what customers were doing and realized that they were taking us into log analytics they were taking us into APM, they were taking us into these different solutions, and yeah, it is an Amazonian thing, so it resonated for me personally. And they're going to continue taking us in new places. Like we love seeing all the novel things that customers do with the platform and it's sort of one of the hallmarks of a great platform is you can have all kinds of novel things that, novel use cases for how people use your platform and we'll continue to see things and we may get taken into other solutions as well as we start seeing things emerge, like common patterns. But for now we're really excited about security and observability. >> So what do you see, so security's a big space, right? >> Yep. >> You see the optiv taxonomy and it makes your eyes bleed 'cause there's so many tools in there. Where do you fit in that taxonomy? How do you see and think about the security space and the opportunity for your customers? >> Yeah, so we began with logs in the security space as well. So SIEM, which is intrusion detection is based on aggregating a bunch of logs and helping you do threat hunting on those logs. So looking for patterns of malicious behavior or intrusion. So we started there and we did both detections as well as just ad hoc threat hunting. But then we started expanding into endpoint protection. So if we were going to have agents on all these different devices they were gathering logs, what if we also started providing remediation. So if you had malicious activity that was happening on one of the servers, don't just grab the information quarantine it, isolate it. So that took us into sort of endpoint protection or XDR. And then beyond that, we recently got into cloud security as well. So similar to observability, we started with logs but expanded to a full suite so that you can do everything. You can have both endpoint protection, you can have cloud security, all of it from one solution. >> Security is a very crowded market as well. What's your superpower? >> Ken Exner: What's our super power? >> Yeah. >> I think it, a lot of it is just the openness. It's the open platform, there's the community around it. People know and love the, the Elastic Search ELK stack and use it, we go into businesses all the time and they're familiar, their security engineers are using our product for searching through logs. So they're familiar with the product already and the community behind it. So they were excited about being able to use detection rules from other businesses and stay on top of that and be part of that community. The transparency of that is important to the customers. So if you're trying to be the most secure place, the most secure business, you want to basically invest in a community that's going to support that and not be alone in that. >> Right, absolutely, so much that rides on that. Favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of Elastic, its openness, its transparency. >> Well, there's a customer Dish Media Dish Networks that's going to present here at re:Invent tomorrow at 1:45 at Mandalay Bay. I'm excited about their example because they use it to manage, I think it's 10 billion records a day across 25 million devices. So it illustrates the scale that we can support for managing observability for a company but also just sort of the unique use cases. We can use this for set top boxes for all their customers and they can track the performance that those customers are having. It's a unique case that a lot of vendors couldn't support but we can support because of the openness of the platform, the open data architecture that we have. So I think it illustrates the scale that we support, the elasticity, but also the openness of the data platform. >> Awesome and folks can catch that tomorrow, 1:45 PM at the Mandalay Bay. Last question for you, Ken, is you have a bumper sticker. >> Ken Exner: A bumper sticker? >> A bumper sticker you're going to put it on your fancy sexy new car and it's about elastic, what does it say? >> Helping you get answers out of data. So yeah. >> Love it, love it. Brilliant. >> Ken Exner: Thank you. >> Short and sweet. Ken, it's been a pleasure. >> It's been a pleasure being here, thank you. >> Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us as an Amazonian now into Elastic what Elastic is doing from a product perspective. We will keep our eyes peeled as Dave was saying. >> Ken Exner: Fantastic. >> The data show is really strong spending momentum so well done. >> Thank you very much, good to meet you. >> Our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(techno music intro) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of SuperComputing Conference 2022. We are here at day three covering the amazing events that are occurring here. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. How's it goin', Paul? >> Fine, Dave. Winding down here, but still plenty of action. >> Interesting stuff. We got a full day of coverage, and we're having really, really interesting conversations. We sort of wrapped things up at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I've got two very special guests with me, Scott from Intel and David from Dell, to talk about yeah supercomputing, but guess what? We've got some really cool stuff coming up after this whole thing wraps. So not all of the holiday gifts have been unwrapped yet, kids. Welcome gentlemen. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, let's start with you, David. First of all, explain the relationship in general between Dell and Intel. >> Sure, so obviously Intel's been an outstanding partner. We built some great solutions over the years. I think the market reflects that. Our customers tell us that. The feedback's strong. The products you see out here this week at Supercompute, you know, put that on display for everybody to see. And then as we think about AI in machine learning, there's so many different directions we need to go to help our customers deliver AI outcomes. Right, so we recognize that AI has kind of spread outside of just the confines of everything we've seen here this week. And now we've got really accessible AI use cases that we can explain to friends and family. We can talk about going into retail environments and how AI is being used to track inventory, to monitor traffic, et cetera. But really what that means to us as a bunch of hardware folks is we have to deliver the right platforms and the right designs for a variety of environments, both inside and outside the data center. And so if you look at our portfolio, we have some great products here this week, but we also have other platforms, like the XR4000, our shortest rack server ever that's designed to go into Edge environments, but is also built for those Edge AI use cases that supports GPUs. It supports AI on the CPU as well. And so there's a lot of really compelling platforms that we're starting to talk about, have already been talking about, and it's going to really enable our customers to deliver AI in a variety of ways. >> You mentioned AI on the CPU. Maybe this is a question for Scott. What does that mean, AI on the CPU? >> Well, as David was talking about, we're just seeing this explosion of different use cases. And some of those on the Edge, some of them in the Cloud, some of them on Prem. But within those individual deployments, there's often different ways that you can do AI, whether that's training or inference. And what we're seeing is a lot of times the memory locality matters quite a bit. You don't want to have to pay necessarily a cost going across the PCI express bus, especially with some of our newer products like the CPU Max series, where you can have a huge about of high bandwidth memory just sitting right on the CPU. Things that traditionally would have been accelerator only, can now live on a CPU, and that includes both on the inference side. We're seeing some really great things with images, where you might have a giant medical image that you need to be able to do extremely high resolution inference on or even text, where you might have a huge corpus of extremely sparse text that you need to be able to randomly sample very efficiently. >> So how are these needs influencing the evolution of Intel CPU architectures? >> So, we're talking to our customers. We're talking to our partners. This presents both an opportunity, but also a challenge with all of these different places that you can put these great products, as well as applications. And so we're very thoughtfully trying to go to the market, see where their needs are, and then meet those needs. This industry obviously has a lot of great players in it, and it's no longer the case that if you build it, they will come. So what we're doing is we're finding where are those choke points, how can we have that biggest difference? Sometimes there's generational leaps, and I know David can speak to this, can be huge from one system to the next just because everything's accelerated on the software side, the hardware side, and the platforms themselves. >> That's right, and we're really excited about that leap. If you take what Scott just described, we've been writing white papers, our team with Scott's team, we've been talking about those types of use cases using doing large image analysis and leveraging system memory, leveraging the CPU to do that, we've been talking about that for several generations now. Right, going back to Cascade Lake, going back to what we would call 14th generation power Edge. And so now as we prepare and continue to unveil, kind of we're in launch season, right, you and I were talking about how we're in launch season. As we continue to unveil and launch more products, the performance improvements are just going to be outstanding and we'll continue that evolution that Scott described. >> Yeah, I'd like to applaud Dell just for a moment for its restraint. Because I know you could've come in and taken all of the space in the convention center to show everything that you do. >> Would have loved to. >> In the HPC space. Now, worst kept secrets on earth at this point. Vying for number one place is the fact that there is a new Mission Impossible movie coming. And there's also new stuff coming from Intel. I know, I think allegedly we're getting close. What can you share with us on that front? And I appreciate it if you can't share a ton of specifics, but where are we going? David just alluded to it. >> Yeah, as David talked about, we've been working on some of these things for many years. And it's just, this momentum is continuing to build, both in respect to some of our hardware investments. We've unveiled some things both here, both on the CPU side and the accelerator side, but also on the software side. OneAPI is gathering more and more traction and the ecosystem is continuing to blossom. Some of our AI and HPC workloads, and the combination thereof, are becoming more and more viable, as well as displacing traditional approaches to some of these problems. And it's this type of thing where it's not linear. It all builds on itself. And we've seen some of these investments that we've made for a better half of a decade starting to bear fruit, but that's, it's not just a one time thing. It's just going to continue to roll out, and we're going to be seeing more and more of this. >> So I want to follow up on something that you mentioned. I don't know if you've ever heard that the Charlie Brown saying that sometimes the most discouraging thing can be to have immense potential. Because between Dell and Intel, you offer so many different versions of things from a fit for function perspective. As a practical matter, how do you work with customers, and maybe this is a question for you, David. How do you work with customers to figure out what the right fit is? >> I'll give you a great example. Just this week, customer conversations, and we can put it in terms of kilowatts to rack, right. How many kilowatts are you delivering at a rack level inside your data center? I've had an answer anywhere from five all the way up to 90. There's some that have been a bit higher that probably don't want to talk about those cases, kind of customers we're meeting with very privately. But the range is really, really large, right, and there's a variety of environments. Customers might be ready for liquid today. They may not be ready for it. They may want to maximize air cooling. Those are the conversations, and then of course it all maps back to the workloads they wish to enable. AI is an extremely overloaded term. We don't have enough time to talk about all the different things that tuck under that umbrella, but the workloads and the outcomes they wish to enable, we have the right solutions. And then we take it a step further by considering where they are today, where they need to go. And I just love that five to 90 example of not every customer has an identical cookie cutter environment, so we've got to have the right platforms, the right solutions, for the right workloads, for the right environments. >> So, I like to dive in on this power issue, to give people who are watching an idea. Because we say five kilowatts, 90 kilowatts, people are like, oh wow, hmm, what does that mean? 90 kilowatts is more than 100 horse power if you want to translate it over. It's a massive amount of power, so if you think of EV terms. You know, five kilowatts is about a hairdryer's around a kilowatt, 1,000 watts, right. But the point is, 90 kilowatts in a rack, that's insane. That's absolutely insane. The heat that that generates has got to be insane, and so it's important. >> Several houses in the size of a closet. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, in a rack I explain to people, you know, it's like a refrigerator. But, so in the arena of thermals, I mean is that something during the development of next gen architectures, is that something that's been taken into consideration? Or is it just a race to die size? >> Well, you definitely have to take thermals into account, as well as just the power of consumption themselves. I mean, people are looking at their total cost of ownership. They're looking at sustainability. And at the end of the day, they need to solve a problem. There's many paths up that mountain, and it's about choosing that right path. We've talked about this before, having extremely thoughtful partners, we're just not going to common-torily try every single solution. We're going to try to find the ones that fit that right mold for that customer. And we're seeing more and more people, excuse me, care about this, more and more people wanting to say, how do I do this in the most sustainable way? How do I do this in the most reliable way, given maybe different fluctuations in their power consumption or their power pricing? We're developing more software tools and obviously partnering with great partners to make sure we do this in the most thoughtful way possible. >> Intel put a lot of, made a big investment by buying Habana Labs for its acceleration technology. They're based in Israel. You're based on the west coast. How are you coordinating with them? How will the Habana technology work its way into more mainstream Intel products? And how would Dell integrate those into your servers? >> Good question. I guess I can kick this off. So Habana is part of the Intel family now. They've been integrated in. It's been a great journey with them, as some of their products have launched on AWS, and they've had some very good wins on MLPerf and things like that. I think it's about finding the right tool for the job, right. Not every problem is a nail, so you need more than just a hammer. And so we have the Xeon series, which is incredibly flexible, can do so many different things. It's what we've come to know and love. On the other end of the spectrum, we obviously have some of these more deep learning focused accelerators. And if that's your problem, then you can solve that problem in incredibly efficient ways. The accelerators themselves are somewhere in the middle, so you get that kind of Goldilocks zone of flexibility and power. And depending on your use case, depending on what you know your workloads are going to be day in and day out, one of these solutions might work better for you. A combination might work better for you. Hybrid compute starts to become really interesting. Maybe you have something that you need 24/7, but then you only need a burst to certain things. There's a lot of different options out there. >> The portfolio approach. >> Exactly. >> And then what I love about the work that Scott's team is doing, customers have told us this week in our meetings, they do not want to spend developer's time porting code from one stack to the next. They want that flexibility of choice. Everyone does. We want it in our lives, in our every day lives. They need that flexibility of choice, but they also, there's an opportunity cost when their developers have to choose to port some code over from one stack to another or spend time improving algorithms and doing things that actually generate, you know, meaningful outcomes for their business or their research. And so if they are, you know, desperately searching I would say for that solution and for help in that area, and that's what we're working to enable soon. >> And this is what I love about oneAPI, our software stack, it's open first, heterogeneous first. You can take SYCL code, it can run on competitor's hardware. It can run on Intel hardware. It's one of these things that you have to believe long term, the future is open. Wall gardens, the walls eventually crumble. And we're just trying to continue to invest in that ecosystem to make sure that the in-developer at the end of the day really gets what they need to do, which is solving their business problem, not tinkering with our drivers. >> Yeah, I actually saw an interesting announcement that I hadn't been tracking. I hadn't been tracking this area. Chiplets, and the idea of an open standard where competitors of Intel from a silicone perspective can have their chips integrated via a universal standard. And basically you had the top three silicone vendors saying, yeah, absolutely, let's work together. Cats and dogs. >> Exactly, but at the end of the day, it's whatever menagerie solves the problem. >> Right, right, exactly. And of course Dell can solve it from any angle. >> Yeah, we need strong partners to build the platforms to actually do it. At the end of the day, silicone without software is just sand. Sand with silicone is poorly written prose. But without an actual platform to put it on, it's nothing, it's a box that sits in the corner. >> David, you mentioned that 90% of power age servers now support GPUs. So how is this high-performing, the growth of high performance computing, the demand, influencing the evolution of your server architecture? >> Great question, a couple of ways. You know, I would say 90% of our platforms support GPUs. 100% of our platforms support AI use cases. And it goes back to the CPU compute stack. As we look at how we deliver different form factors for customers, we go back to that range, I said that power range this week of how do we enable the right air coolant solutions? How do we deliver the right liquid cooling solutions, so that wherever the customer is in their environment, and whatever footprint they have, we're ready to meet it? That's something you'll see as we go into kind of the second half of launch season and continue rolling out products. You're going to see some very compelling solutions, not just in air cooling, but liquid cooling as well. >> You want to be more specific? >> We can't unveil everything at Supercompute. We have a lot of great stuff coming up here in the next few months, so. >> It's kind of like being at a great restaurant when they offer you dessert, and you're like yeah, dessert would be great, but I just can't take anymore. >> It's a multi course meal. >> At this point. Well, as we wrap, I've got one more question for each of you. Same question for each of you. When you think about high performance computing, super computing, all of the things that you're doing in your partnership, driving artificial intelligence, at that tip of the spear, what kind of insights are you looking forward to us being able to gain from this technology? In other words, what cool thing, what do you think is cool out there from an AI perspective? What problem do you think we can solve in the near future? What problems would you like to solve? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Cause it's not the little, it's not the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feats, it's what we're going to do with them, so what do you think, David? >> I'll give you an example. And I think, I saw some of my colleagues talk about this earlier in the week, but for me what we could do in the past two years to unable our customers in a quarantine pandemic environment, we were delivering platforms and solutions to help them do their jobs, help them carry on in their lives. And that's just one example, and if I were to map that forward, it's about enabling that human progress. And it's, you know, you ask a 20 year version of me 20 years ago, you know, if you could imagine some of these things, I don't know what kind of answer you would get. And so mapping forward next decade, next two decades, I can go back to that example of hey, we did great things in the past couple of years to enable our customers. Just imagine what we're going to be able to do going forward to enable that human progress. You know, there's great use cases, there's great image analysis. We talked about some. The images that Scott was referring to had to do with taking CAT scan images and being able to scan them for tumors and other things in the healthcare industry. That is stuff that feels good when you get out of bed in the morning, to know that you're enabling that type of progress. >> Scott, quick thoughts? >> Yeah, and I'll echo that. It's not one specific use case, but it's really this wave front of all of these use cases, from the very micro of developing the next drug to finding the next battery technology, all the way up to the macro of trying to have an impact on climate change or even the origins of the universe itself. All of these fields are seeing these massive gains, both from the software, the hardware, the platforms that we're bringing to bear to these problems. And at the end of the day, humanity is going to be fundamentally transformed by the computation that we're launching and working on today. >> Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen. You heard it hear first, Intel and Dell just committed to solving the secrets of the universe by New Years Eve 2023. >> Well, next Supercompute, let's give us a little time. >> The next Supercompute Convention. >> Yeah, next year. >> Yeah, SC 2023, we'll come back and see what problems have been solved. You heard it hear first on theCube, folks. By SC 23, Dell and Intel are going to reveal the secrets of the universe. From here, at SC 22, I'd like to thank you for joining our conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. Stay tuned to theCube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 22. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)

>>Welcome back everyone, to the special presentation of Cloud Native at scale, the Cube and Platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of Platform nine. Thank >>You very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization. Right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, Bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly, Yes. >>And so as infrastructure, as code comes in, we talked to Bacar, talking about Super Cloud. I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon. Connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it. Everybody or most people know about infrastructures code, but with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D. Instead, with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. Yeah, >>Yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integrations, configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you've got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. That's, >>I wrote a LinkedIn post today, it was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we tried to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into our line in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community invite in two where they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection to the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a serviced layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd want to have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which we will be covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced Arlon at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why arlon, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, >>And what's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened to need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I wanna run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. >>That's right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Arlon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, >>So essentially standard like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, deploy it. Now what there between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things got controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on it's super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge re's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring it's saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale mean? >>Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot. Rogue got Coan coming up and obviously this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time, there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cub cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, >>Well maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed, but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them, obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform now you's been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud a Rod team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Open Stack was an example where the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will, a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the, the, the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah. I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart Yeah. On this segment, what is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a, a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you Yeah, I would you describe that when people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. Yeah. >>And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year. And, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud Native at scale? >>The the hyper square? >>Yeah. Yeah. Abras, Azure, Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, They, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep Well, >>They got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems and the >>Platforms. Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh, the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware. And he kinda over, well he kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, Cloud native develop for developers. And John Feer with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up.

>>Everyone, welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furry, your host of The Cube. We've got a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Mattor Makki, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloud native at scale. So enjoy the program, see you soon. Hello and welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube. Pleasure to have here me Makowski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. >>Thank you for having >>Me. So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is a, is an appropriate term for >>That. So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge Notes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, o ot, and it kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here, there's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenge. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and >>Regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that skill really needs some well thought out, well-structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer's site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on all of these various factors at their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success cloud native, you know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can configure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotpot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the, the two factors of scale is we talked about start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because yeah, you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say you radio sell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did it, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like ishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, Can you share what our lawn is, this new product, What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arwan is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what alarm lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in. What's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, >>What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right online. And if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each components, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the I pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency >>For those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. C C I CD pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, the developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of application that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both those >>Teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OP teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, Kubernetes really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, c communities clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so online addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>Ed, do I wanna get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model on from model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fi, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also opensource because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that, Well, but that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for helpers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating me metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo customer? >>Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native es, and then we have our C I CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS CD pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Spico would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on s Amazon and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us >>Stability. Yeah, I think people are scared, not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Lon uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is arlon also makes use of cluster api capi, which is a ES sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with algo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what Algo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform nine has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Alon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that sla. >>And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with, that are familiar with, with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD and they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our line before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and, you know, give you an inventory and that, >>So customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yeah. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. >>And you provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value >>Here. That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up >>Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables Super club, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And alon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And, you know, alarm flows >>In one. Okay, so now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. There's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for >>That. So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, there's designed to do, the question is, what did, does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo, and, and, and on all the other goodness to automate, What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be in indications of things are effed up a little bit. >>Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your, your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your, So those are, those are the >>Signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the IIA terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. The company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and see, and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yeah. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things with things. So just >>Taking care of, and the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CSO there at the beach. >>Yeah. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for having >>Me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here at Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine b. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or well later, earlier when opens Stack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now was realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructure's code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level. And then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure as configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah, yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. Not declaring, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code. It's code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space that, >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the by intu. They had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our inaugural event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so to deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just really wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD Stock is down arm has been on rise, we've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in, in this community of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Maria Teel at our super cloud event, She's a cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built AR lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads at the end of the day, and I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We've heard people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with AR loan you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call the profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, So >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, just deploy it. Now what there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructure as configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things are controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure as configuration is built kind of on, it's a super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year at CubeCon a lot of this, what does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot rogue, that CubeCon coming up and now this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? It's the big story this year. What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jockeying for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupon and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career VMware over decades with them within 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here a platform. I you's been around for a while at this game, man. We talked about OpenStack, that project we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a Cloud Aati team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Opens Stack was an example and then Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud need of its scale? >>The, the hyper squares? >>Yeah, yeah. A's Azure Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep well, >>They got great performance. I mean, from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, >>Right? Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyper skaters really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems, the platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware and he kinda over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, cloud native develop for developers. And John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud is around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and Edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark I put on on there. Panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's just thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm, right? >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what where we come into >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were kind of talking about the glory days in 2000, 2001 when the first ASPs application service providers came out. Kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like >>It wasn't, >>And web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>In fact, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflations sea year. It's interesting. This is the first downturn, the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. Nope. Cause pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some, you know, new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Alon and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, More dynamic, more unreal. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think Super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's, you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pan or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is as a pilot to get the conversations flowing with, with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third Cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. >>What's, >>What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have 1, 2, 3 container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And it, the beauty of it is yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool and >>Just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores about thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un on-prem as an air gap version. Can >>You give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right. >>So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact, the customer says like, like the Maytag service person, cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. What >>Benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we heard it all here, ops and security teams. Cause they're kind of part of one thing, but option security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right? >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So >>You working two sides to that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side. >>Okay. Another customer that I give an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on it's classic edge. It's classic edge, yeah. Right? They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a box, like a small little box, >>Right? And all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of >>Them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the locations. >>So you guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well. >>Tucan, of course Detroit's >>Coming so, so it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud, not you have to rewrite and redevelop your application in business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. >>And I'll give you an example, I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations >>Are >>For the customer. Customer, >>The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn. >>That's to wrap it up. I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now let's CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super Cloud. >>Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. CARSs being been in an asb, being in a real time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative. You know, that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce is interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the gain, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart that made you an e-commerce or e retailer or an e e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Nascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Fur with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Hello and welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. 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>>Hey, everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and John furrier live on the floor at VMware Explorer, 2022. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage on the cube. But you know that cuz you've been here the whole time. We're pleased to welcome up. First timer to the cubes we saw is here. The CEO and founder of ZDA. Saed welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me >>Talk to me a little bit about what ZDA does in edge. >>Sure. So ZDA is a company purely focused in edge computing. I started a company about five years ago, go after edge. So what we do is we help customers with orchestrating their edge, helping them to deploy secure monitor application services and devices at the edge. >>What's the business model for you guys. We get that out there. So the targeting the edge, which is everything from telco to whatever. Yeah. What's the business model. Yeah. >>Maybe before we go there, let's talk about edge itself. Cuz edge is complex. There's a lot of companies. I call 'em lens company nowadays, if you're not a cloud company, you're probably an edge company at this point. So we are focusing something called the distributed edge. So distributed edge. When you start putting tiny servers in environments like factory floors, solar farms, wind farms, even inside machines or well sites, et cetera. And a question that people always ask me, like why, why would you want to put, you know, servers there on servers supposed to be in a data center in the cloud? And the answer to the question actually is data gravity. So traditionally wherever the data gets created is where your applications live. But as we're connecting more and more devices to the edge of the network, we basically customers now are required to push the applications to the edge cause they can't go all the data to the cloud. So basically that's where we focus on people call it the far edge as well. You know, that's the term we've heard in the past as well. And what we do in our business model is provide customers a, a software as a service solution where they can basically deploy and monitor these applications at these highly distributed environments. >>Data, gravity comes up a lot and I want you to take a minute to explain the definition as it is today. And people have used that term, you know, with big data, going back to 2010 leads when we covering the Hadoop wave, which ended up becoming, you know, data, data, bricks, and snowflake now, but, but a lots changed, but what does it mean to be data gravity? It means that staying local, it's just what specifically describe and, and define what data gravity is. >>Yeah. So for me, data gravity is where you need to process the data, right? It's where the data usually gets created. So if you think about a web app, where does the data get created? Where people click on buttons, they, they interface with it. They, they upload content to it, et cetera. So that's where the data gravity therefore is therefore that's where you do your analytics. That's where you do your visualization processing, machine learning and all of those pieces. So it's really where that data gets created is where the data gravity in my view says, >>What are some of the challenges that data and opportunities that data gravity presents to customers? >>Well, obviously I think every enterprise in this day is trying to take data and make it a competitive advantage, right? Like faster decisions, better decisions, outcompete your competition by, you know, being first with a product or being first with a product with the future, et cetera. So, so I think, you know, if you're not a data driven enterprise by now, then I think the future may be a little bit bleak. >>Okay. So you're targeting the market distributed edge business model, SAS technology, secret sauce. What's that piece. >>Yeah. So that's, that's what the interesting part comes in. I think, you know, if you kind of look at the data center in the cloud, we've had these virtualization and orchestration stacks create, I mean, we're here in VMware Explorer. And as an example, what we basically, what we saw is that the edge is so unique and so different than what we've seen in the data center, in the cloud that we needed to build a complete brand new purpose-built illustration and virtualization solution. So that's really what we, we set off to do. So there's two components that we do. One end is we built a purpose-built edge operating system for the edge and we actually open sourced it. And the reason we opensource it, we said, Hey, you know, edge is so diverse. You know, depending on the environment you're running in a machine or in a vehicle or in a well site, you have different hardware, different networks, different applications you need to enable. >>And we will never be able to support all of them ourselves. As a matter of fact, we actually think there's a need for standardization at the edge. We need to kind of cut through all these silos that have been created traditionally from the embedded way of thinking. So we created basically an open source project in the Linux foundation in LFS, which is a sister organization through the CNCF it's called project Eve. And the idea is to create the Android of the edge, basically what Android became for mobile computing, an a common operating system. So you build one app. You can run in any phone in the world that runs Android, build an architecture. You build one app. You can run in any Eve powered node in the world, >>So distributed edge and you get the tech here, get the secret sauce. We'll get more into that in a second, but I wanna just tie one kick quick point and get your clarification on edge is becoming much more about the physical side too. I mean, absolutely. So when you talk about Android, you're making the reference of a phone. I get that's metaphor to what you're doing at the edge, wind farms, factories, alarms, light bulbs, buildings. I mean, that's what you're talking about, right? Yes. We're getting down to that very, >>Very physical, dark distributed locations. >>We're gonna come back to the CISO CSO. We're gonna come back to the CISO versus CSO question because is the CISO or CIO or who runs that anyway? So that's true. What's the important thing that's happening because that sounds like old OT world, like yes. Operating technology, not it information technology, is it a complete reset of those worlds or is it a collision? >>It's a great question. So what we're seeing is first of all, there is already compute in these environments, industrial PCs of existed well beyond, you know, an industrial automation has been done for many, many decades. The point is that that stuff has been done. Collect data has been collected, but never connected, right? So with edge computing, we're connecting now this data from an industrial machine and industrial process to the cloud, right? And one of the problems is it's data that comes of that industrial process too much to upload to the cloud. So I gotta analyze, analyze it locally. So one of the, the things we saw early on in edge is there's a lot of brownfield. Most of our customers today actually have applications running on windows and they would love to make in Linux and containers and Kubernetes, but it took them 20, 30 years to build those apps. And they basically are the money makers of the enterprise. So they are in a, in a transitionary phase and they need something that can take them from the brown to the Greenfield. So to your point, you gotta support all of these types of unique brownfield applications. >>So you're, you're saying I don't really care if this is a customer, how you get the data, you wanna start new start fresh. That's cool. But if you wanna take your old data, you'll >>Take that. Yeah. You don't wanna rebuild the whole machine. You're >>Just, they can life cycle it out on their own timetable. Yeah. >>So we had to learn, first of all, how do we take and lift and shift windows based industrial application and make it run at the edge on, on our architecture. Right? And then the second step is how do we then Sen off that data that this application is generating and do we fuse it with cloud native capability? Like, >>So your cloud, so your staff is your open source that you're giving to the Linux foundation as part of that Eve project that's available to everybody. So they can, they can look at the code, which is great by the way. Yeah. So people wanna do that. Yeah. Your self source, I'm assuming, is your hardened version with support? >>Well, we took what we took, what the open source companies did, opensource companies traditionally have sold, you know, basically a support model around the open source. We actually saw another problem. Customers has like, okay, now I have this node running and I can, you know, do this data analytics, but what if I have 15 or 20,000 of these node? And they're all around the world in remote locations on satellite links or wireless connectivity, how do I orchestrate them? So we actually build an orchestration service for these nodes running this open source >>Software. So that's a key secret sauce right there. >>That is the business model that taking open store and a lot. >>And you're taking your own code that you have. Okay. Got it. Cool. And then the customer's customer piece is, is key. So that's the final piece, I guess who's using it. >>Yeah. Well, and, >>And, and one of the business outcomes that they're achieving. Oh >>Yeah. Well, so maybe start with that first. I mean, we are deployed in customers in all and gas, for instance, helping them with the transition to renewable energy, right? So basically we, we have customers for instance, that deploy us in the, how they drill Wells is one use case and doing that better, faster, and cheaper and, and less environmental impacting. But we also have customers that use us in wind farms. We have, and solar farms, like we, one of the leading solar energy companies in the world is using us to bring down the cost of power by predicting failures ahead of time, for >>Instance. And when you're working with customers to create the optimal solution at the distributed edge, who are you working with in, within an organization? Yeah. >>It's usually a mix of OT and it people. Okay. So the OT people typically they're >>Arm wrestling, well, or they're getting along, actually, >>I think they're getting along very well. Okay, good. But they also agree that they have to have swim lanes. The it folks, obviously their job is to make sure, you know, everything is secure. Everything is according to the compliance it's, it's, you know, the, the best TCO on the infrastructure, those type of things, the OT guy, they, they, or girl, they care about the application. They care about the services. They care about the support new business. So how can you create a model that too can coexist? And if you do that, they get along really well. >>You know, we had an event called Supercloud and@theurlsupercloud.world, if you're watching check it out, it's our version of what we think multicloud will merge into including edge cuz edge is just another node in the, in the, in the network. As far as we're concerned, hybrid is the steady state. That's distributed computing on premise, private cloud, public cloud. We know what that looks like. People love that things are happening. Edge is like a whole nother new area. That's blossoming and with disruption, yeah. There's a lot of existing market and incumbents that need to be disrupted. And there's also a new capabilities that are coming that we don't yet see. So we're seeing it with the super cloud idea that these new kinds of clouds are emerging. Like there could be an edge cloud. Yeah. Why isn't there a security cloud, whereas the financial services cloud, whereas the insurance cloud, whereas the, so these become super clouds where the CapEx could be done by the Amazon, whatnot you've been following them is edge cloud. Can you make that a cloud? Is that what you guys are trying to do? And if so, what does that look like? Cause we we're adding a new track to our super cloud site. I mentioned on edge specifically, we're trying to figure out you and if you share your opinion, it'd be great. Can the E can edge clouds exist and be run by companies? Yeah. Or is that what you guys are trying to do? >>I, I, I mean, I think first of all, there is no edge without cloud, right? So when I meet any customer who says, Hey, we're gonna do edge without cloud. Then I'm like, you're probably not gonna do edge computing. Right. And, and the way we built the company and the way we think about it, it's about extending the cloud experience all the way into these embedded distributed environments. That's really, I think what customers are looking for, cuz customers love the simplicity of the cloud. They love the ease of use agility, all of that greatness. And they're like, Hey, I want that. But not in a, you know, in an Amazon or Azure data center. I want that in my factories. I want that in my wealth sites, in my vehicles. And that's really what I think the future >>Is gonna. And how long have you guys been around? What's the, what's the history of the company because you might actually be that cloud. Yeah. And are you on AWS or Azure? You're building your own. What's the, >>Yeah. Yeah. So >>Take it through the, the architecture because yeah, yeah, sure. You're a modern startup. I mean you gotta, and the edges you're going after you gotta be geared up. Yeah. To win that. Yeah. >>So, so the company's about five years old. So we, when we started focusing on edge, people didn't necessarily talk as much about edge. We kind of identified the it's like, you know, how do you find a black hole in, in the universe? Cuz you can't see it, but you sort of look around that's why you in it. And so we were like looking at it, like there's something gonna happen here at the edge of the network, because everybody's saying we're connecting these vice upload the data to the cloud's never gonna work. My background is networking. I worked at companies like Juniper and Ericsson ran several products there. So I know how the internet networks have built. And it was very Evan to me. It's not gonna be possible. My co-founders come from open source companies like pivotal and Cloudera. My auto co-founder was a, an engineer at sun Microsystems built the first network stack in the solar is operating system. So a lot of experience that kind of came together to build this. >>Yeah. Cloudera is a big day. That's where the cube started by the way. Yeah. >>Yeah. So, so we, we, we have, I think a good view on the stack, the cloud stack and therefore a good view of what the ed stack needs to look like. And then I think, you know, to answer your other question, our orchestration service runs in the cloud. We have, we actually are multi-cloud company. So we offer customers choice where they want to orchestrate the node from the nodes themself, never sit in a data center. They always highly embedded. We have customers are putting machines or inside these factory lines, et cetera. Are >>You running your SAS on Amazon web services or which >>Cloud we're running it on several clouds, including Amazon, all of, pretty much the cloud. So some customers say, Hey, I'd prefer to be on the Amazon set. And others customers say, I wanna be on Azure set. >>And you leverage their CapEx on that side. Yes. On behalf of yeah. >>Yeah. We, yes. Yes. But the majority of the customer data and, and all the data that the nodes process, the customer send it to their clouds. They don't send it to us. We don't get a copy of the camera feed analytics or the machine data. We actually decouple those though. So basically the, the team production data go straight to the customer's cloud and that's why they love us. >>And they choose that they can control their own desktop. >>Yeah. So we separate the management plane from the data plane at the edge. Yeah. >>That's a good call >>Actually. Yeah. That was another very important part of the architecture early on. Cause customers don't want us to see their, you know, highly confidential production data and we don't wanna have it either. So >>We had a great chat with Chris Wolf who works with kit culvert about control plane, data, plane. So that seems to be the trend data, plane customers want full yeah. Management of that. Yeah. Control plane. Maybe give multiple >>Versions. Yeah. Yeah. So our cloud consumption what the data we stories about the apps, their behavior, the networking, the security, all of that. That's what we store in our cloud. And then customers can access that and monitor. But the actual machine that I go somewhere else >>Here we are at VMware. Explore. Talk a little bit about the VMware relationship. You just had some big news the other day. >>Yeah. So two days ago we actually made a big announcement with VMware. So we signed an OEM agreement with VMware. So we're part now of VMware's edge compute stack. So VMware customers, as they start using the recently announced edge compute stack 2.0, that was announced here. Basically it's powered by Edda technology. So it's a really exciting partnership as part of this, we actually building integrations with the VMware organization products. So that's basically now extending to more, you know, other groups inside VMware. >>So what's the value in it for VMware customers. >>Yeah. So I think the, the, the benefit of, of VMware customers, I think cus VMware customers want that multi-cloud multi edge orchestration experience. So they wanna be able to deploy workloads in the cloud. They wanna deploy the workloads in the data center. And of course also at the edge. So by us integrating in that vision customers now can have that unified experience from cloud to edge and anywhere in between. >>What's the big vision that you see happening at the edge. I mean, a lot of the VMware customers here, they're classic it that have evolved into ops now, dev ops. Now you've got second data ops coming. The edge is gonna right around the corner for them. They're dealing with it now, probably just kicking the tires, towing the water kind of thing. Where do you see the vision going? Cuz now, no matter what happens with VMware, the Broadcom, this wave is still here. You got AWS, got Azure, got Google cloud, you got Oracle, Alibaba internationally. And the cloud native surges here. How do you see that disrupting the existing edge? Because let's face it the O some of those OT players, a little bit old and antiquated, a little bit outdated. I mean, I was talking to a telco person. They, they puked the word open source. I mean, these people are so dogmatic on, on their architecture. Yeah. They're gonna get disrupted. It's a matter of time. Yeah. Where's the new guard come in. How do you see the configuration changing in the landscape? Because some people will cross over to the right side of the street here. Yeah. Some won't yeah. Open circle. Dominate cloud native will be key. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, I think, again, let's, let's take an example of a vertical that's heavily disrupted now as the automotive market, right? The, so look at Tesla and look at all these companies, they built, they built software first cars, right? Software, first delivery of capabilities and everything else. And the, and the incumbents. They have only two options, right? Either they try to respond by adopting open source cloud, native technologies. Like the, these new entrants have done and really, you know, compete with them at that level, or they can become commodity. Right. So, and I think that's the customers we're seeing the smart customers go like, we need to compete with these guys. We need to figure out how to take this technology in. And they need partners like us and partners like VMware for them. >>Do you see customers becoming cloud super cloud players? If they continue to keep leveraging the CapEx of the clouds and focus all their operational capital on top line revenue, generating activities. >>Yeah. I, so I think the CapEx model of the cloud is a great benefit of the cloud, but I think that is not, what's the longer term future of the cloud. I think the op the cloud operating model is the future. Like the agility, the ability imagine embedded software that, you know, you do an over the year update to fix a bug, but it's very hard to make a, an embedded device smarter over time. And then imagine if you can run cloud native software, you can roll out every two weeks new features and make that thing smarter, intelligent, and continue to help you in your business. That I think is what cloud did ultimately. And I think that is what really these customers are gonna need at their edge. >>Well, we talked about the value within it for customers with the VMware partnership, but what are some of your expectations? Obviously, this is a pretty powerful partnership for you guys. Yeah. What are some of the things that you're expecting that this is gonna drive? Yeah, >>So we, we, we have always operated at the more OT layer, distributed organizations in retail, energy, industrial automotive. Those are the verticals we, so we've developed. I think a lot of experience there, what, what we're seeing as we talk to those customers is they obviously have it organizations and the it organizations, Hey, that's great. You're looking at its computing, but how do we tie this into the existing investments we made with VMware? And how do we kind of take that also to this new environment? And I think that's the expectation I have is that I think we will be able to, to talk to the it folks and say, Hey, you can actually talk to the OT person. And both of you will speak the same language. You probably will both standardize on the same architecture and you'll be together deploying and enabling this new agility at the edge. >>What are some of the next things coming up for ZDA and the team? >>Well, so we've had a really amazing few quarters. We just close a series B round. So we've raised the companies raised over 55 million so far, we're growing very rapidly. We opened up no new international offices. I would say the, the early customers that we started deploying, wait a while back, they're now going into mass scale deployment. So we have now deployments underway in, you know, the 10 to hundred thousands of nodes at certain customers and in amazing environments. And so, so for us, it's continuing to prove the product in more and more verticals. Our, our product is really built for the largest of the largest. So, you know, for the size of the company, we are, we have a high concentration of fortune 500 global 500 customers, and some of them even invested in our rounds recently. So we we've been really, you know, honored with that support. Well, congratulations. Good stuff, edges popping. All right. Thank you. >>Thank you so much for joining us, talking about what you're doing in distributed edge. What's in it for customers, the VMware partnership, and by the way, congratulations on >>That too. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you. Thank >>You. All right. Nice to meet you as well for our guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22, John and I will be right back with our next guest.