(bright music) (crowd talking indistinctly in the background) >> Hey guys, welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022. You might notice something really unique here. Lisa Martin with our newest co-host of theCUBE, Savannah Peterson! Savannah, it's great to see you. >> It's so good to be here with you (laughs). >> I know, I know. We have a great segment coming up. I always love talking couple things, cars, one, two, with companies that have been around for a hundred plus years and how they've actually transformed. >> Oh yeah. >> Ford is here. You have a great story about how you, about Ford. >> Ford brought me to Detroit the first time. I was here at the North American International Auto Show. Some of you may be familiar, and the fine folks from Ford brought me out to commentate just like this, as they were announcing the Ford Bronco. >> Satish: Oh wow. >> Which I am still lusting after. >> You don't have one yet? >> For the record. No, I don't. My next car's got to be an EV. Although, ironically, there's a Ford EV right behind us here on set today. >> I know, I know. >> Which we were both just contemplating before we went live. >> It's really shiny. >> We're going to have to go check it out. >> I have to check it out. Yep, we'll do that. Yeah. Well, please welcome our two guests from Ford, Satish Puranam, is here, The Technical Leader at Cloud and Rebecca Risk, Principal Architect, developer relations. We are so excited to have you guys on the program. >> Clearly. >> Thanks for joining us. (all laugh) >> Thank you for having us. >> I love you're Ford enthusiasts! Yeah, that's awesome. >> I drive a Ford. >> Oh, awesome! Thank you. >> I can only say that's one car company here. >> That's great. >> Yes, yes. >> Great! Thank you a lot. >> Thank you for your business! >> Absolutely. (all laugh) >> So, Satish, talk to us a little bit about- I mean I think of Cloud as a car company but it seems like it's a technology company that makes cars. >> Yes. Talk to us about Ford as a Cloud first, technology driven company, and then we're going to talk about what you're doing with Red Hat and Boston University. >> Yeah, I'm like everything that all these cars that you're seeing, beautiful right behind us it's all built on, around, and with technology, right? So there's so much code goes into these cars these days, it's probably, it's mind boggling to think that probably your iPhones might be having less code as opposed to these cars. Everything from control systems, everything is code. We don't do any more clay models. Everything is done digital, 3D, virtual reality and all that stuff. So all that takes code, all of that takes technology. And we have been in that journey for the last- since 2016 when we started our first mobile app and all that stuff. And of late we have been like, heavily invested in Google. Moving a lot of these experiences, data acquisition systems AI/ML modeling for like all the autonomous cars. It's all technology and like from the day it is conceived, to the day it is marketed, to the day when you show up for a servicing, and hopefully soon how you can buy and you know, provide feedback to us, is all technology that drives all of this stuff. So it's amazing for us to see everything that we go and immerse ourselves in the technology. There is a real life thing that we can see what we all do for it, right? So- >> Yes, we're only sorry that our audience can't actually see the car, >> Yep. >> but we'll get some B-roll for you later on. Rebecca, talk a little bit about your role. Here we are at KubeCon, Savannah and I and John were talking when we went live this morning, that this is huge. That the show floor is massive, a lot bigger than last year. The collaboration and the spirit of the community is not only alive and well, as we heard in the keynote this morning, it's thriving. >> Yeah. >> Talk about developer relations at Ford and what you are helping to drive in your role. >> Yeah, so my team is all about helping developers work faster with different platforms that my team curates and produces, so that our developers don't have to deal with all of the details of setting up their environments to actually code. And we have really great people, kind of the top software developers in the company, are part of my team to produce those products that other people can use, and accelerate their development. And we have a great relationship with the developers in the company and outside with the different vendor relationships that we have, to make sure that we're always producing the next platform with the next tech stack that our developers will want to continue to use to produce the really great products that we are all about making at Ford. >> Let's dig in there a little bit because I'm curious and I suspect you both had something to do with it. How did you approach your Cloud Native transformation and how do you evaluate new technologies for the team? >> It's sometimes- many a times I would say it's like dogfooding and like experimentation. >> Yeah. Isn't anything in innovation a lot of- >> Yeah, a lot of experimentation. We started our, as I said, the Cloud Native journey back in 2016 with Cloud Foundry and things, technologies around that. Soon realized, that there was like a lot of buzz around that time. Twelve-Factor was a thing, Stateless was a thing. And then all those Stateful needs to drive the Stateless. So where do we do that thing? And the next logical iteration was Kubernetes was bursting upon the scene at that time. So we started doing a lot of experimentation. >> Like the Kool-Aid man, burst on the Kubernetes scene- >> Exactly right. >> Through the wall. >> So, the question is like, why can't we do? I think we were like crazy enough to say that Kubernetes people are talking about our serverless or Twelve-Factor on Kubernetes. We are crazy enough to do Stateful on Kubernetes and we've been doing it successfully for five years. So it's a lot about experimentation. I think good chunk of experiments that we do do not yield the results that we get, but many a times, some of them are like Gangbusters. Like, other aspects that we've been doing of late is like partnering with Becky and rest of the organization, right? Because they are the people who are like closest to the developers. We are somewhat behind the scenes doing some things but it is Becky and the rest of the architecture teams who are actually front and center with the customers, right? So it is the collaborative effort that we've been working through past few years that has been really really been useful and coming around and helping us to make some of these products really beautiful. >> Yeah, well you make a lot of beautiful products. I think we've all, I think we've all seen them. Something that I think is really interesting and part of why I was so excited for this interview, and kind of nudged John out, was because you've been- Ford has been investing in technology in a committed way for decades and I don't think most people are aware of that. When I originally came out to Dearborn, I learned that you've had a head of VR who happens to be a female. For what it's worth, Elizabeth, who's been running VR for you for two and a half decades, for 25 years. >> Satish: Yep. >> That is an impressive commitment. What is that like from a culture perspective inside of Ford? What is the attitude around innovation and technology? >> So I've been a long time Ford employee. I just celebrated my 29th year. >> Oh, wow! >> Congratulations! >> Wow, congrats! That's a huge deal. >> Yeah, it's a huge deal. I'm so proud of my career and all that Ford has brought to me and it's just a testament. I have many colleagues like me who've been there for their whole career or have done other things and come to Ford and then spent another 20 years with us because we foster the culture that makes you want to stay. We have development programs to allow you to upscale and change your role and learn new things and play with the new technologies that people are interested in doing and really make an impact to our community of developers at Ford or the company itself and the results that we're delivering. So to have that, you know, culture for so many years that people really love to work. They love to work with the people that they're working with. They love to stay engaged and they love the fact that you can have many different careers within the same umbrella, which we call the "blue oval". And that's really why I've been there for so long. I think I probably had 13 very unique and different jobs along the way. It's as if I left, and you know shopped around my skills elsewhere. But I didn't ever have to leave the company. It's been fabulous. >> The cultural change and adoption of- embracing modern technology- Cloud Native automotive software is impressive because a lot of historied companies, you guys have been there a long time, have challenges with that because it's really hard to get an entire moving, you'll call it the blue oval, to change and adapt- >> Savannah: I love that. >> and be willing to experiment. So that that is impressive. Talk about, you go by Becky, so I'll call you Becky, >> Rebecca/Becky: Yeah. >> The developer culture in terms of the developers really being the center of the nucleus of influencing the direction in which the company's going. I imagine that they probably are fairly influential. >> Yeah, so I had a very- one of the unique positions I held was a culture change for our department, Information Technology in 2016. >> Satish: Yeah. >> As the teacher was involved with moving us to the cloud, I was responsible- >> You are the transformation team! This is beautiful. I love this. We've got the right people on the show. >> Yeah, we do. >> I was responsible for changing the culture to orient our employees to pay attention to what do we want to create for tomorrow? What are the kind of skills we need to trust each other to move quickly. And that was completely unique. >> Satish: Yeah. >> Like I had men in the trenches delivering software before that, and then plucked out because they wanted someone, you know who had authentic experience with our development team to be that voice. And it was such a great investment that Ford continues to do is invest in our culture transformation. Because with each step forward that we do, we have to refine what our priorities are. And you do that through culture transformation and culture management. And that's been, I think really, the key to our successful pivots that we've made over the last six years that we've been able to continue to refine and hone where we really want to go through that culture movement. >> Absolutely. I think if I could add another- >> Please. >> spotlight to it is like the biggest thing about Ford has been among various startup-like culture, right? So the idea is that we encourage people to think outside the box, right? >> Savannah: Or outside the oval? >> Right! (laughs) >> Lisa: Outside the oval, yes! >> Absolutely! Right. >> So the question is like, you can experiment with various things, new technologies and you will get all the leadership support to go along with it. I think that is very important too and like we can be in the trenches and talk about all of these nice little things but who the heck would've thought that, you know Kubernetes was announced in 2015, in late 2016, we have early dev Kubernetes clusters already running. 2017, we are live with workloads on Kubernetes! >> Savannah: Early adopters over here. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm like all of this thing doesn't happen without lot of foresight and support from the leadership, but it's also the grassroot efforts that is encouraged all along to be on the front end of all of these things and try different things. Some of them may not work >> Savannah: Right. >> But that's okay. But how do we know we are doing something, if you're not failing? We have to fail in order to do something, right? >> Lisa: I always say- >> So I think that's been a great thing that is encouraged very often and otherwise I would not be doing, I've done a whole bunch of stuff at Ford. Without that kind of ability to support and have an appetite for, some of those things would not have been here at all. >> I always say failure is not a bad F-word. >> Satish: Yep. >> Savannah: I love that. >> But what you're talking about there is kind of like driving this hot wheel of experimentation. You have to have the right culture and the mindset- >> Satish: Absolutely. >> to do that. Try fail, move on, learn, iterate, go. >> Satish: Correct. >> You guys have a great partnership with Red Hat and Boston University. You're speaking about that later today. >> Satish: Yes. >> Unpack that for us. What, from a technical perspective, what are you doing and what's it resulting in? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is Becky was talking about as during this transformation journey, is lot has changed in very small amount of time. So we traditionally been like, "Hey, here's a spreadsheet of things I need you to deliver for me" to "Here is a catalog of things, you can get it today and be successful with it". That is frightening to several of our developers. The goal, one of the things that we've been working with Q By Example, Red Hat and all the thing, is that how can we lower the bar for the developers, right? Kubernetes is great. It's also a wall of YAML. >> It's extremely complex, number one complaint. >> The question is how can I zero on? I'm like, if we go back think like when we talk about in cars with human-machine interfaces, which parts do I need to know? Here's the steering wheel, here's the gas pedal, or here's the brake. As long as you know these two, three different things you should be fairly be okay to drive those things, right? So the idea of some of the things with enablementing we are trying to do is like reduce that barrier, right? Reduce- lower the bar so that more people can participate in it. >> One of the ways that you did that was Q By Example, right, QBE? >> Satish: Yes, Yes. >> Can you tell us a little bit more about that as you finish this answer? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing with Q By Example is like Q By Example gives you the small bite-sized things about Kubernetes, right? >> Savannah: Great place to start. >> But what we wanted to do is that we wanted to reinforce that learning by turning into a real world living example app. We took part info, we said, Hey, what does it look like? How do I make sure that it is highly available? How do I make sure that it is secure? Here is an example YAML of it that you can literally verbatim copy and paste into your editor and click run and then you will get an instant gratification feedback loop >> I was going to say, yeah, they feel like you're learning too! >> Yes. Right. So the idea would be is like, and then instead of giving you just a boring prose text to read, we actually drop links to relevant blog posts saying that, hey you can just go there. And that has been inspirational in terms of like and reinforcing the learning. So that has been where we started working with the Boston University, Red Hat and the community around all of that stuff. >> Talk a little bit about, Becky, about some of the business outcomes. You mentioned things like upskilling the workforce which is really nice to hear that there's such a big focus on it. But I imagine too, there's more participation in the community, but also from an end customer perspective. Obviously, everything Ford's doing is to serve the end customers >> Becky: Right. How does this help the end customer have that experience that they really, these days, demand with patience being something that, I think, is gone because of the pandemic? >> Right? Right. So one of the things that my team does is we create the platforms that help Accelerate developers be successful and it helps educate them more quickly on appropriate use of the platforms and helps them by adopting the platforms to be more secure which inherently lead to the better results for our end customers because their data is secure because the products that they have are well created and they're tested thoroughly. So we catch all those things earlier in the cycle by using these platforms that we help curate and produce. And that's really important because, like you had mentioned, this steep learning curve associated with Kubernetes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So my team is able to kind of help with that abstraction so that we solve kind of the higher complex problems for them so that developers can move faster and then we focus our education on what's important for them. We use things like Q By Example, as a source instead of creating that content ourselves, right? We are able to point them to that. So it's great that there's that community and we're definitely involved with that. But that's so important to help our developers be successful in moving as quickly as they want and not having 20,000 people solve the same problems. >> Satish: (chuckles) Yeah. >> Each individually- >> Savannah: you don't need to! >> and sometimes differently. >> Savannah: We're stronger together, you know? >> Exactly. >> The water level rises together and Ford is definitely a company that illustrates that by example. >> Yeah, I'm like, we can't make a better round wheel right? >> Yeah! So, we have to build upon what we have already been built ahead of us. And I think a lot of it is also about how can we give back and participate in the community, right? So I think that is paramount for us as like, here we are in Detroit so we're trying to recruit and show people that you know, everything that we do is not just old car and sheet metal >> Savannah: Combustion. >> and everything and right? There's a lot of tech goes and sometimes it is really, really cool to do that. And biggest thing for us is like how can we involve our community of developers sooner, earlier, faster without actually encumbering them and saying that, hey here is a book, go master it. We'll talk two months later. So I think that has been another journey. I think that has been a biggest uphill challenge for us is that how can we actually democratize all of these things for everybody. >> Yeah. Well no one better to try than you I would suspect. >> We can only try and hope everything turns out well, right? >> You know, as long as there's room for the bumpers on the lane for if you fail. >> Exactly. >> It sounds like you're driving the program in the right direction. Closing question for you, what's next? Is electric the future? Is Kubernetes the future? What's Ford all in on right now, looking forward? (crowd murmuring in the background) >> Data is the king, right? >> Savannah: Oh, okay, yes! >> Data is a new currency. We use that for several things to improve the cars improve the quality of autonomous driving Is Level 5 driving here? Maybe will be here soon, we'll see. But we are all working towards it, right? So machine learning, AI feedback. How do you actually post sale experience for example? So all of these are all areas that we are working to. We are, may not be getting like Kubernetes in a car but we are putting Kubernetes in plants. Like you order a Marquis or you order a Bronco, you see that here. Here's where in the assembly line your car is. It's taking pictures. It's actually taking pictures on Kubernetes platform. >> That's pretty cool. >> And it is tweeting for you on the Twitter and the social media platform. So there's a lot of that. So it is real and we are doing it. We need more help. A lot of the community efforts that we are seeing and a lot of the innovation that is happening on the floor here, it's phenomenal. The question is how we can incorporate those things into our workflows. >> Yeah, well you have the right audience for that here. You also have the right attitude, >> Exactly. >> the right appetite, and the right foundation. Becky, last question for you. Top three takeaways from your talk today. If you're talking to the developer community you want to inspire: Come work for us! What would you say? >> If you're ready to invest in yourself and upskill and be part of something that is pretty remarkable, come work for us! We have many, many different technical career paths that you can follow. We invest in our employees. When you master something, it's time for you to move on. We have career growth for you. It's been a wonderful gift to me and my family and I encourage everyone to check us out careers.ford.com or stop by our booth if you're happen to be here in person. >> Satish: Absolutely! >> We have our curated job openings that are specific for this community, available. >> Satish: Absolutely. >> Love it. Perfect close. Nailed pitch there. I'm sure you're all going to check out their job page. (all laugh) >> Exactly! And what you talked about, the developer experience, the customer experience are inextricably linked and you guys are really focused on that. Congratulations on all the work that you've done. We got to go get a selfie with that car girl. >> Yes, we do. >> Absolutely. >> We got to show them, we got to show the audience what it looks like on the inside too. We'll do a little IG video. (Lisa laughs) >> Absolutely. >> We will show you that for our guests and my cohost, Savannah Peterson. Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with theCUBE at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2022. The one and only John Furrier, who you know gets FOMO, is going to be back with me next. So stick around. (all laugh) (bright music)

(intro music playing) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to the power of n where HPE Aruba and Pensando are changing the game, the way customers scale with the cloud, and what's next in the evolution in switching. Hey everyone, I'm John furrier with the cube, and I'm here with Shane Corbin, director of technical product management at Pensando, and William show vice president of product management, Aruba HPE. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on and doing a deep dive and, and going into the, the big news. So the first question I want to ask you guys is um, what do you guys see from a market customer perspective that kicked this project off? um, amazing um, results um, over the past year or so? Where did it all come from? >> No, it's a great question, John. So when we were doing our homework, there were actually three very clear customer challenges. First, security threats were largely spawn with on, within the perimeter. In fact, Forrester highlighted 80% of threats originate within the internal network. Secondly, workloads are largely distributed creating a ton of east-west traffic. And then lastly, network services such as firewalls, load balancers, VPN aggregators are expensive, they're centralized, and they ultimately result in service chaining complexity. >> John: So, so, >> John: Go ahead, Shane. >> Yeah. Additionally, when we spoke to our customers after launching initially the distributed services platform, these compliance challenges clearly became apparent to us and while they saw the architecture value of adopting what the largest public cloud providers have done by putting a smart NIC in each compute node to provide these stateful services. Enterprise customers were still, were struggling with the need to upgrade fleets and brown field servers and the associated per node cost of adding a smart NIC to every compute node. Typically the traffic volumes for on a per node basis within an enterprise data center are significantly lower than cloud. Thus, we saw an opportunity here to, in conjunction with Aruba, develop a new category of switching product um, to share the processing capabilities of our unique intellectual property around our DPU across a rack of servers that net net delivers the same set of services through a new category of platform, enabling a distributed services architecture, and ultimately addressing the compliance and TCO generating huge TCO and ROI for customers. >> You know, one of the things that we've been reporting on with you guys, as well as the cloud scale, this is the volume of data and just the performance and scale. I think the timing of the, of this partnership and the product development is right on point. And you've got the edge right around the corner, more, more distributed nature of cloud operations, huge, huge change in the marketplace. So great timing on the origination story there. Great stuff. Tell me more about the platform itself, the details, what's under the hood, the hardware OS, what are the specs? >> Yeah, so we started with a very familiar premise. Rubik customers are already leveraging CX with an edge to cloud common operating model, in deploying leaf and spine networks. Plus we're excited to introduce the industry's first distributed services switch, where the first configuration has 48-25 gig ports with a hundred gig couplings running Aruba CX cloud native operating system, Pensando Asic's software inside, enabling layer four through six, seven stateful services. Shane, do you want to elaborate on. >> Yeah, let me elaborate on that a little bit further, um, you know, as we spoke existing platforms and how customers were seeking to address these challenges were, are inherently limited by the ASIC dye size, and that does limit their scale and performance and ability in traditional switching platforms to deliver truly stateful functions in, in, in a switching platform, this was, you know, architecturally from the ground up, when we developed our DPU, first and second generation, we delivered it, or we, we built it with stateful services in mind from the get-go, we leveraged the clean state design with our P four program with DPU. We evolved to our seven nanometers based pro DPU right now, which is essentially enabling software and Silicon. And this has generated a new level of performance scale, flexibility and capability in terms of services. This serves as the foundation for our 200 gig card, were we taking the largest cloud providers into production for. And the DPU itself is, is designed inherently to process stage, track stateful connections, and stateful flow is at very, very large scale without impacting performance. And in fact, the two of these DPU components server disk, services foundation of the CX 10 K, and this is how we enable stateful functions in a switching platform functions like stateful network fire-walling, stateful segmentation, enhanced programmable telemetry, which we believe will bring a whole lot of value to our customers. And this is a platform that's inherently programmable from the ground up. We can, we can build and leverage this platform to build new use cases around encryption, enabling stateful load balancing, stateful NAT to name a few, but, but the key message here is, this is, this is a platform with the next generation of architecture's in mind, is programmed, but at all, there's the stack, and that's what makes it fundamentally different than anything else. >> I want to just double click on that if you don't mind, before we get to the competitive question, because I think you brought up the state thing. I think this is worth calling out, if you guys don't mind commenting more on this states issue, because this is big. Cloud native developers right now, want speed, they're shifting left at the CICD pipeline with programmability. So going down and having the programmability, and having state is a really big deal. Can you guys just expand on that a little bit more and why it's important and, and how hard it really is to pull off? >> I, I can start, I guess, um, it's very hard to pull off because of the sheer amount of connections you need to track when you're developing something like a stateful firewall or a stateful load balancer, a key component of that is managing the connections at very, very large scale and understanding what's happening with those connections at scale, without impacting application performance. And this is fundamentally different at traditional switching platform, regardless of how it's deployed today in Asics, don't typically process and manage state like this. Um, memory resources within the chip aren't sufficient, um, the policy scale that you can um, implement on a platform aren't sufficient to address and fundamentally enable deployable firewalling, or load balancing, or other stateful services. >> That's exactly right. And so the other kind of key point here is that, if you think about the sophistication of different security threats, it does really require you to be able to look at the entire packet, and, and more so be able to look at the entire flow and be able to log that history, so that you can get much better heuristics around different anomalies, security threats that are emerging today. >> That's a great, great point. Thanks for, for, um, bringing that extra, extra point out. I would just add to this, we're reporting this all the time on Silicon angle in the cube is that, you know, the, you know, the, the automation wave that's coming with around data, you know, it's a center of data, not data centers we heard earlier on with the, in, in, in the presentation. Data drives automation, having that enabled with the state is a real big deal. So, I think that's really worth calling out. Now, I've got to ask the competition question, how is this different? I mean, this is an evolution. I would say, it's a revolution. You guys are being being humble, um, but how is this different from what customers can deploy today? >> Architecturally, if you take a look at it. We've, we've spoken about the technology and fundamentally in the platform what's unique, in the architecture, but, foundationally when customers deploy stateful services they're typically deployed leveraging traditional big box appliances for east-west our workload based agents, which seek to implement stateful security for each east-west. Architecturally what we're enabling is stateful services like firewalling, segmentation, can scale with the fabric and are delivered at the optimal point for east west which is through leaf for access layer of the network. And we do this for any type of workload. Be it deployed on a virtualized compute node, be a deployed on a containerized worker node, be deployed on bare metal, agnostic up typology, it can be in the access layer of a three tier design and a data center. It can be in the leaf layer of a VX VPN based fabric, but the goal is an all centrally managed to a single point of orchestration and control of which William will talk about shortly. The goal of this is to drive down the TCO of your data center as a whole, by allowing you to retire legacy appliances that are deployed in an east-west roll, and not utilize host based agents, and thus save a whole lot of money and we've modeled on the order of 60 to 70% in terms of savings in terms of the traditional data center pod design of a thousand compute nodes which we'll be publishing. And as, as we go forward additional services, as we mentioned, like encryption, this platform has the capability to terminate up to 800 gigs of our line rates encryption, IP sec, VPN per platform, stateful Nat load balancing, and this is all functionality we'll be adding to this existing platform because it's programmable as we've mentioned from the ground up. >> What are some of the use cases lead? And what's the top use cases, what's the low hanging fruit and where does this go? You've got service providers, enterprises. What are the types of customers you guys see implementing? >> Yeah, that's, what's really exciting about the CX 10,000. We actually see customer interest from all types of different markets, whether it be higher education, service providers to financial services, basically all enterprises verticals with private cloud or edge data centers. For example, it could be a hospital, a big box retailer, or a colon such as Iniquinate So it's really the CX 10,000 that creates a new switching category, enabling stateful services in that leaf node right at the workload, unifying network and security automation policy management. Second, the CX 10,000 greatly improves security posture and eliminates the need for hair-pinning east-west traffic all the way back to the centralized deployments. Lastly, As Shane highlighted, there's a 70% TCO savings by eliminating that appliance sprawl and ultimately collapsing the network security operations. >> I love the category creation um, vibe here. Love it. And also the technical and the cloud alignment's great. But how do the customers manage all this? Okay, I got a new category. I just put the box in, throw away some other ones? I mean, how does this all get done? And how does the customers manage all this? >> Yeah, so we're, we're looking to build on top of the river fabric composer. It's another familiar site for our customers, and what's already provides for compute storage and network automation, with a broad ecosystem integrations, such as VMware vSphere Vcenter as with Nutanix prism and so aligned with the CX 10,000 FGA, now you have a fabric composer, unified security and policy orchestration, and management with the ability to find firewall policies efficiently and provide that telemetry to collect your such a Splunk. >> John: So the customer environments right now involve a lot of multi-vendor and new frameworks, obviously, cloud native. How does this fit into the customer's existing environment with the ecosystem? How do they get, get going here? >> Yeah, great question. Um, Our customers can get going as we, we've built a flexible platform that can be deployed in either Greenfield or brownfield. Obviously it's a best of breed architecture for distributed services we're building in conjunction with Aruba. But if customers want to gradually integrate this into their existing environments and they're using other vendors, spines or cores, this can be inserted seamlessly as, as a lead for an access, access tier switch to deliver the exact same set of services within that architecture. So it plugs seamlessly in because it supports all the standard control plan protocols, a VX 90 VPN, and a traditional attitude, three tier designs easily. Now, for any enterprise solution deployment, it's critical that you build a holistic ecosystem around it. It's clear that, this will get customer deployments and the ecosystem being diverse and rich is very, very important. And as part of our integrations with the controller, we're building a broad suite of integrations across threat detection, application dependency mapping, Siemens sooam, dev ops infrastructure as code tools. (inaudible) And it's clear if you look at these categories of integrations, you know, XDR or threat detection requires full telemetric from within the data center, it's been hard to accomplish to date because you typically need agents on, on your compute nodes to give you the visibility into what's going on or firewalls for east west fuels. Now, our platform can natively provide full visibility into all flows east- west in the data center. And this can become the source of telemetry truth that these MLX CR engines require to work. The other aspects of ecosystem around application dependency mapping, this single core challenge with deploying segmentation east west is understanding the rules to put in & Right, first is how do you insert the service, um, service device in such a way that it won't add more complexity? We don't add any complexity because we're in line natively. How you would understand it, would allow you to build the rules that are necessary to do segmentation. We integrate with tools like Guardi core, we provide our flogs as source of data, and they can provide room recommendations and policy recommendations for customers. Around, we're building integrations around Siemen soam with, with tools like Splunk and elastic, elastic search that will allow NetOps and SecOps teams to visualize trend and manage the services delivered by the CX 10 K. And the other aspect of ecosystem, from a security standpoint is clearly how do I get policy for these traditional appliances and enforce them on this next generation architecture that you've built, that can enable stateful services. So we're building integrations with tools like turf and an algo sec third-party sources of policy that we can ingest and enforce on the infrastructure, allowing you to gradually, um, migrate to this new architecture over time. >> John: It's really a cloud native switch. I mean, you solve people's problems, pin- points, but yet positioned for growth. I mean, it sounds that's my takeaway, but I got to ask you guys both, what's the takeaway for the customers because it's not that simple for them, I mean it's, we a have complicated environment. (all giggling) >> Yeah, I think it's, I think it's really simple, um, you know, every 10 years or so, we see major evolutions in the data center and the switching environment, but we do believe we've created a new category with the distributed services, distributed services switch, delivering cloud scale distributed services, where the local, where the workloads reside greatly, simplifying network, security provisioning, and operations with the urban fabric composer while improving security posture and the TCO. But that's not all the folks, it's a journey, right Shane? >> Yeah, it's absolutely a journey. And this is the first step in a long journey with a great partner like Aruba. There's other platforms, hundred or 400 gig hardware platforms where we're looking at and then this additional services that we can enable over time, allowing customers to drive even more TCO value out of the platform of the architecture services like encryption for securing the cloud on-ramp, services like stateful load balancing to deploy east-west in the data center and, you know, holistically that's, that's the goal, deliver value for customers. And we believe we have an architecture and a platform, and this is a first step in a long journey. >> It's a great way of, I just ask one final, final question for both of you as product leaders, you got to be excited having a category creation product here in this market, this big wave, but what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, exactly right, it doesn't happen that often, and so we're, we're all in it's, it's exciting to be able to work with a great team like Pensando and Shane here. Um, so we're really, really excited about this launch. >> Yeah, it's awesome. The team is great. It's a great partnership between Pensando and Aruba. You know, we, we look forward to delivering value for our joint customers. >> John: Thank you both for sharing under the hood and more details on the product. Thanks for coming on. >> [William And Shane] Thank you. >> Okay. The next evolution in switching, I'm John Furrier here with the power of nHPE Aruba and Pensando changing the game, the way customers scale up in the cloud and networking. Thanks for watching. (music playing)

(upbeat music) >> From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicone Valley, it's theCube, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCube. We are here in Sand Hill Road at Mayfield office here talking about entrepreneurship, People First, this is our co-created program with Mayfield. I'm John Furrier, your host, we're with Mitchell Hashimoto, who's the co-founder and co-CEO at HashiCorp. Great to see you, good to keep alumni, you're back on theCube . Thanks for joining me today. >> Yeah, thanks so much, I was here so long ago. (John laughs) >> Like five or six years ago. >> So, we've been really psyched about the program that Mayfield's put together called People First. They're celebrating their 50th anniversary as a venture capital firm, which is historic in the sense that it's kind of still a young industry. Think about it. And love to have entrepreneurs come on because you've been very successful. We talked years ago. I think, the first year you were formed and Cloud certainly has happened. Open Source continues to pump more value. I mean, you get things out there coming out of Google, some ridiculously amazing... The goodness in Open Source is certainly driving a lot of great software development. You've been a part of that so thanks for joining us. So I got to ask you, you guys are growing right now, you're Venture backed, you got a unique culture. Explain HashiCorp, 'cause you guys have a unique business. You're in Open Source, you're in Cloud, you're a distributed workforce. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so we are trying to build or have been building, sort of infrastructure software of the future. We've been saying that since we were founded and what's been interesting is the future has changed quite a bit in the past six years so there's been Cloud, that was the big thing when we were founded and then containers and now schedulers and Kubernetes and things like that. And while we're doing that, we're also sort of building what I think is sort of the company of the future, which is over 90% of our workfoce is fully distributed. Basically, unless there's legal reasons not to be distributed, we are distributed and we're in multiple countries, we're in over 40 states. All of our process is built remote first so everything happens, Slack, all our meetings are Zoom. Even our all hands, we present behind a camera, and things like that so I think that's all very unique, but only for now, I think that-- >> How do you do the all hands? That's interesting. Do you have a camera to a zoom or is it a camera live streaming? How do you do the all hands? >> Yeah, so we set up sort of an AV setup in our office because we have a few of the executives in the office that often are presenting on the all hands and we set up a camera feed so that whether you actually decide to go into the office or whether you're at home, we want that experience to be authentic to both sides. We don't want a great in-room experience and then one corner camera that makes it really hard to hear and stuff like that so yeah, you have to walk up to the camera and be part of the zoom to really be part of the all hands. >> So that people feel present and connected? >> Right, exactly, and we force questions to come through Slack. There's no in-person questions. You have to ask on Slack so everyone can see them and things like that, so-- >> That's awesome. Talk about the journey as you started. You have a co-founder. You guys have an interesting relationship. How did this all get started? What was the beginning genesis of HashiCorp like and take us through some of the early days. >> Sure, so I'm very lucky, I have a co-founder who before the company, we were best friends and after the company or during the company, we're still best friends so (laughs) which it isn't always the case, but in terms of HashiCorp itself, we're super lucky 'cause we went to the University of Washington, up in Seattle, and this was in sort of the mid-2000s and this is a good time to be up there, 'cause Cloud was starting to emerge and we were sort of equidistant geographically, across the lake, if you will, to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and so, we were getting early access to what they thought was sort of the Cloud at the time and it was rapidly changing. We were getting access to the servers, with the APIs, and all this stuff and being a university without a lot of funding, my job there was sort of to help us utilize all these resources and so in the mid 2000s, Armand and I were already realizing, we're on the same team, Armand and I were already realizing that this is not a solved problem by any means, I mean this is a new problem and that eventually, years later, became the genesis-- >> and what was that problem that you saw immediately? >> It was sort of like multi-Cloud, resource management, deployment, security, it's funny 'cause it's... Over 10 years later and it's... It is the problem that Enterprise are hitting right now. >> Think about the early days of Amazon. I still have these memory flashbacks of EC2, long URLs, it's like, okay, now how to I redirect my web servers to this, like, so it was easy to stand up on EC2 instance, put a little S3 to it, then it's like, okay now what? >> Yeah, we're at the-- >> Little red scale, I put this in there, what's kind of there. So again, a little early, kind of build your own kind of a junkyard. You build a car out of some spare parts. But then it had to mature really fast. >> Yeah, we're are the Day Zero state then and now we're firmly in like Day Two. >> And so what was the next step. Can you peg the journey for us, because obviously, they grew up really fast and then they really kind of hit a tipping point around 2010, 11, 12, 13, and kind of grew like a weed >> Yup, yeah, so around that time frame you just painted to 2012 is when Enterprise was sort of adopting it. And I think a lot of that was single Cloud focus. There was very much like, this is our first Cloud so we're going to land purely on Amazon or something and focus on that and we're at the point now, about six years later, 2018, where the maturity around operating the Cloud is sort of well understood and companies are now starting to sort of use what's best for the job and also realized that there's multiple Clouds and we're keeping our private data centers and also, there's new things coming on the scene above Cloud sort of higher level, like Kubernetes, and how we're going to manage all this and so, we like to describe it as sort of the mindset is like the Cloud operating model. It's like you can't operate your resources in the Cloud the same way you do on Prim and people are starting to get that. That's like automation, very people-focused workflows, things like that, and companies are getting that and so now the challenge is these heterogeneous environments. >> So, the top conversation in our office and everyone loves when I bring this up, I want to get your definition and opinion, >> Okay. >> Is Kubernetes. >> Sure. >> Kubernetes, just, a lot of people love it. I've been having Kubernetes dreams these days 'cause there's so much Kubernetes conversation. (Mitchell laughs) you got Kubernetes, you got the notion of Service Mesh is right around the corner, StateFul applications with net problems really hard to work on. Stateless has been around for awhile. What's the importance of Kubernetes? What's the impact, in your opinion, expert opinion, why is Kubernetes important and what's the impact of Kubernetes? >> Yeah, I think the more abstract answer is the scheduler idea and Kubernetes are built on that and really, it's the idea of like, let's move away from looking at the individual machine and let's start moving higher level to just assuming resources are there. It's sort of like when you write, the transition of when you were writing software from having to know how much memory you had to just, let's just assume it's infinite and put whatever in there and it's someone else's problem and we're sort of moving into that data center, it's like, let's just assume we always have compute and storage and network and let's just deploy and what freedom does that give you and I think that's really what Schedulers give you and also, when you sort of take away huge operability challenges of placing the application and giving that to a computer to put in the right spot, you can now deploy so many more applications because-- >> so you're freed up? >> You're freed up in a lot of ways. It introduces a lot of new challenges, but that's a good problem. You want new challenges, you want to solve the old ones. >> What are some of the new challenges that you see emerging that kind of keep the evolution going? >> I think Service Mesh is a great example we could jump into, which is that the challenge of, we like to describe Service Mesh as three fundamental problems, which is discoverability, configurability, and secure connectivity. If you have two services, that is not a problem because you could hard-code the IPs, you could hard-code the configuration, and you could just hard-code TLS certificates, make it work. When you have thousands of services that are coming and going and people are trying new services all the time, that has to all be automated so the idea of Service Mesh is automating that and making it invisible, automatic, free, and that's new, that's a new problem. >> And that's a huge concept. This is a scalable, scale out, huge concept, and super important. >> Yes, yeah. >> This changes the game at many levels. What would you see that changing? What would some of the, for folks who are just now understanding, what does it change downstream or down the road for enterprises and for businesses? >> I think the biggest change is a mind shift change from sort of perimeter or host-based security to identity and service-based security. So, traditional sort of networking and security is very IP Space focused, it's like does this rack talk to this rack or no and things like that. And that has to all go away because that's restricting the placement, that's not allowing apps to go anywhere. We have to move towards this service can or can't talk to this service, don't care where it is or anything and sort of move from a perimeter to just the perimeter being the app itself so we have to sort of firewall and protect right at the app layer and that's hard to transition, that's tooling change, that's education change, that's team change. >> I want to ask you, I could talk about this forever, Cloud Automation is, I think, one of the most important things. That's only going to make AI more powerful and the data behind it, and as new data emerges, but I got to ask you about some of the new blood coming into the market place because traditionally, if you think about Service Mesh, oh it's a software problem, we'll just solve the software, but you actually got to have networking shops, you got to have to have a computer science or computer engineering. A new skill sets developing really fast in this new, I don't want to, maybe call it under the hood, I don't know what to call it, but maybe, it's an engineering mindset, where people, there's a huge demand for skills in automating. It's not your classic application developers, there's great role for that and there's tons of apps being built, but, I'm talking about a new kind of operator. >> Yes. >> What's your take on this new skill, this new opportunity for people to learn and develop a career? >> Yeah, I think the real way to look at it, I like to look at it, is sort of the difference between creating, sort of doing something once and creating a process to do something. And there's sort of two different tasks, righ. It's like when you get promoted for the first time from you know, to manager. It's like the big challenge is learning how to teach others process and enforcing consistent process, versus actually, you know, doing it yourself. And I think that's the difference between someone who is used to the slinging, let's go back to like the server automation, someone who's used to just manually clicking or slinging bass scripts to do one off task, you could be a wizard at that, but then, try to do that repeatably, safely, 9000 times out of 9000 times and now, that's a resiliency challenge. That's sort of understanding failure modes. It's very different and I think that's the biggest skill set to adopt is, I always sort of push anybody in their job to just what, how do you not do your job? Like, how do you move on to the next problem? >> How do you eliminate your job? >> Yeah, basically/ >> That's almost, like the way I think about it. >> Yeah, what's the process. Is it possible right now? And if it's not possible, what's sort of blocking it? >> So I want to ask you a question and I love this one, going to move on just from the business side in a second, but I want to get your thoughts because I've been having conversations lately with Cloud folks and engineers and developers around two words, replicating and reproducing. >> Okay. >> They're kind of two different concepts. Reproducing is doing the same thing over again. Make that spaghetti sauce, do it again, but did I write it down? Is there a recipe? Or I could just hand you the recipe and say, you make it yourself or automating it. So I think, replicating, I'll say has scale, reproducing requires the same components. Do you see dev ops evolving to a point where, do it once and it's replicated? Or is there some reproduction involved, reproducing things? Where is that, where do you see the tech happening? >> I think inevitably, you're sort of doing both, but my sort of dream world, where I think it'll be still, but I think it's sooner than we expect, but I think sort of like 10 years from now is a safe, sort of stage, it's sort of like every, it doesn't matter if you're Fortune 500 or a new company, sort of the way it infrastructure server management goes is you just start with one server. I like to call it the stem cell server. You just start with one server, you say what you want and just let it go and it's going to either replicate or reproduce, it's either creating something new or it's like creating more copies of itself, but it'll turn into any sort of scale face, book level scale that you would want in theory and I think that, that's sort of my long, you know, fence post, guiding fence post, that I always think about the problem. >> Talk about the culture of your company, you guys have a new CEO, you have a partner you've been best friends with so-- >> I don't think he's that new? >> Yes he is. (both laugh) Okay, he's been around for awhile? >> Couple years, yeah. >> Couple years, so you've had a co-founder dynamic. Did you guys look at each other and say hey, we got to bring a CEO in . Some people like to have one of the founders be the CEO. Talk about that dynamic 'cause that's a struggle for a lot of entrepreneurs to have the self awareness and or the need to do that. >> Yeah so Armand and I made the decision to look for a CEO, if possible, I think three and a half or four years ago, it took us almost two years to find Dave and our motivation is really, it's a few things, one was something our investors told us, which is, long term, you want to do for the company you want to give the company the biggest value you can and like, what do you bring to the company? For us, as founders, our skill set was product vision, engineering, sort of industry strategy, things like that and it wasn't the executive management, financing, building various teams like sales marketing, building out the corporate structure, that wasn't us and so we looked at it and thought, we could learn it, probably, but we would make mistakes and it would be hard, it's just not our passion, it's not what we want to do, or we could try to find someone who aligns with our culture and gets our vision, gets open source, things like that, bring them in and sort of scale to a way where we're giving our startup the best chance it has, which means we give it the value we do, which is engineering and product vision and the new person coming in gives it that sort of corporate maturity and that's exactly what Dave did. >> That's awesome and it's always hard to do that because you got to have real maturity to make that happen so congratulations. >> Thanks, yeah. >> You know, a lot of us have that problem. (chuckles) and then one of my startups like, I need a new CEO, the venture guys were pushing it on you, but it's a challenge, you know, you got to think about, you know... That we didn't have a business model back then, but it's different stories, but that's always a tough one. Now let's talk about the culture around where you started from and where you are now because a lot of the stories around entrepreneurship is team, culture, and how you're going to set up your future of work, which you guys have a good structure. Iterating and figuring out where the tail wind is. Are you at the spot where you thought you'd be at a few years ago when we first met? How has it evolved, where there a little bit of zigs and zags you had to make. What was that like and share some of the journey color commentary with us. >> Sure, I mean, as a company sizes, we're nowhere near where I thought we'd be. I think Armand and I came into it expecting failure most likely and so anything beyond that was just surprise. So that's great. I think the place we are where we thought we'd be is sort of the company culture and stuff and that's something we've been very fiercely protective of and we define our culture sort of as we published them, we call the principal of HashiCorp, which sort of revolve around kindness, honesty, humility, things like that, so it's who would we want to work with and let's put words to it because we don't want to be this nebulous thing and so we've held to that really strongly. We're over 300 people now and every... Something Armand says, which I totally agree with, is I come into work, come into work, I go to my remote office, but I come into work and I'm excited to work with everyone at HashiCorp, which is, in past jobs we've had, we'd come into work and we're excited to work with like two out of 10 people, you know, and that's not a good ratio to have and I think that's what I'm most proud of from the culture side, that the ways we've done that is like we have the principles. We also have something called The Tal, which has been incredibly successful for us, both internally and externally, which is how we view product development and design and that helps sort of align the type of engineer who could get behind our vision and put some words to our vision so it's not again nebulous, whatever the founders think. >> So they have expectations of what's going to be like? >> Mhmm. >> From a coding standpoint, contribution? >> Yeah, from how do you, I like to describe it as how do you build product and how do you... How do you handle people? We have the two sides totally published and we're pretty explicit about it. >> That's awesome. Talk about the role of open source and lots of changing and you're seeing a lot of things like the Linux Foundation, CNCF, massively commercialized, there's tons of money coming in there, but Linux Foundation has done a good job of keeping that pretty pure. Success in entrepreneurship and open source go hand in hand now, it's almost... It's really the perfect storm for creators. >> Yeah. >> But, there's a playbook, there's a way that's changed. Share your vision of how you think open source is today and where it needs to maintain and what could be changed for the better? >> Yeah, I think, so open source today is pretty much a default, expected, accepted, sort of a pattern, which is really nice. It gives you community so you could, you know, Groundswell, anyone could adopt your software, without having to go through a sales person or something like that, which is really important, anyone can contribute and make their mark on the software. It's a great way to sort of get careers started. I think it brings a level of transparency to software that is, you know, you could hide behind closed source. It's like we like to tell our customers, it's like if you don't believe us, not only try it, but go look at how it works. We're telling you the truth. And I think that's really important. I think there's still a lot of challenges around how do companies sort of build successful businesses around it? I think we're doing alright and things like that, but there's still low number of data points. >> Always the challenge is, from looking at your reaction on this, is that as companies get involved, the classic reaction was, oh we got the big companies now in this open source project, it's going to be land grabbed, they're going to put their fingers in there, need better governance. >> Yup. >> Things fracture. Where ideally, it's an upstream project, where everyone contributes for the better good and then people pull it downstream. I mean, that's the basic ethos of open source. That's the main, that's the playbook that we want and that's what you believe, that's the ideal scenario? >> I think that yeah, I think shared ownership is really important, but I also think that sort of unified vision is equally important. So, that's a healthy tension to me, which is that you have a huge community that wants to pull the project in different directions and I think if you don't, if you have a governance that's totally fair, what ends up happening, in my opinion, is you end up getting camels instead of horses, right, like you'd start pulling in all these different directions. You sort of need a slightly unfair governance model so there is somebody that says, this is the direction we're going. And that person needs to be someone that's trusted by the community. >> And Linux was very successful with that too, I mean, you know. >> Right, and I think Linux is an example of a project that like reaches a point where that's, the vision is obvious and clear and it reaches a point where, you know, Linux could step down for a bit and take a break and it still runs fine, but it's a-- >> in the early days, you need a benevolent dictator to say, look, we got to do this. >> Yeah, right, Linux is a 25, 30 year old project versus, you know, some of these CNCF projects are two or three years old and I think that's where you absolutely need strong leadership versus-- >> But we'll see. We'll look at the contribution. We look at that, we obviously follow that pretty heavily and learn to appreciate the Kubernetes commentaries. We think that's super important too. Obviously containers, it's pretty much voted, it's open now so. >> Yes, yeah, yeah. >> (laughs) We know that. Okay, so I got to ask you the final question. As an entrepreneur, access to capital is super important. How did you guys go about it? How did you raise money? How should people raise money today? I'll say your an entrepreneur in the ecosystem, you're out in the front lines building a company. >> Mhmm. >> How did you guys access the capital? How should people figure this out? >> Yeah, I mean you just, you got to tell people why, you know it's a marketing problem, in away, but you got to tell people why what you're working on matters because it's so obvious to you as the founder, that's easy, it's about how do you articulate that and tell people how and why it's important and not just to you, but to the market and how it's going to help people and we did that and I think our biggest challenge was we had to do that across six or seven products, which is, we had a lot of pressure to like, why don't you just do one thing, but it was because for us, what was important was not just what the product did, but the greater vision behind why are we doing six things. And we just, you'd say that and you'd find people who believe it and they help you. >> And as you guys, a great example of you're on a big wave with Cloud and Open Source. How should entrepreneurs and what do you guys do to do this, maybe it's more of advice or anecdotal observation, as you have the dynamics with investors, advisors, service providers, how do you get the most out of them and how do you manage that board dynamic, because when you have an emerging market, there's a danger of saying, we got to lock in a business model. >> Yeah. >> So in Open Source, I'll see a little bit more freedom there 'cause you're open source, but that's always a danger and it's that much more you got to balance that, okay, we got to move the needle, but let's not overdrive too hard. How should entrepreneurs handle the... Taking advantage of their investors and board and how should they manage them or work with them? >> Yeah, I think on one side you need sort of, it's like multiple pillars and on one pillar you need a strong vision, so you need, what won't you sacrifice on, sort of? What's the fence post in the distance and maybe the journey there is slightly different, but you know where you're sort of heading towards so that always grounds you. I think the second thing is sort of a level of pragmatism, like you need to have that vision, but you need to meet your customers where they are and so, you need to figure out what you need to give them today, but still head towards that vision. And when you have those two things, you have a board that is on board with both of those things, you have founders that are dedicated, and you have employees, as well, and everything sort of moves in the right direction. >> But you got to lay that out. >> You have to be pretty explicit about it, yeah. >> Alright, well, congratulations on all your success and looking forward to following up and seeing how you guys are doing. Thanks for coming in and sharing your thoughts today. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. I'm John Furrier here at Mayfield for the 50th anniversary, part of our People First network coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)