(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Greetings, brilliant community and thank you so much for tuning in to theCUBE here for the last three days where we've been live from Detroit, Michigan. I've had the pleasure of spending this week with Lisa Martin and John Furrier. Thank you both so much for hanging out, for inviting me into the CUBE family. It's our first show together, it's been wonderful. >> Thank you. >> You nailed it. >> Oh thanks, sweetheart. >> Great job. Great job team, well done. Free wall to wall coverage, it's what we do. We stay till everyone else-- >> Savannah: 100 percent. >> Everyone else leaves, till they pull the plug. >> Lisa: Till they turn the lights out. We're still there. >> Literally. >> Literally last night. >> Still broadcasting. >> Whatever takes to get the stories and get 'em out there at scale. >> Yeah. >> Great time. >> 33. 33 different segments too. Very impressive. John, I'm curious, you're a trend watcher and you've been at every single KubeCon. >> Yep. >> What are the trends this year? Give us the breakdown. >> I think CNCF does this, it's a hard job to balance all the stakeholders. So one, congratulations to the CNCF for another great KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It is really hard to balance bringing in the experts who, as time goes by, seven years we've been all of, as you said, you get experts, you get seniority, and people who can be mentors, 60% new people. You have vendors who are sponsoring and there's always people complaining and bitching and moaning. They want this, they want that. It's always hard and they always do a good job of balancing it. We're lucky that we get to scale the stories with CUBE and that's been great. We had some great stories here, but it's a great community and again, they're inclusive. As I've said before, we've talked about it. This year though is an inflection point in my opinion, because you're seeing the developer ecosystem growing so fast. It's global. You're seeing events pop up, you're seeing derivative events. CNCF is at the center point and they have to maintain the culture of developer experts, maintainers, while balancing the newbies. And that's going to be >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. really hard. And they've done a great job. We had a great conversation with them. So great job. And I think it's going to continue. I think the attendance metric is a little bit of a false positive. There's a lot of online people who didn't come to Detroit this year. And I think maybe the combination of the venue, the city, or just Covid preferences may not look good on paper, on the numbers 'cause it's not a major step up in attendance. It's still bigger, but the community, I think, is going to continue to grow. I'm bullish on it. >> Yeah, I mean at least we did see double the number of people that we had in Los Angeles. Very curious. I think Amsterdam, where we'll be next with CNCF in the spring, in April. I think that's actually going to be a better pulse check. We'll be in Europe, we'll see what's going on. >> John: Totally. >> I mean, who doesn't like Amsterdam in the springtime? Lisa, what have been some of your observations? >> Oh, so many observations. The evolution of the conference, the hallway track conversations really shifting towards adjusting to the enterprise. The enterprise momentum that we saw here as well. We had on the show, Ford. >> Savannah: Yes. We had MassMutual, we had ING, that was today. Home Depot is here. We are seeing all these big companies that we know and love, become software companies right before our eyes. >> Yeah. Well, and I think we forget that software powers our entire world. And so of course they're going to have to be here. So much running on Kubernetes. It's on-prem, it's at the edge, it's everywhere. It's exciting. Woo, I'm excited. John, what do you think is the number one story? This is your question. I love asking you this question. What is the number one story out KubeCon? >> Well, I think the top story is a combination of two things. One is the evolution of Cloud Native. We're starting to see web assembly. That's a big hyped up area. It got a lot of attention. >> Savannah: Yeah. That's kind of teething out the future. >> Savannah: Rightfully so. The future of this kind of lightweight. You got the heavy duty VMs, you got Kubernetes and containers, and now this web assembly, shows a trajectory of apps, server-like environment. And then the big story is security. Software supply chain is, to me, was the number one consistent theme. At almost all the interviews, in the containers, and the workflows, >> Savannah: Very hot. software supply chain is real. The CD Foundation mentioned >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> they had 16,000 vulnerabilities identified in their code base. They were going to automate that. So again, >> Savannah: That was wild. >> That's the top story. The growth of open source exposes potential vulnerabilities with security. So software supply chain gets my vote. >> Did you hear anything that surprised you? You guys did this great preview of what you thought we were going to hear and see and feel and touch at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2022. You talked about, for example, the, you know, healthcare financial services being early adopters of this. Anything surprise either one of you in terms of what you predicted versus what we saw? Savannah, let's start with you. >> You know what really surprised me, and this is ironic, so I'm a community gal by trade. But I was really just impressed by the energy that everyone brought here and the desire to help. The thing about the open source community that always strikes me is, I mean 187 different countries participating. You've got, I believe it's something like 175,000 people contributing to the 140 projects plus that CNCF is working on. But that culture of collaboration extends far beyond just the CNCF projects. Everyone here is keen to help each other. We had the conversation just before about the teaching and the learnings that are going on here. They brought in Detroit's students to come and learn, which is just the most heartwarming story out of this entire thing. And I think it's just the authenticity of everyone in this community and their passion. Even though I know it's here, it still surprises me to see it in the flesh. Especially in a place like Detroit. >> It's nice. >> Yeah. >> It's so nice to see it. And you bring up a good point. It's very authentic. >> Savannah: It's super authentic. >> I mean, what surprised me is one, the Wasm, or web assembly. I didn't see that coming at the scale of the conversation. It sucked a lot of options out of the room in my opinion, still hyped up. But this looks like it's got a good trajectory. I like that. The other thing that surprised me that was a learning was my interview with Solo.io, Idit, and Brian Gracely, because he's a CUBE alumni and former host of theCUBE, and analyst at Wikibon, was how their go-to-market was an example of a modern company in Covid with a clean sheet of paper and smart people, they're just doing things different. They're in Slack with their customers. And I walked away with, "Wow that's like a playbook that's not, was never, in the go-to-market VC-backed company playbook." I thought that was, for me, a personal walk away saying that's important. I like how they did that. And there's a lot of companies I think could learn from that. Especially as the recession comes where partnering with customers has always been a top priority. And how they did that was very clever, very effective, very efficient. So I walked away with that saying, "I think that's going to be a standard." So that was a pleasant surprise. >> That was a great surprise. Also, that's a female-founded company, which is obviously not super common. And the growth that they've experienced, to your point, really being catalyzed by Covid, is incredibly impressive. I mean they have some massive brand name customers, Amex, BMW for example. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Great point. >> And I interviewed her years ago and I remember saying to myself, "Wow, she's impressive." I liked her. She's a player. A player for sure. And she's got confidence. Even on the interview she said, "We're just better, we have better product." And I just like the point of view. Very customer-focused but confident. And I just took, that's again, a great company. And again, I'm not surprised that Brian Gracely left Red Hat to go work there. So yeah, great, great call there. And of course other things that weren't surprising that I predicted, Red Hat continued to invest. They continue to bring people on theCUBE, they support theCUBE but more importantly they have a good strategy. They're in that multicloud positioning. They're going to have an opportunity to get a bite at the apple. And I what I call the supercloud. As enterprises try to go and be mainstream, Cloud Native, they're going to need some help. And Red Hat is always has the large enterprise customers. >> Savannah: What surprised you, Lisa? >> Oh my gosh, so many things. I think some of the memorable conversations that we had. I love talking with some of the enterprises that we mentioned, ING Bank for example. You know, or institutions that have been around for 100 plus years. >> Savannah: Oh, yeah. To see not only how much they've innovated and stayed relevant to meet the demands of the consumer, which are only increasing, but they're doing so while fostering a culture of innovation and a culture that allows these technology leaders to really grow within the organization. That was a really refreshing conversation that I think we had. 'Cause you can kind of >> Savannah: Absolutely. think about these old stodgy companies. Nah, of course they're going to digitize. >> Thinking about working for the bank, I think it's boring. >> Right? >> Yeah. And they were talking about, in fact, those great t-shirts that they had on, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. were all about getting more people to understand how fun it is to work in tech for ING Bank in different industries. You don't just have to work for the big tech companies to be doing really cool stuff in technology. >> What I really liked about this show is we had two female hosts. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> How about that? Come on. >> Hey, well done, well done on your recruitment there, champ. >> Yes, thank you boss. (John laughs) >> And not to mention we have a really all-star production team. I do just want to give them a little shout out. To all the wonderful folks behind the lines here. (people clapping) >> John: Brendan. Good job. >> Yeah. Without Brendan, Anderson, Noah, and Andrew, we would be-- >> Of course Frank Faye holding it back there too. >> Yeah, >> Of course, Frank. >> I mean, without the business development wheels on the ship we'd really be in an unfortunate spot. I almost just swore on television. We're not going to do that. >> It's okay. No one's regulating. >> Yeah. (all laugh) >> Elon Musk just took over Twitter. >> It was a close call. >> That's right! >> It's going to be a hellscape. >> Yeah, I mean it's, shit's on fire. So we'll just see what happens next. I do, I really want to talk about this because I think it's really special. It's an ethos and some magic has happened here. Let's talk about Detroit. Let's talk about what it means to be here. We saw so many, and I can't stress this enough, but I think it really matters. There was a commitment to celebrating place here. Lisa, did you notice this too? >> Absolutely. And it surprised me because we just don't see that at conferences. >> Yeah. We're so used to going to the same places. >> Right. >> Vegas. Vegas, Vegas. More Vegas. >> Your tone-- >> San Francisco >> (both laugh) sums up my feelings. Yes. >> Right? >> Yeah. And, well, it's almost robotic but, and the fact that we're like, oh Detroit, really? But there was so much love for this city and recognizing and supporting its residents that we just don't see at conferences. You uncovered a lot of that with your swag-savvy segments, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you got more of that to talk about today. >> Don't worry, it's coming. Yeah. (laughs) >> What about you? Have you enjoyed Detroit? I know you hadn't been here in a long time, when we did our intro session. >> I think it's a bold move for the CNCF to come here and celebrate. What they did, from teaching the kids in the city some tech, they had a session. I thought that was good. >> Savannah: Loved that. I think it was a risky move because a lot of people, like, weren't sure if they were going to fly to Detroit. So some say it might impact the attendance. I thought they did a good job. Their theme, Road Ahead. Nice tie in. >> Savannah: Yeah. And so I think I enjoyed Detroit. The weather was great. It didn't rain. Nice breeze outside. >> Yeah. >> The weather was great, the restaurants are phenomenal. So Detroit's a good city. I missed some hockey games. I'd love to see the Red Wings play. Missed that game. But we always come back. >> I think it's really special. I mean, every time I talked to a company about their swag, that had sourced it locally, there was a real reason for this story. I mean even with Kasten in that last segment when I noticed that they had done Carhartt beanies, Carhartt being a Michigan company. They said, "I'm so glad you noticed. That's why we did it." And I think that type of, the community commitment to place, it all comes back to community. One of the bigger themes of the show. But that passion and that support, we need more of that. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And the thing about the guests we've had this past three days have been phenomenal. We had a diverse set of companies, individuals come on theCUBE, you know, from Scott Johnston at Docker. A really one on one. We had a great intense conversation. >> Savannah: Great way to kick it off. >> We shared a lot of inside baseball, about Docker, super important company. You know, impressed with companies like Platform9 it's been around since the OpenStack days who are now in a relevant position. Rafi Systems, hot startup, they don't have a lot of resources, a lot of guerilla marketing going on. So I love to see the mix of startups really contributing. The big players are here. So it's a real great mix of companies. And I thought the interviews were phenomenal, like you said, Ford. We had, Kubia launched on theCUBE. >> Savannah: Yes. >> That's-- >> We snooped the location for KubeCon North America. >> You did? >> Chicago, everyone. In case you missed it, Bianca was nice enough to share that with us. >> We had Sarbjeet Johal, CUBE analyst came on, Keith Townsend, yesterday with you guys. >> We had like analyst speed dating last night. (all laugh) >> How'd that go? (laughs) >> It was actually great. One of the things that they-- >> Did they hug and kiss at the end? >> Here's the funny thing is that they were debating the size of the CNC app. One thinks it's too big, one thinks it's too small. And I thought, is John Goldilocks? (John laughs) >> Savannah: Yeah. >> What is John going to think about that? >> Well I loved that segment. I thought, 'cause Keith and Sarbjeet argue with each other on Twitter all the time. And I heard Keith say before, he went, "Yeah let's have it out on theCUBE." So that was fun to watch. >> Thank you for creating this forum for us to have that kind of discourse. >> Lisa: Yes, thank you. >> Well, it wouldn't be possible without the sponsors. Want to thank the CNCF. >> Absolutely. >> And all the ecosystem partners and sponsors that make theCUBE possible. We love doing this. We love getting the stories. No story's too small for theCUBE. We'll go with it. Do whatever it takes. And if it wasn't for the sponsors, the community wouldn't get all the great knowledge. So, and thank you guys. >> Hey. Yeah, we're, we're happy to be here. Speaking of sponsors and vendors, should we talk a little swag? >> Yeah. >> What do you guys think? All right. Okay. So now this is becoming a tradition on theCUBE so I'm very delighted, the savvy swag segment. I do think it's interesting though. I mean, it's not, this isn't just me shouting out folks and showing off t-shirts and socks. It's about standing out from the noise. There's a lot of players in this space. We got a lot of CNCF projects and one of the ways to catch the attention of people walking the show floor is to have interesting swag. So we looked for the most unique swag on Wednesday and I hadn't found this yet, but I do just want to bring it up. Oops, I think I might have just dropped it. This is cute. Is, most random swag of the entire show goes to this toothbrush. I don't really have more in terms of the pitch there because this is just random. (Lisa laughs) >> But so, everyone needs that. >> John: So what's their tagline? >> And you forget these. >> Yeah, so the idea was to brush your cloud bills. So I think they're reducing the cost of-- >> Kind of a hygiene angle. >> Yeah, yeah. Very much a hygiene angle, which I found a little ironic in this crowd to be completely honest with you. >> John: Don't leave the lights on theCUBE. That's what they say. >> Yeah. >> I mean we are theCUBE so it would be unjust of me not to show you a Rubik's cube. This is actually one of those speed cubes. I'm not going to be able to solve this for you with one hand on camera, but apparently someone did it in 17 seconds at the booth. Knowing this audience, not surprising to me at all. Today we are, and yesterday, was the t-shirt contest. Best t-shirt contest. Today we really dove into the socks. So this is, I noticed this trend at KubeCon in Los Angeles last year. Lots of different socks, clouds obviously a theme for the cloud. I'm just going to lay these out. Lots of gamers in the house. Not surprising. Here on this one. >> John: Level up. >> Got to level up. I love these 'cause they say, "It's not a bug." And anyone who's coded has obviously had to deal with that. We've got, so Star Wars is a huge theme here. There's Lego sets. >> John: I think it's Star Trek. But. >> That's Star Trek? >> John: That's okay. >> Could be both. (Lisa laughs) >> John: Nevermind, I don't want to. >> You can flex your nerd and geek with us anytime you want, John. I don't mind getting corrected. I'm all about, I'm all about the truth. >> Star Trek. Star Wars. Okay, we're all the same. Okay, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, no, this is great. Slim.ai was nice enough to host us for dinner on Tuesday night. These are their lovely cloud socks. You can see Cloud Native, obviously Cloud Native Foundation, cloud socks, whole theme here. But if we're going to narrow it down to some champions, I love these little bee elephants from Raft. And when I went up to these guys, I actually probably would've called these my personal winner. They said, again, so community focused and humble here at CNCF, they said that Wiz was actually the champion according to the community. These unicorn socks are pretty excellent. And I have to say the branding is flawless. So we'll go ahead and give Wiz the win on the best sock contest. >> John: For the win. >> Yeah, Wiz for the win. However, the thing that I am probably going to use the most is this really dope Detroit snapback from Kasten. So I'm going to be rocking this from now on for the rest of the segment as well. And I feel great about this snapback. >> Looks great. Looks good on you. >> Yeah. >> Thanks John. (John laughs) >> So what are we expecting between now and KubeCon in Amsterdam? >> Well, I think it's going to be great to see how they, the European side, it's a chill show. It's great. Brings in the European audience from the global perspective. I always love the EU shows because one, it's a great destination. Amsterdam's going to be a great location. >> Savannah: I'm pumped. >> The American crowd loves going over there. All the event cities that they choose are always awesome. I missed Valencia cause I got Covid. I'm really bummed about that. But I love the European shows. It's just a little bit, it's high intensity, but it's the European chill. They got a little bit more of that siesta vibe going on. >> Yeah. >> And it's just awesome. >> Yeah, >> And I think that the mojo that carried throughout this week, it's really challenging to not only have a show that's five days, >> but to go through all week, >> Savannah: Seriously. >> to a Friday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, and still have the people here, the energy and all the collaboration. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> The conversations that are still happening. I think we're going to see a lot more innovation come spring 2023. >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> So should we do a bet, somebody's got to buy dinner? Who, well, I guess the folks who lose this will buy dinner for the other one. How many attendees do you think we'll see in Amsterdam? So we had 4,000, >> Oh, I'm going to lose this one. >> roughly in Los Angeles. Priyanka was nice enough to share with us, there was 8,000 here in Detroit. And I'm talking in person, we're not going to meddle this with the online. >> 6500. >> Lisa: I was going to say six, six K. >> I'm going 12,000. >> Ooh! >> I'm going to go ahead and go big I'm going to go opposite Price Is Right. >> One dollar. >> Yeah. (all laugh) That's exactly where I was driving with it. I'm going, I'm going absolutely all in. I think the momentum here is building. I think if we look at the numbers from-- >> John: You could go Family Feud >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they mentioned that they had 11,000 people who have taken their Kubernetes course in that first year. If that's a benchmark and an indicator, we've got the veteran players here. But I do think that, I personally think that the hype of Kubernetes has actually preceded adoption. If you look at the data and now we're finally tipping over. I think the last two years we were on the fringe and right now we're there. It's great. (voice blares loudly on loudspeaker) >> Well, on that note (all laugh) On that note, actually, on that note, as we are talking, so I got to give cred to my cohosts. We deal with a lot of background noise here on theCUBE. It is a live show floor. There's literally someone on an e-scooter behind me. There's been Pong going on in the background. The sound will haunt the three of us for the rest of our lives, as well as the production crew. (Lisa laughs) And, and just as we're sitting here doing this segment last night, they turned the lights off on us, today they're letting everyone know that the event is over. So on that note, I just want to say, Lisa, thank you so much. Such a warm welcome to the team. >> Thank you. >> John, what would we do without you? >> You did an amazing job. First CUBE, three days. It's a big show. You got staying power, I got to say. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> Look at that. Not bad. >> You said it on camera now. >> Not bad. >> So you all are stuck with me. (all laugh) >> A plus. Great job to the team. Again, we do so much flow here. Brandon, Team, Andrew, Noah, Anderson, Frank. >> They're doing our hair, they're touching up makeup. They're helping me clean my teeth, staying hydrated. >> We look good because of you. >> And the guests. Thanks for coming on and spending time with us. And of course the sponsors, again, we can't do it without the sponsors. If you're watching this and you're a sponsor, support theCUBE, it helps people get what they need. And also we're do a lot more segments around community and a lot more educational stuff. >> Savannah: Yeah. So we're going to do a lot more in the EU and beyond. So thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. And thank you to everyone. Thank you to the community, thank you to theCUBE community and thank you for tuning in, making it possible for us to have somebody to talk to on the other side of the camera. My name is Savannah Peterson for the last time in Detroit, Michigan. Thanks for tuning into theCUBE. >> Okay, we're done. (bright upbeat 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.

>>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 well 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 the success 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 infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Basco talking about Super Cloud. I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures 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 specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. Yeah, >>Yeah. And that really means it developer just accessing resources. Okay, not clearing, 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 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've got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these, these 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. The that's, >>I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a 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 computer by, in two, where they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Bacar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in aural 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 the 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 two 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 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, 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 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 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 Arlan 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 know, 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's 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 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 >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like 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 about 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 its super set of infrastructures code because it's an evolution. You need edge retro's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring it saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, So, all right, so Cloudnative at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloudnative 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 co con 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, we try to address with Arlan. 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 road that Coan coming up, and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan 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 jocking 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 their 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're 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. >>B, you've had a storied career VMware over decades with them, obviously with 12 years, with 14 years or something like that. Big number. Co-founder here, a platform. Now you guys 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. And 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 to 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? OpenStack 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. Yeah, I think 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, 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 over $2 billion tran 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 hyperscalers? >>Yeah. A's Azure, Google >>You mean from a business perspective, technical, 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, and platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, and 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 kind of 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. Vic, 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 Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up.

>>Hello, 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 Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, 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 cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, 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, in 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 distributions 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 microsites, these microsites 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 supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. 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, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare 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 there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or 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 a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis 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 scale 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 I, 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 chain, 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 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 are 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 of 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 figure 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 hotspot is in 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 two factors of scale, as 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 triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because 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 your radio cell 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, 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 nightmarishly 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 Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. 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 arlon 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 site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA 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 dissolves 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? Our line, 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 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 component, 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 deliver 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. See c i CD pipe 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, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications 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 needed developer's. That's right. The option 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, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined 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 Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to 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 or on-prem 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 fision, 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 open source, 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. And 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'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 long. 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 developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met 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. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? 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? I'm a >>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 Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D 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 c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that 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 Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, 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 ecos 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 the >>Ability to, 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 Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes 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 Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City 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 line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online 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 rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, 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 adn, 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 land 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 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 customers' 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 will, >>So if 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 Yep. 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, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, 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 arlon 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, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is 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 RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're 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 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 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're, 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 they're 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 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 budget. 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 maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. 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 boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. 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, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>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 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 the 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 infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures 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 infrastructure as 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 specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. 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 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 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 was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a 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 AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, 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 applications 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 for the internet at the, the layer two 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 that 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 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, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, 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 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, 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 know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures 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 is 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 kinda 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 Armon 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 creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could 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 about 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 as 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 and 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. Could be nice, it 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 road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan 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 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 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 guys have 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. And 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 ERO team at that time. We would to 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 tr 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? OpenStack was an example when 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 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 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 of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, 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 he got software and you got middleware and he kind 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 on the same game. Vic, 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 Phil 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 clouds 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 that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest 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? Yeah, 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 do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And 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, >>I, in fact you, 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 inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in 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. >>Cuz the 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 Infras infrastructure is not just some 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 Ante 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 real. >>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 pain, 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 to, as a pilots, 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 the, 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 else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three 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 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 are 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 OnPrem 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, I dunno, 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've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and 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, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you 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 a 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 net box box, like a small little >>Box 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 location. 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 where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, 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 native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and 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 complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>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 of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. 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 the 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. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime 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 a 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 that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was 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 game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an 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. >>Mascar, 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 Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. 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 the 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.

foreign [Music] to the special presentation of cloud native at scale the cube and Platform 9 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 dick Lee who's the Chief Architect and co-founder of platform nine pick great to see you Cube alumni we we met at openstack event in about eight years ago or later earlier uh when openstack was going great to see you and great congratulations on the success of platform nine thank you very much yeah you guys been at this for a while and this is really 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 the success of containerization 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 baskar talking about super cloud I met her about you know the new Arlo our our lawn um you guys just launched the infrastructure's code is going to another level and it's always been devops infrastructure is code that's been the ethos that's been like from day one developers just code I think 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 infrastructure as code today so I think I think um I'm glad you mentioned it everybody or most people know about infrastructure as code but with kubernetes I think that project has evolved at the concept even further and these days it's um 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 uh 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 infrastructure as code yeah 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 them off turn them 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 integration it's configuration these are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation machine learning assisting open source because you've got a lot of code that's what you're hearing software supply chain issues so infrastructure as code has to factor in these 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 um 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 um hundreds if not thousands of these yaml 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 this space I wrote a LinkedIn post today those comments about you know hey Enterprise is the new breed the trend of SAS companies moving uh our consumer 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 Dynam power dynamics for developers 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 as code people have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructures 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 proliferation of of methods tools Technologies so for example today it's a 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 also 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 methodology apologies and that's something that we try to do with this new project Arlon yeah so so we're going to get to our line in a second I want to get to the yr lawn you guys announced that at argocon which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the community meeting by Intuit they had their own little day over their headquarters but before we get there um Bhaskar 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 has become a thing what's your what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative well it's it's uh 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 uh super cloud the way I interpret that is you know um clouds and infrastructure um 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 uh um better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems yeah I remember it's a great great definition I remember not to date myself but back in the old days you know IBM had its proprietary Network operating system so the deck for the mini computer vintage deck net and sna respectively um but tcpip 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 if I never heard of it it's IBM's you know a connection for the internet at the layer two is Amazon the ethernet right so if TCP could be the kubernetes and containers 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 um this is um I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and I forgot who originated it but um 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 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 going to continue it's interesting just when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on the rise we've been reporting for many years now that arm's going to be huge 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 atoms the pro you know this is where the Innovation they're going so deep and so strong at is the more that they get that gets gone 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 meshes a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in this community of kubecon which we'll be covering so that brings up the whole what's next you guys just announced our lawn at argocon which came out of Intuit we've had Mariana Tesla out our supercloud event she's a CTO you know they're all in the cloud so there contributed that project where did Arlon come from what was the origination what's the purpose why our lawn why this announcement yeah so um the the Inception of the project this was the result of um 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 um 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 um you know we built um Arlon and we built it um 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 get 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 um 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 and what's the benefit of that what does that give what does that give the developer the user in this case the developers the the platform engineer team members the devops engineers they uh get a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters but also applications and configurations they get away 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 abstraction or thin layer below is 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 talked to cxos and um I.T folks that are now devops Engineers they care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work they want to 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 as my workloads running if effectively so how do you guys look at the workload side because 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 um host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it in many cases it's 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 extremely like an ec2 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 I explained so with our own 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 essentially standard that creates a mechanism it's standardized declarative kind of configurations and it's like a Playbook you just deploy it now what's this between say a script like I have scripts I can just automate Scripts or yes this is where that um declarative API and um 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 um 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 uh figures it out and there are these things called controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire to say 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 superset of infrastructures code because different Evolution you need Edge restaurant's code but then you can configure The Code by just saying do it you're basically declaring and saying go go do that that's right okay so all right so Cloud native at scale take me through your vision of what that means someone says hey what is cloud native at scale mean what's success look like how does it roll out in the future as you that 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 going to hear this year kubecon a lot of this what is 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 users there's that aspect to scale there's also um an equally important aspect of scale which is also something that we try to address with Arlon 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 uh 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 going to 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 where I've got kubecon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this seg series out before what do you expect to see at kubecon issue 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 on the overall systems map about the different areas get runtime and observability in all these different areas what's the where's the action where's the smoke where's the fire where's the piece where's the tension yeah so uh I think uh one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupons and I expect to continue and and that is uh the the word on the street is kubernetes getting boring right which is good right or I mean simple well um well maybe yeah invisible no drama right so so the rate of change of the kubernetes features and and all that has slowed but in a positive way um but um there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff if you look at a stack necessary for uh hosting applications based on kubernetes they're just still too many moving Parts too many uh components right too much complexity I go I keep going back to the complexity problem so I expect kubecon and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce a further simplifications uh to to the stack yeah Vic you've had a storied career VMware over decades with them uh obviously 12 years for the 14 years or something like that big number co-founder here platform I think it's been around for a while at this game uh we man we'll talk 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 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 Colorado team at that time I mean it's a 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 because you guys are in a good position right now a lot of DNA in Cloud native um what are you most excited about and what is 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 openstack was an example within 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 uh next year or the year after that but platform will a Platform 9 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 uh very consumable to customers simpler faster cheaper always a good business model technically to make that happen yeah I think the reigning in the chaos is key you know now we have now visibility into the scale final question before we depart you know this segment um what is that scale how many clusters do you see that would be a high a watermark for an at scale conversation around an Enterprise um is it workloads we're looking at or or clusters how would you yeah how would you describe that and when people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale what's the at scale kind of threshold yeah 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 um maybe a hundreds uh two thousands yeah and final final question what's the role of the hyperscalers you've got AWS continuing to do well but they got their core I asked they got a pass they're not too too much putting assess out there they have some SAS apps but mostly it's the ecosystem they have marketplaces doing over two billion dollars billions of transactions a year um and and it's just like just sitting there it has really they're now innovating on it but that's going to change ecosystems what's the role the cloud play and the cloud native at scale the the hyperscale yeah Abus Azure Google you mean from a business they have their own interests that you know that they're uh they will keep catering to they they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of uh services and and apis um so I don't think that's going to change right they're just going to keep well they got great uh performance I mean from a from a hardware standpoint yes that's going to be key right yes I think the uh the move from x86 being the dominant away and platform to run workloads is changing right 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 platforms yeah that joking aside Paul maritz when he was the CEO of VMware when he took over once said I remember our first year doing the cube the cloud is one big distributed computer it's it's hardware and you've got software and you got middleware and uh he kind of over these 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 Vic thank you for coming on the segment appreciate your time this is uh Cloud native at scale special presentation with platform nine really unpacking super cloud rlon open source and how to run large-scale applications uh on the cloud cloud native philadelph4 developers and John Furrier with the cube thanks for watching and we'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up foreign [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Once a staid and boring business dominated by IBM, Oracle, and at the time newcomer Microsoft, along with a handful of wannabes, the database business has exploded in the past decade and has become a staple of financial excellence, customer experience, analytic advantage, competitive strategy, growth initiatives, visualizations, not to mention compliance, security, privacy and dozens of other important use cases and initiatives. And on the vendor's side of the house, we've seen the rapid ascendancy of cloud databases. Most notably from Snowflake, whose massive raises leading up to its IPO in late 2020 sparked a spate of interest and VC investment in the separation of compute and storage and all that elastic resource stuff in the cloud. The company joined AWS, Azure and Google to popularize cloud databases, which have become a linchpin of competitive strategies for technology suppliers. And if I get you to put your data in my database and in my cloud, and I keep innovating, I'm going to build a moat and achieve a hugely attractive lifetime customer value in a really amazing marginal economics dynamic that is going to fund my future. And I'll be able to sell other adjacent services, not just compute and storage, but machine learning and inference and training and all kinds of stuff, dozens of lucrative cloud offerings. Meanwhile, the database leader, Oracle has invested massive amounts of money to maintain its lead. It's building on its position as the king of mission critical workloads and making typical Oracle like claims against the competition. Most were recently just yesterday with another announcement around MySQL HeatWave. An extension of MySQL that is compatible with on-premises MySQLs and is setting new standards in price performance. We're seeing a dramatic divergence in strategies across the database spectrum. On the far left, we see Amazon with more than a dozen database offerings each with its own API and primitives. AWS is taking a right tool for the right job approach, often building on open source platforms and creating services that it offers to customers to solve very specific problems for developers. And on the other side of the line, we see Oracle, which is taking the Swiss Army Knife approach, converging database functionality, enabling analytic and transactional workloads to run in the same data store, eliminating the need to ETL, at the same time adding capabilities into its platform like automation and machine learning. Welcome to this database Power Panel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm so excited to bring together some of the most respected industry analyst in the community. Today we're going to assess what's happening in the market. We're going to dig into the competitive landscape and explore the future of database and database platforms and decode what it means to customers. Let me take a moment to welcome our guest analyst today. Matt Kimball is a vice president and principal analysts at Moor Insights and Strategy, Matt. He knows products, he knows industry, he's got real world IT expertise, and he's got all the angles 25 plus years of experience in all kinds of great background. Matt, welcome. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Holgar Mueller, friend of theCUBE, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research in depth knowledge on applications, application development, knows developers. He's worked at SAP and Oracle. And then Bob Evans is Chief Content Officer and co-founder of the Acceleration Economy, founder and principle of Cloud Wars. Covers all kinds of industry topics and great insights. He's got awesome videos, these three minute hits. If you haven't seen 'em, checking them out, knows cloud companies, his Cloud Wars minutes are fantastic. And then of course, Marc Staimer is the founder of Dragon Slayer Research. A frequent contributor and guest analyst at Wikibon. He's got a wide ranging knowledge across IT products, knows technology really well, can go deep. And then of course, Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Director Research Director at Futurum Research, great all around product trends knowledge. Can take, you know, technical dives and really understands competitive angles, knows Redshift, Snowflake, and many others. Gents, thanks so much for taking the time to join us in theCube today. It's great to have you on, good to see you. >> Good to be here, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, let's start with an around the horn and briefly, if each of you would describe, you know, anything I missed in your areas of expertise and then you answer the following question, how would you describe the state of the database, state of platform market today? Matt Kimball, please start. >> Oh, I hate going first, but that it's okay. How would I describe the world today? I would just in one sentence, I would say, I'm glad I'm not in IT anymore, right? So, you know, it is a complex and dangerous world out there. And I don't envy IT folks I'd have to support, you know, these modernization and transformation efforts that are going on within the enterprise. It used to be, you mentioned it, Dave, you would argue about IBM versus Oracle versus this newcomer in the database space called Microsoft. And don't forget Sybase back in the day, but you know, now it's not just, which SQL vendor am I going to go with? It's all of these different, divergent data types that have to be taken, they have to be merged together, synthesized. And somehow I have to do that cleanly and use this to drive strategic decisions for my business. That is not easy. So, you know, you have to look at it from the perspective of the business user. It's great for them because as a DevOps person, or as an analyst, I have so much flexibility and I have this thing called the cloud now where I can go get services immediately. As an IT person or a DBA, I am calling up prevention hotlines 24 hours a day, because I don't know how I'm going to be able to support the business. And as an Oracle or as an Oracle or a Microsoft or some of the cloud providers and cloud databases out there, I'm licking my chops because, you know, my market is expanding and expanding every day. >> Great, thank you for that, Matt. Holgar, how do you see the world these days? You always have a good perspective on things, share with us. >> Well, I think it's the best time to be in IT, I'm not sure what Matt is talking about. (laughing) It's easier than ever, right? The direction is going to cloud. Kubernetes has won, Google has the best AI for now, right? So things are easier than ever before. You made commitments for five plus years on hardware, networking and so on premise, and I got gray hair about worrying it was the wrong decision. No, just kidding. But you kind of both sides, just to be controversial, make it interesting, right. So yeah, no, I think the interesting thing specifically with databases, right? We have this big suite versus best of breed, right? Obviously innovation, like you mentioned with Snowflake and others happening in the cloud, the cloud vendors server, where to save of their databases. And then we have one of the few survivors of the old guard as Evans likes to call them is Oracle who's doing well, both their traditional database. And now, which is really interesting, remarkable from that because Oracle it was always the power of one, have one database, add more to it, make it what I call the universal database. And now this new HeatWave offering is coming and MySQL open source side. So they're getting the second (indistinct) right? So it's interesting that older players, traditional players who still are in the market are diversifying their offerings. Something we don't see so much from the traditional tools from Oracle on the Microsoft side or the IBM side these days. >> Great, thank you Holgar. Bob Evans, you've covered this business for a while. You've worked at, you know, a number of different outlets and companies and you cover the competition, how do you see things? >> Dave, you know, the other angle to look at this from is from the customer side, right? You got now CEOs who are any sort of business across all sorts of industries, and they understand that their future success is going to be dependent on their ability to become a digital company, to understand data, to use it the right way. So as you outline Dave, I think in your intro there, it is a fantastic time to be in the database business. And I think we've got a lot of new buyers and influencers coming in. They don't know all this history about IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and you know, whoever else. So I think they're going to take a long, hard look, Dave, at some of these results and who is able to help these companies not serve up the best technology, but who's going to be able to help their business move into the digital future. So it's a fascinating time now from every perspective. >> Great points, Bob. I mean, digital transformation has gone from buzzword to imperative. Mr. Staimer, how do you see things? >> I see things a little bit differently than my peers here in that I see the database market being segmented. There's all the different kinds of databases that people are looking at for different kinds of data, and then there is databases in the cloud. And so database as cloud service, I view very differently than databases because the traditional way of implementing a database is changing and it's changing rapidly. So one of the premises that you stated earlier on was that you viewed Oracle as a database company. I don't view Oracle as a database company anymore. I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases, and they still sell database software in the traditional way, but ultimately they're a cloud company. So database cloud services from my point of view is a very distinct market from databases. >> Okay, well, you gave us some good meat on the bone to talk about that. Last but not least-- >> Dave did Marc, just say Oracle's a cloud company? >> Yeah. (laughing) Take away the database, it would be interesting to have that discussion, but let's let Ron jump in here. Ron, give us your take. >> That's a great segue. I think it's truly the era of the cloud database, that's something that's rising. And the key trends that come with it include for example, elastic scaling. That is the ability to scale on demand, to right size workloads according to customer requirements. And also I think it's going to increase the prioritization for high availability. That is the player who can provide the highest availability is going to have, I think, a great deal of success in this emerging market. And also I anticipate that there will be more consolidation across platforms in order to enable cost savings for customers, and that's something that's always going to be important. And I think we'll see more of that over the horizon. And then finally security, security will be more important than ever. We've seen a spike (indistinct), we certainly have seen geopolitical originated cybersecurity concerns. And as a result, I see database security becoming all the more important. >> Great, thank you. Okay, let me share some data with you guys. I'm going to throw this at you and see what you think. We have this awesome data partner called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR. They do these quarterly surveys and each period with dozens of industry segments, they track clients spending, customer spending. And this is the database, data warehouse sector okay so it's taxonomy, so it's not perfect, but it's a big kind of chunk. They essentially ask customers within a category and buy a specific vendor, you're spending more or less on the platform? And then they subtract the lesses from the mores and they derive a metric called net score. It's like NPS, it's a measure of spending velocity. It's more complicated and granular than that, but that's the basis and that's the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is what they call market share, it's not like IDC market share, it's just pervasiveness in the data set. And so there are a couple of things that stand out here and that we can use as reference point. The first is the momentum of Snowflake. They've been off the charts for many, many, for over two years now, anything above that dotted red line, that 40%, is considered by ETR to be highly elevated and Snowflake's even way above that. And I think it's probably not sustainable. We're going to see in the next April survey, next month from those guys, when it comes out. And then you see AWS and Microsoft, they're really pervasive on the horizontal axis and highly elevated, Google falls behind them. And then you got a number of well funded players. You got Cockroach Labs, Mongo, Redis, MariaDB, which of course is a fork on MySQL started almost as protest at Oracle when they acquired Sun and they got MySQL and you can see the number of others. Now Oracle who's the leading database player, despite what Marc Staimer says, we know, (laughs) and they're a cloud player (laughing) who happens to be a leading database player. They dominate in the mission critical space, we know that they're the king of that sector, but you can see here that they're kind of legacy, right? They've been around a long time, they get a big install base. So they don't have the spending momentum on the vertical axis. Now remember this is, just really this doesn't capture spending levels, so that understates Oracle but nonetheless. So it's not a complete picture like SAP for instance is not in here, no Hana. I think people are actually buying it, but it doesn't show up here, (laughs) but it does give an indication of momentum and presence. So Bob Evans, I'm going to start with you. You've commented on many of these companies, you know, what does this data tell you? >> Yeah, you know, Dave, I think all these compilations of things like that are interesting, and that folks at ETR do some good work, but I think as you said, it's a snapshot sort of a two-dimensional thing of a rapidly changing, three dimensional world. You know, the incidents at which some of these companies are mentioned versus the volume that happens. I think it's, you know, with Oracle and I'm not going to declare my religious affiliation, either as cloud company or database company, you know, they're all of those things and more, and I think some of our old language of how we classify companies is just not relevant anymore. But I want to ask too something in here, the autonomous database from Oracle, nobody else has done that. So either Oracle is crazy, they've tried out a technology that nobody other than them is interested in, or they're onto something that nobody else can match. So to me, Dave, within Oracle, trying to identify how they're doing there, I would watch autonomous database growth too, because right, it's either going to be a big plan and it breaks through, or it's going to be caught behind. And the Snowflake phenomenon as you mentioned, that is a rare, rare bird who comes up and can grow 100% at a billion dollar revenue level like that. So now they've had a chance to come in, scare the crap out of everybody, rock the market with something totally new, the data cloud. Will the bigger companies be able to catch up and offer a compelling alternative, or is Snowflake going to continue to be this outlier. It's a fascinating time. >> Really, interesting points there. Holgar, I want to ask you, I mean, I've talked to certainly I'm sure you guys have too, the founders of Snowflake that came out of Oracle and they actually, they don't apologize. They say, "Hey, we not going to do all that complicated stuff that Oracle does, we were trying to keep it real simple." But at the same time, you know, they don't do sophisticated workload management. They don't do complex joints. They're kind of relying on the ecosystems. So when you look at the data like this and the various momentums, and we talked about the diverging strategies, what does this say to you? >> Well, it is a great point. And I think Snowflake is an example how the cloud can turbo charge a well understood concept in this case, the data warehouse, right? You move that and you find steroids and you see like for some players who've been big in data warehouse, like Sentara Data, as an example, here in San Diego, what could have been for them right in that part. The interesting thing, the problem though is the cloud hides a lot of complexity too, which you can scale really well as you attract lots of customers to go there. And you don't have to build things like what Bob said, right? One of the fascinating things, right, nobody's answering Oracle on the autonomous database. I don't think is that they cannot, they just have different priorities or the database is not such a priority. I would dare to say that it's for IBM and Microsoft right now at the moment. And the cloud vendors, you just hide that right through scripts and through scale because you support thousands of customers and you can deal with a little more complexity, right? It's not against them. Whereas if you have to run it yourself, very different story, right? You want to have the autonomous parts, you want to have the powerful tools to do things. >> Thank you. And so Matt, I want to go to you, you've set up front, you know, it's just complicated if you're in IT, it's a complicated situation and you've been on the customer side. And if you're a buyer, it's obviously, it's like Holgar said, "Cloud's supposed to make this stuff easier, but the simpler it gets the more complicated gets." So where do you place your bets? Or I guess more importantly, how do you decide where to place your bets? >> Yeah, it's a good question. And to what Bob and Holgar said, you know, the around autonomous database, I think, you know, part of, as I, you know, play kind of armchair psychologist, if you will, corporate psychologists, I look at what Oracle is doing and, you know, databases where they've made their mark and it's kind of, that's their strong position, right? So it makes sense if you're making an entry into this cloud and you really want to kind of build momentum, you go with what you're good at, right? So that's kind of the strength of Oracle. Let's put a lot of focus on that. They do a lot more than database, don't get me wrong, but you know, I'm going to short my strength and then kind of pivot from there. With regards to, you know, what IT looks at and what I would look at you know as an IT director or somebody who is, you know, trying to consume services from these different cloud providers. First and foremost, I go with what I know, right? Let's not forget IT is a conservative group. And when we look at, you know, all the different permutations of database types out there, SQL, NoSQL, all the different types of NoSQL, those are largely being deployed by business users that are looking for agility or businesses that are looking for agility. You know, the reason why MongoDB is so popular is because of DevOps, right? It's a great platform to develop on and that's where it kind of gained its traction. But as an IT person, I want to go with what I know, where my muscle memory is, and that's my first position. And so as I evaluate different cloud service providers and cloud databases, I look for, you know, what I know and what I've invested in and where my muscle memory is. Is there enough there and do I have enough belief that that company or that service is going to be able to take me to, you know, where I see my organization in five years from a data management perspective, from a business perspective, are they going to be there? And if they are, then I'm a little bit more willing to make that investment, but it is, you know, if I'm kind of going in this blind or if I'm cloud native, you know, that's where the Snowflakes of the world become very attractive to me. >> Thank you. So Marc, I asked Andy Jackson in theCube one time, you have all these, you know, data stores and different APIs and primitives and you know, very granular, what's the strategy there? And he said, "Hey, that allows us as the market changes, it allows us to be more flexible. If we start building abstractions layers, it's harder for us." I think also it was not a good time to market advantage, but let me ask you, I described earlier on that spectrum from AWS to Oracle. We just saw yesterday, Oracle announced, I think the third major enhancement in like 15 months to MySQL HeatWave, what do you make of that announcement? How do you think it impacts the competitive landscape, particularly as it relates to, you know, converging transaction and analytics, eliminating ELT, I know you have some thoughts on this. >> So let me back up for a second and defend my cloud statement about Oracle for a moment. (laughing) AWS did a great job in developing the cloud market in general and everything in the cloud market. I mean, I give them lots of kudos on that. And a lot of what they did is they took open source software and they rent it to people who use their cloud. So I give 'em lots of credit, they dominate the market. Oracle was late to the cloud market. In fact, they actually poo-pooed it initially, if you look at some of Larry Ellison's statements, they said, "Oh, it's never going to take off." And then they did 180 turn, and they said, "Oh, we're going to embrace the cloud." And they really have, but when you're late to a market, you've got to be compelling. And this ties into the announcement yesterday, but let's deal with this compelling. To be compelling from a user point of view, you got to be twice as fast, offer twice as much functionality, at half the cost. That's generally what compelling is that you're going to capture market share from the leaders who established the market. It's very difficult to capture market share in a new market for yourself. And you're right. I mean, Bob was correct on this and Holgar and Matt in which you look at Oracle, and they did a great job of leveraging their database to move into this market, give 'em lots of kudos for that too. But yesterday they announced, as you said, the third innovation release and the pace is just amazing of what they're doing on these releases on HeatWave that ties together initially MySQL with an integrated builtin analytics engine, so a data warehouse built in. And then they added automation with autopilot, and now they've added machine learning to it, and it's all in the same service. It's not something you can buy and put on your premise unless you buy their cloud customers stuff. But generally it's a cloud offering, so it's compellingly better as far as the integration. You don't buy multiple services, you buy one and it's lower cost than any of the other services, but more importantly, it's faster, which again, give 'em credit for, they have more integration of a product. They can tie things together in a way that nobody else does. There's no additional services, ETL services like Glue and AWS. So from that perspective, they're getting better performance, fewer services, lower cost. Hmm, they're aiming at the compelling side again. So from a customer point of view it's compelling. Matt, you wanted to say something there. >> Yeah, I want to kind of, on what you just said there Marc, and this is something I've found really interesting, you know. The traditional way that you look at software and, you know, purchasing software and IT is, you look at either best of breed solutions and you have to work on the backend to integrate them all and make them all work well. And generally, you know, the big hit against the, you know, we have one integrated offering is that, you lose capability or you lose depth of features, right. And to what you were saying, you know, that's the thing I found interesting about what Oracle is doing is they're building in depth as they kind of, you know, build that service. It's not like you're losing a lot of capabilities, because you're going to one integrated service versus having to use A versus B versus C, and I love that idea. >> You're right. Yeah, not only you're not losing, but you're gaining functionality that you can't get by integrating a lot of these. I mean, I can take Snowflake and integrate it in with machine learning, but I also have to integrate in with a transactional database. So I've got to have connectors between all of this, which means I'm adding time. And what it comes down to at the end of the day is expertise, effort, time, and cost. And so what I see the difference from the Oracle announcements is they're aiming at reducing all of that by increasing performance as well. Correct me if I'm wrong on that but that's what I saw at the announcement yesterday. >> You know, Marc, one thing though Marc, it's funny you say that because I started out saying, you know, I'm glad I'm not 19 anymore. And the reason is because of exactly what you said, it's almost like there's a pseudo level of witchcraft that's required to support the modern data environment right in the enterprise. And I need simpler faster, better. That's what I need, you know, I am no longer wearing pocket protectors. I have turned from, you know, break, fix kind of person, to you know, business consultant. And I need that point and click simplicity, but I can't sacrifice, you know, a depth of features of functionality on the backend as I play that consultancy role. >> So, Ron, I want to bring in Ron, you know, it's funny. So Matt, you mentioned Mongo, I often and say, if Oracle mentions you, you're on the map. We saw them yesterday Ron, (laughing) they hammered RedShifts auto ML, they took swipes at Snowflake, a little bit of BigQuery. What were your thoughts on that? Do you agree with what these guys are saying in terms of HeatWaves capabilities? >> Yes, Dave, I think that's an excellent question. And fundamentally I do agree. And the question is why, and I think it's important to know that all of the Oracle data is backed by the fact that they're using benchmarks. For example, all of the ML and all of the TPC benchmarks, including all the scripts, all the configs and all the detail are posted on GitHub. So anybody can look at these results and they're fully transparent and replicate themselves. If you don't agree with this data, then by all means challenge it. And we have not really seen that in all of the new updates in HeatWave over the last 15 months. And as a result, when it comes to these, you know, fundamentals in looking at the competitive landscape, which I think gives validity to outcomes such as Oracle being able to deliver 4.8 times better price performance than Redshift. As well as for example, 14.4 better price performance than Snowflake, and also 12.9 better price performance than BigQuery. And so that is, you know, looking at the quantitative side of things. But again, I think, you know, to Marc's point and to Matt's point, there are also qualitative aspects that clearly differentiate the Oracle proposition, from my perspective. For example now the MySQL HeatWave ML capabilities are native, they're built in, and they also support things such as completion criteria. And as a result, that enables them to show that hey, when you're using Redshift ML for example, you're having to also use their SageMaker tool and it's running on a meter. And so, you know, nobody really wants to be running on a meter when, you know, executing these incredibly complex tasks. And likewise, when it comes to Snowflake, they have to use a third party capability. They don't have the built in, it's not native. So the user, to the point that he's having to spend more time and it increases complexity to use auto ML capabilities across the Snowflake platform. And also, I think it also applies to other important features such as data sampling, for example, with the HeatWave ML, it's intelligent sampling that's being implemented. Whereas in contrast, we're seeing Redshift using random sampling. And again, Snowflake, you're having to use a third party library in order to achieve the same capabilities. So I think the differentiation is crystal clear. I think it definitely is refreshing. It's showing that this is where true value can be assigned. And if you don't agree with it, by all means challenge the data. >> Yeah, I want to come to the benchmarks in a minute. By the way, you know, the gentleman who's the Oracle's architect, he did a great job on the call yesterday explaining what you have to do. I thought that was quite impressive. But Bob, I know you follow the financials pretty closely and on the earnings call earlier this month, Ellison said that, "We're going to see HeatWave on AWS." And the skeptic in me said, oh, they must not be getting people to come to OCI. And then they, you remember this chart they showed yesterday that showed the growth of HeatWave on OCI. But of course there was no data on there, it was just sort of, you know, lines up and to the right. So what do you guys think of that? (Marc laughs) Does it signal Bob, desperation by Oracle that they can't get traction on OCI, or is it just really a smart tame expansion move? What do you think? >> Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. You know, along the way there, and you know, just inside of that was something that said Ellison said on earnings call that spoke to a different sort of philosophy or mindset, almost Marc, where he said, "We're going to make this multicloud," right? With a lot of their other cloud stuff, if you wanted to use any of Oracle's cloud software, you had to use Oracle's infrastructure, OCI, there was no other way out of it. But this one, but I thought it was a classic Ellison line. He said, "Well, we're making this available on AWS. We're making this available, you know, on Snowflake because we're going after those users. And once they see what can be done here." So he's looking at it, I guess you could say, it's a concession to customers because they want multi-cloud. The other way to look at it, it's a hunting expedition and it's one of those uniquely I think Oracle ways. He said up front, right, he doesn't say, "Well, there's a big market, there's a lot for everybody, we just want on our slice." Said, "No, we are going after Amazon, we're going after Redshift, we're going after Aurora. We're going after these users of Snowflake and so on." And I think it's really fairly refreshing these days to hear somebody say that, because now if I'm a buyer, I can look at that and say, you know, to Marc's point, "Do they measure up, do they crack that threshold ceiling? Or is this just going to be more pain than a few dollars savings is worth?" But you look at those numbers that Ron pointed out and that we all saw in that chart. I've never seen Dave, anything like that. In a substantive market, a new player coming in here, and being able to establish differences that are four, seven, eight, 10, 12 times better than competition. And as new buyers look at that, they're going to say, "What the hell are we doing paying, you know, five times more to get a poor result? What's going on here?" So I think this is going to rattle people and force a harder, closer look at what these alternatives are. >> I wonder if the guy, thank you. Let's just skip ahead of the benchmarks guys, bring up the next slide, let's skip ahead a little bit here, which talks to the benchmarks and the benchmarking if we can. You know, David Floyer, the sort of semiretired, you know, Wikibon analyst said, "Dave, this is going to force Amazon and others, Snowflake," he said, "To rethink actually how they architect databases." And this is kind of a compilation of some of the data that they shared. They went after Redshift mostly, (laughs) but also, you know, as I say, Snowflake, BigQuery. And, like I said, you can always tell which companies are doing well, 'cause Oracle will come after you, but they're on the radar here. (laughing) Holgar should we take this stuff seriously? I mean, or is it, you know, a grain salt? What are your thoughts here? >> I think you have to take it seriously. I mean, that's a great question, great point on that. Because like Ron said, "If there's a flaw in a benchmark, we know this database traditionally, right?" If anybody came up that, everybody will be, "Oh, you put the wrong benchmark, it wasn't audited right, let us do it again," and so on. We don't see this happening, right? So kudos to Oracle to be aggressive, differentiated, and seem to having impeccable benchmarks. But what we really see, I think in my view is that the classic and we can talk about this in 100 years, right? Is the suite versus best of breed, right? And the key question of the suite, because the suite's always slower, right? No matter at which level of the stack, you have the suite, then the best of breed that will come up with something new, use a cloud, put the data warehouse on steroids and so on. The important thing is that you have to assess as a buyer what is the speed of my suite vendor. And that's what you guys mentioned before as well, right? Marc said that and so on, "Like, this is a third release in one year of the HeatWave team, right?" So everybody in the database open source Marc, and there's so many MySQL spinoffs to certain point is put on shine on the speed of (indistinct) team, putting out fundamental changes. And the beauty of that is right, is so inherent to the Oracle value proposition. Larry's vision of building the IBM of the 21st century, right from the Silicon, from the chip all the way across the seven stacks to the click of the user. And that what makes the database what Rob was saying, "Tied to the OCI infrastructure," because designed for that, it runs uniquely better for that, that's why we see the cross connect to Microsoft. HeatWave so it's different, right? Because HeatWave runs on cheap hardware, right? Which is the breadth and butter 886 scale of any cloud provider, right? So Oracle probably needs it to scale OCI in a different category, not the expensive side, but also allow us to do what we said before, the multicloud capability, which ultimately CIOs really want, because data gravity is real, you want to operate where that is. If you have a fast, innovative offering, which gives you more functionality and the R and D speed is really impressive for the space, puts away bad results, then it's a good bet to look at. >> Yeah, so you're saying, that we versus best of breed. I just want to sort of play back then Marc a comment. That suite versus best of breed, there's always been that trade off. If I understand you Holgar you're saying that somehow Oracle has magically cut through that trade off and they're giving you the best of both. >> It's the developing velocity, right? The provision of important features, which matter to buyers of the suite vendor, eclipses the best of breed vendor, then the best of breed vendor is in the hell of a potential job. >> Yeah, go ahead Marc. >> Yeah and I want to add on what Holgar just said there. I mean the worst job in the data center is data movement, moving the data sucks. I don't care who you are, nobody likes it. You never get any kudos for doing it well, and you always get the ah craps, when things go wrong. So it's in- >> In the data center Marc all the time across data centers, across cloud. That's where the bleeding comes. >> It's right, you get beat up all the time. So nobody likes to move data, ever. So what you're looking at with what they announce with HeatWave and what I love about HeatWave is it doesn't matter when you started with it, you get all the additional features they announce it's part of the service, all the time. But they don't have to move any of the data. You want to analyze the data that's in your transactional, MySQL database, it's there. You want to do machine learning models, it's there, there's no data movement. The data movement is the key thing, and they just eliminate that, in so many ways. And the other thing I wanted to talk about is on the benchmarks. As great as those benchmarks are, they're really conservative 'cause they're underestimating the cost of that data movement. The ETLs, the other services, everything's left out. It's just comparing HeatWave, MySQL cloud service with HeatWave versus Redshift, not Redshift and Aurora and Glue, Redshift and Redshift ML and SageMaker, it's just Redshift. >> Yeah, so what you're saying is what Oracle's doing is saying, "Okay, we're going to run MySQL HeatWave benchmarks on analytics against Redshift, and then we're going to run 'em in transaction against Aurora." >> Right. >> But if you really had to look at what you would have to do with the ETL, you'd have to buy two different data stores and all the infrastructure around that, and that goes away so. >> Due to the nature of the competition, they're running narrow best of breed benchmarks. There is no suite level benchmark (Dave laughs) because they created something new. >> Well that's you're the earlier point they're beating best of breed with a suite. So that's, I guess to Floyer's earlier point, "That's going to shake things up." But I want to come back to Bob Evans, 'cause I want to tap your Cloud Wars mojo before we wrap. And line up the horses, you got AWS, you got Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Now they all own their own cloud. Snowflake, Mongo, Couchbase, Redis, Cockroach by the way they're all doing very well. They run in the cloud as do many others. I think you guys all saw the Andreessen, you know, commentary from Sarah Wang and company, to talk about the cost of goods sold impact of cloud. So owning your own cloud has to be an advantage because other guys like Snowflake have to pay cloud vendors and negotiate down versus having the whole enchilada, Safra Catz's dream. Bob, how do you think this is going to impact the market long term? >> Well, Dave, that's a great question about, you know, how this is all going to play out. If I could mention three things, one, Frank Slootman has done a fantastic job with Snowflake. Really good company before he got there, but since he's been there, the growth mindset, the discipline, the rigor and the phenomenon of what Snowflake has done has forced all these bigger companies to really accelerate what they're doing. And again, it's an example of how this intense competition makes all the different cloud vendors better and it provides enormous value to customers. Second thing I wanted to mention here was look at the Adam Selipsky effect at AWS, took over in the middle of May, and in Q2, Q3, Q4, AWS's growth rate accelerated. And in each of those three quotas, they grew faster than Microsoft's cloud, which has not happened in two or three years, so they're closing the gap on Microsoft. The third thing, Dave, in this, you know, incredibly intense competitive nature here, look at Larry Ellison, right? He's got his, you know, the product that for the last two or three years, he said, "It's going to help determine the future of the company, autonomous database." You would think he's the last person in the world who's going to bring in, you know, in some ways another database to think about there, but he has put, you know, his whole effort and energy behind this. The investments Oracle's made, he's riding this horse really hard. So it's not just a technology achievement, but it's also an investment priority for Oracle going forward. And I think it's going to form a lot of how they position themselves to this new breed of buyer with a new type of need and expectations from IT. So I just think the next two or three years are going to be fantastic for people who are lucky enough to get to do the sorts of things that we do. >> You know, it's a great point you made about AWS. Back in 2018 Q3, they were doing about 7.4 billion a quarter and they were growing in the mid forties. They dropped down to like 29% Q4, 2020, I'm looking at the data now. They popped back up last quarter, last reported quarter to 40%, that is 17.8 billion, so they more doubled and they accelerated their growth rate. (laughs) So maybe that pretends, people are concerned about Snowflake right now decelerating growth. You know, maybe that's going to be different. By the way, I think Snowflake has a different strategy, the whole data cloud thing, data sharing. They're not trying to necessarily take Oracle head on, which is going to make this next 10 years, really interesting. All right, we got to go, last question. 30 seconds or less, what can we expect from the future of data platforms? Matt, please start. >> I have to go first again? You're killing me, Dave. (laughing) In the next few years, I think you're going to see the major players continue to meet customers where they are, right. Every organization, every environment is, you know, kind of, we use these words bespoke in Snowflake, pardon the pun, but Snowflakes, right. But you know, they're all opinionated and unique and what's great as an IT person is, you know, there is a service for me regardless of where I am on my journey, in my data management journey. I think you're going to continue to see with regards specifically to Oracle, I think you're going to see the company continue along this path of being all things to all people, if you will, or all organizations without sacrificing, you know, kind of richness of features and sacrificing who they are, right. Look, they are the data kings, right? I mean, they've been a database leader for an awful long time. I don't see that going away any time soon and I love the innovative spirit they've brought in with HeatWave. >> All right, great thank you. Okay, 30 seconds, Holgar go. >> Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that we see is really that trend to autonomous as Oracle calls or self-driving software, right? So the database will have to do more things than just store the data and support the DVA. It will have to show it can wide insights, the whole upside, it will be able to show to one machine learning. We haven't really talked about that. How in just exciting what kind of use case we can get of machine learning running real time on data as it changes, right? So, which is part of the E5 announcement, right? So we'll see more of that self-driving nature in the database space. And because you said we can promote it, right. Check out my report about HeatWave latest release where I post in oracle.com. >> Great, thank you for that. And Bob Evans, please. You're great at quick hits, hit us. >> Dave, thanks. I really enjoyed getting to hear everybody's opinion here today and I think what's going to happen too. I think there's a new generation of buyers, a new set of CXO influencers in here. And I think what Oracle's done with this, MySQL HeatWave, those benchmarks that Ron talked about so eloquently here that is going to become something that forces other companies, not just try to get incrementally better. I think we're going to see a massive new wave of innovation to try to play catch up. So I really take my hat off to Oracle's achievement from going to, push everybody to be better. >> Excellent. Marc Staimer, what do you say? >> Sure, I'm going to leverage off of something Matt said earlier, "Those companies that are going to develop faster, cheaper, simpler products that are going to solve customer problems, IT problems are the ones that are going to succeed, or the ones who are going to grow. The one who are just focused on the technology are going to fall by the wayside." So those who can solve more problems, do it more elegantly and do it for less money are going to do great. So Oracle's going down that path today, Snowflake's going down that path. They're trying to do more integration with third party, but as a result, aiming at that simpler, faster, cheaper mentality is where you're going to continue to see this market go. >> Amen brother Marc. >> Thank you, Ron Westfall, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> Well, thank you. And I'm loving it. I see a wave of innovation across the entire cloud database ecosystem and Oracle is fueling it. We are seeing it, with the native integration of auto ML capabilities, elastic scaling, lower entry price points, et cetera. And this is just going to be great news for buyers, but also developers and increased use of open APIs. And so I think that is really the key takeaways. Just we're going to see a lot of great innovation on the horizon here. >> Guys, fantastic insights, one of the best power panel as I've ever done. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on today. >> Great job, Dave, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent! 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host for the theCUBE, a lot of great action here. A lot of great solutions. Great keynote. The future of cloud's going to be all about purpose-built software platforms, enabling more and more SaaS, faster performance with custom chips, all enabling great stuff. I have two great guests here. Who are going to talk about it from Accenture. We've got Karthik Narain, global lead of Accenture's Cloud First. Welcome to the program. Good to see you and Chris Wegmann, AABG Accenture Amazon Business Group. Technology leads senior manager. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> I was commenting before we came on about Accenture's work you guys been doing with the clouds in my article, I posted before re:Invent!. Dave Vellante coined the term superclouds, which we kind of just put out there, but the idea that people can build really strong platforms that enable a new kind of Saas has been the big wave. Connect has been a great example. We heard on stage from Adam, the CEO. Chris, this has been something that's been a real change where it's not just lift and shift and refactor, it's build value in a platform and new SaaS capabilities. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I would absolutely agree. We've seen this change over time. We've seen the lift and shift and modernize and it's definitely moved into the Superclouds. I like the term, but you know, we call them cloud continuums, which we'll talk a little bit about, it's about building these purpose-built solutions. I think if you look at the keynote today, you look at, everybody that was on stage. United and everyone talking about what they're building, their technology companies now, they're not just the business. >> You guys did some new research, coining new terms and Cloud First. What is this all about? What is this new wave you guys are talking about? >> Yeah, so John, you know, few years ago, when people talked about cloud, they generally meant public cloud. I think the definition of cloud is changing and expanding. And from now on, whenever people talk about cloud, it's actually a cloud continuum. It's a continuum of capability from public to Edge and everything in between all seamlessly connected by Cloud First networks, which means all the capabilities that customers used to get from one public cloud destination. They can actually access that across the continuum, whether that be in their own private data center, using the capability of cloud with AWS's Outpost and other capabilities. Or they could use the capability in their Edge location, whether it's their retail centers, their warehouse locations, manufacturing and so on and so forth. So organizations are using the power of cloud beyond one purpose and one destination, but more as an operating system going forward. >> Chris, what's your take on this redefinition of cloud what's your take on it? >> I think it's much needed. I think Andy kicked it off last year when he recognized the term hybrid. We all, who've has been around a while kind of chuckled because they finally said the word. But if you look at the keynote today, they just continued it. Adam picked it up and ran with it. If you look at all the services, Wavelength and all the different services, there's not a single customer that I have, that's just using EC2 or S3 right. They're using all these different services you saw today. You saw all the different services that United put up on the screen. That DISH put up on the screen. So yeah, it's how people and companies, if they're truly going to transform and truly use cloud to transform, you have to use the whole continuum. >> Yeah. And I think the continuum message is a good one because if you look at what the evolution is, that was interesting to. Adam went on and did kind of a history lesson in the beginning, it felt like I was in the Star Wars movie, like back in the old days. And then you kind of progressed. You had to be really elite to roll your own cloud. And the hyperscalers did that, you saw that. Now you still have elite technical people, but now it's general purpose, or purpose built. It's like having prefabricated platforms and open source. We've learned that why do you want to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to? So if I want a call center I get Connect, if I want to have a big plugin platform, I can still build on top of and have that SaaS unique application. This seems logical. This is new. (laughter) This is the continuum. I mean, it seems obvious now looking at it, but how far along in are people getting this. Karthik, what's your take on this? >> I think customers are getting it. They are looking at cloud more as an operating system for their future innovation. They liked the concept that they got from the public cloud, which is easy configurability, consumability and automatability of their infrastructure assets. And when you can get that capability as an operating system for your entire enterprise, and you could innovate across the spectrum, that's extremely powerful. We see companies accelerating their adoption to cloud, but we are also seeing over the last three years, a lot of that adoption was using cloud as a migration destination. But now with the power of the cloud continuum, where innovation is available, that so many new services that Adam launched today, you could use truly cloud as an innovation engine. And we're actually seeing that the clients who are using the cloud continuum for innovation are doing much better than the ones that are using cloud as a migration destination. In fact, they're doing two X to three X use of cloud for innovation and uplifting knowlEdge where they are actually using three X more cloud for sustainability purposes. So huge, huge value. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a great point. Great insight, because what you're saying is essentially you can't hide anymore. The projects are either going to be successful or not. You can see whether it's useful or not, and now you're tying cloud adoption and outcomes together. Where you can look it and saying, we need to make this outcome work. Not for building, for building sake. Those projects were discovered during the pandemic. Why are we doing that? So you can't hide that ball anymore. >> Right and everybody's got to do it now, right? I mean, you don't have a choice. The pandemic is now forcing companies to change. They've changed. And that the research shows that the companies that have truly adopted the whole continuum are doing much better than the companies that didn't. >> What's pattern in this continuum research you guys, what's the big takeaway that you guys have found in that study, in that customer experience that you're having. What's the big, Aha moment. >> I think there are a few things. Number one surprising aspect is that the companies that use cloud for a broader innovation objective, actually, were saving more than the ones that use cloud just as a cost saving initiative. That was a big, Aha moment. Number two, when you talk about all of this innovation that AWS provides, sometimes it's easy for organizations to shrug it off saying, this looks like this is only for the elite companies, or this is only for the digitally native companies to follow. But our research showed that the companies that were successful adopting cloud continuum, the ones that we call less continuum competitors, 60% of them are pre-digitally born organizations. And they were reaping the benefits and they were growing faster, saving more, being more innovative than all others. So this is truly usable across the spectrum of the G 2000 enterprise. >> Yeah, and I think it's a no brainer, but now that you have, customers are transforming, they have multiple clouds. You have AWS, Azure, Google cloud, people were trying to find their swim lane. We heard about skill gap shortage. We did some reporting on that, that this idea of multi-cloud maybe not, I can't hire enough people. I'm going to bet on this cloud, maybe use that cloud. How are people looking at that? How do you guys see that the cloud competitive continuum, or how is the cloud competition affecting the cloud continuum from a customer standpoint? >> Yeah. I mean, you got to look at it, do you use the whole continuum? You've got a lot of cases, you got to be on the same cloud, right. You can use the whole, you got to use all the different components, all the different services. So I think we are seeing customers that are picking one and starting with one and then adding others. I see a lot of my customers who are using multiple clouds, but they're using them in different business units, right? So they may pick one business unit to go deep with AWS on, they may go use another business unit to go deep on another cloud, right? So yeah, I mean, everyone is getting multiple, but a lot of they're starting with one and then adding a second one or a third along the way. >> Karthik, this is what I was trying to get out of my story. It's a hard, very nuanced point. But if you look at the success of say Snowflake and Databricks, all bet on Amazon and their superclouds, they are on Amazon, but they're now working with Azure as well, because why wouldn't you want to open up your market? >> Exactly. And even the industry companies that want to monetize their capabilities using the digital ecosystems are doing that. For example, Siemens wanted to bring all their capabilities in manufacturing and machine operating system into a platform called MindSphere. And they knew that their end goal was going to be multi-cloud, but they want to practice, leveraging the power of cloud with one platform. And when they created MindSphere, they started with AWS and they created that solution in the public cloud and private cloud also at the Edge by leveraging the power of cloud from public to Edge and proved it out. And once it started working and they were able to roll it out for customers. Now they are giving customers the choice to be able to use it in other clouds as well. >> Yeah Karthik, you mentioned earlier at the top of our interview about the platform of the cloud and Dave and I were talking on our keynote review. We did a little history lesson of when Microsoft owned the monopoly of windows, the system software, and they had the application suite with office, but they still wanted developers to build on top of windows. Okay. But now with cloud that's one big windows platform like thing. So the developers ecosystem is evolving. And so one of the things we're watching, I want to get your reaction to this. Is in every major inflection point in the computer industry, when new ways to build and write code rolled out, the application owners always wanted their software to run on the fastest platform. Speeds and feeds matter in these shifts, because why would I want to have my software run slower? >> Yeah. >> What is your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's a lot of things that the industry is going through and we are pushing the envelope on digitization. And today's keynote. When you saw the CEO of NASDAQ talking about the technology bottlenecks that were preventing the matching algorithm to be finally taken to cloud. Now that capability that's available at with AWS is what is enabling that matching algorithm to be taken to cloud through the power of Edge. So there's so much technology innovation, that's happening. That's constantly expanding the boundaries of posibilities. >> I mean, that's exactly the point. And I wrote this in my story and it came out on the keynote today, which was Adam saying, the clouds expanding that's the continuum. If it's running cloud operations, does it matter what it is? I mean, it's, if you're at the Edge and you're running cloud, maybe cause you want latency, of course you want to have low latency. Why wouldn't you want outposts. Again, this is all cloud operations. DevSecOps data is now kind of cloud operationalized. That seems to be what's happening. >> Yeah, I think the developers love the fact that they can write for one and put it anywhere, right? And whether it's a EKS on Inside, I don't even know what you call anymore, the public cloud, right? Or all the way out at the Edge, right? You write it once, you can deploy it there and it makes their lives a lot easier. And you know, as you said, it's all about performance. So they get the best option. >> Well, We love having you guys on the theCUBE, Accenture. You guys have really smart, talented people, always great commentary. Dave and I were looking at reviewing the tape so to speak. It's not really tape anymore. It's it's digitally stored on a S3, but we were looking back at 2016 when we first started talking about horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized applications. If you look at the keynote today and squint through the announcements, Amazon's going to offer full horizontal scalability and vertical specialization at the app level with machine learning capabilities. This means that you need data to be horizontally addressable, which is kind of counterintuitive, but you're seeing all the success on data lakes and lakes. This is the new architecture. It's kind of proven now, what do you guys think? >> Yeah, again, the aspect of cloud is about democratised innovation. The first element is, even though there's so much infrastructure build-out and infrastructural elements where there's continuous innovation going on, the enterprises and developers are moving from Bivives built decisions to assembling and consuming options. And when they assemble and consume, they want newer and newer services to be available. That is very specific to their industry and specific to functions, whether it is supply chain function or manufacturing function or so on and so forth. For this, there are going to be specific data that is going to be required, or operational for that particular use-case. But the whole idea of predictive analytics and AI and machine learning and data science is about how do you find correlations between operational data for a particular capability, with things that in the previous world was unrelated. For that you need to bring all of this data together. Time will tell whether all the data is going to move to one location or is there going to be distributed computing of that data with more technology, but that's the role that data is going to play in these verticalized solutions. >> Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. I want to get you guys while I got one, a couple of minutes left. Advice to people that look into go this next level. They know the continuum is coming, you guys been providing great solutions and advice to your customers. For the folks watching, what advice can you give where they're just putting their toe in the water or want to go full in? >> Yeah, so, we found in that research that there were some common patterns that were followed by these continuum competitors, the ones that were succeeding or winning in the cloud. And there was namely four of them, the first one, and these four can be adopted by others for them to also win in the continuum. The first one was looking at the power of the continuum, how the technology is evolving and creating a strategy to take advantage of the evolution of the continuum. That's number one. Number two, this is about organizational change. So don't go about this change in a soft manner. There are elements that you need to change within your organization to imbibe this wholeheartedly. That's the second thing. Third thing is one common aspect that all the continuum competitors followed was they put experience at the forefront for everything. For their end customers. Last but not the least. This is a holistic journey and an enterprise wide journey. And this would require CSO level, CEO level commitment on a longer term to achieve this. So with these four things, most companies can achieve the successes that the continuum competitors are seeing. >> Awesome insight, Chris, real quick, 30 seconds. What's your advice. >> Chris: Don't be afraid. (laughter) It's pretty simple. >> The water's warm, come on in >> Yeah, come on in. A lot of gone before you, right? It can be scary. It can be daunting, right? A lot of services. Don't be scared to get in and go at it. >> Yeah, one of the jobs I love about being theCUBE host is, you talk to people many years earlier, you guys got it right at Accenture. Congratulations. You were deploying, you saw this wave of purpose-built before anyone else and congratulations. Great success. >> Thanks, thanks for having us on theCUBE. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier. You're watching us here live in Las Vegas, for AWS re:Invent 2021 coverage. TheCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hi there. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John Farah, your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California in our studios for cube conversation and remotely drew showcase VP of product management at Dell technologies. This segment is about autonomous operations and moving beyond the hype into practice reality of what's going on in automation. Drew, thank you for coming on this cube conversation >>And great job. Thanks John. >>So, uh, uh, automation, autonomous operation, everyone sees the Tesla's a self-driving cars. We even heard words like self-driving store self-driving data center, self-driving cloud. It's kind of a buzz word. It's been hyped up a lot, but it's becoming much more of a reality as people start to think about how to automate a way the, the manual undifferentiated tasks and move the value into either writing better software or into operations. This is kind of a hot topic. Uh, why, why is it so hot right now? What's your take? >>Yeah, I think the answer to this lies really in the digital transformation that every company is having to embrace right now. And I use the word company, but everything I described here would apply to public entities as well. I have plenty of conversations with governments and universities and so forth. And the leverage that cost share that I've heard used before. If you're not a technology company and you don't think you need to become one, you're not going to be around for very long because every business to business, business to consumer, even consumer to consumer interaction is becoming digitized. And so, you know, making all those connections, digital based takes human talent. And that's really at the core of why this is a hot topic. You know, anybody who's going to try and hire that talent right now, or who's actively trying is going to tell you the competition is fierce. >>It's a sellers market, so to speak in terms of getting capable it talent. And so this topic of automation and autonomous operations has an incredibly pragmatic component to it because you can't hire your way through digital transformation. Uh, if you're an element of your strategy is going to have to involve making that talent more efficient. And so along with good business processes, automation is going to be a prerequisite to make any progress on your digital transformation within a finite set up of it talent. So, you know, to your question, why is it a hot topic? I, you know, look at every entities, digital transformation is going to dependent on, >>You know, you've been around, uh, seeing a lot of ways of innovation come and go. You know, every one has its own kind of like unique characteristics. Now we're seeing with this transformation, this digital transformation, a lot of things kind of coming together. So it's always been the classic people, process technologies, you know, the three kind of areas people talk about, but if you look at what cloud and now edge and distributed computing is bringing into the equation, companies are identifying competitive advantages to processes that can be software enabled or defined or automated and where their workflows are, the IP of company. So this is kind of like a new revelations. Like, I mean, Ross has always been great with your manufacturing, whatever that was in place, but now the scale of that in digital with the apps out there, this has been a big focus of the modernization of applications. What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, no, no, very much so it's, um, you bring up an excellent point kind of all the focus and attention that corporations have given to these other processes for time now that you know, this, this whole, um, you know, online, digital digitize, modern operations model, if it's flowing into that as well. And you know, it's, you know, at the end of the day to, to the, some of the points that you made here, you know, are, are you and your whatever business or entity that you're supporting, you know, are you pushing out the lovers levels of features and capabilities that your internal customers or your external customers need at the pace and velocity that you need to that's, that's where competition is going to take place. That's where business is going to be won or lost. And so I think seeing an indexing of the processes around that and our customers starting to think more about that is critical. Just as much to your point, as you know, uh, you know, the, this technology strategy. Um, and, and how are you going to engage, you know, your customers through a, uh, uh, a modern, you know, digitize processes is important for the factory as the factory line for Ford motor company is in terms of how they're going to be interfacing with their customers. So, um, yeah, very, very timely. And certainly top of mind. >>Yeah. And a lot of CEO's and customers that you work with. I know you guys are having a lot of conversations. We've talked with you guys in the past, across all of Dale, actually Dell technologies, and it's the same conversation. It's distributed computing and automation, AI machine linear, all factoring in workflows becoming competitive advantage. Now we're into this autonomous phase, which is like self running or healing or all these new, new stuff. When customers think about this, and we've heard CEOs talk about strategies, don't touch the white hot core until you get to the edges first, put your toe in the water, different approaches to tackling autonomous operators. What sort of, um, strategies and results should customers expect as they go in and start jumping into the, into the, into the pool, if you will, you know, as they start, >>I'm glad you asked this question because the subject of automation gets lumped in with a lot of topics with similar, you know, buzzwords of AI and machine learning and self-healing, and self-driving while these technologies like that make autonomous operations. In reality, we run the risk of having the underlying technology, dominate the discussion, and that's not where it needs to go in, in, in my discussions with customers, they don't care if the underlying technology is machine learning or deep learning, you know, it doesn't really matter. They want to see tangible out. So, and so when we talk about the kind of results to expect, there's some pretty simple questions to ask is, you know, that I, you know, I engage with any CIO or any company, a person in an it operations capacity is, is my, is my team spending, you know, how much time is my team spending on updates or the updates taking place within tighten up windows? >>Is my team getting the root cause of issues faster? Is my team closing out tickets faster is my business deploying more applications per week, per month, per year. These are the kinds of things that really matter. I mean, this is where the rubber meets the road on this, and, you know, the way we approach this is as we deliver more capabilities and features in this space of autonomy, we're constantly engaging our customers in a before and after state to understand if we really moved the needle. And so we, we, we do collect data on this front to see if we are delivering tangible results. And you know, what we've seen just in the past year is when we do this and do it right, we're seeing issue resolution times dropping like 50 to 90%. We're seeing time spent on admin tasks reduced by like 85%. We're seeing operations cost dropped by a third, you know, applications being pushed out, almost doubling. So these are, these are the real benefits, right? If you, if you can free up and pull the human component out of some of these, you know, necessary, but not necessarily, um, you know, value added tasks, uh, in your day to day operations, this is the kind of results customers can see. >>I want to ask you about your recent event hosted by mark Hamill, but about the framework you guys announced. But before that, I want to ask you, I got your here about supply chain. I mean, honestly, Dell made, made its bones in supply chain and innovation going back to the early days, Michael's book is awesome and he talks about being successful. Um, but you started to hear words like software supply chain is starting to hear words like the word supply chain is now becoming lingua franca in business, not just on moving goods here and there. Digital supply chains are emerging and it's impacting developers because they have to secure them. And there's also mindset of an operational mindset, our systems thinking, uh, with as well as design thinking, but mainly systems thinking. So this is not for the, you know, supply chain geeks out there. This is like hitting me. And she, this notion of supply chain doesn't promise operations hit to the core of this. >>Yeah. It, um, yes, it should, because ideally what you're doing is your autonomous operations strategy is contemplating the fact that that supply chain is going to be fluid. Like, you know, and, and so, you know, just think about the, the, the, you know, the, the, the underlying infrastructure and the choices that you have being, um, on, um, on bare metal on VM, based on container-based, there's different distributions within that. We then start to think about, you know, how I might orchestrate that then the different platforms that we have there around configuration management or application orchestration, um, you're right. That supply chain does become pretty complex. And so, um, us as a, as a provider to customers that are having to do with that software supply chain, um, you, what we need to be cognizant of is the fact that, you know, we can't dictate that always, we have to assume there's going to be changes in there. And so that certainly does influence our approach and trying to make that as, um, you know, friendly to a heterogeneous environment that we know is going to change going forward. Awesome. >>And we're going to see more of that kind of thinking and apply into the people skill, skill development, and also software automation to offload that. But okay. Back to the event you guys had mark Hamill, who's, I'm a huge fan of star wars. Uh, the kid I master, um, represents the old guard, you know, let's do it now, looking at the cloud. Um, you guys announced that that event, this autonomous operations framework, could you talk about what that is and why is it important? >>Yeah, so to begin with, you know, if you had told me when I was watching mark Hamill as a child in a movie theater, that he would one day help me do my job, I would have gone insane. But anyways, um, that, that aside that, that autonomous operations framework, it's built around six levels of automation. And we can talk, take the cue from the society of automotive engineers and work that they had done around autonomous cars, but we believed that we needed something distinct for, for it. And, you know, it starts off with level zero, which is no automation, look at your there's a human doing absolutely everything. And you progress up through five subsequent levels of operator assisted, partial automation, conditional automation, level five, being full autonomy. There's a set of expectations with each of these. And look as you progress up the level of involvement of humans in the decision, and the reaction is decreased each and every step, and some might say, well, so what all you did is document a framework. >>Well, it's important to both our customers and then our internal teams that have to deliver this. And let me just elaborate on that a little bit. Why it's important to customers is that automation implies trust. As, as, as you know, you as my infrastructure provider Dell, do I trust you to automate something that is typically involved my own team, assessing what it is the problem to be and determining the remediation action. Am I willing to hand over the keys to that to you? Uh, you have to earn that and you earn that by progressing up through these different levels. And, you know, if I can't trust you with, you know, conditional automation, I'm not going to trust you with full autonomy. So the customer is, you know, there's a, there's a psychology that's involved here that they have to progress through these levels. And so you have to be deliberate, I'd say as well, you need to recognize that not all customers are going to progress through that at the same pace. >>So it's important that when we think about how we're going to provide this, yeah, we want to have an option for the highest level of autonomy as possible, but that doesn't mean all customers are going to be ready. So we need to think about, you know, how do you provide the N minus one and minus two levels of capabilities. So we're meeting customers where they are in terms of their comfort and, and embracing this idea of autonomous. And then, you know, for us internally, that's the customer's perspective for us. Then this is a, a great set of guideposts for our teams to think about how we advance. And so when we have a feature, um, that, that we're deploying and making available, let's say it's sort of a workload contention feature, right? We then think about that about, okay, how do we start to advance up through the different levels here? We know workload contention is an important problem, but how do we start to take the human out of that equation in a methodical way to advance them through these levels? So we give a suite of options to our customers to do without that. >>True. Talk to me about your reaction with customers. Cause I know there's a spectrum of customers that are leaning in, some are putting the toe in the water, so to speak somewhat more information, some are just looking at the architecture of how they're going to scale post COVID and then have a growth strategy for their business, what feedback you're getting, where are, how would you put the customer's mindset? Um, and, and can you describe the makeup of the customer profile for >>Yeah. You know, I would say, um, you know, there, you know, when we were talking about these six levels, there, there were about halfway up in general. If you, if you ask me to kind of do the bell curve, right. And in terms of comfort level, and we'll, we'll call it like partial or conditional automation there where it's like, you know, in general, it's like, okay, we, we, we know we need to take some of the humans out of this, but why don't we start by, you know, you recommending what the remediation is. I'll take a look at it and decide if I want to implement it or recommend the remediation and give me a button I can click to, to, to act upon it. So there's still some level of human checks and balances in there, but we've taken a lot of the grunt work out of it, so to speak, um, to do it. >>But that's where they are. They, they certainly aspire to move up again, back to this resource crunch, competing for talent than I can't keep hiring people to keep up with the work here and what they want to do is work with us to, okay, so how do I evolve this to start to prove it then? And this is where we can kind of go back to some of these things of the machine learning and so forth, where it's up to us as we think about how we design the systems around this is how can we start to observe how customers are responding to our recommendations? Are they always taking on, are they modifying them so we can get smarter in terms of what it is we're going to suggest and what we're just we're going to automate so that we're doing it around their values, not necessarily ours, that's a really important component here. This value based approach that we need to embrace, because, you know, you know, what, what might be considered an acceptable set of circumstances for a financial services company? You know, it might not be for a manufacturing company. And so that's something that we need to take into account in the overall design. >>Yeah. And also to your point earlier about meeting them where they are, is super important. And I think what's interesting, I've been watching over the past five Dell technology worlds, um, the tradition transition of Dell becoming much stronger and, and, and cohesive in each element of the end to end mix if you will, of hybrid. Um, and that's been a big boost. Um, and so as customers go, okay, I still got to get better. So they get, they're taking this way. And some, some customers, you know what I need to do more, but you guys are running these companies with your technology. So it's not like as easy, it's not a clean sheet of paper. In some cases, it is when you have new projects, they go cloud native and they just ended, they deploy, uh, and they have an edge and all that good stuff. But in terms of making autonomous operations real in terms of your roadmap, as you guys evolve, um, how close are you to having that secret formula? Or do you have the secret formula now? What is it? >>Yeah, so the short answer is, you know, do we have the, the, the secret sauce that we do? And, but that doesn't mean we're done like, so, so back to the framework, like nobody in the industry is at full autonomy. So let's just be really honest. There it's a, it's an aspirational north star that we, we all have to make progress to, but you know, what that means is you can take something that has a level of autonomy today. And let's take something like workload contention analysis that I brought up earlier, where, you know, we can identify where we've got workloads competing for shared resources that need to be redistributed. You know, today we flagged that contention and let the customer determine remediation. So, Hey, we're, we're letting you know you've got a problem. Um, you know, they're going to determine that remediation based upon their first hand knowledge of the environment and applying the values that they have to determine the best path, but, you know, our task is then to gain insight on that and how our customers are choosing to remediate, translate those into rule-based decisions for an explicit outcome that kind of advances you up one step, moving beyond rules. >>You start to understand more generalized outcome sot. That's a conditional automation. And then you move beyond that to get to a service level based objective, which would be high autonomy. So you're there, but this, this framework clearly calls out like this is a journey like there's no, you never really get to the end, so to speak. And that's fine, right? That, that Nirvana of full autonomy, we all should aspire to it, but we are going to be very, very deliberate in terms of how we take things like this and advance them up through the framework to make it more real. And again, give customers choice as they're willing to progress up through that trust will be there with an option for them when they, when they want to stay back with where they are, because that's where their comfort is. We'll be able to meet them there. >>Yeah. And I think also that be fair to anyone who may look at this as, you know, kind of like maybe future every, every customer you have is different operationally. I mean, you have, again, you mentioned financial FinTech, they're huge. If financial services area versus say, you know, classic enterprise, I mean, it could be insurance or whatever, a lot of legacy, and now new technologies coming in, this is all part of the, the opportunity is to kind of bring that together. Um, and it's not going to switch. >>Yeah, it is. And I'll just, you know, the one last plug for why I feel great about doing this as Dell technologies is I think about the, the breadth of what we cover in that environment, you know, with the, the breadth of our portfolio and the level of insights that we can have by kind of contemplating all the impacts across that typology that we span. Um, it's super exciting in terms of kind of what we can really unlock here in terms of value from an end date >>Drew. It's great to chat with you. I have one quick, more important question. Most important question is, did you get a selfie with mark Hamill Come on in every star wars? I mean, I'm a huge star wars fan, of course, star wars, star Trek are all on the same tier. Yeah. >>Uh, no, sorry. I missed out. I was, I was virtual for that one. So, um, although I probably could have done a screenshot on zoom or something like that and claimed it. So, but the >>Well great to have you on the queue. Thanks for your insight. I think this is a great area. Autonomous operations are moving beyond the hide, was seeing evidence in it. You seeing us the on clean sheet of paper, Greenfield opportunities, and then as it comes into the white hot core enterprise, um, even more trust is needed. Even more reliability track record you guys doing great work. Thank you so much for sharing on the cube. Great. Thank you, John. Okay. This is the cube. I'm Sean for your host for this cube conversation. Thanks for watching.

(soft music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's covers of Splunk's dot com virtual event, their annual summit. I'm John Ferry, host of the cube. We've been covering dot conf since twenty twelve. Usually a physical event in person. This year it's virtual. I'm here with Claire Hockin, the CMO of Splunk. She's been here three and a half years. Your first year as CMO, and you got to go virtual from physical. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much, John. Great. >> I got to ask you, I mean, this has been the most impressive virtual venue, you've taken over the hotel here in Silicon valley. You're entire teams here. It feels like there's a dynamic of like the teamwork. You can kind of feel the vibe. It's almost like a little VIP Splunk event, but you're broadcasting it to the world. Tell us what's happening. >> Yeah, it's been, I think for everyone a year where we really hope to be back to having a hybrid event, so having a big virtual component, but running dot conf as we had before from Las Vegas, which wasn't possible. So what we thought in the last six weeks is that we would actually bring the Splunk studio to a physical location. So we've been live all of this week from California, where we're sitting today and really thought through bringing the best of that programming to our, you know, our amazing audience of twenty six thousand people. So we were sitting here in a studio, we have a whole live stage and we've activated the best of dot conf to bring as many Splunkers as we can. And as many external guests to make it feel as real and as vibrant as possible. So. >> I have to say I'm very impressed. Since twenty twelve we've been watching the culture evolve. Splunk has always been that next big thing. And then the next big thing again, it seems to be the theme as data becomes so bigger and more important even than ever. There's a new Splunk emerging, another kind of next big thing. And this kind of says the patterns like do something big, that's new, operationalize it and do something new again. This is a theme, big part of this culture here. Can you share more about how you see this evolving? >> Sure. And I think that's what makes Splunk such a great place to be. And I think it attracts people who like to continually challenge reinvent. And I think we've spent a lot of time this year building out our portfolio, going through this cloud transformation. It just gives you a whole new landscape of how you unlock that power of data and how customers use it. So we've had a lot of fun, always building on top of that building, you know, our partnerships, what customers do and really having fun with it. I think one of the best things about Splunk is we do have this incredibly fun and playful brand and as data just becomes something that is more and more powerful, it's really relatable. And we have fun with activating that and storytelling. So, yeah. >> And you have a new manager, Teresa Carlson came in from Amazon web services. You have a lot more messaging kind of building on previous messaging. How are you handling and looking at the aperture of, that's growing from a messaging standpoint, you have a partner verse, which has rebranded of your solution of your ecosystem, kind of a lot of action going on in your world. What's the update? >> Yeah. It keeps us busy. And I think at one end, you know, the number of people that are using Splunk inside any customer base is just growing. So you have different kinds of users. And this year we're really working hard on how to partner and position Splunk with developers, but at the top end of that, the value of data and the idea of having a data foundation is something that's incredibly compelling for CTOs. So working really hard about looking at Splunk and data from that perspective, as well as the individual uses across areas like security and observability. So. >> You know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is, I was thinking about this when I was driving in this morning, Splunk has a lot of customers and you keep your customers and you've have a lot of customers that organically came into the Splunk through the product leadership and just great product. And then as security became more important, Splunk kind of takes that territory now. Now mainstream enterprise with the platform are leaning into Splunk solutions, and now you've got an ecosystem. So it's just becoming bigger and bigger just seems that the scale of the Splunk is growing radically bigger than it was, Is that happening? And what's your take on that? >> I think that's definitely a thing, John. So I think that the power of the ecosystem is amazing. We have customers, partners, as you've seen and everything just joins up. So we're seeing more and more dot joining through data. And we're just seeing this incredible velocity in terms of what's possible and how we can co-build with our partners and do more and more with our customers. So Splunk moves incredibly quickly. And I think if anything, we're just, gaining velocity, which is fun and also really challenging. >> Cloud-scale. And certainly during the pandemic, you guys had a tailwind on the business side, talk about the journey that you've had with Splunk as in your career and also for the customers. How are they reacting and what can they expect as Splunk continues to evolve? >> I think we're working really hard to make sure that Splunk is easier to use. Everything gets every more integrated. And I think our goal and our vision is you just capture your data and you can apply it to any use case using Splunk. And to make it sort of easier see that data in action. And one of the things I love from today was the dashboard studio. They're just these beautiful visualizations that really are inspiring around how data is working in your organization. And for me, I've been a Splunker for three and a half years. And I just think there is just so much to do, and there's so much of our story ahead of us and so much potential. So just really enjoying working with customers on the next data frontier, really. >> You have the Jedi Knight from Star Wars speaking, you had the F1 car racing. Lando was here, kind of the young Jedi, the old Jedi. The generations are coming together. You're seeing that old IT world, which relied on Splunk. And now you have this new developer real-time shifting left with security DevOps now going mainstream, you kind of have the confluences of these cultures coming together. It's not really clashing. It's kind of jelling. How are you handling that? How do you see that? What's Splunk kind of doing? Because I can see the themes, am I right? >> No, no. One of the stories from this morning that really struck me is we have Cal Poly and we worked with Cal Poly on their security and they actually have their students using Splunk and they run their whole security environment. And at the very top end, you have Walmart, the Fortune one, just using Splunk at a massive, incredible scale. And I think that's the power of data. I mean, data is something that everyone should and can be able to use. And that's what we're really seeing is unlocking the ability to bring, you know, bring all of your data in service of what you're trying to do, which is fun. And it just keeps growing. >> We had Zach Brown, the CEO of F1 McLaren Racing Team, here on the queue earlier. And it was interesting cause I was like driving the advantage with data, you know, kind of cliche, but they're using data very specifically, highly competitive. It almost kind of feels like a cloud kind of scale model because we've got thousands of people working on the team. They're on the track, they're competing, they're using data, they got to be agile and they got to be fast real time. Kind of sounds like the current enterprise's these days. >> Absolutely. And I think what's interesting about McLaren that the thing I love is either they have hundreds of terabytes of data moving at just at incredible speed through Splunk Enterprise, but it all goes back to their mission control in the UK. And there are 32 people that look at all that data. And I think it's got a half second delay and they make all the decisions for the car on the track. And that I think is a great lesson to any enterprises you have to, you know, you have to bring all that data together and you have to look at it and take decisions centrally for the benefit of your whole team. And I think McLaren is a really good example of when you do that it pays dividends and the team has had a really, really great season. >> Well, I want to say congratulations for pulling off a great virtual event. I know you had your physical event was on track and literally canceled the last minute because of the pandemic with the Delta virus. But it was amazing, made for digital TV kind of event. >> Absolutely, >> This is the future of media. >> Absolutely. And it is a lot of fun. And I think I'm really proud. We have done all of this with our in-house team, the brand, the experiences that you see, which is really fantastic. And it's given us a lot of ideas for sort of, you know, digital media and how we story tell, and really connect to our twenty thousand customers or two hundred and thirty thousand community members and keep everyone connected through digital. So this has been a lot of fun and a really nice moment for us this week. >> You know it's interesting, I was saying to the team here on one of our breaks, is that when you have this kind of agility with media to tell your own story directly, you're almost telling more stories there before. And there's a lot to tell you have a lot of successful customers, the new partners. What's the coolest story that you've seen. What would you share that you think is your favorite? If you could pick one or a few of them, what are your top stories that you see happening? >> So I've talked about Cal Poly, which I love because it's students and you know, the scale of Walmart, but there are so many stories. And I think the ones that I love most are the data heroes. We talk about the data here is a lot of Splunk and the people that are able to harness that data and to take action on that data and make something amazing happen. And we just see that time and time again, across all kinds of organizations where data heroes are surfacing, those insights. Those red flags, if you like and helping organizations stay on step ahead. And Conf is really a celebration of that. I think that's why we do this every year. And we really celebrate those data heroes. So across the program, probably too many to mention, but in every industry and at every scale, people are, you know, making things happen with data and that's an incredibly exciting place to be. >> Well you have a lot of great customers to, to use as references. But I got to ask you that as you go forward this year in marketing, what are your plans to take on this new dynamic? You've got hybrid events, you've got the community is always popular and thriving with Splunk at large-scale enterprises, global system integrators, doing business deals with you guys, as you guys are continuing to grow and grow and grow, what's the strategy? How do you keep the Splunk coolness going? Cause that's, you know, you guys are growing so fast. That's your job, is to keep things on track. What's your strategy? >> I think I look at that and just, we put the customer at the heart of that. And we think, you know, who are the personas, who are the people that use Splunk? What's their experience? What are they trying to do? What are those challenges? And we design those moments to help them move forward faster. And so that I think is just a really good north star. It is really unifying and our partners and customers, and every Splunker gets really behind that. So stay focused on that. >> Thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. Congratulations for great event. And thanks for having the Cube. We love coming in and sharing our media partnership with you. Thank you for coming. >> Thank you so much. And next year is your tenth year John. So we look forward to celebrating that as well. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Okay it's the Cube coverage here live in the Splunk studios. We are a virtual event, but it's turning out to be a hybrid event. It's like a VIP event, a lot of great stories. Check them out online. They'll be recycling through so much digital content. This is truly a great digital event. Jeffery, hot of the Cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Woman: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a Cube conversation with a real leader in the industry he's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get the met in person and kind of a virtual COVID 20, 20 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio. Bob Evans. He's a founder and principal analyst, the Cloud Wars Media coming to us. Bob where are you coming to us from today? >> In Pittsburgh today. Jeff. Good to see you. >> Awesome. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania cause Henry Clay was there many moons ago so that's a good town. So welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. Great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation. >> Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So I know you attended today, the Citrix Cloud Summit you know, we've covered Citrix energy in the past this year, they decided to go we'll obviously virtual like everybody did but they, you know, they did something a little creative I think as, and they broke it into pieces, which, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party the partners, all for three days in Vegas. Cause that's the only time you could get the Science Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event, >> Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys had hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways fine but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job at coming outside in here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out >> Great. And you've been covering cloud for a long time and, and you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed especially hospitality, travel you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though we're, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry. And for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play but on March 15th, approximately it was go, right? It was Light switch no more planning, no more talking, it's here now. Ready, set, go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, and you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media memes right? Who's driving your digital transformation the CEO, the CIO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. >> Jeff. Yeah. And I'd sure echo your, your initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months. There's, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousand time digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche but in fact right? You know, it has become something that's really you know, one of the driving forces, touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation. Isn't so much about the technology, of course but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced digitally driven lifestyles. And the pandemic only accelerated that as you said. So it triggered things you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B2C companies and from them back up to the B2B companies So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were, deluding themselves maybe telling themselves these different companies that yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshall from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary. And cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. >> Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because you know, Moore's law is my favorite law that nobody knows which was, you know, we tend to underestimate, excuse me we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gardener kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle. And then you know, the thing goes at the end, you know, had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago you know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we are actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember the big consultant companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies. And despite the billions of dollars of investment we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those. But I would say that today over these last six or seven months to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly. But specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud, you know, as you've said how fast some companies have been able to do this and then not remarkable thing, Jeff right. About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, in when companies change that relative to changing human behavior changing technology is somewhat easy but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it, of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here. It was right. You've got a fast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was a Kirsten Kliphouse from Google cloud. One of Citrix's partners who said that we're two best of breed companies, Citrix and Google cloud. So I thought that, that coming from Google you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in-approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been both been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. >> Right. Right. And, and just to keep going down the quote line, you know once everyone is taken care of and you, you deal with the health and safety of your people which is a number one, right? The other thing is the great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think you know, David talked about in that, in his keynote that this is an opportunity, He said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model right? There is no, there is no formula for how do you reopen, there was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was, everybody's figuring it out. And you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions. But clearly, you know, the path to, to leverage as much as you can, is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know the ability to, to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time right. Solution, but also you know, taking an aggressive tact to take advantage of this opportunity, both in taking care of their customers, but really it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. >> It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on you know, your, your guy there Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's, it's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020 and a couple of things right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies right? What, how the CEO gets engaged in saying, I, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart. And then the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today if you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happening on the one side and into that it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned come the smart, capable forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more. But instead of trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I, I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, workspaces. And so on what Citrix, you know others are doing like this, the product development cycles Jeff, you study this stuff closely. It's, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said that somebody within three months within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product available we would have said it just, it's not possible the nice idea but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? >> Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it. >> Yeah. >> At scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think that the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees you know, working from home and then, you know, bake that into the way that they had their go to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny cause that's been bantered about for, for way too long, but now, now it's here. And most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back it's going to be a lot different. So, you know, the new way to work is really important. And there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And, you know, there's a great line I heard where, you know work is an output. It's not a place to go. And, you know, I had Martin Michaelson early on in this thing, and he had the great line, you know it's so easy to fake it at work, you know, just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere. What the leadership needs to do is, is a couple of things. One, is measure output right? Not activity. And you know, it's great. People can have dinner with their family or go see the kid's baseball game. Or I guess they don't have a baseball games right now but, you know, measure output, not activity which is, doesn't seem to be that revolutionary. But I think it kind of is. And, and then the other thing is really be an enabler and be a, an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. And, but unfortunately, the counter is, you know how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day? And how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and, and texts and tweets and everything else. You know, I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these, these silly distractions automating, you know, as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that, you know, all limitations are self-imposed, right? We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example of the CEO of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company. He said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's going to take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities that that was true it is not true today yet too often, the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So flip that over to one of the customers that, that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said since then that number has gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing an a day what they used to do in a month. Like, you said it, you tell them that on March 10th, they're not going to believe it but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're going to be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you want to move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you, and go in on that. And the tech number is that sort of sit back and say, ah well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're going to get destroyed. They're going to get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're going to see this massive forcing function in the tech industry. That's going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is, going to be a fascinating talk. >> So I throw on a follow up to make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time. >> Yeah. At Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. >> Wow. >> So it's 8,000 a day. >> Wow. I mean the thing that highlights to me, Bob, and the fact that we're doing this right now, and none of us had to get on an airplane is, you know, I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable? right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying instead of focusing what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't and that would be great and we'd have a good time but conversely, there's so many new things that you can do right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And, and for like, you know, events like the one today. And, you know, we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense, of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or, you know, whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants. Who've never attended the, the events before. So I think he really brings up a good point, which is, you know, focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do because we can't do anything about those anyway >> No, and you know, that old line of a wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first (laughs) you know, one of the other guests that that was on the Cloud Summit today Jeff, I don't know if you got to see 'em, but Steve Shute from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization he said this about Citrix. "Citrix workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud based access for this new generation of remote workers." So you get companies like SAP, and, you know, you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful. They end up, your point Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott. He recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers as devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures Hey, he was only at work, four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down what they meant in February. Isn't going to to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. >> Right. Right. Another big theme I wanted to touch base with you on it was very evident at the at the show today was multicloud right and hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in, in the day. And you know Amazon really changed the game in, in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is you know, we had seven year headstart. Nobody even was paying attention to the small book seller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly right? As horses for courses, and really focusing at the application first right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs, can be any place in that in a large organization you know, this is pick an airline or, or a big bank right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to to have stuff running in Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center. IBM cloud, Ali Baba. I mean there's restrictions for location and, and data sovereigncy and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multicloud hybrid cloud. Pick your, pick your, your adjective but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. >> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noga is that the CIO at mass General Brigham, one of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in, in, in his hospital organizations, you know transformation, what they've been able today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not people poor. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not a place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not the thing that it's a panacea for everything though, big fan, but also a realist about it. >> Great. >> And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multicloud and I know all the big tech vendors would love it and say Oh no, it's not a multicloud, but just be my cloud. Just, just use my stuff. Everything will be easy, but that's not true. So I think Citrix position itself really well big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of like a road war you loose five or seven years ago, as long as he, or she can connect through email and, you know, sending a sales data back and forth, they're all set. Now. It's very different. You've got people sitting in a wildly different environments for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. But that, that seamless experience always dependable, always reliable is just, you know, it can't be compromised. And I just thought you have one you know, high level thought about what happened. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix certainly a fine company put it. It's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world but look at the companies we have, the Microsoft, SAP talking about Google Cloud, AWS, you know, up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that is undeniable right now. >> Right. Right. And I think it's driven, you know, we hear over and over right? I mean, co-opertition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer's going to choose you know, kind of by workload, even if you will or by budget as to what they're going to do where so you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to be you're going to get, you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic, that's, that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and you know, and, and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like okay. So what you know, who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, you know, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI, to very specific functions and tasks to, again, help people prioritize what they're going to do help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do. And really, you know at a whole another level of, of productivity really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next, my next marginal minute? You know, cause ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work, done it, how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities are gargantuan. >> Jeff. The point you made a few minutes ago about, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it, what it'll be overtime well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet. They don't have the delivery system to get it in there, cloud's going to be an accelerator for that. And it gives the tech companies, which and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company. Now as a data company, every company says, it's an analytics. Everybody says I'm into AI. Every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers cause the competitive level is going to soar. It's going to bring more choice. As you said, the more customers more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech vendors. You've got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google cloud said, Hey, you know, if, if a shoe company or a retailer or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do. And they don't want to do that. >> Right. >> So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI, unlike anything that we've ever seen. >> Yeah. >> And that's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. >> Yeah. Baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in, in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I just gave you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with, with COVID in terms of the rate of change. And the, you know there's no more talking, the time to move is now, share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing you know, as you, as you look forward a little bit you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited. What's getting you up in the morning. >> Yeah. Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we, I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done, not only in the last six months but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in health care and making it available to more people, in education the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even pre-teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe, there's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're going to look back on this point and say, this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier worrying so much about the things we can't do. And instead put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make. And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are going to be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here. And the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends and more and more Jeff, I think these tech companies are going to say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it rather than just through the narrow lens of, you know sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I, I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future is going to bring. >> Well, Thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's very prolific writer and again, really, really a great to meet you in person. And thanks for sharing your thoughts >> Jeff, thanks so much. You guys do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. >> Thank you. Allright. He's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online. Their virtual conference. I'm John Furrier here in the Cube studio for a conversation with Matt Garman, Vice president. Sales amount of AWS. We're here with our quarantine crew. Matt. Thanks for joining me. I know your remote as well. We're living in a virtualized world. Thanks for coming on. AWS Summit is now online. You're running sales and market for the company. This is really caught a lot of companies by surprise this this situation sheltering in place. It's highlighted a lot of scale problems. One of them is events. So we're here at the AWS Summit online, and you guys are still pulling it off A lot of content. Great to see you. >>Great. Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>So before we get into some of the announcements in the customer focus things that you guys are doing, you and I both met. We did an interview when you were running the EEC to you've been with Amazon for a long time, Got a storied history. You were there from one E. C two launched saw Amazon grow. This really kind of ties into some reporting that we've been doing where cloud native a scale of what advice became it really was a game changer and that showed the at scale opportunity for startups. And now the enterprise. This covert 19 is really showing companies and individuals their living it, of being disrupted, where the Internet and large scale tools and technologies can help them, but also exposes gaps in their lives or in companies, cases, things like provisioning VP ends. Maybe they didn't figure out 100% would be at home, but then going forward, the applications are now thinking about this new virtualized world. Even when it comes back to normal, be somewhat of a hybrid, you know, integrated world. This will put pressure on you guys as Amazon to build more capacity like you did with the see too, but at a whole nother level. So I want to get into that and more. But this covert 19 really has changed the game for the world. What do you guys see in your customer base? This is a big part of the conversation. What's going on? >>Thanks, John, And you're right. This is an unprecedented time for us, and on day eight of us as well as our customers are all trying to figure it out. I think you know, part of part of what we've seen from our customers as we talk out there, whether they're public service or private customers is is really that that demands that they're seeing from their customer bases are rapidly changing. Some customers have their businesses have seen much fewer lower demands and others before. But others they're seeing 10 21 100 x more business than they were before. And what we're seeing is that those customers that have their business running in the cloud are able to handle that on quickly. Our ableto adapt and change and grow with their changing customer base, and sometimes that's internal. Sometimes you're like you said. That's because, um, they need to scale up their VPN or they need to scale up their virtual workstations. Other times, it's customers who maybe they run a large call center business. But their call center folks are no longer able to come into the office, and they quickly spin up a virtual call center. We've seen our Amazon connect business really, really take off as customers quickly united to figure out how they can manage the actually increased call Williams they're seeing, but in a virtual location. And finally, we're just seeing some customers, whether they're from entertainment from communication or online education. Many of these businesses they're scaling rapidly wouldn't have been able to do it if they're running in their own data center. But because they're in the cloud, they're able to quickly spin up more instances, spin up more storage and meet the demands of their customers. So I think it's been nice to see. Fortunately for us, we've had many years, as you mentioned, I used to run the C two team on, and we've been thinking for over a decade about how we really manage that supply chain. How do we ensure that we're able to handle rapidly scaling? So we've really optimized our supply chain Unfortunately, in a good position where we can continue to operate, continue to scale and continue to handle the demands are growing customer base even unprecedented times like this. >>You know, you mentioned that I want to get into that concept. You wrote a block post the other day on the Amazon Day one blawg keeping organizations running during Covad 19 and you kind of teased out this point about average connected time. And if you think about this crisis, this really is that the true test for scale and elasticity of having that cloud model and some of the clouds have not done as well as Amazon. There's been some stories out there. Google and Microsoft has had the up time you guys had, but this really has been the future pulled forward. So you guys have a lot of customers like Netflix like slack, that are really taken advantage of this. This is the true test of cloud and only the beginning again. Like I said, this is going to show a lot of gaps in most other traditional enterprises. But this highlights the tests that you guys were waiting for. I won't say that you're waiting for a crisis, but cloud, this is ultimately the test. Your thoughts on Netflix, who Lou Slack, A bunch of other names land and he throws the slide. But we have re invent. But the >>big I think if you look at, obviously we have a lot more time at home, right? I'm at home here in Seattle. A lot of us are spending more time at home. And so a lot of the streaming services like you said, the Netflix is the who lose that Disney Pluses of the world. Also games. Think about how many kids were playing fortnight or playing a or the video games. A lot of those businesses have really seen an increase in their demand on they have been able to just seamlessly scale along with eight of us on the work side. Think about everybody from slack that runs entirely on AWS Zoom, who runs the vast majority of their infrastructure and aws all of these communication on work from home capabilities. These are all running on AWS enabled many of the scale, and we think all of our kids, our kids are all trying to figure out what a school look like. You don't actually go to school. I was talking from the team at Blackboard. They've seen a 10 sometimes even 100 X increase in their business. America will just seamlessly scale up on demand. I mean, really overnight just exploded. >>I was on Twitter just the other day, talking with some folks because the whole jet, I think, is going down. I was gonna wing of my normal commentary. Um and this is the public sector challenge as well. You mentioned schools. These air traditionally? No, I t or enterprise like chops. They need scale now. They need it fast. They have to stand up. I imagine this is the kind of scenario that this is also gonna hit the small, medium sized enterprises as well as some of the big ones. So the big guys have legacy problems, data silos, whatever we've had, great. Comes with some of your team members there. But that's just one sector. You got small, medium size enterprises that don't have any I t public sector and education. They're gonna be in market in months, if not >>tomorrow. Public sector is a super interesting one. And, frankly, our public sector team I don't know that they have slept in the past three months working to try to help governments, both the United States and internationally, everything from me. If you think about it, our our unemployment systems in states across the United States have gone from something like 3% unemployment claims to 15% unemployment claims within a two month period. Those systems are not meant to scale like that, and they reached out to us pretty quickly to see how we could help them start to scale. You think about some of the the systems that are trying to send out checks to people, systems that are trying to send out small making loans to folks. We've been really working deeply with many of those government agencies to try to figure out how we can get the money in the hands of the individuals that need it as quickly as possible and really help those legacy systems. Sometimes they're built on, you know, legacy databases or Oracle's or Microsoft sequel systems. And those things just aren't scaling. And they're trying to figure out How can they get to a more modern architecture that can really keep scaling with the needs of the new demand that they're reaching? It's just something that didn't anticipate before. >>Yeah, and I think your customers, as you're now going to be overseeing the larger global organization, sales and marketing, um, it's not like you guys are preaching to the customers because you're living through the same crisis in an environment that they are. You certainly can align with their empathy and certainly help them solve problems. But now we're in a business climate where we're seeing unemployment numbers of massive numbers. Usually companies come out of these challenges, and we think it could be highly accelerated on an upward trajectory, flat or negative. In 2008. That crisis we saw the winners come out of that one. You guys rode that wave with AWS. Easy to can. You know that world now coming out of this next pandemic, it's going to be hybrid or virtualization of meat of life. >>How are >>you leading your team? How are you talking to customers? I'm out of this empathy, but you got to run an organization. You have to still sell services and market your products You got reinvent was a physical event. I mean, >>these air, >>huge challenges you're living them to. What's your >>take on >>all this? >>Yeah, part of I think you know, in my new role. And as you mentioned, I used to run the computing with AWS, including easy to many compute services for about 13 years before coming and running. Now the sales and marketing, or AWS >>and And in >>that role, you know, a lot of what I would think about is how we really help our customers understand how critical it >>is to the >>her hair. The cloud gives you just so much more flexibility, so much more agility. And we would you know, there's a bunch of the early adopters would lead into that and really got it. And once they got onto the cloud, they saw their innovation level went up, their agility goes up all those things. But, you know, there was still a lot of folks that were they're interested. I mean, we obviously have, ah, decent sized business today and many, many millions of customers that are using the cloud today. But some of them are have been slower to kind of fully adopt and really move all of their business critical workloads to the cloud. I firmly believe that coming out of this crisis, you're gonna have two types of of businesses. You're gonna have some that just go into their shell, right? They're just going to say I'm just gonna try to survive. I'm just gonna try that to get by, going to try to conserve every little bit of something. I can just protect what I have. You know, I don't think those are long term. I'm not optimistic of. Those are going to be the businesses that right. I think every time you see a crisis, you have businesses that lean into it. They're smart about it. They think about long term. What are the things that are going to help me compete in this new world? And I think Cloud is gonna be one of those things. We've talked to everybody from airlines to traditional Fortune 500 enterprises, and they see that like they're still leaning into the cloud, even even airlines. No one's been hit harder than the airlines. And even I've talked to several executives and airlines their saying Look, my cloud initiative, that's the thing I'm not cutting. I'm gonna cut everything else. But this is the thing that's gonna let me succeed when I really get into that new world. And so I really think you're going to see some of those folks that maybe you were hesitant before so again in the next 34 years. Maybe I'll get to the cloud. I really think that they're going to start to lead in because they're going to realize if my competitors or in the cloud and I'm not that is gonna be a significant disadvantage and, you know, knock on wood. Hopefully, there's no other global pandemic, but they have to deal with. But I think it just really highlights any uncertainty in the world. There's going to be differences and they just are unable to deal with to the flexibility and the scale that they want to go up and down, by the way that they're unable to really handle whatever the world throws up. But I think we're going to be living in a continually uncertain environment. >>Yeah, I definitely would agree with you, and I think it's going to get back to normal at some point, but even is gonna have an impact into 2021 as many people are kind of figuring out the window, people saying no spring 2021 Maybe, you know, there we started get some semblance of normality the way it was, but still that environment and this brings up the whole summit online that you guys are doing. Your summits have been a great set of events. We've covered many of them with the real key physical cube. Now we're doing the Virtual Cube. They've been a practitioner and user, the developer builder event. It's a free event. Nutrition had. Now you have them all over the world. They're going on virtual. People still need to build out these projects. There's still a demand, and some projects are being cut. Some are, as you guys look over the horizon with your customer base conversations around what to fund whatnot the fund. As you mentioned. What are some of the things that you're seeing and recommending to customers that they should continue to double down on? Because smart manager is going to step back and say, Hey, I can see some gaps. We're going to double down on that and we're gonna kill that. We're gonna move this over here. There's going to be a reinvention and growth strategy that they have to figure out quickly. There's no yet playbooks emerging, but it's clear out the video virtual interactions. But those projects get double down your thoughts on the customer builders out there. >>I think that's absolutely right in it and expands every industry you can think about. Think about, you know, I was talking Teoh several customers in the healthcare space. And how long has it been five years that people have been touting that telemedicine is really gonna be that thing that eventually comes and eventually becomes a big thing? This has really accelerated that, such that. Now I've talked to probably dozens and dozens of people who, for the very first time of talk to their doctors over being their cell phone because they don't want to go into the hospital for you're getting, you know, six or something like that. Then they just have a minor medical things you need to do. Telemedicine is one of those things that is really taking off, and there's been really enabling, frankly, that customers have been able to do telemedicine. That's really helps, knows that that wanted to stay safe but also get good medical advice. I think that's just one example where we're gonna continue to see this go. I think coming out of this the other thing, our custom, lot of our customers were thinking about, and anytime you really go into an uncertain economic world. You want to think about capital preservation. Now is not the time you want to go spend money to build your own data center or to buy your own servers. If ever there was a time where the cloud makes the most sense, capital preservation >>is E >>particularly we don't know if there's gonna be an economic recession. We don't know how long this is going to take. All businesses, whether they're severely impacted, should be really thinking about that capital preservation. But they've also got to be thinking about how they innovate. You know, I've talked to ah, popular ride sharing customer the other day, and they were talking about how ride sharing his way down. But they're still using this as a time to lean forward into innovation because they know coming out of this, they want to be ahead of where their competitors are going to be. And they really want to use this as an opportunity to take their own internal teams, focus them on where they think the biggest potential is gonna be. And then once the economy turns around people out and about again, they can hit the accelerator and really take off. So I think that's really how a lot of our customers were thinking about situation where they're right now. >>You know, you guys haven't had a steep learning curve over the years with cloud and cloud scale. I think as the world comes in, the human capital piece becomes interesting, too, not just on of spending with money, monetary, the human capital to work, how people are contributing. So this brings up the whole reinvention. It's funny to watch as people are forced with these first generation problems of how to make things digital, how to get scale going. You have people who have learned it, have a learning curve, and again there's no compression algorithm for experience, as you guys like to point out. So >>this is >>creating this kind of like, How do I change the roles of my company? And so I want to get your thoughts because we're looking for proof points because a lot of the answers are not yet evolved and usually things they're not understood before they become mainstream. But people have to react really fast. What are some examples? Can you give around how Cove in applications are rolling out because that's truly a indicator in my mind of what people are doing with the cloud. Because Covert was an instant response. We've already interviewed a few folks that are on Amazon around Covitz Solutions, where the standing of either analytics or doing some things Could you use the covert of example of how rapid deployment or reinvention of data or business models our rendering themselves? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a couple of different what one is. But for the very first thing that most people look at is how do we get data like we just need to find data around this space. And so we've worked with a number of partners and customers on How do we really go, help build Data Lakes in the cloud and coming getting all that data in one place so that both governments as well as private enterprises, can really start to think of that Data slices in different ways on get to look at what is the actual data, whether it's one of the number of hospital that's available one of the number of tests that are happening, you know, one of the number of oh infections that we're seeing, where the rate of change, etcetera. We also work with a number of our analytics partners, and we have a wide range of analytics partners that are really taking this as an opportunity where they can rapidly then take that data and slice it a number of different ways to try to help understand how they respond. I think you know, the first part of that was on the healthcare side where folks were saying, Where do we need enough ventilators? Where we where do we need to go? Build hospitals? Are we start to identify hot spots right where I see if you can really look at kind of second order derivatives of kind of changes, and you can look at it close enough, you could say, Oh, there's a hot spot popping up in this particular area and eventually you know, if we can get some better data, contract tracing and things like that where you can open up the economy and still have, you know very quickly identify where a hot spot might be a merging. Those are the types of data pieces that you know what the right levels of of security and data privacy, but with but with access to that data, we can get a handle on how some of these things are happening. Then I think you go and you look at s So that's that's kind of some of the data analytics pieces. Right? Then you also go look at what are folks doing on the testing side? And I think, you know, there's a lot of discussion about how well testing is done. I think we all >>know that there >>are ways that we always thought maybe it was a little bit further along with it is, but there's a number of private places that are actually really speeding up. I think this is one of the big areas that Amazon best, right? And I don't I don't know. We'll see if we are able to get there faster than some of the other places, but we we see a real need for testing. Testing is one of those such a critical component if we could do rapid testing, frequent testing, both for our own employees. But frankly, for for all the industries that we all rely on, I have come to rely on, particularly in this virtual world. We know that the faster we can get testing and more reliable, we can get testing. The better we are able to then isolate, get people to self quarantine and really kind of control that mass spread >>of the >>disease. >>I know >>you know >>healthcare is interesting. One of the emerging things we're seeing coming out of the summit here and some of the conversations we had is how the enterprise has always been kind of a hard environment to find stuff. As people live at home and working at home, working remotely, working in remote teams, the idea of searching for stuff becomes interesting. So you guys announced the general availability, Kendra. The timing couldn't have been better for that, because that's really giving you a Google like vibe feel for funding information. But it's really an integration play under the covers, so I think that's the kind of trend that we're seeing. We're seeing also startups putting up APS out there so you see a lot of activity. That's kind of in line with this. That you guys are announcing anything >>at any >>update on the Kendra or >>Canada is fantastic, and it's it's really I think struck a nerve with folks where the traditional way of thinking about search, particularly internal for internal Internets just doesn't work. You know how many hits you get and how many millions of people across billions and billions of people on the Internet that that model works on the Internet. You might be looking for very specific things. Um, and with machine learning, we're able to tell what is the intent of the requests that people are looking for and take you to the right place so that if you say you know one of the hours of my help desk, there's a very specific page that you're looking for, which is this number. In fact, you're not looking for a job to go to. You're not looking for information about help desks. You're looking for the actual hours of my internal help desks, particularly probably from my building. And as we do build these ML models that can start to learn on how your Internet works and how people are thinking about it and what's helpful or not, we've been able to improve an Internet search orders of magnitude. I've used it internally for our own. I'm instrumented it. It's night and day compared to what we used before was kind of your keyword search type of thing. So I think applying ML, particularly when people remote and really relying on resource, is like that where they can't just, you know, lean over to a cube next to them and say, Hey, we're still you know what time is the help desk open? >>I think getting breaking down the silos to just we build that abstraction layer a data leak really kind of makes a big difference. >>That's right. >>So final question for you as companies settle into the new realities that are upon them, what's the outlook for the rest of 2020 for you guys? And what do you say? That customers that are here on the online trying to consume the virtual content that they should be building out because you've got not just customers. You've got commercial customers, you got public sector and you got an ecosystem. You got partners out there who are building on top of AWS. Um, rolling this together. What's your message to them? What's on the outlook? >>2020 Number one. I encourage everyone to take advantage. I think In many ways, some of these virtual summits are great opportunity, maybe, for those were unable to travel to the summit or to be able to actually physically get there. It's a great opportunity to learn, really dive in trying to do some virtual labs really get in and understand some of the new features and functionality that are out there from a partner perspective. Many of the things that we're building, whether it's our outflow service that we just launched a couple of weeks ago, that helps us to really connects to our various partners into a data lake. As John was mentioning those air, these were really some of the things that you know, if you think about our broad swath of our partner ecosystem, encourage our customers to really look at all of the partners that are running on AWS who have great solutions. Like the Cube. You're looking for virtual events. They have. They have an awesome product you should check out, but we have a wide set of partners that will help you. Yeah, put together the virtual world that you all are trying to work through right now and encourage you just to learn >>I really appreciate the plug, actually, one for the cube. A new event Cloud. What? We're trying to figure it out. I think this kind of reminds me of a famous quote I heard on the queue, which is a notable one, is that everything in the future that is going to be invented was on Star Trek or Star Wars. So I assume we're gonna have video cameras and everyone's office, and we'll be able to go and talk to folks. So looking forward to again, standing up content, getting the content and connecting people. Thanks for spending >>the >>time out of your day to come in and talk with me and share your insights. And, ah, Amazon Summit Web services Summit online Virtual cube Virtual. Thanks for your time. Appreciate your insights. >>Great. Thank you. >>OK, Cube here. Virtual in our studio covering remotely all the top content out there covering AWS summit online. There's a whole new reality rolling it together. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, this year's event happening digitally, we're talking to Red Hat executives, partners, customers, where they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this digital event. And really important topic, of course, has been Automation for a long time, I think back to my career automation is something we've been talking about for decades, but even more important in today's age. Happy to welcome back to the program, Tim Kramer with Red Hat, Vice President of Engineering is that I don't have listed view here. But since we last talked to him at Ansible Fest, has been a little expansion in the scope of what you're working on. First of all, welcome back, and tell us what's new in your world? >> All right, thanks a lot. Yeah, there's been rather substantial change in roles. I'm now in charge actually, of all of the engineering within Red Hat. All the development engineering site includes: the middleware teams, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course management and automation, the new team that we just brought over from IBM doing Advanced Container Management. I'm basically running the whole thing and OpenShift of course. >> Excellent. Just a few things to keep you busy. Congratulations on that and love your support in the the Boston "Hello World" rella eight shirt that of course we saw last year at summit. I know one of the things being digital is people do miss some of the t-shirts. I know my family was quite fond of the "May The Fourth Be With You" shirts, that Red Hat did one year at summit. Of course, celebrating Star Wars Day, highly celebrated in in the Miniman household. But Tim, let's talk about Ansible. This brings our audience up to speed, what's happening that some of the latest pieces, and of course, it's been one of the great success stories. Ansible was a lot of adoption before the acquisition, but really accelerated over the last few years? >> At Ansible Fest, we talked a lot about technology to come and showed a few demos of the possibilities. What we have done since then is actually bring all of that technology to life and to expand it. One thing that Red Hat has really done is continue to invest heavily in Ansible, to make sure that we can bring new capabilities and new value to the subscription for everyone. Some of the things that have been happening since summit, which of course we are in, and since Ansible Fest, since we last talked was it, the community continues to scale at a really rapid rate. It's almost hard to keep up. And the number of modules that we have had is grown just tremendously. We have well over 3000 modules now that are available, and as customers and partners and also just casual users are looking through that, it's difficult to figure out: what's really supported? What's really rock solid? What can I count on? And what is, maybe sort of that Wild West community, I'm just trying out some stuff with Ansible and see how it goes. We've been focusing on a lot, is a place that you can come to the Ansible automation platform and the hub where you can now get this content and you can rely on the fact that it's going to be certified by partners, tested by partners, they're always keeping up with the latest updates. A great example of this is, let's just take NetApp or F5, or Cisco as good examples, across the various spaces, we absolutely in the Ansible engineering team are not experts on all of the latest changes, the new hardware coming out, the new software upgrades that they're making. And our ability to keep up with that is pretty difficult. We just can't do it, but they sure can. And their customers, and our customers are both demanding that we give them more content, better content, and we need to be able to do it at the rate that our partners want to be able to provide that kind. As an example, normally we were kind of slowing Ansible down and trying to do one release every six months. But if a new piece of software, a new switch or a new disk array or anything comes out in the meantime, all of our customers had to wait for that next six months release, that was not very convenient. And having an expectation that our partners are going to line up on our schedule is, well, That didn't work out so well for them. We've created the certified content. And we now have the goals to have 50 certified partners. Back at first, I think we had three or four. We're now up to 30, our goal is to hit 50. We had about 100 modules that we showed at fest that were certified, we now have over 1200 modules that are certified content. And these are our partners, creating this content and making it stable and secure for everyone to use. >>So that, I think, by far   >> That was the coolest thing that we've done. >> Yeah, it's great to see that progress. Congratulations on the momentum since Ansible Fest. One of the other things talked about that back at that show, we talked about how analytics and automation, how those are going together, how's adoption been? Is this impossibly met? >> Adoption on the analytic side has been... It's been taking off. It was pretty nascent. I can tell you that, that we've grown by about five X there, but we started a little bit small. We had a few customers that signed up early on to do it. I think probably the more impressive thing is that, we have a couple of customers in markets that you would traditionally think, we're not going to get their data, they're more concerned about what we're sharing, but we have a major bank, we have a major manufacturer that have well over 10,000 systems providing data back into Red Hat that allows us then to analyze and provide a bunch of analytics back on their running estate. And I think that's amazing, seeing the big customers that are coming in from Marcus that you might think, we're probably not going to get a lot of uptake has been really exciting to me. >> All right, you talked a bit about how Ansible fits into the ecosystem, of course being at summit, want to understand a bit more how Ansible the latest of how it's fitting into the rest of the Red Hat portfolio. I've got interviews with Stephanie Shiraz, talking about you, Raul and Joe Fitzgerald, talking about ACM, your group I know is heavily involved working on a lot of those pieces. Help us understand how this is kind of a seamless portfolio. >> I think that's one of the most important things that we do within Red Hat team, is that we have to share the sufficiency across all the product groups and make them better and provide an additional enhanced value there. We've done a lot on the RHEL side, probably one of the maybe lesser known thing is that, we've been working really closely on OpenShift. And actually, we have a lot of customers now that really want the Ansible automation hub available on OpenShift as a first-class application. We're doing things, we're writing operators for those so that we can automate the updates and upgrades and back up and all of that important functionality, so that it's really easy, than to manage your Ansible automation hub, running on OpenShift, that's one big thing. And then we're going to integrate that really well into the advanced container management, that the team from IBM that came over is working towards. I have a really close partnership with ACM team to make sure that we can start to not only gather lists of affected systems, but then take that list and do a bunch of automations against it. >> That's one. On the RHEL side, we've done a lot. We introduced at last summit rally, and we talked about having insights as part of that. Since then, we've been adding more and more capabilities into insights, and to enhance that value of the subscription route. We looked at adding in, well, advisor is now what we used to call insights. It's just something that advises you about problems or issues that may be occurring in your URL instances that are running on prem. We've also added in a drift service, so you can tell if your configurations are sort of drifting apart. We've added in a compliance checker, so you can define some kind of a policy or compliance that you want to enforce on all of your running instances, and we make sure that you're still compliant. We also have a vulnerability detector, which you'd kind of expect, so any nasty security issues that come along, we can pop those up and show you right away. And probably some of the... One of the newer things is, we allow you to do patching. And you can do that patching, right from cloud@redhat.com. We also have another new very exciting feature, which is Subscription Watch, also on cloud@redhat.com. And what this allows you to do is to see and manage all of your subscriptions across your entire hybrid estate. From what you're running on prem, to what you're running in any of the public clouds, we can actually track that for you. You can see what kind of usage you have. And then, make better economic decisions for yourself, and then be able to easily expand that usage if you want to, it used to be a little bit more difficult to do that. We're trying to make subscriptions just like as much in the background as possible to make it easier for our customers. >> Tim, one of one of the big changes customers have to go through is moving from, their environment in their data centers, to the leverage of SaaS and managing things that are outside of their control and the public cloud. You've got an engineering development team, and you've got software that went from, mostly going in customers data centers too, you've got SaaS offerings, you're living in the public cloud. Want to understand, what's changing in your world? What advice would you give to other people as to kind of the learnings that Red Hat has had going through those pieces? >> It's actually a kind of a neat story, because after we change to start making a lot of our services that we had just only shipping products on prem into cloud based services, we had to develop this platform to be able to host all of these services. We started with the insights platform, because we already had that running out in the public cloud. So that was the obvious first thing to base everything on. But we had to build out that platform so that it could support all these services, the ones I just talked about, that are with REL are really good examples. Between a policy, compliance drift, all of these different kinds of services that we're offering, we had to build out that set of capabilities and services in what we're calling sort of the cloud@redhat.com platform. What I'm seeing is that a lot of customers are going through some of these same kinds of thoughts. Like they have a myriad, let's say of applications that are running that they're trying to provide back into their their own company. Different divisions of a company, they have things that are running in the cloud, some things that are running on prem, and they want to start to be able to offer a more cohesive set of services, consolidate some of these, share some of the engineering effort that they have across their various teams. This is exactly the journey that we went through to get to cloud@redhat.com. Finding a surprising number of customers that are actually really interested just in that story, about how we did that. One of the things that we've found is, we've been working with the folks at the open innovation labs within Red Hat. And this is one of the transformation stories that they see constantly as well. We've worked with them and shared this, they're a great resource to help customers kind of think through that problem and get them into a new kind of a platform. But it's quite a journey. We've been really focused on the infrastructure and on prem. Moving to the cloud was a big. But I'll tell you it engineering can move so much faster in a SaaS service than it can with on prem software delivery. It's been remarkable how quickly we could get there. >> Tim, one other thing, if I look at Red Hat, you're a global company, most development organizations are highly distributed to begin with. So many companies today are now having to rapidly figure out how do I manage people that are working from home? How do I live in these environments? From an automation tooling, we'd love to hear any advice you have there, as well as just anything else from your engineering experience in your teams that other people might be able to learn from, as they're dealing with today's landscape. >> To be honest, this is a... We have never seen anything like this in our history, with this kind of pandemic that's happening worldwide. It's shifting everything about business. And it has been challenging just within Red Hat engineering for how we can manage the engineers and their expectations and how difficult it can be to work from home. I have amazing stories from my own engineers. I had an engineer who's in Spain and his wife is a nurse. She's on like 18-hour shifts, the hospital comes back, they have to separate, he's got the kids. And because they don't want them to get infected, it's a really, really difficult working situation for a lot of families out there to try to make it through this. One of the things at Red Hat is, we just have to recognize that it's okay to slow things down a little bit. Let our engineers not feel the pressure that they have to do both childcare and school-at-home and caring for sick relatives or sick family, as well as meet all of your deadlines, it's kind of too much. We've been really... We're trying to be very compassionate with our folks letting them know that we have their back, and it's going to be okay as we try to get ourselves through this ridiculously different time that we've never seen anything like this, like I said. From an engineering perspective, I think work-from-home has been, it's okay for some people. If you have a larger home, I think it's a little easier maybe to find a room that you can go into and do your work. For some, no, if they're in an apartment, or you're sharing with a bunch of friends, it's not your workplace. And it can be really challenging to figure out how to work for eight hours a day with sort of a lot of distractions or just feeling confined and it's just been really difficult for anybody that wants to try to get out, you go a little stir-crazy. The good thing I guess is that engineering is naturally lends itself to being able to be remote and work from home. We have an advantage that way, than other industries, which is great. But it's definitely been really challenging for our teams to be able to cope with this and all we can do is just be really understanding. >> Tim, we appreciate the stories, they're definitely everyone's working through some challenging times. Want to give you the final word as to really takeaways as to what should people be watching? What things should people be going back and looking at from an automation standpoint as they leave Red Hat Summit 2020? >> We're just going to continue to work with the community, work with our partners, get more certified content and continue to scale, the best way that we can for all of our users and our customers. That is the key focus. We want to continue automating and providing all of that flexibility. If you want all 4000 modules and a big download, we certainly are... We're going to continue to give you that option. But if you want to be able to start customizing what you download, maybe only relying on certified content, instead of community content, we're going to give you that option now as well, so that you know what you're running. And with the analytics, we're just scratching the surface here. We're getting some great data. It's helping us to develop new ways of insights into how your systems are running. And that'll get very exciting as we go forward. I know that we've seen like a Forex increase already in the amount of insights attached to REL, which is really great, and for now, at least in the hundreds of customers that are using the AI, I think as we show more value there, you'll get a lot more customers to provide some of their data which will allow us then collectively to come up with some really great analytics to help people become more efficient with your automation. >> Well, Tim Kramer, thank you so much for the updates. And thank you to everything your team's doing. And just a reminder to the audience, of course, these communities not only are important technical resources, but many of them you've made friends with over the years. If you need help, reach out to the community. There are so many good stories that can be found amongst these communities helping each other through these challenging times. Much more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCube. 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