[MUSIC PLAYING]
RICHARD SEROTER: All right, good to see everybody.
My name is Richard.
I'm with Google Cloud.
James, remind me, what do you do?
JAMES WATTERS: Hey, Richard.
How are you doing?
I work at VMware Tanzu.
RICHARD SEROTER: That's right.
You do some technical stuff, right?
I think we can count on you for some technical insight.
JAMES WATTERS: I think they call me the chief technology
officer of our division in a business formal way, yep.
RICHARD SEROTER: Nice.
Awesome.
Well, I appreciate you taking some time to chat today.
We're going to talk about mental models for multicloud
to start with here.
How do you think about this?
When you hear about multicloud, it's
usually a multidimensional kind of question.
How do you kind of frame that in your own mind
and how do you talk to other people about it?
JAMES WATTERS: First thing I'd say,
Richard, is it's really relevant.
I was literally just on a Zoom with a Canadian bank
that is a joint customer of Anthos and Tanzu.
And their regulator was like, hey, show me
how you failover between things.
So the first thing I'd say is it's not really
a fabricated conversation.
It's really a reality of heterogeneous enterprises.
And I think in some sense, there are
people dealing with the extreme of it, which is like,
hey, I'm a little startup in San Francisco
and I just want to pick a cloud and go.
Don't bother me with multicloud.
And then I think you've got the other example of, hey,
I'm a 70-year-old company at scale
that has a lot of complexity.
And I need thinking that helps me
parse and digest that complexity of the way I operate.
So the way I think about it is it's
a very contextual word, that different people
can talk past each other very quickly
if they have different needs and the different operating models.
So I think being very contextual about how
you think of multicloud and what that means to the person saying
it is really important.
And when I see the Twitter wars about it,
I don't get into them, because usually it's just one person
coming from one context talking past someone else
from the other one.
Does that make any sense to you in your travels, your time
over at Google?
RICHARD SEROTER: It does.
It does.
So you obviously see it from different ways,
as we look at the compute layers, data, things like that.
But when you hear someone say that this makes sense to them,
where are they typically coming from?
You mentioned heterogeneity, this environment,
they've got different sort of setups.
Where are they usually coming from?
Why do they say this makes sense?
JAMES WATTERS: I think the context of the people that
think it doesn't make sense are the people that
are very focused on, say, data gravity problems.
And they've designed a lot of their identity and security
models specifically to one cloud.
So if you're all in on Redshift on Amazon and everything you do
is an IAM rule, you're going to pop your head up and go,
multicloud?
I got data gravity everywhere and everything
is customized to an IAM rule.
That sounds really hard.
I think the other universe of people come at it from more
of a developer productivity perspective, where they say,
it's really about developer gravity.
And everything I do is somewhere within the Kubernetes ecosystem
because I want the most pluggable set
of developer tools, CI/CD.
I want things that developers are familiar with,
the latest frameworks, the latest
open-source technologies.
And so that developer gravity is inherently multicloud
because software is inherently multicloud.
So I see people that are very focused on big analytics
and very deeply integrated system administration
principles arguing with people that
are very developer-oriented and might
be coming at this more from an open source and productivity
perspective.
But I said, I don't get in the middle of that,
because they're actually not disagreeing.
They're just saying very different things.
RICHARD SEROTER: That's right.
Yeah, it makes sense.
So when you look at the hard parts of this,
so when you are talking to someone, going hey,
we're going down this path, or maybe we accidentally realized
we're already doing a lot of this,
where do you see the sticky points,
where someone has to really be thoughtful about how
to do it right?
JAMES WATTERS: Yeah.
I think I come back to that model I gave to you, which--
and I think I'm just an observer.
But I think Google made some novel announcements
about trying to bring BigQuery everywhere.
I've not used it or I don't know much about it,
but that was at least novel, which is like, hey, we're
going to do that.
But I think most people probably run your BigQuery stuff
on the cloud, like they're not running that everywhere today.
That was more of a concept car almost
was how I looked at that.
That was kind of cool.
So that's something that I think is inherently still hard.
If you look at how much it costs to get data moving from one
cloud to the next and you're big doing analytics,
I think that is hard.
And I think you'll lose credibility with people
if you somehow pretend you can abstract and nullify
that equation.
I think where people are getting really big wins there,
Richard-- and this is why I'm happy to participate here--
is I do think that there's an emerging DevSecOps ecosystem
that's happening that is, by its nature,
multicloud because it's a best-of-breed DevSecOps tool
chain.
And I think that's very centered on Kubernetes
and the community that's happening there,
and that no large-scale organization that I've met
wants to build the new DevSecOps platform
for every infrastructure they consume.
That doesn't really make sense.
And the biggest pauses I get are people that really even want
to build IAM roles into one DevSecOps pipeline.
I think you should be more multicloud than that.
So those are a couple observations,
like DevSecOps versus doing big analytic jobs
are very different use cases.
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
I buy that.
So then what's counterbalance now,
what's easier than people think?
Because we can all get worked up about multicloud
and all the complexity and all the sticky things.
But you and I have spent a lot of time
professionally with the Spring framework, things that maybe,
hey, if you do the right abstraction,
maybe this actually isn't as hard as we think it is.
So where do you actually talk people down off
the ledge a little bit?
Like, hey, this is actually just do the right thing.
Here's some ways that are easier than you thought.
JAMES WATTERS: That's where things
that have developer gravity versus data gravity
are inherently multicloud, because anything
that you're just, get cloning, to start
a project on your laptop--
by its nature, the most important entity
of compute to most developers I know is not the cloud,
it is their laptop.
If you look at where things like Docker
started, where HashiCorp really got its start--
there's new companies out there like GitPod
that are very interesting-- they're
much more around the developer's laptop.
So if you don't think that's inherently
going to be multicloud, I think that's a bit of a mess.
In fact, there was just an interesting "Hacker News"
article thread about how Lambda is actually
pretty complicated devex because it can't be run portably
on the laptop.
I think with the work that's happening
between VMware's contribution and Google's contribution
to things like Knative, now you can
start to imagine an ecosystem that is
both laptop and cloud-friendly.
And I think thinking about what happens at the developer's
laptop is more important in some ways than the, quote unquote,
"cloud architecture," is where you start to really realize
where the multicloud ecosystem comes from.
RICHARD SEROTER: Awesome.
This has been great.
I think your whole perspective on this
is terrific, especially as we're just all trying
to help make sure people just do the right things
for their own organization.
As you say, context matters a ton.
Any parting thoughts, any things you think about,
that if somebody is a CIO on their journey
or a dev figuring out what to invest
in next, any assuring words or words of caution?
JAMES WATTERS: I think it's a great time
to be working on cloud technologies,
because I think it's just like that Unix to Linux transition
that I lived through when I went from Sun to VMware.
And I think that the explosion of things
that are adding value above cloud hardware--
like I think when Snowflake went public, that
should be a wake-up call to everybody,
because some people used to think,
oh, you've got to get all of your systems software
from your system provider.
And I think Snowflake's IPO really broke the glass on that.
And I think you're going to see more and more and more
investment in these best-of-breed multicloud
solutions.
And I'd say the parting thought is
that multicloud and best-of-breed go together.
That's why you run Java everywhere,
because it's the best-of-breed framework.
You don't use a single cloud's framework.
So I think you're going to see more
and more best-of-breed technologies, which
is going to yield more multicloud technologies.
RICHARD SEROTER: Good stuff, James.
Well, it's always a pleasure to chat with you.
I'm glad we get to connect again.
And thanks for taking some time to chat with us.
Talk to you.
JAMES WATTERS: OK, yeah.
Great chatting with you, Richard.
Thank you.