(bright music)
>> Welcome back to Supercloud 22.
I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante,
with the opening keynote conversation
with Vittorio Viarengo.
He's the Vice President of Cross-Cloud
at VMware, Cube Alumni.
Vittorio, great to see you.
Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, my pleasure.
>> So you're kicking off the Supercloud event.
Again, a pilot.
Again, we were texting just a few months ago
around some of the momentum.
You identified this right away.
You saw it, you saw the momentum.
What's the reality around supercloud?
What's your perspective?
>> Well, I think that
we have to go back to the history of IT, over the last ever.
I feel like in IT,
we're always running after the developers.
The developers, they're smart.
They go for the path of least resistance,
and they create innovations,
and then the entire stacks moves around,
and if you look at developers over the last, you know,
15 years, they've been going to the cloud, right?
And the reason they're going for the cloud is,
you now, they say software is eating the world.
Is really who builds software?
Developers, so I think it's developers are eating the world,
and so initially, there was one game in town,
so they went with AWS,
but eventually, we got the multiple clouds,
and now, the reality is that the applications there,
it's how we make money, how we save money.
They're running on multiple cloud, the 75% of the companies
running on multiple clouds today,
and so, I think that creates the new computing platform
for the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years,
and I think that that multi-cloud world
brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked,
but also some challenges,
and it's prime to a simplification,
and that's where we're trying.
>> One of the things we observe is this abstraction layer
across clouds to create a consistent experience
for customers, and very importantly,
as you point out, developers.
So when you think about the history of abstractions,
we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s,
which is really different, as you pointed out,
that we had in the 2010s,
where there was really, you know, one main cloud.
Now, you have all these clouds.
What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions?
>> Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction
to unleash the next level of growth, right?
I grew up as a...
I started my career as a C++ developer.
So initially, you know, on Windows,
if you wanted to open a window on the screen,
you had to write 200 lines of code.
Then the MFC library came in,
and now, you still have to be a C++ developer,
but now, with a one line of code,
you can initiate, open the yellow world
and start to build your applications,
but it's only when Visual Basic comes along,
then now, we get five millions developers
building applications that are 20 years later,
we're still using, okay?
And then the list goes on and on,
and in the application integration,
we used to look at the bytes on the bus and say,
"Okay, this is the customers,
and we're going to map it to SAP,"
and then we went one level higher with SOA and web services
and the rest of history, and then unleashed tremendous,
you know, growth and look at, you know, how we now,
you know, we be able to throw APIs, integrate anything,
and so then the ultimate example
of abstraction is virtualization.
We made all these different servers and networking
and storage look like one, and now, you know,
and the business never cares if you're running SAP
back on-prem on HP or some other piece of hard drive.
They care that it runs, right?
And so I think that now, we need to bring
a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only
abstracts the low level APIs at the highest level,
but also uniforms and unify the APIs
and the way do management and security
across multiple cloud.
>> Let's unpack that because I think
the virtualization angle is interesting
'cause with virtualization enabled AWS.
If you look at AWS' success, virtualization, the Hypervisor,
got them going, and that established that value.
Now, the new structural change is happening.
How do you define that specifically?
What is supercloud in your mind?
>> So in our mind, supercloud is a set
of cloud native services that, first of all...
Let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization.
Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem
and is no wonder that AWS and Azure,
they did it on their cloud, right?
But the lingo franca of the cloud
is not the virtualization layer.
That's taken, it's hidden.
It's down there, it just does its thing.
The lingo franca of cloud is microservices, API,
Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and one would think,
"Okay, now, we have Kubernetes, life is good.
I just, you know, deploy on-
Well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution,
and so to us, the supercloud is the ability to take,
to factor out the common things that you can do across cloud
and give you a single pane or glass
to manage your application and single pipeline
so you can build your application once
and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds,
and then, basically, factor out
the other two important things with the security
and observability of the application.
>> One of the trade-offs of abstraction,
you go back to the mainframe.
They had to squeeze out the performance overheads.
VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it.
So are we going to see that across clouds
with multi-cloud or what we call supercloud.
Are you going to see a trade-off?
What trade-off do you see that the industry,
technically, has to attack?
>> Abstractions are always about trade-offs, right?
You're trading off the speed.
You know, I'm writing C++ code goes really fast for scale.
You know, now, I have five million developers
writing applications, but I think, eventually,
what happens is that or you're trading off
specialized skills for, you know, more valuable skills,
and if I had a dollar every time I heard,
"Oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization,"
well, or the JVM is too slow, but guess what?
How many Java developers, how many Java application
are running out on the JVM?
So I think, eventually, there will be trade-offs,
but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like
how much value are you getting in terms of scales
and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off
you were making on the lower level.
>> On the evolution of hybrid cloud,
'cause right now, hybrid cloud is a steady state.
People see that clearly, you know, on-premise and Edge,
right around the corner.
Public native cloud, there's benefits to be
in the native cloud.
How does multi-cloud fit?
'Cause by default, people have multiple clouds.
If they run on Azure, they probably have
some sort of productivity software
with Microsoft or other Microsoft products,
but it's best to breed.
It's not yet connected.
So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing.
It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds,
yet some people are thinking about it.
So we think, and I think you might agree,
that multi-cloud will happen, multiple clouds
in the sense of workloads running seamlessly.
Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future?
(men laugh)
>> So there is a lot of unpack there.
First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that
because most customers are operating
their on-prem as the cloud, so the moment you have
your on-prem cloud and AWS, your multi-cloud,
so 75%, 85% going to 85%-
>> You mean Private Cloud on-premise cloud operations?
>> Yeah, and then you have another cloud,
you're already multi-cloud.
>> I'm assuming the experiences is identical, right?
That's the assumption you-
>> Well, initially, it's not identical, right?
That's why you need a supercloud, right?
>> Yeah, exactly. >> And most customers though
are in denial, meaning that I see them being in five stages
of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud.
One is denial.
We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud.
We're standardized.
The second one is euphoria.
Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go.
All these developers are happy to do whatever they want,
and then the third one is like, holy crap.
They got the first bill.
They realize that the security share responsibility model
to deal with.
They realize that somebody is to deploy this application
and manage the application.
Nobody does it for them,
and then they go into like, (indistinct).
Okay, now, we need to do something about this, right?
It's a new normal, and then you end up
with the enlightment, right?
Now, we're really being productive and strategic
about how we use multi-cloud.
Very, very few customers are in that stage.
Most customers are still
within the denial and the new normal,
and within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as,
"Okay, I have an application here, an application there.
Okay, great, big deal."
The next level is, "Okay, I have an application here
that uses a pieces of a service
of an application over there.
Okay, now, I'm coordinating application.
I'm using microservices,"
and then the third stage is like,
"Okay, I am designing my application
to use multiple services or multiple cloud
because each uses differentiated features
of that particular cloud."
>> Is it part of the problem too, Vittorio,
that the industry, the technology industry,
you guys have not caught up.
The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem.
What's VMware doing to solve that problem?
>> So we have seen this coming four or five years ago, right?
That's why we acquired Pivotal,
and then we made a number of acquisition around it
because we saw that...
Well, let's go back.
What is VMware DNA?
If you look, I've been running engineering,
product management in the company
then I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side,
but I've seen, and I sweat with those engineers,
and when I look at those engineers,
these people know how to make stuff
that was not designed to work together
work together and deliver value,
and so if we go back to, you know, on-prem,
we did it with virtualization.
In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction,
which is, you know, at the APIs at the...
And so over the last five years,
we built what we believe is very comprehensive portfolio
that unified how you build, you run, manage, secure,
and access any application across any cloud.
No Hypervisor required.
>> So that's the game changer right there.
So let me ask you a question.
How does the choice factor come in
because can VMware do all this
or do they need to rely on partners?
Because most customers have HashiCorp
and other companies in there
doing services for them as well.
So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach?
Can you do it alone
or are you going to need help from the ecosystem?
>> First of all, if you look at the success
of your event today, look how many vendors
from multiple backgrounds and multiple level of the stack
that are coming together to talk about the supercloud.
So that to me is success already,
and, of course, there are tremendous companies
that are going to deliver fantastic value
for, you know, management like HashiCorp or security
and the development experience.
Our approach is to bring them together
as an integrated platform,
and I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles,
the investment to be able to pull that off.
>> Okay, you saw Keith Townsend.
He had that very cool blackboard, and he called,
this was maybe eight or nine months ago,
he called the supercloud
and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational.
When is this going to be real?
>> I think it's absolutely real today in some of the pieces.
Right, there's always an aspiration.
You have to look at a company like VMware as a company
that looks out five, 10 years, right?
You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know,
which is a technical visionary,
and so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud,
and we invested in first part of the stack.
What is it?
How to build applications natively in the cloud using Tanzu.
So with Tanzu, you can build application,
manage Kubernetes cluster,
secure, creating this service match,
and so that's the reality today.
Then on the next step is security.
We recently announced our security approach.
We have a very peculiar position in the stack
to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint,
not just, you know, in the application,
but in between, right?
By looking at all the Hypervisor,
if you're using Hypervisor.
You looking at East-West traffic with NSX
and cross cloud networks, and so these
are the three main places that are in place today, right?
And then I cannot spoil our user conference
coming in a couple of weeks where we're going to make
more announcement around the supercloud,
which we called cross-cloud services.
>> Vittorio, I remember in 2016,
I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu
when they announced the deal with VMware.
VMware and AWS had the relationship,
and you're running on the cloud on AWS VMware,
and you look at what's happened since,
and this is where the supercloud conversation
starts to kick in where Amazon's really good at moving
bits around and optimizing the power
and the silicon of the infrastructure,
which means that the higher level services
are going to be much more open for people to innovate around.
So Dave calls it, the super pass.
This area platform is a service to change the SaaS game.
So I have to ask you,
how do you see the SaaS game changing with supercloud?
Because if you have a Private Cloud or Edge,
you're now multiple clouds, technically, as you pointed out.
How has that changed the SaaS configuration?
Because SaaS and IaaS and PaaS had great relationships
in native clouds to solve problems.
Now, you have the multi-cloud.
How do you see this platform as a service area
changing or maybe enabling?
>> So I think that that's where the innovation,
the ability to aggregate common...
Because look, there is a reason why people use
multiple cloud, right?
They choose it because they have differentiated features.
So we don't want to ever hide those features,
like if you're using Google,
because you need AI capabilities, absolutely.
We don't want to prevent that, right?
But at the PaaS level, you know,
when you are orchestrated these microservices,
you don't want to do it in five different ways, right?
So those are the areas where I think
are prime for aggregation and simplification.
How you, you know, look at all this Kubernetes environment
and being able to monitor your application
and force security policies,
both from a resource consumption,
this group of developers can only use this many resources,
but also a run time that you don't run out of like,
you know, you get that bill shock,
and so those are the areas where I think
there's this more ability
for us to innovate and deliver value,
not at the lower level which is taken by the-
>> So you try to have your cake and eat it too,
which is if you can pull that off it's game over, right?
You have a specific set of cross-cloud services
that are unique and value added
that are differentiable in the industry,
but at the same time,
you're trying to give access to developers,
if in fact, they want access to those primitives, right?
>> Yeah.
>> That's a bold aspiration.
>> Well, we want to have the cake, eat it, and lose weight.
(men laugh)
But seriously, I think,
going back to your point about the ecosystem,
of course, we're not going to do it alone, right?
If we were doing it alone, there is not a market, right?
And so I think that the market is so big
and the area of challenges for IT is so large
that there's room for many companies to add value,
and I think that, as I said, our approach is
to, you know, we're a platform company, right?
So you're going to find tremendous companies
that will solve one problem for multiple clouds.
You're going to find the hyperscaler
that have a platform approach for one cloud.
We like to think that we can position ourself
in that two by two as the company
that has a platform approach across multiple clouds.
>> You know, it's great.
That's where we've known each other for a long time.
It's 12 years of "CUBE" coverage.
Watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work,
watching cloud native kind of go
that next level's been fun to watch,
and the developers have had a great run.
I mean, open sources booming,
developer goodness is out there.
People are shifting left,
a lot of great stuff going with containers and Kubernetes.
So looking good on the developer experience front right now,
and I think it's only going to get better,
but developers don't think about locking.
They just want to get the job done.
Move on to the next line of code.
It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying,
"Hey, we love this, too,
but we got to align with the developer."
Level up, so to speak.
So ops and security teams are saying,
"Hey, I got to run this with automation
with the higher level services."
So there seems to be a focus
around the supercloud conversation around ops teams.
This is your wheelhouse, VMware.
You guys do a lot of IT operations
and things of that nature.
How do you see that and what's the message
cross-cloud brings to and supercloud brings
to the development teams and the ops teams
who are really going to be doing DevOps together
and/or faster?
>> I think if you go back to what where we started, right?
Developers run the show,
and I think there's been a little bit of inertia
in IT organization on the op side and the security side
in catching up to see how to catch up
to where developers are, right?
And with the DevOps revolution,
if operators don't really understand
what the developers need and get ahead of that,
they're going to be left behind.
So I'll give you an example, like SMB Global,
one of our customers, their band runs their operation.
Basically, told me I had to sit down
and figure out what these developers were doing
because I was being left behind
and then or Cerner, one of our partners and customers,
same thing they say, okay, we sat down.
We realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers
and set those guard rails, right?
These are the Kubernetes environment you want to use?
Okay, this is how we're going to set them up.
This is want to make sure that we shift left security,
that we have a single pipeline that feeds that,
and Cerner, using our technology was able to...
They made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler,
was going to go unnamed to another hyperscaler,
It was going to go unnamed, and they managed to change
all the deployments in four hours.
So that's the power of the supercloud,
being able to say, "Hey, developers, do whatever you want,
but these are the guard rails, and we're going to be able
to like stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility,
but also, make sure that operation and security,
as a saying."
>> Shift left shield right, basically.
>> Awesome, awesome stuff.
We've got 15 seconds.
What is supercloud?
What's the bumper sticker?
>> The supercloud is a level of abstraction
across any of the public clouds
that allows developers to go fast,
operators to make sense of what's happening,
security to enforce security,
and end users to access any application
with a great user experience and security.
>> And it's inclusive of on-prem.
I'll just throw that in. (John laughs)
>> All right, great stuff.
Thanks for coming on.
We're going to have a industry panel
to talk about and debate Supercloud 22.
We'll be right back after this break.