(upbeat music)
>> Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to theCUBE Live, AWS re:Invent 2022.
This is our first day of three
and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE.
Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante.
Dave, it's getting louder and louder behind us.
People are back. They're excited.
>> You know what somebody told me today?
>> Hmm.
>> They said that less than 15%
of the audience is developers.
I'm like, no way. I don't believe it.
But now maybe there's a redefinition of developers
because it's all about the data,
and it's all about the developers in my mind.
And that'll never change.
>> It is, and one of the things we're going to be talking
about is app modernization
as customers really navigate the journey to do that
so that they can be competitive,
and meet the demands of customers.
We've got an alumni back with us to talk about that.
Ajay Patel joins us,
the SVP and GM Modern Apps
& Management Business Group at VMware.
Ajay, welcome back.
>> Thank you.
It's always great to be here.
So, thank you, David.
Good to see you, Ajay. Isn't it great?
It's great to be back in person.
So, the VMware Tanzu team here back
at re:Invent on the show flow.
There we go.
Talk about some of the things
that you guys are doing together innovating with AWS.
>> Yeah, so it's great to be back in person
after multiple years,
and the energy level continues to amaze me.
The partnership with AWS started on the infrastructure side
with VMware cloud on AWS.
And with Tanzu we're extending it to the application space.
And the work here
is really about how do you make developers productive?
To your earlier point, it's all about developers,
it's all about getting applications
in production securely, safely, continuously.
And Tanzu is all about making that bridge
between great applications being built,
getting them deployed,
and running and running and operating at scale.
And EKS is a dominant Kubernetes platform.
And so the better together story
of Tanzu and EKS is a great one for us.
And we're excited to announce
a set of innovations in that area.
>> Well, Tanzu was so front and center at VMware Explore.
I wasn't in VMware Explore Europe,
but I'm sure it was a similar kind of focus.
When are customers choosing Tanzu?
Why are they choosing Tanzu?
What's the update since last August when we first...
>> You know what?
The market settled into three main use cases.
One is all about developer productivity.
Consistently we're all dealing with skill set gap issues.
How do we make every developer productive modern developer?
And so Tanzu is all about
enabling that develop productivity,
and we can talk quite a bit about it.
Second one is security's front and center.
And security's being shifted left
right into how you build great software.
How do you secure that
through the entire supply chain process?
And how do you run and operationalize secure at runtime?
So we're hearing consistently
about making secure software supply chain
a heart of what our solution is.
And third one is, how do I run
and operate the modern application at scale
across any Kubernetes, across any cloud?
These are the three teams
that are continuing to get resonance,
and empowering all of this is exciting, David,
is this formation of platform teams.
I just finished a study
with Bain Consulting doing some research for me.
40% of our organization now have some form of a central team
that's responsive for what we call platform engineering,
and building platforms to make developers productive.
That is a big change since about two years ago even.
So this is becoming mainstream,
and customers are really focusing
on delivering value to making developers productive.
>> And the other nuance that I see,
and you kind of see it here in the ecosystem,
but when you talk about your customers
with platform engineering, they're actually building,
they're pointing their business.
They're going to page out AWS,
pointing their businesses to their customers.
Becoming software companies, becoming cloud companies,
and really generating new forms of revenue.
>> The interesting thing is,
some of my customers
I would never have thought as Leading Edge are retailers.
And not your typical Starbucks that you get a great example.
I have an auto parts company
that's completely modernizing
how they deliver point of sale
all the way to the supply chain.
All built on Kubernetes at scale.
You're typically think of that a financial services
or a Telco leading the pack,
but I'm seeing innovation in India,
I'm seeing innovation in AMEA coming out of there.
Across the board every industry
is becoming a product company.
A digital twin as we would call them,
and means they become software houses.
They behave more like you and I in this event
versus a traditional enterprise.
>> And they're building their own ecosystems,
and at ecosystem's generating data
that's generating more value,
and it's just this cycle, it's amazing.
>> It's a flywheel, it's a flywheel.
So, innovation continues to grow.
Talk about really unlocking the developer experience,
and delivering to them what they need
to modernize apps to move as fast
and quickly as they want to.
>> So, I think AWS coined this word
undifferentiated heavy lifting.
If you think of a typical developer today
how much effort does he have to put in
before he can get a single line of code out in production?
If you can take away all the complexity,
typically security compliance
is a big headache for them, right?
Developer doesn't want to worry about that.
Infrastructure provisioning,
getting all the configurations right is a headache for them,
being able to understand what size of infrastructure
or resource to use cost effectively.
How do you run it operationally?
'Cause the application team
is responsible for the operational cost
of the product or service.
So these are the heavy lifting
that developers want to get away from.
So, they want to write great code, build great experiences.
And we've always talked about frameworks,
a way to abstract it with the complexity.
And so for us, there's a massive opportunity
to say how do I simplify,
and take away all the heavy lifting
to get an idea into production seamlessly,
continuously, securely?
>> Is that part of your partnership?
Because you think about AWS,
they're really not about frameworks,
they're about primitives.
I mean, Werner Vogels even talks about that in his speech,
but that makes it more challenging for developers.
Actually, if you look at some of their initial investments
around proton and et cetera,
work they're starting to do, they're recognized.
PaaS is a bad word,
but the outcomes a platform as a service offers
is what everybody wants.
I Just talking to the AWS leaders responsible area,
he actually has a separate build team.
He didn't know what to call the third team.
He has a Kubernetes team,
he has a serverless team, and has a build team.
And that build team is everything above Kubernetes
to make the developer productive,
and the ecosystem to bring together to make that happen.
So I think AWS is recognizing
that primitives are great for the elite developers,
but if they want to get the mass scale,
and adoption in the business IT, if you will,
they're going to have to provide richer set of building blocks,
and reduce the complex,
and partnership like ours make that a reality.
And what I'm excited about is, there's a clear gap here,
and Tanzu's the best platform to kind of fill that gap.
>> Well, and I think that they're going to double down, triple,
I just wrote about this, double down,
triple down on the primitives.
They have to have the best servers,
and storage and database.
And I think the way they, I call it taping the seams,
is with the ecosystem.
>> Ajay: Correct.
>> Nobody has a better ecosystem.
I mean, you guys are the postage child for the ecosystem,
and now this even exceeds that.
But partnering up, that's how they continue to make me-
>> And they're looking for someone who is open, right?
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> And so one of the first question is,
are you proprie or open?
Because one of the things
they're fighting against is the lock in.
So they can find a friendly partner who is open source, led,
upstream, committing to the code,
delivering that innovation,
and bring the ecosystem into orchestrated choreography.
It's like singing a music, right?
They're running an application delivery team
like running a musical orchestra.
There's so many moving parts here.
How do you make them sing together?
And so if Tanzu and our platform
can help them sing, and drive more of their services,
it's only more valuable for them.
>> And I think the partners would generally say,
AWS always talking about customer obsession.
It's like becomes this bromine, you go, yeah, yeah,
but I actually think in the field
the sellers would say,
yeah, we're going to do what the customer,
if that means we're going to partner up.
And I think AWS's comp structure makes it sort of-
>> I learned today how incentives and marketplaces work, and-
>> Dave: It's powerful.
>> It's very powerful, right?
So you line up the sales incentive,
you line up the customer and it benefits,
you line up bringing the ecosystem
to drive business results-
>> Dave: And everybody.
>> Everybody wins.
And which is what you're seeing here,
the excitement and the crowd is really,
the whole, all boats are rising.
>> Dave: Yeah, yeah, right?
>> Right?
And it's driven by the fact that customers
are getting true value out of it.
>> Oh, absolutely. Tremendous value.
Speaking of customers,
give us an example of a customer story
that you think really articulates the value
of what Tanzu was delivering
especially making that developer experience far simpler.
What are some of those big business outcomes
that that delivers?
>> At Explore we had the CIO of CVS,
and with their acquisition of Aetna and CVS Health,
they're transforming the health industry.
And they talked about the whole COVID,
and then how they had to deliver the number of vaccines
to you and I, and how quickly they had to deliver on that.
It talked about Tanzu,
and how they leverage Tanzu platform
to get those new applications out,
and start to build that.
And Roshan was basically talking
about his number one priorities.
How does he get his developers more productive?
Number two priority, how does he make sure apps are secure?
Number three priority,
how does he do it cost effectively
in the world particularly where we're heading towards
where the budgets are going to get tighter?
So, how do I move more dollars to innovation
while I continue to drive more efficiency in my platform?
And so cloud is the future.
How does he make the best use of the cloud
both for his developers and his operations team, right?
>> What's happening in serverless?
In 2017 Andy Jassy was in theCUBE.
He said if AWS or Amazon had to build all over again,
they would build in what's using serverless.
And that was a big quote, we've mined that for years.
And as you were talking about developer productivity,
I started writing down all the things developers have to do,
they got to build a container image,
they said they got to deploy an EC2 instance,
they got to allocate memory,
they got to fence off the apps in a virtual machine.
They got to run the computer against the app,
they got to pay for all that.
So, okay, what's your story on,
what's the market asking for in terms of serverless?
'Cause there's still some people
who want control over the run time.
Help us sift through that.
>> And it really comes back to the application pattern
or the type you're running.
If it's a stateless application
that you need to spin up and spin down,
serverless is awesome,
why would I want to worry about scaling it up and down?
I want to set up some SLAs,
SLIs service level objectives or indicators,
and then let the system bring the resources I need
as I need them.
That's a perfect example for serverless, right?
On the other hand,
if you have a more of a workflow type application,
there's a sequence, there's state,
try building an application using serverless
where you had to maintain state
between two steps in the process.
Not so much fun, right?
So I don't think serverless is the answer for everything,
but many use cases,
the scale to zero is a tremendous benefit.
Events happen, you want to process something,
work is done, you quietly go away.
I don't want to shut down the server started up,
I want that to happen magically.
So I think there's a role of serverless.
So I believe Kubernetes,
and serverless are the new runtime platform.
It's not one or the other,
it's about marrying that around the application patterns.
I DevOps shouldn't care about it.
That's an infrastructure concern.
Let me just run application,
let the infrastructure manage the operations of it,
whether it's serverless,
whether there's Kubernetes clusters,
whether it's orchestration, that's details, right?
I shouldn't worry about it, right?
>> So we shouldn't think of those as separate architectures.
We should think of it as an architecture that-
>> The continuum in some ways
of different application workload types.
And that's a toolkit that the operator has
at his disposal to configure and saying,
where does should that application run?
Should I want control?
You can run it on a Kubernetes cluster.
Can I just run it on a serverless infrastructure,
and leave it to the cloud provider do it all for me?
Sure. What was PaaS?
PaaS was exactly that.
>> Dave: Yeah, yeah, right.
>> Write the code once you do the rest.
>> Dave: Yeah. Okay.
>> Those are just elements of that.
>> And then Knative is kind of in the middle, right?
>> Knative is just a technology
that's starting to build that capability out
in a standards way to make serverless available
consistently across all cloud.
So I'm not building to a lambda
or a particular technology type.
I'm building in a standard way
in a standard programming model.
And infrastructure just works for me.
>> Dave: On any cloud?
>> On any cloud.
The whole idea portability. Consistency, right?
>> Dave: Powerful, yeah.
>> What are some of the things that folks can expect to learn
from VMware Tanzu and AWS this week at the show?
>> Yeah, so there's some really great announcements.
First of all, we're excited to extend our partnership
with AWS in the area of EKS.
What I mean by that is traditionally,
we would manage an EKS cluster,
you had a visibility of what's running in there,
but we weren't able to manage the lifecycle.
With this announcement,
we can give you a full management
of lifecycle of EKS workloads.
Our customers have 400 plus EKS clusters,
multiple teams sharing those in a multi-tenanted way
with common policy, and they want to manage a full life cycle
including all the upstream open source component
that make up Kubernetes.
People that Kubernetes is the one thing,
it's a collection of lot of open source packages.
We are making it simple to manage it consistently
from a single place.
On the security front,
we're now making tons of service mesh
available in the marketplace.
And if you look at what service mesh,
it's an overlay, it's an abstraction.
I can create an idea of a global name space
that cuts across multiple VPCs.
I'm hearing that Amazon's going to make
some announcements around VPC,
and have the Stitch VPCs together.
It's all moving towards this idea of abstractions.
I can set policy at logical level.
I don't have to worry about data security,
and the communication between services.
These are the things we're now enabling
which are really an and to make EKS even more productive,
making enterprise grade, enterprise ready.
And so a lot of excitement
from the EKS development teams as well
to partner closely with us
to make this an end-to-end solution for our customers.
>> Yeah, so I mean it's,
under Jassy was really driving those primitives,
and helping developers,
under Selipsky it's continuing that path,
but also recognizing the need for solutions,
and that's where the ecosystem comes in.
>> Right.
>> And the question is, what is that boxes
you said last time, right?
For the super cloud there is a cloud infrastructure,
which is becoming the new palette,
but how do you make sense of the 300 plus primitives?
How do you bring them together?
What are the best practices patterns?
How do I manage that when something goes wrong?
These are real problems that we're looking to solve.
>> And if you're going to have deeper business integration
with the cloud, and technology in general,
you have to have that abstraction.
>> One of the simple question I ask is,
how do you know you're getting value
from your cloud investment?
That's a very hard question.
What's your trade off between performance and cost?
Do you know where your security when a lock 4G happens,
do you know all the open source packages you need to patch?
These are very simple questions,
but imagine today having to do that
when everybody's doing in a bespoke manner
using the set of primitives.
You need a platform.
The industry is shown at scale
you have to start standardizing,
and building a consistent way of delivering
and abstracting stuff.
And that's the next stage of the cloud journey.
>> And with the economic environment,
I think people are also saying, okay, how do we get more?
>> Ajay: Exactly.
>> We're in the cloud now.
Now how do we get more? How do we-
>> Ajay: The most value out the cloud? Yeah. Exactly.
>> Totally.
>> How do we transform the business?
Last question, Ajay, for you, is,
if you had a bumper sticker,
and you're going to put it on your fancy car
what would it say about VMware Tanzu and AWS?
>> I would say Tanzu accelerates apps.
>> Love it.
>> Thank you so much.
Thanks, Ajay. Thank you so much-
for joining us.
We appreciate that. As Always great to be here.
>> Dave: Pleasure.
>> Likewise.
For our guest, and Dave Vellante,
I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE,
the leader in emerging enterprise tech coverage.