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>> Okay. Welcome back, everyone.
Day three of theCube coverage here
at VMware Explore, not VMworld.
12 years theCube's been covering
VMware's end user conference.
This year it's called Explore, previously VMworld.
We've got two great guests, friends of theCube,
Cube alumni and Cloud RI,
Keith Townsend, principal, CTO Advisor,
airstreaming his way into VMworld this year in a big way.
Congratulations.
And of course James Urquhart,
principal technologist of VMWare at Tanzu cloud RI.
He's been in cloud game for a long time.
We've known each other for a long, long time,
even before cloud was cloud.
So, great to see you guys.
Thanks for coming on.
>> Ah, it's a pleasure, always happy to be here.
>> So day threes are kind of like riff.
I'll throw out SupeCloud.
You guys will trash it, we'll debate it.
[James and Keith Chuckling]
>> He'll be controversial
and say there's damage done by the over rotation
of developer experience, we'll defend Tanzu,
but really at the end of the game is that...
Guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time.
We're totally into it.
And we've been saying this infrastructure as code
as the end state.
We want to get there, right?
DevOps and infrastructure as code has always
been the underlying fire burning in all the innovation,
but it's now getting legitimately enterprised.
It's adopted in large scale.
Amazon Web Services, we saw that rise.
It feels we're in another level right now.
And I think we're looking at this new wave coming,
and I got to say the Broadcom thing has put an
electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem because
they don't know what's going to happen next.
So as a result, everyone's kind of got to spring
in their step a little, whether it's nervous
energy or excitement around something happening,
it's all cloud native.
So as VMware's got such a great investment in cloud native,
but yet multicloud's the story, right?
So messaging's okay? So what's happening here, guys?
Let's break it down.
You're on the show floor of the airstream,
you're on the inside.
But seeing the industry, James we'll start with you,
what's happening this year with cloud next level
and VMware's future?
>> Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is
that we are beginning to see the true separation
of capacity delivery from capacity consumption
in computing.
And what I mean by that is the abstractions that sort of
bled between the idea of a server and the idea
of an application have sort of become separated much better.
And I think Kubernetes is the strong evidence of that,
but also all of the public cloud APIs
are strong evidence of that.
And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that were strong evidence
of that.
So I think what's starting to happen now then
is developers have really kind of pulled very far away
from anything other than saying, I need compute.
I need network. I need storage.
And so now you're seeing the technologies that say,
well we've figured out how to do that at a team level,
one team can automate an application to an environment,
but another team will...Other teams...
If I have hundreds of teams or thousands of applications,
how do I handle that?
And that's what the excitement I think is right now.
>> I mean the developer...
we were talking before you came on camera, Keith,
around your controversial statement
around the developer experience.
Now, I mean I believe
that the cloud native development environment
is doing extremely well right now.
You talk to...look around the industry.
It's at an all time high and relative to euphoria,
sit on the beach with sunglasses.
You couldn't be better if you were a developer.
Open Source is booming,
everything's driving to their doorstep, self service.
They're at the center
of the security conversation with ShiftLeft.
Yeah, there's some things there, but it's a good time
if you're a developer.
Now is VMware going to be changing that
and are they going to meet the developers where they are?
Are they going to try to bring something new?
So these are conversations that are super important.
Now VMware has a great install base
and there's developers there too.
So I think I see their point, but you have a take on this,
Keith. What's your position on this?
How do the developer experience,
core and tangential, overplayed?
>> I think we're doing a disservice to the industry.
And I think it's hurting, I think...
I'm going to stand by my statement.
It's damaging the industry to an extent. VMware-
>> What's damaging to the industry?
>> The focusing, over focusing, on developer experience.
Developer experience is super important, but we're focusing
on developer experience to the detriment of infrastructure.
The infrastructure to deliver that developer experience
across the industry isn't there.
So we're asking VMware,
who's a infrastructure company at core,
to meet the developer where the developer is at today
with an infrastructure that's not ready
to deliver on the promise.
So when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations
like adding block storage
to VMC on AWS, we collectively yawn.
It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well
what does that mean for the developer? Down the road-
>> It should mean nothing,
because if it's infrastructure as code,
it should just work, right?
>> It should just work, but it doesn't.
>> Okay. I can see the damage there.
>> When you're thinking, oh, well I should be able to just
simply provide DR service for my on-prem service
to this new block level stores
because I can do that in an enterprise today non-cloud.
We're not there.
We're not at a point where we can just write code
infrastructure code and that happens.
VMware needs the latitude to do that work
while doing stuff like innovating on tap.
And then I think...when buyers look
at what we say, and we say VMware
isn't meeting developers where they're at,
but they're doing the hard work
of normalizing across clouds.
I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John.
The unicorn we all talk about.
And at the end I tried to wrap up
and he said, no, no, no wait, I got to talk about vRealize.
Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about
vRealize and the importance of normalizing that underlay.
And we just don't give these companies in this space
the right latitude.
>> So I'm trying to rock a little bit what you're saying.
So from my standpoint, generically speaking, okay.
If the developers are key to the cloud native role,
which I would say they are, then if I'm a developer
and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood
I'm not getting the weeds,
and which some people love to do,
I want to just make things work.
So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service.
I don't care about locking,
someone else should figure that problem out,
but I'm going to just accelerate my velocity,
making sure it's secure.
And I'm moving on, being creative and doing my thing,
building apps. Okay. That's the generic statement.
So what has to happen in your mind to get there?
>> Someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move.
AS/400 still propagate the data center.
There's still HP-UX running SAP ECC.
There's still...75% of the world's transactions happen
through SAP.
And most of that happens on bare metal.
Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that
infrastructure's cold world.
Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do DR
between my on premises edge solution and the public cloud,
someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes
consuming that. That work isn't done.
>> It's an opportunity.
>> It's on paper.
>> It's an opportunity though.
It's not, I mean, we're in a bad spot.
So I mean, I think what you're getting
at is that there's a lot to fix, a lot of gaps.
>> Yeah.
>> Alright. I want Jay, I want to bring you in
because we had a panel on SuperCloud event.
Chris Hoff of Beaker was on there.
>> Mhmm, yeah.
>> He's always snarky,
but he's been building clouds lately.
So he's been getting his hands dirty,
rolling up his sleeves.
The title of the panel was originally called
The Innovators Dilemma with a question mark.
You know, "Haha, innovators, dilemma." Little goof on that.
Because there's challenges and trade offs
like he's talking about.
He says we should call it the integrators dilemma
because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay,
it's not as seamless as it can be or should be
in the Nirvana state,
but there's a lot of integration going on.
A lot of APIs are key to this.
API security, one of the most talked about things.
I mean I interviewed six companies
on API security in the past couple months.
So yeah, I mean I never talked to anybody
about API security before this year. APIs are critical.
So these key things of cloud are being attacked.
And so there's more complexity
as we're getting more successful.
And so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations.
What's your read on this to make the complexity go away,
You guys have the chaos reign here,
which I actually like that. Dave does too.
But Andy Grove once said
"Let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos."
So we're in that reign in the chaos mode now.
What's your take on what Keith was saying around...
>> So I think that the one piece of the puzzle
that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative
that I think is important
is it's really not just infrastructure and developers.
In fact, and I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago
right? There's really sort of three layers
of operations that come out of the cloud model in long term,
and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and
in the middle is platform and services.
And so I think this is where VMware is
making its play right now is in terms
of providing the platform and service capability that does
that integration at a lower level, works with VMs, works
with bare metal, works with the public cloud services
that are available.
Makes it easy to access things like database services
and messaging services and things along those lines.
Makes it easy to turn code that you write
into a service that can be consumed by other applications.
But ultimately creates an environment that begins to
pull away from having to know
to write code about infrastructure.
And so infrastructure code's great, but if you have
a bright platform, you don't have to write code
about infrastructure.
You can actually declare what basic needs
of the application are.
And then that platform will say,
okay, well I will interpret that.
And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is.
And that's what VMware's taking advantage
of with what we're doing with that.
>> Yeah. I remember when we first...
Lou Tucker and I, and I think you might have been
in the room during those OpenStack days,
and when Kubernetes was just starting, literally
just happened, the paper was written, going to go out
and a couple companies formed around it.
We said that could be the interoperability layer
between clouds and our dream at that time was...
And we mentioned and Stratus in our super cloud
but the days of spanning clouds, a dream, we thought that.
Now look at Kubernetes now.
It's kind of become that defacto rallying moment for,
I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've
been talking about allows for write once, run anywhere.
I think to me, that's not...nowhere in the market today.
Nobody has that.
Nobody has anything that could write once
read one, write once and then run on multiple clouds
>> It's more true than ever.
We had one customer that just was using AKS
for a while and then decided to try the application on EKS.
And they said it took them a couple
of hours to get through the few issues they ran into.
>> Yeah. I talked to a customer
who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle Cloud
on Oracle Cloud's VMware solution.
And he raved about now he has a inherent backup DR
for her OCVS solution,
because there's a shim between the two.
>> And how did he do that?
>> But there there's a solution.
And this is where the white space, as James talked about
in the past exists.
When I go to a conference like CubeCon,
theCube will be there in Detroit, in about 45 days or so.
I talk to platform group after platform group
that's doing the work that VMware...
Red Hat, HashiCorp, all should be doing.
I shouldn't have to build that shim
while we rave and talk about the power Kubernetes.
That's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60
to 65% of their, for the platform.
Right now there's groups of developers within
that sit in between infrastructure
and sit in between application development,
that all they do is build platforms.
There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform.
VMware announced TAP 1.3.
And the thing that I'm surprised no one on Twitter
is talking about is this API discovery piece.
If you've ever had to use a API,
and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever
and now it just magically happens.
The marketing at the end of developing the application?
Think if you're in your shop that develops hundreds
of applications, there's thousands or tens
of thousands of APIs that have to be documented.
That's beating the developer where it's at,
and it's also infrastructure.
>> Well guys, thanks for coming on theCube.
I really appreciate it. We're on a time deadline.
Wish we could do more.
We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explore.
Thanks for coming on theCube. Appreciate it.
>> Thank you.
>> Pleasure, John.
>> We'll be back with more live coverage
after this short break, stay with us.
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