>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco,
celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE.
Covering VMworld 2019.
Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners.
>> And welcome back here, San Francisco Moscone Center North
John Walls along with John Troyer.
We're live here on theCUBE at VMworld 2019,
and right now we're joined by Chris McReynolds,
who's a product management and cloud and data services
for CenturyLink.
It's good to see you, sir.
>> Good to be here, thanks for having me.
>> And he's going to tell us today
why milliseconds matter, right?
You are. >> That is the goal.
>> Your subject of an upcoming presentation,
just about 45 minutes or so,
but we'll get to that in a little bit.
First off, let's just paint the picture of CenturyLink.
Your presence here, quite obvious.
But, you know, what your portfolio includes there,
what you're up to, and maybe starting to hint
a little bit about why milliseconds matter to you?
>> Yeah, makes sense.
So we're a technology company, global in nature, you know.
A lot of our roots started with fiber connectivity,
basic networking services, IP services,
but over the years we've become
far more of an IP service company,
so there was an acquisition of Savvis a long time ago
that brought a lot of those capabilities to our company,
and we've made more fold-in acquisitions
that have also bolstered those capabilities.
We have invested heavily in security services recently,
and about two weeks ago we had an announcement
that said we're investing heavily in edge compute,
getting workloads closer to end-users
and that's really where milliseconds matter,
is you want the performance of those applications
to consumers or machinery, or whatever it may be,
to work effectively and work well,
and sometimes that requires that those workloads
are in close proximity to the end-users.
>> You bring up edge compute,
and we were just having this discussion before we started,
John asked of you, "Okay, how do you define the edge?"
Because there are lot of different slices of that, right?
Different interpretations, different definitions.
So with that being said, how do you define,
or at least in your mind, how do you separate edge
from core and what's true edge?
>> Yeah, good question, so I think the broadest-
>> Well it was John's question, not mine,
I wanted to give credit. >> And I chuckled,
I chuckled both times so,
because there is no perfect answer.
The broadest definition I've seen,
is that you have core, and you can think AWS, Azure,
you can think where the big core cloud nodes are
that are pretty central, maybe 50 milliseconds away
from the end-users.
There's two intermediate "edges" if you will
and this is where there are varying opinions.
To me, there's really only one.
If you're within five milliseconds
of where your end-users are,
I consider that to be a market edge.
Some people say there's a closer edge
that's within a millisecond of the end-users,
but I just, I personally have not seen the use cases
come out yet that require that low of a latency
that don't actually reside where the end-users are.
So, you, go ahead.
>> Well that's, so that's some modules at a warehouse
or a manufacturing facility, is that what we,
is that what you consider like an edge application
or data center? >> To me, a market edge, yeah.
In there's, it's interesting.
If you have, ten manufacturing plants in a geographic area,
or maybe a better example is if you're a logistics company,
and you have sorting and distribution centers.
You have multiple of those in an area that can all use
the same compute, as long as it's within five milliseconds.
You can do the sorting lines and keep the machinery working,
you can get it routed into the right vehicles
for distribution, that's a good market edge.
When you get all the way to that, that deep edge,
or on-premise, think of an autonomous vehicle
as a good example.
There are certain things you're not
going to want to transmit and make driving decisions
that don't reside on that vehicle.
You don't want to crash into anyone, you need (snaps finger)
almost instantaneous decisions, and that would be the edge.
That intermediate one millisecond that sits between
the two of those, I think it pushes one direction
or the other.
>> So Chris, here at VMworld 2019,
obviously a lot of talk about cloud,
but very specific this year, we have a lot of specifics
around what VMware is doing, hybrid cloud is real,
and of course hybrid cloud implies the network.
And so, I mean one of the latest announcements
from CenturyLink is that you're providing VMware Cloud
on AWS, you're managing, you are able to help manage,
provide that as a managed service.
I know you already do managed services
where you're managing stuff in your data centers,
but I guess you can also manage work loads on-prem,
and, I mean, talk a little bit about that portfolio
and how adding VMware, VMC on AWS, VMware cloud on AWS,
adds to that, and maybe we'll slide into
the networking piece and how important that is.
>> Yep, so we have a tool called Cloud Application Manager
that has been build over the past handful of years
that allows customers to deploy workloads
to AWS, to Azure, and now to VMC on AWS,
as well as private cloud environments.
So maybe customers want to host those workloads on-premise,
maybe it's regulatory compliance,
or whatever the reason may be.
So we have a lot of experience of helping customers
deploy those workloads, and then a lot of customers
come to us and want to manage, want us to manage
the lifecycle of those workloads.
So those are the core capabilities.
I think the reason that VMC on AWS is so compelling
to customers, is a lot of customers may not want
to deal with the hardware refresh cycles that they do
when it's their own private cloud environment,
or their own hardware stack.
This gives them the opportunity to migrate those workloads
in a relatively seamless fashion,
into an environment that is sitting in more of
a public cloud type model, where it's,
it's OPEX versus the CAPEX and the headache.
>> Go ahead, John.
>> Just in terms of, so, and then, and so part of
why you would work with CenturyLink is you are
experienced managed service provider,
but also you have a lot of the networking set up
to do that efficiently, right?
So, maybe you talk about some of the workloads
that you see going up there, and some of the tools,
and performance folks can expect.
>> Yeah, that's near, that's a core part of my product set,
so near and dear to me, for sure.
We've developed a lot of capabilities
over the last year and a half, around dynamic networking.
So, if you have your existing VMware environment
in your own data center, or maybe it's a private cloud
that's managed by CenturyLink,
we now have the ability for customers to go in
and create net new connections,
private network connections that have better latency,
have better throughput and performance,
between those environments and AWS,
or, in this, VMC on AWS.
It allows customers to do a couple of things.
If they have their own environment
and they're happy with it today, but it's not scaling,
and they need to add more capacity,
they could do that in a hybrid fashion in VMC on AWS.
If they're done with their existing environment
and hardware stack, and they just want to forklift
and move that into VMC on AWS,
they can create a big, large connection,
push a ton of data over a few weeks, shut it down,
and our billing model's an hourly billing model,
such that we're only charging them for as long
as it's necessary.
This gives them flexibility to manage where their workloads
are sitting between those two locations,
as they see fit over time.
>> So you're talking about all these new flexibilities,
you know, new capabilities, much more agile systems being,
I guess, interconnected with each other, right?
But whether, you know, it's hybrid or whether it's
multi-cloud, whatever the case is, how do you,
how do you get everybody, or everything to talk
to each other in a way that works and provides, you know,
addresses the latency challenge?
Because, to me, I'm again outside looking in,
that's a big hurdle.
As new capabilities get developed, new possibilities exist,
but we got to make it fast.
We have to make sure they're speaking the same language.
>> Yeah, it's a great question and it is very challenging,
and it is not all automated today
as much as we would like it to be.
We have great integration to deploy workloads
between environments.
We've spent a ton of time from a networking standpoint
of integrating with different cloud providers,
and they each have their little nuances,
and to make it common between all of them
takes a lot of time and effort.
I think where a lot of our focus is going
in the next twelve months is,
how do you take those application migration and management
capabilities we have in one tool set, how do you marry that
with all of the dynamic networking capabilities
and standardization across the cloud providers we've done.
So now it's, not only are you moving network workloads,
you're also creating the right underlying network
to support those workloads in that multi-cloud fashion well.
So two capabilities we have, we just need to marry them up
a little more tightly.
>> I mean, what are you seeing out there
in the market with your customers?
Multi-cloud, right,
is perhaps another over-used word, like edge.
Are you seeing multi-cloud portfolios?
Are you seeing applications actually use,
have data in one place and the compute in another?
And obviously, network becomes increasingly important
if that's a reality today, but is that real
or is that still science fiction?
>> It's becoming more real.
So there are a lot of, this is my opinion,
a lot of enterprises really bet big on one cloud provider,
because you have to build up the competency of capabilities
inside your own shop, and you become really good
with working in Azure, AWS or Google, or VMware on VMC.
The companies that are doing true multi-cloud
and using multiple cloud providers well,
are companies that probably reside around here.
So, I won't say any these specifically are doing this,
but companies like Uber, companies like Spotify,
companies that are born in the cloud that started
with those core competencies will take the best
of multiple cloud providers.
So maybe the big data analytics sitting in Google
is most intriguing to them, but they love the,
they love the storage cost price points on AWS,
and they love this aspect in Azure.
They'll piece together components,
since they built it in a containerized fashion,
and they take the best of what each cloud has to offer.
And to your point, the cloud providers
are coming to CenturyLink and saying,
"We need a better way to stitch together
"all of these cloud environments,
"because people, the cutting-edge developers
"are pushing us in that direction now."
>> What about the application network relationship?
Changing?
You know, do you see a shift there of some kind as a,
you know, we're talking about obviously
a lot of new opportunities, a lot of new developments,
and so does that alter the dynamics of that relationship
in any way?
>> It does, and it's those same conversations
that I just mentioned, actually, that's driving it.
I think today it is network engineers
and network infrastructure people
reacting to applications not performing well,
or reacting to a software developer's request
to add this Google region or that VMware on AWS region.
Over time, what's going to happen, I believe,
is their service mesh orchestration capabilities,
like Istio is a good example
as the one Google's pushing hard.
And it, what it allows people to do is,
from a rules-driven perspective,
I want my application to have these latency requirements
and you can't find me a network solution
that is any worse than that.
Or, if you're seeing packet loss greater than 80%,
I want you to add more capacity to the network.
It won't be humans and network engineers doing that,
it's going to be applications saying,
"Here are my criteria for me to work well,
"networks, let me see all the options I have out there,
"now I'm going to go pick the best one and change it
"if I need to to make myself work the way I need to,
"as an application."
>> Yeah, I love that, that I've never connected Istio
down to, as an app service layer,
down to the network. >> Yeah.
>> Thank you, I just had a new, I got a new thought.
>> Eureka!
(all laughing)
Another reason why milliseconds matter.
>> That's right.
>> All right.
Hey Chris, thanks for the time, we appreciate that.
I know this is a very busy time for you,
and you do have a speaking engagement
so we're going to cut you loose for that.
But thanks for spending time with us
and good luck at CenturyLink.
>> Appreciated, enjoyed it.
>> Looking forward to more success.
Back with more from Vmworld 2019,
after this short break, right here, on theCUBE.