>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco,
celebrating ten years of high tech coverage,
it's the Cube.
Covering VM World 2019.
(calm music)
Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners.
>> Hello, welcome back everyone
to the Cube's live coverage of VM World 2019.
I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante.
Dave, ten years covering the Cube, we were at Moscone
in 2010, boy a lots changed
but it's still the platform
that Paul Moritz laid out with the stuff filling in,
10 years later >> Joking, we call it software
main framing, and Robin came in and said,
"you can't call it main framing" (laughs).
>> And we have leaders from VMware's
largest business unit,
the cloud platform business unit.
Kit Colbert, the CTO.
And Krish Prasad, SVP and general manger.
Guys, thanks for coming on the Cube.
Appreciate it! >> Yeah, thanks for having us.
>> So world is your business unit is smoking hot.
It's very popular,
you're running around doing meetings,
cloud platform is the software model that's ten years later
actually happening at scale.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> Congratulations! What's the, what's the big news,
what's the big conversation for you guys?
>> Yeah, the biggest news this week is
the announcement of Project Pacific and
it's about taking the platform, which has
hundreds of thousands of customers on it,
and bringing together Kubernetes,
which is now very popular
with the developers
and that platform together
so that operators on the one hand
can just deal with a platform they love,
and the developers can deal with the
Kubernetes layer that they love.
>> It's interesting to watch because you
know the whole end-user computing stack that was laid out
ten years ago is actually happening now
at SASS, let's use SASS business models.
We all see the. >> Yep.
What's happened with Amazon's, the success in cloud.
But it's interesting to see Kubernetes,
which we've been following since
way before it started in open stack days.
You saw that emerge, and everyone kind of saw that
and it really became a nice layer.
>> Yep.
>> That the industry just created as a defacto.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> And you guys are actually driving
that more forward. >> Yeah.
>> So congratulations on that.
But sitting it natively in vSphere,
it's interesting because
you guys have to spend a ton of time.
>> Krish: Yeah.
>> This is a core product for you guys.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> So you're bringing something
native into vSphere,
I'm sure there's a lot of debates
internally on how to do that. >> Oh yeah.
>> Kit, what's the, what is the relevance work?
'Cause you guys have a lot of efficiencies in vSphere
but bringing in Kubernetes is going to give you some
new things. >> Yeah.
>> What's the?
>> So the thinking is really,
you know as Krish was mentioning,
how do we take this proven platform and move it forward?
Customers have
moved millions of workloads
on top of vSphere,
operated them in production,
production grade capabilities.
And so they've been able
to be very successful at that,
and so the question is,
how do we help them move forward in the Kubernetes?
You know as you mentioned,
Kubernetes is still fairly young.
The ecosystem around it
is still somewhat immature, still growing, right?
And it's a very you know different environment
than what folks are used to who have used vSphere.
And so there's a big challenge
that customers have around managing multiple environments,
all the training is different,
all the tools that are different.
So if we can actually take their
investments they've already made into vSphere,
leverage and extend those
into the Kubernetes world, that's really powerful
and it will help our customers take
all these millions of workloads
and move them forward.
>> It's interesting because
we're always speculating about VMware.
I was talking to Jerry Chen when he was on yesterday.
He's been at VMware since early days as you know.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> But looking at VMware when they went to their,
you guys went back to your core
when vCloud Air kind of went it's way,
and then the deal with Amazon
since the stock prices have been going great
so great shareholder take all the value there
but you got clarity around what cloud was.
>> Kit: Hmm hmm.
>> And as you look at the operator target audience,
you guys have the operators.
>> Krish: Hmm hmm.
>> And the Dev and Ops is critical,
so you guys have been operating a lot of workload
and I think this is fascinating with,
so the role of containers is super relevant
because you got VMs and containers so.
>> Yeah.
>> Again the debate continues.
>> Well, I think.
>> Containers, VMware,
and it's an interesting conversation
because Kubernetes is orchestrating all that now.
>> Kris: Yes.
>> Well, the snarky treat tweet the other day,
and you guys and feel free to comment was oh, I thought we,
you know launched pivotal so we didn't have to run
containers on virtual machines.
>> John: Yeah.
>> Now we know that
people run containers on veer metal,
they run containers on virtual machines but.
>> Yep.
Yeah man, it's a debate
that we hear pop off and you know
the snarky twitter feeds and so forth.
When we talk to customers about it,
you know this whole VM versus container debate
I think really misses the point
because it's not really about that.
What it's about is,
how do I actually operate these workloads in production?
Right, there's kind of this three pillars we talk about,
build, run, manage.
Customers want to accelerate that.
They want to do that with enterprise grade capabilities,
with security,
and so that's where it really gets challenging
and I think you know we built this amazing ecosystem
around vSphere to achieve that.
And so that's what we're taking forward here.
And yes, the fact that we're using
virtualization on the covers,
that's an implementation detail almost.
>> John: Yep.
>> What's more valuable is all the stuff above that.
The manageability, the operational capabilities,
that's the real powerful thing.
>> Well it seems to be to the business impact because.
Okay, people are going to to go to the cloud
and they're going to build cloud with the apps
but you've got all these incumbent companies
that are trying not to get disrupted,
they're tryna find new opportunities,
they're playing offense and defense at the same time.
They need tooling to be able to do that.
They don't want to take their ERP app
and stick it in the cloud.
Right, they want to modernize it.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> And you know you're not going to build that
overnight in the cloud anyway
so they need help.
>> Kit: Hmm hmm.
>> That's the key move
that we made here.
If you think about it,
customers don't have Kubernetes experts right they, today.
And most of them,
in their journey to the modern apps,
they are saying,
hey we need to set up two stacks at least.
We are all,
remember a stack that we love
and now Kubernetes, our developers love
so we have to send that out.
And they don't have any in-house experts to do that, right.
And with this one move,
we have actually collapsed it back to one stack.
>> Yeah I think it's a brilliant move actually,
it's brilliant because
the DevOps ethos is proven.
Everyone wants to be there.
And the question is,
who's leading and who's lagging?
So Ops has traditionally lagged
if you look at it from a developers standpoint.
You guys have not been lagging on the operating side.
Certainly have tons of Vms,
it's virtualization has been standardized so.
This, it's unifying.
>> Kit: Yeah.
>> The two worlds together. >> Exactly.
>> And it really is, we've been calling it Cloud 2.0
because if you look at what Hybrid really is.
>> Hmm hmm. >> It's cloud 2.0.
Cloud 1.0 was DevOps, storage and compute.
Amazon, you're born in the cloud.
We have no IT department.
>> Yeah (laughs).
>> 50 plus people, why would we ever?
And developers are the operators.
>> Yeah.
>> So we're small.
But enterprise scale is not that easy.
So I'd love to get your thoughts
on how you guys would frame the Cloud 2.0 vis avi.
If Cloud 1.0 was storage and compute
and Amazon like scale,
what is Cloud 2.0 to you?
>> Yeah, well I think so
let's talk about the cloud journey,
'cause I think that's what you're getting at here.
(clears throat)
So here's how I discuss it with customers.
You are where you are today,
you have your existing apps.
A lot of them are monolithic,
they're slow to update,
you know so forth, right.
And then you have so the Cloudinator Nirvana
over here where like everything is re-architected,
it's micro-services. >> Cool and shiny.
>> Yeah, it's got all this container stuff.
>> But it doesn't run my business.
>> Well yeah.
But this is where you want to get to, right.
And I think the challenge,
and the challenge is
it's a huge amount of effort to get there, right.
All the training we're talking about,
all the tooling,
and all of the changes there.
And people tend to look at this
as a very binary thing, right?
That you're either here where you are,
or you're in the cloudinator, Nirvana.
People don't often talk about what's in the middle
and that the fact that it's a spectrum.
What I think what we see at VMware
is like, let's meet customers where they are.
You know I think one of the big realizations we had
is not everyone needs to get
every single application on this far side over here.
Some apps, your AR pieces or whatever you know,
it's fine to get them a little bit of the way there.
And so one of the things that we saw
with VMware Cloud in native U.S for example,
was that people.
There was a pent up demand to move the public cloud.
But it was challenging because
to go from a vSphere environment on Prem
to an AWS native environment,
you have to change a bunch of things,
the tooling changes,
like the environment's a little bit different.
But with VMware Cloud in the native US,
there's no modification at all.
You just literally v-motion it.
And so people are v-motioning things insanely fast.
Now without modifying the app, you can't get,
you know it's not like the app is suddenly better scaleable.
But you get other cloud beenfits,
you get things like, oh my infrastructure is dynamic,
I can add host dynamically.
They pay for what I need,
I can consume this as a service.
And so we help moving,
we help to move their workloads a little bit
in that middle of the spectrum there.
And I think what we're doing with
Project Pacific and Kubernetes is the same thing.
They can start taking advantage
of these great Kubernetes capabilities
for their existing apps without modification.
So again, kind of moving them further
in that middle spectrum.
And then,
you know for the apps that really make a difference
to their business, they can put in the extra effort
to get all the way over there.
>> And we saw that some of the evidence
of some challenges of that shiny new trend,
within the Adupica system.
Big data objects store,
I mean who doesn't love that concept, right.
>> Kit: Yeah.
MAP produced,
but what happened was
is that the infrastructure costs and the personnel,
the human capital cost was so massive that,
and then the cloud,
Cloud came along and it's, oh, I'll just go to Cloud.
>> Well there's also the other point about
just the bespoke tooling that
as you found out. >> Yeah, it's always about
the people process. >> The confusion.
>> Technology, right,
and the disruption they create,
you know, to that
and the investments that it takes to
transition all of that. >> And then you had a skill.
Then you had a skills gap. >> Yep.
In terms of people help a little bit.
So that brings us back to,
so how do you address that problem?
Because the, most of the audience out here
are not developers. >> Yeah.
Now Pivotal has he developer's connections so.
>> This is one of the really cool things about Pacific.
That what we've done with Pacific,
when you look at it from an IT operations point of view,
that person sees vSphere,
it's the tool they already know and use,
understand it well.
When a developer looks at it,
they see Kubernetes.
And so this is two different view points.
It's kind of like you know the blind man
around the elephant (laughs).
But the thing is, is actually
you know a singular thing in the back end, right.
Even though they have these two different views.
And so the cool thing about it
is we can actually bring IT apps and developers together
that they can use their own language tools process.
But there's a common thing that they're talking about,
and they have common visibility into that.
And that's super, super powerful.
And when you look at it,
all the stuff that's happening on the Kubernetes side,
is fully visible on the vSphere side.
So all of these tools
that are already working as vSphere
suddenly line up
and support Kubernetes automatically.
So again, without any work
we suddenly get so much more benefit.
>> And the category busters are going on too.
You're changing,
you're taking software approach that you guys know
and you're taking it into the software developer world.
It's kind of changing the game. One of the things I wanted
'cause I wanted to get your thoughts on Cloud 2.0
because you know,
if compute and storage was Cloud 1.0,
we're seeing networking and security and data
becoming critical ingredients
that are problem statement areas
people are working on, certainly networking.
You guys are in that.
So as Cloud 2.0 is going to take into the fact
that messy middle between you know,
I'm on here and that
I want the Nirvana. >> Yep.
>> It's always, the origination story
and the outcome, end story is always great,
but the missing messy middle
as you were pointing out, is hard.
So how do you guys find?
>> And if you look at
look at the moves that we made
in the market,
do you know about the big fusion acquisition that we made?
Right which happened
like a month ago. >> Yep.
>> And it was about preparing the platform
for AI and ML workloads.
So really what we are trying to do
is really make sure that the vSphere platform is
ready for the modern applications, right.
AIML on one side, Kubernetes applications,
some you know, service oriented applications,
all of them can land on the same platform.
And more and more whether its AIML
or other applications,
they are being written on top of Kubernetes.
>> John: That's infrastructure's code.
>> Yeah, infrastructure as well, right.
So enabling Kubernetes will help us land
all the modern applications
on top of the same platform
that our customers are used to.
So it's a huge kind of inflection point
in the industry from my stand point.
>> Well, to your earlier point,
every CIO you talk to,
say, I want to get from point A to point B
and I don't want to spend a billion dollars to get there,
I don't want to have to hire
some systems integrator and outsource to get me there.
Show me how I get there without
you know disrupting my business.
>> Well I think it's,
it's how do we meet the customers where they're at?
Right? >> Yeah.
>> Like what the problem with this,
the kind of either or model,
you're either here or you're there
is that there's a huge opportunity cost.
And again, a lot of people
just need a little bit of goodness,
they don't need the full, crazy Nirvana goodness, right.
>> John: Yep.
And so we enable them to get that very easily
in an automated way.
Right, if you're just spending any time refactoring
or thinking through this app,
that takes months or even a year or more.
And so you know, the speed that we can unleash
or the velocity for these customers is critical.
>> Well the benefit
is that Nirvana is always taken out of context
because people look at the outcome over iterations,
and saying, well I want to be there.
But it all starts to be on a very variable basis.
Shadow IT we used to call it.
But you can go on the cloud
and do something really small and simple,
and then, wow this is much more efficient,
I like this stack, or this approach.
That's ultimately how it gets there.
So I got to get,
I got to get that point of
for infrastructure's code because
this is what you're enabling in vSphere,
from what I see.
I want to get you guys reaction on this because
the world used to be
and I asked Kelsey on this years ago
and he kind of validated it but,
'cause he's old school intel.
Infrastructure dictated to the applications
what it could do
based on what it could do.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> Now it's flipped upside down.
>> Kit: Yep.
>> With cloud platform because
platform implies enabling something,
enabling platform, whatever you want to call it.
The apps are dictating the infrastructure,
I need this,
that's infrastructure as code,
that's kind of what you're saying.
Is that?
>> Yeah, I mean look,
Kubernetes brought a paradigm
which said, hey I can declare what I want, right.
And then the system will take care of it
and maintain that state, right.
Desired state execution
is what it brought to the table.
And
the container based apps
have already been working that way,
what this announcement does with Project Pacific is that
the VM applications
that our customers built in the past,
they are going to be able to take advantage of
the same pattern, which is the,
the infrastructure as code,
declarative and desired state executions.
That's going to happen even for the old work loads
that our customers are using.
>> And they're going to sill to do VMs, I mean. Their scale,
they're going to have thousands
of VMs are going away. >> Absolutely
>> But they'll operate the same paradigm.
>> I mean, Paul Moritz doesn't get enough credit for the
comment he made in 2010.
He called it the hardened top.
Do you really care what is underneath,
and if its working effectively?
>> Yeah, well I mean I think
you know the reality today is that
even though containers that get all,
get a lot of coverage and attention.
Most work loads are being provisioned,
new work loads even,
are being provisioned in VMs, right.
If you look at AWS, the public Clouds,
I mean it's the EC2,
or Google Compute Engine,
those services,
those VMs are the ones that are getting heavily used.
And so the way we look at it
is we want to support everything
and it's just,
we want to give customers a bunch of tools in their toolbox
and let's put,
and use the right tool for the right job, right.
That's really the mentality.
>> That's really Cloud 2.0.
Krish I want to get your,
I want to nail you down on the definition of Cloud 2.0.
(laughing)
What is your version of Cloud 2.0?
>> You keep asking (laughter).
>> Come on.
>> We keep dodging your answer. >> I'll get it out, come on.
>> No, I think, look
we touched on all aspects of it,
one is the infrastructure as code
allowing the consumer of the cloud
to be able to dictate
the environment in which the applications will operate,
right.
And the consumer is defining it
or the developer is defining it in this case,
that to me is the biggest shift
that we have gone through in the durado
and we are just making our platform
come to life to support that.
>> We're taking a Cube survey,
and we're going to put it all together
and we want the community to define it, not us.
>> Yep.
>> What is it?
Explain to the audience what it means to be a project,
and how does a project get into an offering?
You could describe that.
>> I mean, so Project Pacific is vSphere, right.
I mean this is a massive re-thinking,
re-architecture of vSphere,
pretty much every major sub system component within vSphere
has been updated with this effort.
What we're doing here
is what we've technically announced
is actually what we call a technical preview.
So it's saying,
hey this is technology we're working on.
We think it's really interesting,
we want to share it with the public,
get the public's feedback you know,
figure out, are we on the right direction or not?
So we're not making any commitment to releasing it
or any time frames yet.
But so part of that needed a name, right.
And so,
'cause it is vSphere but it's a specific
thing we're doing at vSphere
so that's where the project comes from.
I think it also gives it.
You know, this thing
has been a huge effort internally, right.
There's a lot of work that's gone into it,
so you know it has some heft,
and deserves a name in itself.
>> Yes, It's DevOps 2.0, it's you guys brand,
you're making your infrastructure
truly enable program out programmable
for apps. >> Yep.
>> Application tsunami.
>> The one thing I would say is we wouldn't
announce it as a project
if it was not coming soon.
I mean we still are in the process
of getting feedback we'll tune it and what not,
but it's not something that is way out there,
it is going to come.
>> John: It's a clear direction.
>> Yes.
>> It's a statement,
you're putting investment into it,
it's coding going on,
just got to course correct, get some feedback.
>> Krish: Yeah.
>> Yeah, exactly. >> And, figure it out.
I mean, it's pretty obvious.
You can go a lot of pain or (laughs) easy.
It's an easy button for group at Eddies.
>> It is, It is the easy button.
>> Easy on ramp to the future.
>> Yeah, I think it's a great move, Congratulations,
we're obviously big fans of Kubernetes.
Saw the guys last night
having a little meeting at the Mariott,
thinking up the next battle plan for,
game plan for you guys, so.
>> Yeah.
We got a lot of,
this is just the tip of the iceberg,
we've got a lot of really really cool stuff we're doing,
the whole build on this. >> Well we're going to be
following the Cloud platform, your progress,
certainly recovering Cloud 2.0,
looking at these new categories that are emerging.
Again, the end state is DevOps
programmability for applications.
The Cube coverage
10th year covering VM World,
we're in the lobby of Moscone San Francisco.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.
Thanks for watching.
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