(upbeat music)
>> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's cover
of DockerCon Mainstage, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
We're here with Shubha Rao, Senior Manager, Product Manager
at AWS, in the container services.
Shubha, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Hi, thank you very much for having me, excited to be here.
>> So obviously, we're doing a lot of coverage
with AWS recently, on containers, cloud native,
microservices and we see you guys always at the events.
But tell me about what your role is in the organization?
>> Yeah, so I lead the product management
and developer advocacy team,
in the AWS Container Services group,
where we focus on elastic containers.
And what I mean by elastic containers, is that,
all the AWS opinionated,
out of the box solutions that we have for you, like,
you know, ECS and App Runner and Elastic BeanStalk.
So where we bring in our services in a way
that integrates with the AWS ecosystem.
And, you know, my team manages the product management
and speaking to customers and developers like you all,
to understand how we can improve our services
for you to use it more seamlessly.
>> So, I mean, I know AWS has a lot of services
tha t have containers involved with them
and it's a lot of integration within the cloud.
Amazon's as cloud native as you're going to get at AWS.
If I was a new customer,
where do I start with containers
if you had to give me advice?
And then, where I have a nice roadmap to grow within AWS.
>> Yeah, no, that's a great question
a lot of customers ask us this.
We recommend that the customers choose
whatever is the best fit for their application needs
and for their operational flexibilities.
So, if you have an application which you can use,
pretty abstract and like end to end managed by AWS service,
we recommend that you start at the highest level
of abstraction that's okay to use for your application.
And that means something like App Runner,
where you can bring in a web application
and run it like end to end.
And if there are things that you want to control
and tweak, then you know, we have services like ECS,
where you get control and you get flexibility
to tweak it to your needs.
Be it needs of like, integrations or running your own agents
and running your own partner solutions
or even customizing how it scales
and all the, you know, characteristics related to it.
And of course we have,
if there are a lot of our customers also run kubernetes,
so that is a requirement for you,
if your apps are already packaged to run, you know, easily
with the kubernetes ecosystem,
then we have, yes, for you.
So, like application needs, the operational,
how much of the operations do you want us to handle?
Or how much of it do you want to actually have control over.
And with all that, like the highest level
of abstraction so that we can do the work on your behalf,
which is the goal of AWS.
>> Yeah, well, we always hear that all that heavy lifting,
undifferentiated heavy lifting, you guys handle all that.
Since you're in product management,
I have to ask the question
'cause you guys have a little bit longer view,
as you have think about what's on the roadmap.
What type of customer trends
are you seeing in container services?
>> We see a lot of trends about customers who
want to have the plugability for their, you know,
services of choice.
And our EKS offerings actually help in that.
And we see customers who want an opinionated, you know,
give me an out of the box solution,
rather than building blocks.
And ECS brings you that experience.
The new strengths that we are seeing is that a lot
of our customer workloads are also on their data centers
and in their on-prem like environments.
Be it branch offices or data centers or like,
you know, other areas.
And so we've recently launched the,
anywhere offerings for you.
So, ECS anywhere, brings you an experience
for letting your workloads run
and management that you control, where we manage the scaling
and orchestration and the whole like, you know,
monitoring and troubleshooting aspects of it.
Which is the new trend,
which seems to be something that our customers use
as a way to migrate their applications to the cloud
in the long term or just to get, you know,
the same experience and the same, like,
constructs that they're familiar with,
come onto their data centers and their environments.
>> You know, Shubha, we hear a lot about containers.
It's becoming standard in the enterprise now, mainstream.
But customers, when we talk to them,
they kind of have this evolution,
they start with containers and they realize how great it is
and they become container full, right.
And then you start to see kind of,
them trying to evolve to the next level.
And then you start to see EKS come into the equation.
We see that in cloud native.
Is EKS a container?
Or is it a service?
How does that work with everything?
>> So EKS is a Amazon managed service, container service,
where we do the operational set up, you know,
upgrades and other things for the customer on their behalf.
So basically, you get the same communities APIs
that you get to use for your application
but we handle a little bit of the integrations
and the operations selected to keeping it up and running
with high availability. in a way that actually
meets your needs for the applications.
>> And more and more people are dipping their toe
in the water, as we say, with containers.
What are some of the things you've seen customers do
when they jump in and start implementing
that kind of phase one containers?
Also, there's a lot of head room beyond that,
as you mentioned.
What's the first couple steps that they take?
They jump in,, is it a learning process?
Is it serverless?
Where is the connection points all come together?
>> Great, so, I want to say that,
no one solution that we have, fits all needs.
Like, it's not the best case,
best thing for all your use cases,
and not for all of your applications.
So, how it all comes together is that,
AWS gives you a ecosystem of tools and capabilities.
Some customers want to really build the, you know,
castle themselves with each of the Lego block
and some customers want it to be a ready made thing.
And I want, you know,
one of the things that I speak to customers about is,
is to rethink which of the knobs and controls
do they really need to have, you know
because none of the services we have is a one way door.
Like, there is always flexibility and, you know
ability to move from one service to the other.
So, my recommendation is to always like,
start with things where Amazon handles
many of the heavy lifting, you know, operations for you.
And that means starting with something like,
serverless offerings, where, like, for example,
with Lambda and Forget, we manage the host,
we manage the patching, we manage the monitoring.
And that would be a great place
for you to use ECS offering and, you know,
basically get an end to end experience in a couple of days.
And over time, if you have more needs,
if you have more control, you know,
if you want to bring in your own agents
and whatever else you have,
the option to use your own EC2 Instances
or to take it to other, like, you know,
parts of the AWS ecosystem, where you want to, you know,
tweak it to your needs.
>> Well, we're seeing a lot of
great traction here at DockerCon.
And all the momentum around containers.
And then you're starting to get into trust
and security supply chain, as open source becomes
more exponentially in growth, it's growing like crazy,
which is a great thing.
So what can we expect to see from your team
in the coming months, as this rolls forward?
It's not going away anytime soon.
It's going to be integrated and keep on scaling.
What do we expect from the team in the next month or so?
Couple of months.
>> Security and, you know, is our number one job.
So you will continue to see more and more features,
capabilities and integrations,
to ensure that your workloads are secure.
Availability and scaling are the things that we do,
you know, as keep the lights on.
So, you should expect to see all of our services
growing to make it like, more user friendly, easier,
you know, simpler ways to get the whole availability
and scaling to your needs, better.
And then like, you know, very specifically,
I want to touch on a few services.
So App Runner, today we have support for
public facing web services.
You can expect that the number of use cases that you can
meet with app runner is going to increase over time.
You want to invest into making it AWS end to end workflow
experience for our customers because,
that's the easiest journey to the cloud.
And we don't want you to actually wait for months
and years to actually leverage the benefits
of what AWS provides.
ECS, we've already launched our, like, you know,
Forget and Anywhere, to bring you more flexibility
in terms of easier networking capabilities,
more granular controls in deployment and
more controls to actually help you plug in your
preferred, you know, solution ties.
And in EKS, we are going to continue to
keep the communities, you know,
versions and, you know, bring simpler experiences for you.
>> A lot of nice growth there, containers, EKS,
a lot more goodness in the cloud, obviously.
We have 30 seconds left.
Tell us what you're most excited about personally.
And what should the developers pay attention to
in this conference around containers and AWS?
>> I would say that AWS has a lot of offerings but, you know,
speak to us, like, come to us with your questions or,
you know, anything that you have,
like in terms of feature requests.
We are very, very eager and happy to speak to you all.
You know, you can engage with us on the container store map,
which is on GitHub.
Or you can find, you know, many of us in events like this,
AWS Summits and, you know, DockerCon
and many of the other meetups.
Or find us on LinkedIn, we're always happy to chat.
>> Yeah, always open, open source.
Open source meets cloud scale, meets commercialization.
All happening, all great stuff.
Shubha, thank you for coming on theCUBE.
Thanks for sharing.
We'll send it back now to the DockerCon Mainstage.
I'm John Furrier with theCUBE.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)