>> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley,
it's theCUBE,
covering Google Cloud Next '17.
(funky techno music)
>> Welcome back to our live coverage here
of Google Next 2017,
an event that last year was focused only on Google Cloud.
They've actually expanded a bit,
they're talking about G Suite,
talking about some of the devices,
and they bring in a really broad and diverse community,
so when I talk to the Google people,
it's not one show, it's a handful of shows.
I went to the analyst event.
My guest for this segment is Chris Wahl,
who came in through the community event.
So, excited to get that angle.
Chris, thanks so much for doing the drive with me
from San Francisco down to Palo Alto.
For those of us not in the area,
it's a 45 minute drive, it's not too bad.
It's a beautiful, sunny day.
It's great to catch up with you and thanks for coming.
>> Always glad to be on,
love being a CUBE Alumni, so,
I think it's my third time.
>> Wow, a three-time Alumni.
It's like if you've been a host of Saturday Night Live
for like seven times, you know
you get the special jacket. - Automatically.
>> Things like that.
You're getting up there.
Three times.
It's like, you're not quite in Pak Elsinger area,
but you have passed,
you've been on more than Andy Jassey now.
>> Wow, cool.
>> I think that that's pretty impressive.
>> Bucket list, accomplished.
>> Exactly, so, what brings you to the Google event
and tell us a little bit about the community event.
>> Yeah, to be honest,
I thought it was a spam email at first.
I just got an invite saying,
hey, we have this Google event going on,
and I'm not really plugged in
to the Google Universe too much.
So I said, cool, I'm interested,
I'll take a look.
Got invited out by Sarah Novotny
to a community focus day.
>> Host: Sarah's awesome.
Also a CUBE Alum, of course.
>> Yeah, Alum, and ran OSCON
I think, as a boarder or some kind of
management facility for quite a while.
So yeah, the Google Cloud Next is this week but on Tuesday.
They actually had a bunch of influencers,
evangelists, community members,
out to spend time with all sorts of Google-y Google-ers,
talking around what their vision is around
kind of bridging the gap to the enterprise,
what their thought around Kubernetes,
and just really the community in general were.
Which was kind of cool because it was all
fresh and clean and new for me.
So, it was really great to taste the Kool-Aid,
and see how delicious it could be.
>> Yeah, so I'm curious what your take is.
I remember I did a panel at Interop a couple of years ago,
and it was like, basically,
hyper-scale, you're-not-Google,
so what do you need to do,
how do you do it, do you just use Google stuff,
can you code like Google,
can you act like Google,
or are you just an enterprise
and you're forced to live in the past.
>> I think over the last couple of years,
the idea of the Sight Reliability Engineers come out
and been more focused on the enterprise
and kind of dovetailed into the Dev-Op story.
So, it was really interesting to hear,
not only trying to talk to the enterprise,
but also how they're trying to get the enterprise
to kind of stop being the
traditional enterprise that it's been.
Which I think entirely, it's something that
we practitioners have always been trying to do.
No one wants to be on-call all the time
and fixing these flaming disasters and things like that.
But at the same time, you have to recognize
that moving that much
intrinsic culture poison
from one side to the next is hard.
They're admitting that too,
it's like, we wold love for you guys to be more Google-y,
and to use the tools that we have here,
but we're not sure you even know
what the tools are or how to use them,
or what kind of documentation is necessary,
or what meet-ups we can go to find my people,
you know, the practitioners.
>> I want to channel our friends,
the Geek Whisperers, and alright Chris,
so how did you transition out of being
a VMware guy to someone that does
cool and interesting things now,
because VMware is no longer the coolness.
>> That's been the vibe, yeah.
It's something I personally have been trying to,
I don't think in any technology
you want to be that technology specific.
VMware, love it, have been doing it for 12 something years,
but you don't just want to be pigeon-holed
in that kind of silo.
Which is actually why I wanted to come out
and talk with the folks at Google
around what they're doing to build a community.
I think it was Sam something-or-other--
>> Host: Sam Ramji.
>> Sam Ramji actually came up and said,
you know, as long as we're going to exist as a company,
we're going to have this community day.
It's the first one they've done,
and they plan to do it basically infinitely forever,
because they realized they had the analysts,
and things like that out there,
they had all the engineers and developers,
but what were they missing?
The folk in the trenches that are trying
to adopt and use this sort of technology.
I like that aspect of it.
There weren't any huge, mind-shattering
results that were out there,
except for I think, me personally,
I like that Google kind of admitted
that yeah, they hadn't been doing the best job
around interfacing with the community
and getting IT practitioners and operation-centric
folks into the fold, welcoming into the bosom of Google,
and that they were trying to work on that.
And it's like, okay, awesome.
Let's have a conversation,
which the other half of the day was an un-conference,
where we literally broke up into groups,
that we decided ourselves as like
a democracy of Google decision-making.
We formed eight different groups.
Some focused on containers,
I actually sat in in a two hour session
where we just kind of riffed on abstraction layers
and where we should we start working.
Is it at the container level,
is it at the hypervisor level,
is it at the virtual machine level?
And it was neat because everyone had a completely
different idea and background around that.
I felt like I was an alien in that conversation
for a lot of it 'cause they're working
on solving problems that are totally alien to my world.
So I liked all that.
>> It's an interesting crowd when the server-less stuff
got talked about in the keynote today--
>> Yes!
>> There was a big clap and I loved Brian Stevens.
He's like, functions are just fragments of code,
and they get applause,
you know, he's kind of like--
(Chris laughs)
>> It's like either remark, I got applause for that.
>> Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny.
But you know, that's the kind of people
that come to this show, right?
So, you checked out a thing called, what was it,
Code Labs or something like that?
Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
>> Yeah, yeah, there was, I had some notes
there that I'd written down.
Certification in Code Labs, specifically.
So Code Labs was interesting
'cause it's a place that you can,
you have to book it in advance, like a day in advance,
and from about 11 to seven each day,
they just have Google-y Google-ers,
you know, very Google-y people out there
that say alright, here's all our various APIs,
such as the new one where you can query a video
and say I'm looking for, I think in the keynote,
they had "find me baseball" in this video,
and it actually shows you in the timeline
where baseball occurs.
There's also things to do
image tagging and things like that.
And, I don't know, it might be difficult
to grasp that API interaction at first.
And so you can sit down,
and they'll show you how to write code
in the languages of your choice.
Obviously Go is very prominent.
I'm a PowerShell developer,
so it's like, alright,
how would you write that in Curl,
and that's maybe our bridge to one another,
since I don't know Go and they don't know PowerShell,
or the person I was working with.
So that was cool, to hear how they approach those things,
because I've typically done it as an Ops person.
I'm typically looking at it from the perspective
of I'm trying to automate some task
and feed it into an orchestration engine.
And I'm not super deep on APIs in general,
I like them, but ...
That was cool, I liked that you're basically
getting to meet with really, really awesome engineers
and SREs to pick their brain and their vast decades
of experience on writing code.
To work with APIs and things that are Google-centric.
So that was awesome.
>> So it sounds like you didn't feel like this was a
marketing show, right, - [Chris] No!
>> that they bring in the engineers,
the technical people, I mean
it's not far being from San Franscisco
from the Google-Plex, the Mothership is nearby.
>> Thats's a good point because a lot of these shows
have just become a sales pitch in a wolf's clothing
or a conference clothing, and this was ...
I've never met so many really, really talented engineers
all concentrated in one spot.
I mean, you've got the rock stars that I think
everybody knows, like Sarah, and Kelsey,
that are very available and personable,
but you also have a whole army of people
that have a huge amount of passion around writing code
and understand what your problems are
and wanting to talk to you.
I felt like a person,
which I've been a Google customer since, I guess,
Google came out, you know,
Google apps and things like that.
This is really the first time I really
started putting faces to the technical practitioners
that work there, and they're really interested
and excited with what my mundane kind of problems.
So, that's kind of cool.
>> Yeah, I found they're definitely, they're listening,
they're talking, it's really good,
because right, we at our firm,
we've used Google for a while
and it's like, oh wait I have a challenge.
Who do I call, who do I email?
Nope, you should just watch the YouTube video and use it.
C'mon, aren't you smart enough to use these things right?
You know, was kind of how we all felt for a while.
Interesting. Kinder, gentler Google
than we've knew in the past?
>> They had the Google leaders circle
and the various groups that you could join online,
but it was just, you can't fake that kind of raw passion,
and I sat down with some of the SREs at the community day,
and it was really just, talk to me about what you do,
and why, and what tools you use,
and what can we do to be better?
More specifically, the Dev Rel,
the developer relations folks were just awesome.
And they're like, is our title threatening?
What meet-up should we go to?
What can we do to make your life better?
And I just kind of, at first,
said a few comments and realized, no, this is real.
They want to know my day one and day two operations,
so that they can find the right tools,
or if there isn't one, build one.
And I don't know, that's great.
I've never seen that at a conference before.
So I'm hooked.
I definitely plan to go again.
>> Alright, so anything you didn't see
that you were hoping to see,
follow-up that you want to have,
other cool stuff going on that you want to share?
>> I almost want to do like a plea to Google
that throughout the community today and at the conference,
there's been a lot of commentary
and some, kind of some references to,
oh we don't want to tell you how to do things,
we don't want to tell you how to build
architecture in a certain way.
Please do tell me how to do those things.
At least give me a reference architecture,
or some example environments,
because I feel like a lot of it is just,
here's some cool things you can do,
kind of in isolation.
Or here are some things with Kubernetes
that kind of exist outside of reality.
I'm looking for, alright,
I don't have any of that stuff,
how do I onboard into that?
Here's a white paper, and that kind of jazz.
>> Yeah, and we saw, you know,
I hate to always bring up AWS,
but AWS went from here's this giant toolbox
with all these things
to right, here's some services,
here are some tracks, here are some,
not wizards, but you know,
templates you can follow for certain things.
Here are people that are probably similar to you
and, boy, with Google with their
AI and ML and all their things that they can do
to help us sort out all the TLAs that they've got to.
(Chris laughs)
You know, they should be able to help going forward
because, yeah, Google should be able to personalize
all that to be able to work a little bit better
for us as opposed to us having
to just kind of figure it out a little bit.
I know you played with the Google Cloud
a little bit yourself-- - Yeah.
>> And it wasn't as simple as you were hoping, right?
>> It was hard.
(both laugh)
I mean--
>> Host: C'mon, if you can't figure it out, you know--
>> I don't feel like I'm the sharpest tool in the shed,
but I was like, I'm kind of the
representative layman ops person,
and it felt very convoluted, complex,
the documentation was fragmented.
I'm like, just give me the wizard
so that I can start fishing for myself.
I just do that first hit for free,
and then I'll take care of it beyond that.
So, that would be my one ask to Google as a whole,
but otherwise I think the tooling
and the people, and the culture are all there,
it's just build a few more things
and I think we've got some interesting
entanglements at the enterprise level once that's done.
>> Okay, want to give me the final word,
what's going on with you other than,
your hometown, your new hometown of Austin, Texas.
South By coming, so I know there's a lot of music
and fun going on but, what's happening in your world,
what's happening with Rubrik?
>> Oh yeah, I'll mention South By,
definitely will be there,
I will not be available online or anything.
I'm going to be going into sequester mode
and just listen to music with my co-host actually.
If you listen to the Datanauts podcast,
with Ethan Banks, he's going to come by.
So, we'll be at the show I guess
if you want to hang out with us, hit us up.
Otherwise, Rubrik's been awesome.
It's definitely a rocket ship ride
and it was actually dove-tailed into
quite a few conversations I had while at Google Next.
Because movement of data into
and around clouds is non-trivial,
so that's where the Cloud Data Management world
that we're in, kind of fits into that equation,
and why I personally wanted to go to this show,
but also professionally I thought that there'd be
some inroads there to discuss with the other practitioners.
>> Absolutely, the whole infrastructure side
and how that plays in the public cloud,
how it plays with Sass,
there's a lot of those discussions going on.
Congrats, you guys have been growing some good buzz.
You guys have been hiring, too,
so check Chris out for all that.
We'll be back,
lots more coverage here of the
Google Cloud
Next 2017,
you're watching theCUBE.
(funky techno music)