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STEPHANIE WONG: Welcome back to the "Next Live Show,"
I'm Stephanie Wong.
Joining us now is Jennifer Lind, Product Management Director.
Thank you so much for joining us.
JENNIFER LIN: Thanks for having me.
STEPHANIE WONG: So for those viewers who are just
learning about Kubernetes and Borg,
can you explain what each of those is,
and how we're making Kubernetes easier to consume
and the significance of how each has evolved at Google?
JENNIFER LIN: Sure.
Kubernetes is the externalization
and the open source of our internal controller development
container orchestration tool called Borg.
It's something that we've evolved over the last decade,
and we have said publicly that we
launch four billion containers a week
across the Google environment.
So managing that at scale, we've learned a lot
about just running large global scale systems
and doing container orchestration at scale
in a resilient, reliable way.
Kubernetes was open sourced a few years ago,
and we've had our own managed version of Kubernetes
with Google Kubernetes Engine now over four years.
So a lot has happened in a very short period of time,
but there's lots of lessons learned under the covers.
STEPHANIE WONG: We continue to talk about API, services
and open source.
Why is Google differentiating in this space?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I think this industry is changing so fast,
developers writing new software, so it's really important
that we get the interfaces and how
to enable the lifecycle management of services
right as a system.
And I think that's why Kubernetes has also gained
a lot of traction very quickly.
It sort of makes the notion of a service a first class citizen.
And we've been very clear about how do APIs interact,
and how do we essentially define services
and do the lifecycle management of services.
And that's all coming with the maturity of things
like Kubernetes and Istio.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, and this is all enabling our developers.
A lot of developers want to approach the way that Google
does and dive in and get experience the way
that Google develops software.
How does open source enable the community
and empower the community?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I think open source
has been the reason why a lot of this has moved so quickly.
I mean, it feels like overnight it has become,
Kubernetes has become sort of the container orchestration
system of choice.
Just a few years ago, there were so
many, there was a lot of fragmentation, a lot of folks
understood the value proposition of containerization
with Docker.
But essentially managing that at scale at the system level,
there were various options.
Through open source, I think we've allowed a lot of people
to just, number one, understand what's going on.
Number two, contribute in a way that's meaningful for them.
And get a lot of the use cases out there in the open,
so we can iterate on best practices, et cetera.
And yes,--
A lot of this has been very focused on developer agility,
but now as we move into sort of the maturity of it,
yes, a lot of the practices for the operational administrators
and SREs and making this essentially a production level
system, is a lot of what the community is
excited about as well.
STEPHANIE WONG: That's great, yeah.
Open source is really focused on our users.
And we also want to build our user experience
into our products.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
And given that our cloud users are different
and they have different needs, how
do we build that into our products as well?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I mean, on the product side within Google,
we do a lot with the user research team
to just make sure we understand, who are the personas,
whether it's developer or security
administrator or a network administrator
or the IT professional or the user.
So just making sure we taking sort of a use case driven
approach, and understanding sort of who
is the user of the product.
And essentially, what problem are they trying to solve?
And how do we hide the complexity
and make it a lot easier?
And make sure that they're essentially
doing their job well.
But there are a lot, because this
is a software stack with a lot of,
we've talked a lot about decoupling and separation
of concerns.
You could have a unified stack, but you
have to recognize that there's lots of folks that essentially
are consumers of that stack.
STEPHANIE WONG: So what's your advice for those
who want to move to the Cloud with acceleration,
and not have to do a rip and replace,
and manage their existing lifecycle?
How do they bring in Cloud Native?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I think Cloud Native has really
been about sort of openness and the flexibility
that we talked about today with Anthos is really,
there are an architectural set of principles,
which I think Kubernetes and things like Istio
have kind of put out there in the open source community.
There's a framework.
And then there's an implementation.
So number one, I think the industry is really
rallying around the fact that container orchestration,
there's sort of a clear de facto standard there.
Obviously, we have our managed version of that,
because there's a lot beyond just the software bits in terms
of how do you actually do lifecycle management
and keep essentially automatic upgrades, patching, security
updates, et cetera, as part of this system,
so that developers can move quickly,
but you can keep essentially the security and stability
of the system.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
And one big part of the acceleration
is GKE on prem, which was announced last August.
And this is the first time we've actually
brought our technology into the data center at this scale.
So why now?
And why not sooner?
JENNIFER LIN: I mean, what we found
is, everybody understands the benefits of Cloud.
But in many cases, there's technical and non-technical
reasons why they can't move all their workloads into Cloud
overnight.
So this was a lot about bringing the best of the Kubernetes
stack and what we're doing with Google Cloud
to the on prem environment, and helping people move
at their own pace.
While at the same time, modernizing in place.
So it's not just about renting compute cycles.
It's actually about application modernization
and developing new services and adding
more business value, et cetera.
So we're pretty excited about that.
Now it's not just on our GCP resources,
but we can essentially run this on third party servers
in a private data center for the enterprise.
And as we talked about today, other environments as well.
STEPHANIE WONG: So speaking of modernization,
we loved your demo during the day one keynote.
JENNIFER LIN: Thank you.
STEPHANIE WONG: We heard a lot about modernizing in place
this year.
Can you talk about how Anthos enables
you to modernize your applications,
no matter where they are, as you mention, on premise or user
in the Cloud?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I think that's the nice thing
about Kubernetes is, with Anthos,
we're really thinking about sort of open APIs.
So that the interfaces between those environments, number one,
we can hide the complexity, but still
keep a consistent management environment.
For the developers, independent of where those workloads
run, they can learn one set of tools
and essentially evolve as the industry evolves
without picking sort of exactly where that's going to run
or what production environment it's going to run in,
because many developers don't know.
They want to write once, run anywhere.
Their consumers may be running in many, many clouds.
And similarly for the platform administrator,
they don't have to learn a bunch of different vendor tools.
This framework is here to stay.
We believe it's going to be the standard for many years
to come.
So even if that's not running in Google's Cloud per se,
that skill set that many enterprises
are trying to hire people who understand Kubernetes, that's
very portable.
So people are willing to invest in it now
because it's going to be here to stay for many years.
STEPHANIE WONG: And on that theme,
we're hearing that developers and operators want
to be managing at higher levels of the stack.
But they still want visibility and control over policy
management at a service level.
How is Anthos providing a unified programming model
and monitoring and policy across on premise and multiple clouds?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, great question.
I mean, with Kubernetes obviously,
we've really thought about container orchestration
and cluster administration at scale.
With Istio, we're thinking about assuming
most of your microservices are now containerized,
how do you look out for the lifecycle and health
of those services and the interactions
between those services?
How do you make sure that those services are authenticated
and that you can put essentially policies around those services
without having to manage the underlying infrastructure
complexity?
And then we showed how we're doing
config management and automating essentially configurations
at scale in a way that essentially is declarative.
So you can define the policies once and push them down
to different environments, and you
don't have to rewrite them with a lot of toil
for each cloud environment.
And that's really important for customers
that are thinking about, let's say, PCI compliance
or governance.
Those rules around how to have those security
controls in place don't change cloud to cloud.
But today, they're spending a lot of time
just to make sure they can ensure audit and compliance
in each different environment.
So we believe that's sort of extra overhead
that doesn't need to be there, and that
was a key push with Anthos.
Many of our enterprise customers,
they want to embrace new technologies,
but it's not easy to figure out, how
do I ensure that I'm still reducing my costs,
keeping the efficiency and addressing
what the auditors and compliance regulatory environments are
looking for?
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
And we actually know that not everybody
has the luxury of moving to the cloud
immediately, for whatever reason.
How can we help them get there?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I think a lot of it is, I mean,
this has been a great week so far.
I think the partner community is very engaged.
I think a lot of the use cases and the best practices that
are being put out there are based on folks
trying things out, sharing best practices.
We're trying to take more of a use case driven approach.
With Anthos, I think a lot of what we're trying to share
is the operational domain knowledge,
and the best practices of us having run these systems
at scale.
But also tapping into our hundreds of ecosystem partners
who are getting excited about it and contributing back.
As this matures, and I think this
is happening very quickly in the last couple of years,
but it really is about solution delivery and not
just technology delivery.
STEPHANIE WONG: With Anthos, all these
customers moving into production [INAUDIBLE]
skills, very exciting.
And obviously, as you said, there are security concerns.
How are we making that easier for our customers?
JENNIFER LIN: Yeah, I mean we've been,
security is a major differentiator for us for GCP
more broadly.
And I think because containerization
is relatively a new space, we've been doing a lot with both
our customers and partners to do number one, education
and awareness round container security
and secure software supply chains
and things like binary authorization and CICD,
and how to make sure that security is baked in
way upstream,--
So that when a developer checks in code,
essentially it starts the governance process of security.
And it's not a bolt on afterthought after the fact.
I think that is a lot of the way that the Google developers are.
When they check in code, essentially they
don't have to be an expert in security,
but the platform takes care of a lot of the complexity
of security and governance.
STEPHANIE WONG: Thank you so much for your time, Jennifer.
JENNIFER LIN: Thanks for having me.
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