 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Day two live coverage here in Seattle of the CNCF, KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman here all week, the three days, it's multiple years we've been covering KubeCon. Covering this community, oh, back to the OpenStack days to now CloudNative and Kubernetes, Rise of Kubernetes and KubeCon, it's been great, CloudNative Computing Foundation, and the center of it has been an individual Kube alumni that we've talked to many times, Lou Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems, great to have Lou on. Good to see you. Great to be back again. We got a great history of conversations, and every year we kind of have a pinch me moment where it's like, it's so awesome right now, the technology's coming together. Now more than ever, the standardization, the matureization of Kubernetes and what's going on around it is probably one of the most exciting trends. It's not just about Kubernetes, it's about what that's enabling, ecosystem, storage, networking and compute now though, is working now magically, creating a lot of value. So we've talked about it, what's the update from your perspective, how do you see it evolving now? I see it very much the same way. I had a short little keynote yesterday and was talking about, actually, I think we've entered this kind of golden age of software where because of the number of projects that are now going into the CNCF, for example, and elsewhere, and GitHub repositories, we just have a major driving force which is the accumulation of the software that's used now to power the clouds, power data centers, totally transforming infrastructure. We're no longer cabling, as I sort of say, and now become code. And that's all about the software that's being developed through the open source community. We've been talking before we came on camera about the, and we've had other conversations about the historical waves of innovation. AI's been around for a while, all these things have kind of been around, but now with cloud computing and the resources available in terms of compute power, storage and networking now, programmable, is creating a lot of innovation. And this has been a tailwind for some and a headwind for others, companies that have transformed and understood that have been leveraging it. We've seen conversations from NetApp, Cisco, you guys are transformed, you're turned it into a tailwind for Cisco because now all that magic can come in for the programmability on the networking side. Exactly right, yeah. Now we see AI's having a big impact across the board on all of these waves. We're big contributors also into Kubeflow, for example, because on top of Kubernetes, the biggest issue we're going to have an AI going forward is we don't have enough AI engineers. We don't have enough people who are trained in that. And so we need to create these tools and the services that we see coming out in the cloud now for AI are designed to make it easy to consume AI. You don't have to be an AI expert in order to use it. And that's what I think is really exciting. How is the cloud native environment changing IT investments? Because again, the old days I have to throw a machine at something, I got to have by this and siloed, you got now horizontal capabilities, you got vertical specialization with machine learning and AI, as you just referenced, how is it changing investments? Because people now are looking at reimagining their infrastructure, they're reimagining how apps are built. How is Kubernetes cloud native impacting IT investments? So we found, for example, when we talked to our customers and everything else, they're all using multiple clouds. So I think a term that we're getting to see arise here now is this multi-cloud environment that we have. And so Cisco with what we've been doing with our hybrid solutions for AWS and hybrid solutions that we're having with Google is making it so that you can have the same environment within your data center as you have in the cloud. And then we connect the two. So now the IT infrastructure really is looking like a cloud and there's many clouds and multiple clouds in your own data center and multiple service providers. That makes it easier for IT to really consume cloud native technology. Yeah, I wonder if you can drill us down a level from what we're talking about. You can talk about Kubeflow and machine learning. Remember back to big data, it was like, okay, well what do we have to do with the network? Well, I need some more buffering, but how are we, what is just the base infrastructure layer and where Kubernetes and this ecosystem just becomes the platform for all of the modern applications and what has to be done differently? I wonder if you can help. So one of the big challenges I think is this, how do we connect the different clouds together with your own data center? And that's why we, the hybrid solutions where Cisco is driving now are designed specifically to make that easy because it's scary for IT organizations to say they're going to open up some part of their firewall to have connections coming in. And so we provide a solution that makes it easy for people. And that means that things such as Kubeflow and things like that, they can be running, perhaps like they might do some of their research in a public cloud provider such as AWS or Google and then they want to run it now in production within their own data center and they don't want to change a thing. And at the same time we're seeing other capabilities, you want to access some service in the cloud as a part of your enterprise app. You know, one of the things people have a hard time understanding is what is just kind of standardized? Okay, I've got compliant Kubernetes, it can run all these places and then there's areas where, you know, Cisco has done, you know, deep integration work with both Google Cloud and with AWS. Maybe help understand what are the standard pieces and what's the extra engineering work that needs to be done to support some of these? Well, I think what has helped us all is the fact that Kubernetes has really taken off. So we really are seeing, if you have a Kubernetes platform and you adhere to the public APIs of Kubernetes and everything else like that, you then can have a portability of applications back in the Java days we were going after that and now we're seeing it with Kubernetes. And so by what we've developed has been with the Cisco Container Platform is an on-premise managed Kubernetes environment that looks identical to what you find in the Kubernetes environment at AWS or at Google. So the same interfaces are there, the IT doesn't have to relearn things, they can actually get the advantage of that standardization. And that's key for operations in IT because that is the promise of cloud operations, similar on both platforms, on-premises and in the cloud. And the next question is, okay, from a networking perspective, we've had many conversations with Suzy, we at Cisco around network programmability or net DevOps as you guys call it, which is kind of a play on DevOps. This is the future because with multi-cloud the apps don't need to know about where to provision workloads, which cloud when, is a better region over here, latency, network factors come in, you still got to move things around, what A to B, edge of the network for IoT, talk about the importance of network programmability now more than ever with cloud native, why it's so important. Well, the first and foremost, it has to be driven by APIs. The old days of actually going out and having people configure network switches to make connectivity or open up provisions and firewalls and things like that, that's behind us. Now we have that all because of programmability of the network through what we've been doing with ACI and other technologies, we can make it so we can connect these clouds and maintain the security. We're also seeing other things such as Istio and edge-based computing and things like that come into play, where again, the ordinary developer doesn't have to learn all of the details of networking and security, but the operations people need it to be secure, need it to be able to be moved around and need to be able to have telemetry so they can tell what's going on. Yeah, one of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE, Stu and I were yesterday riffing on this, but for a while, but it's also now trickled into the Silicon Valley conversations around some of the tech elite people around architecture. Cloud architects are in high demand and there's two schools of thought. There's a persona of around a systems architect, more of a systems view, operating systems kind of view, that's cloud, that's operating environment, serverless events, these are kind of concepts that is a systems oriented thinker and then you have the application developer that looks like an app server kind of world. Those are old paradigms that you've lived through. Now coming together now in one, horizontally scalable cloud, that's a system, vertical specialization around the apps and with DevOps layer, having these guys work together. Talk about this dynamic, your thoughts on it, how this shapes employee selection, people who lead projects, because the CTO and architect roles now more important with systems perspective, but the software side's just as important. So I think one thing that's become very clear is that we need to make it easier for the domain experts in an application area to just take care of their part. And so that's why like one of the previous episodes we've talked about here was about Istio where we've actually separated out essentially the data plane, the transport of data around with security, encryption, identity and everything from the actual application code of the microservice. That makes it much easier because now the engineering teams are too large, you can't have everybody know everything anymore. Like you say, we've got specialists in different areas, we need to be able to provide them underlying systems that connect these things and that underlying system that has to be managed by your operations people. So we've got DevOps, we've got where the application people are writing code actually that the develop that the operations people use so that we can actually have this kind of uniform infrastructure that is maintainable. And security's super important and all that good stuff. Yeah, so, Lou, it's interesting. We've been watching so many of the pieces we worked on, the open stack, it was really from the bottoms up building the infrastructure. We've seen a dynamic the last few years, Kubernetes sum and serverless even more coming from the top down. I want to get your thoughts on that. We've been digging in and trying to tease out some of the K native pieces that are being discussed here versus some of the functions things that are happening especially in Amazon and Microsoft. I'd love to get your take. I think we're always seeing this progression in platforms for computing and programming languages and paths we've talked about years ago. All of these things are designed always to make it easier. So like you're right, we've got for example K native now really coming on a thing. Can we standardize away specifically helping Kubernetes people move into this area? Like I mentioned before the Q flow again, how can we start to standardize these pieces? The beauty of this is these standardized pieces are coming out in open source. So everybody gets it and that means it's deployable in your public cloud, it's deployable in your data center and then through a lot of the hybrid technology that Cisco's working, you can connect those together. But you're right, we're going to continue to see innovation, that's great. Because we need that, we need that constantly. What we need to be able to do is make it easier to consume and then integrate into these systems and that's what I think Kubernetes has a lot to do with how we make it easier. Final question on Cisco that I want to go in on a more personal note with you on your situation which is news breaking here on theCUBE. Cisco has successfully transformed its direction. It's been always a great leader in networking, always a great business, billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Now with cloud native and Kubernetes, the relationship I've saw with Amazon, you got Google, you guys have taken that systems view, you're making things programmable. Explain the Cisco strategy from your perspective as a CTO and as a legend in the industry. The people that know Cisco know the old Cisco. What is the new Cisco and how does Kubernetes and how does all this cloud native fit into the new Cisco? Yep, I think the new Cisco really is focused now on where customers are taking their computing resources and it is in this multi-cloud world where we're saying it's not a fight anymore. You can't say I have a reason to keep things here in my data center, I'm never going to go to cloud and other customers are saying I'm never going to have a data center. Now we're saying we're probably going to both. And Cisco is a networking company that plays right into our strength because what you have to be able to do is now connect those environments in a secure way, in a manageable way. And so this plays right into where Cisco's growth I think is going to be, it'll be in much more of these kinds of services that allow that to happen. And then the relationships and partnerships we have with the major cloud providers. This basically the decomposition of monolithic applications into sets of micro-services is connected by the network. This is the fundamental beauty of where you guys see that tailwind. Exactly, awesome. Well Lou, you've been a legend in the industry. I've been following your career from the beginning. You have products that's in the Computer History Museum. You've done amazing work at Sun Microsystems. I mean, just a great story career. The work you've done at Cisco, you've been on theCUBE so many times, like I don't know the number. You really contributed to the industry and there's news now about your situation. Share the news about what's happening to you. I made an announcement at our CNCF board and our OpenStack board meeting that I'm leaving Cisco. And so I'm having to withdraw from those board positions as well as Cloud Foundry. And that's sad in a way because I have relationships with those people. But in many ways after I want to spend some time to really see where the future is again because as you know in my career I've changed several times. And I'm so looking forward to actually now going into sort of a new direction which may be much more moving up the stack. I think there's very exciting things going on in AI. There's exciting things going on in genomics. There's a lot of activity going on. So we've been building this technology for a purpose to allow us to have those kinds of things. Now I want to start focusing much more directly. And you're leaving Cisco on what date? Leaving Cisco beginning of January. Well congratulations, great work. And I think one of the trends I think this speaks to is I see a lot of computer scientists, a lot of people who have some DNA from the old ways like you do and been there and contributed at a seminal level just some great contributions. Seeing computer science as an opportunity to solve problems. This is kind of a renaissance from seasoned pioneers and young people coming together. This is a great opportunity. Is that kind of what you're thinking you're just going to tackle a problem? There's 8,000 people here. This show is sold out. And this is almost all developers. So people who have a background in computer science who are getting online and learning it themselves. This is an opportunity and a time to get in. You've been a great mentor to many. You've been a great contributor in the open source community. Again, your contribution at the systems level and you understand certainly what's going on with cloud native. Looking forward to following up and congratulations. Yep. Well I hope to be back again. Yeah, of course. If you're VIP CUBE alumni. Lou Tucker, exciting news. Cisco's transformed. He's moving on to some, taking on some big new challenges. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Lou Tucker, Vice President CTO Systems, Cisco Systems. Moving on to some new endeavors here in the CUBE. We're covering the live coverage here at CUBECon, cloud native.com, John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Back with more day two interviews after this short break.