 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Jeffrey Snover. He is the technical fellow and chief architect for Azure Storage and Cloud Edge at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE, I should say, Jeffrey. You're at theCUBE alone. Yes, I enjoyed the last time. So, can't wait to do it again this time. Well, we're excited to have you. So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about PowerShell. You invented PowerShell. It was invented in the early 2000s. It took a few years to ship, as you said, but can you give our years an update of where we are? Yeah, you know, it's 2018 and it's never been a better time for PowerShell. You know, basically the initial mission is sort of complete. And the initial mission was provide sort of general purpose scripting for Windows. But now we have a new mission and that new mission is to manage anything anywhere. So, we've taken PowerShell. We've open sourced it. It's now running. We ported it to macOS and Linux. It's a very large list of Linux distributions that we support it on and it runs everywhere. And so now, you can manage from anywhere. Your Windows box, your Linux box, your Mac box, even in the browser, you can manage, and then anything, you can manage Windows, you can manage Linux, you can manage macOS. So, manage anything anywhere, any cloud, Azure or AWS or Google, any Hypervisor, Hyper-V or VMware or any physical server. It's amazing. In fact, our launch partners, when we launched this, our launch partners, VMware, Google, AWS, non-Microsoft's traditional partners. That's great to hear. It was actually one of the critiques we had of the keynote this morning was, partnerships are critically important, but felt that Saja gave a little bit of a jab towards the kind of the Amazons out there, and when we talk to customers, we know it's a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world. You work all over the place with your solutions that you had. There's not only Azure, Azure Stack, out to the edge. The edge, it is early, it's going to be very heterogeneous. Connect the dots for us a little. We love having the technical fellows on, as you go from PowerShell to now, this diverse set of solutions that you work on today. Yeah, exactly. So, basically from PowerShell, they asked me to be the chief architect for Windows Server, right? Because if you think about it, an operating system is largely management, right? And so that's what I did, resource management. And so as the chief architect for that for many years, and we decided that as part of that, we were developing cloud-inspired infrastructure. So basically, Windows Server had grown up, sort of focused in on a machine. Azure had gone and needed to build a new set of infrastructure for the cloud. And we looked at what they were doing, and they say, hey, that's some great ideas. Let's take the ideas there and put them into the general purpose operating system. And that's what we call our software-defined data center. And the reason why we couldn't use Azure directly is, Azure's really design center is very, very, very large systems. So for instance, the storage stamp, that starts at about 10 racks. No customer wants to start with 10 racks. So we took the inspiration from them and re-implemented it. And now our systems can start with two servers, our Azure Stack systems. So then what we decided was, hey, this is great technology. Let's take the great cloud-inspired infrastructure of Windows Server and match it with the Azure services themselves. So we take Azure, put it on top of Windows Server, package it as an appliance experience, and we call that Azure Stack. And that's where I've been mostly focused for the last couple of years. Great, can you help us unpack a little bit? There's a lot of news today. Yes. Windows 2019 was announced. I was really interested in the data box edge solution, which I'm sure. Is that crazy? Yeah, really interesting. Let's do some AI applications out at the edge, and it's the same kind of box that we can transport data because, I always say, you've got to follow customers' applications and data, and it's tough to move these things. We've got physics that we still have to work on until some of you smart guys figure out how to break that. But yeah, maybe give us a little bit of context as to news of the show, things your teams have been working on. Yeah, so the data box edge, big, exciting stuff. Now there's a couple of scenarios for data box edge. First is, first it's all kind of largely centered on storage and the edge. So storage, you've got a bunch of data in your enterprise and you'd like it to be an Azure. One flavor of data box edge is a disk. You call us up, we send you a disk, you fill up that disk, we send it back to us, it shows up in Azure. Next. A pretty big disk though. It can be a small disk. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, it can be a single SSD. But then you can say, well no, I need a bunch more. So we send you a box. The box is over there. It's like 47 pounds. We send you this thing. It's about a hundred terabytes of data. You fill that thing up, send it to us and we upload it. Or a data box heavy. Now this thing has a handle and wheels. I mean literally wheels. It has especially designed so that a forklift can pick this thing up, right? It's like, I don't know, like 400 pounds. It's crazy. And that's got about a petabyte worth of storage. Again, we ship it to you. You ship it, fill it up, ship it back to us. So that's one flavor, data box transport. Then there's data box edge. Data box edge, you go to the website said like a data box edge, we send you a OneU server. You plug that in, you keep it plugged in. Then you use it. How do you use it? You connect it to your Azure storage and then all your Azure storage is available through here. And it's exposed through SMB. Later we'll expose it through NFS and a blob API. But then anything you write here is available immediately. It gets back to Azure. And effectively it looks like near infinite storage. Just use it and it gets backed up. So it's amazing. Now on that box, we're also adding the ability to say, hey, we got a bunch of compute there. You can run IoT edge platforms. So you run the IoT edge platform. You can run gateways. You can run Kubernetes clusters on this thing. You can run all sorts of IoT software. Including we're integrating in brainwave technology. So brainwave technology is, and by the way, this, I want to talk about this a second. This, it is an evidence of the largest transformation we'll see in our industry. And that is the reintegration of the industry. So basically, what does that mean? In the past, the industry used to be back when the big key players were digital. Remember digital from DEC? Both were all Massachusetts people. So DEC was the number one employer in Microsoft, in Massachusetts, gone. IBM dominant, much diminished. A whole bunch of people. They were dominant when the industry was vertically integrated. Vertically integrated meant all those companies designed their own silicon. They built their own boards. They built their own systems. They built their OS. They built the applications. They serviced them. Then there was the disintegration of the computer industry. Where basically we went vertically integrated. You got your chips from Intel or Motorola. The operating system you got from Sun or Microsoft. The applications you got from a number of different vendors. Okay, so we got vertically integrated. What you're seeing, and what's so exciting, is a shift back to vertical integration. So Microsoft is designing its own hardware. We're designing our own chips. So we've designed a chip, especially for AI. We call it a brainwave chip. And that's available in the data box edge. So now when you do this AI stuff, guess what, the processing's very different. And it can be very, very fast. So that's just one example of Microsoft's innovation in hardware. Wow, so, I mean, I- What do you do with that? One of the things that we keep hearing so much at this conference is that Microsoft products and services are helping individual employees tap into their own creativity, their ingenuity. And then also collaborate with colleagues. I'm curious about where you get your ideas and how you actually put that into practice. As a technical fellow, how do you think about the future and envisage these next generation technologies? Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those things, honestly, where your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength. So my weakness is I can't deal with complexity, right? And so what I'm always doing is I'm taking a look at a very complex situation. I'm saying, what's the heart of it? Like, give me the heart of it. So my background's physics, right? And so in physics, you're looking for the F equals MA. And if you have that, when you find that, then you can apply it over and over and over again. So I'm always looking at what are the essential things here? And so that's this, well, you see a whole bunch of confusing things like what's up with this, what's with this. That idea of there is this narrative about the reintegration of the computer industry. How very large vendors, be it Microsoft or AWS, because we operate at such large scales, we are going to be vertically integrated. We're developing our own hardware, we do our own systems, et cetera. So I'm always looking for the simple story and then applying it. It turns out, I do it pretty accurately and it turns out it's pretty valuable. All right, so that's a good setup to talk about Azure Stack. So the value proposition we heard, of course, is start everything in the cloud first. Microsoft does Azure, and then let's have some of those services in the same operating model in your data center or in your hosting service provider environment. So first of all, did I get that right? And give us the update on Azure Stack. I've been trying to talk to customers that are using it, talking to your partners. There's a lot of excitement around it, but proof points, early use cases, where is this going to be pointing towards where the future of the data center is? Yeah, so it's a great example. So what I figured out when I thought about this and kind of drilled in, like what really matters here? What I realized was that what the gestalt of Azure Stack is different than everything we've done in the past. And it really is an appliance, okay? So in the past, I just had a session the other day and people were asking, well, when is Azure Stack going to have the latest version of the operating system? I said, no, no, no, no. Internals are internal. It's an appliance. Azure Stack is for people who want to use a cloud, not for people who want to build it. So you shouldn't be concerned about all the internals. You just plug it in, fill out some forms, and then you use it, you start using it. You don't care about the details of how it's all configured. You don't do the provisioning. We do all that for you. And so that's what we've done. And it turns out that that message resonates really well. As you probably know, most private clouds fail. Most private clouds fail miserably. Why? And there's really two reasons. There's two flavors of failure, but one is they just never work. Now that's because, guess what? It's incredibly hard. There are so many moving pieces. And guess what? We learned that ourselves, man. The number of times we stepped on the rakes of like, how do you make all this work? Is a gazillion moving parts. So if any of you have a team that's failed at a private cloud, they're not idiots. It's super, super, super hard. But so that's one level of failure. But even those teams that got it working, they ultimately failed as well because of lack of usage. And the reason for that is, having done all that, they then built a snowflake cloud. And then when someone said, well, how do I use this? How do I add another nick to a VM? The team that put it together were the only ones that could answer that. There was no ecosystem around it. So with Azure Stack, the Gestalt was like, this is for people who want to use it, not for people who want to build it. So you just plug it in, you pick a vendor, and you pick a capacity. This vendor, four nodes. This vendor, 12 or 16 nodes. And that's it. You come in, we ask you what IP range is, how do I integrate with your identity? Within a day, it's up and running, and your users are using it, really using it. Like that's craziness. And then, well, what does it mean to use it? Like, oh, hey, how do I add a nick to a VM? It's Azure. So how does Azure do it? I have an entire Azure ecosystem. There's documentation, there's training, there's videos, there's conferences. You can go and put on a resume. I'd like to hire someone with Azure skills, and get someone, and then they're productive that day. Or, and here's the best part, you can put on your resume, I have Azure skills, and you knock on 10 doors, and nine of them are going to say, come talk to me. So that was the heart of it. And again, it was back to your question of like, the value, what does a technical value do? It's to figure out what really matters, and then say, we're all in on that. There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of customers like, I must have my security agent on there. I said, well, no, then you're not a good candidate. What do you mean? I said, well, look, we're not going to do this. And they said, well, you'll never be able to sell to anyone in my industry. I said, no, you're wrong. I said, what do you mean I'm wrong? I said, well, let me prove it to you. Do you own a SAN? I said, well, of course we own a SAN. I said, I know you own a SAN. Let me ask you this. A SAN is a general purpose server with a general purpose operating system. So do you put your security and management agents on there? And they said, no, we're not allowed to. I said, right. And that's the way Azure Stack is. It's a sealed appliance. We take care of that responsibility for you. It's worked out very, very well. All right. You got me thinking. One of the things we want to do is we want to simplify the environment. That's been the problem we've had in IT for a long time is it's this heterogeneous mess. Every group did their own thing. I worry a multicloud world has gotten us into more silos because I've got lots of SaaS providers. I've got multiple cloud providers. And boy, maybe when I get to the edge, every customer is going to have multiple edge applications and they're going to be different. So how do you simplify this over time for customers? Yeah, here's the hard story. Back to getting at the heart of it. Look, one of the benefits of having done this a while is I've stepped on a lot of these rakes. You're looking at one of the biggest, earliest adopters at the Borland cross-platform GUI framework. And every time there is this, oh, there's multiple platforms, people say, oh, that's a problem. I want a technology that allows me to bridge all of those things. And it sounds so attractive and generates a lot of early things. And then it turned out, and I was rocking with this Borland cross-query platform. I wrote and it worked on Macs and Windows, except I couldn't cut and paste. I couldn't print. I couldn't do anything. And so what happens is it's so attractive, blah, blah, blah. And then you find out, and when the platforms aren't very sophisticated, the gap between what these cross-platform things do and the platform is not so much. So it's like, eh, it's better to do this. But over time, the platform just grows and grows and grows. So the hard message is people should pick. People should pick. Now, one of the benefits of Azure as a great choice is that with the other guys, you are locked to a vendor, right? There is exactly one provider of those APIs. With Azure, you can get an implementation of Azure from Microsoft, the Azure public cloud. Or you can get an implementation from one of our hardware vendors running Azure Stack. They provide that to you. Or you can get it from a service provider. So you don't have to get, you buy into these APIs. You optimize around that. But then you can still use vendor, you know, hey, what's your price for this? What's your price for that? What can you give me? With the other guys, like, they're going to give you what you give. Give you and that's your deal. That's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for coming on theCUBE again. It was great talking to you. Oh, that was fast. I enjoyed it. This was great. Great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned to theCUBE. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.