 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging in with VMware, with the latest update of the VMware Cloud on AWS. Definitely a technology solution set that the ecosystem has been very interested to dig into. And to help us do that deep dive, I'd like to welcome back to the program Kit Colbert. He is the vice president and CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit with VMware. Kit, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. All right, so you brought along some slides. As we said, if people want to watch, we've got an executive interview to give kind of the general business update. But when it comes to the technology, I guess we start with the VMware Amazon partnership is a deep integration. We've heard both from Andy Jassy and from Pat Gelsinger on how much engineering work and how critically important it is. Anybody from the technical side understands that one of the interesting things in cloud is that Amazon created bare metal instances to support this solution. So one of the items here is that there is a new bare metal instance. So why don't you bring us inside what the updates are and what this means to user-based? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so the bare metal support is something that we work very closely with AWS on when we're first launching VMware Cloud on AWS. And the idea there with that bare metal support is that it very similarly models EC2 virtual machines in the sense of each of these VM types or instance types, as they say, are various kind of t-shirt sizes, right? And so they have a lot of these different instance types. And so similarly speaking on the bare metal side, we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there. So we started out with an i3.metal instance and we added an r5.metal instance. And now we're really excited to add what we're calling i3en.metal. And so let's bring up a slide to talk more about all the new capabilities there with i3en. You know, what we had found when we talked to customers is that they love the simplicity of the hyper-converged model that i3 brings. What they said was, hey, you know, we've got a lot of workloads that are storage capacity battle. And so that meant that, you know, they had just each of these workloads, they use some amount, usually a good amount of CPU memory, but they had a lot of storage capacity requirements. What that meant with i3 is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads. And obviously they had some extra compute capacity lying around. And so, you know, what we've done here with i3en is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity. So we can see here, what is it, about 45 terabytes or so. So much, much larger than what you can get, about 4x larger than what you can get on i3.metal today. So, you know, this again, very targeted to those very large workloads that need a beefy underlying server. And, you know, just trying to better align the customer needs and workload needs with the underlying physical capabilities. And so this is just going to be one of many that we'll bring out. We've got, you know, a whole pipeline of these actually. And, you know, again, you can imagine all the different types of VM instance types, right? There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know. So there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And, you know, as we get more and more feedback from customers, as they're running more and more applications, we'll get more and more of these instance types out there as well. Yeah, really interesting, Kate, it gives me flashbacks. I'm thinking back to, you know, 10 or even 15 years ago when you talked in the early days of did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had or did I buy servers that had the configuration so I could optimize and take advantage of the feature functionality that's needed. All right, when I heard some of the things you talked about there about being able to use certain workloads and the like, one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is, you know, the overall price of this, let's just say it's not the least expensive solution to start with. So what are some of the new entry level options that you have with the VMC on AWS? How does this update help? Yeah, yeah, first of all, on the price side, what we have found is that this is actually extremely price efficient, price competitive, if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical and bare metal capacity. But, you know, as you just mentioned Stu, you know, the default configuration is three nodes of those I3 hosts. And those I3 hosts aren't small either, right? They're pretty beefy. And, you know, if you just want to get started just try something small. Well, today we do have actually a one node instance but that one node instance is just temporary. It's kind of a testbed, if you will, a proof of concept type of environment. It's not a long term, long running production environment. And so customers kind of have this one node on the one hand or three nodes on the other. And, you know, obviously they're saying, hey, why can't we just start with two nodes? Make it super simple, reduce that price point, again, for a very small footprint deployment and then allow us to scale up. So we bring up the next slide. What you can see is that that's exactly what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now. And the idea here is this is a full production environment. You get all the great VMware technologies, you can view motion stuff, HA, you get availability and so forth storage policies as you see here. So again, this is meant to be a long-lived, fully supported production environment that can also scale up if need be, right? You might start out with two nodes and then find, hey, I want to add three or four or more and you can certainly fully do that and fully support that. So again, this is just giving customers more optionality and more flexibility for where they want to come in. What we've been doing thus far is talking with a lot of customers that had pretty large footprints and saying, hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center or I've got a lot of workflows I want to burst. And in those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense. What we're finding now is that a lot of customers do want that flexibility to start smaller, just with two nodes, really simple, kind of put their toe in the water, if you will, and get a feel for the service and then expand from there. Yeah, one quick follow up on this. You mentioned that if customers are maximizing, leveraging the full environment that they have there, it's very cost competitive. How are you hearing from customers? What is their growth pattern? Are they getting good utilization? Do they have a good feel for how to manage that economics? In the AWS space, a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days and how to make sure that the technical group and the financial group are working close together. Yeah, so that's a great question actually. And the whole notion of the economics around this is a huge focus area for us. We have a whole cloud economics group, as a matter of fact, that we frequently bring in to talk with customers to help them think through all these different things. There's a number of different considerations there. A lot of them look from going from on-prem into the cloud to the VMC and AWS. And with VMC and AWS, our prices are just public cloud in general. It's very easy to understand the price because it's right up front, you're getting charged, right? On-prem is a bit more difficult to understand that. You've got a lot of capital expenses. You got a lot of other sort of operational expenses, power, electricity, people. And how do you make all the right computations there? So we have whole teams to help people think through that. But usually what we have found is that price is not the main thing, right? Price is kind of a secondary or tertiary type of consideration. The main thing's always one of our primary use cases. It's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers or my data center is that capacity I want to keep it, but I really need to be able to burst to the cloud. Maybe some sort of test dev, like testing the cloud and production on-prem or vice versa. Those are the key use cases that bring customers in. And then it's really a question of, okay, now that you know you want to do this, how do we do this as effectively, efficiently from a cost perspective as well as possible, right? And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts to happen. And then you get into more of the details, like, okay, what kind of instance type do I want? What are the cost metrics of that? Can I actually fill it to capacity? That's where we start getting to those more specific situations for each customer. Excellent. Well, yeah, that really tees up for me, Kit. When I think about the early customers that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS, they tend to be your enterprise customers. They're no big VMware customers. They have enterprise license agreements and the like. VMware's got a strong history working across the board and you talk about cloud in previous solutions, you've had close partnerships with the managed service providers. So my understanding is you're actually looking to help connect between what you've done with the managed service providers in the past and this VMware on AWS solution. So bring us inside this option. Yeah, let me break it down for you because we do work with a lot of partners. Obviously from VMware's inception, partners have been corridor strategy and corridor success, right? What we've actually been doing, actually somewhat kind of quietly over the past, I mean, 15 years anyway, is been really building out what we call our VMware cloud provider partner program and the VCPP program. And the idea there is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers that can take our software and run it on behalf of their customers, essentially delivering our software as a service to their customers. And that's been great. We've seen a lot of success stories there and we have about 4,200 of these folks now like a tremendous amount spread all around the world, all sorts of different geographies and also all sorts of different industry verticals. And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific, you know, let's say into the finance vertical, all, you know, in and around Wall Street, providing all sorts of great services for the financial services firms. Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well. And what they're saying and what they're seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea of running infrastructure. Well, I can do that but it doesn't necessarily differentiate me, right? I need to move up the stack and start offering more services and really trying to be a very, you know, sort of boutique and targeted solution for their customers. And so a lot of these customers, you know, obviously want to run on VMC and AWS. And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners to, you know, sell through essentially VMC and AWS to sell these servers to their customers. But one of the challenges there is that they are only able to sell the full sort of bare metal server. They weren't able to break that up or split that across customers as they can do today within their own environments. And in fact, today within their own environments, they use something called VMware Cloud Director and this is software that we give them. And, you know, it's really nice is you can take a vSphere environment, software defined data center and break it apart or kind of carve it up if you will into multiple smaller tenants than the, you know, that each of these customers can and take part of. And so, but we didn't have that functionality for VMware Cloud and AWS. And so that's what the announcement's all about. So let's pull up the slide to talk about that. The basic idea here is we can now enable those same software defined data centers that are running inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud and AWS to be accessed by VMware Cloud Director. And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD for short, made VCD a service that we now operate and it runs there alongside VMC and AWS. And so now these managed service providers can leverage the VCD as a service to roll out access and carve up these SEDCs that they get. And, you know, the takeaway here is that we're just giving these partners much greater flexibility and optionality in terms of how they consume the underlying bare metal infrastructure on VMC and AWS and then give that out to their own customers. Again, giving greater customer choice and options to those customers. All right, Kit, so the other big thing that we've covered this year with VMware of course is the launch of vSphere 7, what that means in the cloud native space, the whole Tanzu portfolio line. So help us understand how all the application modernization Kubernetes and the like ties into all the solution that we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. This has been a huge focus for us, as you know. You know, we launched Tanzu last year at VMworld and then launched the product set earlier this year. It's finally ready to GA. We've seen great customer interest and customer traction there. And obviously one of the big questions people had was like, hey, how can I get this for VMC and AWS? And so, you know, the specific product they were looking at there was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is that it enables a customer to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right? And you can do this on AWS. You can do this on prem on vSphere or other clouds and so forth. And so obviously this technology needed to come to VMC. You know, the thing we talk about with customers when it comes to VMC and AWS is this notion of migrate the modernize that we can migrate you off of your on prem infrastructure to this modernize cloud infrastructure that is VMC and AWS. And once you have that modernize infrastructure it makes it much easier to modernize your applications. You've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there. So now the application itself can start taking advantage of all these things as well as these new type of capabilities. So let's pull up the slide for this one. So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus on VMC and AWS. And what this gives you is all that great functionality, the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running on top of your VMC environment right next to all of your existing apps. So this is not one of those situations where you need separate clusters or different environments. You can have a single environment that can have both your traditional applications and your more modern ones. And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care of all the management of that Kubernetes environment. It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle managed, manage all the security, you get a container registry there. It can elastically scale based on demand. And of course you get all that great consistency as well. And we do have a lot of customers that are multi cloud that are doing things across different environments. And so TKG can replicate itself and give you that consistent management across any of those environments on prem and the cloud between clouds. So that's really what the power of this is. And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform for migrating your existing workloads to really being a platform for modernizing those workloads as well. Yeah, it's interesting, Kit. You know, when I think about traditionally VMWare, it was, you know, let me take my app and I'm going to shove it into VM and I'll never think about it again. So what's the change in mindset? How do you make sure that it's not just, you know, stick it in there and forget about it, but you know, can move and change, which is, you know, really the call for today is that I need to be more agile and need to be able to respond to change. So that's a great question. And we actually spend a lot of time talking about this with customers. So if we take a step back, you know, it's important to understand the traditional journey most customers are looking at when they're moving to the cloud. I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing. Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC and AWS, you didn't have the ability to take those two apart. You had to migrate and modernize simultaneously. In order to move to the cloud, we actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling and so forth to your application. And obviously that created a lot of challenges because it slowed how quickly customers could move up to the cloud. And so what we've done, which I think is really, really powerful, it's kind of broken those two apart to say, you know what, you may have a business imperative to get out of the data center. We can help you do that. We can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds of workloads a week up to VMC and AWS. And then, you know, once you've done that, you're now a little bit more breathing room, right? You've gotten out of your immediate business problem, let's say in this case, you know, closing down a data center. And now you can sort of focus on, okay, how do I think about modernizing these applications? How do I think about the interior points too and opening them up and actually getting inside of them? And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect of the approach that we've taken here is that ability to separate out those two, to get the quick business wins that you need. And then to take the time to think about, okay, how do I actually modernize this? How do I want to? What sort of technologies do I want to use? How should I do this right rather than just need to do this quickly? And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect of our approach and that we can give customers more optionality in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts. Yeah, so Kit, final question I have for you. The VMware-AWS partnership has been around for a couple of years now. What would you say is the biggest change technically from when the solution was first announced just to where we are today with all the new updates that you've talked about? Yeah, that's a great question. Look, it's hard to pick one, right? I think the biggest thing in general is just the increasing maturity of this offer. And that goes really across the board. Technical maturity, operational maturity, compliance, certification maturity, getting more and more of those under our belt. Global reach maturity, right? We started off in one region, but now we're all over the world pretty much every region that AWS has. You see more and more features, you know, we're constantly releasing new features, new hardware types. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's not been like one singular thing. What it's been is just a lot of work by the team across a thousand different areas and moving all those in parallel. And that's really been the heavy lift that we've had to do over the past few years. You know, as we talked about, it was a lot of work just to get this thing out in the first place, right? We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS to enable this bare metal capability. And so we got that one out. We got it out and had that initial service there, but a lot of limitations, right? We just had one instance type, only one region, didn't have as many compliance certifications. So obviously that limited the number of customers initially, right, just because there were some restrictions around that. So our goal has really been to open this up to as many customers and in fact, every customer, all of our 500,000 on vSphere customers to be able to move to VMC and AWS. And so we're slowly but surely every month knocking down more and more barricades to that, right? And so what you've seen is just a tremendous explosion of innovation and effort across the entire team. And so it's really as kudos to the team for their continued effort day in day out over these past three years or so to get VMC and AWS to where it is today. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Kit. Great to talk to you. Congratulations to the VMware and AWS team. And of course looking forward to talking to more of the customers down the road as they take advantage of this, hopefully at VMworld and some of the Amazon shows too. Thanks so much for joining us earlier. Thank you, Stu. All right, and stay with us for a lot more coverage. Of course, VMware, cloud on AWS, really exciting and interesting topic we've been covering since day one. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.