 From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. Hi, I'm Wickey Bonds, Peter Burris. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of IBM Innovation Day here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Great series of conversations and this next one also is going to be a great conversation with Jason McGee, who's an IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of Cloud Platform here at IBM. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So we've had a lot of great conversations about what does open mean, where's the cloud going, what's the role of developers in this whole thing. But I want to dig a little bit deeper into this kind of core question. The cloud suggests a new model for computing. Sure. I would also think that would mean that there's a new model for development on the horizon. Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's absolutely true. I think one of the core things that people are trying to get out of cloud these days is development velocity. For many years, of course, one of the key pressures in IT has been how do I do stuff more quickly? And that's gone through many iterations over time, but I think cloud today, people are really trying to figure out how to leverage cloud as a platform for speed of development and the combination of services on cloud and new development models like microservices and new technologies like containers are all kind of contributing elements and helping people solve this problem. How do I build stuff more quickly? So with all that new technology is a new mindset required. Does somebody think about the problem differently? Does somebody break the problem down differently? How do you start with that notion of looking at a business requirement, a business outcome, and translate it into the technology? We used to just create code. Now we're doing something different. Yeah, I think the first thing you have to do is think about how to organize people. Software development at the end of the day is a sport amongst people and you have to think about how to break up the problem. And so like microservices, a lot of us think of microservices as a technology. It's not really a technology. It's really a philosophy about how to attack a problem with a group of people. It's about how to organize. And its fundamental idea is break it into independent parts and allow a small team of people to not only develop that part, but to own it end to end. Like the old development model was development test production handed over the wall to operations. The new model is break it into small problems and then have a team own the whole thing end to end. And with that new organizational philosophy comes new architectures for apps, new technologies that help you do that, and new platforms to run things on. So as we think about that, that suggests that the approach to software from a licensing standpoint, from what are you buying, what are you installing is also gonna change. How do you foresee and what is IBM preparing customers for in this kind of new world where software is a service coming from a lot of different places as opposed to a license with 800 million lines of code. Yeah, I mean. Billion lines of code behind it. Yeah, it's interesting. I think these new ideas are enabled by things like cloud. Part of the reason that cloud has enabled this new model to be feasible is because you get, for example, consumption-based pricing. You can use a wide variety of technologies. You can pick the right tool for the job. You can pay for just what you use. And therefore the old models of static software licensing and big platforms can start to fade away as these small teams are able to kind of pick the right tool for the job. And that wouldn't be possible in a world without as-a-service delivery and meter pricing and things like that, because you would have to consolidate a fewer choices and buy bigger chunks of things. As you said, microservices is more of a philosophical approach to how you think about software. And it's also predicated on that wonderful notion of RESTful, the great paper that was written a number of years ago, and APIs. IBM has kind of an interesting role in the industry, though, is that IBM's got to bring a whole bunch of customers with highly stateful applications forward into the cloud. Absolutely. Kubernetes, great for stateful. How are we going to address that tension between the stateless world of Greenfield applications and the stateful legacy that has to move into this new world? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, I think a lot of times new trends emerge and it's easy to ignore the past, but the lesson I've learned in over 20 years in IT is like nothing ever goes away, right? And so you have to not only define the future, but you have to figure out how to help people get there. I actually think part of the reason technologies like Kubernetes are so dominant right now is because they actually do a reasonable job at both. Kubernetes and containers are a great platform for the kind of new architectures and for adopting these new methodologies we're talking about, but they can also accommodate the existing apps and you can move existing apps into these new platforms. And so that helps give people a path. They can move something they have and then slowly refactor it or they can move something they have and build new things around it and they can do all that with platforms like Kubernetes as an enabler, right? And it's been interesting to watch. Like at IBM we use, we obviously make Kubernetes available both in our public and private clouds, but we're also big users and we run all of our cloud services on that platform. Stateful databases, AI and machine learning workloads, analytics platforms, stateless web apps, like the whole lot, we've been able to run on a platform like that. Talk to me a little bit about this notion of cloud operating model and how we manage that because it seems to me as though the user adoption of a lot of these new technologies is going to be facilitated if we can put forward a management platform that uses those technologies to manage those technologies. What's the relationship there between the evolution of management? Is that a leading edge of how we're going to see people adopt some of these technologies? It's certainly a very kind of critical component of the story. I mean, if you really believe in the idea that where we want to move to is this kind of microservice model of small teams that run things themselves, then you get into the question of, all right, well, if you have eight people whose job is to run something in production, they need to be able to do that efficiently, right? You can't have complex operational processes. You need a lot really good tools. It needs to be really easy for them because you're asking people to have a really vast set of knowledge. And so it's driving the evolution of management philosophies. You're seeing new technologies like Istio, for example, emerge, which are allowing an application person to define policy about security and access and networking that normally would have required a network expert to go do. And more. It's a very powerful platform. A powerful platform, right? But I think it's coming out of this realization that if that small team of people ever want to sleep and when they have to run things, they're gonna need tools to help them do that. So it's been interesting to watch the kind of circular evolution of these different domains. So 20 years of experience from WebSphere forward, let's think about the next five years. Where is the biggest innovation gonna happen in software? Well, I mean, there's the obvious stuff around the application of AI, but the part that I'm most excited about is I think we've been on an arc over the last 20 years to make the application the center of IT. Historically, infrastructure has been the center of IT. You start a project, you buy a server, you install an operating system you set up. That's been the big asset. That's been the like, the center has been the infrastructure and you build your way up. And I think as velocity has become dominant, we've been trying to flip it and say, I'm building an app. Let me focus on the app and focus on what the app needs and drive the requirements down. And I don't think we're done yet. I think there's a lot more to do there, but that's the path we're on. I think over the next five years, we'll really get there. As an app team, I don't really have to think about infrastructure and I can have the system adapt to the needs of the application. Do you see a point where the data and the application are increasingly further broken apart? The data and the application? I don't know that they're gonna be further broken apart, but I think we'll see more kind of intelligent scheduling and combinations of those things. There are cases where the data needs to be king and the application needs to come to the data and vice versa. And historically, the data world and the app world have been pretty separate. And if we think, again, if we think teams are gonna run their things, then just like they're doing ops and dev, they're gonna have to do apps and data. And so there's an opportunity there to bring those worlds closer. I see some of it, but Kubernetes as an example has a common operational platform for both kinds of systems. But there's more for sure. So bring it together when it makes the most amount of sense, keep it separate when other people you need to use the data. Stop assuming you have specialists in every technology and assume you have a multidisciplinary team that has to run it all. All right, Jason, one more question. February, San Francisco, IBM takes it over with IBM Think. A lot of users, a lot of new questions being raised, a lot of opportunity for learning, a lot of opportunity for networking. What are you hoping to accomplish? What conversations do you wanna have at Think? Yeah, I'm really excited, I think to have conversations with clients about how they're actually adapting to this new world. I think sometimes the biggest challenge is not technology, but how organizations assimilate these ideas. And so I'm excited for the conversations with customers about what problems they're solving, sharing those experiences with each other, and also practitioners. I think we've moved into a world where IT is dominated by the people who actually do the work by the practitioners. And I really hope to see a lot of them show up at Think in February and share with us what they're doing. Jason McGee, IBM Fellow VP CTO, Cloud Platform here at IBM. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you. And once again, this is Peter Burris from the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. You've been watching theCUBE, stay tuned.