 Good afternoon, cloud community, and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on day three of Google Cloud Next. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by a fabulous trope of gentlemen. Dustin, John, so nice to have you here in the analyst seats. Have you been having, you're just sitting here smiling. Have you been having a great time? It's amazing, yeah, absolutely. Great food, great environment here in Vegas, wonderful guests, good conversation. What more can you ask for? Exactly, I'm not asking for anymore, except a fantastic guest, and we have that in Bobby Allen, Google's cloud therapist. Bobby, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, team, thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean, we're now, you know, this is a part of our thing now. Before I had the same show, we got to get you on the show. We do, we do. For a therapy session. Yeah, exactly, I was just going to say, it's day three, I'm ready for some therapy, so that's exactly why we put Bobby where we did on the schedule. Thank you. You have had a packed week. You've done four sessions. Google's made a million announcements. Give us some highlights. Five live demos. Five live demos. Five live demos. How many worked? All of them worked. Wow. All of them worked, nothing blew up, they break the cloud, so several AI demos, some non-AI stuff. Three in one of the spotlights, kind of the mini keynote, so I left it all in the paint. I left it all on the field. I love that, I love that. What would you say was the core theme or the energy that you found throughout all of those activations? I think the energy throughout all of those is we're trying to just let people touch the future now. So a lot of the things that we thought were impossible before, so one of the inspirational things that we try to channel is, I love the movie Hidden Figures, right? When I think about what those women did at NASA to put people on the moon and back with the tools that they had, they didn't let the tools that they had limit their imagination, and I feel like we're getting back to that now. It's a great book. Yeah. It's phenomenal. Creativity, the productivity, the creativity enhancements. A lot of good stuff coming together, and one of the things we've been riffing on theCUBE, Bobby, is that 10 years ago when Kubernetes started, it wasn't looking good off right out of the gate. A lot of, and it could have failed, many times in the first couple of years. Exactly. But it's now 10 years later, it's working, it's becoming boring, as Hen says. That's a big part of the cloud now. It's enabling a lot of that later. Serverless containers, that's a big part of it. And now you've got the developer action going on. So big, big hybrid cloud growth coming is a big part of the end to end workloads. This is, what are you hearing here around the impact of what the solidarity around Kubernetes, the cohesive nervous, what's that enabling? I'm hearing that people obviously want to look for ways to innovate and building on some things that we've talked about before. You don't need a new platform this time. Because I think what people are waiting for, John, is like, do I have to do something different to achieve all these new features and capabilities and outcomes? And Hen emphasized something that we talked about before. You don't need a new platform this time. Kubernetes is the platform directly or indirectly. So either you're building on top of Kubernetes or one of the things we talked about here, I got to do a session on how Alphabet is powered by part of Google Cloud. And so for example, Vertex AI runs on GKE. So even if you're not touching Kubernetes directly, you're touching something that runs on Kubernetes. So pretty cool stuff. I know that you've got a really interesting position at Google that puts you in touch with a lot of customers, a lot of developers. And you get some insight into their roadmaps. Tell us a little bit about how GenAI is fitting into their roadmap and how Google is helping accelerate that. So I think customers obviously want to talk AI all the time. They've got to come up with like, I need an AI plan. And so then we've got to break that down. Are you talking a plan for AI-assisted development? You want to create AI workloads? You want to AI-infused insights on your platform? You want to AI-assisted collaboration? Yes. They want all of those things. And so we have to kind of break down exactly what you're looking for at the time. But the other thing that I think comes to mind is I want to make sure that when I talk to customers that I'm listening, but I'm also putting AI in its proper context. And so here's what I've said before. AI is not the thing. AI is the thing that makes the thing better. And so if the thing is the dish or the application, AI is the sauce or the spice that makes that better. So you wouldn't put paprika or Sri Ratchasauce on a plate and call that a meal, right? You've got to use it to hit something else. And so I think the challenge that we have is let's make sure we're thinking about the application, don't feed a barbecue to a vegetarian, don't go with Bob's brisket out of Texas and give that to a vegetarian. Like does the application fit the context? But what is happening though, is once people are getting a flavor of AI, they want it everywhere now. That sauce or that spice, they want it woven throughout everything else to get extra value. And it's becoming table stakes now. Yeah, I think you're right. Everyone does want a little Sri Ratcha once you've had it or a little top two. On something, right? But not just by itself, right? Only with cowboy boots. Only with cowboy boots, right. What's the biggest thing you've seen here that surprised you this event? I'll see the live demos, huge accomplishment, the alphabet use case. I mean, dog fooding, we talked about it earlier, they love to do that, drink your own champagne, as Hen says, what surprised you this event that you didn't expect to have happened? I think one thing that surprises me a little bit or maybe I've been reminded of is our customers want to be reminded about some of the things we've done before, right? So we're so focused on the new stuff, but sometimes they need help consuming the things we've done before. We've had customers that have said, Bobby, this is great, but I need you to also help me come along because I couldn't absorb everything you did last year. And so we've got to bridge the old to the new. So one of my favorite sessions, again, it's hard, because you don't want to put your favorite challenge, but there was a session that actually one of the guys on my team, and my boss did called the past, present, and future of Kubernetes. So think part origin story, where we are now and kind of the ghost of Christmas future. All in the same session, right? It was great because we got people on ramps, we showed them where we're going, we showed, you know, in the beginning, moving from monoliths to one of the things we talked about in that session, for example, in the beginning, GKE was a monolith, you can believe that. So we were talking to folks about microservices and that was a monolith and that's evolved over time. So I think giving people an opportunity to say, humbly, this is great, Bobby, but I'm not there yet. You're on step 10, I need to pick it up at step two and then let me go on that journey with you. Like we've got to slow down and listen to the customers. Moving at the pace of Wall Street is not the same as the pace of customers being able to consume all the news. I love the cloud therapist angle because I'll give you a therapy use case and I want you to take me through doctor on this one. I'm a customer, I hate change. We did it this way before. I got some brownfield in there. I don't know who built the project, but I got to run it, I don't want to get fired. Wall this AI in here. I don't know if I have the prerequisites. I'm not confident, everyone's enthusiastic. My boss wants me to do this. The board's forcing the pressure. Take me through the, get me pumped up. So we're going to start with some questions, right? Because I think what, and I'm a product manager, right? So cloud therapist is like my superhero name, like Spider-Man, but Peter Parker is product manager. That's what my answer is. I love that. So it's like, what happens often, John, with product managers, we try to solve everything by these engineering feats of strength. As opposed to, let me talk to you about what you're trying to accomplish. Let's start with the outcomes you're trying to achieve. And so these are typically how I start the conversations, not roadmap, not features, typically two or three questions, what does better mean to you? Where are we willing and able to change? And what do we think is going to happen if we do X? And then I just let them talk. The first question is interesting because most customers don't agree. People at the same table from the same company don't agree on what better means. And this is the grenade I throw in the room just to kind of prove my point. If I'm willing to invest in whatever your most valuable application is, and I do that for free, if you can tell me what that is, I'll commit to that. It's taken a year sometimes for people to tell us what their most valuable application is. Right, mapping, science fair projects and products, the values where people struggle. So I try to start, John, with simple questions, what you want to achieve, and then if I earn your trust or know that I'll bring the solutions to bear, that'll let that come to pass. What comes, what happens when you throw that grenade, that bouncing Betty out there and gets people shut up? What happens next? Do people just kind of reveal their point of view? Is it more of a cultural challenge? Is it a personal challenge, is it an organizational challenge? What are some of the things you see there? So I have to go back to you all know my personal mantra, right? Technology is the easy part of tech. Tech is the easy part, people are the best part. Behavior is the hard part, humility is the worst part. What is up happening is tech is like the part of the iceberg that's above the water, all the other stuff is below. And it's much bigger even though it's invisible. So what happens is we need to talk about the tech but we need to talk about all the other things that need to happen also to achieve that change. So people struggle with role definitions. Sometimes for example, people fight the things that are happening because they're losing control of their empire, right? I'm fighting serverless because I'm in control of the Kubernetes platform and I don't want my job to go away. Folks don't understand that the entire pie is getting bigger. We don't have to fight for these victims anymore. Like we need all of us bringing our best ideas and our best innovations to kind of take this new ground. So I want to give kind of a adjacent answer to your question, John. So I like to put it in the context of family, right? So when you go over Grandma's house for Thanksgiving dinner, baby, what do you do? I work in the cloud. Great, can you fix my printer? And so what used to happen was we were computer people. Then we became cloud people. Then we became AI people. You can't even say I'm an AI person anymore because what type of AI are you talking about? Are you AI training? Are you AI inference? Are you AI developer assistance? AI, like what's happening is those specializations and those skills are coming down because we can't be this technology juncture. The technology is so complex now that we've got to understand it at a deeper level to explain it simply. And the printer is still broken. The printer is still broken. I'd say what's a printer? People still use those? I know, they do sometimes. I'm serverless at that point, no one could. Yeah, exactly. Printerless? I don't know, maybe not. I want to get back to those five demos that you and your team put together, right? All right, take us behind the scenes backstage just a little bit. I know that a lot of work goes into pulling that off. It's a team sport, team effort. It gives the viewers a little taste of what does it take to put together something as complicated as- So thank you for the question, Dustin. First I want to ground this in, like I got to be kind of the face or the demo dolly but just know that there are literally hundreds of people behind the scenes that I want to kind of thank if they're watching this that did a phenomenal job pulling stuff off. Five live demos going flawlessly at a conference in Vegas with a few hundred or a thousand of your closest friends watching is not an easy feat. But the things that we talked about were, so for example in the spotlight with my GM, Hen Goldberg, we did three demos in that one session alone. The first one was on what we call Cloud Run application canvas. And again, you can't pick your favorite child but like that one is really exciting. So the cool thing about it is you're literally using AI to create AI. And so Cloud Run was already the simplest way to deploy your code to a container. Now it's the simplest way to get a JNAI application up and running. Literally, and I'm not exaggerating, in five minutes you can get an application running. You can say, I want a JNAI application that looks like this and it'll build it. It translates your intent into architecture and you can deploy it and it'll tell you, enable these APIs, set these privileges, deploy it and it's running in five minutes talking to Gemini and Vertex. It's amazing. So that was the first demo. So we're using AI to build AI. The second demo was what we called Gemini Cloud Assist, right? Gemini Cloud Assist is where you're using AI to help you operate and optimize existing workloads in a platform like GKE. And then the third demo was security posture, right? Because unfortunately our pace of innovation is increasing but the bad actors are still doing the bad acting, right? They're still doing their thing. So we've got to make sure- They have the same tools. They have the same tools and their tools are almost more juiced up than they were before too. So security posture has reactive and proactive threat detection and compliance. So things that are broken and things that might break wrapped around your AI and your non-AI workloads because most of our teams have to do the new stuff and also maintain some of those, I don't, you all know I don't like legacy, I like vintage but sometimes there are modern workloads that are non-AI that already feels like they're old because everything is so AI whitewashed now. We got to protect those too. Absolutely. I love the point about the cloud run. Reduce a step that takes it to do something, make it easier and talk about that on theCUBE. So that's a great formula for innovation. Simple, intuitive, easy to use, reduce the steps it takes, great. Question is this, maybe you both can chime in if you want. Impact on platform engineering. If Rob Streche was here, he couldn't make it. He had that personalized issue to go to. Platform engineering is hot. This sounds like it's a huge impact on platform engineering. How do you see this impacting the platform engineer and those teams that now have to work together because this is a game changer, the cloud run. So I'm going to give you a different slant on this one. I love this question, but I'm going to go kind of more logical platform than even physical or virtual platform. So Hen made a statement in her spotlight that we kind of partnered on together, which is this. Innovation happens at the intersection of where the model lives and where the app runs. Because if you just have a model, you don't have any magic. And if you just have an application, you don't have something that seems cool enough. You need those things to come together. So here's what happens. In terms of the model, the model can live in vertex in a managed environment or in something like GKE. If you want to go to hugging face, pull down an open source model, the application can live in cloud run or can live in something like GKE. And so what does that look like? We call that the crisscross diagram. So I can have a modeling vertex and a runtime in cloud run, a modeling vertex, a runtime in GKE, a modeling GKE and a runtime in cloud run or both of them in GKE. All of those are four logical platforms to deliver AI applications. So what's happening now is you could be a heavy GKE user but then have these kind of bespoke or POC type scenarios where someone can spin up AI without having to have a platform team behind them. I love that. So optionality, that's optionality. Optionality at its finest. Agreed. First of all, you're full of an incredible slew of analogies and metaphors that I feel we could all learn from. You bring up family a lot. I know you have two teenagers. I do. I'm curious, how are they using AI? What are their opinions about all the stuff we're doing here? Oh my goodness. Well, so they think AI is cool. I think they're, so what I want to say is so we use a lot of superheroes in my household so like my family thinks I'm Captain America. Are you? It's amazing. I'm a Marvel guy, right? Not DC. I'm a Marvel guy. I can do this all day. That's my guy. Steve Rogers is my guy, right? So I've got some who've seen my stuff on Twitter know I wear workout shirts and Captain America's like the guy. I've even seen kids at the gym like Captain America's black, he is today. Yeah. And so part of what happens is I think some of my kids are looking at like, you know, there's some things that are exciting here. There's some things that are scary, but like that is in the mix to try to make sure we build Jarvis, not Ultron, right? So I think they do like the fact that someone they know and someone they can touch is playing a role, a very minor, very humble role and what's happening in the world of AI. But even though they don't understand it all they know that we talk about things like can you do this? What should you do this? They know that there are folks like myself that are thinking about the ethics and the implications, not just the possibilities. And the fact that they're aware of that is powerful. Does it make you seem cooler in their eyes since you work in AI? You know, sometimes it does. So like, for example, one of the things that, there's some cool pockets at times, right? So not AI related. Not hot pockets, but cool pockets. So when my, cool pockets, when my son found out that Street Fighter 6 runs on GK, all right Dad, that's a little bit, that's a little bit cool. You got some street cred there. You're a gamer and it's like, all right, Dad, I'll give you that one. Don't get too excited, but yeah, there's some little pockets where you get some cool pockets. I like that. I know I'm thinking hot pockets, cool pockets. That's fantastic. Okay, Bobby, I think I've asked you this question maybe before at KubeCon. What do you hope to be able to say the next time we invite you back on the KubeCon because we'll obviously have you back. Favorite cloud therapist that you can't say today? I want people to be able to say that I couldn't create things before. I can create now. I don't have to necessarily be a programmer, but I can go further now than I could before, right? Just like I talked about with Hidden Figures. Hen made a statement that I want to emphasize. Quite simply, our capabilities, your possibilities. And I want people to feel like our capabilities are propelling them to reach for things, aspirations that they wouldn't have before. I couldn't do this in April, I can in August. That's what I hope people feel like they're taking new ground and re-imagining things that they thought were impossible before to make the future relevant today. Yeah, absolutely. Dude, just following on that. Do you think that we'll see a new class of business creators and entrepreneurs or even business models as a result of that? I do. I think we're going to see a lot more non-developer, non-traditional development background creators, right? So you're a marketing person with a great idea. You're a product manager who maybe does another programming background. When you can literally give the intent of what you want to create to something like Gemini and it can turn that into architecture. So one of my buddies, Richard Sarota, great guy, Google's chief evangelist, he talks about shifting down and I want to build on that, shifting down and pushing up. So let's shift responsibilities down, infrastructure, managing a lot of things, FinOps, so I can be pushed up to focus on the bigger picture. It's a unlocking potential, is what you're there. Unlocking potential, right? Unlocking the creativity of people that have domain knowledge and different ways of thinking about things that don't have to be traditional programmers, right? Because that code on the screen intimidates a lot of folks and we've got a lot of people with great ideas and now we're unleashed to say, I can create this without learning programming. I think that's where I want the future to go and that's really exciting to me. It's beautiful and that's a fantastic note to end on. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you for having me. Dustin and John, always a pleasure and a shout out to your son and daughter as well. Hello from all of us here in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage here of Google Cloud Next end of day three, believe it or not, here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.