 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of WTG Transform 2018. I'm happy to welcome back to the program Brian Anderson, who's come all the way from Boston University. I think he said three blocks away. About three blocks away, yes. All right, Brian's the director of College of Arts and Sciences Information Technology. Great to see you again. Thank you, we'll be back. So good news is, we spoke, it was just about a year ago. It was August last year, it's June this year. I'm sure nothing's changed in your environment. Students never change, technology never changes. There's a little bit of change on your end? A little bit, a little bit. Last year we spoke quite a bit about hyperconvergence and what that's gonna mean in terms of education and how we deliver that, and what the experience could be like for these students. And I think at this point we're satisfied with everything that Nutanix has brought to us. We've deployed VDI in a couple of large deployments for a whole bunch of classes. So we decided to reassess and re-evaluate what we're doing this year, and now we move on to application development. Ooh, so that's great. So we get, in many ways I say, you need to modernize your platform, and then once you do that, we can look at the long hauled attempt, which is really at the application side, right? Exactly, once we knew what we had and what we could possibly do with it, we decided to move forward and figure out what else could we change, and we had a lot of legacy applications for the business, and so this past year we hired a developer who's focusing solely on dockerizing our applications. So we're deploying docker and a whole bunch of applications within the college, and then we're gonna be doing Kubernetes deployment later this year. Okay, and let's be clear, where does this live? Is this on the Nutanix platform? Is it in service providers, public clouds? Where does this span? Because Kubernetes can live in all of those environments in the containerized stuff also. It can, it can. Now currently it's all contained within a handful of VMs within our Nutanix server environment. We're planning on looking at calm and using natural of blueprints to deploy Kubernetes and docker down the road. Okay, so I've got the Nutanix platform, what hypervisor am I using? HV. Okay, so using the HV, which of course is Nutanix, it comes on the platform and then in the VMs you're using containers. Have you looked at bare metal? Because that's one of the discussions is like, well, if I'm doing containers, do I just do that on Linux on bare metal or do I do it virtualized and there's pluses and minuses for each of those? We did. A few of the pluses that my sysadmins really enjoy is when our developer is going to go crazy and do new things, we can make a snapshot. So if he happens to do something to the environment, we can restore it in 10 minutes. And I think as far as my developer is concerned, he doesn't want to have to rebuild the environment every time he makes a mistake. He's had a few close calls so far and having HV and the ability to snapshot and restore has been awesome for him. Okay, what insight can you give us about, what sort of applications are they building? And you said dockers and Kubernetes, are they building their own stack? Are they leveraging? How are they getting to that state? Well, we're taking some business apps that we're focusing on both student and faculty applications dealing with various components of each and he's pulling them apart to figure out what components go into the Docker containers. What do we have to still reside in VMs for security and long-term use and try to figure out how to reimagine the application stack to move forward. We're starting to look at reusing components that he's developing and I'm hoping that we have a lot of pieces that we can do that with so we have a lot of applications to rewrite. Okay, and just to drone a little bit because I've got, we've got a team of theCUBE that's going to be at DockerCon next week. I've been going to the Kubernetes show for a while. So when you say Docker, are you using just the free containers which is now called Moby? Are you using the Docker CE or EE as part of that? I actually can't tell you that because that's all my developers work. So they're using Docker, as you said. It's like the Kleenex analogy of the container. Do you know from a Kubernetes standpoint, have they just built their own? Do you have a distribution or a platform that you're building on? Is this Nutanix? He just downloaded the distro from Kubernetes instead of a small cluster himself. We're going to be looking at using Calm to do a deployment on the Nutanix natively. Okay, really interesting stuff. What is, you know, you talked a bit about, you can give a little bit of stability and recovery and things like that for your developers to be able to play in that sandbox. Give us a little bit of the roadmap as to how long do they play with this and then how does this roll out for the university? So we're looking at probably a three to six month development cycle on a lot of new applications. Right now, part of my developer's job is to try to figure out how this environment's going to work. My sysadmins are deeply engaged with him but since most of Docker and Kubernetes is developer-faced, he has to do most of the legwork and figure out how it's all going to work. And so we're hoping to leverage Nutanix to have multiple environments all with the same back end so we have dev, test, and production all in the same hardware but different pieces of actually physical clusters that'll be separated. So he doesn't mess around with the production all too much but set up a baseline so we can use the short of that development cycle even further. Yeah, one of the things we always look at is, right, you've got your developers doing their thing, how does that fit with the operation side? Is it DevOps? Even I interviewed Solomon Hikes last year. He was the founder of Docker and he said, actually it was an operation mindset that I had when I created this container format. How are you seeing it to such a great, you're all working together, you're in discussion there. Do you have a DevOps rollout in what you're doing or do you keep dev and ops separate? I still keep them somewhat separate but my administrators are writing a little bit more code and scripting than they used to. And I think in general that's going to be the movement in the entire industry where you can't just look at and have your developers do everything in Docker and not understand how it works. Brian, talk to us about your partners for doing this. How involved are the likes of Nutanix and Winslow Technology in Dell in this discussion of the containerization in your developers? Nutanix, we've been utilizing a lot of documentation and we're going to be leveraging them a lot when we start to look at Calm. Winslow, we haven't really talked to them about it, to be honest. We probably should because I might have some ideas and other partners we can talk to. Dell, they're really just the hardware we're running everything on. It's stable, we don't have to worry about it and I'm still happy with that. Yeah, that's not in any, oh I don't need to worry about them. There's certain pieces we always look at and I'd love your feedback on this. When we virtualize first and now even when we containerize, how much don't I need to worry about the infrastructure? I mean, remember back 15 years ago, it's like, oh, I'll virtualize that. Well, have you checked the BIOS because the BIOS might not work and the server could break things. The OS could cause problems. Virtualization relatively stable these days. How are you finding the container stuff? It's really interesting and very, very unique to virtualize a virtualized environment even further. It's kind of mind blowing. Just, I've been doing this for 20 years and this is much further than I've ever expected the industry to go. Oh yeah, just wait and as you go even further to the Kubernetes, it's like, wait, is it on top of underneath or side by side with the technologies you're doing? From a Kubernetes standpoint, you said today it's all in the Nutanix. What's the value of Kubernetes for you? Is it just kind of the cluster orchestration of containers or is portability a piece, even part of the concern that you look at there? Oh, it's mostly for portability. Part of the applications that we're looking at down the road are gonna be burstable applications, especially some student-facing ones. And certain times of the year, we're gonna have to go from maybe 100 people logged in to several thousand at the same time. So we're hoping to stand up something that we can easily move to a cloud provider and still work the same way that we're expecting it to. And so I think Kubernetes, along with the orchestration internally on-prem, it's gonna be a huge benefit for us to know the environment is gonna be exactly the same when we move it to Amazon or Google or Azure. All right, so Brian, you're still kind of in the thick of it here, but from what you've learned so far, any learnings or things that you'd recommend to your peers that, oh, wait, if I could turn back the clock three months I might have adjusted or pointed things in a different direction? Yes, when our developer started, he focused more on getting an application up and running before starting to learn Docker. I would encourage anybody that's just starting down the road, get your developer learning Docker and Kubernetes first, because they might want to rewrite what they're doing in the application. Okay, well, Brian, this has been fascinating. I want to give you the final word is that you look out through the rest of the year, so it's done a lot so far since last time we talked, but by the time we come around next year, you'll be all serverless and deploying things offside the globe, I'm assuming, but what are you looking at? Oh, probably, I have no idea. If you told me a year ago that we're going to be doing what we're doing now, I wouldn't have believed you. It's a fantastic journey. It's amazing what we learn every day. All right, well, Brian, I appreciate you sharing some of the learnings as we go. It's one of the reasons we come to events like this. I know yourself. Talk to your peers here, what's going on. Thank you for moving forward with what you're doing. Thank you. All right, lots more coverage here at WTG. Transform 2018, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE.