 Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk and today We have with us once again Brent shoulder global CTO at Suza Brent is great to have you back on the show after a long time Yeah, it's great to be back and great to talk to you again A lot has changed pandemic happened and of course the market is changing a lot of companies are looking at Cost cutting or the way we look at it becoming more cost efficient Which also mean the whole you know once again the ecosystem is changing If I ask you if you look at all these macro micro and major trends Changes that are happening in industry What are you seeing is happening when it comes to a cloud adoption digital transformation companies are definitely Trying to accelerate their transformation as much as possible and cloud native is a root of that You know, that's one of the biggest things that I see in talking with companies in while, you know There may be some macro economic headwinds Companies still need to invest to innovate Because they recognize the competitive environment and that they're in and that they need to respond to it and continue moving So it's great to see the investments that are going in in the innovation in cloud native AI and ML and edge You know, it's just an exciting time of everything going on I mean we look at loud native that things have mature everybody's talking about the next thing kubernetes But there are still a lot of companies who still are in a very early stage of their digital transformation Suza has been on for a long time you folks kind of, you know set the whole open source, you know ecosystem their Banks are there like which are like hundred years old, right? So do you still see there are companies which are in the very early phase of their digital transformation cloud native journey is still And if yes, what are some of the major challenges they face? You know, I think it's I think there's still many companies that are very early and and even some that that let's say are the Such at the beginning that you know, they're still haven't rolled out any material production solutions in the in the cloud native space, and I think the the inhibitor for many of the companies falls into two camps One is just the operational expertise, right is is they're traditionally used to and well versed in the virtual machine world and and all the infrastructure that is involved there and With you know, it's one of those of you know when your hair is on fire you focus on what you've got to do And having the time and bandwidth to do that transition is is still a and a hit a burger to some Because they need the applications to go as well, which leads to the second aspect is, you know It's it's really a new development world for companies to move into cloud native to develop in a microservices architecture to adopt That development methodology both architecturally and the CICD or DevOps delivery models and operational models I think those are some of the barriers That are in place, and I think that really sets up the trends, you know that we're seeing is And that we as an industry need to continue to do is how do we make it easier? Faster to adopt the technology To minimize the new skill sets leverage the existing skill sets that Companies have so that they can put them to use in a much quicker manner Excellent. Once again, since you brought the point of a skill set, we are also seeing, you know, a kind of Not disturbing. I think what happened during pandemic companies were over hiring They just you know wanted more talent because there was always a talent shortage in the market We cover, you know, a lot of reports through Linux Foundation and all those and now the layoff is happening Seven percent seems to be a magic number there, which means that, you know There are a lot of developers in the market, but as you also said that I mean this This gap is not going to go away anytime soon that, you know, you have to kind of also internally enhance those skill sets Once again, what kind of challenges organizations are facing when it comes to having these developer Skill sets because we are also looking a lot of cultural organizational changes. We talk about platform engineering We talk about DevOps. We talk about SREs Rules are changing whether I don't know if the actual role is changing or just the labels are changing So if you just ask you to look at it from the culture of people's perspective What are companies doing and what they can do to address this skill set challenge? Yeah, you know, you mentioned some of the turnover in the industry And I think it's, you know companies trying to address that skill set challenges is, you know, aligning their business needs With the resources that they have and making sure that they've got the investments in the right places You're talking about it, you know, are they change is the world changing or is the roles changing or is the we're just changing the names I think the role is changing Because the technology and how you work has to change, you know, are historically Much of the organizational architecture was, you know, functionally siloed And that has to fundamentally change to take advantage of the technologies, you know having, you know Here's my compute team. Here's my storage team and the network experts know there's a security team, you know down the hall And they all work independently in silos does not work in the cloud native environment You've got to bring in more of an integrated experience where they work in teams with all of the skill sets together To deliver that and that's the biggest thing that we see You know, you mentioned one of the terms and this is one that is big in my mind and I see this every day when I'm talking to customers is this notion of platform engineering And I see platform engineering and it's a very maybe generic term But how I see platform engineering in the companies that I'm talking to that are adopting cloud native It's about providing the set of services to the company to the developers across the company and the operations teams across the company That provide them a consistent experience and actually abstract away some of the nuances of the underlying technologies You know, if we are asking developers to go learn Kubernetes In addition to understanding the applications that they're trying to develop and the business problems they're trying to solve That just because it's not in the interest of most of the developers You know when I travel around the industry and talk to developer groups They want to develop code. They want to solve problems. They don't want to understand pods and service meshes and such It's you know, somebody else take care of that And that's really the role of platform engineering is abstracted out of way provide services common services for the developers And that's where the team that platform engineering teams need to work together. I'm seeing them are the successful ones are working together Across compute storage network and security to provide that set of services to their developer community Now when we are talking about you said, you know, the developers are they don't want to get involved Also technologies are changing so fast. You didn't want to just keep learning new things because there are a lot of things that they're good at They want to continue to do is one more thing that is evolving and I remember talking to Susan also back in the early days was also AI ML there. We all talk about chat GPT copilot is there. So can you also talk about that how the AI ML all these new technology can also kind of enable Platform engineering teams so as to take care a lot of mundane jobs so they can still continue to focus on the challenges Versus doing a lot of repeatable things. Does that make sense? Yeah, you know, I do see you know more of that coming into the operation space and we even take advantage of the technology in some areas and are working on some of the next Areas, you know, one of the areas that is really being maybe two areas that is really being applied to observability right Kubernetes brings in a lot of power But with that is a lot of complexity under the hood and so to really scale and optimize on a continual basis as new services come online as they need to scale up scale down etc. And you've got all these different services interacting the only way to practically optimize that on a real time basis is with AI So I think we're going to see this notion of AI ops, you know really grow as you know the Kubernetes continues to expand And microservices continue to expand because you've got to balance, you know those services against available resources And you know, both the operation side and then the let's call it the reliability side keeping things running when there's an outage occurs where where's the root cause With complex interconnected systems understanding where the problem originated is extremely complex. So again an AI ML Problem that the technology can really be brought to to help address the second area I see AI ML helping significantly in the area of operations is security Again a very complex area it's it's changing every day right it's it's not like you know I can go out and like the old days of let me just go download a vulnerability file and you know check my scan you know make sure my security scans being done You know that's not the way security works these days you know the actors are the malicious actors out there you know have new approaches every day And the patterns that they use are constantly changing so to keep up with them and detect anomalous behavior is really the key that we see security moving into You know some of those solutions that we're working on and building into our systems you know the behavioral learning you know what's normal understanding that and then being able to real time catch anomalous behavior to help prevent data loss or malicious activities that may be going on you know that I think we're going to continue to see zero trust grow as the preeminent way to protect data loss and you know AI is definitely going to contribute to the growth of that. Now let's just like put it all together wrap it up and look at it from the lens of Suza the challenges the ideas that we talked about talk a bit about how is Suza evolving from the early days of Linux player to providing a wide variety of solutions so that you know the challenges that we just talked about so that you can help your customers wherever they are in their journey. If I was to just kind of summarize some of our key focus areas one in this whole this what I now refer to as the distributed enterprise and the complexity of the platforms is is how can we help build a unified platform across that distributed enterprise at both the Linux layer which underlies you know both the infrastructure and the applications and the Kubernetes or the cloud native layer having a unified cloud native platform you know across that distributed enterprise heavy focus on those two areas of the platform level working on simplification for the developer and the operations you know the world is moving too fast and there's too much technology for everybody to be knowledgeable about everything. So how can we simplify adoption reduce risk in adopting new technologies you know we talked about you know there's still many companies that are to come on to the cloud native experience. And I think much of that is about simplifying and reducing risk in technology adoption and then finally what I would call kind of the supply chain to production security. You know it's where you're getting your software from and can you trust that the developers and their building of it you've got to have security shift left into the developer realm it's dev sec ops it's not it can't be just dev ops any longer. And then you got to carry that through to the operation side to the production side and then implement zero trust controls on top of that. So if I was to kind of summarize the the spectrum of SUSE's portfolio investments and where we're going and trying to you know really focus on the customer needs that covers that the spectrum of that. Brent thank you so much for taking time out today and once again talk about the larger trends and the role SUSE is playing today in this ecosystem. I really appreciate your insights and I would love to have you back on the show again but let's make sure that there will not huge gap like this one. Yeah and it is such an exciting time in the industry and a lot of things to talk about so look forward to our next discussion.