 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are Cloud Native Insights. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to Episode 1 of Cloud Native Insights. So this is a new program brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. I am your host, Stu Miniman, and we're going to be digging into Cloud Native. And of course, Cloud Native, like Cloud before it, kind of a generic term. If you look at it online, there's a lot of buzzwords. There's a lot of jargon out there. And so we want to help understand what this is, what this isn't, and really happy to welcome back to the program to help me kick it off. Youp Piskar, he is an industry analyst. His company is TLA Tech. Youp, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Steve, glad to be here. All right, and one of the reasons I wanted you to help me kick this off, not only have you been on theCUBE, you know, your background, I met you when you were the CTO of a service provider over there in Europe where you're Netherlands-based. You did strategy for a very large supermarket chain also. And you've been on the program. I chose like DockerCon in the past. You work in the Cloud Native space. You've done consulting for some of the companies we'll be talking about today. But you help me kick this off a little bit. When you heard the term Cloud Native, does that mean anything to you? Did that mean anything back in your previous roles? Help us tee that up. So, it kind of gives off a certain direction in where people are going, right? So to me, Cloud Native is more about the way you use Cloud, not necessarily about the Cloud services themselves. So, for instance, I'll take the example of the supermarket. They had a big e-commerce presence. And so we worked on getting them to a place where they could, in smaller teams, deploy software faster more often and in a safer way so that teams could work independently of each other, work on adding business value, whatever that may be for any kind of different company. And so Cloud Native to me kind of means using that to the fullest extent, right? Using those services available to you in a way, organizationally and culturally, that makes sense to go wherever you need to go, be that, you know, release every hour or, you know, transform your SAP environment to something that is more nimble, more flexible, literally more agile. So, you know, Cloud Native means so many things to so many people because it's to me at least, not directly about the technology and how you actually use it. So, and you and I are in, you know, strong agreement on this, you know, thing one is you've noticed we haven't said Kubernetes yet. We haven't talked about containers because Cloud Native is not about the tooling. You know, we're, you know, strong participants in, you know, the CNCF activities, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. KubeCon and Cloud Native is a huge show, great momentum, one we're big fans of. Too often, people would conflate and they'd say, oh, Cloud Native equals I'm doing containers and I've, you know, deployed Kubernetes. One of the challenges out there, you talk about companies, you know, well, you know, I had a Cloud First initiative and I'm using multi-Cloud and all this stuff. It's like, well, are you actually leveraging these capabilities or did I shove things in? Something I'd railed about for the last couple of years. You talk about repatriation and repatriation is often, I went to go do Cloud. I didn't really understand what I was doing. I didn't understand how to leverage that stuff and I crawled back to what I was doing before because I knew how to do that well. So, you, I think you said it really well. Cloud Native means I'm taking advantage of the services. I'm doing things in a much more modern way. The thing I've loved talking to practitioners and one of the things I want to do on this program, absolutely, is talk to practitioners is, you know, how have you gone through things organizationally? There are lots of things right now. Talk about like FinOps and of course all the spin-offs from DevOps and DevSecOps and the like. How are we breaking through silos? How are we modernizing our environments? How are we taking advantage of new ways of doing things and new services? So yeah, I guess you, you know, there are some really cool tools out there. Those are awesome things, but you know, I love your viewpoint, your perspective on often people in tech are like, hey, I have this really cool new tool that I can use. You know, can I take advantage of that? You know, do I do things in a new way or do I just kind of take my old way and just make things maybe a little incrementally better hopefully with some new tooling? Well, yeah, I mean, I totally agree. You know, tooling is cool. Let me, let me start by saying that I, you know, I'm an engineer by heart. So I love tinkering with new stuff. So I love Kubernetes. I love, you know, the new Terraform release, for instance, I love seeing competition in the container orchestration space. I love diving into K-native serverless, you know, all those technologies I like, but it is a matter of, you know, what can you do with them, right? So for instance, Hashicorp, a client of mine, I work on their Hashicorp event. You know, they offer kind of a, not necessarily an alternative, but kind of an adjacent approach to what the CNCF is doing. And even in those cases, and I'm not specifically calling out Hashicorp, but I'm kind of giving the broader overview is it doesn't actually matter what tool you use, even though it'll help me, it'll make me happy just to play around with them. But those new tools have to mean something. They have to solve a particular problem you have, either in speed of delivery or consistency of delivery or quality of service, the thing you are building for your customer. So it has to mean something, right? And so back in the day, when I started out in engineering 15 years ago, a lot of the engineering was for the sake of engineering just because, you know, you could create a piece of infrastructure a little faster, but there was no actual business value to be had there. And so a lot of the engineering kind of was stuck inside of its own realm. Whereas what you see now is if you can use Terraform and actually get all of the, you know, the potential out of it, it'll allow you to release software more quickly because you're able to stand up infrastructure for that software more quickly. And so, you know, we've kind of shifted from, you know, back in the, you know, in the attic or in the basement, doing IT stuff that no one really understands. No one kind of perceives the business value of it into a realm of, okay, if we can deploy this faster or we don't even need to use a server, we can use serverless, then we have an advantage in the marketplace, you know, whatever marketplace that is, whatever application we're talking about. And so that's the difference to me. And that was that, you know, that's what CNCF is doing to me. That is what HashiCorp is helping build. That is what, you know, a lot of companies that built, for instance, a managed Kubernetes service, you know, Platform9, SpectroCloud, all those kinds of companies, they will help, you know, a given customer to speed up their delivery, to not care about the underlying infrastructure anymore. And that's what this is all about to me. And that is what cloud native means. Use it in a way that I don't actually have to do the toil of the engineering anymore. There's loads of smart people working for, you know, the big three cloud vendors. There's loads of people working for those managed service providers. Please use them so that you can, you know, speed up your delivery, create better software, create it faster, make customers happy. Yeah, it's a lot to unpack there. I want to talk a little bit about that landscape. Right, when you talk about, you know, cloud native, maybe a little compare contrast. I think about, you know, the wave of DevOps. And for often people it's like, you know, DevOps, you know, that's a cultural movement. But there's also tooling that I could buy to help me along that ways. You know, automation, you know, going with agile methodology, CICD, are all things that you're like, well, is this part of DevOps or isn't it? There's lots of companies out there that we saw rode that wave of DevOps. And if you talk about cloud native, you know, you put first thing, you know, you start with the cloud providers. So when I hear you talking about, you know, how do we get rid of things that we don't need to worry about? Well, for years we heard Amazon Web Services talk about getting rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. And it's something that we are a huge fan of. Talk about what is the business outcome. It's not, hey, I went from, you know, a standalone server to I did virtualized environments and now I'm looking containerization or serverless. What can I get rid of? How do I take advantage of native services? And all of those cloud platforms, one of the huge values there is it isn't, hey, I deploy this and maybe it's a little bit cheaper and maybe it's a little better, but there's, that is really the center of where innovation is happening. Not only from the platform providers themselves, but from that ecosystem. And I guess I'll put it out there. One of the things I would like to see from cloud native should be that I should be able to take care of, take advantage of innovation wherever it is. So cloud native does not mean it must live in the public cloud. It does not necessarily mean that I'm going full bore multi-cloud everywhere. I've had some great debates with Corey Quinn on theCUBE online and the like because if you look at customer environments today, yes, they absolutely have their data centers, they're leveraging typically more than one public cloud. SAS is a big part of the picture and then edge computing pulls everything away into a much more distributed architecture. So I'm glad you brought up Hashi Accompany you're working with really interesting and if you talk about cloud native, it's, they're not trying to get people to, oh, use multiple clouds because it's good for us. It's they, hey, the reality is is you're probably using multiple clouds and whether it's one cloud or many clouds or even in your data center, we have a set of tools that we can offer you. So, you know, Hashi, you mentioned Terraform, Vault, you know, the various toolings that they have, open source, you know, big play in this environment both under the CNCF umbrella and beyond, gives us a little bit as to, you know, where are the interesting places where you see either vendors and technology today or opportunity to make these solutions better for users? So that's an interesting question because I literally don't know where to begin. The spectrum is so, so broad and so I'll start off with a joke on this, right? You cannot buy DevOps but the vendors were sure try and sell it to you. So that's kind of where, you know, the battle is raging on. It's getting foothold into an organization and you see that, you know, you see companies like Hashi doing that. They start out with open source tooling then kind of move into the enterprise realm to solve the issues that enterprises usually have. And that's what the cloud vendors will try and do as well. They'll, you know, they'll kind of kickstart you with a free service and then move you up into their hashtag. And that's, you know, that's where cloud native is kind of risky because the landscape is so fragmented. It is really hard to figure out, okay, this tool actually solves my use case versus this one doesn't. But again, it's in the ecosystem in this ecosystem already. So let's, let's still use it just because it's easier. But it does boil the disc, a lot of the discussion down into basically into friction, how much effort does it take to start using something? Because that's where, you know, that's basically the issues enterprises are trying to solve. It's around friction and it used to be friction around, you know, buying servers and then kind of being stuck with them for, you know, four to five years. But now it is the vendor lock in where people and organizations have to make tough decisions, you know, what ecosystem am I going to buy into? And that's, that's also where a lot of the multi-cloud marketing comes from on the one hand to get you into a specific ecosystem. On the other hand, companies kind of filling that gap, helping you manage that complexity and Hashi corpus is one of those examples in my book, to help you manage that multi-cloud challenge. So, but yeah, but it is all part of that, you know, discussion around friction. Yeah, and I guess I would start if you say, as you said, it is such a broad spectrum out there. If you look in the developer tooling marketplaces, there's lots of people that have, you know, landscapes out there. So CNCF even has a great landscape and you know, things like security, you know, matter wherever I am and everywhere that I am. And there's a lot of effort to try to make sure that I can have something that spans across the environment. Of course, security, you know, huge issue in general. And right now COVID-19, the global pandemic coming on has been, you know, putting a spotlight on it even more. We know shared responsibility models where security needs to be. Data is at the center of what we're talking about when we've been talking for years about companies going through their transformation. I hadn't talked about, you know, digital transformation. What that means is at the end of the day, you need to be data driven. So there's lots of companies, you know, big movement in things like ML Ops. How can I actually harness my data? I said one of the things I think we got out of the whole big data wave, it was that bit flip from, oh my God, there's data everywhere. And maybe that's a challenge for me. It now becomes an opportunity. And oftentimes somewhere that I can have new value or even new business models that we can create around data. So, you know, data security and everyone is modernizing. So, you know, worry a bit that there is sometimes, you know, cloud native washing, you know, just like everything else, it's, you know, cloud enabled, it's, you know, AI ready from an infrastructure standpoint, you know, how much are you actually leveraging cloud native? The bar we always said is, you know, if you're putting something in your data center, how does that compare against what I could get if I'm doing AWS Azure or Google type of environment? So I have seen good progress over the last couple of years in what we used to call, you know, private cloud. Now it's more a hybrid environment or multi-cloud and it looks and acts and is managed much more like the public cloud. And a lot of that is that driver for developers. So, you know, Ballmer, you know, developers, developers, developers, you know, absolutely he was right as to how important that is. And one of the things I've been a little bit heartened at is it used to be, you talk about the enterprise and while the developers were off in the corner and, you know, we need to think about them and help enable them. But now, like the DevOps movement, we're trying to break down those silos, you know, developers are much more in the workflow. When I look at tools out there, you know, not only, you know, GitHub, you know, you talked about Hashi, you know, GitLab, Ansible and others, often they have ways to have, not only the developers, the product owners and others all get visibility into it because if you can get, you know, people in the organization all accessing the same work stream the way that they need to have it, there's goodness there. So I guess final question I have for you, is, you know, what advice do we have for practitioners themselves? Often the question is, you know, how do I get from where I've been to where I'm going? This whole discussion of cloud native is, you know, we spent, you know, more than a decade talking about cloud and it was often the kind of where and the movement and the like. So what I want to tee up with cloud native is the discussion really for the next decade and, you know, if I'm, you know, a CIO, if I'm in IT, how do I make sure that I'm ready for these next opportunities while still, you know, managing what I have in my own environment? So that kind of circles back to where we started this discussion, right? Cloud native and DevOps and a couple of those methodologies, they're not actually about the tooling. They are about what you do with them. Can you leverage them to achieve a goal? And so my biggest advice is, you know, look for that goal first. Have something to work towards because if you have a problem, the solution will present itself. And I'm not saying go look for a problem. The problems there already. It's a matter of, you know, articulating that problem in a way that your developers will actually understand what to do and then they will go and find the tools that are needed to solve that particular problem. And so we turned this around in a sense that, you know, finally we are at a point where we can have business problems actually solved by IT in a way that doesn't require, you know, millions of upfront investment or, you know, consultants from an outside company. Your developers are now able to start solving those problems and it'll, you know, maybe take a while. They may need some outside help to figure some stuff out. But the point is we can now use, you know, these cloud resources, these cloud native services in such a small practical way that we can actually start solving these business problems in a real way. Yeah, you put, I actually earlier this year I've done a series of interviews getting ready for this type of an environment. You know, one of the areas I've spent a bunch of time trying to dig in and to be frank, understand has been serverless. So, you know, people very excited about serverless. You know, one of the dynamics always is, you know, does everything we're talking about with containers and Kubernetes, do I even need to think about that? I always looked as, you know, containerization was kind of moving up the stack and making infrastructure easier to work for applications. But something like serverless, it comes top down. It's more of not the tooling, but how do I build those applications and those environments and not need to think at least as much about the infrastructure. So, serverless, absolutely something we will cover. You know, containers, Kubernetes, what I'm looking for. I always love practitioners. I love somebody, you've been, you know, in that end user slot before. Startups, absolutely we'll be talking to as well as other people, you know, in the ecosystem that, you know, want to help have discussions, have debates. You know, we don't have, you know, a strong, you know, this is the agenda that we have for Cloud Native, but really want to help facilitate the dialogue. So, I'll give you a final word here. Anything, you know, what's exciting you these days when you talk to your peers out there? You know, in general, you know, it can be some tools even though we understand tools are only a piece of it or any other final tips that you have in this market space? Well, I want to kind of go forward on your statement earlier about serverless. Without calling, you know, any specific serverless technology out there specifically, but, you know, looking at those technologies, you'll see that we're now able to solve those business problems without actually even needing IT, right? So, no code, low-code platforms are, you know, very adjacent to the serverless movement. And that's what, you know, that's what really excites me at this point simply because, you know, we no longer need actual hardcore engineering as a trait to use IT to, you know, move the needle forward. And that's what I love about the cloud native movement that it used to be hard and it's getting, you know, simpler in a way, also more complex in a way what we're paying someone else to solve those issues. So I'm excited to see where, you know, no-code, low-code serverless and those, you know, kinds of technologies will take us in the next decade. Absolutely. Wonderful when you have technology that makes it more globally accessible. There are obviously, you know, large generational shifts happening in the workforce. Youp, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Steve. Steve. All right, and I guess the final call to action really is we are looking for those guests out there. So, you know, practitioners, startups, people that have a strong viewpoint, you can reach out to me. My email is just stewstu at siliconangle.com or you can hit me up on the Twitters. I'm just at stew on there also. So thank you so much for joining us. Planning to do these in general weekly cadence. You'll find the articles that go along with these on siliconangle.com. Of course, all the video on thecube.net. I'm Stu Miniman and love to hear more about your cloud-native insights.