 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto for a special CUBE conversation. Breaking news here in Silicon Valley and at Cisco Systems. News around Cisco partnering with Amazon Web Services. And here to talk about is Fabio Gorey, Senior Director of Cloud Solutions Marketing at Cisco. Good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Hello John, how you doing? So big news, Cisco and AWS collaborate to accelerate innovation. A first kind of this kind of announcement. Love the pioneering aspect of this announcement. Obviously Amazon Web Services the leading cloud provider who's been into hybrid cloud lately because they've been talking about that as their connection point into the enterprise. You guys are the leader in the enterprise that networking and other services, I don't even know how much market share you have these days but you guys pretty much own the enterprise, everyone kind of knows that. This deal with Amazon, you guys are doing the first hybrid Kubernetes on AWS. Talk about the announcement, why is it so important to Cisco? So you name it, the solution name is actually a bit of a mouthful but you mentioned the three key words, is hybrid, is Kubernetes, is the AWS. And this is the first solution of this kind that really integrates this two environment in a way that will be exceptionally beneficial for organizations that want to accelerate their innovation path, which ultimately means delivering application faster without having to worry about constraints in terms of where to develop, where to deploy. It really set them free to take their decisions. You know, one of the things we've been speculating on theCUBE a lot around cloud, there's been tons of debates, hybrid cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud, all this stuff's been going on. One thing that's been very clear is the public cloud has demonstrated speed, agility, faster time to value, and for app developers that's been great. Cloud native, if you're born in the cloud, it's just a great environment. If you've been on-premise and you had that legacy and or existing pre-cloud environment, that trend has been more towards cloud operations. So not so much everything's moving to the cloud, although Andy Jassy would love to see everything move to Amazon and that's his goal. But stuff stays on-premise going to be for a while. But the cloud operations on-premise is essentially cloud but on-premise. So that's this new hybrid dynamic. This is what enterprises have been reimagining their infrastructure on. This is where a lot of the energy has been. How does that, your solution for Kubernetes with Amazon solve that problem? Does it help customers get to the cloud faster? Is it an operating model? Explain the nuance of how customers have done that. It's fundamentally all of that. If you think about it and your introduction is spot on, is customers really want to use the public cloud, right? The services in the public cloud. Why? Because it gives them speed. I think that's a big change that we've seen since I would say a few quarters, right? Where people started really trading off speed and innovation for cost, right? It originally was like, I want to shut down my data center that the cloud is going to be cheaper. Well, it's not about cheaper, it's faster. And people want to develop new digital experiences which boils down to building application faster. So what ultimately they want to do is making the infrastructure on-prem looking like a bit more like the public cloud. Now it's never going to be just like the public cloud with all the bells and whistles and innovation. But it's got to be such that you can actually take the best innovation of the public cloud, Kubernetes first, to the on-prem rather than the other way around, right? That's our North Star, that's our belief. And Kubernetes is really a big winner in the container market. The way to develop new application is based on containers. Kubernetes is the orchestrator right now in the marketplace. Every single big cloud provider has launched Kubernetes based services in various forms. And so the enterprises are now looking at and businesses of every size, they are trying to figure out how to really develop this capability on-prem because in the end, as you know, it's never kind of black and white, right? We're still working with mainframes. Long life to the mainframe is going to be around for 20 years probably. We're going to have traditional databases, ERP systems and the likes for very, very long time. What do you do, right? Everything that you develop new in the cloud needs to ultimately connect back to the existing systems because that's what you need. So the simplicity of things is interesting. I want to just rewind that for a second. So you're taking the best of Amazon container service, last container service with Kubernetes, making that available on-premises through the Cisco container platform. Correct. So this is the linchpin. So it's almost like you're not trying to take Cisco and saying, oh, we're cloudified. Correct. You're taking the Cisco environment, which everyone runs and some people think it runs great and they're going to change that overnight, but you now enable them to take what they're doing here and make it compatible with the cloud and on-ramp to the cloud. So the idea is fundamentally not so much taking EKS on print. That's not the thing. But the idea is having a container platform that fundamentally gives you pretty much a transparent way of interacting with the other side. And when I say transparent, I really mean the linchpin or the solution which is around the identity and authentication. What we've done that really differentiates this that makes it so unique right now is that we have integrated the IAM in identity and authorization, sorry, and authentication in common. So you're going to use the same set of keys on both sides, which of course is the developer dream because you don't have to use different type of keys and authentication models if you're a user. It's the same thing. And it's a dream for IT operation because of course this is much simpler as well as for the CISO and the security team. This makes it extremely secure, reduces the risk so that you have really a very consistent integrated kind of solution, which is... So there's engineering involved on Cisco side. Can you elaborate on... Actually it's been a collaboration between the two sides. Explain the partnership. So it's been absolutely, it's actually a collaboration. So we've been collaborating to build this integrated architecture. It is a Cisco solution but developed in collaboration with AWS. And so what we've been doing is fundamentally looking at how EKS was going to be available to the container platform so that you'll be able to fundamentally orchestrate your containers in the most efficient way regardless of where the containers actually end up being. Which is actually what we're hearing from customers. Customers want to just take the containers that are coming from the developers and being free to develop whatever they want. Sorry, to deploy whatever they want. So the containers are key here. So the container service and Kubernetes orchestrates containers works across what the identity layer allows for what seamless interaction. Is that the key for developers? Is that I could take me through a quick use case. Explain it with an example. I don't know, you may take a new application that in the banking, on the banking side you can take some new artificial intelligence kind of applications or machine learning. What you fundamentally can do now is deciding, well first of all, what kind of tools you want to use. You want to use the AWS cloud with all the development tools. You want to use yours. It doesn't matter. At the end, there is an end over between the developers and the IT operations team. And the IT operations team now with this solution can fundamentally quickly and easily provision clusters wherever they want. And they do it on the basis of their specific parameters, their specific goals. What do you want? It could be cost, it could be security, it could be reliability, whatever it is. It doesn't matter. This is not about the religion of whether it's public cloud or on-prem. It's just using the best of both worlds and deploying whatever it makes sense. You know, Andy Jassy and I always talk when we reinvent and he always comes back to the same refrain. He always hits the same notes. We listen to our customers. We're driven by the customers. They take us where we want to go. I know Cisco has been very customer centric as well. How has the customer's reaction? What have they been telling you around why this solution is to develop? I mean, because we know shadow IT's been going on with Amazon for almost a decade. Put their credit card, they sneak up on Amazon, build some stuff and look how easy it is and then bring back to the IT department saying, hey, look what I did in the cloud. Now you implement it. Whoa, we've got network policies. So there's been kind of that kind of tension, kind of R&D if you will, but it's still happening. That kind of goes away here with this kind of announcement. How has the customer needs been profiled as you look at the announcement? What's the key reasons why they want this solution? And why did Amazon glob onto it because they're not going to do something unless it's a customer need. Let's talk about that. Well, I would say it's really meeting the customer where they are. And again, we have two environments that have been inspired by different kind of criteria. As a lot about application modernization, it's a lot about security, it's a lot about compliance on-prem. Of course, the cloud is also very secure. I think we're over this kind of artificial discussions, as AWS will say, is a shared responsibility model, right? They guarantee the security of the cloud and you're responsible for the security in the cloud. And so ultimately what people want to have is, how can we actually integrate these two worlds in a consistent fashion, right? So that I have a consistent environment that's really the key word here, consistent environment where I have common Mino networking between these things, whatever they are, common Mino securing them, including authentication, identity and authentication. Common Mino monitoring this application because the alternative is building another silo. And that's what people don't want to do, right? If I add another silo, I may add innovation but it comes to a very high cost. People want to add innovation without disruption. They want to have this consistency and just extend the way they do things. Of course, going into a DevOps model and getting faster and faster because that's the way to compete. I think IT operations is an area with the development and enablement you guys have had and with the work you guys have been doing with DevNet and DevNet Create, this notion of programmability, you're right in line with the wave that everyone wants to ride, which is lower the cost of mundane tasks and or scripts and things of that nature, command line interface, that's kind of like a hodgepodge. Make the network programmable and automate and make the developer freer to do better things. It seems to be the trend line. So with that in mind, does this fit that horizontally scalable vision of the cloud? Do you see this having impact into, say, network sales, application? Where's the key impact points for the customer? What impacts them? It's a huge impact, right? And it depends whether you're taking like a tactical view of things, like a literary application by application or classes of application or you're really thinking about where is this trend kind of taking you, right? Now, if you take the former kind of approach, then you're starting kind of identifying a whole bunch of different issues, like again, for instance, the security one, the networking one is huge, right? People go, I don't know, Office 365 and they get disappointed. Why? Because all the traffic gets trombone through the data center because that's how things are aware, right? Now you're completely changing the application on top and you discover that the infrastructure underneath hasn't been designed to accommodate those kind of traffic flows, right? And so you're starting solving problem by problem. The fact of the matter is, with the rise of the cloud, the infrastructure and the processes in IT need to change altogether. It's infrastructure, it's processes with of course the rise of DevOps. It's relentless automation, right? Potentially driven by more and more machine learning and AI kind of capabilities. Just talking about that because this is a big discussion because I'm interviewing a lot of CIOs or CXOs or senior IT practitioners and the ones that are successful, the ones who recognize the wave, some people take different steps, they'll experiment, they'll do some tests, some will just go all in and revamp but they all recognize the one point. They got to re-architect and re-imagine the IT infrastructure up and down and the cloud is a big forcing function, a role of data, programmability, automation, not new concepts in some cases, containers we've all been around for a while but how do you guys talk to your customers? Because this is something, first of all, do you believe in that? And two, what do you talk to your customers about when you're saying, look at the hard truth is how we got here is not how we go forward? Absolutely. Well, you know, there are different ways. You can either boil the ocean or for instance, you take a solution like this. If you take a solution like this, you can actually sit down and discuss how to build a solution and architect a solution like this in collaboration with AWS, they took establishing four key principles, right? The first one is got to be hybrid, right? Which means you need to strive to build this consistent environment between the two domains. Second, it has to be production grade. We're speaking with customers adopting Kubernetes, they're saying that they get to a point where they need to integrate 20 open source tools. Now, I wonder whether that's going to take you anywhere over the long term once you scale your operation. Can you actually do it with a kind of approach? Third, and this is a big one, you have to be able to manage this new hybrid reality, managing just the new apps, but the old apps as well. And fourth, it's got to be extensible. You're starting from containers and authentication, how about everything else, right? How about cloud management orchestration? How about application performance management? Because now apps are getting everywhere and of course, you know, that's probably the next episode of theCUBE that we can do together, they're going to the edge. So it's getting very, very complicated. So even with a simple quote unquote example like this, you're starting seeing some principles that you need to establish, and they should inspire how you actually transform your infrastructure and operation. The worst thing that you can do is taking a tactical approach and just going step by step and, you know, move by move. Well, let's definitely do that, Cube. I have a couple of statements I'd love to do more of more of a deep dive with some slides. Certainly the edge is going to be a big point, but I want to ask you the impact to your customer base because I think this is a game changing announcement. I mean, Amazon web services, they don't do a lot of Barney deals. They don't do a lot of deals that look good on paper. They're very specific about how they do their business development. So it's a huge win for them, I think, and for you guys. But I think Cisco customers are going to be impacted. So please explain the impact of Cisco customers. What does it mean to me? I'm a Cisco customer. I've got routers, I've got switches, I've got UCS servers, I've got all kinds of stuff in there. How does this impact my life? What changes? Do I throw away gear? Do I buy new gear? Do I buy software? How do I buy the service? Am I buying Amazon? Do I have Navajo? Explain all that. How does the customer engage with the solution and what's the impact of their environment? Well, that's a very big question. Let me frame it a little bit, right? First of all, how are they impacted? They're impacted by the cloud altogether, right? And very often they're using multiple clouds. We know it's multiple services. So they need to start thinking in terms of those principles that we said before. From a company standpoint, of course we've been well known over the last 30, 35 years, right? Not to leave everybody behind. We're trying to, of course, accommodate the change of the infrastructure. And for instance, how do you move from CLI to more programmability? Through, for instance, the rise of IBM, which is the intent-based networking, where you have more policy-based models that help you fundamentally automating the network. Whether it's about connecting your data centers or connecting your branches, you have to fundamentally adopt more and more automation into your strategy. And so what we're doing is we're fundamentally helping customers, making this kind of transformation. You mentioned DevNet. I think that's like the tip of the iceberg of also a new Cisco Wave, right? Where it's all about, if you want, transforming the talent that's been working with us in the company, and outside the company, and having them taking it to the next level, where instead of going classical CLI, you're more and more kind of thinking, you know, not to make the fashion, because you have to get fast. The only thing that really matters is getting faster. I noticed you guys, I'll just give you guys a lot of props here, because you guys have a lot of meat on the bone with this announcement. Simplifying container orchestration with the Cisco Hybrid solution for Kubernetes on AWS, Linux Foundation wants to see it that way, Amazon's that way. You guys have a lot of code up and running on the sandboxes and for the folks watching, developer.sysco.com slash awsdeveloper.sysco.com slash AWS. You already got sandboxes up already. Five labs for cloud native. You got the EKS cloud. Yeah, I will continue adding more and more material. The cloud is a different world, right? People want to experiment it. And by the way, if you think about how we're packaging and pricing the solution, you can actually start in a very modular way, right? You can just go with the software if you want, or you can buy the software and the hardware underneath. You can go with one, three, or five years. You can get demos of this solution. It's, if you want, it's a different way of experimenting Cisco, but we're there. I mean, we made the change. We're totally for adding a software motion to an already strong kind of hardware component that has been traditionally our strength. And if you think about it, having the full stack, we can do some magic. If you buy a Cisco software, like this solution, and then you put it on Cisco hardware, such as Hyperflex and ACI or data center infrastructure that a lot of customers are using, you get fundamentally a greater performance. You get a single number to call, which is actually. You know, it's interesting, Fabio, and I talked with Lutuck a years ago, and then I'll continue to talk to him every year, as well as Susie Wee. And we see this on the cloud native, born on the cloud side. IT doesn't exist in a lot of these cloud native companies because the developers do all the IT. So you guys are seeing a surge in DevNet and DevNet Create where the Cisco ecosystem, your customers are turning into developers naturally. And so we've seen that shift at Cisco. That has happened internally. You guys recognize that the developer ecosystem, not the cloud native, but application developers, and that your command line interface guys and gals are turning into developers, because when you're slinging code these days, it's pretty straightforward. You can look at our, actually, my friend Susie Wee, and how is she is pitching this change. She talks about DevNet Ops. Others talk about DevSec Ops. Whatever that is, you know, whatever kind of terminology you're using, it boils down to the same concept. You have to automate the way that you manage the infrastructure, right? Infrastructure needs to become more responsive and faster. You can open five or six trouble tickets just to provision a container to a developer that that's not going to cut it in the future. It's got to be fast. Yeah, and making the network programmable is the Dev Ops movement that's coming 2.0. Absolutely. And you guys are aware of, I know you are. It's interesting to see how Amazon relates to that. When you talk about that to AWS, what's the conversations like? They obviously get it and they're smart. They must get it immediately. I mean, absolutely. The reason why we're having this collaboration is very simple. I mean, they get the same request from the customer. We're fundamentally speaking to the same people. Yeah, there may be differences in terms of the developer versus the IT operation. But in the end, it boils down to the request, hey, you know, the public cloud is fantastic, but I also want to have a solution for a prem, right? I have my needs. And if you're not totally born into the cloud, you have to, you want to have investment protection. You want to have your own prem environment for whatever reason, right? And it's not about religion, it's about economics, it's about viability of certain solutions and the likes. Well, great news, congratulations. Fabio, great announcement with Amazon Web Services. Good deal, hybrid cloud. Now, you guys also Cisco, you guys aren't married to one cloud, so I got to ask the hard question. What impact to Google, Microsoft, do you guys have relationships? How does this match up from a integration standpoint with other clouds? Is it deeper? Is it more coming on the other clouds? Can you just kind of give us a description of the evolution of Cisco with the other clouds in this hybrid architecture? Yeah, you know, I want to stay true to one of the principles that we mentioned and we orbited around this conversation, right? For the last 15 minutes. And that is, we're customer centric, right? Customers want to use the clouds that they want to use. We're there to help them, right? Now, AWS is, of course, if you look at the share, it's a pretty big market leader, but we will work with all the providers that our customers want to use. That's actually the North Star that we have. Now, if you look at the kind of, if you want products or stacks or architectures, you will see that there is a huge degree of commonality across all of this, right? So we're using kind of the same baseline software, but configuring slightly different ways for a simple reason, right? Because the clouds are different. And not just the clouds are different, the cloud providers are different. So we're playing in full respect. You sit down, you discuss objectives, and then you actually go after those goals. Yeah, you just kind of do the work and integrate in. So you have to expect a slightly degree of integration because of the nature of the cloud, the business and the cloud providers. But I think when you look at from a customer standpoint, what they want and what they're asking Cisco to do, they want to have commonalities, right? They want to have the same mean of networking, the same mean of securing these environments. They want to have the same way of extracting analytics, especially for application performance. And they want to have a common mean of managing and orchestrating all of these resources. Because the alternative is fundamentally getting lost into different tools and different clouds that by design cannot work in other environments. And so that's what customers want. And that's what we're pursuing as a company. Fai, talk about the announcement in terms of just summarizing it real quick. You talked to a lot of customers, we've been doing press tours all day today, analysts, financial wall street, all the whole nine yards. Now you're in the queue. What's the summary? What's the big walk away? Looking back now after the announcement, talk about the impact. What is this about? What is actually happening in your mind? How are people reacting to it? How big will this be? You know, I have two things in mind when I, I gave myself that kind of question, right? The first one is I have this concept in my mind of making Kubernetes is the engine of your innovation, right? This is about really transforming this new container orchestration technology that sounded esoteric until literally a few months ago into the cornerstone of the innovation, right? We've been talking about hybrid for a long while, but we believe that is about mostly taking the best of the public cloud and making it work on-prem rather than going the other way around. That's for sure. And I would say in general is this is a big first step into closing that gap between the infrastructure and the applications, which is kind of by definition closing the public cloud, but when it comes to the on-prem world was still pretty far away, right? And so clearly there's a lot of competition in the marketplace and we want to win that battle to close this gap. And closing that gap means fundamentally enabling customers to innovate and developing their new digital experience faster. And that's actually the nature of their business. It's not an IT conversation anymore. It's a business. And the value extraction and creation from new applications. I think I got to give credit to the Kubernetes community because what's great about Kubernetes and watching that evolve, we were there at the CUBE president at creation when it started hanging around OpenStack and all the different activities around Linux foundation before it went there, was that you had containers obviously happening, but the industry got behind kind of a de facto standard. We've seen this before. TCPIP sounds like one of those things that just became a de facto standard and then it became a standard. Another example with Linux itself, right? I mean, once big companies started going behind it and offering enterprise class support, we saw a really very, very rapid ramp up. I think we're seeing the same with Kubernetes. I think now there are a bit less doubts about where the world is going. This is clearly a winner and people I think are now. And it's clear you guys are getting behind it. This Amazon doesn't do deals like I said, unless it's a serious thing. So congratulations to you guys getting behind Kubernetes. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you for that. All right, Fabio Gori here inside the studio with Cisco breaking down the hot news, game-changing news. Cisco's partnering with AWS with Kubernetes to really bring a level of industry standard and seamless integration between on-premises and the cloud. And I'm excited to keep bringing in more action coming up going to be at the CNCF event, KubeCon. Check us out there and also Amazon re-invent. People have multiple sets there. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for this KubeCon conversation. Thanks for watching.