 Hi, this is your host, Glyn Bhartia, and welcome to another episode of GFR. Let's talk. And today, we have two guests from NetApp. Eric Han, VP of Product Management of Cloud at NetApp, and Shiva Subramaniam, VP of Engineering of Astra at NetApp. Eric, Shiva, it's great to have you both on the show. Glad to be here. Swap, I just want to say it's great to be on your show. I love your episodes, and it's an honor. Actually, it's my honor to have you both on my show. And since this is the first time we are talking to each other, let's remind our viewers, what is NetApp all about today? Absolutely. So I'll start. And today is Shiva's second day. So we'll give him all the hard questions. But I thought it was important for him to be here. So from a NetApp perspective, obviously, we have a well-known heritage in terms of how we handle storage and data management. And if you look at it as a company, we've been transitioning early and successfully into cloud, specifically with hyperscalers and cloud services. And so you can see that our portfolio has grown not just from storage and data, all the way through cloud and cloud ops. And so that includes across our portfolio, whether it's Azure, Google, Amazon, and as well as private clouds. Now, from an Astra perspective and why we're so excited to have Shiva, we're doing tons of investment in Kubernetes. Astra is something that has started several years ago. And it's about how do we take a lot of our existing capabilities but bring it to a new audience to Kubernetes and solve some of the key challenges when it comes to data and stateful applications. And I couldn't be more excited than have somebody like Shiva to partner with. Shiva, since Eric asked me to throw harder questions at you, if you look at the pace at which the technologies have been evolving, it's super fast. It's like, you know, super highway. What kind of evolution have you seen in the cloud, cloud native Kubernetes space in these past few years? And also we have started talking about cost cutting or in a way becoming more cost efficient. So how to maintain a balance between embracing these new technologies and also remain cost efficient? Yeah, I can answer from a technical standpoint and then we can move. And I'll pull in Eric as well for the from market strategies point of view. From a technical landscape, right? You know, Kubernetes from five years back and today it's grown immensely because of the community coming in and helping that moving forward. When I started in Kubernetes, it was a container management system, but what happened is evolution of time that's become the innovative path for a lot of the two phases of infrastructure agility as well as developer agility as well, right? The companies have been kick starting. There's a lot of companies coming on the developer workspace and creating products on top of Kubernetes because of the agility that it provides, right? At the same time, infrastructure wise, you know, you're being able to see a lot of innovative work around, you know, data migration data, which at NetApp is, you know, doing a very good job on data migration, data production aspect of things, but also that's a space which is also really, really nascent, right? Stateful workloads is very nascent. Kubernetes started with state list workloads and is really good at it, but at stateful workloads is where the challenges are, right? Moving data across systems, moving data across regions and things like that. And that's a space I'm very excited about. And, you know, NetApp is a front runner in terms of how we are doing data migrations and things like that. And I see that Kubernetes being belonging to the NetApp cohort of databases will be, you know, really propellous in the future in this regard. Oh, I was going to jump in as well and just say a few things. One is that I think Shiva's being humble, right? Some of the things that Shiva's done at Salesforce in platform engineering, he's built sophisticated systems that manage data, manage persistence using Kubernetes to solve complex business problems. So I think Shiva's being humble in the sense of all the deep expertise he has that he's bringing in is really gonna be a key thing that our teams and all our customers benefit from. But to your original question, Swab, I think I was looking this morning, our original interview was scheduled for late November and this is a reschedule. And since that time to your point about the macroeconomic, it feels like things have changed quite drastically, right? And so I acknowledge your point. You're saying like, hey, I think your fundamental question to us was, you know, how does Kubernetes fit in the landscape as the economy changes and we're discussing what's happening externally, right? And I think from that perspective, there's a few things that aren't gonna change. One is that if you look at COVID and the pandemic, right, everyone had a digital app they had, I order my food, I still, right now I still order some of my food through the apps. So you always have to have a digital experience, oftentimes it's powered by microservices. You need that automation, right? And you need that ability to scale. So from a cost perspective, I believe that this transformation of whether you adopt cloud, whether you adopt containers, that decision is done. Now, to point to your question, which I think is great, is that, you know, what happens now in the macroeconomic situation? I do think that some of the ones that were secondary projects that weren't core, those will get extra attention or extra scrutiny, but there's a core basis that says, I'm going to cloud or I'm adopting Kubernetes on-prem. And from that perspective, I need something that scales, I need something that's automated that I can spin up and spin down, right? Just like Kubernetes does. And from all the things that we can do in data, which is what she was referencing, there's cost efficiencies that we can articulate. But again, I understand it's a complex space, some of it has soft costs like training, expertise. Do you do big clusters? Do you do little clusters? Do you separate by namespace? And do you carve it up that way, right? So I think those are all transformations, but the thing here that I think is true is regardless, you've adopted Kubernetes, you're going to look to the experts, hopefully you see NetApp as one of them, even in the ecosystem, right? Whether you're using different technologies, I think we're trying to publish patterns, we're trying to work with ISVs, we're trying to work with application vendors to make some of the hard things standard, push it back into the community, push it back for everyone's benefit. I think that expertise hopefully helps the ecosystem and customers. And I do think to your point, there is a reality. And I think the core projects remain. And then the secondary, it might not be the time that they get tackled as much as we'd want. That's all. What are some of the big pain points that are still there as companies are looking at becoming more cost efficient and how NetApp can help them? Yeah, I'll start a little bit. And I'll say that, you know, Shiva and I were talking to some important partners and customers over the last few days. And I think for them, what we're discussing is that for the ecosystem, as you said, right, it has been something that Kubernetes is that they've been learning. But I think the idea of going into production, the idea of adoption, that's over. That's been the last few years. Now, it is challenging in the sense every three, four months, there's a new release. And then in terms of whether you stay current, whether you're adopting these new capabilities, I think those are going to be exciting, but it's a question of like, how do you stay current? And how do you continue to innovate as you're using Kubernetes already in production? And then to your point about costs and what can you truly achieve? There is a, as it broadens from the early adopters to some of the more middle groups, right? Who are already doing stateful. I think from their point of view, there's a discussion that we were having at length last night about guardrails, right? How do you help someone not shoot themselves in the foot? And I think from that perspective, there's no simple answer, right? There's best practices, there's training, there's making sure we're publishing, communicating and making products simple, but not too opinionated, right? That's something that Steve and I have enjoyed discussing all the last few days. And I think to your original question swap, I think that how can we help and how can we help this adoption and what are some of the predictions for this? Is that I think people have decided that they're going to go adopt Kubernetes, they are doing multi-cloud, but they're probably not doing crazy things like bursting following the sun. But they are saying that this cloud is good for this use case analytics. That other cloud is good for my enterprise applications where I move from Oracle or something to Postgres. And then some of the core assets applications if they're hybrid are going to stay in this on-prem environment. Those patterns are well-established and making it a repeatable playbook for their teams, right, so that there's common setups, guardrails, but enough flexibility, right? Because if you, to your point about the origins, right? There are some things that Kubernetes solved that is much more flexible than an entire PaaS. Like a PaaS will give you simplicity, it'll give you scale, but then it'll tell you what version of Java you want to use or what database you get to use. And I think there is kind of a pendulum swing back and forth where people are all now starting to talk about PaaS, again, maybe they use different terms, maybe you can serverless. I do think there's a pendulum back and forth there, right? But I still think the fundamental basis, applications, ISVs, enterprise, they're all going to be based in Kubernetes. And I think the best thing we can do for those challenges is to be out there engaging with the ecosystem, solving those problems and helping them along the way. As we discussed, our industry is very innovative. There was a time when Docker, OpenStack, those were the shiny objects, now it's Kubernetes. Do you think that we have found the holy grail of the tech world, such as Linux or Kubernetes, or there is still the next shiny object in all seriousness? Are there still pain points that need to be addressed? That may need a new breed of technologies. There are new things that I'm excited about, right? Web application frameworks, kernel filter with EVPF. I believe that those have a mainstream benefit and we can get into how people are doing AI. At the end of the day, though, there is something underpinning all of that. And that's Kubernetes and that's not changing. And the containerization front, right? You could say, we suddenly start talking about everything old is new, late binding, different languages. There is always in computer science that reoccurrence, you could say, mainframes invented this a long time ago. But that kind of thinking aside, there are hard problems that I think as people look at virtualization, what did virtualization solve and not solve? There was an era of virtualization. There's been an era of cloud, but there is always gonna be an era of applications and that's where Kubernetes, I think, solve something uniquely and the orchestration benefits. And from our perspective at NetApp, there's gonna be a key component of data and that's what we're adding. There's other things that are important like networking, but I think Kubernetes is that underpinning doesn't change. Even if you're talking about the new stuff, you're gonna run it on something and it's gonna have some form orchestration. Now, do we move into a late phase and adoption? I still think we're pretty early, right? Customers are still saying, I'm learning, I'm still making these key decisions. So I think the time of innovation is now, fortunately, we invested early. Now we have even more abilities and we built on something. And I think when we spend more time together, I think Shiva's got a great background on what he's already solved and what he's seeing that is, even though he's brand new to NetApp, I think there's just so much expertise that I want him to have a chance to shine on. Shiva, Eric, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course discuss the whole evolution of Kubernetes, where things are now, where things are heading. Now also talk about NetApp. I wish we had more time today, but I would love to have you folks back on the show again. But I really, really, really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Swap. Thank you, Swap.