 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE live in San Francisco. Live coverage of Google's annual conference for Google Cloud called Next 2018. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. I'm here with Susie Wee, CUBE alumni vice president and CTO at Cisco DevNet. And among other things, a lot of great stuff you're working on, welcome back. Thank you, nice to be here. So we've just interviewed you at Cisco Live in Orlando and before that other shows, you're known for being the, kind of the inspiration behind DevNet's developer program which has now gone into a whole nother solar system in terms of capabilities, results, performance with Cisco as well as DevNet Create, which is, you've been passionate about, which is the cloud native part of Cisco. Yes. It's been good visionary part on you, but now it's reality. This is the exciting story, I think that's important here that I'd love to get your take on. Cisco here at Google Cloud, you've been partnering with Google, Google is the cloud native, you can't get any cloud native than Google. Absolutely. What's the important story for Cisco here? What's your take? It's fantastic. So basically we've been building out for Cisco, kind of the developer community and the fact that Cisco's been building out a programmable infrastructure and why would you make your infrastructure programmable? Well, you want to actually allow the whole world of cloud applications, hybrid cloud applications, bringing cloud native back into the enterprise, taking private cloud, public cloud, bringing it all together. And it's really fantastic for us to be here together with Google to really show how we're partnering with Google cloud technologies, Cisco's cloud technologies to bring public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, make all of that a reality. You know, I look at Cisco and I love the company. I've been one of those things where, you know, as an internet native myself, going back when I was in my 20s and early 30s with the information super highway that became the web, the internet, et cetera, Cisco's had a great run, really made a critical part of the infrastructure, bought a bunch of companies, been part of the internet revolution, and then, you know, the network's been so important. And then incomes, web 2.0 and cloud, and now you see application and DevOps really taking center stage with the cloud. So it felt like Cisco was like, where are we and we're still important and what's happened is the power of the network is now moving up the stack, where application developers are going to be taking an image of all the goodness of networking, but more importantly, network assets are now more important than ever. With this DO shipping 1.0 and with Kubernetes being doubled down on by Google, service oriented architectures are state of the art now. More important than network. Explain why the network value is so more important now in context of this new abstraction layer around Istio and Kubernetes. Well, we had this whole world of cloud, cloud development, and it seemed like it was so exciting and that's where all the innovation was and all the excitement was and all the money was, but what happens is now we've gotten a lot out of that and the next kind of chapter of innovation comes from how you have your cloud opportunities for public cloud, but how do you bring that back and use private cloud? How do you use enterprise data, enterprise applications? How do you bring it to the edge and have IoT and digitized infrastructures? So cloud applications don't have to only be cloud, but they can actually come back and touch a physical infrastructure. And when you really want to make that work well, the network matters. So you actually want to use the network to provide security. You want to use the network to have policies that bring things together, but then you say, how do I take those cloud applications and make them work well with all of the things that the network infrastructure needs to do? And then tools like Istio becomes important because you have Istio, you have a service mesh. It's not like you want all the app and cloud developers to really worry about what's going on underneath there, but by kind of providing these layers and the technology stacks from the infrastructure side, from the network side, and bringing them up to the app and cloud developers, we're just getting this really exciting time in the industry where it's all coming together. And it's also very fast paced. And I think Diane Greene was just on the cube earlier talking about the speed of pace and scale that they're experiencing. And I love the theory of this conversation, but the best part about covering tech and being part of the industry is when it actually happens, it's not just talk, it's reality. And I think you're starting to see proof points starting to come into visibility. And today on stage, they gave a demo where they were running multi-cloud on the cloud and on premise note. Okay, so I got a note on the network. It wasn't like anything other than it was like magic. Wait a minute, that's just one interface. So you're starting to see this notion of abstraction layer that makes it very easy for the buyer or the person deploying technology to use it. This is under the covers, a lot of magic's happening. There is, there is a lot on there. What's going on under there? Well, basically, so when you're in a cloud environment, we have all this excitement with Kubernetes. I can write apps with containers and everything like that. And then the question is, how do you bring that on premise, right? And so when you're dealing with an on premise infrastructure, you have private cloud, you have data that needs to stay in a private cloud, or you have kind of data sovereignty issues and you have data that needs to stay within a country and not go elsewhere. How do you use the cloud services and safe in this way? And so what happens is now you can have this on-prem infrastructure that understands containers, that understands cloud native and still pull from the best public cloud services. And we have Cisco Container Platform, what cloud container platform, which will actually help us to run Kubernetes containers and then provide the coupling with Istio, with the service mesh to make all of this work. So what happens is you're just kind of spreading your infrastructure to be able to work on-prem, as well as in the cloud, and making all that work together. And it should be kind of seamless to a developer who doesn't need to know about the infrastructure, but it need to do all of the security, set all of the policies, all the networking to get the performance you need and everything. So Lynn, who I interviewed earlier, and she's a product manager in Istio, she has all the APIs in the service management side of it. She had a great analogy. She's like, hey, you know what? I mean, I brought up the horse and buggy days in car. And she took the car analogy one step forward. First of all, horse and buggy, that's like the old world, you know, old IT. Horse, buggy, which carriages too. Now we're living in cars. Now they see in power windows. But she's like, I want to drive the car. I just want to get to my destination in a very easy, elegant way. But also, I'm a mechanic. I need to have an ease of, I need to service the engine of the car. So this is kind of what's interesting about the operator side of the business and networking in particular. You want to have an easy to service the engines and the services, but at the same time, the target audience that just wants to do something needs to do it fast and simply. Yes, and kind of like we look at that as there's the world of kind of application developers, but then the world of infrastructure developers and they each need to do their thing to make this all work together. But you don't want too much coupling. You want just the right amount of coupling. So the abstraction layers are coming out just right. And so what Jennifer, what Diane, really what we're all bringing together with Cisco and Google is to create those right abstractions to take the best of public cloud, the best of on-prem private cloud and make those work. Yeah, I want to get your thoughts on something that I thought would be a big story here at the show. It turned out it wasn't a little bit. Maybe it was earlier. I was off a little bit, but I still see something developing. I want to get your thoughts on. In DevOps, the developer, obviously we know what the role they play with Agile, all those great things. Goodbye, waterfall development. Hello, Agile. On the internal side of operations, the operators of networks and operators of infrastructure is a whole persona that's still important. So the world of operators and developers are now are coming together in a confluence of tech bridging it. So you see this world where obviously we need application developers from, I just want to code abstract away the complexities of infrastructure and network. Creative, I'm doing some things to, I'm an operator, I need five nines, I need bulletproof security. So you have two personas that are super important, not mutually exclusive. Yes. Your reaction to that, those two personas, those are going to be the, seems to be the key audiences. There are. Deploying, what's your thoughts? There are. Well, I think that's why this partnership is fantastic because as we know, like on the Cisco side, all those IT professionals, right, who are running those mission critical infrastructures and everything, they are our customers. They are learning the newest technologies, they're running these- They're operating things. Mission critical, high-skill, high reliability. Yeah, they're operating things. And so, and they need to adopt and provide the infrastructure that's carrying the containers, that's carrying the newest cloud apps that's coupling into the public cloud. So they need to do their job right and learn these new technologies become, you know, kind of facile with it so that the app developers and cloud developers can come in and make this stuff work. And, you know, there's this kind of concept of self-service ops, right? So self-service ops where they are still using the programmable infrastructure. They have things ready to go. The developers can come in and get the right kind of developer and cloud environments that they want with the right policies, configurations, performance going. And I think that's really key for how these audiences come in and work together. They each have their domains of expertise that they work in and they understand what the other side is like. It's not a lot of conflict either. I think DevOps has kind of leveled the playing field that there's really no real conflict. It's symbionic and it's together. Yeah, and I think the key is that the infrastructure has become programmable. So if it was kind of the old infrastructure where we had to manually configure stuff, you know, kind of get things in order, it, that infrastructure would not have been able to handle what you want to do with cloud, hybrid cloud applications and everything there. But now that that has become programmable, you know, with our networking portfolio becoming programmable, all of a sudden these two worlds can interact more seamlessly and they have the tools to help each other more. So I think that's why we're in this new chapter. And there's some great open-source projects going on, obviously. Istio, you got Kubeflow. We talked about NetFlow earlier with about StealthWatch, a really compelling, you know, indication of where the world's going. Yes, and that's, I think that's where, you know, by taking innovations at all layers, then what you can do is like help an app developer get security down from the network infrastructure, make sure that the network and compute infrastructure is providing the services, as well as kind of the agileness that the app developers need. You know, we talked on camera and also off camera at Cisco Live in Orlando, Suzy. And, you know, I saw Chuck Robbins on stage and saw Diane Green come out. I'm like, hmm, something's going on there, guys. I need to, you know, you kind of kept things on the down low. But you guys have had a relationship with Cisco. You guys have been co-developing and today the partnership of Google and Cisco, where you guys are GCP Google Cloud Platform certified with this new cloud service. You essentially have a co-developed product. We do. And Google's got Google on Google stuff going on, but there's Google Cisco also leading over into the Google side. So this is really interesting nested relationship with Google that you guys have. Yes, we do. That's going to bring benefits to both Cisco and Google. Absolutely. I think what's interesting is you take kind of Google's cloud business and just their whole frame of thinking around what they enable cloud developers to do and all of the services that they can build out. And then you take kind of Cisco's understanding of the on-prem environments, of the private cloud, what enterprises need, and you start to bring those perspectives together. Then you have really interesting offerings that come out. So then they kind of come in from the Google cloud technologies with the Cisco cloud technologies bringing them together. And then we also have something that we're announcing here, which is the Cisco and Google cloud challenge. And so what we're doing is we actually just opened this up yesterday where what we're doing is inviting people to write hybrid cloud applications and to write hybrid cloud solutions using the Cisco and Google technologies together. And so that's something that we just opened up. So just to give a commercial to that, Cisco and Google cloud challenge, two clouds, infinite possibilities. The URL is developer.sysco.com slash Google challenge. And this is something that your team is putting on, Google proper, what's- We're doing it together. So it's Cisco DevNet together with Google technology partners. And we've gotten together to basically create the challenge. And what we're doing is inviting the world to kind of invite in and develop hybrid cloud solutions using our new technologies. We're really excited to see what the community develops and what they submit. We're going to have industry experts be the judges of the solutions. And then we're going to announce 10 finalists at KubeCon in December. And then the two winners at Cisco Live Europe in January. You know, you got a little knack for gamification. You have a lot of demos at DevNet at your events. This is a little, it's got like an eSports vibe to it. We can televising these soon, like these hackathons, like team A winning, you know. What we know is like we're creating together with Google, but as well as we're creating just a sandbox of like cool tools, right? To enable this entire new world of hybrid cloud applications. And we want to see what people create. They're going to create things that we can't even think about. Well, Sue, you know what I love about you and I love about your team and what you're doing at Cisco and Pioneering is that. And you know, it's obviously our ethos as well. It's an open source ethos. Co-creation is a beautiful thing because it's not so much you're jamming Cisco down people's throats. You're creating a collaborative open environment where co-creation, collaboration. This is the future of work. This is what's going on. This is a really. And we've been together on this mission, right? So both the mission for cloud native, for kind of applications meeting infrastructure, the changing boundaries. Like we've been on this together for the last few years. It's like we're surfing the wave together. What's the wave look like to you? I'm asking, we were sitting here hanging 10 on our tech surfboards. You got tons of open source coming on. Exactly. You have partnerships that are open, but yet got some guardrails with people that do business and some commercialization, which is fine. It's like an upstream project. There's a lot going on. Istio really to me is just, I'm blown away by how fast that evolved. I mean, Luke Tucker and I have had many conversations with Istio, he's hardcore on it. Google stepped up big time. Definitely, definitely. And it's going to be in like, you know, as we had Cisco and Google step up to create these technologies because we had the vision of them coming together. And now the technologies are real enough that we can invite people to innovate on top of it. And so as we, you know, kind of embrace the open source tools, as well as, you know, the hardened tools that are in these different areas, just bring these all together, then it'll be interesting what the community develops. And what, when we bring together the DevNet community together with the Google developer community, like before I thought they were kind of like separate. Would they talk to each other? But what we saw it create is they're mixing well and just they see more possibilities when they start to work together. It's kind of like a sports team or whatever metaphor you want to use. You have, they're not really a lot of conflict because you have, again, operate operators and developers. They, the other guy doesn't want to do it. The other guy or gal. Exactly, exactly. And they need what the other does. So it's actually quite symbiotic. And again, programmable is the key because you say, who's problem is it? Oh, it's their problem. Finger pointing, we've seen that in the enterprise where people buy IT. Finger pointing, who's going to support it? Here in a collaborative environment, the developers are happy to pass on the engine building to the engine builders and the engine builders don't want to write the apps. I think it's that whole apps meet infrastructure thing. And now that it's programmable, they can like count on each other more and do, you know, have the other take care of what they don't want and provide value. It's great to have the reality comes. It's great to have you on the queue. I'll ask you one final question, the spirit of co-creation. You know, Diane Greene said on the keynote, this is an amazing time. She went on and some great anecdotes about, you know, Soundbyte's number one pain point in security, number one opportunities AI, all that great stuff. But I think I want to ask you that she said, this is an opportunity for people to re-engineer their business. You're a CTO, you're technical, you're on the business side. If you were in charge of re-engineering a business, knowing what you know, cloud native, and maybe I got some legacy stuff behind it, how would you go out and how would you be that change and how would you architect the engineering of a business today, knowing what you know? I mean, what's interesting is that before, if you were an enterprise and you were writing enterprise applications, you have your IT, you know, you had a certain way of doing things and a certain set of things you could create. If you were starting a net new service, you know, a net new cloud service, you had a set of things that you could do. But now you can actually bring those together and kind of think unbounded, like how could I take the best cloud services, how can I still respect the privacy of data, customer data, different service, and bring all of this together, is you don't have to restrict yourself to that. So now you can actually think about new business models that involve the ecosystem. You have to be very aware of the ecosystem. Don't try to do it all yourself, but how do you bring in the ecosystem for the right parts? Get your business model going and really use all these technologies underneath. So it's really a great time to really be able to disrupt your own business with the new possibilities. A services-centric user view, user view. Absolutely. It's interesting and now doable. And you don't have to stay pure cloud. You can actually still touch to the physical environment. You can work with enterprise applications and use what's in the cloud, use the newest artificial intelligence, everything there. It's limitless. Susie, thanks for coming on. Great to see you. Congratulations again on all your success. Cisco's, I think it's a great partnership. Obviously operators and developers working together. DevNet's been a great smash in success. DevNet create for cloud native. Cisco operating the networks, bringing that magic, making it programmable and enabling more sets of services and abstractions. This is changing the business models. We're seeing it in real time. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action in real time live from Moscone in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more day one coverage after this short break.