 Live from New York, it's the queue. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, here in New York City for the AWS Summit. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is Corey Quinn. And happy to welcome two guests from NetApp. First of my right, welcome back to the program from another cloud show earlier this year. Yolansy Stephenson, who's the CTO and vice president for cloud services. And to his right, while it's a first time on the program, I actually was on one of his earlier podcasts, Jeff Dickey, who's joined NetApp as the chief technologist inside that same cloud and data services group. Jeff, welcome, and Yolansy, welcome back. Thank you, Stu. Thank you. Okay, so, Yolansy, let's start with you. So, we've watched the cloud and data services, from my words, it's like almost, I want a new brand. It's like, this is not the on tap, everywhere, best NFS, the number one thing there, it's about multi-cloud. It's about getting the value out of my data, that transformation we've seen overall in what was known as the storage industry. There are a lot of new people, a lot of new products, and it's the end, as I think there was one NetApp term, is all of the history and the things you can trust, but a lot of new things. So, give us the updates on what's exciting in your role. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, of course, we are still relying on that all trusted on tap and waffle storage operating system in the backend, but we have abstracted a lot of that into a more automation, or you're consuming it in a more autonomous way. We are actually taking all the storage knobs, that traditional storage admin is really used to, you know, tweaking and all of that. That's all done and managed by us. It's fully as a service, and we are more focused on the data management capabilities off on tap than the actual storage system or the performance of that storage operating system. I mean, we are in a very unique position as NetApp. I mean, we have a very strong foothold in the enterprise, and now we have integrated services with all the public clouds. I mean, fully native integrated services, either going through their own console or at their own APIs or with our own UI. So the data management capabilities that we are actually bringing to the table is you can seamlessly migrate from the core to the edge and to the cloud, depending on where you want your data to reside. So our goal is actually to do something very similar as Kubernetes has done to the application layer. They have made it completely mobile. There is no longer that VM format issues that we had in the old days. It's basically just a kernel module. I can move it wherever on top of a hypervisor of choice or a public cloud of choice. But data has always been sort of left behind on some proprietary box sitting there. But NetApp, like I said, NetApp is in this very unique position of being able to move, migrate, replicate, and split the data according to your strategy, whether it's on premise or the public cloud. All right, Jeff, what I'd love to give you a viewpoint is what you're here from customers. I've known you for many years. Talk about that journey towards cloud and what is cloud and how does it fit into their customer environment. So give us what brought you into NetApp and some of the conversations you're having as you've been digging in with the NetApp team. Well, the coming to NetApp is actually a long story. I've known the green cloud folks for a long time. I think it was the first kind of US partner of theirs and had been a big fan of their, first their cloud and then their software. So I was really excited when the NetApp acquisition happened. And for about a year, I was learning the stuff they were working on and that was blowing my mind. And again, I've worked with almost every storage company out there, so it was exciting to, like the future of what was happening. And then after the acquisition of StackPoint, which I was currently working with, so it's like NetApp took my two favorite companies in a short time. So I said, hey, I want to be working on, you guys are doing the coolest stuff that I've seen right now. And the roadmap is blowing my mind. I want to join. So it's been a great time here. I think what's most unique, what I've found is the typical, when you're doing cloud consulting, you go after the low hanging fruit. It's very simple strategy. If you were to go to a customer and say, let's take your highest demanding, most revenue generating systems, and we're going to migrate those to AWS first. Well, they're going to look at the $10 billion contract and the two-year engagement and say, no, we're not going to do that. You go for the low hanging fruit. But because of the products that have come out and what we're doing in the public clouds, we're, for the first time, we have NFS, like basically SLA performance file system in the cloud that can handle the biggest, baddest on-prem apps. So now that we're able to do that, so what customers are doing, they are now, we're taking those big ones and it's accelerating the whole journey to cloud because instead of creating more of a chasm between your public cloud infrastructure and your on-prem, because a lot of people, you know, if you've got a $50 billion budget, you're putting it mostly into cloud and some of your on-prem, which, again, is still generating a lot of revenue, is not getting the love it needs and it's not becoming cloud either and you have this kind of chasm. So I think it's great that, you know, with the customers we're working with, they're very excited to be moving what they thought they were never going to be able to move because it just wasn't there. And now they have native connections to all the services they love, like, you know, here at AWS. So it's just great because, you know, yes, they're consolidating their data and you're having less silos, but that's exciting, but what excites me most is what are they going to do next and after that, what are they going to do next with that? Like, as they learn how to use their data and connect more to cloud services and our cloud services and the public cloud services, they're going to be able to do way more than they ever thought they would. Something that I think would resonate with a number of folks has been that, I mean, I go a little bit back, a little older than I look, although I wear it super well. And I cut my teeth on waffle and working with SnapMirror and doing all kinds of interesting things with that. It's easy to glance, walk around the expo hall and glance at and figure, huh, I see there's a NetApp booth. You must still be trying to convince AWS to let you shove a filer into US East One. That's not really what your company does anymore in the traditional sense, but I think a lot of people may have lost that message. From a cloud perspective, what is NetApp doing in 2019? So, I mean, we are really, really software focused. So, I mean, we're doing a lot of work. We are containerizing that waffle operating system. We're really excited about launching that as alpha today. That basically means launching it in alpha in October. That basically means that you could get all the on top data management goodies on top of any storage operating system on top of any physical or persistent disks in any of these different public clouds. EPS, Volumes, Google PDs or Azure. We want it to make it so anybody can actually deploy on top. We've always had that story with on top select, but being able to containerize it, I don't know if we can actually, so we can actually reap the benefits of Kubernetes when it comes to high availability, gratification, auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities to make it a much more robust scale out as well as scale up solution. So, that's truly our focus. And our focus for 2019 is, of course, we've been really, really busy with our headstone coding for a long, long time or for a long time. Long, very short time in NetApp terms, but in cloud terms very, very long, like for the last 18 months. But now we're really integrating our entire portfolio where we have monitoring, deep analytics, compliance, Kubernetes, storage providers, schedulers. So, everything is sort of gelling together now. So, I think back a couple of years ago, if you talked to Amazon, the answer to everything was move everything to the public cloud. Yeah, yeah. Today, Amazon had at least admitted that hybrid cloud is a thing. They won't say hybrid necessarily, but with outposts and what they're doing with their partnership with VMware and the like, they're doing that. When I look at customers, most of them have multi-cloud. Now, when we say multi-cloud, it means they have lots of clouds and whether or not they're tied together, they're not doing that. And while Amazon won't admit to it and isn't looking to manage in that environment, they're playing in that because if I have lots of clouds, one of them is likely AWS. NetApp sits at the intersection a lot of this. You have a huge install base inside the data center. You're working very much with Amazon and the other cloud providers. So, what I'm hoping to get from you is your insight on customers. You know, where are they today? What are they struggling with in that hybrid or multi-cloud world? And where do you see things maturing as we go the next couple of years? Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is, 83% of all workloads still reside on premise. Whether it stays like that or doesn't, I mean, AWS is doing outposts. Google is doing Anthos. Azure is doing Azure Stack. And the good thing is we are actually playing with all of them. We are collaborating on all these different projects, both on the storage layer as well as on these like application lifecycle management. From our point of view, it is really important that we start tying all the infrastructure related stuff into the application layer. So you're actually managing everything from that layer and down. So for a developer like me, it's actually really simple to actually do all the tasks and completely manage my own solution. Of course, I need operations to be managing the infrastructure, but I should be oblivious to it as a developer. And what we are actually seeing customers doing now more and more. And it's actually really refreshing coming here to New York and meeting all these financial companies. They have always been like, probably the slowest movers to the public cloud because of compliance reasons and other stuff. But they are actually really adopting it. They have segmented up their workloads and really know what teams are allowed to provision and are supposed to be running in the public cloud in order to tap into the innovation that's happening there. And what teams are only allowed to work on on-premise environments. So it sort of relates into the true cloud concept. The true cloud concept being everything is a cloud and there is no lock-in. Have the freedom of choice, where to provision, where to spin up your workloads. So we're seeing that more and more from our customers. Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, Jeff, I wonder if you could give a little bit more. As you said, NetApp's done quite a few acquisitions in the last couple of years. What sort of thing should people be thinking about NetApp that they might not have a couple of years ago? Well, I'll tell a quick story. My first day as a NetApp employee was at Kupkan in Seattle. And I remember I was wearing the NetBadge and I had a friend that I was partner with and he looks at my badge and says NetApp. It's like the box in the closet people. And I'm just like, well, I mean, not anymore, you know? And that's, I think that's the biggest thing. You mean network appliance problem, you know? Those of us that have known NetApp long enough? No, it's now internet application, right? Now it's a little bit different. So I think that the big thing is, you know, it's not just storage. I mean, storage is a key component and it's very important, but that's not the only thing. And I think on the cloud side, it's very important because we're still maintaining this relationship with our storage appliances and everything. But we have more buyers now. So we can go across the company and say, well, what are you doing? Like are you an SRE? Are you a developer lead? Are you a VP of operations? Like we have all these products that work for them. Yet in the end, it's a single vision to the deep insights of everything they're doing with us. Yeah, so just a quick follow up on that. So I think when NetApp bought a Kubernetes company, it was like, okay, I'm trying to understand how that fits. When I look at NetApp's biggest partners, I think VMware, Cisco, Red Hat, all going heavily after software solutions, including the Kubernetes piece. So how does NetApp do differently because you still have strong partnerships there? I think we're in a strong place because now we're doing two things. We're bringing the apps to the data and the data to the apps. So where do you want to be? There's the right place for your app. There's a lot of choice now and now you can choose. Where is this going to live best? Where is this going to operate? Where is this going to serve our customers best? What's going to be the most cost effective? Being able to deploy and manage and I mean, just type in a couple of characters and your entire production Kubernetes deployment is backed up anywhere you want. There's just, the apps are nothing without data. The data is nothing without the app, right? So it's bringing those two together. I think it's very important to kind of get out there. My job is getting that out that it's not storage silos. This is about your apps. What are you doing with it? Where do you want your apps and what is that data? How is the data helping your apps grow and we're helping people move forward and innovate faster with these products? I mean, both companies, my company Green Cloud and Stackpoint, I mean, we were really, really early adopters of Kubernetes and we've always taken a very, both companies, very application centric point of view on Kubernetes. Well, most everybody else have taken a very infrastructure centric approach. We were two startup companies, just developers and we always sort of felt like because it's a very common misunderstanding that Kubernetes was actually built for developers. It wasn't, it was, it is an infrastructure play built and developed by the Google SREs to run code. So everything that we were adding on top of it and beneath it, it ties it all together. So I mean, for a developer working on our Kubernetes offerings, he's basically working in his own element. He's just doing commits and magic happens in the background. We tie the development branch to a specific notebook. We tie the staging branch to another one and the production environment, once you commit that, then it actually goes through like an SRE process where they are basically the gatekeepers, where they actually either allow or say, hey, we found a bug or we are not able to deploy this according to our standards. So tying it all together all the way from the storage layer all the way up to the application layer is what we are all about. And I got the same question when we were acquired and we had, when we were green clothed, we were in a really, really good situation where we had term sheets from three different companies. I'm not allowed to say which ones, but everybody, once I sold it to NetApp, they were like, why NetApp? But if you go to KubeCon and you're always there, there is a very live matrix on what the biggest problems are with Kubernetes and persistent volume claims and storage and data management hasn't been solved yet. And that's where we believe that we have a unique way of offering those data management capabilities all the way up the stack. All right, well, Jonsi and Jeff, thank you so much for giving us the update there. Absolutely, Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be at KubeCon later this year in San Diego where at Amazon re-invent, always go to the Kube.net to see all the shows as well as hit the search, and you can see the thousands of videos, always no registration to be able to check that out, so check all the interviews, and as always, thanks for watching the Kube.