 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of next level network experience event brought to you by Infoblox. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. We're here in our Palo Alto studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Infoblox for their next level networking virtual event with theCUBE. Glenn Sullivan is our guest principal product manager with Infoblox, formerly with SnapRoute, theCUBE alumni. Great to have you back on, Glenn. Great to see you. And thanks for jumping on remotely. We're doing the remote thing, the remote cube. Good to see you. Yeah, it's great. I wish I could be in the studio. You guys have a great studio up there in Palo Alto. So I wish I could have joined you, but that's not possible right now. The governor's on, is off, we're going to get there. But when it does come back, we'll certainly do a lot more remotes than when it goes to a hybrid world. Hybrid sounds like the media business is turning into a cloud computing. You got public videos in person, you got hybrid and virtual, the cloud native world is certainly spawning everywhere now with COVID. And you guys are talking about next level networking, but with the word experience. I want to get your thoughts on that because it's been six months, you've been on the cube, a lot's happened, next level networking experience. Describe it. Yeah, it's really about processing things as close to where they need to be processed as possible. So you don't really want to put everything in the cloud. You don't really want to have everything happen on-prem. You want to do the right data processing where it's needed, have a little bit on-prem and have a lot in the cloud or vice versa. It's really about elastic scale. That's what I think about with cloud native technologies is being able to run whatever you need to run service-wise as close to the delivery mechanism of either the user or as close to the app in the cloud as you need to. That's really what it means by having elastic scale and we try to do that every day. And notice the word experiences in there. That's been super important because you build the provision, manage these services from the customer standpoint. I mean, I can't drive in, there's no space, the data center is closed, I got to go in. I now can do remotely. This is the key about having abstraction layer innovation. Certainly DNS, DHCP, IP address management, never going away, you got to connect stuff to the internet. I mean, the network is there. You got to make it more innovative. What's your thoughts on the impact of the network now the cloud native and open source specifically are driving more action? Well, there's a lot going under the hood, right? And you can't just manage things the way you used to be able to where you take and you buy a box and it's that cattle versus pets thing that we talk about in cloud native, right? Where you treat this appliance very specifically and very specially and you upgrade it and you're afraid to touch it. Now that you can't get the things you have to do everything lights out. So what we learned by applying technologies in the cloud, you didn't go into AWS's data center or Google's data center or Microsoft deserves data center and manage these things. So what we've learned about how to manage infrastructure across the board in networking and compute and storage now is even more important because everybody's lights out all the time now. And scale and speed is critical. I mean, Google's pioneered the concept of SRE site reliability engineer. What you're teasing out Glenn is same kind of concept for the network. You got to have the security. You got to have the scale. This is a huge point. Can you react to that? Yeah, it's about spinning up instances where you need them, when you need them. If networking equals a physical black box appliance that you specifically nurture and manage instead of just networking services, because DHCP is a networking service. DNS is a networking service. IPAM is a networking service. So you should be able to spin those up wherever you need to and manage those without having to worry about it all being tied to specific things that you have to manage in a very nurtured way. I want to get your thoughts, the term borderless enterprises being kicked around. You guys use that term. I've heard the borderless network. I mean, it makes sense, I guess. But what does the borderless enterprise mean to you? Well, it's really just an extension. If you think about it from the software defined perimeter concept before, people call it different terms now, but it's just saying that borderless means that I don't have people sitting in an office anymore. And if I do have people sitting in an office, they have the similar experience to people that are connecting remotely no matter where they are. So because there is no boundary to your network, right? Because the edges of your network don't match edges of your walls in your branches, that's pretty borderless to me, right? And you have to kind of think about, it's not just about adding more firewalls, it's not just about adding more network perimeter security. It's really about how do I apply foundational security across the board? And I've been at Infoblox now for a little over six months and I can tell you, it's great to see, thinking about these foundational services, right? These infrastructure services like DHCP, DNS and IPAM being really at the foundational layer of the security that you apply to your network, right? It's the first couple of things that happen, right? The first thing you do is you get an IP address, that's DHCP, you can figure out all kinds of stuff about a device that way. Then you start looking up services with DNS, right? And then it's like, okay, well, now I've got a lot more information about what the user's doing, where they're going and how to secure it, right? So these sound like they're really, you're playing vanilla protocol suites until you really start applying borderless security across the board with them. Yeah, a lot of machinations and also you now have massive amounts of connection points because with IoT, not only have more in terms of volume of things connecting, but they're being turned on and off very quickly. They have to get connected, so you have that going on. Yep, and then you got to make sure that they do what they're supposed to do, right? If they're supposed to phone home to a specific place that they only do that and that they haven't been hijacked and somebody isn't mimicking them with malware, there's all kinds of security threats when you start thinking about all the possibilities that IoT brings into account. Yeah, oh, some light bulb that you screw in, Wi-Fi enabled has a multi-threaded capability and who knows what's on there, right? I mean, this is what the reality is, no one knows what to connect, so a little hygiene comes a long way. I want to just get back into what you said. You've been there for a few months, you came from SnapRoute, which was doing some real pine work, that's where we did a feature interview on you and what you were doing there with that technology. With Borderless Enterprise, what is the role that CloudNave and Open Source play? Because this is your wheelhouse, I want to get your thoughts, because when you add that to Borderless, things kind of happen. There's two things that I like to think about. One, it's scaling things down as skinny as possible or as big as necessary, right? Elastic scale, right? We talk about cloud-native technologies, we always talk about elastic scale. Well, what does that mean? Well, that means that am I securing an entire data center? Am I securing a branch office? Am I securing a gas station? Or am I securing a person working from home? This is what we mean by elastic scale. It doesn't mean that I'm purpose building bespoke specific security profiles for those individual use cases. It means that I have a system that I can scale up and scale down no matter where those folks are, right? That's really what you have to do when you think about cloud-native technologies and the Borderless network is, you have to be able to run things as close to the user as possible or as close to the app as possible or somewhere in between. The second thing that I think is super key is abstraction, right? You can't manage everyone working from home or you can't manage as many instances as you need with everyone's individual laptop, right? This doesn't scale, right? Abstraction is key to cloud-native technologies because it means that I don't pay attention to anything that's below me, right? If I'm an SRE, I don't necessarily care about what type of servers that application sets running on. If I'm a network engineer, I don't really care about the fiber patch panels that connect my network devices together, right? Abstracting away the underlying infrastructure is key for cloud-native technologies. So as we add more and more devices, more and more endpoints, more and more users to manage, we have to make sure that we abstract the way the complexity of all the connections that need to be built between those users and whatever abstraction orchestration layer that we utilize. And so you almost peel back the onion from the early days of DNS and go to the core. Hey, I want to connect to this domain and packet moves from here to there across an IP address. Oh, let's add some abstraction on it. This has been the innovation formula for the internet for years, right? So how do you describe the next level? Because you mentioned, again, the word experience is in there. So next level means, okay, networks need to be programmable. You do have next level open source dynamic that you pointed out beautifully. What's that next level experience? How do you see the preferred future evolving? Because if you take this further, if you believe cloud-native provides some scale, as you pointed out, it should simplify these. Abstractionally, it should reduce complexity or abstract away the complexities and provide more simplicity. Absolutely, I mean, I always come out from an ops perspective because that's just my background, right? I was running networks for a long time before I started building network operating systems, right? I can tell you that what I need is visibility. I need to be able to see what's going on at any given moment. I need to be able to know that the things that I've deployed are up and running. I need to know that the information that I need to troubleshoot that, that the issues that arise is at my fingertips, right? Because I always think about it like the 3 a.m. call, the network engineer or a system in or the DNS admin or it doesn't matter who they are at 3 a.m., they got to wake up because they've just been paged and something's wrong. How do they get to what's broken? So that's one way to think about it. There's also the deployment way to think about it, right? Like, how can I deploy as many new users, as many new branches, as many new locations, whatever the process is. You hear zero touch provisioning, you hear all these other, these speeches and they come as part of a cloud native mentality, right? They mean that I don't have to do a whole lot of pre-thinking and pre-staging and pre-configuration and pre-thought before I deploy stuff, right? It means I need something, I deploy, whatever is required from a service level, I kickstart it, it bootstraps itself and it joins, right? I take away the headache of having to think about where something is or when it is. And that's a lot of the synergy that we had between what we were doing at SnapRoute and when we came to Infoblox, right? It was, I can tell you, we were pleasantly surprised by the platform that was built and we were like, okay, well, this is gonna be great. We can add services to this and we don't have to worry about having to go and reinvent the wheel because when you choose technologies like Docker containerization and choose technologies like Kubernetes orchestration and Kubernetes abstraction, you are a lot closer to where you need to be. I mean, one of the things that isn't super well known out there is that Core DNS is one of the major projects that Infoblox helps maintain within side of CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, right? Core DNS ships at the core of every Kubernetes version from now on, as of a few versions ago. So if you think about it, Infoblox has got a lot of Cloud Native technologies built into everything that we do and we're one of the key maintainers of one of the key DNS features of something that's at the heart of Kubernetes and I don't have to tell you how popular Kubernetes is. Yeah, we've chatted about that. It sounds like it's the kernel of all the action, DNS, the core DNS for Kubernetes. Exactly, exactly. It's definitely at the core there. Glenn, I want to get your thoughts. First of all, I love chatting with you. You mentioned your operating background but also you could bring a lot of dev into it too. So this is ultimately, to me, the inflection point of where DevOps goes mainstream because you used to do ops for a fruit company, Apple. Yes, yes. Big one. Very popular fruit company called Apple and we know how hardcore they are. Actually, they lean heavily on, you know, lock it down, make sure everything's secure. I mean, it's well known in the Silicon Valley and around the world, certainly in tech circles, the security mindset. High, large-scale operations. Now you bring that also the DevOps aspect of it with Cloud Native. As that world has to become secure and networks, it's an ops game. Let's face it, no matter how much DevOps you sprinkle into the equation, at the end of the day, it's ops. Operations of networks, high availability, large scale. But now you have a little bit of development going on top. The programmable internet has to get to the network layer. What's your take on that? Because you still need security. You want to have the capability to do some advanced automation. These are hot new trends. And networking people are now hearing this, not for the first time, but it's the new thing where it's like, okay, I can have my ops, but I got to do something now. So what makes sense of this? Where are we in this whole programmable networking aspect? Yeah, there's sort of two schools of thought. And it's interesting what's happening, right? You've got kind of on the extreme left side, you've got, I just treat the network like it's dumb plumbing and I run all of my software overlays on top of it. And I basically treat the network like it doesn't exist. And it's kind of a situation that's been perpetuated by the silos that are out there where you have the network engineers and the server, compute engineers or SREs. And then it's like, well, these folks never have to talk to each other because we just treat the network like it doesn't exist and we run overlays on top. And some of the vendors in the server overlay, security space has been really proud of that interaction. And I could tell you that that's one way of doing it, but it's not the optimal way, right? Like when I was a network engineer, I could tell you, you're trying to build credibility, right? So if I was talking to a network engineer now and I'd say, like, how do you get your credibility built with your server folks? It's kind of like learning a different language, right? If you try to speak the other language, the person actually is appreciative of that and will help you. So I always found, you know, findings you can automate, run that code base, you know, figure out the API structures, build some pseudo code together to make it happen and figure out what you're doing over and over and over again and automate it, automate away, right? And that's some of the nice things that are the same here, right? Everything we could ever want to do in any GUI is all, you know, rest API underneath the hood, right? So it's like, we don't have to, you know, pitch to people that, oh, you can automate this code if you want to, you can run these APIs if you want to. They know it and they use it and people are happy with it. And I think if you're a network engineer, you've got to spend the extra effort to try to, you know, you don't have to do anything complicated. You know, it's not like you got to go right seats. I'm sorry? It's not rocket science. No, start with Ansible. You'll learn some Python. You'll learn some Django on top of that and then keep running, right? Keep automating on top of that. All right, great stuff, Glenn. I know you've got a tight deadline. Appreciate you coming on for this virtual fireside chat as part of the Infoblox Next Level networking virtual event. What specifically can companies do to get what they need from a technology standpoint to secure the borderless enterprise? How do you see it playing out now that you're on the Infoblox side from Snap route with what Infoblox has, which is a holistic portfolio approach, a holistic view. What are you guys offering customers and how do they secure their borderless enterprise? Really, really start with DDI, right? I know DDI is something that is not specific to Infoblox, but if you look at what we're doing with the NSDHCP and IPAM, it's really the foundational layer to start securing the rest of your network. We don't necessarily, you know, make it so you don't need the rest of your security stacks that are running on top, but we do optimize them and we make it so you can right size them. And we really think that if you focus on getting that layer solid and you really focus on the DNS security, you can apply a lot of lightweight, high impact features as early on in the packet forwarding process as possible, right? If you think about, I'm a network edge of your heart. So I always think about the path of the packet from the start to the end. And DDI happens really early in the process. If you get that right, the rest of your security infrastructure built on top of that is just going to work that much better. You're the principal product manager at Infoblox, formerly with Snapbra. How do you fit into this? What product are you managing? Can you give a little bit of background on kind of what you're working on? So I'm an emerging technologies, PM. So basically anything kind of new and cool that we look to add to our platform, it'll come out of myself and my group. And Kubernetes obviously is one of them. Well, Kubernetes is already there. So we're already doing stuff with Kubernetes inside Infoblox, like our whole platform, if you buy blocks on DDI and blocks on threat defense today, it's all deployed using Kubernetes and Docker containers and orchestration layers and everything today. So everything that we're building on my team is all building on top of that well solid platform that's already been developed. There's definitely demand out there. You're starting to see the big companies like VMware, very operational focused companies start acquiring cloud native and open source kind of a new kind of section for them. Obviously it's a tell sign. The markers are all there in terms of the trends. What are people missing? What's real? What's vapor? What's reality? When you look at the landscape and what does Infoblox bring to the table? So I think what's important to know is that when you're looking at open source technologies, a lot of them have been hardened over many years and there's new stuff coming out all the time and there's definitely new uses for them. But what's kind of important is what you put on top, right? Everyone's got open source under the hood or they've got technologies they've OEM'd under the hood, but the experience that you present to customers is really key because you can take any kind of open source project and wrap a very thin layer on top of it and you can either trump up the open source topics and say, this is the open source software we use underneath or you can downplay it and say, hey, this open source software, we don't really talk about what's under the hood and it just all works magically. We find that transparency is really helpful. You let people know what's under the hood and you contribute to it and you show that you're involved in this community and you use that as a leverage to kind of push forward. So if you look at what we're doing with some of the different projects within, Blocks When DDI uses KIA and we're part of ISC that's part of the maintainers of that, like we're openly in this space, right? And I already mentioned Cordy and us before, right? So you can either take open source and use it and pretend that you don't or you can take open source and contribute to it and be a community member and be an advocate and usually when you're on that side of the equation, you end up in a better place with your customers building confidence in your customer base. That's great stuff. Glenn Sullivan, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. I'll give you the last word in a nutshell. If I have cloud native and open source, how do I secure my borderless enterprise? Think about it as close to where the source is as possible and scale things elastically so that you can do as much processing of the user experience as possible so that you aren't trying to funnel everything to a single place and apply some magical policies in a single centralized location to where you have to process a lot of data across the board. If you think about it from a hybrid approach where you've got a little bit on-prem and you've got a little bit in the cloud or in some combination that's right for your organization, the hybrid approach that really trumps the local survivability and really keeps focus on securing things as close to the user as possible or as close to the source as possible, then you're going to be in good shape. Glenn, great stuff. As always, a masterclass in networking. Appreciate the insights. Thanks for coming on this Infoblox next level, networking virtual venture with Cuba. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us and thanks for watching.