 Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE Live, AWS re-invent 2022. This is our first day of three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, it's getting louder and louder behind us. People are back, they're excited. You know what somebody told me today? They said that less than 15% of the audience is developers. I'm like no way, I don't believe it. But now maybe there's a redefinition of developers because it's all about the data and it's all about the developers in my mind and that will never change. It is, and one of the things we're going to be talking about is app modernization, as customers really navigate the journey to do that so that they can be competitive and meet the demands of customers. We've got an alumni back with us to talk about that. Ajay Patel joins us, the SVP and GM Modern Apps and Management Business Group at VMware. Ajay, welcome back. Thank you. It's always great to be here, so thank you David. Good to see you. It's great, it's great to be back in person. So the VMware Tanzu team here back at re-invent on the floor, show floor, there we go. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing together, innovating with AWS. Yeah, so it's great to be back after in person, after multiple years and the energy level continues to amaze me. The partnership with AWS started on the infrastructure side with VMware Cloud on AWS and with Tanzu we're extending it to the application space. And the work here is really about how do you make developers productive? To your earlier point, it's all about developers, it's all about getting applications in production, securely, safely, continuously. And Tanzu is all about making that bridge between great applications being built, getting them deployed and running and operating at scale. And EKS is a dominant Kubernetes platform. And so the better together story of Tanzu and EKS is a great one for us and we're excited to announce a set of innovations in that area. Well Tanzu was so front and center at VMware Explorer. I wasn't at VMware Explorer Europe, but I'm sure it was a similar kind of focus. When are customers choosing Tanzu? Why are they choosing Tanzu? What's the update since last August? When we... You know what, the market's settled into three main use cases. One is all about developer productivity. You know, consistently we're all dealing with skill set gap issues. How do we make every developer productive modern developer? And so Tanzu's all about enabling that developed productivity and we can talk quite a bit about that. Second one is security's front and center. And security being shifted left right into how you build great software. How do you secure that to the entire supply chain process and how do you run and operationalize security at runtime? So we're hearing consistently about making secure software supply chain a heart of what our solution is. And third one is, how do I run and operate the modern application at scale? Across any Kubernetes, across any cloud. These are the three themes that are continuing to get resonance. And empowering all of this is just exciting, David, this formation of platform teams. I just finished a study with Bain Consulting doing some research for me. 40% of our organization now have a some form of a central team that's responsive for what we call platform engineering and building platforms to make developers productive. That is a big change since about two years ago even. So this is becoming mainstream and customers are really focusing on delivering a value to make developers productive. And the other nuance that I see and you kind of see it here in the ecosystem, but when you talk about your customers with platform engineering, they're actually building, they're pointing their business, they're going to page out AWS, pointing their businesses to their customers, becoming software companies, becoming cloud companies and really generating new forms of revenue. You know the interesting thing is some of my customers I would never have thought as leading edge are retailers. And not your typical Starbucks that you get a great example. I have an auto parts company that's completely modernizing how they deliver point of sale all the way to the supply chain. All built on Kubernetes at scale. You're typically thinking of the financial services or a telco leading the pack. But I'm seeing innovation in India, I'm seeing innovation in Amir coming out of there across the board. Every industry is becoming a product company, a digital twin as we would call them. And means they become software houses. They behave more like you and I in this event versus a traditional enterprise. And they're building their own ecosystems and ecosystem generating data, that's generating more value. And it's just, this cycle is amazing. It's a flywheel. So innovation continues to grow. Talk about really unlocking the developer experience and delivering to them what they need to modernize apps to move as fast and quickly as they want to. So you know, I think AWS coined this word undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you think of a typical developer today how much effort does he have to put in before he can get a single line of code out in production. If you can take away all the complexity typically security compliance is a big headache for them, right? Developer doesn't want to worry about that. Infrastructure provisioning, getting all the configurations right as a headache for them. Being able to understand what size of infrastructure or resource to use, cost effectively, how do you run it operationally? Because the application team is responsible for the operational cost of the product or service. So these are the heavy lifting that developers want to get away from. So they want to write great code, build great experiences. And we've always talked about frameworks, a way to abstract over the complexity. And so for us, there's a massive opportunity to say, how do I simplify and take away all the heavy lifting to get an idea into production seamlessly, continuously, securely? Is that part of your partnership? Because you think about AWS, they're really not about frameworks. They're about primitives. I mean, Werner Vogels even talks about that in his speech, but that makes it more challenging for developers. No, actually if you look at some of their, initial investments around Proton and et cetera work they're starting to do, they're recognized. Paz is a bad word, but the outcome the platform as a service offers is what everybody wants. Just talking to the AWS leaders responsible area. He actually has a separate build team. He didn't know what to call the third team. He has a Kubernetes team, he has a serverless team, and has a build team. And that build team is everything above Kubernetes to make the developer productive. And the ecosystem to bring together to make that happen. So I think AWS is recognizing that primitives are great for the elite, developers, but if they want to get the mass scale and adoption in the business IT, if you will, they're going to have to provide a rich set of building blocks and reduce the complexity. And partnership like ours make that a reality. And what I'm excited about is there's a clear gap here and Tanzu is the best platform to kind of fill that gap. Well, I think that, you know, they're going to double down triple, I just wrote about this, double down, triple down on the primitives. They have to have the best servers and storage and database. And I think the way they, I call it taping the seams is with the ecosystem. Correct. You know, nobody has a better ecosystem. I mean, you guys are, you know, the postage child for the ecosystem. And now this even exceeds that. But partnering up, that's how they continue to. And they're looking for someone who's open, right? Yeah, yeah. And so one of the first question is, you know, are you preparatory or open? Because one of the things they're fighting against is the lock-in. So they can find a friendly partner whose open source led, you know, upstream, committing to the code, delivering that innovation and bring the ecosystem into an orchestrated choreography. It's like singing a music, right? They're running an application delivery team like running a musical orchestra. There's so many moving parts here. How do you make them sing together? And so if Tanzu and our platform can help them sing and drive more of their services, it's only more valuable for them. And I think the partners would generally say, you know, AWS always talking about customer obsession and it's like, becomes this bromide you go, yeah, yeah, but I actually think in the field, the sellers would say, yeah, we're going to do with the customer. If that means we're going to partner up. And I think AWS's comp structure makes it sort of- I learned today how incentives with marketplaces work. Yeah. And it's powerful. It's very powerful, right? So you line up the sales incentive, you line up the customer and the benefits, you line up bringing the ecosystem to drive business results and everybody wins. And which is what you're seeing here. The excitement in the crowd is really the whole, all boats are rising, right? And it's driven by the fact that customers are getting true value out of it. Oh, absolutely. Tremendous value. Speaking of customers, give us an example of a customer story that you think really articulates the value of what Tanzi was delivering, especially making that developer experience far simpler. What are some of those big business outcomes that that delivers? You know, at Explorer, we had the CIO of CVS and with their acquisition of Aetna and CVS Health, they're transforming the health industry. And they talked about the whole COVID and then how they had to deliver the number of vaccines to you and I and how quickly they had to deliver on that. It talked about Tanzu and how they leverage the Tanzu platform to get those new applications out and start to build that. And Roshan was basically talking about his number one priorities, how does he get his developers more productive? Number two priority, how does he make sure the apps are secure? Number three priority, how does he do it cost effectively? In the world particularly what we're heading towards where the budgets are going to get tighter. So how do I move more dollars to innovation while I continue to drive more efficiency in my platform? And so cloud is the future. How does he make the best use of the cloud both for his developers and his operations team? What's happening in serverless? In 2017 Andy Jassy was on theCUBE, he said if AWS or Amazon had to build all over again they would build with using serverless. And that was a big quote. We've mined that for years. And as you were talking about developer productivity, I started writing down all the things developers have to do with it they got to build a container image. They got to deploy an EC2 instance. They got to allocate memory. They got to fence off the apps in a virtual machine. They got to run the computer against the app. It goes, they got to pay for all that. So okay, what's your story on, what's the market asking for in terms of serverless? Because there's still some people who want control over the runtime. Help us sift through that. And it really comes back to the application pattern or the type you're running. If it's a stateless application that you need to spin up and spin down, serverless is awesome. Why would I want to worry about scaling it up and up? I want to set up some SLAs, SLIs, service level objectives or indicators, and then let the system bring the resources I need as I need them. That's a perfect example for serverless, right? On the other hand, if you have a more of a workflow type application, there's a sequence, there's state. Try building an application using serverless where you have to maintain state between two steps in the process. Not so much fun, right? So I don't think serverless is the answer for everything, but many use cases, the scale to zero is a tremendous benefit. Events happen, you want to process something, work is done, you quietly go away. I don't want to shut down the server, start it up. I want that to happen magically. So I think there's a role of serverless. So I believe Kubernetes and serverless are the new runtime platform. It's not one or the other. It's about marrying that around the application patterns. I develop or shouldn't care about it. That's an infrastructure concern. Let me just run the application, let the infrastructure manage the operations of it. Whether it's serverless, whether it's Kubernetes clusters, whether it's orchestration, that's details, right? I shouldn't worry about it, right? So we shouldn't think of those as separate architectures. We should think of it as an architecture that... To continue them in some ways, of different application workable types. And that's a toolkit that the operator has at his disposal to configure and saying, where does should that application run? Should I want control? You can run it on a Kubernetes cluster. Can I just run it on a serverless infrastructure and leave it to the cloud provider to do it all for me? Sure. What was Baz? What was exactly that? Yeah, yeah. Write the code once you do the rest. Yeah, okay. It's just elements of that. And then Knative is kind of in the middle, right? Knative is just a technology that's starting to build that capability out in a standard way to make serverless available consistently across all clouds. So I'm not building to a Lambda or a particular technology type. I'm building it in a standard way, in a standard programming model, and infrastructure just works for me. On any cloud. On any cloud. The whole idea of portability consistency, right? Powerful, yep. What are some of the things that folks can expect to learn from VMware Tanzu and AWS this week at the show? Yeah, so there's some really great announcements. First of all, we're excited to extend our partnership with AWS in the area of EKS. What I mean by that is, traditionally we would manage an EKS cluster, you had visibility of what's running in there, but we weren't able to manage the life cycle. With this announcement, we can give you full management of life cycle of EKS workloads. I have customers that 400 plus EKS clusters, multiple teams sharing those in a multi-tenanted way. With common policy, and they want to manage a full life cycle, including all the upstream open source component that make up Kubernetes. People think Kubernetes is the one thing. It's in the collection of a lot of open source packages. We're making it simple to manage it consistently from a single place. On the security front, we're now making Tanzu service mesh available in the marketplace. And if you look at what service mesh is, it's an overlay, it's an abstraction. I can create an idea of a global namespace that cuts across multiple VPCs. I'm hearing that Amazon's going to make some announcements around VPC and how they stitch VPCs together. It's all moving towards this idea of abstractions. I can set policy at a logical level. I don't have to worry about data security and the communication between services. These are the things we're now enabling, which are really an end to make EKS even more productive. Making an enterprise grade, enterprise ready. And so a lot of excitement from the EKS development teams as well to partner closely with us to make this an end-to-end solution for our customers. Yeah, so I mean, it's under Jassy, it was really driving those primitives and helping developers under Salipsky, it's continuing that path, but also recognizing the need for solutions and that's where the ecosystem comes in. And the question is, what is that box as you said last time, right? For the super cloud, there is a cloud infrastructure which is becoming the new palette. But how do you make sense of the 300 plus primitives? How do you bring them together? What are the best practices patterns? How do I manage it when something goes wrong? These are real problems that we're looking to solve. And if you're going to have deeper business integration, the cloud and technology in general, you have to have that abstraction. You know, one of the simple question I ask is, how do you know you're getting value from your cloud investment? That's a very hard question. What's your trade-off between performance and cost? Do you know where your security, when a log4j happens, do you know all the open source packages you need to patch? These are very simple questions, but imagine today having to do that when everybody's doing in a bespoke manner using the set of primitives. You need a platform. Industry is shown at scale, you have to start standardizing and building a consistent way of delivering and abstracting stuff. And that's where the next stage of the cloud journey. And with the economic environment, I think people are also saying, okay, how do we get more? We're in the cloud. Now, how do we get more? How do we optimize that? How do we transform the business? Last question, Ajay, for you is, if you had a bumper sticker and you're going to put it on your fancy car, what would it say about VMware Tanzo and AWS? I would say Tanzo accelerates apps. Love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. It's always great to be here. Pleasure. Likewise. For our guest, I'm Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage.