 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our coverage of Google Cloud Next, hashtag Google Next 19. I'm here with my co-host, Stuart Miniman. I'm Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also here. Dominic Preuss is here. He's the director of product management storage and databases at Google. Dominic, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for being here. Gosh, 15, 20 years ago there were like three databases and now there's like, I feel like there's 300. It's exploding all this innovation. You guys made some announcements yesterday, we're going to get into, but let's start with, I mean data we were just talking at the open is the critical part of any IT transformation, business value, it's at the heart of it. Your job is at the heart of it and it's important to Google. Yes, you know, Google has a long history of building businesses based on data. We understand the importance of it. We understand how critical it is. And so really that ethos has carried over in a Google Cloud platform. We think about it very much as a data platform and we have a very strong responsibility to our customers to make sure that we provide the most secure, the most reliable, the most available data platform for their data. And it's a key part of any decision when a customer chooses a hyper cloud vendor. So summarize your strategy. You guys said some announcements yesterday and really embracing open source. There's certainly been a lot of discussion in the software industry about other cloud service providers who were sort of, you know, bow guarding open source and not giving back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What's, how would you characterize Google's strategy with regard to open source, you know, data stores, data management and how do you differentiate from other cloud service providers? Yeah, Google has always been the open cloud. We have a long history and our commitment to open source, whether it be Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Angular, Golang, pick any one of these that we've been, you know, contributing heavily back to open source. Google's entire history is built on the success of open source. So we believe very strongly that it's an important part of the success. We also believe that we can take a different approach to open source. We're at a very pivotal point in the open source industry as these companies are understanding and deciding how to monetize in a hyper cloud world. And so we think we can take a fundamentally different approach and be very collaborative and support the open source community without taking advantage or not giving back. So somebody might say, okay, but you've got, Google's got its own operational databases. You got analytic databases, relational, non-relational. I guess Google Spanner kind of fits in between those. It was an amazing product. I remember when that first came out, it was making my eyes bleed, reading the white paper on it, but awesome tech. But so you certainly own a lot of your own database technology and doing a lot of innovation there. But so square that circle with regard to partnerships with open source vendors. Yeah, I think you alluded to a little bit earlier. There are hundreds of database technologies out there today and there's really been a proliferation of new technology, specifically databases for very specific use cases, whether it be graph or time series or all these other things. As a hyper cloud vendor, we're going to try to do the most common things that people need. We're going to do manage MySQL and Postgres and SQL server. But for other databases that people want to run, we want to make sure that those solutions are first class opportunities on the platform. So we've engaged with seven of the top and leading open source companies to make sure that they can provide a managed service on Google Cloud Platform that is first class. And so what that means is that as a GCP customer, I can choose a Google offered service or a third party offered service. And I'm going to have the same seamless, frictionless integrated experience. So I'm going to get unified billing. I'm going to get one bill at the end of the day. I'm going to have unified support. I'm going to reach out to Google support and they're going to figure out what the problem is without blaming the third party or saying that isn't our problem. Like we take ownership of the issue and we'll go and figure out what's happening and make sure you get an answer. And then thirdly, a unified experience so that the GCP customer can manage that experience inside a cloud console, just like they would their Google offered services. They'll fully manage databases as a service, essentially. Yes. So of the seven vendors, a number of them are databases, but also for Kafka, managed Kafka or any of the other solutions that are out there as well. All right. So we can spend the whole time talking about databases. I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the other piece of your business, which is storage. Dave and I have a long history in what we'd call traditional storage and the dialogue over the last few years has been, we're actually talking about data more than the storing of information. A few years back I called cloud the silent killer of the old storage market because I'm not looking at buying a storage array or building something in the cloud. I use storage as one of the many services that I've leveraged. Can you just give us some of the latest updates as to what's new and interesting in your world as well as when customers come to Google, where does storage fit in that overall discussion? Yeah. So I think the amazing opportunity that we see for large enterprises right now is today a lot of that data that they have in their company are in silos. It's not properly documented. They don't necessarily know where it is or who owns it or data lineage. When we pick all that data up across the enterprise and bring it into Google Cloud Platform, what's so great about it is regardless of what storage solution you choose to put your data in, it's in a centralized place. It's all integrated and then you can really start to understand what data do you have? How do I do connections across it? How do I try to drive value by correlating it? And so for us, we're trying to make sure that whatever data comes across, customers can choose whatever storage solution they want, whichever is most appropriate for their workload. And then once the data is in the platform, we help them take advantage of it. We are very proud of the fact that when you bring data into object storage, we have a single unified API. There's only one product you use. If you have really cold data, really fast data, it doesn't, you don't have to wait hours to get the data. It's all available within milliseconds. And now we're really excited that we announced today is a new storage class. So in Google Cloud Storage, which is our object storage product, we're now going to have a very cold archival storage option that's going to start at 0.12 cents per gigabyte per month. And we think that that's really going to change the game in terms of customers that are trying to retire their old tape backup systems or really looking for the most cost efficient longterm storage option for their data. The other thing that we've heard a lot about this week is that hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Google laid out a lot of the partnerships. I think you had VMware up on stage, you had Cisco up on stage, I see Nutanix is here. How does that storage hybrid multi-cloud fit together for your world? Yeah, I think the way that we view hybrid is that every customer at some point is hybrid. Like no one ever picks up all their data on day one and on day two it's on the cloud. It's going to be a journey of bringing that data across. So it's always going to be hybrid for that period of time. And so for us it's making sure that all of our storage solutions we support open standards, right? So if you're using an S3 compliant storage solution on-premise you can use Google Cloud Storage with our S3 compatible API. If you are doing block we work with all the large vendors whether it be NetApp or EMC or any of the other vendors are used to having on-premise. Making sure we can support those. So I'm personally very excited about the work that we've done with NetApp or on NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform. If you're a NetApp shop and you've been leveraging that technology and you're really comfortable and really like it on-premise we make it really easy to bring that data to the cloud and have the same exact experience. You get all the wonderful features that NetApp offers you on-premise in a cloud native service where you're paying on a consumption-based service. So it really takes kind of the decision away for the customer. It's like NetApp on-premise but you want cloud native features and pricing, great. We'll give you NetApp in the cloud and it really makes it to be an easy transition. So for us it's making sure that we're engaged and we have a story with all the storage vendors that you're used to using on-premise today. Can I ask you a question about, go back to the very cold, ice cold storage. You said 0.12 cents per gigabyte per month which is just kind of in between your other two major competitors. What was your thinking on the pricing strategy there? Yeah, I mean basically everything we do is based on customer demand. And so after talking to a bunch of customers, understanding the workloads, understanding kind of the cost structure they need, we think that that's the right price to meet all of those needs and allow us to basically compete for all the deals. We think that that's a really great price point for our customers and it really unlocks all those workloads from the cloud. It's dirt cheap, it's easy to store and then it takes a while to get it back, right? That's the concept? No, it is not at all. So we are very different than other storage vendors or other public cloud offerings. When you drop your data into our system, basically the trade-off that you're making is saying I will give you a cheaper price in exchange for agreeing to leave the data in the platform for a longer time. So basically you're making a time-based commitment to us at which point we're giving you a cheaper price. But what's fundamentally different about Google Cloud Storage is that regardless of which storage class you use, everything is available within milliseconds. You don't have to wait hours or any amount of time to be able to get that data. It's all available to you. So this is really important. If you have long-term archival data and then let's say that you get a compliance request or regulatory request and you need to analyze all that data and get to all your data, you're not waiting hours to get access to that data. We're actually giving you within milliseconds, giving you access to that data so that you can get the answers you need. And the quid pro quo is I commit to storing it there for some period of time, is that what you said? Correct, so we have four storage classes. So we have our standard, our near line, our cold line in this new archival. And each of them has a lower price point in exchange for a longer committed time that you leave the data in the product. I think that's real business value there. So obviously it's not sitting on tape somewhere. Yeah, we have a number of solutions for how we store the data. And for us, it's indifferent how we store the data. It's all about how long you're willing to tell us it'll be there and then that allows us to plan for those resources as long time. That's a great story. Now you also have this pay as you go pricing tiers. Can you talk about that a little bit? For Google Cloud Storage? Yes. Yeah, everything is pay as you go. And so basically you write data to us and there's a charge for the operations you do and then you charge for however long you leave the data in the system. So if you're using our standard class, you're just paying our standard price. You can either use regional or multi-regional depending on the disaster recovery and the durability and availability requirements that you have. And then you're just paying us for that for however long you leave the data in the system. Once you delete it, you stop paying. So it must be, I mentioned what kind of customer discussions are going on in terms of storage optionality, right? It used to be just, okay, I got block and I got file but now you got all different kind of, you just mentioned several different tiers of performance. What's the customer conversation like, specifically in terms of optionality and what are they asking you to deliver? Yeah, I think, you know, within the storage space there's really three things, right? There's object block and file, right? So on the object side or on the block side we have our persistent disk product. Customers are asking for better price performance, more performance, more IOPS, more throughput. We're continuing to deliver a higher performance block device for them and that's going very, very well. For those that need file, we have our first party service which is Cloud File Store which is our managed NFS. So if you need managed NFS, we can provide that view at a really low price point. We also partner with, you mentioned Elastifile earlier, we partner with NetApp, we're partnering with EMC. So all those options are also available for file. And then on the object side, if you can accept the object API, right? It's not positive compliant, it's a very different model. If your workloads can support that model then we give you a bunch of options with the object model API. So data management is another hot topic and that means a lot of things to a lot of people. You hear the backup guys talking about data management, the database guys talking about data management. What is data management to Google and what's your philosophy and strategy there? Yeah, I think for us, again, I spent a lot of time making sure that the solutions are unified and consistent across. So for us, the idea is that if you bring data into the platform, you're going to get a consistent experience. And so you're going to have consistent backup options. You're going to have consistent pricing models. Everything should be very similar across the various products. So number one, we're just making sure that it's not confusing by making everything very simple and very consistent. Then over time, we're providing additional features that help you manage that. So I'm really excited about all the work we're doing on the security side. So you heard Urs talk about access transparency and access approvals, right? So basically we can have a unified way to know whether or not anyone either a Googler or if a third party offer, a third party request has come in about if we're having access to data for any reason. And so we're giving you full transparency as to what's going on with your data. And that's across the data platform. That's not on a per product basis. And so we can basically layer in all these amazing security features on top of your data. You know, the way that we view our business is that we're stewards of your data. You've given us your data and asked us to take care of it, right? Don't lose it. Give it back to me when I want it and let me know when anything's happening to it. And so we take that very seriously and we see all the things we're able to bring to bear on the security side to really help us be good stewards of that data. Well, the other thing you said is I get those access logs in near real time, which is again a nuance, but it's very important. Dominic, great story. Really, I think clear thinking and you're obviously delivering some value for the customers there. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing that with us. Absolutely, happy to be here. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. You're watching theCUBE live from Google Cloud Next from Moscone. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, John Furrier. We'll be right back.