 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPSCOT as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good morning and welcome back to KubeCon EU. We are here in fabulous Amsterdam. It's a little wet, not quite as sunny as yesterday, but the energy is just as high, if not higher, here on the show floor. My name is Savannah Peterson. Join with my new favorite co-host, Rob. What's up, Rob? Glad to be here. You staying warm? I'm trying. The weather is definitely not cooperating today. I wish I had my Silicon Valley like Vast on today. Speaking of comfort Vast, Venkat rocking it over here. We've got Venkat and Jella. We're going to have a customer story here. It's going to be a really interesting conversation, but actually, since we were talking just before we went live, I would love for you both to explain what you do. We'll start with you, Jella, to how you would explain it to your children. Right. I'm responsible, if we didn't see for our managed container service, which means that we designed this boiler thing. But what is a container? Of course, I know about containers for a long time because I've worked with network shipping even before Kubernetes was a word. You saw the analog version to the technical version. I love it. Everyone uses the analog of a container ship. When I was talking with my youngest daughter, she came up, she tried to explain and said, well, so it's like sharing a power bank for my mobile and with all different slicks, but it's all energy. So yeah, kind of things. It's more difficult, but yeah, it's very hard to explain to someone who is not familiar with it what it is because it's very abstract. Basically, you say, yeah, it makes applications run faster, easier and more flexible. Right. It does all the things on your phone and in your life faster. It's all the stuff we don't see on the inside a lot of the time. Ben Kat, what about you? Well, my son always asks me, so what do you actually do? I tried explaining to him, then I said I work for a company called Portworx. So for a long time, he thought I was a worker in a harbor moving boxes. I love. So what do you actually do? You've been there for a while. I'm still trying to figure it out. They just keep you around on the payroll, just do what happens next? Yeah, I just show up and say, what the heck is going on here? You just put on your vest and everything goes smoothly. And walk around, cup the coffee cup in hand, like, you know, no pointy hairs. Yeah. So yeah, I run product management and engineering for Portworx. I've been with Portworx since 2016. Kind of have seen the journey of containers and Kubernetes and a good old docker and all of the things. You came in right at that time. Exactly. I've had a lot of fun. It's excited to see how our community and the industry has evolved. And I think, again, we're well on our path to massive adoption and traction here. So yeah, excited to be here. But yeah, I wish the weather cooperated. It was sunny and warm and baking yesterday, and now it's cold and drizzling. Yes, we're back to normal. But I'm glad I have my comfort vest on. Security. I'm from here, so I'm used to this weather. No wonder you're so sunny and chipperious. You just bring the sunshine from inside yourself. Venkat, you mentioned something right there that I want to dig in. And I love that we did that intro, right? The kids, no one, my mother doesn't know what I do. I mean, sometimes I say hello to her. Hi, mom, on camera. But other than that, yeah, I get it. But you mentioned the ecosystem and you also mentioned maturity. And I feel like, I mean, I've been at quite a few queue counts over the years. Not quite as OG as you guys certainly wasn't on a container ship. But I definitely feel that we've tipped over a little bit. The momentum feels like all the partners are there. The players are there. You guys are obviously bigger players in this space than some of the startups and projects that are going on. Do you guys agree? Do you feel like we're in a slot where, I mean, it's not just will we end up using Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a part of our operation. Yeah, I think it's, you know, I mean, Kubernetes is the new operating system of the cloud. Yeah. It's not just cloud, but for the data center, for the multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. So if you're building your infrastructure and if you're building your app now, or even like trying to run your infrastructure, and if you're not running it with Kubernetes, you're doing something wrong. You need to re-evaluate your strategy, right? Because there's enough tooling and enough orchestration that's built around Kubernetes. And the ecosystem is so healthy and vibrant. And there's so many choices that are available. I think it's a no-brainer to run anything on Kubernetes, right? And that's where the industry is. That's where we see from our customers. We'll talk a little bit more about, you know, how it's not just containers that are getting orchestrated with Kubernetes, right? Yeah. We see those off with our customers, as well. We typically have our large enterprise and government customers who are cautious about these things. They are not the early adopters, typically. But now we see that they actually are moving towards containers. They say, yes, we want to go there. Please help us, because we have all these legacy of applications that need to go there. And how do we build new applications? And that's why we come in to help them to get to using Kubernetes at scale, but also at a really reliable thing and enterprise-grade solutions to run their very business-critical application source. So that's what we do. I always say we do the difficult stuff. So it's not like just spending up a Kubernetes platform. That's it. We integrate it. We make sure it fits well into their environments. And that it is well-supported and meets all their business needs, including business continuity to get to where the port works place. Decreasing complexity is such a pain killer. And it's really been the conversation and the barrier for Kubernetes adoption out the gate. I'd love to hear that you're doing all the hard stuff. Y'all have been partners for quite a while. Five years, you mentioned. Talk to me a little bit more about that, Ben Kett. Yeah. So Portworx was a startup, and we're trying to kind of build out our business. DXE was one of the critical partners for us to take us to customers in EMEA, especially, right? And we had some very successful installs and some very large European companies with DXE. And so we have a long history of partnering and maturing the products together and making it work for our customers. And after the Pure's acquisition in Pure has a much bigger strategic partnership with DXE as well. And we're in a lot more customers. It's cool that that wasn't happening on both sides. Exactly, right? Made it easy to continue the partnership. Yeah. And expand on it. And it's expanded to a global level and to have more traction and work together. I mean, Pure is a very strategic partner for us. Of course, we work with many partners. And actually that's one thing that we combine. We combine the partnership with Pure, with the partnership with other Kubernetes vendors and infrastructure vendors to really create solutions, integrate solutions that combines the best of all worlds. So, and I love this actually. I hadn't thought about the maturation of both your products together and collaborating on that. What's the communication like between you guys? Are you collaborating on your product roadmap and offerings and things that are going to go on? Tell me a little more about that. Yeah. So, we have like two weeks, every week we have a meeting to discuss strategy of sub-sales, also product development, technical questions, architectures. Been working also. You're communicating a lot then. Also working together. Yeah, that's awesome. We'll go to marketplace, pipelines, potential clients, all kind of things to really address the market together. So, in our offerings, I'm responsible for our managed container services globally to provide those things. We include Portworx as our default solution for many of the solutions we build for our customers because it's, we think it's a very reliable product. I was just going to say, and why is it that default? It works. Yeah. To give an example, and it's a use case. Please. So, we have, we had one of our clients, a German bank, where we, as part of an outsourcing deal, we inherited their container platform, which managed by one and a half person, outdated versions. Bless that person. Yeah. So, what we did, we not only upgraded to the latest and greatest version of, in this case, OpenShift, put that into our leverage teams, that we have scalability, put in best practices to really make it to integration. But they also had a need to increase the business continuity of that. Because being a bank, heavily regulated, they cannot afford to have those applications not run if something happens to the data center where they run it on. So, they're running it on-premise to DXC managed data centers in Germany that are twin pairs. So, then we looked at how can we accomplish that. We looked at various alternatives and then decided to go with Portworx, implemented that to provide a constant synchronization of the stateful application state towards the disaster recovery side, but also of the state of the container platform itself. So, this is synchronized in real time, five milliseconds. And so that, in the end, we achieved an RPO, so a recovery point objective of virtually zero, five milliseconds, and then RTO, so time to be up and running again in 15 minutes, which is quite aggressive and quite good. That is a bold claim, but also that's awesome. Not seen before. We actually presented this also at other conferences, which was called as well. And actually, it is the only solution that we know of that actually works and delivers this. You can do backups, but then you always lose data. And this time you have a real success. And that was a great success, and we're now expanding that to using the same solution for other clients, reusing these things, working with Portworx to make that happen and to build up new solutions on top of that. Yeah, I think coming out of that, what's been great, and we had your colleague on yesterday talking about some of the more trends and some of the pillars that you're going into. You're my boss. We're all equals here. It's a very community-driven. So where is Portworx and pure going with this? Because there's a lot of creative stuff going on in this industry. There was a lot of project updates just this morning trying to keep up with them and try to tweet about them was near impossible. So, what's going on inside from a product perspective? Well, thank you. First of all, what Yala mentioned is that you can see how customers are really pushing the armill upon running machine-critical workloads on Kubernetes. When somebody wants a really significant lower RTO and failover and have that SLA and they are putting their applications on Kubernetes, it's way past, it's not just prime-time discussion. It's way above the prime-time. That means it's not just early majorities, like late majorities, like kind of customers. So, we see that a lot and to talk about the future, we actually learn a lot from our customers and partners. So, to Yala's team and other customers, we have learned tremendously from them and how to build what they are trying to solve, what are their pain points and scale. What we have kind of come to observe is that the market especially with the cloud-native, Kubernetes and the overall infrastructure market, it's kind of like a three market place. One is our self-service DevOps platform where the biggest challenge the platform teams have is that they have thousands of developers and very few platform engineers that support them. They have the resource imbalance. It's tremendous. How can a few people support a large development team? So, making the platform engineers life easy, it's kind of our life-mission here. They are the superheroes that are managing tremendous different kinds of apps and making their life easy and giving them their quality of life back and enabling them to be successful. It's something that we take very seriously. That's our mission. It's a huge theme. This is something that we take a lot of pride in to building the solutions for our platform teams. There is a slightly adjacent thing that happens also is databases are hard. There's a proliferation of databases. There's a ton of choices and almost every developer has their own preference for databases. If you ask these organizations that are trying to support these modern apps, they struggle a lot to keep these databases running. So, what we are doing, we're making it simple. We're kind of idiot-proofing the databases. So, we're coming up with kind of debats for the masses. So, you can run databases. You're full of little segments and taglines today. I'm loving it. I'm feeling it. You gave a motivational speech two seconds ago. You've got some really nice one-liners. A nice little transcript. I'm trying. I'm trying. So, the database is a service for everybody. For DBAs who don't want to manage all these databases. For platform teams who don't want to own and say, look, how do you troubleshoot like this nifty new database is developer to score and wants to run it in production, but the user experience is tremendous with it. But, hey, so what Portworx does is with Portworx Data Services and our single-click DBAs anywhere, we enable databases to be running in production day-to-day too and from deployment to running in production. We also manage them. So, we manage everything. Data operations, installing, patching, upgrading. Neither the platform teams nor the DBAs or the application owners have to ever worry about managing these in production. But the good thing is, it's not tied to any cloud. It's multi-cloud. You can run it on any of the cloud providers if you have a Kubernetes or even if you don't have a Kubernetes. You don't need to even know about Kubernetes to run this. We handle Soop2Nuts, the entire management. And we can run your data center too and it's fully managed by Portworx and our partners can manage it. There's a ton of options our customers get. The other most important thing that is happening is kind of like, you know, Kubernetes is a phenomenal virtualization platform. It's a containerization platform but you can also virtualize apps. So, we see a lot of customers kind of going to kind of a bare metal Kubernetes play and run apps, virtualized apps in that. And we see a big movement towards that. We're seeing a lot of customers doing that. There's a lot of economics argument, convenience argument and automation argument. It cuts your optics down significantly and all of that. Hot topic right now too. And we see that a lot and in these economic times it's extremely important and critical for customers. So, the cost savings argument drives a lot of that too and performance. And we see, you know, customers are perceiving Portworx as kind of essentially a vSAN for Kubernetes. So, if you look at it, now Kubernetes is kind of becoming the platform of choice to run any workload and orchestrate anything. So, Portworx kind of fits right in that like where VMs are containers, you don't need to worry about, you know, the life cycle of data, running databases there, you get, you know, a one stop shop for all of your data needs. D-Vast for the masses, I'm going to be I'm going to be remembering that all day. That's really exciting. Venkat and Yela, thank you both for being here. This was very insightful. We've got a lot of taglines. We can now talk to our folks and I hope everybody's life gets made easier through both the work that you're doing and hopefully we're making your life easier at home, folks. Rob, thanks so much for joining me for this fabulous segment. We are in Amsterdam at KubeCon EU. You are watching theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and we're the leading source for emerging tech coverage.