 Welcome back to Los Angeles. The Cube is live. I can't say that enough. The Cube is live. We're at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 21. We've been here all day yesterday and today and tomorrow talking with lots of gas really uncovering what's going on in the world of Kubernetes. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We've got some folks next. We're going to be talking about a customer use case, which is always one of my favorite things to talk about. Please welcome Micah Coletti, the principal platform engineer at CHG Healthcare, and Venkat Ramakrishnan, VP of products from Portworx by Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah. So Micah, first of all, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of CHG Healthcare. Yeah, so CHG Healthcare, we're a staffing company. So we, I'm sure like a local tenant. So our clients are doctors and hospitals. So we help staff hospitals with temporary doctors or even permanent placing. So we deal with a lot of doctors, a lot of nursing and we're a combination of multiple companies. So CHG is the parent. So, and yeah, we're known in the industry as one of the leaders in this field and providing hospitals with high quality doctors and nurses. And, you know, our customer service is like number one. And one of the things our CEOs really focused on is now how do we make that more digital? How do we provide that same level of quality of service but a digital experience that is rich for our users? I can imagine there was a massive need for that in the last 18 months alone. COVID definitely really raised that awareness up for us and the importance of that digital experience and that we need to be out there in the digital market. Absolutely. So you're a customer of Portworx by Peer Storage. We're going to get into that, but then Kat, talk to us about what's going on. The acquisition of Portworx by Peer Storage was about a year ago. Talk to us about your VP of products. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I think I could not say how much of a great fit for a Portworx to be part of Peer Storage. It's a Peer itself is a very fast-moving large startup that's a dominant leader in a flash and data center space. And, you know, Peer recognizes the fact that Kubernetes is the new operating system of the cloud. It's how, you know, it's kind of virtualizing the cloud itself. And there's a, you know, a big burgeoning need for data management in Kubernetes and how you can kind of orchestrate workloads between your on-prem data centers and the cloud and back. So Portworx fits right into the story as complete vision of data management for our customers. And it's been phenomenal. Our business has grown as part of being part of Peer. And, you know, we're looking at launching some new products as well. And it's all exciting times. So you must have been pretty delighted to be acquired as a startup by essentially a startup. Yeah. Although Peer has reached significant milestones in the storage business and is a leader in flash storage, still that startup mindset is there. Absolutely. That's unique. That's not the same as being acquired by a company that's been around for 100 years seeking to revitalize itself. Absolutely. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect? Yeah. So I think, you know, Peer's culture is highly innovation-driven and it's a very open, flat culture. I mean, it's everybody in Peer's accessible. You can easily have a conversation with folks and everybody has this learning mindset. And Portworx has always been the same way. So when you put these teams together, we can create wonders. I mean, right after that position, just within a few months, we announced an integrated solution that Portworx orchestrates volumes and file shares in Peer's flash products and then delivers as an integrated solution for our customers. And Peer has a phenomenal cloud-based monitoring and management system called Pure One that we integrated well into. Now we're bringing the power of all of the observability that Peer's customers are used to for all of the Portworx customers. And I've been super happy, you know, delivering that capability to our customers. And our customers are delighted. Now they can have a complete view all the way from Kubernetes, an app to the flash. And I don't think any one company in the planet can even claim they can do that. Yeah, I think it's fair to acknowledge that Pure One was observability before observability was a word that anyone used regularly. So that's very interesting. Micah, talk to us about, obviously you are a customer, CHG is a customer of Portworx, now Portworx by Peer Storage. Talk to us about the use case. What was the compelling, was there a compelling event? And from a storage perspective that led you to Portworx in the first place. Yeah, so they began this, our CEO basically came to the vision we need to have a digital presence. We need and has this. And this was even before COVID. So they brought me on board and my manager Reed Glosser, he, we basically had this task to, how are we going to get out into the cloud? How are we going to make that happen? And we chose to follow very much a cloud native strategy and the platformer choice, I mean, it just made sense with Kubernetes. And so when we were looking at Kubernetes, we were starting to figure out how we're doing and we knew that data is going to be a big factor, you know, being able to provide data. We're very much focused on an event driven, we're really pushing to event driven architecture. So we leverage Kafka on top of Kubernetes. But at the time we were actually leveraging Kafka with MSK down out in AWS. And that was just a huge cost to us. So I came on board, I had experienced with Portworx, a prior company before that. And I basically said, we need to figure out a great storage or overlay. And the only way to do it is we got to have high performance storage. We got to have secure. We got to be able to back up and recover that storage. And the Portworx was the right match. And that allowed us to have a very smooth transition off of MSK onto Kubernetes saving us as a significant amount of money per month and just leverage that already existing hardware, that already existing compute memory and just, and move right to Portworx. Leveraging your existing investments. Exactly. Which is key. Very key, very key. So Venkat, how common are the challenges that when you guys came together with CHD? How common are the challenges that you see in the past industries? It's a great question. This is, I'll tell you the challenges that Micah and his team are running into is what we see a lot in the industry where people pay a ton of money to other vendors. Especially in some cases, use some cloud native services, but they want to have control over the data. They want to control the cost and they want higher performance and they want to have, there's also governance and regulatory things that they need to control better. So they want to kind of bring these services and have more control over them. So now we will work very well with all of our partners including the cloud providers as well as on-prem and server vendors and everybody, but different customers have different kinds of needs and Portworx gives them that flexibility. If you're a customer who want, have a lot of control over your applications, the performance, the latency, and want to control costs very well and leverage your existing investments, Portworx can deliver that for you in your data center. Right now, you can integrate that with pure slash and you get a complete solution. Or you want to run it in cloud and you still want to have, leverage the agility of the cloud and scale, Portworx delivers a solution for you as well. So it kind of not only protects the investment, it future proves their architecture. You get future proving your architecture completely. So if you want to tear to cloud or burst to cloud, you have a great solution that you can continue to leverage. Micah, when you hear future proof and I'm a marketer, so I always go, I love to know what it means to different people. What does that mean to you and your environment? My environment, so future proof means, like one of the things we've been addressing lately, that's just a real big challenge and I'm sure it's a challenge in the industry especially with Kubernetes is upgrading our clusters. Ability to actually maintain a consistent flow with how fast Kubernetes is growing. They're out, I think EKS, we leveraged EKS so it's like 121 or 122 now and that effort to upgrade a cluster can be a daunting one. With Portworx, we actually were able to make that to where we could actually spin up a brand new cluster and with Portworx, shift all our applications, services, data, migrate it completely over. Portworx handles all that for us and stand up that new cluster in less than a day. And that effort, it would take us a week, two weeks to do. So not only a man hours, time spent there, but just the reliability of being able to do that and the cost, instead of standing up a new cluster and configuring it and doing all that and spending all that time, we can just really, we move to what we call blue-green cutover strategy and Portworx is an essential piece of that. So Venkat, is it fair to say that there are a variety of ways that people approach Portworx from a value perspective in terms of, I know that one area that you are particularly good in is the area of backups in this environment, but then you've got data management and there's a third kind of vector there. What is the third vector? Yeah, it's all of the data services. Data services. Like for example, do you database as a service on any Kubernetes cluster, be it on your cloud or your on-prem data centers? Which data, what kind of databases are you talking about? We're talking about anything from Redis, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, you know, Concio. We are supporting, we just announced something called a Portworx data services offering that essentially delivers all these databases as a service on any Kubernetes cluster that a customer can point to and lets them kind of get the automated management of the database from day one to day three, the entire life cycle, you know, through regular Kubernetes, Kube-Kerl experience, through APIs and SDKs, and a nice slick UI that they can, you know, just role-based access control and all of that, that they can completely control their data and their applications through it. And, you know, that's the third vector of Portworx's offerings. Like a question for you. So Portworx has been a part of PeerStorage. You've known it since obviously for several years before you were at CHG, you brought it to CHG. You now know it a year into being acquired by a fast-paced startup. Talk to me about the relationship and some of the benefits that you're getting with Portworx as a part of PeerStorage. Well, I mean, one of the things, you know, when I heard about the acquisition, my first thing was I was a little bit concerned. Is that relationship going to change? And when we were acquiring, when we were looking at adopting Portworx, one thing I would tell my management is Portworx is not just a vendor that wants to throw a solution on you and provide some capability. They're a partner. They want to partner with you and your success in your journey and this whole cloud-native journey to provide this rich digital experience for not only our platform engineering team, but our dev teams, but also be able to really accelerate the development of our services so we can provide that digital portal for our end users. And that didn't change. If anything, that accelerated, that relationship did not change. You know, I came to Venkat with an issue we just were dealing with. He immediately got someone on a phone call with me and so that has not changed. So it's really exciting to see that now that they've been acquired, that they still are very much invested in the success of their customers and making sure we're successful. You know, it's not all of a sudden, I was worried I was gonna have to do a whole different support process and it was gonna go into a black hole, didn't happen. They still are very much involved with their customers. And that sounds kind of Venkat similar to what you talked about with the cultural alignment. I've known here for a long time and they're very customer centric. Sounds like one of the areas in which there was a very strong alignment with Portworx. Absolutely, and Portworx has always taken pride in being customer first company. Our founders are heavily customer focused. You know, they are aligned, they want, they have always aligned our, the Portworx business to our customers needs, Pure is a company that's maniacally focused on customers, right? I mean, that's all, you know, Pure's founder calls and everybody care about. And so, you know, bringing these companies together and being part of the Pure team, I kind of see how synergistic it is. And, you know, we have, you know, that has enabled us to server customers even better than before. So I'm curious about the two of you personally in terms of your histories. I'm going to assume that you didn't both just bounce out of high school into the world of Kubernetes, right? So, like Lisa and I, you're spanning the generations between the world of, say, virtualization based on X86 architecture and virtualization where you don't have microservices, you have a full blown operating system that you're working with. Kind of talk about, you know, Micah, with you first, talk about what that's been like navigating that change. We're in the midst of that. Do you have advice for others that are navigating that change? Don't be afraid of it. You know, a lot of people want to, you know, I call it, we're moving from where we're naming, we still have cats and dogs, they have a name that the VMs, either whether or not they're physical boxes or they're VMs to where it's more like, I hate to say cattle, you know, it's like we don't own the OS and not to be afraid of that because change is really good. You know, the ability for me to not have to worry about patching an operating system is huge. You know, where I can rely on someone like EKS and the version and allow them to, if a CVE comes out, they let me know, I go and I use their tools to be able to upgrade. So I don't have to literally worry about owning that OS. And containers is the same thing. You know, it's all about being fault tolerant, right? And being able to be change aware. You know, you can actually roll out a new version of a container, a base image, with a lot of ease without having to go and patch a bunch of servers. I mean, patch night was hell. Yeah, I'm sorry if I could say that, but it was a nightmare, you know, but this whole world has just been a game changer with that. So, Venkat, from your perspective, you were coming at it, going into a startup, looking at the landscape in the future and seeing opportunity. What's that been like for you? I guess the question for you is more something Lisa and I talk about this concept of peak Kubernetes. Where are we in the wave? Is this just the beginning? Are we in the thick of it? Yeah, I think I would say we're kind of transitioning from early adopters to early majority phase in the whole, you know, crossing the chasm analogy, right? So, I would say we're still at the early stages of this big wave that's going to transform how infrastructure is built, apps are built and managed and run in production. I think some of the pieces, the key pieces are falling in place and maturing. There are some other pieces like observability and security, you know, kind of edge use cases need to be, you know, they're kind of going to get a lot more mature. And you'll see that the cloud, as we know today and the apps, as we know today, they're going to be radically different. And, you know, if you're not building your apps and your business on this modern platform, on this modern infrastructure, you're going to be left behind. You know, my wife's birthday was a couple of days ago. I was telling this story to my couple of friends is that I used another flowers delivery website. They missed delivering the flowers on the same day, right? So, and they told me all kinds of excuses. Then I just went and looked up a, you know, like DoorDash, which just delivers, you know, and then I, you know, like your food, but there's also flower delivery in DoorDash. And I told, I DoorDash flowers to her and I can track the flower delivery all the way. She did not eat them. Okay, good. She didn't eat them. But my kids love the chocolates though, right? So, and you know, the case and point is that you cannot be, you know, building a modern business without leveraging the model tool chain and modern tool chain and how the business is going to be delivered and that thing is going to be changing dramatically. And those kinds of customer experience, if you don't deliver, you're not going to be successful in business. And Kubernetes is the fundamental technology that enables this. Containers is a fundamental piece of technology that enables building new businesses, you know, modernizing existing businesses. And the 5G is going to be, there's going to be new innovations that's going to get unleashed. And again, Kubernetes and containers that enable us to leverage those. And so we're still scratching the surface on this. It's big now. It's going to be much, much bigger, you know, as we go into the next couple of years. Speaking of scratching the surface, Micah take us out in the last 30 seconds or so with where CHG Healthcare is on its digital transformation, how is Portworx facilitating that? So we're right in the thick of it. I mean, we are, we still have what we call the legacy. We're working on getting those, but I mean, we're really moving forward to provide that rich experience, especially with event-driven platforms like Kafka and Kubernetes and partnering with Portworx is one of the key things for us with that and AWS along with that. But we're, and I remember I heard a talk and I can't remember the name, but he talked about how Kubernetes is sort of like the 56K modem, right? You're hearing it, but it's got to get to the point where it's just there. It's just the high-speed internet and Kelsey Hightower, that's who it was. Oh, from Google. Great, great, yeah. And I really like that because that's true, you know, and that's where we are. We're all in that transition where we're still early. It's still that 56, you still want to hear a note. You still want to do Kube CTL. You want to learn it the hard way and do all that fun stuff. But eventually it's going to be where it's just there and it's running everything, like 5G, I mean, stripped down, doing micro, you know, K8s, things like that, you know, we're going to see it in a lot of other areas and just periphery and really accelerate the industry and compute and memory and storage and services. Yeah, a lot of acceleration. Guys, thank you. This has been a really interesting session. I always love digging into customer use cases, how CHG is really driving its evolution with Portworx, Venkat, thanks for sharing with us what's going on with Portworx a year after the acquisition. Sounds like all good stuff. Thank you, thanks for having us. Our pleasure. All right, for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Los Angeles. This is our coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 21.