 Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of the Cube. We are here in our Palo Alto studios to have a conversation around cloud computing, multi-cloud hybrid cloud. The change is going on in the IT industry and for businesses across the globe is impacted by cloud computing, data, AI. All that's coming together. And a lot of people are trying to figure out how to architect their solutions to scale globally but also take care of their businesses. Not just cutting costs for information technologies but delivering services that scale and benefit the businesses and ultimately their customers and the end users. I'm here with a very special guest, Donnie Burkholz, who's the VP of IT Service Delivery at CWT Carlson, Wagon Lit Travel. Also the program chair, the open source summit, part of the Linux Foundation, formerly an analyst, great friend of the Cube. Donnie, great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. So we've been having a lot of conversations around obviously cloud, we've been there watching it from day one. I know you have been covering it as an analyst. Part of that cloud already go back to 2007 eight timeframe, roughly speaking, you know, even before that with Amazon. Just the massive growth certainly got everyone attention. IBM once called Amazon irrelevant now going full cloud with buying Red Hat for billions and billions of dollars, 63% premium. Open source has grown significantly and now cloud absolutely is the architectural linch pin for companies trying to change how they do business, gather more efficiencies, all built on the ethos of DevOps that is now kind of going mainstream. So I want to get your thoughts and talk about this across a variety of touch points. One is what people are doing and you're delivering services, IT services for CWT and also trying to get positioned for the future. So, and then open source, you're on the open source program chair, open source driving all these benefits. Now with IBM buying Red Hat, you've seen the commercialization of open source at a whole nother level, which is causing a lot of conversation. So tell us what you're doing, what CWT is about and your role of the company. Absolutely, thank you. So CWT, we're in the middle of this journey. We call CWT 3.0, which is really one about how do we take the old school green screens that you've seen when you've got travel agents or airline agents booking travel and bring people into the picture and blend together people with technology. So I joined about a year and a half ago to really help push things forward from the perspective of DevOps because what we came to realize here was we can't deliver quickly and iterate quickly without the underlying platforms that give us the kind of agility we need without the connections across a lot of our different product groups that let us again iterate on the right things from the perspective of our customers. So I joined a year and a half ago, we've made a lot of strides since then in modernizing many of our technology platforms. The way I think about it here, it's a large enterprise. We've got hundreds of different applications. We've got many, many different product teams and everything is on a spectrum. So we've got some teams that are on the bleeding edge, not even the leading edge, but I would say the bleeding edge, trying out the very latest things that come out, experimenting with brand new open source tools, brand new cloud offerings to see, can we incorporate that as quickly as possible so that we can innovate faster than our competitors? Whether those are the traditional competitors or some of the new software companies coming into things from that angle. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got teams who are taking a much more conservative approach and saying, let's wait and see what sticks before we pick it up. And the fortunate thing I think about a company at the scale we are, is that we can have some of those groups really innovating and pushing the needle and then other groups who can wait and see which parts stick before we start adopting those at scale. And so you got to manage the production kind of stability versus kind of kicking the tires for the new functionality. So I got to ask you first, set up the architecture there. Are you guys on an on-premise with cloud hybrid? Are you in the cloud native? Do you have multiple clouds? Can you just give a sense of how you're deploying specifically with cloud? Yeah, absolutely. I think just like anything else, it's a spectrum of what we see here. There's a lot of different products. Some of them have been built cloud native. They're using the serverless functions of service technologies from scratch, brought in some leaders from Amazon to lead some of that drive here. They brought in a lot of good thinking, a lot of good culture, a lot of new perspective to technologies we're adopting as a company that's not traditionally been a software company, but that is more and more so every day. So we've got some of that going on that's completely cloud native. We've got some going on that's more, I would say hybrid cloud where we're spanning between a public cloud environment back to our data centers. And then we've got some that are different applications across multiple different public clouds because we're not in any one place right now. We're putting things in the best place to do the job. So that's very much the approach we take. And it's one that back when I was in my analyst world, one of my colleagues called it the best execution venue. What's the best place? What's the right place to do the right kind of task? You incorporate what are the best technologies you can adopt to help us differentiate more quickly. And where does the data live? What's the data gravity look like? Because we can't be shipping data back and forth. We can't have tons of transactions going back and forth all the time between different public clouds or between a public cloud and one of our data centers. So how do we best account for that when we're protecting what our applications should look like, whether they're brand new ones or whether they're ones we're in the middle of modernize. Great, thanks for sharing that's great. So yeah, I totally see that same thing. People put, we know where the best cloud for the app if you're a Microsoft shop again, you need some measure. You want to kick the tires on Amazon. There's good roles for that. So we're seeing a lot of those multiple clouds. But while I got you on the line here, I know you've been an analyst. I want you to just help me define something real quick because there's always kind of confusion between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Certainly multi-cloud, we get a lot of hype on that. You're seeing with Kubernetes, with stateful applications versus stateless. You're seeing some conversations there. Certainly an open source and that's top of the agenda. Donnie explained for folks watching the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud because there's some nuances there. And some people have different definitions. How do you guys look at that? Because you have multiple clouds, but some aren't actually running a workload across clouds yet because of latency issues. So define what hybrid means to you guys and what multi-cloud means to you. All right, yeah, I think for us hybrid cloud would be something where it's about integrating on-prem workload, often a more traditional workload with something in a public cloud environment. And it's really hybrid cloud to me is not two different public clouds working together or even the same application in two different public clouds. I'm not something a little bit different and that's where you start to get a think into a lot of the questions of what is multi-cloud? We've seen that go through a lot of different transitions over the past decade or so. We've seen a lot of different vendors that went out there thinking they could sell multi-cloud management that panned out at different levels of success. I think for at least a decade we've been talking about ideas like can we do cloud bursting? And has that ever really worked in practice? And I think it's almost as rare as a unicorn of oh, we're on-prem for the cost efficiencies and then we burst the cloud for the workload. Well, to this day, I've never seen anything that gives you 100% functionality and 100% performance comparability between an on-prem workload and a public cloud workload. There always seems to be some kind of difference and this is a conversation that I think Randy Bias has actually been a great proponent of. Of it's not just about the API compatibility. It's not just can I run Azure in their data centers or online. It's about what does the performance difference look like? What does the availability difference look like? Can I support that software in my data center as well as the engineers at Microsoft or Amazon or at Google or wherever else are supporting it today? Can I keep it up and running as well? Can I keep it performing as well? Can I find problems as quickly? And that's where it comes to the question of how do we focus on our differentiators and let the experts focus on theirs? That's a great point about Randy Bias. Love that great API debate. I was looking at some of that footage we had years ago. But this brings up a good point I want to get your reaction to because a lot of vendors going out there saying, oh, our cloud's this, we got all this stuff going on and there's a lot of hype and a lot of posturing and positioning. The great thing about cloud is you really can't fake it until you make it, you got to be working, right? So when you get into the kind of buying into the cloud, say, okay, great, we're going to do some cloud and maybe you get some cloud architects together. So, okay, here's what it means to us and each environment will have to understand what that means and then go do it. The reality kind of kicks in and this is what I'd like to get your reaction to. What is the realities when you say, okay, I want to go to cloud either for pushing the envelope and or moving solid workloads that are in production into the cloud. What is the impact on the network? Network security and application performance because at the end of the day, those are going to be impacted. Those three areas come up a lot in conversations when all the glam and all the bloom is off the rose, those are the things that are impacted. What's your thoughts on how practitioners prepare for those three areas? The network impact, network security impact and application performance. Yeah, and I think preparation is exactly the right word there of how do we get the people we have up to speed and how do we get more and more out of that kind of project mindset and into much more of the product mindset and whether that product is customer facing or whether that product is some kind of infrastructure or platform product. That's the kind of thinking we're trying to bring it into it of how do we get our people who may run a CI CD pipeline, may run an on-prem container platform, may be responsible for realization, may be responsible for on-prem networks or firewalls or security. How do we get them up to speed and turn them into real software engineers? I mean, that's a multi-year journey. That's not something that happens overnight. You can't bring in a team of consultants to fix that problem for you and say, oh, well, we came in and implemented it and now it's yours and we walk out the door. It's no longer that build and operate mindset that you could take a little bit more with on-prem because everything is defined as code. And if you don't know how to deal with code, you're gonna be in a real rough spot the next time you have to make a change to that stuff that that team of consultants came in and implemented for you. So I think it's turned into a much more long-term approach, which is very, very healthy for technology and for technology companies as a whole of how do we think about this long-term in a sustainable way? Think about scaling up our people. What are those training paths look like? What are those career paths look like so that we can decide, how many people do we want certified? What kind of certifications should they have or equivalent skill sets? I remember hearing not too long ago that I think it was Capital One had over 10,000 people who were AWS certified, which is the enormously large number to think about. But that's the kind of transitions that we've been making as we become more and more cloud native and cloud by default is getting the right people, the people we have today trained up in these new kinds of skill sets instead of assuming it's something we can have some team fly in from magic land and implement and then fly away again afterwards. That's great, Don. Thanks for sharing that insight. I also want to get your thoughts on the open source summit but before we get there I've got to ask you a question around some of the trends we've been seeing and early on at DevOps we saw this together and the folks doing the hard work in the early pioneering days where you saw the developers really getting closer to the front lines. They were becoming part of the business conversation in the old world of IT. Okay, here's our strategy, consolidate this, load some virtual machines, get all this stuff up and running. The business decisions would then trickle down to the tech folks. Then with the DevOps revolution that's now cloud computing and all things, IoT, everything else happening, with the developers and the engineering side of it and the applications on the front lines, they're in more of the business conversation. So I have to ask you, when you're at CWT, what are some of the business drivers and conversations that you guys are having with executive management around choices? Are the business drivers, do you see an order of preference around agility, the transformation value for either customers or employees, compliance and security are the top ones that people talk about generally? What are the, of those business drivers, which ones do you guys see the most that are part of iterating through the architecture and ultimately the environment that you deploy? Yeah, I think as part of, I mentioned earlier where that we're on this journey we call CWT 3.0 and what's really new about that is bringing in speed and agility into the conversation of if we have something that we imagine as a five year transformation, how do we get to market quickly with new products so that we can start really executing and seeing the outcomes of it? And so we've always had the expectations around availability, around security, around all these other factors, those aren't going away. Instead we're adding a new one so we've got new conversations and a new balance to reach at an executive level of we now need a degree of speed that was not the expectation, let's say a decade ago, may not even have been the expectation in our industry five years ago, but is today. And so now we're now incorporating speed into that balance of maybe we'll decide to very intentionally say we're not gonna go for quite as many nines today so that we can be iterating more quickly on our software or we're going to invest more in better release management approaches and tools, right? Canary releases like green, blue releases, all these sorts of new techniques, feature flags, that sort of thing, so that we can better deal with speed and better account for the risk and spread it to smallest surface area possible. And you're probably doing those things also to understand the impact and look at kind of what's coming in that you're instrumenting and the infrastructure because you don't want to have a put it out there and pray that it hope that it works. Right, I mean, yield way. That's how we get the product teams that are building it a really great, really quick understanding about what the user experience looks like and whether that's the real user monitoring tools or through other tools and tricks that we may incorporate to understand what our users are doing on our tools in real time. That's the important part of this is to shorten the iteration cycle and to understand what things look like in production. You've got to expose that back to the software engineers to the business analysts, to the product managers who are building it or deciding what should be built in the first place. All right, so now that you're on the buyer side you actually got people knocking on you, hey, Donny, buy my cloud, do this. You got all these solutions. I got all these tools. I got a tool shed full of the fool with the tool as they say, you don't want to be that person, right? So ultimately you've got to pick an environment that's going to scale. When you look at the cloud, how do you evaluate the different clouds? You mentioned gravity, your old data gravity earlier. All kinds of new criteria is up there now in terms of cloud selection. You mentioned best cloud for the job. I get that. Is there certain things that you look for? Is there a list? Is there criteria on cloud selection that goes through your desk? Yeah, I think something that's been really healthy for me coming into the enterprise side from the analyst perspective is you get a couple of new criteria that start to rise up real quickly. You start thinking about things like what's that vendor relationship going to look like? How is the sales force? Are they willing to work with you? Are they willing to adapt to your needs? And then you can adapt back with them so you can build a really strong, healthy relationship with some of your strategic vendors. And to me, a public cloud vendor is absolutely a strategic vendor. That's one where you have to really care a lot, invest in that relationship and make sure things go well and you're sailing together, going in the same direction. So to me, that's a little bit of a newer factor because it was easy to sit back and come in as a strategic advisory role and say, well, you should go with this cloud. You should go with that cloud because of reasons X, Y, or Z. But that doesn't really account for a lot of the things that happened behind the scenes. What's your sourcing and procurement department doing? How are they like to work with around contracts? Will you negotiate a good MSA? All these sorts of things where you don't think about that when you're only thinking about technology and business value. You also have to think about the other, just the day to day, what does it look like? What's the blocking and tackling working with some of those strategic vendors? So you've got that to incorporate in addition to the other criteria around do they have great managed services, self-service managed services that'll work for your needs? For example, what do they have around databases? What do they have around stream processing? What do they have around serverless platforms? Whatever it might be that suits the kinds of needs you have. Like for example, you might think about what is our business look like and it's a graph. It's travelers, it's airports, it's planes, it's hotels. It's a bunch of different graphs all intersecting. And so we might imagine looking for a cloud provider that's really well suited to processing those sorts of workloads. In the old days, the networking guys used to run the keys to the kingdom, hey, you know, I'm an Iraqi stack servers, I'm going to do all this stuff but I got to go talk to the networking guys, make sure all the routes are provisioned, all that is locked down. Mainly because that was a perimeter environment then. With cloud now, what's the impact of the network and what's the role of the network? As we see DevOps, this notion of infrastructure as code, you got compute networking storage of three main pillars of all environments. Compute check, storage getting better, networking. You mentioned Andy, Randy Bias, this was a big pet pee for him. What's the role that cloud does? What's the role of the network with your cloud strategy? I think something that I've seen following DevOps for the past decade or so has been that it really started as the ops doing developments moved more into the developers and the ops working together and in many cases sharing roles in different ways. Then incorporated QA, incorporated product to some extent. Most recently it's really been focused on security and how do we have that whole dev sec ops, sec dev ops thing going on. And something that's been trailing behind a little bit was network. Absolutely, I had some very close friends about 10 years ago maybe who were getting into that and they were the only people they knew and the only people they'd ever even heard of thinking beyond the level of using some kind of an expect script to automate your network interaction. But now I think networking as code is really starting to pick up. And you look at what people are doing in public cloud environments. You look at what open source projects like Ansible are doing around the new focus on network functionality. And they're not alone in that. Many others are investing in that same kind of area. Of it's finally really starting to get up. Like for example, we have an internal DevOps day that we run twice a year. And at the most recent one, guess who one of our speakers was? It was a network engineer. Talking about the kinds of automation they'd been starting to build against our network environments, not just in public cloud, but also on premise. So we're really investing in bringing them into our broader DevOps community, even though net may not be in the name today. I don't think the name can ever extend to include all possible roles. But it is absolutely a big transition that more and more companies I think are going to see rolling along. And one that we've seen happening in public cloud externally for many, many years now, it's been inevitable that the network's gonna get engaged in that automation piece. And the network teams are gonna be more and more thinking about how do we focus our time on automation and on defining policy? And how do we enable the product teams to work in a self-service way? We set the governance, but governance now means they can move at speed. It doesn't mean wait seven to 30 days for us to verify all the port openings, match our requirements, so on and so forth. That's to find out the front. And that's awesome. And I think that's the last leg of the stool in my opinion. I think you nailed it, making it operationally automation enabled and then actually automating it. So, Dan, okay, before we get to the open source and one final question for you. As you look at and planning for the technologies around containers and microservices, which sounds like a lot like networking constructs, provisioning services, the role of state stateless applications become a big part of that. As you look at those technologies, what are some of the things you're looking for in evaluating containers and microservices? And what role will that play in your environment and your job? I think something that we spend a lot of time focusing on is what is the day to experience going to look like? What is it going to be like, not just to roll it out initially, but to operate on an ongoing basis, to make upgrades, to monitor it, to understand what's happening, when things are going wrong, to understand, the security stance we're at, how well are we locked down, is everything up to date? How do we know that and verify it on a continuous basis instead of the older school approach of, hey, we come in and do a PCI survey or an audit once a year, and that's the day we're in compliance and then after that we're not. Which I was just reading some stories the other day about companies saying, hey, there's a large percentage of the time that you're out of compliance, but you make sure to fix it just in time for your quarterly surveys or scans or what have you. And so that's what we spend a lot of our time focusing on is not just the ease of installation, but the ease of ongoing operability and getting really good visibility into the security, into the health of the underlying platforms that we're running. And in some cases that may push us to let's say a cloud managed service. And in some cases we may say, well that doesn't quite suit our needs, we may have some unique requirements, although I spent a lot of my time personally saying, in most cases we are not a snowflake, right? We should be a snowflake where we differentiate as a company. We should not be a snowflake at the level of our monitoring tools. There's nothing unique we should really be doing in that area. And so how can we make sure that we use whether it's trusted vendors, trusted cloud providers or trusted open source projects with a large and healthy community behind them to run that stuff, instead of be able to let ourselves, because that's not our forte. I'd love to, that's a great conversation. I'd love to have with you another time around competitive advantage around IT, which is coming back in Vogue again. It hasn't been that way in a while because of all the consolidation and outsourcing. You're seeing people really, really ramp up and saying, wait a minute, we outsource our core competency and IT and now with cloud is a competitive advantage. So how do you balance the intellectual property that you need to build for the business and then also use the scale and agility with open source? So I want to move to that open source conversation. I think this is a good transition. Developers at the end of the day still have to build the apps and services that are going to run on these environments to add value. So open source has become, I won't say a professional circuit for developers, but it really is become the place for developers because that's where now corporations and projects have been successful and it's going to a whole nother level. Talk about how open source is changing specifically around it becoming a common vehicle for one, employees of companies to participate in as part of their job and two, how it's going to a whole nother level with all this code that's flying around. You can't go a day without finding out that new TensorFlow libraries and donated for Google, big code bases are being rolled in there and still the same old success formula for open sources continues to work. You're on the program chair for open source summit which is part of the Linux Foundation which has been very, very successful in this modern era. How has that changed? What's going on in open source and how does that help people who are trying to stand up architecture and build businesses? I think open source has gone through a lot of transitions over the past decade or so. So it started and in many ways it was driven by the end users and now it's come back full circle so that it's again driven more and more by the end users in a way that there was a middle term there where open source was really heavily dominated by vendors and it started to come back around and you see a lot of the web companies in particular, right? You're sort of Googles and Amazons and LinkedIn's and Facebook's and Twitter's. They're open sourcing tools on an almost daily basis. It feels like I just saw another announcement yesterday maybe the day before about a whole set of kernel tools that I think it was Facebook at open source. And so you're seeing that pace just going so quickly and you think back to the days of, for example, the Apache web server, right? Where did that come about from? It didn't come from a software vendor. It came from a coalition of end users all working together to develop the software that they needed because they felt like there was a big gap there and there's an opportunity to cooperate. So it's been really pleasing for me to see that kind of come back around full circle of now you can hardly turn around and see a company that doesn't have some sort of open source program office or something along those lines where they start to develop a much more healthy approach to it, right? At the early 2000s, it was really heavy on that fear, uncertainty and data around open source driven in particular by some vendors, but also a lot of uncertainty because it wasn't that common or maybe it wasn't that visible inside of these Fortune 500 global 2000 companies. It may have been common, right? What we used to say back when I worked at Redmonk was you turn around and you ask the database admins are you running MySQL or are you running Postgres? You ask the infrastructure engineers are we running Linux here? And you'll get a yes, nine times out of 10 but the CIO was the last to know. Well now it started to flip back around because the CIOs are seeing the business value in adopting open source and having a really healthy approach to it. And they're trying to kind of normalize the approach to it as a consequence of that and saying, look, it's awesome that we're adopting open source. We have to use this so that we can get a competitive advantage because every thousand lines of code we can adopt is a thousand lines of code. We don't have to write and we can focus on our own products instead. And then starting to balance that new model of it used to be, you know, as a buy versus build. And then SaaS came around and it's buy versus build versus rent. And now there's open source and it's buy versus build versus rent versus adopt. And so every one of these just shifts the conversation a little bit of how do you make the right choice at the right time at the right level of the stack? You know, that's a great observation. That's awesome insight. It feels like dumping it a little bit. A lot of dumping going on in open source. And you worry that the flood of vendor contributed code is the new tactic. But if you look at all the major inflection points from the web, you know, through Bitcoin, it's just now 10 years old, this year all started out as organic community projects or conversations on a message board. So there's still a revolution. I think you're right. Their script is flipping around. Love that comment about the CIOs were last to know about open source. I think now it might be flipping around to the CIOs will be last to know about some proprietary advantage that might come out. So it's interesting to see the trend where you're starting to see smart people look at using open source, but really identifying how they could use their engineering and their intellectual capital to build something proprietary within open source for IT advantage. Are you seeing that same trend? Is that on the radar at all? Is that just more of a fantasy part? I think it's always on the radar. And I think especially with open source projects that might be just a little bit below the surface of where a company's line of business is, that's where it'll happen the most often. And so, you know, if you were building analytics product and you decided to build it on top of, you know, maybe there's the Elk stack or the Elastic stack, maybe there's gray log, there's a bunch of tools in that space, right? Maybe, you know, solar, that sort of thing. And you want, you're building some kind of analytics tool or some kind of graph tool or whatever it might be. Yeah, you might be inclined to say, well, the functionality's not quite there. Maybe we need to build a new plugin. Maybe you need to enhance a little bit. And I think this is the same conversation that a lot of the Linux kernel embedded group went through some number of years ago, which is it's long-term a higher burden to maintain a lot of those forks in the house and keep updating them forever than it is to bring some of that functionality back upstream. And so that's a good, healthy dialogue that hopefully will be happening more and more inside a lot of these companies that are taking open source and enhancing it for their own purposes is taking the right level of those enhancements, deciding what that right level is and contributing those back upstream and building a really healthy upstream participation regardless of whether you're a software vendor or an adopter of that software that sees it as a really critical part of their product stack. Awesome, well, Donnie, thanks for spending the time chatting with me today. Great to see you. Great to connect over our remote in here in our studio in Palo Alto. Final question for you, having fun these days and what are you most excited about? Because again, you've seen, you've been on multiple sides of the table. You can see what the vendors have. You actually have the realities of doing your job and build value for Carlson Weglitt and Travel, CWT. What are you excited about right now? What's hot for you? What's jazzing you these days? Yeah, I think what's hot for me is, to me, there's nothing or very little that's revolutionary in technology. A lot of it is evolutionary, right? So you can't say nothing's new. There's always something a little bit different. And so serverless is another example of something that's, it's a little bit different. It's a little bit new. It's similar to some previous ticks, but you got new angles specifically around the financials and around, how do you pay? How is it priced? How do you get really almost closer to the metal, right? Get the things you need to happen closer to the way you're paying for them or the way they're running. So that remains a really exciting area for me. I've been going to serverless cont for probably since the first or second one now. I haven't been to the most recent one, but it, you know, there's so much value left in there to be tapped that I'm not yet really on to say what's next, what's next. I've helped myself move out of that analyst world of getting excited about what's next. And for me, it's now, what's ready now? Where can I leverage some value today or tomorrow or next week and not think about what's coming down the pipe? So for me, that's, well, what went GA, right? What can I pick up? What can I scale it inside our company so that we can drive the kinds of change we're looking for? So, you know, you asked me, what am I the most excited about right now? And it's being here a year and a half and seeing the culture change that I've been driving since day one, start to come back. Seeing teams that have never built automation in their lives, independently go and learn it and build some automation and save themselves 80 hours a month. That's one example that just came out of our group a couple of months back. That's what's valuable for me. That's what I love to see happen. Automation, automation is addicting. It's almost an addictive flywheel. We automate something. Oh, that's awesome. I can move on to something else. Something better. That was grunt work. Why do I want to do that again? Donnie, thanks so much. And again, thanks for the insight. Appreciate you taking the time and sharing us with theCUBE here in our studio. Donnie Burkholtz with the VP of IT Services, CWT, a great guest. I'm John Furrier here inside the CUBE Student Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.