 Good afternoon, Cloud Natives, and welcome back to Chicago, where we're here for Cloud NativeCon, KubeCon 2023. Very exciting to be back. The last show from CNCF this year. My name is Savannah Peterson. I'm joined here by my Kube co-host, Rob. Rob, what do you think? This is now your second KubeCon with us. It is. It is, and I think this one is just great energy. And I think, again, it's talking about Kubernetes having that Linux-like moment, which is really excellent. I know, I do feel like we're celebrating a little bit today, which is very exciting. Speaking of celebration, it's always a joy to have Kube alumni on the show. Oh my goodness, two very familiar faces. Merle Satish, thank you so much for being here. Merle, I'm going to start with you because you somehow drew the great straw of having your booth be the background of our Kube set. We appreciate you. You're making all our colors pop. Everyone's nice and vibrant. This is awesome. How are you feeling? How does it feel to be at the show today? You know, I'll tell you, Savannah, springtime weather in Chicago in November, deep-dish pizza, and Kubernetes Paradise all in one place. It doesn't get better than this. That's for sure. Chef's kiss. Wow, couldn't have said it better than myself. What about for you, Satish? Last time we had the Ford booth right behind us, so I mean, we're a good company either way. I think this is awesome. I remember everybody's coming back, as you were saying, Savannah earlier, and it's great to see all the energy. I'm glad to see everybody back, and hopefully we can make things happen again. And keep them happening. The momentum, it really does feel like we're building up again, and not in this kind of tempered in-between land. So, you two have been working together for a while. Satish, tell me a little bit about the partnership. I think we started Kubernetes, I think we started our cloud-native journey or transformation way back in 2017. And it always, our Kubernetes journey was always gathered around stateful stuff, right? So, we've always like, state has been an important part, state has been a curse in Kubernetes as well. I was telling Morally yesterday that, hey, if only we'd not have POSIX interfaces, you know, life will be so fun. But here we are, storage is the key integral part, and I think there's hardly anything we can do in Kubernetes without having storage. And that is what has brought us together, and we've been still together. It's a lot of problems to solve, and hoping to actually make it simpler and easier for everybody going forward, we'll see. Yeah, developer productivity, definitely a key theme of the show, everyone wants to make it easy, and the need for storage is only going to go up exponentially as we continue to increase the data and everything else is going on. How are you all thinking about that at Portworx? Well, first of all, I must say that, you know, it's a pleasure to be back on theCUBE with Satish. You know, one thing I just want to say that- A little dream team over here. There's like a chemistry, the energy's coming. Being a serial startup person here, people attribute a lot of innovation to startups, right? And there's a lot of startups at KubeCon here, but the reality is a lot of innovation happens because we find innovation partners in our customers. And Satish, notice what he just said, he started in 2017, you know, that is like a whole generation ago, or two generations ago. A decade ago, at least. Yeah, exactly, for Kubernetes. And it is really important. One of the models that we've always had at Portworx has been sort of this co-creation model with customers. And Savannah, customers like Satish and Ford are examples of our co-creation model, right? A lot of innovation happens because there's a partner for a startup or for an early innovator company that says, hey, I'm going to try and take a chance and innovate with you. And Ford in particular is really unique, as you can imagine, because it is a large industrial company that builds real, you know, killer products. World leading products. And at the same time, taking, having the ability to innovate and add, you know, a major technology platform like Kubernetes is something that we're very excited to be doing jointly. Obviously, there's many people who partner with Ford, but we're happy to be one of the folks who provides sort of the underpinnings for their data part of the app and data equation, which includes, you know, storage, disaster recovery, includes backup, and things like, you know, data services in the future. And we go forward. I mean, again, to your point, it's real stuff, right? Real factories, real things like assembly lines. If they stop, you're losing money, that kind of thing. So that all of, you know, what was said there around DR and storage, that has to be rock solid for you to be able to go and run all of these different applications that you containerize. Absolutely. I think, as I said, no, no matter everything, the buzz is around 12 fact cloud native and everything. At the end of the day, there is state somewhere. Quality of caching system, messaging systems. We've been affectionately calling them as table stakes because we all have to have them, you know? I'm like, without them, we can't do. And the other aspect is like continuity of business, right? Quality and cost is an important theme for us. Developer experience is an important theme for us. And it's all based on the fact that, you know, we are able to actually sustain this kind of innovation over a long period of time. But every year, every time I come to KubeCon, I'm like, one of the consistent theme is like, how can I do better? How can I cut the time even shorter, right? Previously we were doing like cluster in a month. Maybe next time we talk about cluster in like, how about in a week? Next time we talk about cluster in a couple of hours, right? So that speed of innovation is like growing such a fast clip, but at the same time, how do we actually keep up and deliver to the customer expectations that has becoming more and more interesting and challenging for all of us to see them like new solutions propping up all over the place behind us? So glad to see what's going on here. So how, I would imagine partnerships like Portworx are extremely important for you. Are you on the show floor right now looking for potential partners who may be able to help other aspects of your innovation, both of you, as you continue to scale? You want to take it? Well, I mean, you know, one of the things that companies like Ford and teams like Satish have done is really formalized this platform engineering concept. Now, what used to be called DevOps is really kind of morphed now into platform engineering. And to that end, I think Savannah, when you asked about partners, right? Platform engineering itself is a very broad area, right? So there's obviously Kubernetes app orchestration is one part of the platform. So there's some platforms within platform engineering. One of them is the actual orchestration of the app. There are security parts of this platform. There's data parts of the platform like Portworx. There are parts of the platform that have to do with observability. So one of the nice things that we're seeing, I think as the industry matures, is that companies like us, you know, we're here not just to kind of play our part, but also to kind of partner with other platform companies, right? So there's sort of a partnership between sub-platforms within platform engineering. And this is a big change that I've seen in our own operation, right? Before we were sort of, we were operating more as hustlers. No, it's why I think it's really interesting you've had this long relationship, there's a lot of serendipity and collaboration here, but with true shared goals. And obviously there's still competition. We live in a capitalist economy. It's not like that's gone away, but there's some very strategic plays going on, like you two working together, that I think are really going to be the magic feature. I think the important thing is like, we've been talking about like, it's not just on-premises and cloud. I'm like, we have been doing a lot of stuff in Google Cloud recently. I'm like, a lot of stuff in GKE, a lot of stuff in Cloud Run and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, what we're talking about is like, enablement of developers and velocity of delivering services at a particular price point and at a particular quality. I think that's the most important part is like, we can't forget that price and quality is the cost and quality are two important pivotal points for all of us. I'm like, everything we do from our vehicles to the services. I was just going to say, this is the thing with Ford. I drive a Ford and you know. So this is what you're known for. You're a known for quality that the mainstream consumer can access. Which is amazing. And that's what we're trying to build more and more of and saying that how do we actually go to the next level and provide experiences, right? Experiences from forever developer portals, to developers and also the customers and consumers who like our products and services. Yeah. Is, do you feel when you talk, and I love this because I can feel your chemistry here but I can sense your passion, is this something that you and the team are thinking about when you're selecting partners like Portworx to make this as easy and to decrease the cognitive load in one of the stats we had just to throw it out there was 76% of developers reporting too much cognitive load in what they're doing right now. And I would imagine it's sort of your job to be the antidote to that. Yes. I think one of the things that what I would say is like, we tried shifting left. Yeah. I'm like, there's a lot of people talking saying we should shift right. And there was an interesting blog post I recently read about shifting down about it, right? So we have been like experimenting with all of this stuff. We call it a opinionated stacks. And we are building our own frameworks around all of this stuff. The idea is that how can I build a framework or less complex solutions? Do I need to know every Iota of things within Kubernetes to be successful? Or do I need to know just enough to be successful, right? The idea, if you think about it, the idea of like the cloud foundries of the world or the app engines of the world, it's kind of coming back because it's great to see a lot of bells, whistles, knobs and levers provided by Kubernetes, but sometimes it's also overwhelming them, right? How do you focus? So you don't know that it's a whole car and you know, sometimes we're almost too zoomed in to those little pieces. What we are at least some of the parts of my team are working on is like, how do I reduce that cognitive load by shrinking saying that these are the most essential building blocks that you need to focus on and rest of this, how do we focus on creating business value, right? So what's the fun in actually saying that everybody is a Kubernetes engineer? Question becomes interesting is like, I created more value on top of Kubernetes because Kubernetes is at the end of the day, you know, I'm like, I think I heard Kelsey talking about and like, you want Kubernetes to be boring, right? Makes perfect sense because once you make the underpinnings boring, you can make value on top of it exciting, right? It's kind of the Intel inside. Exactly. I see Kubernetes as that future for us. You know what I mean? Kubernetes inside the Maki. And you know that there's a lot of it, but that's the truth though. Yeah. It is a change. It is a shift in what we're capable of doing and what companies are able to build, but it is, yeah. At the same time, I think some of the trends and I think you started to hit on it. And is it DevOps coming to platform or DevOps coming to IT, which becomes platform engineering to simplify that out? It seems like there's one of the things that we heard about in Amsterdam was everybody was talking platform engineering. Now it's a little bit more of a undertone of everything everybody's talking about. Almost because it's become real and people are embracing it. In fact, somebody had reached out. It's not hype anymore. Yeah. Well, somebody reached out to me early and I go, are you hearing anything about platform engineering? And I go, yes, I hear about people retooling their teams to do that. Are you seeing that across the customers? You know, let me give you an example of this, right? Portworx's mission right from the inception of the company has been very simple. It is to improve developer velocity. Now you think about that, right? What does platform engineering done? Gaunter has a great phrase. They call it creating a paved road, right? So the Kubernetes journey for a developer does not need to be as exciting and bumpy every year as it's been for the last six, seven years, right? By creating a paved road, you actually hide the complexity as Satish was talking about, right? Making it a, first of all, a smooth ride. You know, you don't really need to know all of the details and experience every bump on that road. We will kind of take the data bumps out for you as Portworx. And actually- I love that analogy, you know? It's like fresh asphalt. You know, you drive a car, you ride your bike and it's all just smooth. You still have to be attentive to steering. We had a customer dinner yesterday. And Satish, I'm going to steal one of your phrases. He used a beautiful phrase. He got up on stage and talked to some of our customers in the audience. And he said, one of the things that he tells his developers is experiment freely, but deploy responsibly. And I love- That feels like a T-shirt in the making. That really is. Look at the beauty and the contrast of those two phrases, right? He allows the developers to experiment with all kinds of stuff that they need to be able to innovate. But at the same time, he is creating guardrails and creating that paved road to allow them to develop responsibly and they can go with the assurance that it is going to run smoothly. And it's that type of combination of data resilience that companies like us provide and other people provide security resilience, security protection. Those are the kinds of things that make modern platform engineering really allow Kubernetes to become more invisible but allow more and more developer velocity, right? It's a great phrase that I really love. I love the velocity, it's all about velocity. And I'm sure that even from your side, it's from a Ford perspective, you don't want the developers worrying about that stuff, about the resilience, about the underpinnings. You want that smooth paved road because that gets them to productivity faster. And they're thinking about building better code versus hey, how do I go and tie these things together and mesh them up and make sure that they're resilient and make sure that they're cyber resilient for that matter and that I can get back my minimally viable company if something goes bump in the night or the factory doesn't go down or these other things. Is that really how you have focused your platform? That's exactly what we are talking about, right? So we call it like, we gave it a name and like opinionated stacks. That's what we call internally. The idea is that to pave those roads around set of technologies, right? So if it is, Google, we're talking about Cloud Run, if it like Kubernetes, we're talking about Knative. But the idea is that the same set of abstractions should work everywhere, right? It should work in my plans, it should work on-prem, but it should also work in cloud. And that's the beauty of Kubernetes is that these abstractions are portable, right? The very reason everybody's working so hard is to make these abstractions portable so that not everybody has to learn all of those things. So relearn the same things. The idea is that learn it once and apply it many places. I'm like, I think the old adage of right ones run anywhere from Java kind of coming to the infrastructure is like learn once and apply everywhere, right? So that's the kind of norms that we are trying to portray and reduce the cognitive burden, as you were saying earlier, like how can I make them productive sooner, faster, better? Yes. That's the goal. And it'll make them happier too. Absolutely. They're not reinventing the wheel every time. I love it. All right, last question for you both. A little bit of a lightning round since you're veterans and VIPs here on theCUBE. So I'm going to start with you. What do you hope you can say next time you're sitting next to me up here? I think if next time if I can say that, hey, if I can go from like take a brand new developer coming and onboard it to the team and started committing to the depositories in the first day, how about that? Day one, he comes in and then he needs to actually start committing and first PRN, here's the code that is running out there in the production. Wouldn't that be awesome? Yeah, goes home and tells the family at the end of the day and it's smashing first day forward. I absolutely love that. What about you, Merly? You know, it's very simple. It's, I want to be able to say, and I think I'm already saying it, data on Kubernetes is a reality, right? So people used to think of Kubernetes really in its first avatar as a app orchestrator, but the reality is apps and data go hand in hand. There's no such thing as an app without its counterpart in data and I think the world is coming to realize that data is something that needs to be managed also under Kubernetes so that you manage app and data together and that they travel together. And so, you know, there's many, many customers now like Ford who are beginning to recognize that databases and data services, storage, all of those things need to be managed underneath Kubernetes and not outside of Kubernetes. And I think by the next KubeCon, this should be something that's common knowledge across the industry. I love that. Well, we'll check in in Paris and see if that's the case. Absolutely. Merly, Steve, thank you so much for being here. It's truly a pleasure each and every time to have you on the show. Rob, your opinion and expert analysis is always appreciated and thank you all for tuning in from home, from work, from Mars, wherever you happen to be here. We are in the Paris of the Prairie, Chicago, Illinois, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech news.