 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with James Waters, CTO of modern applications at VMware here to talk about the big Tansu cloud native application wave, the modernizations here. James, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Hey John, great to be back on and really excited about Reinvent this year and been watching your coverage of it. There's lots of exciting stuff going on in this space. Awesome. Well, James, you've been riding the wave of cloud one.o, two.o, what do you want to call it? The initial wave of cloud where the advent of replatformings there you get all these benefits and things are moving fast. Things are being developed, a lot of endeavors, things are tracking, some are kicking, Kubernetes kicks in. And now the big story is over the past year and a half certainly the pandemic highlighted is this big wave that's hitting now which is the modernization of the enterprise, the modernization of software development and even Amazon was saying that in one of our talks the software development life cycle's over it should be completely put away to bed. And that DevOps is truly here and you add security you got DevSecOps, so an entirely new large scale heavy use of data, new methodologies are all hitting right now. And if you're not on that wave, you're driftwood. What's your take? Oh, I think you're dead, right John? And kind of the first 10 years of working on this were sort of proving that the microservices, the container, the declarative automation, the DevOps patterns were the future. And I think everyone's agreed now and I think DevSecOps and the trends around app modernization are really around bringing that to scale for enterprises. So the conversations I tend to be having are hey, you've done a little Kubernetes, you've done some modern apps and APIs but how do you really scale this across your enterprise? That's what I think is exciting today and that's what we're talking about some of the tools we're bringing to Amazon to help people achieve faster consumption, better scale, more security. You know, one of the things about VMware that's been impressive over the years is that on the wave of IT, they already had great operational install base. They did a deal with Amazon, Ragu did that in I think 2016, that kind of cleared the air, okay, they're not going to do their own cloud or they have cloud efforts, kind of solidifies that. And then in comes Kubernetes. And then you saw a completely different cloud native wave coming in with the Tanzu, the Heptio acquisition. And since then a lot's been done. Can you just take us through the Tanzu evolution because I think this is a cornerstone of what's happening right now. Yeah, that's a great question, John. I think that the emergence of Kubernetes as a common set of APIs that every cloud and almost every infrastructure agrees on was a huge one. And the way I talk to our clients about is that VMware is doing a couple of things in this space. The first is that we're recognizing that as an infrastructure we're baking Kubernetes into every vSphere be it vSphere on-prem, be it VMC on Amazon. You're just going to find Kubernetes as a big part of vSphere. So that's kind of a big step one, but it's in some ways the same way that Amazon is doing with EKS and Azure is doing with AKS. But like every infrastructure provider is bringing Kubernetes everywhere. And then that kind of unleashes this really exciting moment where you've now got this globally controllable, you've got this global control plane that you can program to be your DevSecOps platform. And Kubernetes has this incredible model of extensibility where you can add CRDs and program right against the Kubernetes APIs with your additional features and functions you want your DevSecOps pipeline. And so it's created this opportunity for Tanzu to kind of have then a global control plane which we call Tanzu Mission Control to bring all of those Kubernetes running in different clouds together. And then the last thing that we'll talk about a little bit more is this Tanzu application platform which is bringing a developer experience to Kubernetes so that you're not always starting with what I like to say like, oh, I have Kubernetes, am I done? There's a lot more to the story than that. Yeah, I want to get to this Tanzu application platform on EKS. So I think that's a big story at VMworld we've seen that. But before we do that for the folks out there watching who are like now seeing this whether they're young, new to the industry or enterprises who are from replatforming or refactoring trying to understand what is a modern application. So give us the definition in your words what is a modern application? You know, John, that's a great question. And I tend to start with why and like, hey, how did we get here? And you and I both I think used to work for the bigger iron vendors back in the day and we've seen the age of kind of like the big box Silicon Valley. I don't know. I worked at Sun just across the aisle here. And basically we'd sell you a big box and then once or twice a year you'd change the software on it. And so in a sense like there was no chance to do user oriented design or any of these things like you kind of got what you got and you hope to scale it. And then modern applications have been much more of the age of like what you might say like Instagram or some of these modern apps that are very user oriented and how you're changing that user interface and that user design might change every week based on user feedback and you're constantly using big data to adjust that modern app experience. And so modern apps to me are inherently iterative and inherently scalable and amenable to change. And that's where the 12 factor application manifesto was written, a blog was written a decade ago basically saying here's how you can start to design apps to be constantly upgradable. So to me modern apps, 12 of the factors one of them Kubernetes compatible but the real point is that they should be flexible to be constantly iterated on maybe at least once a week at a minimum and designed and engineered to do that. And that takes them away from the old vertically scaled apps that kind of ran on 172 processors that you would infrequently update in the past. Those are what you might call like cloud apps. Yeah, it's interesting. Is that helpful? Yeah, totally helpful. And by the way, those old iron vendors they're now called the on-premises vendors. And so, you know, HPE, Dell and whatnot, IBM. But the thing about the cloud is that you have the true infrastructure as code happening. It's happened. It's happening faster and better and greater the goodness there. So you got DevSecOps, which is just DevOps with security. So DevSecOps is the standard now that everyone's shooting for. So what that means is I'm a developer. I just want to write code. The infrastructure is going to work for me. So things like Lambda functions are all great things. So assuming that there's going to be this now programmable layer for developers just to do stuff. What is, in context to that need, what is the Tanzu application platform about and how does it work? Yeah, that's a great question, John. So once you have Kubernetes, you have this abundance of programmable infrastructure resources. You can do almost anything with it, right? Like you can run machine learning workflows. You can run microservices. You can build APIs. You can port legacy apps to it. But it doesn't come out of the box with a set of application patterns and a set of controllers that are built for just, you know, modern apps. It comes with sort of a lot of flexibility and it expects you to understand a pretty broad surface area of APIs. So what we're doing is we're following in the footsteps of companies like Netflix and Uber, et cetera, all of which built kind of a developer platform on top of their Kubernetes infrastructure to say, here's your more templatized path to production. So you don't have to configure everything. You're just changing the right parts of the application. And we kind of go through three steps. The first is an application template that says, here's how to build a streaming app on Kubernetes. Click here and you'll get in your version control and we'll build a Kubernetes manifest for it. Two is an automated containerization, which is we'll take your app and auto create a container for it so that we know it's secure and you can't make a mistake. And then three is that we'll auto detect your application and build a Kubernetes deployment for it so that you can deploy it to Kubernetes in a reliable way. We're basically trying to reduce the burden on the developer from having to understand everything about Kubernetes to really understanding their domain of the application. Does that make sense? Yeah, and this kind of is like you mentioned Netflix. Early on, they were one of the pioneers in inside AWS, but they had the full hyper scalar developers. They had those early hardcore devs that are like unicorns. No one see how do you hire these people? They're just not many enough in the world. So the world's becoming, I won't say democratization, it's an overused word, but what we're getting to is, if I get this right, you're saying you're going to eliminate the heavy lifting, the boring mundane stuff. Yeah, even at Netflix, as great of a developers they had, they still built kind of a microservices or an application platform on top of AWS. And I think that's true of Kubernetes today, which if you go to a Kubernetes conference, you'll often see don't expose Kubernetes to developer. So tons of application platform starts to really solve that question. What do you expose to a developer when they want to consume Kubernetes? So I have to ask you, I know you do a lot of customer visits. That's one of the jobs that make you go out in the field that you like doing and working back with some of the customers that's been in the DNA of VMware for years. What is the big narrative with the customers? What's their pain point? Obviously the pandemic's shown them projects that are working and not working. They want to come out of it with a growth strategy. VMware is now an independent company. You guys got the platform. What are the customers doing with it? Well, I'll give you one example. I went out and I was chatting with the retailer had seen their online sales goes from 1 billion to like 3 billion during the pandemic. And they had been using kind of packaged shopping cart software before, like a basic online store that they bought and configured. And they realized they needed to get great at modern apps to keep up with customer demand. And so I would say in general, we've seen the drive, the need for modern apps and digital transformation is just really skyrocketing and everyone's paying attention to it. And then I think they're looking for a trusted partner and they're debating, do we build it all in house or do we turn to a partner that can help us build this above the cloud? And I think for the people that want an enterprise trusted brand, they'll have a lot of engineering talent behind it. There's been strong interest in Tanzu. And I think the big message we're trying to get out is that Tanzu can not only help you in your on-prem infrastructure, but it can also really help you on public cloud. And I think people are surprised by just how much. It's just in the common thread I see that that point is right on is that these companies that don't digitize their business and build an application for their customer are going to get taken away from by a startup. I mean, we're seeing, so if you don't have an app for that, you're out of business. I mean, this is like now, no, it's not like, maybe we should do the cloud. Oh yeah, let's get proactive. Pretty much it's critical path now for companies. So I'm sure you agree with that, what's the progress of most of the enterprises today? What percentage do you think are having this realization? I would say at least 70, 80% if not more are there now. And 10 years ago, I used to kind of have to tell stories like, some startups going to come along and they might disrupt you. And people kind of give you that like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. And now it's sort of like, hey, someone's already in our market with an API. Tell me how to build API first apps. We need to compete. And that's the difference in the strategic conversation kind of post pandemic and post, you know, the last 10 years. All right, final question for you because this is a great thread. Obviously the web, having a web interface is not good enough to your point. You got to have an application that they're engaging with, with all the modern capabilities because the needs there, the expectation for the customers there. What new things are you seeing beyond mobile that are coming around the pike for enterprises? Obviously, web to mobile, mobile to what? What's next? I think the thing that's interesting is there is a bigger push to say, more and more of what we do should be an API. Both internally, like, hey, other teams might want to consume some of these services as a well-formed API. I call it kind of like Stripe envy. Like you look at all these companies, they're like, hey, Stripe's worth $100 billion now because they built a great API. What about us? And so I've seen a lot of industries from automotive to course financial services and others are saying, what if we gave our developers internally great APIs and what if we also expose those APIs externally? We could get a lot, a more fast-moving business than the traditional model we might have had in the past. It's interesting, you know, commoditizing and automating away infrastructure or software or capable workflows is actually normal. And if you can unify that in a way that's just better. I mean, you have a lower cost structure, but the value doesn't go away, right? So a lot of, I think a lot of this comes down to, you know, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. I mean, that's how DevSecOps works. I mean, it's agile, it's faster, but you still have to achieve the value of the net is lower cost. What's your take on that? Well, I think you're dead right, John. And I think this is what was surprising about Stripe is it was possible before Stripe to go out as a developer and kind of pull together a backend that did payments. But boy, it was hard. And I think that's the same thing with kind of this tons of application platform and the developer experience focus is people are realizing they can't hire enough developers. So this is the other thing that's happened during the pandemic and the great resignation, if you will. The war for talent is on. And, you know, when I talk to a customer, like, we might be able to help you even 30% with your developer productivity. There's like one out of four developers you might not have to be able to have to recruit. They're all in. And so I think that API first model and the developer experience model are the same thing, which is like, it's not, doesn't have to just be possible, it should be excellent. Well, great insight, learning a lot. Of course, we should move to the CUBE API and we'll plug into your applications. We're here in the studio with our API James. Great to have you on. Final word, what's your take this big story for re-invent? If you had to summarize this year's re-invent going into 2022, what would you say is happening in this industry right now? You know, I'm just super excited about the EKS market and how fast it's growing. We're seeing EKS in a lot of places. But we're super excited about helping EKS customer scale. And I think it's great to see Amazon adopting that standard API from Kubernetes. And I think it's going to be, you know, just awesome to watch the creativity the industry is going to have around it. Well, great insight. Thanks for coming on. And again, we'll work on that CUBE API for you. Virtualization of the CUBE is here. We're virtual, which we could be in person and hope to see you in person soon. Thanks for coming on. You too, John. Thank you. Okay, CUBE's coverage of ADUS re-invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.