 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Escape 19. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here in New York City for the first ever inaugural multi-cloud conference called Escape 2019. Escape, we're in New York, we're not escaping from New York, we're escaping from the cloud. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs, the custodian founders of Cockroach Database, welcome back, good to see you. Congratulations on your new role, new gig in there for a while. Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen you, John. I've jumped out of the data space in Indie Kubernetes and so, yeah, I landed at Cockroach Labs about a year ago and I'm having fun. It's interesting, the game is still the same, data is still the center of the value proposition with software. Data is now code, data is interacting with software, data control planes, data layers, data lakes, all of this is an evolution of stuff we were talking about back in the open source days at Hortonworks, the data is in motion, data in flight, data at rest. Data is continuing to be critical in automation, security, every single app. It's at the center of the big battle right now, right? There's this like, I just sense there's a larger battle going on for the platform right now and the platform is being battled out by these large public cloud providers and it's who can get compute, who can get actually people, residents in their cloud and data has always been the centerpiece of that and data has gravity, before it was on-prem so the battle was in-house at all these people and now it's like, how do we get this stuff to move on? We were talking before you came on camera and also we talk online a lot and have a lot of connected friends and the cloud native space but now that cloud 2.0 has arrived where it's enterprise, hybrid, people starting to get excited about that, you're seeing the re-platformization or refactoring, whatever word you want to use, a modern enterprise architecture that has the best of cloud native, that has the best of what the enterprise used to do with compute, like mini-computers and whatnot. Now packaged up in an operating model, this modernization trend is hitting every thing, note, developers, security. This is kind of where you're playing right now. You look at what Google's done with Spanner database and where that's all come from and these kinds of large scale data problems. Modernization's here, what's your take on this? I think it's just modernization, it's stuff we've been doing for a long time. I was talking to Steve Milani earlier. Steve's brilliant, right? And Steve's talking about, you know, 1992, we saw this transition to kind of client server. I've never seen anything like this trend. This transition and this modernization is much bigger than any of the other trends that we've been through. Back when we were talking before is the Hadoop game and we were talking modern data architecture. How do we actually transform the way we thought about data from these kind of, you know, single kind of stove pipes of data into larger data lakes and this sort of thing? That was the beginning. What we're seeing this time though is a massive, you know, transformation up and down this stack of which data is one huge massive piece of it. And as we know, man, data has gravity and it's at the center of this battle again. What's your definition of multi-cloud? We're the first ever multi-cloud conference. What is multi-cloud? You know, I got to ask this a fair amount. So as I was looking for speakers, I was like, what do you mean a multi-cloud conference? What does that even mean? There's a lot of people, like multi-cloud unbelievers. I think we already live in a multi-cloud world. I think hybrid cloud is just multi-cloud. You know, I talked to a lot of people through the CFP process for the conference. You know, I had guys who were running, you know, edge computing platforms, you know, talking to me about this. I'm like, well, if you look at it, it's just servers. They're just servers that are everywhere. And actually, how do we actually start to attach all this stuff? It's all multi-cloud. It's, you know, what is the cloud but a bunch of different servers that somebody else owns? You may own them, you may not. The challenge is going to be, how do we tie all that together? You know, how do we? I mean, computer history has proven, if anything, heterogeneous environments, multi-vendor. I mean, you go back and talk about, you know, the comment about the client server. I mean, that was a real threat to the mainframe. Internet working completely changed the game. At that time, PCs were exploding in growth and multi-vendor was a big dump buzzword. And that was the reality. You had to compete and service multiple vendors in an environment. Multiple clouds, just multiple vendors. John, and it's, you know, it's kind of, it's like the multi-cloud conference. And, you know, my friend, Joseph Jackson, Joseph and I have a lot of conversations about things, you know, and he's brilliant in terms of how he thinks about commercial open source and how these things are. And, you know, I really played around with changing the name of this to the open and independent cloud conference because that's really what this is about. It's about, how do we have a conversation in the open about how we open up the cloud? And, you know, I just got, I was a little frustrated with some of the conferences I went to because I think people are talking about this, but it's not lip service. It's just difficult to talk about it in a broader sense. I'm really glad you did this because I've been calling multi-cloud bullshit on theCUBE for over a year. Stu and I have debates about this. And, you know, I'll put in, okay, of course. But people who know what I mean know that I believe that multi-cloud reality of I have Amazon, I got Azure, I got, I mean, hell, if you upgrade Office 365, you have Azure. So that's another cloud. So yes, people have multiple clouds in their environment, but the foundational work is being done now. You guys are doing it. And that's what I was getting at. There's no multi-clouding going on and meaning sense of the seamless workloads, what HachiCorp's doing. So this is the foundational, what you guys are getting at in my mind, at least from my perspective, is a foundational conversation around what is the foundation of multi-cloud look like? And John, look, there is a technical equation here. I think a lot of people will argue the technical merits of what is multi-cloud. Is it even possible to combine networking and security? Those are really, really difficult problems to solve. At Cockroach Labs, to solve the database problem, to solve the data problem, to actually have, I could spin up a note of Cockroach on this laptop that's sitting next to you and have that participate in a database that spans multiple clouds. That's awesome. But there's a whole other side of this conversation, John, around what does it mean for my skills in my organization? What does it mean for the financial side of things? So legal. And so I think we're all dealing with a lot of these multi-cloud kind of concepts. We're just addressing them yet. And so it's complex. Well, first of all, it's fun too, it's complex. But what innovation is complex? But here's the thing. Dave and I were joking around Cloud 2.0. And we picked that term out. We were talking about Cloud 2.0. Mainly because I remember during Web 2.0, it was just everyone, what is Web 2.0? It creates such a debate. And so to goof on Web 2.0, we said Cloud 2.0. But what we mean is that it's changing, right? I'll give you an example. I mean, to me, Cloud 2.0 or multi-cloud is having a fully horizontal scalable infrastructure on demand, elastic at resource, with domain specialty application development that takes advantage of data and machine learning for a domain-specific context. And then having an addressable data layer on top of that. Yes. That's what you need is multi-cloud now. And being able to service your customers no matter where they are. And unfortunately, the public com providers don't have full coverage across the whole planet. So we inherently live in this multi-cloud world. If you want to deploy an application today, I'm sorry, but the world is your audience. There's no segmenting your app to just New York, right? And so how do you actually service customers when they're coming at you from all over the planet? It's another challenge that we have. And fortunately, I want to add to your Cloud 2.0 conversation that it is a world of hybrid and multi- and multi-region and single region. And it's the evolution between these different kind of flavors of this, such a, I feel is the emerging trend that's happening. Categories are changing. Network management becomes observability. Configuration management becomes automation. The old database becomes a different kind of database for you, you know, data protection, cyber protection. This redefining moments here where white spaces are becoming larger categories. I mean, look at observability. Yeah. Public, it bought. Look at what Google did over the past like 10, 12 years. And look at the startups that are now out there that are kind of doing this really innovative stuff. We have light stuff here. Cockroach is another great example. What the up-found team is doing. And so like, people have been through this. From a data point of view, we couldn't agree more. I mean, I can spin up an instance of RDS, Postgres, and it's going to be a single instance that's going to live in one region. That's going to service one bit of a cloud in one corner of the world. The cloud and this massive distribution of stuff, you have to inherently start over when you're building these technologies. And that's why the CNCF has come about, right? There's a fundamentally different approach. You're at the CNCF. I love those guys. And we're going to go to CubeCon. But one of the things that I was talking with the Hashicarp co-founder earlier today, he was talking about workflows. And I was talking about workloads. And so I think the conversation is still technical and geeky. But if you just abstract out all the nerd talk and geek talk and say, what's the workflow? And what's the workload? You go, okay, no other buzzword should be talked. You got to go on stage. So you got to go, Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing and Cockroach Labs, good friend of the Cube, and part producer of this show with Mike Harrow and the team, Escape 19. First, inaugural multi-cloud conference. We'll be back with more after this short break.