 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at Nutanix Next 2018. Happy to welcome the program. Brian Stevens, who's the CTO of Google Cloud, had on the program many times. Brian, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Glad to be here. I have a first time guest, Ricardo Tanez, who's the SVP of development at Nutanix. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you for being here. Thanks for being here. All right, so Ricardo, you've only been with Nutanix for three months. I believe this is probably your first .NEXT. Yes, it is. So it gives a little bit about your role and what brings you to us today. So I'm responsible for some of the core data path and Prism products. So, you know, a lot of it has to do with how do we end up delivering value to our customers and actually end up having predictable, scalable HCI solutions. So that's really what I'm focused on and focusing on sort of improving our ability to deliver products more quickly. All right, so Brian, last year, you know, Diane Green was, you know, up on stage talking about the partnership and what was happened here. See Google at the show. Obviously, you know, tight their partnership for Nutanix, but you know, gives the update on that. They're downgrading. Yeah. Not at all. Not at all. Yeah, I wish we had enough time to kind of get into the weeds on some of the stuff you're working on, but tell us what brings you here and what kind of stuff you're poking at these days? Geez, I think I met Neil Potty a couple of years ago. Just at the very beginning of like, trying to find sort of the intersection between Google Cloud and Nutanix. I mean, Nutanix is largely redefining what IT looks like on premise. We believe we're doing that in cloud and they're just, you really just want to eliminate the impedance between on premise and public cloud. And so the work with Nutanix is I'll be like, what can we do to actually make it more seamless for users that want to use core cloud technology? Yeah, Brian, you're one of those people that we would say have enterprise DNA in what they've done in their background. People on the outside will always say, well, you know, Google, it's Google-y. It's, you know, it's too smart for us. Enterprise DNA is still sexy. Yeah. I mean, look, there's a lot of enterprises out there. And, you know, while yes, the, you know, there's startups. So maybe we talk a little bit about what that means inside Google and you want to keep working on. Oh my gosh, yeah, it was quite a pivot for Google. And it was, you know, amazing technology, but the customer that you were serving with Google Cloud was already inside of Google. You were serving search and YouTube and ads and, you know, so you end up being a really technically but close relationship. And so with enterprise, there's a couple of things. It's been a cultural transformation inside of Google. It's been obviously working with, you know, enterprise customers globally and building that go-to-market model and motion that you can still have it. We want a really technical engineered partnership with our customers. So it's not a vendor relationship. So building all that out, we think we're unique with that. And then the other part of it, I think you were alluding to it earlier before we went on, Mike, was just around enterprise has an increased set of requirements on what we deliver to them from a capabilities perspective, from a security aspect, from a telemetry aspect, and then it's all like, how do we actually slipstream into their process rather than just redefine everything? So to us, that's a big part of what our enterprise pivot's been like for the last three to four years. So Ricardo, you have some background at Google. What brought you to Nutanix? What appeal to you? Well, you know, more than anything else, I think Nutanix has set them up themselves up to basically take that experience that has in the enterprise and translate that into the cloud. So when I was at Google, I actually worked on the Google search appliance, which was Google's first. I remember that. Do you remember that? I had one. The little yellow boxes, sometimes blue boxes. And that was a great experience. So I'm really happy to hear that Brian talk about the transformation that has happened within Google. But, you know, being at Nutanix, the ability to take that experience very close with the workloads that customers are running and then being able to work with a partner like Google and actually be able to have hybrid clouds where internal private cloud plus having public cloud providers, that really ends up changing the game for a lot of enterprises. You know, Brian, one of the things we're struggling with as an industry is, you know, it's application mobility, data where it goes. Nutanix has been talking about really hybrid cloud from their standpoint. We've talked with you before about where Kubernetes fits into this. Application portability, you just made an acquisition today, was announced, Velostrada. Give us your state on where that, those things added to the big gnarly topic, you know. It was just more friction, like public cloud offers, you know, great capability that's going to be used not necessarily completely instead of, but in companion to, you know, application services. But there was still that friction around, okay, in the early incarnation, it was like, okay, it's VMware in this environment or KVM in this environment, and then it's a whole nother AMI kind of model here. So the ability to use it, there was a tax. And then there also wasn't that portability and that lightweight aspect that you'd want from an application containerization. I mean, you want what you have on your phone. I mean, you want that ability to sort of install apps anywhere. And cloud and IT infrastructure should be exactly the same way. So that's a big part of our investment in containerization. You know, Google, back when I was at Red Hat, was, you know, investing in C groups back when I was at Colonel way back then to kind of build that first incarnation of containers and Linux. Along comes Docker to standardize that. I mean, it's an amazing gift to the world. And then Kubernetes is, we're just moving up the stack like on how do you orchestrate it. So sure, like companies like Velostrad are like really interesting because you have, you know, beyond having, you know, a Kubernetes platform everywhere. Yeah, we'll say it's the de facto, but that doesn't mean everybody's running it. And so you're still running on existing systems, you know, largely kind of virtualized. And Velostrad is like a technology leader in being virtualization of this type to Google cloud or other clouds. And then even more so, the technology they have to bring that to containers. So they help you do that migration transformation process. And I think that's really important for IT organizations. Ricardo, you want to comment on some of the hybrid cloud migration stuff and the potential we're really interested in? So we have our calm product, which allows us to actually end up taking workload and moving it to, for instance, Google cloud or eventually XI cloud, and then moving that workload back. So having that sort of mechanics, sort of inside and outside gives it maximum flexibility. And that's a lot of power for IT to have, right? Deciding where to, is best actually run their workloads and be as efficient as possible. So as we look at the calm, we look at Google cloud, just the overall picture. You know, if you're enterprise, you're looking at Google and you're saying, man, Google runs at two different speeds. One is 12 factor micro services, Kubernetes functions. And then the other side is that, you know, some people just want to VM. They just want a cloud instance and how to make that simple. So let's talk about this relationship. How does Nutanix come together with Google who runs at two different speeds to make Google cloud more consumable to the average enterprise? Well, you know, we're going to talk a little bit more about it later, but the fact that basically, we're going to be able to deploy XI within Google cloud with Nest's HV and then allow our customers that are basically doing standard workloads to migrate their jobs over to a Google cloud offering. And then as Brian will point out, that basically creates opportunities for them to be able to avail themselves of other capabilities that Google has. So it's not altogether an instant move. You have to rewrite, reorient all your apps, it's an ability to kind of do that small migration if you want to. But you have that capability of being able to go back and forth in terms of what your workloads are. Brian, I want to get your viewpoint on just some of the changing roles that are happening in our industry. We were talking that, some of the interviews we've been doing today, it's people talking about infrastructure and code. There was big hackathon at this event for the first time and they sold out with like over 14 groups and everything like that. This is a show that started out with people talking about storage and now we're talking about invigilable data centers and clouds and all of those things. What are you seeing out in the marketplace? What are some of the challenges and opportunities you're hearing from customers these days? I mean, it depends on which customers, right? Like, I mean, which region of the world and what their business looks like. And I mean, I think we all know the holy grail. I mean, infrastructure as code is an implementation, but I think what we know that what you really desire is the ability for reproducibility, the ability to sort of not have state in the IT process. You want to be able to recreate things anywhere, recreate a whole application blueprint internally on public cloud, tear it down, recreate it. There's no other way to do that without code. And so what's, it sort of comes from sort of that SRE model that Google invented is that what if you didn't have an IT department and what if you had software engineers that were responsible for IT function? What would that look like? And that's where all of a sudden you realize everything's APIs and code. So I think it's, I think that's interesting and that's sort of where you want to get to but it's then like, how do you bridge that? Because a lot of people aren't software developers in IT departments. All right, so here's my follow-up because when I go to the Kubernetes show and I talk to the users there, 95% of them had built their own stack and why did they do that? Because they were head of all the platforms and then I come into the Nutanix show and they're like, oh, you know, TensorFlow and functions and all that stuff. We're going to put an easy button and make it easy. That, I need to take all of these tools and open source and put it together versus the platform and the easy button. How do you write, is this just the early adopters and the majority or? That's the open source world, right? I mean, think about what's great about open source is not just creating sort of a venue for collaboration and developers, it's creating access for end users. And so some of the best companies in the world have been built on a DIY model of people just taking open source and integrating it and making the recipe that they want. And so I think you get that whole sort of spectrum and you aren't forced down this model of here's a cut product. Oh, and it happens to be based on open source but you always have to use technology this way and open source gives them the freedom to do it as they want. We just need to make sure that we bridge it so that there's not anybody left behind. That everybody should be able to use the power of Kubernetes and that means making things super easy to use and the integration of Nutanix, we think is a huge part of just sort of making you use that technology stack in a way that's seamlessly operated for an audience like this. So a lot of the debate and questions around Kubernetes is how far should it go? Should it be on, should it go as far as being an opinionated pass? Should it just be a container platform? Where does it, what does it start and end? My opinion? Yeah, that would be awesome. Well, I think the way, I think the way the industry started was obviously there were no passes and then we built on a bunch of Red Hat and Google App Engine and Aroku and what happened is those are interesting but you're right, they are overly opinionated. So you were left either picking a pass and you got to change everything to do it this way and it's great because it delivered value of managed service when everything fit in that model or you had to, you got next to nothing. You got a straight IaaS platform and then you got to do all the rest. So what we've been doing at Google is tearing that apart and building that architecture from the ground up where you opt into the level that you want. If you want to be able to use IaaS and the features of IaaS, you use that. If you want to step up and just use containers on IaaS, you can use containers on IaaS. If you want to step up and use Kubernetes orchestration, you can do that. If you want to step up and manage everything as services then that stacks on top of Kubernetes with Istio. And if you want to be full on and put in a developer workflow that always says as you do deploys this way then that stacks on top. So I think you're going to get away from this, you know, false dichotomy of a choice of here or here and you're going to all of a sudden get this architectural layering cake that lets you opt into what you want and have consistency, IT consistency all the way through it. I mean, you know, I used to have a startup that was focused on Hadoop as a service. And, you know, one of the things was that basically you didn't have this layering, right? It was, you know, you take the whole stack or you take nothing. And I think the strategy that Google has employed with Kubernetes is just brilliant. You know, to kind of work your way up and basically get people at different levels to be involved. And, you know, there is a duty to yourself folks and they should be allowed to and empowered to actually do the things that they want to do. And then there are other people who want to have more composed environment. And so we can actually bring that to them as well. And I think that's brilliant. And basically, you know, very early on while Google used a lot of open source internally it wasn't a strong sort of part of the open source environment. And so I've just enjoyed watching the evolution of Google instead of leading open source movement. So it's been fantastic. And I'm right there with you. You know, give them at every level. Ricardo, one of the questions coming into this week is people want to know the upstate update of what's happening with Zai. Can you speak about where we are with that and the relationship with Google? What should we be looking for for the rest of this year? Well, I can't really talk about that. But, you know, we are working very closely with Google and we'll talk a little about that at our talk later today. But I won't comment on anything to do with Zai. So that gives me the opportunity to ask another controversial question about Kubernetes and getting both of your opinions on it. So, you know, there's religions and open source, there's religions in enterprise IT. One of which is DevOps. And you look at what companies like Netflix have done with containerizing Java applications and running those legacy Java applications and their container platform. Enterprises are looking at that stuff and thinking, you know what, can I continue to rise my monolithic application, put it on top of Kubernetes and get, drive more efficiency out of my operations from portability to being able to stack up applications in public cloud. General opinions, monolithic applications and is that a good thing, bad thing and different that shouldn't, wrong plate, wrong tool, wrong. No, I think it's just that there's no, there's no like one size even for like what a monolithic app looks like. Like we don't really have a really proper definition of what it is. But I think people do feel it that all of a sudden like Kubernetes means a rewriting, container means a rewriting and actually it doesn't. Because apps are usually sort of separated from the OS already and so what they're doing is marrying the libraries of the OS and containers allows them to do that but just get a higher degree of portability and then with Kubernetes orchestration. So it really depends on more around what's the machine resources that that monolithic app needs and are those machine resources still available in a containerized environment? In most cases the answer is yes. Now the most interesting thing is what's the escape hatch? Because you can't have a monolithic app that your company, say it's on a mainframe, say it's in the case of something that will not containerize and shouldn't because it's working as designed and no use touching it. But that should still participate in the application architecture of the future and that's why Istio and services are so important. So even if you can't change your runtime stack you still need to be able to put a services layer in an API in front of that monolithic service and you'll have a visibility of a service mesh inside of that environment. So now IT sees it just looks like a black box IT service. It doesn't really matter to them that it's not running on the next generation stack because they can still depend on its services. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I look at what Kubernetes offers and containers as sort of an on-ramp to creating services, the on-ramp to actually taking that monolithic application assuming that they're resources and take a step up in terms of the architectures that you can build around it and then be able to break apart that monolithic application doesn't happen all at once. It's sort of the stepping stones that you can take. So it's a very powerful model for enablement for people who have stuff that they haven't been able to make the most value out of because of maybe the application's been around for a while. Now they can actually end up putting it in an environment where they can actually make the most of it and then work on how they're going to end up slowly sort of pulling it apart and actually making it more service oriented. All right, Ricardo and Brian, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the update and look forward to seeing more throughout the show and further in the year. Be sure to check out thecube.net where you'll not only find all of this information but theCUBE is really excited to say that we will be at the Google Cloud show in July. So for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of day one of two days of live coverage. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.