 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next on AIR20. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud Next 20 on AIR. Of course, last year, we were all in-person in San Francisco. This year, it's an online experience. It's actually spanning many weeks. And this week, when we're releasing the theCUBE interviews, talking about application modernization. Happy to welcome back to the program. Two of our CUBE alumni. First of all, I've got Aparna Sinha, who is the director of product management. And joining her is Pali Bhatt, who is the vice president of product and design, both with Google Cloud, Aparna and Pali. Welcome back, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu, thrilled to be here. Well, so it goes without saying that 2020 has had quite a lot of changes. Pali, if I could start with you. Obviously, there has been a lot of discussion as what is the impact of the global pandemic, the ripple in the economy on cloud. So I would love to hear a little bit, what you're hearing from your customers, what that impact has been on you and your business. Yes, Stu, thank you for asking. As I look at our customers, what's been most inspiring for me to see is how organizations and the people in those organizations are coming together to help each other during this unprecedented event. And one of the things I wanted to highlight is, as we all adjust to this sort of new normal, there are two things that I keep seeing across every one of our customers. Better operational efficiency with the focus on cost saving is something that's a business imperative and has grown in urgency. And the second bit is an increased focus on agility and business innovation. In the current atmosphere where digital has truly gone from being one of the channels to being the channel, we're seeing our customers respond by being more innovative and reaching their customers in the way that they want to be reached. And that's been, for me personally, very inspiring to see. And we're thrilled at Google Cloud to be a part of helping our customers in this journey. In terms of our business itself, we're seeing tremendous momentum around our app modernization business because it plays directly into these two business imperatives around operational efficiency, cost saving, and of course, business innovation and agility. In Q2 of 2020, we saw more than a hundred thousand companies use our application modernization platform across GKE, Anthos, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and our DevOps tools. So we've been just tagged with the response of how customers are using our tools in order to help them run their businesses, operate more efficiently, and be more innovative on behalf of their customers. So we're seeing customers use everything from building mission critical applications to then securing, migrating, and then operating our services. And we've also seen that customers get tremendous benefit. We've seen up to a 35% increase simply by using our auto migration tools. And we've also seen an up to 75% improvement to all of the automation and replatforming that they can do with our app modernization platform. It's been incredible. What I do want to do though is have Aparna chime in on some of the complexity that these customers are seeing and how we're going about trying to address that. Aparna? Yes, so to help our customers with the application modernization journey, Google Cloud really offers three highly differentiated capabilities. Stu, the first one is really providing a consistent development and operations experience. And this is really important because you want the same experience, regardless of whether you're running natively in Google Cloud or you're running across clouds or you're running hybrid or you're running at the edge. And I think this is a true unique differentiator of what we offer. Secondly, we really give customers and their developers industry leading guidance. And this is particularly important because there's a set of best practices on how you do development, how you run these applications, how you operate them in production for high reliability, a exceptional security stature, and for the maximum developer efficiency. And we provide the platform and the tooling to do that so that it can be customized to a specific customer's needs and their specific place on that modernization journey. And then the third thing, and I think this is incredibly important as well is that we provide a data-driven approach, a data-driven optimization and benchmarking approach so that we can tell you where you are with regard to best practice and then help you move towards best practice no matter where you're starting. Well, thank you, Aparna and Polly. Definitely resonates with what we're hearing, customers need to be data-driven and there's the imperative now that digital movement. Polly, last year at the show, of course, Anthos was really the top talk of the conference. The year's gone by, we know things move really fast. So if you could, probably don't have time to get all of the news, but share with us the updates, what differentiated this year along from a news standpoint? Yeah, so we've got a tremendous set of improvements to the platform. And one of the things that I wanted to just share was that our customers as they actually migrate onto the cloud and begin their modernization journeys and their digital transformation programs, what we're seeing over and over is those customers that start with the platform as opposed to an individual application are set up for success in the future. That platform, of course, is Anthos where your application modernization journey begins. In terms of updates, we're going to share a series of updates in our blog posts, et cetera. I just want to highlight a few. We're sharing there a beta availability of Anthos for bare metal. It's one of the things that our customers have been asking about. And now our customers get to run Anthos on-prem and at the edge without the need for a hypervisor. What this does is help organizations minimize unnecessary overhead and ultimately unlock all of the new cloud and edge use cases. The second bit is we're announcing the GA of our speech-to-text on-prem capability. So this is our first hybrid AI capability. So customers like Iron Mountain get to use hybrid AI. So they have full control of their infrastructure and have control of their data. So they can implement data residency and compliance while still leveraging all of Google Cloud's AI capabilities. The third service is Anthos Identity. Again, this extends existing identity solutions so that you can seamlessly work on Anthos workloads. Again, this is going to be generally available for on-premise customers and beta for Anthos on AWS. And you're going to see more and more customers be able to leverage their existing identity investments while still getting the consistency that Anthos provides across environments. And the last one that I'd like to highlight is Anthos Attach clusters, which lets customers bring any Kubernetes conforming cluster on to Anthos and still take advantage of the advanced capabilities that Anthos provides, like declarative configurations and service automation. So one of the customers I just want to call out is Kohl's, which has built its entire hybrid cloud strategy on Anthos. They began with the platform first and now we're seeing a record number of customers on Kohl's.com who are able to take advantage of Anthos. Same thing with Macquarie Bank, played, there's a number of use cases. I am particularly excited about Major League Baseball. I'm a big fan of baseball and Major League Baseball is now using Anthos for their 2020 season in all of their stadiums. For processing a large amount of data, Anthos gives them the capability to get those capabilities in stadiums. Very, very excited about all of those. Okay, quick follow up on that, Anthos Attach clusters, because it was one of the questions I had last year. Google Cloud has partnerships with VMware for what they're doing, Red Hat and Pivotal also is part of the VMware families and they have their own Kubernetes offerings. So should I be thinking of this as a management capability similar to like what Tandu does or maybe Azure Arc or is it just a kind of interoperability piece? How do we understand how these multiple Kubernetes fit together? Yeah, so what we've done with Anthos is really taken the approach that we need to help our customers automate and manage their infrastructure. So specifically what Anthos Attach clusters gives our customers is they can have any Kubernetes cluster. As long as it's Kubernetes conformant, they can benefit from all of the things that we provide in terms of automation. One of the challenges of course, as you know, is configuring these very, very large instances involves a lot of hand crafting today. We can provide declarative configuration so you automate all of that away. So think of this as config is code, think of this as infrastructure is code, management is code. We are providing that service automation layer on top of any Kubernetes conformant cluster with Anthos now. Great, all right. It's app modernization week. So Aparna, maybe bring us in aside, you were talking about customers and what they're doing to modernize. What's new that they should be aware of this year? Yeah, so Stu, first of all, our mission is really to accelerate innovation in every organization through making their developers more productive as well as automating their operations. And this is something that is resonating even more in these times. Specifically, I think the biggest news that we have is really around how we are going to help companies get started with application modernization so that they can maximize the impact of their modernization efforts. And to do this, we are introducing what we're calling the Google Cloud Application Modernization Program or Google Camp for short. And Google Camp has three pieces. It has an assessment, which is really data-driven and fact-based. It's a baseline assessment that helps organization understand where they are in terms of their maturity with application modernization. Secondly, we give them a blueprint. This is something that is, it encapsulates a specific set of best practices, proven best practices from development to security to operations, and it's something that they can put into practice and implement immediately. These practices, they cover the entire application lifecycle from writing the code to the CI CD to running it and operating it for maximum reliability and security. And then the third aspect, of course, is the application platform. And this is a modern platform, but also extremely extensible. And as you know, it spans across clouds. And this enables organizations to build, run and secure and, of course, manage both legacy as well as new applications. And the good news, of course, here is, this is a time-tested platform. It's something that we use internally as well for our Cloud ML services, our BigQuery Omni-Service capability, as well as for Apigee Hybrid and many more over time. So with Google Camp, we've really covered all aspects of the application lifecycle and we think it's extremely important for enterprises to have this capability. Yeah, so Aparna, when you talk about the extensibility, I would expect that Google Cloud Run is one of the options there to help give us a bridge to get to serverless if that's where a customer is looking. Am I right on that? That's great. That's right, Stu. The Camp program is holistic and it brings together many of our capabilities. So Cloud Code, Cloud CI CD, Cloud Run, which is our serverless offering and also includes GKE and Anthos best practices because customers for their applications are usually using multiple platforms. Now, in the case of Cloud Run in particular, I want to highlight that there's been a lot of interest in the serverless capability during this last few months in particular, I think disproportionate amount of interest in serverless and container native. In fact, according to the CNCF's 2020 state of cloud native development report, you might have seen that they noted that 2.7 million cloud native developers are using Kubernetes and 4 million are using serverless architectures or cloud functions and that about 60% of back-end developers are now using containers. So this just points to the usage that was happening already and is now really disproportionately accelerated. In our case, we've worked with several customers. The New York State Department and Media Market Saturn are two that are really excellent stories. With the New York State Department, they had a unemployment claims crisis. There was a lot of volume that was difficult for their application to handle. And so we worked with them to re-architect their application as a set of microservices on Google Cloud and our public sector team teamed up with them to roll out a new unemployment website in record time. That website was able to handle a 1,600% increase in web traffic compared to a typical week. And this is very much due to the DevOps tooling that we provided and we work with them on. And then with Media Market Saturn, this is really an excellent example and a MIA-based example of a retailer that was able to achieve an 8x increase in speed as well as a 40% cost reduction. And these are really important metrics in these times in particular because for a retailer in the COVID-19 crisis to be able to bring new applications and new features to the hands of their customers is ultimately something that impacts their business and is extremely valuable. Yeah, I think you bring up a really great point, Aparna. When I traditionally think of application modernization, maybe I've been in the space too long, but it is simplicity is not the first thing that comes to mind. As Polly pointed out, right now, there's an imperative people need to move fast. So I want to throw it out to both of you. How is Google trying to make sure that in these uncertain times that customers can move fast and that with all these technology options that it can be just a little bit simpler? Yeah, I think I'll just start off by saying, the first thing we've done is build all of our services from the ground up with automation, simplicity, and agility in mind. So we've designed for development teams and operations teams to be able to take these solutions and get productive with them right away, right? In addition, we understand that some of our largest customers actually need a dedicated program where they can actually assess where they are and then map out a plan for incremental improvement so they can get on their journey to application modernization but do it with the highest ROI. And that was Google camp that Aparna talked about. Ultimately at Google Cloud, our mission of course is to accelerate innovation in every organization to both developer velocity improvements but also giving them the operational automation that we talked about with our application modernization platform. So we are very excited to be able to do this with every organization. Great, well Aparna, I'll let you have the final word is the application modernization week here at Google Cloud Next online. You can have the final takeaway for customers. Well, thank you, Stu. You know, we are extremely passionate about developers and we want to make sure that it is easy for anyone anywhere to be able to get started with development as well as to have a path to accelerated path to production for their applications. So some of what we've done in terms of simplicity which as you said is extremely important in this environment is to really make it easy to get started. And some of the announcements are around build packs and the integration of cloud code our plugins to the development environment directly into our serverless environment. And that's the type of thing that gets me excited and I think I'm very passionate about that because it's something that applies to everyone. You know, regardless of where they are or what type of person they are they can get started with development and that can be a path to economic renewal and to growth, not just for companies but for individuals. And that's a mission that we're extremely passionate about at Google Cloud. Well, Aparna and Polly, thank you so much for sharing all the updates. Congratulations to the team and definitely great to hear about how you're helping customers in these challenging times. Thank you for having us on, Stu. Thank you, Stu, great to see you again. All right, stay tuned for more coverage. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.