 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman, co-hosting for three days with John Troyer to my left, and happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni. To my right is Robert Christensen, who's the Vice President of Strategy in the Office of the CTO with the Hybrid IT Group. Great to see you. And sitting next to him is Kumar Shrikanti, SVP and CTO of that Hybrid IT Group at HPE. Kumar, great to see you. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. Thank you. Good to be back here. Hot off the presses, HPE had a big announcement today, really unveiling its full container platform. Kumar, maybe help us frame and understand what that is and why that launch here at the show. Thank you Stu. Good to see you, John. And it's very nice to be back on theCUBE. Yeah, we are very excited. We made an announcement at HPE Container Platform. As we said in the press release and the various conversations, this is built on proven technologies. HPE has acquired few companies in the past, which includes my company, Blue Data MapR. Blue Data has been in the container technology for more than five years. We have containers running specifically for the workloads like Big Data and AIML. And we brought those technologies together to give the customers the choice of 100% Kubernetes to run both stateful and stateless workloads under the same pane of glass. And we are very excited about this opportunity and we have actually talked to a lot of customers. And the most important, in addition to all of that is that we've also integrated the MapR technology, which is one of the very robust and sophisticated data store that gives you persistence for the containers. Yeah, Kumar, John and I were coming out of the keynote and saying, if you're brand new in this environment, oh my gosh, there's just so many projects and so many pieces, you know, when I think back, you know, who helped me along the way? One of the pieces you picked up was CTP, Cloud Technology Partner. And you're talking about specific applications. So, you know, really building those bridges to where customers are and helping them, give us if you could some of those key use cases where you're finding that cloud native philosophy and where customers are looking for HPE's help. Yeah, Robert and I spent a lot of time over the last few months internally and talking to the customers. Our thesis is that all the low hanging fruit applications have moved. It's actually the most difficult applications, both stateful and stateless applications. So, customers are asking and say, we want to standardize. We want to have a abstract platform and Kubernetes is it. And but we wanted to have a platform that gives us both hybrid opportunity. I want to be able to run the applications on-prem, when necessary, also on the public cloud. And I want to be able to have the same platform to run both stateful and stateless applications. You know, and that's a really interesting point because what Kumar's really looking at is that the only way that an enterprise has been using the path of modernization has been in public cloud trajectory, okay? And they really haven't had anything on-premises that gave them the set of services necessary to get parity between the two. And what we're finding and been involved with public cloud since 2010, right? So, hundreds and hundreds of engagements, the portion that they thought they were going to move to cloud is substantially dropped. The actual number of applications versus, now those are going to stay on-prem and we were looking at each other and we were saying, hey, this is a trifecta of opportunities with the containers coming in and the normalization of Kubernetes as the unified PAS platform, the abstraction of boiling all the way down to bare metal, right? And giving those clients that true native architectures where they are not having to pay what we consider excessive prices to be put in that world right there. And then allowing that modernization practice to happen. So, we got to start with that platform that container platform and do it in the way that the motion's going right now in the world today that's consistent with the public cloud. This is really important, that you have to have consistency in your development environments, whether in public or private. And that's what we believe is important. And so, Robert, you're seeing enterprises develop that, it sounds like you're seeing enterprises develop that operational experience and operational expertise, process development independent of where their workloads are running. Well, that's the goal. Okay. Well, right now, they're siloed. Right. Okay, you've got a public operating model and you've got a private operating model, right? And there's some people that try to stitch this stuff together, but it's really difficult. What we're looking to do is give a consistent plane across all, all right? And when you have a consistent plane, a control point across all, no matter where you put your clusters and a management frame around it, now you have the ability to build an operating model that's consistent to go forward. Okay, so we've been at this show for four years. I interviewed Joe Beta and Joe says, he said, look, you know, Kubernetes, it's not a magic layer. It does not all of a sudden say, add Kubernetes in it and everything works everywhere there. No, it's a very thin layer. And there's a lot of- I'm glad he said that. Washing my car from behind. To happen on top, right? If the problem just rubs up Kubernetes, I don't get better. So Kumar, help us understand kind of the HPE stack, if you were, and what you put together, and therefore it will be an enabler for customers and their applications. Thank you. That's a very, very well said. I joke that Kubernetes will wash your car and toast your bread and babysit. I think Joe is right, a lot of wisdom there. So what we found is, containers do not solve persistent storage problems, per se. So if I have a database running and my container goes away, we also notice that you want to make sure your endpoints are well-secured and you want to expose only things, whatever you want in the thing. We also found out that customers are more interested in applications, not giving me just the engine and the tires. I need to go from point A to point B. What BlueData has done is actually, it actually automates all your deployments of your AI ML applications. We announced that product in September. So what this container platform does is bring all these pieces together for the customers to be able to move to the deployment and not worry about whether I have tires or I have a engine and all. In addition, I would like to point out that I think Antonio talked about it, our SAML, we want to come to the customers and say, best possible lowest cost workload per application. This is why we think bare metals are very, very, very important. Running containers on bare metal will remove your VM tags. And we've been running bare metal containers in the BlueData for almost five years. One of the things I think I want to add to that because you were going to say, hey, deploying Kubernetes and just add a little bit on top of that and it's all fine, right? I thought that was a great comment. A lot of our clients are literally talking about container sprawl, right? They don't take anything to go to cncf.org and pull down to the Kubernetes distro, launch it out there and I've got a bunch of stuff running. They're popping up faster than all the shadow IT did when the public cloud started coming up, right? So you have this motion that's uncontrolled. And if you're an enterprise and you're in governance and you're trying to put your arms around a global infrastructure like that, you want to be able to put your arms around that. More importantly, you may have one group running 1.15, you may have another group running 1.8, you may have two other groups that have an older version that's in the production right now and you have them all independently running and then you need to maintain a multi-tenancy across all of that and then separate those. Okay, you have to have a system that does that and so the container, HPE container platform does that. This is a huge differentiating with a consistent data layer underneath. And that abstraction between the two and that governance around it is so much bigger than what we consider just Kubernetes on its own and that world-encumbered zone. Right, right. Well, to play on that, right? We used to say talk about Paz a lot, right? And a lot of words were spilled. What I love about some of the work here is that it comes from actual use, proven in production use cases, years of work, the rough edges, the cuts on your hands. So that's actually great, all open source also and contributed back to the community, also interesting. There is a, you know, but as folks, and there's many ways of getting Kubernetes, we're all Kubernetes, Kubernetes with pieces in this room right here. So, you know, an interesting set of technologies that you put together with, before ease of use and for governance and, you know, from the business layer, from the ops layer, from the dev layer, but there is a difference in speed sometimes of, you know, what the enterprise wants to move. Kubernetes releases every quarter, and, you know, the other projects release at their own pace. So in this open source philosophy, and the HPE as a partner with the, you know, Pointnext and, you know, support is your middle name, kind of. You know, how do you marry the speed of the cloud native technologies and all the open source collaboration with kind of the enterprise on the enterprise side and help them? Very good question. I think Robert pointed to this. One of the focus for us is we didn't want to provide, I think before the interview, you were talking about the curated Kubernetes. We are supporting 100% Kubernetes open source. So Robert says, I am a developer, I want 1.19 and Stu says, I want to have 1.17 because I'm stable on that. You can have both the clusters, along with the blue data, epic controller clusters, in the same pane of glass. Now you can run big data applications. You can run your cloud native, you can run your cloud native because you are on 1.19. So that's our goal. So when the CNCF releases newer versions, obviously that we will support it. And then as you pointed out, HPE support is the middle name. We have a Pointnext organization, we have a CTP. So we will help the customers and we will obviously support certain versions and make sure when somebody gives a call and help the customers and move forward. So we want to give that flexibility so that the developers can deploy whatever the native new versions that are coming up under the umbrella of HPE container platform. And it's this epic layer that's providing some of the multi-tenancy and governance and control. That's exactly right. So this, if you look at the CNCF roadmap, they're grid, right? And you see where Kubernetes lands in that one piece and there's all these surrounding piece like that. There's lots and lots of vendors here that have pieces of it, right? But it takes a system, right? And you know that. And then it takes an operating model around that. Then it takes a deployment and governance model around that, right? And then you have, so there's so much more that the enterprise requires to make this a legitimate platform that can be scaled. One thing that I would like to add is, I don't want to underplay the value of a persistent proven data layer that has been there for 10 years with the MAPR. MAPR runs some of the best and largest databases in the world. And we are now bringing those two together. It's a very, very profound and very, very useful for the enterprises. Robert, you were emphasizing the consistency that needs to happen. Explain to how that fits in with your partnerships with all the public clouds, because you hear a very different Kubernetes message if you go to the Google show versus the Azure versus AWS. And I see HPE at all of them. That's absolutely true. So I was the CTO with cloud technology partners, right? So I joined in 2013 and our whole world was how do we work with the three hyperscalers to bring some consistency across them, right? And you have operating models that are different for all three. I mean, what runs on AWS in a certain way is going to run differently on Azure, what's going to be running differently in GCP, right? So the tooling, all the pieces are different. You go pull that back on-prem now, you have a whole different conversation as well. So what we know is that you have to have a unification of behavioral control systems in place for wherever you deploy your clusters, wherever that's going to be like that. So what we know is, is that the tagging nomenclature, the tagging is key to all of this operational models, to all your tools are going to be using tagging. And when you go into existing environments, tagging will be inconsistent between even with inside AWS, will be inconsistent with the Azure. So you have to have a mapping. And so what we have as part of our GreenLake offering that would come in together with this is we have a unification tagging layer that bridges that gap and unifies that into a consistent nomenclature and control plane that gives you a basis to have an operating model. This only gets exposed until you start having 20, 50, 100, 200 clusters out there and everybody goes, how do I put my arms around this? So it's very important that that's just one piece of it. But operating model, operating model, operating model. I keep going back to this every time. There's a bunch of people here who can spin up managed clusters all day long and some of them doing better than others. But unless you surround it and you surround it with the stuff that he's talking about as a consistent data layer, persistent and a consistent management system of all these people's behaviors, you're going to get just an unbelievable out of control platform. Yeah, Kumar, I'd love your viewpoint as to just the overall maturity of this ecosystem and where does HPE see their role as to, we talked about data and everything that's changing. I heard a lot in the keynote this morning about some of the progress that's being made but I'd love your viewpoint there. Yeah, HPE is a legend in the valley. As you know, I mean, they've done, in fact, we all engineering calculators starts with HPE calculators. HPE recognize they missed a couple of transitions in the industry. And I think there's a new leadership with Robert and me and other key leaders recognizes this is a great opportunity for us. We see this window to help the customers make the modern digitalization, transition the applications, taking the monolithic applications, doing microservices. You can, in fact, Robert and I was talking to a bank and they told us they have 6,000 applications built. So far, they have microservice, four of them. And we have actually, what we believe with this application is you can actually run your monolithic applications in a container platform while you are figuring it out. So what we see is helping the customers make the digital transition and making sure that they have, they go down this journey. That's what we see. Kumar, Robert, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch. Thank you. And look forward to seeing your presence. Thanks for having and Q, I love Q. Yeah, thanks to everyone, look for it next time, okay? All right, thanks so much. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more in our three days, wall-to-wall coverage here at CubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. Thanks for watching The Cube.