 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPSCOT as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, everyone. It's the Kube's live coverage here in Amsterdam for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe. I'm John Furrier, host of the Kube, Rob Streche, Kube Analyst. We've been breaking down all the actions. Day two, continuation of open source, meets enterprise platform engineering, cloud native, distributed computing edge. Everything's happening right here since we're all the actions happening and our next guest is Brad Moll, Senior Director of DevOps and Developer Relations Ecosystems with Dell. Long title, but very important because you've got a lot going on. Welcome back. I do. Thank you guys. Glad to be here. So DevOps obviously is changing, evolving. DevSecOps has been there. It's now a whole other level emerging platform engineering. I'll notice in your title you added developer relations ecosystem. And that's important because you guys are making great strides in this area of Dell as platform engineering goes mainstream. That's a big story here. Yeah, totally. For us, people keep talking about DevOps is dead. I hear that around a lot and it can't be dead because DevOps is an operating model. Platform engineer is a title. It's a way of operating within that world. We're seeing this transformation happening right now at this conference. What's the big booth strategy you guys have here? I noticed a lot of action. You guys got a podcasting station. I think it's awesome. A lot of media. You guys are popping out media. What are some of the stories that's being told there? What's the conversations? Yeah, I know. So our strategy with our booth this year was really to have multiple interactive areas for our end users. We wanted people to understand Dell has a lot to offer. We have demo stations talking about all our infrastructure as code, all of our container modules that are helping with persistence and security and other things. We have hands-on labs in the booth. We just partnered with a company called Instruct. And we actually have hands-on labs in the booth real-time that spin up in the cloud. We also have a podcasting booth, as you mentioned, because we have a great DevRel team that we've built out over the past six to nine months. And we wanted to make sure that at a conference like this we can capture all of the people in the industry and just have open conversations. What's working? What's not? What's out there? Actually, very similar to you guys. But doing it more from a Dell perspective, trying to get the community angle. And last of all, we have an awesome swag game. And I'm only saying that because the end users are telling us that. I think later on you'll see that in your swag segment. Well, we'll certainly be evaluating it in great detail. I'm biased. Stack ranking of course. Savannah is the ultimate judge of the event. We'll see this. But I think what you hit on a really important thing there, DevOps is not dead. It's a platform engineering is a title. And I think what's interesting and what, you know, I mean, we've known each other for over a decade now. And I think I look back on it and go, we've seen the market go through these waves. Everything that's old is new again. And I think we see things coming back on prem and repatriation, having been at AWS and seeing what was going on in hybrid back then. And that was years ago. Now I'm seeing a lot of people saying, Hey, I at least need to bring my Dev and test back on. And I'm going to build here deploy many. And I think that seems that build wants deploy many is a theme we've had over the last decade, at least. What are you guys seeing from the customers when they're coming into booth and what they're asking? Yeah, it's a combination right now of cost optimization is number one. I mean, that's one of the biggest conversations in FinOps and all the other angles in the industry. There's a discussion that's basically, where should I place my workload based on multiple metrics and cost is one of the leading ones. Hey, is it actually cheaper to bring it on prem? You know what, for a lot of people, it actually is. But the reason it's actually becoming more cost optimized is because the technology around those workloads is starting to work better. Automation, right? Abstraction layers like Kubernetes and even virtualization. All of these technologies are hitting this inflection point that allow you to operate at scale without needing 100 people to run 10,000 servers anymore. You can do it with less people with more things. Yeah, well, the thing I would have questioned that, Robin, your question is, did it ever leave on prem? So there's there's a migration that's been happening. Test has been on the cloud. And but a lot of stuff hasn't left on prem. Yeah. So I mean, there's only a few companies you can point to that have moved all their stuff to the cloud. Capital one, this the Amazon always showcases all those, but there's still an on prem DNA. They're just running cloud ops. Yeah. So now if you believe that to be true with edge around the corner, the on prem cloud edge equation now is but that is now in this community, not fully baked out yet, but outside of here, it's multi cloud, right? Super cloud is exactly right. Super cloud is happening. We cover that extensively on the Cuban Silicon angle. So you got cloud proven model, yeah, cost optimization, turn the lights off before you go to bed, you know, make sure they're not leaving open, open S3 buckets, cloud optimization. Yeah, on Prem's retooled, setting up for the edge. Yeah, this is back to the workload question. So the question that I have for you guys is, what's that look like from an ops standpoint? So platform engineering becomes that standard new IT, I call it. Yep. What happens next? Because the architecture is now cloud enabled. Yeah. What happens next? So I guess when I look at it, I'm going to go back one step for a second. When you look at virtualization and we packaged a OS and an application side of a VM, that was not a workload oriented abstraction. It was a hardware oriented abstraction that you work bottoms up. When you get in the containers, containers is way closer to that pipeline CICD mentality where you can actually package up your app in a standard. Now you can lifecycle manage the app from an IT ops perspective, very different paradigm than virtual machines. What's beyond that? That's the trick. Is it awesome? Which is now one of the biggest things out there. I think right now it's way too early to say because it's very specific in the use cases, but there is going to be a market for it. Outside of containers and maybe the Watson market, I don't, I mean FAS and serverless, I would actually ask you guys, I'm not seeing as much of that as I used to. Yeah. I think serverless has definitely taken a dip down. I think people are looking at it going the costs associated with doing it and building that way. And most of the people who are building for serverless were building containers anyways and using container images to go and launch those server. So I think it, we were, I was talking at a bar the other night with a VP of development and he was looking at how he moves, he's moving exactly what you're saying. He's going on that journey from virtualization to now containers and microservices and they're starting to rebuild and they do IoT devices. So you start to look at it and he's trying to figure out what lives where and when and why and how. And that the how part, he came here this week to figure out the how. Yeah, that's an answer. And I think that's probably the type of person who's stopping by the booth to talk to you guys. 100%. Yeah, that's you hit on the multi-cloud piece, which actually ties in here because we are seeing a lot of customers coming to us in general, whether it's here or at other events or whatnot. They are choosing multiple public cloud providers for a reason. One's better at AIML, one's better at more cost effective for test dev. And at the same point they still have on-prem. And what they're telling us is they have to have three operations teams just to manage across all that. And they're looking back to your point you're making. How do we standardize the control plane from a container, Kubernetes, workload deployment, application mobility, security? How do we hit on all those things? But do that in a standardized way across the multi-cloud. That's exactly where Dell is looking to help people. Yeah, it was interesting. It just made me think about the whole Broadcom, VMware, EU debate because they're like trying to shut down that acquisition. I haven't heard one conversation around VMware and Broadcom being choking competition. When in reality everyone wants to modernize with containers and Kubernetes from VM. I can see why you have such great traction in your booth because that market is evolving, modernizing in real time, to containers and Kubernetes. That's not virtual machines. No, but VMs will never die. So we've got to be careful about that. Virtualization has a huge part of the market. It's basically traditional apps that will never get refactored to cloud native microservices will always be in VMs. I mean, hell, I talked to a customer and user who was putting Kubernetes on mainframe, which blew my mind. But if you start to think about it, the greening of everything, well, I just have to upgrade a few components and it's a large server and I can run Linux there and run Kubernetes. I think it's going to be very interesting to see to your point about multi-cloud. I think services like Apex and others that you guys are offering and how it brings it near cloud. And I think the data and where the data lives, and by the way, it still has to be on a disk or a hard driver and VME or of some sort somewhere doesn't just float around. That has weight and it has gravity and sits somewhere. And I think that's really also driving a lot of this. We were just talking on the lead up into this about sovereignty here in the EU. And I think that's an interesting thing that has to be playing into why the developers are coming and talking to you is about sovereignty and security and things of that nature as well. Yeah. I think one more angle to this that we're actually definitely talking a lot of the booth is the education side of it. There's not enough people in the industry to be able to handle all of the work that's going on, to do everything from management of the cloud and on-prem to all the migration mobility stuff to the refactoring. And what we're hearing from our end users is how do you help us educate us, help teach us Kubernetes and all the other APIs and whatnot. It's actually we as Dell this week specifically have just relaunched our developer dot Dell dot com. Nice. And we're trying to make it easier for more of our traditional servers, systems admins, virtualization admins to actually understand how do we use APIs? What is Python and GoLang? What is Kubernetes? How do we do infrastructure as code level automation and just provide the educational resources that how to videos that all that stuff. So that for us is another major thing is bring some of the more traditional end users along with us. Yeah. A lot of the companies out there are not doing that as well as they should. Yeah. Talk about the maturity route journey because as people start to modernize, right? You got the cloud operations, which essentially IP operations. What does the maturity curve look like for your customers? So funny enough, one of my customer conversations I have early on in that meeting is typically I'm seeing this trifurcation in the industry right now. And I think we might have talked about this last year, but it's actually getting more prevalent right now. There's a lot of customers out there that are just saying that DevOps isn't a thing. I actually did a customer briefing about a few months ago. And I'm sitting there presenting out on this topic. And I have a whole DevOps, what is DevOps and the CIOs there on his phone ignoring me. The rest of the team is listening in. And I'm like, this is, you know, there's people that will never do DevOps as people that are figuring it out. It's a squishy middle. This is the elite top 10 or 15% that are already deep in the code, automating, building their own cloud. The CIO looks up at me and says, yeah, we don't do DevOps. The rest of the team in the room is like, no, no, we're doing everything he's talking about. We're not up at the top. We're not advanced, but we're definitely figuring it out right now. And for 15 minutes, they had a conversation amongst themselves about how they're actually doing DevOps. They don't use that word. And what I'm finding is there are a lot of people that still don't want to do it, but I think it's more the acronym as it's there. It's not understanding what it is, even though they are actually doing it. Yeah. I think that has been, I think in growth of the industry. We talked once yesterday with Pure Storage and former Portland CEO. And he had an observation. He's like, the old DevOps came out of the hole. I want to be like Google. Yes. And not everyone's Google. No one does that. It's not even the 1%. But what they wanted was they wanted operational simplicity. They wanted to have enablement. They wanted to have smooth operations. And so platform engineering has become the new version of what a clean, modern, seamless IT looks like. And I think that's the distinction I see. And I think what you're getting at is, and all the other stuff is down in the weeds, either abstracted away or built into the products. Yeah. I think the platform engineer angle, I love it because it's actually a codified definition of where people should try to achieve, right? Which is if DevOps is this operating model of agile IT ops in an application-led world, what you're really looking at then is platform engineering is when you figure out the infrastructure as code things, you figure out what CICD means to you, you figure out what cloud native and Kubernetes means to you, now you got to build a platform for your end users with guardrails that you can operate at scale. That's what platform engineering has to do. That's why we as Dell want to deliver those platforms along with many other companies to help make a solution-earing approach to the platform. Yeah. And that was the original principles of DevOps, which was infrastructure as code, automate it, let it run. But we didn't have the tooling in the end, exactly. I think it's a maturity thing. I think that's why you guys are hitting home run right now with the market because you had IT, you had the relationships, now they're progressing into the cloud ops. Yeah, I think that's it and I think even in the keynote this morning they talked about how do we build the next set of leaders for the community. And I think you're talking about the progression and bringing back the learning site and things of that nature is key to a robust community. I think it's also where we saw people go from, they were NT administrators to be VM administrators from mainframe to NT, all of this stuff evolves. So I think it's great where you guys are hitting on that. Greg, thanks for coming on. Great to see you again. I know we've got a lot going on. Take a minute to explain what's on your agenda. I know we've got Dell Tech World coming up, Red Hat, Ansible Summit coming up, a lot of activities, just to give us a taste of what's going on in the Dell world for Dell ecosystem. Being a month ahead of Dell Tech World, for this discussion, it's not great because there's a whole bunch of stuff in Dell Tech World that we can't talk about today. Show it a little away. I can't. Marketing will kill me. But it's only a month away, so we've got Dell Tech World coming up in Vegas at the end of May, same exact week that Red Hat Summit's happening in Boston. We're going to be at both. You're going to see big discussions happening with all of our partners, with the Microsofts, the VMwares, the Red Hats. What we might hear? Just give a taste. How we're driving the multi-cloud strategy forward with our partner ecosystem is going to be a big one you're going to hear. How we're actually going deeper into helping enable our end users with Kubernetes and containers, persistent storage, security types of things, protecting their data that's all going to be in there. Right now, we're really trying to make sure from a DevRel perspective that we're really driving that education angle, that we're really driving into the community. We want to give back. Our goal here is to make sure that the CNCF and open source thrives in the future and that we as Dell are helping to shepherd that forward as much as we can. All right, Fred, thanks for coming on. Impressive results that you guys put together. I know it's been working hard for the past two years on this. Really kind of hitting the mark as people modernizing developer.dell.com. Congratulations on your success. And yeah, a lot more work to do. It's just the beginning. Oh, totally. Yeah, awesome. Cube breaking it down here at CloudNativeCon, KubeCon, EU, Europe. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier with Rob Stretcher. We'll be right back with more coverage after the circuit.