 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. We are covering VMware Explorer live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall-to-wall coverage and John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Cast & By Veeam. Please welcome Tom Leiden, VP of Marketing, and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from Friends. Matt LeBlanc, the Systems Engineer from North America at Cast & By Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. Thank you for having us. Tom. Go ahead. I was going to say, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list, like if you want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, run a VM. Went to the internet, I downloaded it and in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. I mean, Kubernetes, at least remember the early days of theCUBE, OpenStack was kind of transitioning, cloud was booming, and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind, so that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it. And you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. You remember Pat Gelser, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here. But it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions, there's open source, AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here at VMware Explorer with Kubernetes and the customers? Because they have choices. They can go do it on their own, they can add a little bit with Lambda, serverless, they can do more here. It's not easy, it's not like as easy as people think it is and this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? And that's, I'll talk to that, but what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS or Tanzu. We're seeing all of the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything plus the need to have a on-prem solution managed at all. I got a stat, I got a share. They want to get your reactions. You can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. I talked to a big CISO, CXO, executive big company. I won't say the name. We got a thousand-inch developers, okay? A hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes. Okay, okay, 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need and people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around there's a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and he's over-exaggerating the ratio probably but the point is the numbers kind of make sense as of the thousand developers just starting to see people getting adoption to it, they're aware of the value but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean hyperbole at some level but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. Got to get good at it. You got to know how to use it. It's very accurate actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days so we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google Trends and in Google Trends if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off and the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes and that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.casting.io. We're going to rebrand it soon at KubeCon so stay tuned. But we're offering hands-on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us because for us the faster the adoption goes the better for our business. I was just going to ask you about the learning so there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really kind of get those numbers up as John was mentioning. Yeah, and we're really breaking it down to the very beginning, right? So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes cluster and people really hands-on are going to install a Kubernetes cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands-on way learn Kubernetes. You know, it's interesting this VMware Explorer, their first new name change but VMworld prior, big community, a lot of customer loyal customers. Yeah, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises. And you know, let's face it, some of them aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because their workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to kind of maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud-nated. They did with Tanzu, it was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now. You're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time. KubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great because you had the day one, day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity. Tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at KubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt. So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMware Explorer. But we're also talking with the SREs and the DevOps folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training, and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together. Because you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads. And the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. So how would you describe the personas specifically, here versus say, KubeCon? IT ops? Very, very different. Well, yes. Go ahead, explain. Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers. And their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect applications that are very resilient and reliable. And it is a different way of working. I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and DevOps. And there was a people saying, their title's called DevOps. Like, no, no, no, you do DevOps. You don't really, you're not the DevOps person. But they become the DevOps person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how DevOps has been co-opted as a position. You know. And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier, when I started casting, like we have this new persona, it's the DevOps person, right? That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people were like, they're not falling from space. It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more DevOps approach to what they're doing. It's not a new- And then the SRE conversation was in Site Reliable Engine. It comes from Google from one person managing multiple clusters. How that's evolved into being the DevOps. So it's been interesting. And this is really the growth of scale, the 10x developer going to more of the cloud native, which is, okay, you got to run Ops and make the developer go faster. So if you look at the stuff we've been covering on theCUBE, it's the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call DevOps like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service. And they don't want it to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go check in security code, wait for the Ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new Ops, not so much IT Ops, because that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet, but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between Dev and these complicated Ops areas, like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? Well, there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible, not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be built or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. And that was the old DevOps role or a person. That was what DevOps was called. So again, that is standard. I think at KubeCon, that is something that's expected. Yes. You would agree with that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now translating VMworld, VMware Explorer to KubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? And then obviously got reinvent right at the end and first we get December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now, back to back. That'll be super interesting for this ecosystem. Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at KubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions because they want to know every little detail how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting because when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members, right? We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. It's actually a great thing. Actually, it's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying, I am hearing the conversation here. This is, you guys will like this on the beam side, the other side of the beam. There's deep dives on ransomware and air gapping and configuration errors on backup and recovery. And it's all about beam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on making sure they don't get screwed up on ransomware. Not Kubernetes, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the absolute end up writing the code for that. So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes. And both on the beam side as well as the casting side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution. And from an air gap perspective, there are many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean, this is the customer side. What's accelerating there? What's there? What's the current situation with the customer base with cruise, not just here, but like in the industry with Kubernetes? How would you guys categorize that? How does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to, and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing, the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7,000 VMs. And three months ago, they said, over the next few years, we plan on moving all of those workloads to Kubernetes. And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload both from the administration side and cost-restricted as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubbery at the road on acceleration. Yeah, so I would say scale and flexibility, that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud-native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not gonna be good enough for all of their workloads and then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point, they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. Yeah, oh yeah. They were projecting over the next few years they were going to go to a 50-50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs but it was going to be a mix. Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming and helped demystify it? I would think Supersteria is a really great example and you know the details about that. I love the Supersteria story. They're a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now, Supersteria is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We were able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Caster was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. A weekend. A weekend. That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real, come on. Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months, not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. Don't tell anyone. Keep that down low, you're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously, this is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You can see, you can hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing what Docker's doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. Yes. And that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, you know, they're across, you know, three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. You know, last year AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and you know, to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. You know, it's interesting just the sidebar here for a second, we had a couple of chats earlier today where the influence is on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon that's super, the hyper clouds like Amazon is your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM, everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe it's this time for some peace, right? Amongst the cloud vendors, like, hey, you've already won. Okay. Like, everyone's won. That's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time. And everyone then, because the relationship is not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus like, what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie is getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas. That's good thing. That's the tides rising, the pie is getting bigger. There's a bigger market out there now. So people can share and share. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, but you know, and I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers. And if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that yes, you may have started all of your on-cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere. So it's not like- Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java right once, run anywhere, right? So you can't do that today on the cloud, but now with containers- You can. Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. So when you have Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you're deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu. And it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less proprietary. So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth because the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICP pipeline. You got tools coming out of Kubernetes. Infrastructure as code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. It's the skill set. And that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have the experience. But there are many people that are still young at this. Okay, let's do a, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into KubeCon. It's coming up and I was reading events right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre-KubeCon interviews, we'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs, we'll get the scoop on that. We do that every year. But while we've got you guys here, let's do a little pre-preview of KubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does KubeCon look like? You guys are our big sponsor of KubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner. Where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Has we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact KubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? So I think first of all, KubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic. Because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. KubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year. But the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already. And I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast. And it's going to be a huge attendance. That's what I'm expecting. Second, so this is going to be my third personally in-person KubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet again be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production, rather than those at the first in-person KubeCon for me in LA, where it was a lot about learning still. We're going to continue to help people learn because it's really important for us. But the exciting part about KubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production. And that's really cool. And users contributing projects too, you know? Also. There's a poster child there and you've got a lot more. And of course, you've got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending. You're like, come on. Matt, what's your take on KubeCon? What are you going in? What do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic, new projects. I'm going to see much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. And the sharing's going to increase too. And the sharing, yes. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, why do I need Kubernetes? It's more, how do I make, how do I architect this for my solution and for my environment? And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved. And the size of KubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. And to finish off with, I think, from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready. Because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. And what can the audience expect from you guys at KubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? Yes, we have a rebranding sitting ready for our learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're no longer going to call it learning.custom.io, but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at KubeCon. All right. All right, that sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me, breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. Thanks, Matt. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the Kube's live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe.