 TheCube presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 22. Brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation. This is Spain, a KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Towns, along with Paul Gillan, Senior Enterprise Architecture for SiliconANGLE. Welcome, Paul. Thank you, Keith. Pleasure to work with you. You know, we're going to have some amazing people this week. I think I saw a stat this morning. 65% of the attendees, 7,500 folks, first-time KubeCon attendees. This is your first conference? It is my first KubeCon, and it's amazing to see how many people are here. And to think of, you know, just a couple of years ago, three years ago, we were still talking about what the cloud was and what the cloud was going to do, and now we were going to integrate multiple clouds. And now we have this whole new framework for computing that is just rifled out of nowhere. And as we can see by the number of people who are here, this has become the dominant trend in enterprise architecture right now, how to adopt Kubernetes and containers, build microservices-based applications, and really get to that transparent cloud that has been so elusive. It has been elusive, and we are seeing vendors from startups with just a few dozen people to some of the traditional players we see in the enterprise space with thousands of employees looking to capture a kind of lightning in a bottle, so to speak, this elusive concept of multi-cloud. And what we're seeing here is very typical of an early stage conference. I've seen many times over the years where the floor is really dominated by companies, frankly, I've never heard of. Many of them are only two or three years old. You don't see the big dominant computing players with the presence here that these smaller companies have. That's very typical. We saw that in the PC age. We saw it in the early days of Unix, and it's happening again. And what will happen over time is that a lot of these companies will be acquired, there'll be some consolidation, and the nature of this show will change, I think dramatically over the next couple of three years. But there is an excitement and an energy in this auditorium today that is really a lot of fun and very reminiscent of other new technologies just as they crested. Well, speaking of new technologies, we have Dave Cole, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer of Spectre Cloud. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. So let's talk about this big ecosystem, Kubernetes. Yes. Solve problem? Well, you know, the dream is, well, first of all, applications are really the lifeblood of a company. Whether it's our phone or whether it's a big company trying to connect with its customer, it's about applications. And so the whole idea today is how do I build these applications to build that tight relationship with my customers? And how do I reinvent these applications rapidly in a long-comes containerization which helps you innovate more quickly? And certainly a dominant technology there is Kubernetes. And the question is, how do you get Kubernetes to help you build applications that could be born anywhere and live anywhere and take advantage of the places that it's running? Because everywhere has pluses and minuses. So you know what? One of the problems of Kubernetes from when I first read about it years ago is runs on my laptop. I can push it to any cloud, any platform. Where's the gap? Where are we in that phase? Like talking to me about scale, is that, is it that simple? Well, that is actually the problem, is that to date, while the technology is the dominant containerization technology and orchestration technology, it really still takes a power user. It really hasn't been very approachable to the masses. And so it was these very expensive, highly skilled resources that sit in a dark corner that have focused on Kubernetes. But that now is trying to evolve to make it more accessible to the masses. It's not about sort of hand wiring together what is a typical 20-layer stack to really manage Kubernetes and then have your engineers manually reconfigure it and make sure everything works together. Now it's about how do I create these stacks, make it easy to deploy and manage at scale? So we've gone from sort of DIY developer-centric to all right now, how do I manage this at scale? Now this is a point that is important, I think is often overlooked. This is not just about Kubernetes. This is about a whole stack of cloud-native technologies. Yes. And who is going to integrate all that stuff, piece that stuff together? Obviously, you have a role in that. But in the enterprise, what is the awareness level of how complex this stack is and how difficult it is to assemble? We see a recognition of that, that we've had developers working on Kubernetes and applications, but now when we say how do we weave it into our production environments? How do we ensure things like scalability and governance? How do we have this sort of interesting mix of innovation, flexibility, but with control? And that's sort of an interesting combination where you want developers to be able to run fast and use the latest tools, but you need to create these guardrails to deploy it at scale. So where do the developers fit in that operation stack then? Is Kubernetes an AI ops or an ops task, or is it sort of a shared task across the development spectrum? Well, I think there's a desire to allow application developers to just focus on the application and have a Kubernetes-related technology that ensures that all of the infrastructure and related application services are just there to support them. And because the typical stack from the operating system to the application can be up to 20 different layers, components, you just want all those components to work together. You don't want application developers to worry about those things. And the latest technologies like SpectroCloud, there's others, are making that easy. Application engineers focus on their apps, all of the infrastructure and the services are taken care of, and those apps can then live natively on any environment. So help paint this picture for us. I got AKS, EKS, Anthos, all of these distributions, OpenShift, the Tanzu, where is SpectroCloud helping me to kind of cobble together all these distros? I thought distro was the thing, like just like Linux has different distros, you know, Kubernetes has different distros. That actually is the irony is that sort of the age of debating the distros largely is over. There are a lot of distros and if you look at them, they're largely shades of gray and being different from each other. But the Kubernetes distribution is just one element of like 20 elements that all have to work together. So right now, what's happening is that it's not about the distribution, it's now how do I again, sorry to repeat myself, but move this into scale. How do I move it into deployed scale to be able to manage ongoing at scale, to be able to innovate at scale, to allow engineers, as I said, use the coolest tools but still have technical guardrails that the enterprise knows they'll be in control of. What does at scale mean to the enterprise customers you're talking to now? What do they mean when they say that? Well, I think it's interesting because we think scale is different because we've all been in the industry and it's frankly sort of boring old word, but today it means different things like how do I automate the deployment at scale? How do I be able to make it really easy to provision resources for applications on any environment from either a virtualized or bare metal data center, cloud, or today edge is really big where people are trying to push applications out to be closer to the source of the data. And so you want to be able to deploy at scale, you want to manage at scale, you want to make it easy to, as I said earlier, allow application developers to build their applications, but IT ops wants the ability to ensure security and governance and all of that. And then finally, innovate at scale. If you look at the show, it's interesting three years ago when we started SpectroCloud, there are about 1400 businesses or technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Today there's over 1800. And all of these technologies made up of open source and commercial, all versioning at different rates, it becomes an unsurmountable problem unless you can set those guardrails, sort of that balance between flexibility and control. Let developers access the technologies, but again, manage it as a part of your normal processes of a scaled operation. So Dave, I'm a little challenged here because I'm hearing two, where I typically consider conflicting terms. Flexibility, control. Yes. In order to achieve control, I need complexity. In order to choose flexibility, I need T-shirt, once T-shirt fits all to, and I get simplicity, how can I get both? That just doesn't, you know, compute. Well, that's the opportunity and the challenge at the same time. So you're right. So developers want choice. Good developers want the ability to choose the latest technology so they can innovate rapidly. And yet ITOps wants to be able to make sure that there are guardrails. And so with some of today's technologies like SpectroCloud, it is, you have the ability to get both. We actually worked with dimensional research and we sponsor an annual State of Kubernetes survey. We found this last summer that two out of three IT executives said you could not have both flexibility and control together. But in fact, they want it. And so it is this interesting balance. How do I give engineers the ability to get anything they want but ITOps the ability to establish control? And that's why Kubernetes is really at its next inflection point. Whereas I mentioned it's not debates about the distro or DIY projects. It's not big incumbents creating siloed Kubernetes solutions. But in fact, it's about allowing all these technologies to work together and be able to establish these controls. And that's really where the industry is today. Enterprise CIOs do not typically like to take chances. Now we were talking about the growth in the market that you described from 1400 to 1800 vendors. Most of these companies, very small startups. Our enterprises, are you seeing them willing to take a leap with these unproven companies? Or are they holding back and waiting for the IBMs, the HPs, the Microsofts to come in with the VMwares with whatever solution they have? I think so. I mean, we sell to the Global 2000. We had yesterday as a part of Edge Day here at the event. We had GE Healthcare as one of our customers telling their story. And they're a market share leader in medical imaging equipment. X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans. And they're starting to treat those as Edge devices. And so here is a very large established company, a leader in their industry, working with people like SpectroCloud, realizing that Kubernetes is interesting technology. The Edge is an interesting thought, but how do I marry the two together? So we are seeing large corporations seeing so much of an opportunity that they're working with these smaller companies, the latest technology. So let's talk about the Edge a little. You kind of opened it up there. How should customers think about the Edge versus the Cloud data center, even bare metal? Actually it's a good, well, bare metal is fairly easy. Is that many people are looking to reduce some of the overhead or inefficiencies of the virtualized environment. But we've had really sort of parallel, little white tornadoes. We've had bare metal as infrastructure that's been developing. And then we've had orchestration technologies developing, but they haven't really come together very well. Lately, we're finally starting to see that come together. SpectroCloud contributed to open source, a metal as a service technology that finally brings these two worlds together, making bare metal much more approachable to the enterprise. Edge is interesting because it seems pretty obvious you want to push your application out closer to your source of data, whether it's AI inferencing or IoT or anything like that, you don't want to worry about intermittent connectivity or latency or anything like that. But people have wanted to be able to treat the Edge as if it's almost like a cloud, where all I worry about is the app. So really the Edge to us is just the next extension in a multi-cloud sort of motif where I want these Edge devices to require low IT resources to automate the provisioning, automate the ongoing version management, patch management, really act like a cloud. And we're seeing this as very, very popular now and I just used the GE Healthcare example of that. Imagine a CAT scan machine, I'm making this part up in China and that's just an Edge device. And it's doing medical imagery, which is very intense in terms of data. You want to be able to process it quickly and accurately as close to the endpoint the healthcare provider as possible. So let's talk about that in some level of detail. We think about kind of Edge and these fixed devices such as an imaging device. Are we putting agents on there? Are we looking at something talking back to the cloud? Where does special cloud inject and help make that simple, that problem of just having dispersed endpoints all over the world simpler? Sure, well we announced our Kubernetes Edge solution at a big medical conference called HIMS months ago. And what we allow you to do is we allow the application engineers to develop their application and then you can design this declarative model, this cluster API but beyond cluster profile which determines which additional application services you need and the Edge device, all the person has to do at the endpoint is plug in the power, plug in the communications, it registers the Edge device, it automates the deployment of the full stack and then it does the ongoing versioning and patch management. Sort of a self-driving Edge device running Kubernetes. And we make it just very, very easy. No IT resources required at the endpoint, no expensive field engineering resources to go to these endpoints twice a year to apply new patches and things like that, all automated. But there's so many different types of Edge devices with different capabilities, different operating systems, some have no operating system. I mean that seems like a much more complex environment. Just calling it the Edge is simple but what you're really talking about is thousands of different devices that you have to run your applications on. How are you dealing with that? So one of the ways is that we're really unbiased. In other words, we're OS and distro agnostic. So we don't want to debate about which distribution you like, we don't want to debate about which OS you want to use. The truth is you're right, there's different environments and different choices that you'll want to make. And so the key is how do you incorporate those and also recognize everything beyond those OS and Kubernetes and all of that and manage that full stack. So that's what we do is we allow you to choose which tools you want to use and let it be deployed and managed on any environment. And who's responsible for making Kubernetes run on the Edge device? We do, we provision the entire stack. I mean of course the company does using our product but we provision the entire Kubernetes infrastructure stack, all the application services and the application itself on that device. So I would love to dig into like where POS happened and all that but provisioning is getting to the point that it's a solved problem. Day two, as you just mentioned Hems, highly regulated environments. How does Spectre Cloud helping with configuration management, change control, audit, compliance, et cetera. The hard stuff. Yep, and one of the things we do, you bring up a good point is we manage the full life cycle from day zero which is sort of create, deploy, all the way to day two which is about access control, security, it's about ongoing versioning and patch management. It's all of that built into the platform. And you're right, like the medical industry has a lot of regulations. And so you need to be able to make sure that everything works, it's always up to the latest level, have the highest level of security. And so all that's built into the platform. It's not just a fire and forget, it really is about that full life cycle of deploying, managing on an ongoing basis. Well Dave, I'd love to go into a great deal of detail with you about kind of this day two ops. And I think we'll be covering a lot more of that topic, Paul throughout the week as we talk about just, you know, as we've gotten past, you know, how do I deploy Kubernetes pod to how do I actually operate IT? Absolutely, absolutely. The devil is in the details, as they say. Well, and also too, you have to recognize that the edge has some very unique requirements. You want very small form factors, typically. You want low IT resources. It has to be sort of zero touch or low touch because if you're a large food provider with 20,000 store locations, you don't want to send out field engineers two or three times a year to update them. So it really is an interesting beast and we have some exciting technology and people like GE are using that. Well Dave, thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. You're now CUBE alumnus, you've not been on before. I have actually, yes, but I always enjoy it. Great conversation. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Towns along with Paul Gillan and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage.