 Welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, our studio, where we're doing a live stage performance and virtually syndicating it out around the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host with theCUBE here at Kit Colbert, the CTO of VM. We're doing a keynote on cloud chaos, the evolution of SuperCloud architecture. Kit, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here for SuperCloud 2. And so we're gonna dig into it. We're gonna do a Q&A. We're gonna let you present. You got some slides. I really want to get this out. It's a really compelling story. Do the presentation and then we'll come back and discuss, take it away. Yeah, well thank you. So we had a great time at the original SuperCloud event. Since then been talking to a lot of customers and started to better formulate some of the thinking that we talked about last time. So let's jump into just a few quick slides to sort of set the tone here. So if we go to the next slide, what that shows is the journey that we see customers on today. Going from what we call cloud first into this phase that many customers are stuck in called cloud chaos. And where they want to get to, and this is the term customers have actually used. We didn't make this up. We heard it from customers. This notion of cloud smart, right? How do they use cloud more effectively, more intelligently? Now, if you walk through this journey, customers start with cloud first. They usually select a single cloud that they're gonna standardize on. And when they do that, they have to build out a whole bunch of functionality around that cloud. Things you can see there on the screen, disaster recovery, security, how do they monitor it or govern it? Like these are things that are non-negotiable. You've gotta figure it out. And typically what they do is they leverage solutions that are specific for that cloud. And that's fine when you have just one cloud, but if we build out here, what we see is that most customers are using more than just one. They're actually using multiple, not necessarily 10 or however many are on the screen, but this is just as an example. And so what happens is they have to essentially duplicate or replicate that stack they've built for each different cloud. And they do so in kind of a siloed manner. This results in the cloud chaos term that we talked about before. And this is where most businesses out there are. They're using two, maybe three public clouds. They've got some stuff on-prem. And they've also got some stuff out at the edge. This is apps, data, et cetera. So this is the situation. This is sort of that cloud chaos. So the question is, how do we move from this phase to cloud smart? And this is where the architecture comes in. This is why architecture I think is so important. It's really about moving away from these single cloud services that just solve a problem for one cloud to something we call a cross-cloud service, something that can support a set of functionality across all clouds. And that means not just public clouds, but also private clouds, edge, et cetera. And when you evolve that across the board, what you get is this sort of super cloud, this notion that we're talking about here, where you combine these cross-cloud services in many different categories. You can see some examples there on the screen. This is not meant to be a complete set of things, but just examples of what can be done. So this is sort of the transition and transformation that we're talking about here. And I think the architecture piece comes in both for the individual cloud services, as well as that super cloud concept of how all those services come together. Great presentation, thanks for sharing. If you can pop back to that slide on the cloud chaos one, I just want to get your thoughts on something there. This is like the layout of the stack. So this slide here that I'm showing on the screen that you presented, okay, take us through that complexity. There's the one where I want to live. That looks like spaghetti code. Yes. So do you turn this into a super cloud stack? Right, is that? Well, I think it's an evolving state that like, let's take one of these examples like security. So instead of implementing security individually in different ways, using different technologies, different tooling for each cloud, what you would do is say, hey, I want a single security solution that works across all clouds, right? A concrete example of this would be secure software supply chain. This is probably one of the top ones that I hear when I talk to customers. How do I know that the software I'm building is truly what I expected to be and not something that some hackers got into and polluted with malicious code? And what they do is that typically today, their teams have gone off and created individual secure software supply chain solutions for each cloud. So now they could say, hey, I can take a single implementation and just have different endpoints. It could go to Google or AWS or on-prem or wherever have you, right? So that's the sort of architectural evolution that we're talking about. You know, one of the things we hear, Dave, you're on the queue all the time and when we talk privately with customers who are asking us like, what's going on? They have the same complaint. I don't want to build a team, a dev team for that stack. So if you go back to that slide again, you'll see that that illustrates the tech stack for the clouds and the clouds at the bottom. So the number one complaint we hear and I want to get your reaction to that. I don't want to have a team to have to work on that. So I'm going to pick one and then have a hedge secondary one to backup. Here that's one, that's four, five, eight, 10 environments. That's going to be the reality. So what's the technical answer to that? Yeah. Well, first of all, let me just say this picture is again, not totally representative of reality oftentimes because while that picture shows a solution for every cloud, oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes it's a line of business going off, starting to use a new cloud. They might solve one or two things, but usually not securities, you're not some of these other things, right? So I think from a technical standpoint, what you want to get to is yes, that sort of common service with a common operational team behind it that is trained on that that can work across clouds. And that's really, I think the important evolution here is that you don't need to replicate these operational teams, one for each cloud, you can actually have them more focused across all those clouds. Yeah, in fact, we were commenting on the opening today. Dave and I were talking about the benefits of the cloud. It's heterogeneous, which is a good thing, but it's complex, there's skill gaps and that skill required. But at the end of the day, self-service of the cloud and the elastic nature of it makes it the benefit. So if you try to create too many common services, you lose the value of the cloud. So what's the trade off? In your mind right now, as customers start to look at, okay, identity, maybe I'll have one single sign on. That's an obvious one, other ones. What are the areas people are looking at from a combination, common set of services? Where do they start? What's the choices? What are some of the trade-offs? Because you can't do it everything. No, it's a great question. So that's actually a really good point. And as I answer your question, before I answer your question, the important point about that, as you saw here, across cloud services or these set across cloud services, the things that comprise the super cloud, at least in my view, the point is not necessarily to completely abstract the underlying cloud. The point is to give a business optionality and choice in terms of what it wants to abstract. And I think that gets to your question, is how much do you actually want to abstract from the underlying cloud? Now what I find is that typically speaking, cloud choice is driven at least from a developer or app team perspective by the best of breed services. What high level application type services do you need a database or AI, ML systems for your application? And that's going to drive your choice of the cloud. So oftentimes, businesses I talk to want to allow those services to shine through. But for other things that are not necessarily highly differentiated and yet are absolutely critical to creating a successful application, those are things that you want to standardize. Again, like things like security, the supply chain piece, cost management, like these things you need to and things like COGs become really, really important when you start operating at scale. So those are the things that I see people wanting to focus on. So there's a maturity model. Yes. And we heard earlier from Walmart who's fairly advanced, but at the same time, their super cloud is pretty immature. So what are you seeing in terms of super cloud, momentum, cross cloud, momentum? What's the starting point for customers? So it's interesting, right? On that three tier journey that I talked about, this cloud smart notion is that is adoption of what you might call a super cloud or architecture. And most folks aren't there yet, even the really advanced ones, even the really large ones. And I think it's because of the fact that we as an industry are still figuring this out. We as an industry did not realize this sort of cloud chaos state could happen, right? We didn't, I think most folks thought they could standardize on one cloud and that'd be it. But as time has shown, that's simply not the case. As much as one might try to do that, that's not where you end up. So I think there's two things here. Number one, for folks that are early in to the cloud and now are in this cloud chaos phase, we see the path out through standardization of these cross cloud services through adoption of the sort of super cloud architecture. But the other thing I think that's particularly exciting is I talked to a number of businesses who are not yet in the cloud chaos phase. They're earlier on in the cloud journey. And I think the opportunity there is that they don't have to go through cloud chaos. They can actually skip that whole phase if they adopt this super cloud architecture from the beginning. And I think being thoughtful around that is really the key here. It's interesting because we're going to hear from Iona's Pharmaceuticals later. And yes, there are multiple clouds, but the multiple clouds are largely separate. And so it's a business unit using that. So they're not in cloud chaos, but they're not tapping the advantages that you could get for best of breed across those business units. So to your point, they have an opportunity to actually build that architecture or take advantage of those cross cloud services prior to reaching cloud. Well, I actually, you know, I'd love to hear from them if you say they're not in cloud chaos, but are they? I mean, oftentimes I find that each BU, each line of business may feel like they're fine and you know themselves. But when you look at it from an overall company perspective, they're like, okay, things are pretty chaotic here. We don't have standardization. I don't, you know, like, again, security compliance, these things, especially in many regulated industries, become huge problems when you're trying to run applications across multiple clouds, but you don't have any of those company-wise standardization. Well, this is a point. So they have a big deal with AstraZeneca, who's got this huge ecosystem. They want to start sharing data across those ecosystems. And that's when they will, that cloud chaos will, you know, come to four, you would think that. I want to get your take on something that Bob Muglia said earlier, which is he kind of said, hey, Dave, you guys got to tighten up your definition of it. So he set a super cloud as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services, hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So thank you, that was nice and simple. However, others in the community, we're going to hear from Dr. Nehlu Mihai later, who says, no, no, wait a minute. It's got to be an architecture, not a platform. Where do you land on this architecture V platform thing? I look at it as, I don't know if it's, you call it maturity or just kind of a time horizon thing. But for me, when I hear the word platform, I typically think of a single vendor. Single vendor provides this platform. That's kind of the beauty of a platform. It's that there is a simplicity, usually consistency to it. They did the architecture. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, well, there's obviously architecture behind it. It has to be, but you as a customer don't necessarily need to deal with that. Now, I think one of the opportunities with super cloud is that it's not going to be, or there is no single vendor that can solve all of these problems. It's got to be the industry coming together as a community, interoperating, working together. And so that's why for me, I think about it as an architecture, that there's got to be these sort of well-defined categories of functionality. There's got to be well-defined interfaces between those categories of functionality to enable modularity, to enable businesses, to be able to pick and choose the right sorts of cross-cloud services, and then weave those together into an overall super cloud. Okay, so you're not pitching necessarily the platform. You're saying, hey, we have an architecture that's open. I go back to something that Vittorio said on August 9th with the first super cloud. Because as well, remember we talked about abstracting, but at the same time giving developers access to those primitives. Yes. So he said, and I think your answer that confirms this, I want to have my cake, eat it too and not gain weight. That's good. Right. Well, I think that's where the platform aspect can eventually come. After we've gotten aligned architecture, you're going to start to naturally see some vendors step up to take on some of the remaining complexity there. So I do see platforms eventually emerging here, but I think where we have to start as an industry is around aligning, okay, what does this definition mean? What does that architecture look like? How do we enable interoperability? And then we can take the next step. Because it depends too. Because I would say Snowflake has a platform and they've defined the architecture, but we're not talking about infrastructure here. Obviously, we're talking about something. Well, I think that if the Snowflake talks about what he's talking about, security and data, you're going to start to see the early movement around areas that are very spanning oriented. And I think that's the beginning of the trend. And I think there's going to be a lot more, I think on the infrastructure side, and to your point about the platform architecture, that's actually a really good thought exercise because it actually makes you think about what you're designing in the first place. And that's why I want to get your reaction quote from- Well, I just have to interrupt, since later on you're going to hear from near-Zook of Palo Alto Network, he says architecture and security, historically they don't go hand in hand because it's a big mess. It depends if you're whacking the mole or you're actually proactively building something. Well, kid, I want to get your reaction from a quote from someone in our community who said about SuperCloud, the SuperCloud's great. There are issues around computer science rigors and customer requirements. So there's some issues around the science itself as well as not just listening to the customer, because if that's the case, we'd have a better database, a better Oracle, right? So, but there's other, there's tech involved, new tech. We need an open architecture with universal data modeling, interconnecting among them. Connectivity is a part of security. And then once we get through that gate, figuring out the technical, the data and the customer requirements, they say SuperCloud should be a loosely coupled platform with open architecture, plug and play, specialized services ready for optimization, automation that can stand the test of time. What's your reaction to that sediment? You like it? Yeah, that probably aligns with my thinking, I think. And what I see from talking with customers as well. I mean, I like the, again, the listening to customer needs, prioritizing those things, focusing on some of the connective tissue networking and data and some of these aspects, talking about the open architecture, the interoperability, those are all things I think are absolutely critical. And then yeah, like I think at the end, on the computer science side, do you see some science and engineering, things that need to be engineered differently? We heard databases are radically gonna change and that are inadequate for the new architecture. What are some of the things that are from a science standpoint? Yeah, yeah, yeah, some of the more academic research type things. Or tech, better tech or is it? Yeah, look, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's a bunch around, certainly around the data piece around, you know, those issues of data gravity, data mobility, how do you wanna do that in a way that's performant? There's definitely issues around security as well. Like how do you enable like trust in these environments? There's gotta be some sort of hardware route of trust and a whole bunch of various types of aspects there. So a lot of work still to be done? Yes, I think so. And that's why I look at this, is this is not a one year thing or it's gonna be multi years. And I think, again, it's about all of us in the industry working together to come to an aligned picture of what that looks like. The world's moved from private cloud to public cloud and now cross cloud services, super cloud, meta cloud, whatever you wanna call it. How have you sort of changed the way engineering's organized, developers sort of approach the problem? Has it changed and how? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny. We at VMware are going through the same challenges as our customers in any business, right? We use multiple clouds. We got a big, of course, on-prem footprint. You know, what we're doing is similar to what I see in many other customers, which you see the evolution of a platform team. And so the platform team is really in charge of trying to develop a lot of these underlying services to allow our lines of business, our product teams to be able to move as quickly as possible, to focus on the building while we help with a lot of the operational overheads, right? We maintain security, compliance, all these other things. We also deal with, yeah, just making the developer's life as simple as possible. So they do need to know some stuff about, you know, each public cloud they're using, those public cloud services. But at the same time, we can abstract a lot of the details that don't need to be in. So I think this sort of delineation or separation, I should say, between the underlying platform team and the product teams is a very, very common pattern. I noticed the four layers you talked about were observability, infrastructure, security, and developers on that slide. The last slide you had at the top, that was kind of the abstraction. Key areas that you guys at VMware are looking at. There's some groupings that we've come up with, but we love to debate them. I noticed data is in every one of them. It's not like, back to the data questions, that security is called out as a pillar. Observability is just kind of watching everything, but it's all pretty much data-driven. Of the four layers that you see, I take that as areas that you can consistently rely on to have standard services. Which one do you start with? What's the, is there a order of operations? I think infrastructure is number one, but the observability you need to know what's going on. Yeah, well, it really is highly dependent. Again, it depends on the business that we talk to. I mean, it really goes back to, what are your business priorities? And we have some customers who may want to get out of a data center. They want to evacuate the data center. And so what they want is then consistent infrastructure, so they can just move those applications up to the cloud. They don't want to have to refactor them. Well, we'll do it later, but there's an immediate and sort of urgent problem that they have. Other customers I talk to, security becomes top of mind or maybe compliance because they're in a regulated industry. So those are the sort of services they want to prioritize. So I would say there is no single right answer, no one size fits all. The point about this architecture is really around the optionality of it, is it allows you as a business to decide what's most important and where you want to prioritize. How about the deployment models kit? Does a customer have that flexibility from a deployment model standpoint or do I have to approach it a specific way? Can you address that? Yeah, I mean, deployment models, you're talking about how they consume. So running a control plane in the cloud and communicating elsewhere or having a single global instance or instantiating that instance. So that's a good point actually. And the white paper that we released back in August around this sort of concept, the cross-cloud service. This is some of the stuff we need to figure out as an industry. So when we talk about a cross-cloud service, we can mean actually any of the things you just talked about. It could be a single instance that runs, let's say, in one public cloud, but it supports all of them. Or it could be one that's multi-instance and that runs in each of the clouds and that customers can take dependencies in whichever one, depending on what their use cases are. Or even going further than that, there's a type of cross-cloud service that can actually be instantiated even in an air-gapped or offline environment. We have many, many businesses, especially heavily regulated ones that have that requirement. So I think- Global, don't forget global. Yeah. Regions, locales. Yeah, there's all sorts of performance latency issues that we're concerned about. So most services today are the former. They're a single sort of instance or set of instances within a single cloud that support multiple clouds. But I think what we're doing and where we're going with things like what we see with Kubernetes and service meshes and all these things, well, better enable folks to hit these different types of cross-cloud service architectures. So today, you as a customer probably wouldn't have too much choice, but where we're going, you'll see a lot more choice in the future. If you had to summarize for folks watching the importance of super cloud movement, multi-cloud, cross-cloud services, as an industry influx, because I'm always riffing on the whole old school network protocol stacks that got disrupted by TCP, IP. That's a little bit dated. We got people on the chat that are like 20 years old that weren't even born then. So this is one of those influx ones that's once in a generation, inflection point, I'm sure you agree. What's scoped the order of magnitude of the change and the opportunity around the marketplace, the business models, the technology and ultimately benefits the society? Yeah. Wow. You're getting there again. You have 10 seconds. I know. Yeah, exactly. No, look, so I think it is, what we're saying is really the next phase of what you might call cloud, right? That this notion of delivering services, the way they've been packaged together traditionally by the hyperscalers is now being challenged. And what we're seeing is really opening that up to new levels of innovation. And I think that will be huge for businesses because it'll help meet them where they are. Instead of needing to contort the business to make it work with the technology, the technology will support the business and where it's going, give people more optionality, more flexibility in order to get there. And I think in the end, for us as individuals, it will just make for better experiences, right? You can get better performance, better interactivity, given that devices are so much of what we do and so much of what we interact with all the time. This sort of flexibility and optionality will fundamentally be better for us as individuals in our experiences. And we're seeing that with chat, GTP. Everyone's talking about just early days. There'll be more and more of things like that that are next-gen, like obvious, like, wow, that's a fall out of your chair. It'll be the next wave of innovation that's unleashed. All right, Kid Colbert, thanks for coming on and sharing and exploring the super cloud architecture, cloud chaos, the cloud smart. There's a transition progression happening and it's happening fast. This is the super cloud wave. If you're not on this wave, you'll be driftwood. That's a Pat Gelsinger quote on theCUBE. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more super cloud coverage here in Palo Alto after this break.