 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next 17. Welcome back to our live coverage here of Google Next 2017, an event that last year was focused only on Google Cloud. They've actually expanded a bit. They're talking about G Suite, talking about some of the devices and they bring in a really broad and diverse community. So when I talk to the Google people, it's not one show, it's a handful of shows. I went to the analyst events. My guest for this segment is Chris Wall, who came in through the community event. So excited to get that angle. So Chris, thanks so much for doing the drive with me from San Francisco down to Palo Alto. For those of us not in the area, you know, it's a 45 minute drive. It's not too bad. It's a beautiful sunny day. It's great to catch up with you and thanks for coming. I was always glad to be on. Love being a CUBE alumni. So it's like, I think it's my three time. Wow, a three time alumni. It's like, you know, if you've been a host of Saturday Night Live for like seven times, you know, you get like the special jacket, things like that. You're getting up there three times. It's like, you know, you're not quite in Pac-Elzinger area there, but you have passed, you know, you've been on more than Andy Jassy now. So, you know, I think that that's pretty impressive. Bucket list. Yeah, exactly. So what brings you to the Google event and tell us a little bit about the community event? Yeah, it was, to be honest, I thought it was a spam email at first. I just got an invite saying, hey, we have this Google event going on and I'm not really plugging into the Google universe too much. So he said, cool, I'm interested. I'll take a look. Got invited out by Sarah Nabotny to a community focused day. Sarah's awesome. Also a cute cube alum, of course. Yeah, alum and Ran Ozcon, I think, as a boarder or some kind of management facility for quite a while. And so yeah, the Google Cloud Next is this week, but on Tuesday they actually had a bunch of, I guess influencers, evangelists, you know, community members out to spend time with all sorts of googly Googlers talking around what their vision is around kind of bridging the gap to the enterprise, what their thoughts around Kubernetes and just really the community in general were, which was kind of cool because it was all fresh and clean and new for me. So it was great to really taste the Kool-Aid and see how delicious it could be. Yeah, so I'm curious what your take is. I remember I did a panel at Interop a couple of years ago and it was like, you know, basically, you know, hyperscale, you're not Google, so you know, what do you need to do? How do you do it? You know, do you just use Google stuff? Can you, you know, can you code like Google? Can you act like Google is like, or, you know, are you just an enterprise and you're, you know, forced to live in the past? I think over the, I don't know, last couple of years, the idea of the site reliability engineers come out and being more focused on the enterprise and kind of dovetailed into the DevOps story. And so it was really interesting to hear not only how they're trying to talk to the enterprise, but also how they're trying to get the enterprise to kind of stop being the traditional enterprise that it's been, which I think internally, it's something that we practitioners have always been trying to do. Like no one wants to be on call all the time and fixing these flaming disasters and things like that. But at the same time, you have to recognize that moving that much, you know, I guess intrinsic culture poison from one side to the next is hard. So they're admitting that too. It's like, we would love for you guys to be more googly and to use the tools that we have here, but we're not sure you even know what the tools are or how to use them or what kind of documentation is necessary or what meetups we can go to find my people, you know, the practitioners. I want to channel our friends, the Geek Whispers, and all right, Chris, so how did you transition out of being a VMware guy to someone that does, you know, cool and interesting things now because VMware is no longer the coolness, you know. That's been the vibe, yeah. It's something I personally have been trying to, you know, I don't think in any technology you want to be that technology specific. You know, VMware, I love it, have been doing it for 12 something years, but you don't want to just be pigeonholed in that kind of silo, and which is actually why I wanted to come out and talk with the folks at Google around what they're doing to build a community, and I think it was Sam, something or other. Sam Ramji. Sam Ramji actually came up and said, you know, as long as we're going to exist as a company, we're going to have this community day. It's the first one they've done and they plan to do it basically infinitely forever because they realized that they had the analysts and things like that out there, they had all the engineers and developers, but what were they missing? The folks in the trenches that are trying to adopt and use this sort of technology, so I like that aspect of it. There weren't any huge mind-shattering results that were out there, except for I think me personally, I like that Google kind of admitted that yeah, they hadn't been doing the best job around interfacing with the community and getting IT practitioners and operation-centric folks into the fold, like welcoming into the bosom of Google, and that they were trying to work on that, and it's like, okay, awesome, let's have a conversation, which the other half of the day was an unconference where we literally broke up into groups that we decided ourselves as like a democracy of Google decision-making. We formed eight different groups, some focused on containers. I actually sat in a two-hour session where we just kind of rift on abstraction layers and where should we start working? Is it at the container level? Is it at the hypervisor level? Is it at the virtual machine level? And it was neat because everyone had a completely different idea and background around that. Like, I felt like I was an alien in that conversation for a lot of it because they're working on solving problems that are totally alien to my world. So I liked all that. Yeah, it's an interesting crowd. When the serverless stuff got talked about in the keynote today, there was a big clap, and I love Brian Stevens. He's like, functions are just fragments of code, and they get applause. He's kind of like, right, it's like, it's like. He even remarked, he's like, I got applause for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. So, but you know, that's the kind of people that come to the show, right? So you checked out a thing called, what was it, Coat Labs or something like that? Yeah, yeah, there was, I had some notes there that I'd written down. Certification and Code Labs specifically. So Code Labs was interesting because it's a place that you can, you have to book it in advance like a day in advance and from about 11 to seven each day, they just have googly Googlers, very googly people out there that say, all right, here's our various APIs such as the new one where you can query a video and say, I'm looking for, I think in the keynote, they had find me baseball in this video and it actually shows you in the timeline where baseball occurs. There's also things to do image tagging and things like that. And I don't know, it might be difficult to grasp that API interaction at first and so you can sit down and they'll show you how to write code in the languages of your choice. Obviously, Go is very prominent, but I'm a PowerShell developer. So it's like, all right, how would you write that in curl and that's maybe our, you know, our bridge to one another since I don't know Go and they don't know PowerShell or the person I was working with. So that was cool to hear how they approach those things because I've typically done it as an ops person, I'm typically looking at it from the perspective of I'm trying to automate some task and feed it into an orchestration engine. And I'm not super deep on APIs in general, I like them, but that was cool. I like that you're basically getting to meet with really, really awesome engineers and SREs to pick their brain and their vast decades of experience on writing code to work with APIs and things that are Google centric. So that was awesome. That's good, so it sounds like you didn't feel like this was a marketing show, right? That they bring the engineers, the technical people. I mean, it's not far, being from San Francisco from, you know, the Googleplex, you know, the mothership is nearby, so. No, that's a good point because a lot of these shows have just become a sales pitch in a wolf's clothing or a conference clothing. And this was, I've never met so many really, really talented engineers all concentrated in one spot. I mean, you've got the rock stars that I think everybody knows like Sarah and Kelsey and whatnot that are very available and personable, but you also have a whole army of people that have a huge amount of passion around writing code and understanding what your problems are and wanting to talk to you. I felt like a person, which I've been a Google customer since I guess Google came out, you know, Google apps and things like that, and this is the first time I really started putting faces to the technical practitioners that work there and they're really interested and excited with what my mundane kind of problem, so that's kind of cool. Yeah, I found they're definitely, they're listening, they're talking, it's really good because right, you know, our firm, we've used Google for a while and it's like, oh wait, I have a challenge. Who do I call? Who do I email? Nope. You should just watch the YouTube video and use it. Come on, aren't you smart enough to use these things right? You know, it's kind of how we all felt for a while, so, you know, interesting, kinder, gentler Google than we knew in the past, you know? I mean, they have like the Google leader circle and the various groups that you can join online, but it was just, you can't fake that kind of raw passion and I sat down with some of the SREs at the community day and it was really just talk to me about what you do and why and what tools you use and what can we do to be better and more specifically, the DevRel, the developer relations folks were just awesome and they're like, is our title threatening? You know, what meetup should we go to? What can we do to make your life better? And I just kind of at first said a few comments and then realized, no, this is real. They want to know my day, you know, day one and day two operations so that they can find the right tools or if there isn't one, build one. And I don't know, that's great. I've never seen that at a conference before, so I'm hooked, I definitely plan to go again. All right, so anything that you didn't see that you were hoping to see, you know, follow up that you want to have, you know, other cool stuff going on that you'd want to share. I almost want to do like a plead to Google that throughout the community day and at the conference, there's been a lot of commentary and some kind of some references to, oh, well, we don't want to tell you how to do things. We don't want to tell you how to build architecture in a certain way. Please do tell me how to do those things. You know, at least give me a reference architecture or some example environments because I feel like a lot of it is just, here's some cool things you can do kind of in isolation or here's some things with Kubernetes that kind of exist outside of reality. I'm looking for, all right, I don't have any of that stuff. How do I onboard into that? Here's a white paper and that kind of jazz. Yeah, and we saw, you know, hate to always bring up AWS, but AWS went from, right, here's this giant toolbox with all these things to, right, here's some services or here's some tracks and, you know, not wizards, but, you know, templates you can follow for certain things that say, okay, you know, here are people that are probably similar to you and, boy, with Google with their, you know, AI and ML and all their things that they can do to help us short out all the TLA's that they've got to. You know, they should be able to help going forward because, yeah, you know, Google should be able to personalize all that to be able to work a little bit better for us as opposed to us having to just kind of figure it out a little bit. I know, you know, you played with the Google, you know, cloud a little bit yourself and it wasn't as simple as you were hoping. It was hard. Yeah, I mean, come on, if you can't figure it out, you know. I don't feel like I'm the sharpest tool in the shed, but I was like, I'm kind of the representative layman ops person and it felt, it felt very convoluted, complex. The documentation was fragmented. I'm like, just give me the wizard so that I can start fishing for myself. You know, like, I just do that first hit for free and then I'll take care of it beyond that. So that would be my one kind of ask to Google as a whole. But otherwise, I think the tooling and the people and the culture are all there. It's just build a few more things and I think we've got some interesting entanglements at the enterprise level once that's done. Okay, I want to give you the final word. You know, what's going on with you other than, you know, your hometown, your new hometown of Austin, Texas, South by coming. So I know there's a lot of music and fun going on, but what's happening in your world? What's happening with the rubric? Oh yeah, so I'll mention South by definitely will be there. I will not be available online or anything. I'm going to go into sequester mode and just listen to music with my co-host actually, if you listen to the data knots podcast with Ethan Banks, he's going to come by. So we'll be at the show. I guess if you want to hang out with us, hit us up. Otherwise, rubric's been awesome. It's definitely a rocket ship ride. And it was actually dovetailed into quite a few conversations I had while at Google next because movement of data into and around clouds is non-trivial. And so that's where the cloud data management world that we're in kind of, I think fits into that equation and why, you know, I personally wanted to go to this show, but also professionally thought there'd be some inroads there to discuss with the other practitioners. Absolutely. The whole infrastructure side and how that plays in the public cloud, how it plays with SaaS, there's a lot of those discussions going on. Yeah, grouch, you guys have been growing some good buzz. You guys have been hiring too. So, you know, to check Chris out for all that. And we'll be back, lots more coverage here of the Google cloud next 2017. You're watching theCUBE.