 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, welcome to the CUBE Conversation here. In the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California, I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security, and as the world goes digital, we're going to have the deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We got Keely, Vice President of Booze, Allen's digital business. Keely, great to have you. John Pisano, principal at Booze Allen's digital cloud solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing, having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale. And that's really modern applications and consumer. And then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is the military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go the next level, you start to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with snowballs, snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology. That's IT-like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption. So I want to get into it. Let's, Key, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, if you take a look from mainframes to desktops, to servers, to cloud, to mobile, and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we've just feel that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right? And what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into space. We're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous, we think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. So that's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute because there's a lot to unpack there, roll of open source, modern application development, software and hardware, supply chains, all our core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the DC area, you've got people there of congestion and now you've got devices now serving those people and that's their play. People at work, whether it's a military operation, you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a, you know, bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operation impact? Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations or the key kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud where you tend to be less constrained and then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem and how does, how do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers. So when we build a lot of applications, right? Especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things. Whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics and you have to kind of rethink that. Key, let's get into the aspect you brought up which is space and then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, you know? And in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you got the future of work or play. And now you've got this situational deployments, whether it's a new tower next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere, a concert where we've got five bars and no connectivity, right? So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power, conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSA and what they've done with K3Ss to do that, right? So I think those were some of the enabling technologies out there, John, as you've kind of alluded to, there are some, there are additional challenges, right? As we think about it, we're not, it's not a simple transition in modernization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this, as modern application development happens, we just were covering cloud native con and Kubecon, Dockercon and containers are very popular, Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport, that's intelligent and all these new things. So out of open source fit into all this, because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditionally proprietary software confines, right? So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we are very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that, right? So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data? And how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization, right? It is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services, like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities, right? Historically, those tend to be closed source type apps where today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to or grow that library of stuff. Yeah, and then we've got trends like open ran. I saw some ground station for the AWS just starting to see Starlink you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because security is a huge issue, right? We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose built kind of devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to need to be data driven. There is an open source impact key. So if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. Right, that's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users. In the digital battlefield, it's our warriors, right? To increase survivability and analytality. At the end of the day, from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act, noodle loop is value to the warfighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I mentioned before, there are various different challenges. One being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface. When we think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about as we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one workforce, as you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there, right? But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've been talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people are thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership, right? How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices, right? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CICD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet, right? That's kind of what we say, right? How do we move DevSecOps to automate secured containers, right? All the way to the edge devices to mitigate, you know, some of those total cost of ownership challenges. It's interesting as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security because remember supply chain on the hardware side and software in there too. So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left as they say, you got to be at the point of CICD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding, right? So all these paradigms are new, right? And day two operations, I call it day zero operations because it should be never day two. You got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation, it's a new one that we're having on the cube and in the industry. Software supply chain is a superly relevant, important topic because now you've got to interface it not just with other software, but it's hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break fix person in space. Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. No, so, you know, I think it's certainly, you know, I don't think anyone has the answers. We certainly don't have all the answers, but we're very optimistic, right? If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the chiefs, a software officer, Nick Shalon and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plant owner of platform one, right? You know, they were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these, you know, desec ops principles in partnership with the DOD-CIO, right? And that shift-left concept, right? They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that desec ops. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge, because those are all accelerators, right? I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touch upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware, right? The software just, you know, if the devices themselves just become firmware, right? You can just put over the wire updates, right, onto them. So I'm optimistic, right? I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. Yeah, and it's also some collaboration. What I like about why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. You know, some people are saying this is the weakest link in the supply chain and it can be short up pretty quickly, but this other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you get the confluence of these worlds colliding all aspects of culture and dev and sec and ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or in that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it and make a decision on is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely gonna be important to some of the others that are using it. So I think it's critically and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about that. Now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Key talked about and it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. Key, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned Battlefield and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edger on the DoD's work. You mentioned the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity, I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, you got to, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. How are you seeing this translate into the edge and innovation area? You know, it's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all-domain command control, JASC too. And all the services are getting behind that or looking into that and this vision of this military, internet of military things, right? And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, is not just the connected end of the sensors, which requires the transport again, right? But also they have to be interoperable, right? So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, but if they can't, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another, right? In a common language, right? That kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value, right? Of that, you know, a sensor shooter kind of paradigm we've been striving for for ages, right? So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history, we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate, right? Where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before, right? So I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the peace parts in place and being put into place. I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, engineers out there, not enough more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because, you know, the old adage is, these are hard problems that attracts great people. You got a new engineering, SRE-like scale engineering. You have software development that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could come at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people and there's real hard problems to solve. Not just security. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators, right? You know, we've been thinking about this for some time and you know, we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery and so forth. But, you know, there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about even from a commercial perspective, right? So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the early, you know, mid, you know, 90s, right? For us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. It's a revolution, new leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation without their support would be here. Now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? Yeah, so it's actually, it's fortuitous. And I think we just got, we got lucky. There's two aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner in our, on the platform one basic ordering agreement. So just there, you know, we had a common mentality, right? Of DevSecOps and so there was a good partnership there. But then when we thought about, we're engaging from an edge perspective, you know, they're K3Ss, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators in around K3Ss, right? To reduce that software footprint which is required on these edge devices. You know, we kind of got a two-fer there in that partnership. Awesome, John, any comment on your end? Yeah, I would just amplify the K3S aspects and leveraging the containers. A lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities. Containers and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever's wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. I really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening. The next big thing is coming quickly and it's here on us and that's cloud, I call cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment edge with 5G. Changing the game, Key, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and repivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers as a pattern emerging, right? You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it, some people are not getting there. So I got to ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance, launching a satellite, a couple hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad, right? So, you know, the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits, more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? You know, as we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection, right? On the sensor themselves. Other definition of edges were a little further back, what we call the edge of the IT enterprise. But, you know, as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment, right? From your cloud to your tactical clouds, right? Where you can do some processing and then at the edge themselves. Really, at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about is still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data. The telco is transporting the data, right? And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relation to telcos, right? One, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing, right? So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud, right? Which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the process to the data, right? So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them, right? So I think, you know, at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, right? How that works. So the network of these telcos, I think are just going to expand. John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out at the scalability speed of innovations, a big factor. The old telco days are like, I mean, you know, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. You got, you know, it's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Key would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds, being available, you know, in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near pure threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. I, while yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. Because I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, you know, continue to survival and lethal. And so that's something I think as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology key, it's been like siloed. Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project and we have the tactical edge and we have the siloed IT solution when really work and play, whether it's work here and John's example is the warfighter. And so his concern is safety is life, right? And protection. The other department has to manage the comms and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go, right? So all this is, they'll integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like, it's together. Yeah, John, I mean, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this silo thinking, not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise, right? You know, from a digital battlefield perspective, you know, it's a joint fight, right? So even across these enterprises of enterprises, right? So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate. We have to interoperate. And by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated to, right? Not reinventing the wheel. Yeah, I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously is much more, more deployments not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower from a backhaul standpoint, but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? So, you know, we're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the are the possible, right? Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, Amazonas and Microsoft also investing as well, right? So I think the merge of the, you know, are the unconstrained are the possible, right? By these small companies that are, you know, just kind of driving, you know, innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out kind of these hardened kind of capabilities. They're going to converge at some point, right? And that's where I think we want to get further innovation. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scaled roll of data. We kind of, we hit out all the key points, I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. You know, the developers are now going to be in the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning, architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? It's just a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architecture a couple of times and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will actually connect with your cloud architectures so that they're not disjointed, right? They're not siloed, right? They're interoperable. They integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure out kind of, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients, right? So being a little patient and thinking through kind of how you can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that you raised, I would number one amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment with legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patients open, all that. I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. Like how do you go through this life cycle? How is security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. John Pisano, principal of Booz Allen Digital Class Solutions. Thanks for sharing that great insight. Key Lee, vice president at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot and how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. Thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier. This is a CUBE conversation. Thanks for watching.