 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome everyone back to theCUBE's live coverage. This is day three of Google Cloud Cube coverage here. Google Next 2018, hashtag Google Next 18. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick. Our next two guests, kicking off day three is Ed Enoff, the director of product management at Google Cloud, part of the Apigee acquisition, really part of the APIs. Really a big part of the story here at Google Next. And Chuck Knossman, vice president of IT and T-Mobile. Customer, Ed, thanks for coming on. Chuck, thanks for coming on. So Apigee, big part of the story at Google Next is, you know, the role of APIs and services is huge. And I won't say nuance. I mean, certainly Istio is a new to a lot of people. Kubernetes, superbly very important piece of this new cloud service platform as well as just running workloads, multi-cloud, et cetera. What's the focus? What's going on for you guys at the event? Take a minute to explain the announcements and what you guys did here at the show. Sure. So, you know, APIs are how software talks to software. And what we announced this week at the show with Kubernetes and Istio are new ways for people to build software and deploy it in new distributed fashions. And so that's creating new ways for tying your software together, microservices. A lot of people are talking about now are a key part of this. And so from an Apigee perspective, you know, we're looking at facilitating how to make that communications happen, how to make it secure, how to make it efficient, how to monitor it. And so what we announced was that Apigee is making it now possible for you to have all the tools that we've given you for managing your APIs for, you know, getting your mobile apps to talk to your cloud services and all of that. Now is also going to apply to these new microservices that you're building. And so we think it's a pretty exciting thing. A lot of our customers have been asking for this and obviously Chuck being one of them. And so, you know, that's what it's been all about for us this week. Chuck, obviously APIs, key part of DevOps. You know, it's first started with slinging some APIs around stitching together. Developers voted with their code. Clearly APIs is the way that its software's working. Microservices takes us to a whole other level. Now, operationalizing APIs seems easy, but it's you got to start managing things differently. How are you guys taking that API and this new service management piece of it and kind of operationalizing APIs into T-Mobile? Yeah, we've been using Apigee for about four years now. And so over the time, I think we were have 200 plus internal APIs. So we've, over that time, we've kind of learned how to operationalize that piece of it. Over the last couple of years, we've really been focused on the microservice layers. Riding cloud-native applications essentially in that layer. And now with the Apigee hook into Istio, we're going to have a much better way to manage it. And it's really nice to see the platform starting to grow and mature along with us. So that's really great. I can only imagine how complicated it is to run real-time, cloud-native and have also legacy. And I think one of the things I'd like to get your thoughts on is containers have become a nice piece of not ripping and replacing to bringing the new. You don't have to kill the old to bringing the new. And now with containers, Kubernetes and microservices and Istio, you have an ability to kind of do both. Talk about how you guys do it. Because this is not a perfect storm in a good way for enterprises. Well yeah, it's really good timing for us as well. We're just now starting our Kubernetes journey on-premise, if you will. So we're a big cloud foundry shop. We're starting to put our legacy applications into Docker containers and we'll be moving them onto Kubernetes. And so you can see the whole, the containerization shift as we go through time. And it's really, for us, like I said, it's fortuitous at this timing because now with Istio coming in and being able to control all that, that's a great thing for us. And talk about, you give a lot of history to you. This is normal, APIs, this lingua franca has been around for a while. You've had a lot of experience in that. But a lot of the enterprises that we talk to are like, there's a lot of pressure in IT to do more now with Cloud Native and now with the new services that are out there, it kind of takes the pressure off IT because the pressure of, I got to have a sunset that app where I don't know when to kill that workload. I know I want to maybe transform it, but I don't want to have to disrupt all this stuff. So talk about the importance of non-disruption because this seems to be a conversation that's talked a lot in the hallways. Yeah, that's exactly right. So what you see within enterprises is that there's a need to deliver a whole set of new applications and a lot of these are connected to digital experiences, basically everything that you experience on your mobile apps, every new form of engaging with your customer. That's where a lot of the business growth is that's bringing a lot of the funding for these new initiatives. But a lot of the core data of the enterprise is locked up within systems that have been operating very efficiently but siloed for many years. And so that's the part that we see the most, which is folks within IT come to us and say, look, I've been building these legacy systems for many years now and I know that if I can just take the data that's locked up in these and bring these into these new ways of doing business, that it's going to have a huge impact on my business. And that's where the question sits. And then the follow-up on that is, hey, we want to make our businesses more like the way you guys are doing it in Silicon Valley and we see what you're doing with containers and we see things like Kubernetes and Cloud Native and we know that's the right way to build things, but there has to be a way for us to bring all of these other assets that we've been building for the last 30 years along for the ride. And in fact, for most of these businesses, our response is, hey, it's not just a question of building along for the ride, that's your core. That's your, that has been what you built your business on. So don't even just think about it as this thing that you somehow have to drag along. Think about how you actually can amplify it because it's been the source of your business for so long. Well, yeah, I would add to that is that it gives us scale and operation, a much better operational platform to work with. For us, we've grown tremendously, or our growth has been tremendous over the last five years. We've gone from, I think, 30 million customers to 73 million customers. And frankly, to scale those systems up, containerization is probably the only way we can go with it. And with, from an operational standpoint, having one platform like Kubernetes to operate for all of this stuff just helps us out tremendously. And we hear that all the time. I think that's the biggest story around container, outside of, you know, geeking out on the benefits of it, is that it really allows a nice bridge to the future. You don't have to burn the boats as they say in Silicon Valley, you know. And you can pick your, you can pick on the applications you want to keep around, right? Then you refactor them to be cloud native on the ones you don't, you don't have to go all the way, right? And so you can make it a much better that way. Chuck, I'm curious to get your take on the changing competitive environment. Because before, you know, you had these big, complex systems and you wanted to keep them running. Now the pressure for more innovation, more applications, quicker applications to leverage not only your inside stuff, but outside stuff in how some of these technologies are helping you deliver that to your customers, your internal development teams. Yeah, scale is one aspect of it. Performance is another. And the ability to move those workloads close to the customer, just like Google's trying to do with moving closer to the customer, we do the same thing, right? And so that the hybrid cloud is real for us. We run in almost all the clouds right now and on-premise, we treat that as a cloud as well. But being able to do that can only happen when we containerize stuff and utilize similar platforms on all these places. Right, and then you'll have this huge transformational shift over the next several years with 5G, right, that's coming in. Yeah, we've been at it for a couple years now. For a couple years, so this is going to be another huge wave of change inside your infrastructure. Yeah, yes, and it's fantastic. What attracted you to Google Cloud? Sheriff, take a minute to explain what was the interest in Google Cloud? Why Google Cloud for you guys? Well, we're just getting started with it, but it's really, it's the partnership we've had with Apigee that's helped us kind of understand what's going on with Google Cloud, but then the open source nature of it as well as the focus on AI and ML. That's why we're really taking a hard look at what's going on with Google Cloud and the attitude towards enterprises is great as well. The culture's a good fit there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of people are attracted by some of the speed. I mean, we've been hearing here at the show, Google obviously built their business on being fast. Yeah, and having your own network is massive as well, right? And now you've got the API. And what's the future look like for APIs and Apigee inside Google? Give us a little taste of what you guys are working on, some of the projects you guys are passionate about, and some of the successes you've had are any anecdotal use case studies. So definitely, so APIs carry our customers the most important data. And data is the basis for machine learning and AI. And so you're going to see a lot of product innovation for us about bringing AI to the point of these data conduits that are what APIs are all about. It's the natural place to couple it with every business process. So that's a big deal for us. I think that the security aspect, you heard a lot about security in the keynotes. Again, APIs are the conduit in many cases for, again, the enterprise is most important data to get outside of the perimeter of the enterprise. It has to be done in a secure way. And then finally, being able to go and leverage the sort of collaborative nature, the stuff you see within open source, the community around all of this, again, most APIs are about bringing a lot more developers to build more applications in less time around these APIs. And that is, that collaboration component is something that we see a ton of opportunities in terms of leveraging Google's unique know-how in terms of advancing and pushing the state of the art in APM management. So I think you're going to see a lot of that from us. Chuck, I'd love to get your thoughts on how you and IT, obviously, IT is transforming. We talk about it all the time. How you keep track of what's good, right? It used to be in the old days, the stack was pretty not that complex. And you go to gardener magic quad, oh, they're a leader, kick the tires, they come in, vendor will come in. But some of the best cloud providers don't even show up on a magic quad because it's horizontally scalable. APIs changes the stack a little bit of new modern middlewares emerging with Istio and new sets of business models and services are emerging. So a lot of people are like trying, I mean, how do you determine who's good in IT? Because you want to move the needle, you want to transform, you got a lot of buildup. How do you kind of evaluate, is there any new ways or is it gut instinct or specific things that you look at? Really good question. We try to adopt the open source stuff first, but from the company standpoint, we also look at the company themselves and who's really vested in what's going on with it. Like Apigee four years ago was really the only ones that were really only doing APIs, right? And their knowledge and the depth and their roadmap, that's what we really kind of look for. But to your point, things are changing so rapidly that you kind of have to go with the watch the open source community, where all the pull requests coming from or what platforms are they going after and then track that. And that's what we try to do. And so when we see Kubernetes and the explosion that's happening on that, the tooling that's coming around that, we know that's going to be good for enterprises going forward. So we're going to be heavily invested in that. It's interesting, we always talk about developers, but what's interesting that's coming out of the show that we're observing is, it's always about developers doing building apps, that's why. But the role of an operator inside IT, used to be an operator would maybe provision some storage and some servers. Now the role of what an operator, used to be network ops guys, now it's kind of more of a holistic view. Your thoughts on this, I know it's super early, but the emergence of these two personas in IT is super critical. We look at it a lot, it's automation, right? That's where it all comes to play. So if you've got a platform like a Kubernetes where you can have all this automation built around it and you let the developers just do their thing and focus on the business logic, that's huge. So there is kind of two personalities and the caring and feeding of that platform is just as important as the guys right in the applications across the top. Yeah, it's a really great environment. Final question for you guys, observations on the show, Google Next, what's your observation? Obviously you got an API perspective just globally looking down, if you kind of look, zoom out and look down at the show. Thoughts and commentary on what's happening here? You know, I think the scale of it has been amazing, you know, and we became part of Google two years ago. We were here at the show last year, looking at it this year and the level of growth, the activity, attendees, the number of announcements, it's just been amazing. It's been very exciting for us to be part of. Chuck, your thoughts? Super impressed, this is our first one, really, that we've come to. We were even participating on stage on the Knative, we wrote some applications to work with Knative. But it's a very diverse crowd, which is awesome. I think you really need that. Some of the others, I don't see as much. So I think what Google is doing, and again, their approaches to enterprise, looking more at solutions, vertical solutions, are very impressed with what's going on here. It's a really great time. Congratulations on all your success with the APIs. You guys have done the work. And open source, it's where your employees want to work, they want to meet other people, and this is where the co-creation, that's where the assessments of the vendors happen. Opensource.t-mobile.com, that's where we want to be. All right, great, thank you, Chuck. And thanks so much for coming. Thank you. I really appreciate the time. It's theCUBE live coverage here in San Francisco, covering Google Cloud's conference next 18. We'll be right back with more day three coverage. Stay with us, we'll be right back.