 Okay, welcome back everyone live here in theCUBE, Las Vegas for VMware Explorer 2023, our 13th year covering VMware's conference, formerly VMworld. Now VMworld, I'm John Furrier, Rob Stretcher, got two great guests here, managing on VP of Modern Apps and with VMware and Ryan Morgan, VP of Suffering with Spring. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having us. Okay, so we missed the Spring conference, which is the pre-event before VMware Explorer, which is everyone's here, that went on. And then we had the great news you guys had with Tanzu App Engine platform, tying together with ARIA, which I thought was probably one of the biggest things I liked that came together. That's going to have a lot of impact. So a lot of news to cover. First, let's get into the Spring news. What did you guys do at the conference? Give us the quick highlights. Sure. This is our first in-person Spring one for four years. So there was a lot of built up excitement about getting back together. This year we celebrated our 20th anniversary of Spring and our 10th anniversary of Spring. So that was a huge milestone, still growing at 50% year over year in terms of downloads. So it was great just to see the community and everyone together. As far as content, we talked a lot about what's coming in Spring Framework 6.1 in Spring Boot 3.2, mainly around virtual threads, which is coming in Java 21, and then coordinated checkpoint at Restore, which allows you to checkpoint an application and then restart it at a later time, which gives you benefits in terms of startup time. So in today's market, obviously Java is still huge. You get a lot of other frameworks, a lot of language. And now with AI, all this coding is going to come natural. How do you guys see the Spring vectoring into that AI wave coming in? Because it's going to be pretty huge. You're going to have a lot of assistance, a lot of intelligence assistance. You guys have it on the other side too. How's that blending in? Because these modern apps got to land somewhere. As Amanda Plevins would say, they're going to come in, where do they drop? So apps got to drop somewhere. I know that's going to probably be our conversation, but how does the modern application view look? Yeah, you can think of it in a couple of different ways. One is kind of AI for the end user, right? There's AI for the developer. So one of the things we focused on for this conference is a new project called Spring AI, which makes it very simple for Spring developers to interface with open AI models, right? So it gives you a variety of starters and templates and gets you going very, very quickly. And when you say open AI, do you mean the company open AI models, or do you mean open source models? Both open source models as well as Azure AI. So we did a demo on the keynote stage on Azure, kind of demonstrating this for a Spring application. And why is, again, when you look at the whole portfolio, why is this so important? Because to me, I look at it and go, it makes sense. And again, we were talking before, I developed on Spring as a platform, and that was back from 2006 to 2011. So a little bit while ago, why is it important with the whole portfolio, with Tanzu and everything else? No, that's a great question. And when we look at it, what we're doing with Tanzu, it's all about applications. You know, you heard Pernima kind of say the tagline over and over again, accelerating application delivery. And we do that working with a lot of enterprises. And we still, Spring is a hugely popular framework, especially also within the enterprises. And it has a high correlation with cloud native application development pattern. So for us, this is a very rich vibrant community, keeps growing, he's continuing to innovate with the community on bringing AI and these other capabilities to the framework and those tools. And from a platform side, we're trying to bake that in into like Tanzu application service, Tanzu application platform, so that the everyday developer can take those components, be able to build the apps quickly, and then get all the benefits of the secure supply chains, running on those app spaces with the engine that are Spring-specific, and then be able to take that all the way through operating and optimization. Is the secure supply chain actually built in to that? Tap, yeah, it's a part of the application platform. I think maybe it's getting glossed over, but core parts of the application platform are the developer portal, so that front end DevX, which is where you'll see a lot of the Spring application templates. The secure supply chain, you know, automated build, scan, sign, all that stuff, S-bombs, and then deploying it onto the runtime and managing. Out of curiosity, just because the geek in me is the developer portal built off of Backstage or something. Absolutely, yeah, it's all the hype, and we've been working with Backstage for like two plus years, so we've been involved in the ecosystem pretty for a long time. Because I think this is something, and I brought this up to a couple of people, and I think we talked about it briefly, is that I think it's almost also got glossed over is how much open source is part of this. Oh, Honderfuss said. And how important it is to this part, so. VMware has a ton of open source. Not only do we contribute to all the big projects that you know you've heard of, like Backstage, Kubernetes, all of that. We also author and open source a lot of technology. Spring is open source. We sometimes donate those into the foundation. Sometimes we just continue to maintain them. But what we do then is bring it together, integrate, add enterprise controls, all those other features that enterprises are looking for, and then that's what we ship as product. Oh, sorry. All right, go ahead. I'm going to butcher the name of an Antara. Is that the service mesh? Oh, you're thinking Antria? Antria, yes. I knew I was going to say that. Oh, yes. And that's being, you're trying to bring that to the CNCF now, right? Is that? I believe so, I'm going to have to check. There's always a lot of movement for us and all the projects we're involved in. Well, the thing I want to ask about the news was one of the top news that got a lot of attention was the expanded platform, Tanzu platform, but with the App Engine, can you unpack that a little bit? What's the, what is that about? How does that fit in? Yeah, so we've expanded the definition of the platform because the platform is both a development platform site as well as a runtime. Like, you know, those two things need to go together. It's part of a life cycle. So that's really why we expanded it. It doesn't get rid of what we had before, you know, the portal supply chains or Kubernetes operations, but how do we, you know, abstract the complexity away from, away from Kubernetes more? You know, there's a lot of talk about that over Twitter, X, whatever now. But that's really the idea of the engine, right? Can you codify business requirements? And then also like the packages and all those things that you need for the app into a place that then is going to continuously like orchestrate and keep maintaining the state and all the things you need, like security, I think need things to be highly available. But you can, it doesn't matter what that underlying infrastructure is. So core to the VMware value proposition, yeah. So talk about the simplicity because one of the things we heard when we were coming in we were like, Tansu, what's it going to fit? The feedback we've been hearing on theCUBE and in the hallways is it's simpler. It feels simpler. What was the, how would you describe that? If someone said, hey, what happened? How did you guys make it simpler? Simpler, well really by doubling down on Tanzu being the application portfolio brand and our focus from an application context so that there is the application platform and then intelligence services all in the pursuit of accelerating the delivery of those applications. And that way it's, it just kind of provides like here's two things you focus on and within there there's core capabilities that modules that you would add on. When we are talking to Ra-Goo when he came on and we were talking about how he had the wave slides and we were all seeing how old we are, the PC apps, web apps. We all lived it, right? Mobile apps. And then he kind of skipped cloud apps. He kind of skipped one. He goes, he interrupted me before I could say cloud apps. He goes, no, no, that's part of mobile. I go, okay, all right, okay, that's SAS. Okay, I get that on-premise focus. But the AI apps was the big part we focused on. That's going to be the app side of the modern apps and that's what you're focused on. How do you guys see that 20 mile stair for modern apps as DevOps pushes platform engineering? We have been thinking it's going to be the big driver. How does the platform engineering trend and the movement with the AI apps come together? Right now we're in build up mode. Everyone's euphoric, oh, AI's everywhere. Hugging face got a big fat financing round today. Everyone's playing with the models. So it's super fun at open source, but as it starts to get built. At a platform level, yeah. They got to land somewhere. So how does that platform engineering tie into the apps that are going to drop in? Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. How can we take, and this is part of Raghu's keynote, AI went from this niche thing to now it's more generally available to everyone. It's accessible. But as businesses start to bring that into their organization, how do they make that available to developers in a way that's easily consumable? It's also secure? I think the questions around what we have that we're answering with the software supply chain, we have to do that with the AI components and where's the data coming from? Where's the models coming from? Can you prove the provenance of that? And that's really, I think, where the evolutions of the platforms will go because it's not something by itself. You're going to have the AI as part of the application and those all need to go through this same supply chain, have the same assurances so you can protect yourself as a business and your customers. And then they land on a platform that you continue to have the flexibility to run that anywhere based on the business need where you're serving your customers. And help, I guess, bring this and bridge the gap to spring because I think for me, that was, I mean, again, I've been there a long time ago. My last company used .NET and we were moving to .NET Core. So I get some of that, that it's still heavily used, Java and .NET are still out there all over the place. But a lot of people, it's not seen as sexy, right? It's not rust or go or something. It's not the standing you up. Node.js or some of these other things that help bridge that gap for people who are watching of why spring is still important and why Java is still important in .NET. Right, so Java as a platform has been moving faster than ever, right? So they've moved to a six month release cycle, new features coming out every six months. As a spring team, we've decided that we are going to fast follow to be able to bring all the great innovations that you are seeing on the JVM, two developers. Even if you just update a Java application from Java 8 to 17 and Spring Boot 2.7 to 3.0, you automatically get a bunch of performance benefits, right? Then you can go a bit deeper and begin to take advantage of some of these newer constructs that are coming in the platform, right? So that's kind of how we see it. What's the view of the developers right now? Because we are looking at, I was always talking about the Jenner Bay Isle, yeah, going to go faster. But everything seems to be circling back to like the old days, like systems programming, everything we're talking about seems like operating systems. So Java is grounded as one of those heavy duty core, like C++, heavy hard core coding. And so it seems like AI were coming back to these systems and old school constructs that have been working. So is that translating into the developer community, Java, or am I just kind of like overthinking this thing? I mean, it's just a breath of support within Spring. We support 200 different technology starters, right? So no matter what it is you're trying to accomplish, there's likely something that we can do to help you move faster, right? And then maybe going back to Betty's point earlier about, being able to enable AI and enable gen AI on the dev side, doing work with code bases that are private, right? So GitHub, Co-Pilot might be not really sure where the data's coming from. We're able to go back and train a model based upon internal source code, right? So maybe you follow the conventions of whatever bank you're at or whatever company you're at, right? And by doing that, you can kind of ensure that safety and that providence of where that's coming from. Yeah, I mean, I think this large language model, programming language, you can get that thing trained, you know, who knows what, it sounds like a dog, a pats, pats and cattle, pats, gotta train pats, you can't train cattle. No way, a cloud joke there, couldn't resist. I actually just thought of something and hopefully maybe you're maybe not have an opinion on it, but when Oracle went and changed the licensing on the JDK, does that have any impact on your community or what you guys are putting out there? Is that, how is that going with the job changes? We made a big change in Spring Boot 3 to switch to the new Ducati EE namespace. That was a big lift. It was really one of the reasons why we also decided to push the baseline from Java 8 to Java 17. We felt that if you're gonna go through the work of migrating from the older namespace to the new one, you may as well go through the JVM upgrade as well, with the whole idea being that you could almost, you know, future-proof yourself for the next decade or so, right? Great, great. My final question is, what's next? What's the business plan? What's the plan? What's the business plan on Tanzu? You're overseeing Tanzu and that platform. What's the plan for Spring? Take us out. Yeah, so I mean, you saw it. Develop, operate, optimize. So you will continue to see further integrations on the solutions and that the value that we have in those intelligence services. How can we shift some of that information left to make it more useful for the developer, right? Should I know how much this cost of my changes? Is that important to me, right? Everybody wants the information because today everybody's in these silos. So you'll see further integration as well as, you know, we're gonna be bringing app spaces, an engine from like beta to GA throughout the rest of the year, and then, you know, just continued enhancements. And especially with Spring, we're going to, you know, we already have a lot of capabilities for Spring baked in to the platforms, but Tanzu is a great place and should be the best place to land Spring first. So that's a big focus there. So locking down Spring, so you're out. Not locking down. Don't say that. Okay, bad word. Nailing to the wall. It's like, no, but getting apps landing on Tanzu from Spring first, like getting that done. Making it really easy, right? Really easy and a great experience for the developer. Right. And on the Spring side, it's, you know, keeping with that innovation within Java. And then as Betty said, you know, making Tanzu a great place to run Spring. The more we can take out of the platform or out of the developer's hands into the platform, allows it to go faster and be more secure. And so success looks like your developers using the platform, dropping it into Tanzu application engine with ARIA management under the covers. Is that kind of the goal? Yeah, I mean, the more workloads that we can help get out to market faster. And the more that we can improve the cost performance and security of our workloads or other workloads, the better. Final, final question. What's the one thing you guys taking away from VMware Explorer this year? Oh, it has been so vibrant. I mean, the energy here has been amazing. This was my first spring one. And it was like, standing room only in a lot of these places. So that was really exciting to see. To see a truly vibrant like developer event inside of Mixplore was a good thing. And I love your tweets, by the way, helped me figure out what was going on. So thanks for sharing all that content. We were definitely watching on the back channel there. What was the one thing, Ryan, you take away from VMware Explorer? I take away, you know, we were, you know, moving to developer conference into a infrastructure conference. There was some concerns on how that might work. But I would say it's been great to expose spring to so many new people and then just being able to see the community again for the first time in four years has been fantastic. All right. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Third day, we're going to shut it down. I'm going to pull the plug in a few hours. We've got one hour left. Hey, thanks for coming. I know you're super busy. You guys are super busy. Appreciate it. Always. Oh, it's awesome. Cube Live coverage. We're going to the very end. I'm John Furrier, Rob Stretcher, Dave Vellante, and the others have Lisa Martin. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.