 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here live in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, breaking down all the content and the analysis, opinion, getting all the data, sharing that with you. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, we're in day three winding down. Great event, our next guest is one of the stars of the show here, original Kubernetes pioneer, Joe Bate, also the co-founder of Heptio, recently sold to VMware in acquisition. Startup, only what, two years old? Yeah, about two years. How about two years, welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Google, great work you've done with Craig, with pioneering Kubernetes, Heptio startup. Yeah, yeah. Got taken off the table as you guys are ramping up. Congratulations. Thank you so much. It's been a little bit of a wild ride, I can tell you that. So first question for you is, I don't want to get into a little VMware thing, we're going to hit that up at VMworld next year, but as you look at the ecosystem of Kubernetes, I mean you got to be looking at this saying, hey we knew this was going to be big, you guys been running it with Borg and where that came from in the DNA. The magic wand almost was kind of passed out, and we're like, hey this happened. It's kind of happening in a big way. What's your reaction? How do you feel on an emotional level? What's the vibe going on in your mind right now? I mean I look at this and it blows my mind. I mean I think we knew that we had a possibility with Kubernetes to do something big, we could feel it. I don't think we ever expected this to be honest. The thing though that I think surprises me and it was both about building a startup and building a company, but also seeing the community grow is that every time you hire a new person to a startup, every time you have somebody join the community and start contributing, it's like another cylinder in the engine. And it really starts taking it in directions that you had no idea it was going to go into. And so I look around here and this is a product of a community, this is not a product of any single company, any single set of folks. I mean you start things snowballing and interesting things happen, but it really is a group effort. And it's so hard to do a startup. I've done a lot of startups, we've done a lot of interviews with startups. It's hard. You've got to start a company, you got to do all that legal work then you got to get the momentum and it's capped off by the validation certainly by VMware who announced heavily at the VM world. Pat Gelsinger said Kubernetes is the dial tone. And I'm like okay, I guess we were talking earlier it's the Ethernet, I've called it the TCP IP. So all the analogies come to this enabling kind of capability and that's where we see a lot of the value. Where do you see the opportunities for the ecosystem to innovate? I mean you're getting some clear visibility around the stability, but now value is starting to get created. What's your thoughts on value creation? Where are some areas that are right? Well I think a couple of things. I think we're at the point now where it's about how do we bring these technologies to new people, to new audiences, to folks who might not have heard about it, don't quite get it, how do we make this stuff more relevant to them? So we're moving out of this technology focus phase into a phase that's focused on solution and value that's delivered. And this isn't always about innovation and building on top, some of it is about different ways to do it and also just having these ideas just permeate, right? And as technologists we build on incredibly complicated technology. When you look at say something like AWS, right? If you were to approach that brand new without any idea of the history there it'd be incredibly intimidating, right? But it's been around long enough, it's grown organically that everybody's like, oh yeah I totally understand all that stuff, right? It just takes time sometimes for these technologies to become understood, to become part of the fabric of what people assume the technical skill set is. And I think that's a big part of what we're seeing starting to happen now too. Joe, I want to get your viewpoint. When I think about the last 10, 15 years, the whole discussion of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, portability, even I think about things from a VMware context or from a cloud computing context. Seems like we had a lot of false starts and false expectations about, we listed a Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy and others talk about the three laws of the cloud. We're not changing physics. And Kubernetes is super important for multi-cloud but portability was kind of thrown out there. I want to get you help us tease out what it is, what it isn't and how do you see multi-cloud today? Yeah, so I mean, first on the topic of false starts, you know, there's this popular narrative that, oh, it's going to be this, now this is the hot thing, now it's this. And the reality is that mainframes are still around, right? Technologies don't disappear. It's an additive type of thing. So it's not like, say, for example, Kubernetes or serverless or, you know, or machine learning, right? It's like, it's all of those things working together. And I think that's, I think if you look in that way, it doesn't feel like a false start. It just seems like we're adding more different techniques, more technologies onto the pile. In terms of, you know, where I see this stuff going, I think multi-cloud and compatibility do go hand in hand. From the very start, we never wanted to pretend that Kubernetes was going to be this magic layer that was going to make differences between different environments disappear. What we did want to do, though, is actually find the commonalities and minimize the extra differences that didn't need to be there, right? And so a lot of times when I talk to customers, I don't say, hey, don't use this special, you know, service in this cloud. I don't tell them that. What I do say, though, is if you are going to start using those things, do it in an eyes-open type of way. Understand the trade-offs. Understand why you're doing it versus just willy-nilly adopting technologies because they look nice and shiny, and that's what you want to do, right? So I think whether you're adopting Kubernetes, whether you're adopting a specific cloud technology, whether you're moving to cloud versus actually building, you know, automatable infrastructure on-prem, make sure that you're thoughtful about how you enter those types of decisions. The feedback we hear from people here in theCUBE this weekend and other places as well is pick a problem to solve. Don't boil over the ocean. Get in there, use Kubernetes for what you think you can nail a problem on, iterate from there. That's the common theme. Now, as you guys pivot over to VMWare, they've been investing a lot in their strategy, obviously with AWS. RDS is now on VMWare. They look at Kubernetes as a great opportunity to bridge on-premises and cloud. So it's clear, we can see why they like it. Explain for the folks watching who are fans of you and Craig and Heptio, what's next for you guys? You join VMWare, you just close the deal. You're a principal engineer at VMWare. You're in the business unit side. Just share some of the specifics that you can on what's going to happen next. Yeah, I think it's too early for me to speak on sort of a grand strategy across VMWare. I think I'm still mapping things out and understanding things. What I can talk about is the way that we were thinking about the market from Heptio's point of view and every indication that I've seen that this is actually very, very compatible for VMWare. A lot of the keynotes that you saw here at KubeCon show that adoption curve where we're in the early phase versus the early majority, that type of thing. And I think there's some truth to that. But I also think that there's an axi to that that actually isn't shown up there around the different personas that you see adopt different technologies inside of the enterprise organization. And so, the strength of somebody like VMWare and I think the early adopters for things like Kubernetes are that operator persona. And we're seeing an evolution of that persona as it starts to come to grips with the world of the cloud. We're moving from a place where things are ticket-based, human-intensive to how do we move to API-driven, policy-driven types of things. And so that's obviously where the cloud is but how do we take those learnings? How do we take those lessons and actually apply those things on-prem? And so our goal from Heptio's point of view and I think it's incredibly well aligned with VMWare and an enormous opportunity is taking the VMWare faithful, the folks who do go to VMworld that have built careers on that solution. How do we help them move their career forward, move their positioning forward in a way that doesn't eliminate their jobs but helps them actually be smart in a modern cloud, world where cloud is actually part of the landscape. We had Aparna on from Google and Aparna from your Google days and she made a comment about these new personas, new opportunities, new jobs that are opening up based on Kubernetes. Okay, great, we see some of that. And then we then rift on the idea that Kubernetes also is an uplift for existing roles, system architect, network guy, server guy. So this is, and then the VMWare operator that have been working virtual machines, this is a lift for them. Talk about what specifically is going to get them jazzed up is that the policy knobs on Kubernetes, what's going to really appeal to people below Kubernetes and what's going to appeal to the developers above Kubernetes? Well, I mean for centralized IT within an organization, cloud has been a challenge, right? If, you know, and I'm not thinking of a specific customer but it's not, you know, it's not insane to think about something like a developer who wants to write an app, they have to file a ticket, it can take anywhere from two weeks to three months to get stuff provisioned, right? And they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting to actually get that stuff ready. Meanwhile, they can take their credit card, go to a cloud, get a machine up and running within 30 seconds and get their app shipped. So while they're waiting on that ticket, they can get that app shipped and then they dare their manager to deny the credit card charge when it comes due, right? That is a challenge for centralized IT which oftentimes has not had any competition. Now all of a sudden they find themselves in a situation where they're competing with cloud for the hearts and minds of their own customers for their developers. And different organizations have reacted to this in different ways. Some of them had said, you know, we're just going to explode out IT and actually say, you know, different business units, you own your own destiny there. But depending on the enterprise, depending on the goals, depending on their requirements around regulatory needs, around policy, around cost controls, around mobility of developer skills across the organization, that may or may not work for them. And so for me, the bridge forward for the centralized IT is really one of giving them the power tool so that they can actually serve their customers better in a world where cloud exists. Yeah, their job, that's their job to serve the business. I mean, like the bar has been raised, right? And so we want to help them meet that challenge. That's awesome. Yeah, Joe, I want to get your thoughts on this growing ecosystem. I said in our open this morning, we've been looking for the last five years or so, where is that independent cloud computing show and sitting here with 8,000 people, another 2,000 people in the hallways are on the wait list and things like that, it's here. And there's all of these projects, it's multiple communities come together. How does it feel that Kubernetes, was it kind of the first domino to help tip something broader with cloud native? I mean, it feels really good to be honest. I think one of the things that we saw Heptio as and I think VMware is actually in a great position also is to be a neutral party that really is on the side of customers as they enter this complex world where they're dancing with elephants that are the big cloud providers. And I think that there's an enormous appetite for customers to actually have trusted partners in that world. Now with respect to the conference, I think what I love doing is I love being on the floor here, I love talking to people, I love going to the session tracks. That's where I think the heart of this conference is. Some of the contributor community days that happen on Monday that don't get a lot of coverage. I mean, the big headlines are one thing, but there really is I think an undercurrent of community that's happening in this conference that is really something pretty special. I think that's a great point and at least what I've seen, right, those contributors, the Envoy group, tomorrow there's the operators group. This is not a monolithic community, it's not like, look, I've been in VMworld for years. It was about virtualization and primarily a single product from a single company and everything that wrapped around it. This is not a vendor doing it. There's all of these, I talk to the people that all they care about is helm. I talk about, there's all of these different pieces and many of them tie into what was going on in Kubernetes, but there's just so much diversity and it's a common ground for everybody to work together. This is one of the things that I think has been interesting about the CNCF is that there is no, you know, there is an idea that we want to create a set of projects that work well together, but there also is a realization that, you know, there is no one way to skin the cat. There is no one way to solve a problem. And so there is room for projects to disagree. There's rooms for projects to experiment. There is room for folks to try and find their audience and be successful. That's the modern upgrade in my mind to not for, not going against the open source ethos, but also innovating with it. You're balancing commercial, so you just, I think they've applied this upstream concept called CNCF where the downstream benefits for commercialization, you can still do the open source community thing while having an impact downstream to IT and just regular developers. And I think this is the trend that we see in enterprise when we talk to customers, we talk to interview people. IT has been outsourced for decades and now they're asked to be a competitive advantage. Then you have the competition thing that you pointed out and smart CIO CXOs are bringing developers in to create a competitive advantage. And it's a new, it's a new reset. Oh yeah, for sure. And not throwing away networks, they're not throwing away compute and storage. They're going to change it. And I think this is really real, tailwind is, do you agree with that? Or what's your thoughts? The way I like to think about it is that, and I'm using company names here as an example, but I think there is this race between Tesla learning how to become a car company versus say like Ford or GM learning how to become a software company. And that dynamic is playing itself out across every single industry. And I think there is not a CEO or CIO or board out there that doesn't realize that the way for us to be relevant in the future is to turn software into not just a cost center and something we deal with, but something that becomes a fundamental advantage and driver of our business. Every industry, media, software. Oh yeah. We're a software company that happens to do media with theCUBE. Yeah, and it's totally right. Any industry, right? This is why Amazon's getting into grocery stores. Yeah. Right? It's integration. This is a completely new horizontal dynamic with a little bit of specialism with machine learning at the Apple. We're moving to a software defined world. For sure. Joe, better great to have your commentary here in theCUBE. Thanks for sharing and congratulations on the acquisition. It's a super outcome. The numbers floating out there. It's pretty large. Good deal. We have no comment. Open source. Open source business models are changing, but the value is still the same. Those who create the value can extract it. That's the ethos of open source. Of course theCUBE as well. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.