 Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host here talking about the journey to cloud native with a friend of theCUBE, Peter Frey, field CTO and head of field engineering from platform nine. Peter, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, I'm happy to be here looking forward to our conversation today. You know, we love when we get into KubeCon zone. It's all about developer productivity, scaling up infrastructure DevOps, infrastructure as code, continuing to power away. Evaluate many companies in the enterprise on mainstream with Kubernetes. They're kicking the tire, someone jumping into the deep end and evaluating how it impacts their organizations. This is a really big trend and it's a sea change from the era of virtualization. It's happening. So can you share your thoughts on what you're seeing right now? You're out in the front lines, you're talking to customers. You guys are running a lot of infrastructure for Kubernetes with big deployments. What are you seeing? Yeah, every one of our customers, every one of the prospects that I talked to out there in the industry, they're all evaluating Kubernetes, trying to figure out what Kubernetes is going to mean to them and their business and how they're going to adopt it. And as they're on that journey, they're realizing that Kubernetes is just not a tool, but it's an entire ecosystem of tools that they need to implement, right? They're on this journey from maybe VMs to a containerized workload. Maybe Greenfield apps are going to be all containerized, but they still have virtualized workloads. Virtualized workloads, they're not going away, right? And so, Kubernetes with the Kuber project allows you to run virtual machines inside the Kubernetes cluster. So you can run that app that's running in the VM that's been available for the last, running for 10 years. And the developer quit five years ago, but they're not going to take time to refactor that right now. So they just want to run it close to the virtualized infrastructure or the containerized infrastructure. So we allow platform nine supports Kuber allowing you to run that kind of workload side by side with your containerized workloads. Peter, I want to dig into this virtual machine workloads, migration to containers. It's a huge topic. A lot of people are talking about it and doing it. Can you tell us more about how some of the enterprises are moving the VM workloads to containers to save costs or make efficiency happen on the infrastructure? And how can you run VMs and containers side by side? What's the benefits of doing that? Yeah. So running virtual machines in containers side by side is absolutely 100% possible. You inside of Kubernetes, there's a project called Qvert that allows you to take virtual machines. You can even import them directly from your VMware environment or your existing infrastructure and pull them into a Kubernetes cluster and then run them natively inside a Kubernetes cluster. People were doing that today with several of our customers. They are, you know, they're doing it for many reasons, right? One of them was, one of our customers just recently moved some Palo Alto network firewalls. They got managed to increase their throughput on the virtual machines, 3X from two gig to six gig throughput. Pretty amazing results. And we were able to migrate that in just a matter of minutes. And it was very impressive. So you get cost savings too. It's not just infrastructure and efficiency. You get to save money. Yeah, yeah. Because now you're running on a single solution, you're maybe not paying for another virtualized environment. You can do it all in a single solution. It also saves money on your infrastructure team, the people that are maintaining the Kubernetes clusters and that sort of stuff, because now you're just one environment instead of two. We had Amelia on the Cube earlier talking about skills gaps. It's always hard to hire people. So that's another factor that drives us all this. And this is really kind of key as companies shift to the modern infrastructure. It's really about leveraging the VMs and containers and Kubernetes together, but the scale will come from the containers and Kubernetes as we're seeing. Can you share, Peter, the patterns and observations that you've seen as you guys have been doing this, you've stumbled the process. She's probably used cases where it's like, do that, but don't do that. That breaks and that will break over there. I mean, is there things that you see that are hotspots or key areas to optimize around when you talk about evaluating and deploying the Kubernetes at scale? Yeah, I think what Kubernetes does is it makes you think different now as a technologist, as a leader and everything that you do at Kubernetes. The way you deploy an app to Kubernetes, the way you maintain that app, the way you upgrade that app, the way that the application is troubleshoot, the way you troubleshoot that and the Kubernetes cluster, it's all kind of wrapped together inside of the single ecosystem, right? And our customers, what they're finding is that talent resource is hard to find and it's really expensive when they find it, right? And I'll give you an example. One of our customers, I won't mention any names, but literally was working on a Friday night. He was developing a CI CD pipeline, kind of a normal DevOps activity, right? And he built this pipeline and he's like, I'm done for the day. So I keep CTL, delete namespace, give the namespace and then he included this thing called dash dash all on the command line. And he's on this production cluster. And what happened was because it included dash dash all, deleted every namespace. Because when you delete a namespace, it deletes all the pods and services in Kubernetes and he literally wiped out that entire Kubernetes cluster in a keystroke, right? Platform nine, because we had backups of their environment, we're able to restore that in less than two hours. The company was fine. Like they failed over to a backup solution and their business still ran, but late on a Friday night, this guy's calling us saying, can you help us? And that's a talent resource because he was a young engineer with Kubernetes. He wasn't familiar with the command line and he fell into one of the possible traps that are out there. And so there are many different ways that Kubernetes can explode and have challenges. At CD can blow up, we could worker nodes can go off lines and each one of these needs to be shot in a different way. So there's, yeah. It's, this is like, you know, the old school classic ops equation. You want to monitor everything you want to have, things instrumented, you know, as it gets more complex, it's harder. So can you share some of the things that you guys are doing with customers deployments? We've heard that you have some large deployments around your customer base. What are some of those complexities that you guys take away from the customers to manage that you do on your side, but lets them still get the benefits of kind of feeling like they're rolling their own and deploying and being more productive. What are some of the things that you guys take care of specifically? Yeah, so Amelia mentioned earlier that we have some customers that are very large distributed edge type customers where they have, you know, multiple Kubernetes clusters deployed regionally around the United States and around the world. And so when you start looking at managing at scale, right, that magnifies the, all the problems that you're going to have to have, right? So you need to have a way of remote managing everything, right, accessing those boxes, be able to fix them, monitoring everything so you get alerts and alarms. And then not only do you have to have alerts and alarms, but you got to have standard operating procedures, right? You need to know what you're going to do when this thing happens, right? So you can quickly resolve the issue and bring back service or restore those, you know, mission critical applications as quickly as possible. You guys have always on assurance. We've mentioned that before in the past. So with some SLAs, you guys have been having success with retail, which I think is a great edge case. As the internet edge comes on, data provisioning, managing appliances, these are critical tasks. You guys have a great example. Is this something that you can share and your point of view on this? Because I think this is an area people are starting to see now extend out from the cloud native, on-premise cloud native cloud. Now you got the cloud native edge emerging. Can you share that distributed computing architecture? What are some of the things that you're seeing out in the field that customers are doing? Yeah, I mean, the retail edge is just one space, right? We work with content delivery networks, the 5G edge, but specifically in the retail edge, right? The retail space, they're trying to reinvigorate how to get feet in their stores, right? And they're trying to do that through technology. And the only way you can do that is through innovation. You have to be able to do that innovation very, very quickly, right? And so anything from in-store marketing that's personalized to you because you have your app installed, they know where you are, you walk and pass an aisle and it's got some advertising that's personalized directly towards you, right? Or makeup stores that are trying to use your facial image from in the store to be able to show you what makeup might look on there. But in order to innovate there, right? You can't have DMs, you can't have applications that can be updated once a month or once a year, right? Or you have to send a person to the store to update those applications. All of this needs to be done remotely through continuous delivery mechanisms to be able to allow you to be effective and efficient in delivering those unique experiences. Well, you guys got a lot of great customer successes, a lot of large scale, big complex customers. The joke in here in theCUBE also out in Kubernetes world like at KubeCon is, there's more complexity coming. So taming complexity is going to be the big focus. What do you think is the right direction that we're going to be going into? What's next? What do you see coming around the corner around making things easier, more automated for customers that don't have to spend a lot of time? And you guys are doing that service right now. What's next for you guys? Where does this go in the next year or two? Yeah, I think everybody's trying to, you know, the developers, their expectation is Kubernetes is an endpoint. They just want to use it and they want it to be available. They want it up and running all the time, right? And I believe that, you know, as we look forward into the future, right, that use case that we started the conversation off with where virtualization is going to run side by side with containerization, it's going to be a critical thing. And we're seeing a lot of that activity at platform nine right now. And that's a tell sign in your opinion, Peter, right? That this is transitions happening at scale. It is absolutely happening. Everybody we talk to is trying to figure out what they're going to do in that space and how they're doing it. Peter, share with the folks watching, what are you doing that's cool that they might not know about? Why is Kubernetes so important? What are some things that you're working on that you could share? Yeah, thanks. You know, what I like to tell our customers and our prospects and everybody I talked to about platform nine is that we deliver production ready Kubernetes, okay? We deliver production Kubernetes upstream Kubernetes straight from the GitHub repo offered as a SaaS managed service, right? We offer full automation around the deployment, the management, the monitoring, maintenance and upgrades of Kubernetes, okay? In fact, I like to tell our customers that we've got the simplest zero-touch Kubernetes upgrade in Kubernetes industry because we test every aspect of an upgrade before it goes into our product that our customers can use. But I think the number one thing that I think we should take away for everybody about platform nine is that our alerting, our monitoring, our support teams, our customer success managers, all of those we've got your back, right? We're an extension of your team. And honestly, you know, when an incident happens something breaks in your Kubernetes cluster we're alerted to it. We're going to alert you to it. Tickets will be created automatically. And then we have that white glove service to be able to jump on a Zoom. We bring our incident manager, our solution architect, our cloud support engineers, and we will stay on that Zoom session until your Kubernetes cluster service has been fully restored. And we can bring the breadth of platform nine's engineering to help with that. Awesome, great to have you on, Peter. Well, I got you here real quick, one final question. I got a lot of people always asking me this, mostly CEOs or executive level folks about what the definition of Kubernetes is. It's changed a lot of its orchestration. How would you define the current state of Kubernetes if someone like a CEO asked you? How would you define Kubernetes today? What is it? I would call it a container orchestration solution allowing you to deploy and manage applications and containers quickly and easily with a lot of automation built in around scheduling and availability of those containers across your infrastructure. And this is the reason why it's so important. It's the runtime, it's pulling things together, it's making things work with containers. That's the cloud native. Peter, thank you so much for coming. Great to see you and we'll see you at the next KubeCon. Sounds great. All right, Peter Frey, field CTO and head of field engineering, part of state of on-premise edge with cloud native. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE with platform nine. Thanks for watching.