 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hey welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE. Live here in San Francisco covering Google Cloud's event, Google Cloud Next 18, hashtag Google Next 18. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Lakshmi Sharma, Director of Product Management Networking for Google Cloud. We met in Denmark at KubeCon, part of the CNCF. Great to see you again, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Great to have you on, we've been hearing so many people talk about the networking. Dave I know he's got a lot of questions and it's come up, the performance, the low latency. Even we had a deep tea on earlier about Cloud Spanner. Customers, I moved from Oracle because the low latency. Low latency is the killer app for networking. That's right. What's new, what's happening at the show for you and your group? So a lot of things happening. You must have seen the announcements yesterday around Cloud Service Platform where GKE is a very kind of inherent part of it. And anywhere where you talk about hybrid, it wouldn't happen without connectivity. It wouldn't happen without service discovery, load balancing, so networking is inherent part of a lot of that hybrid story that we talk about this morning. We did a demo of Cloud Armor in a keynote session. So Cloud Armor, which is all the years of infrastructure work that we had been doing at Google, protecting our infrastructure services, leveraging that knowledge, and also protecting our edge for our customers, enterprise customers in Cloud. So there is a lot happening in networking. And what's interesting too is that, I mean I like the hybrid thing, we're actually choking off camera that I don't think Google actually needs to do hybrid because we just go to Google. But I see how you want to manage the objection, maybe sales inhibitors, but it should look like a cloud. I think that's everyone wants to do. Networking from one company to another has always been kind of a challenge. How are you guys solving that inter-cloud, inter-networking challenge? Because it's hard to get an SLA if you're going to be moving workloads around the cloud. So how do you guys talk about that inside Google? Because this is something that's come up a few times. You get software defined networking. What's the solution for moving workloads in and out of the cloud? Fantastic, and that's an area where we have launched some products, like not just from Google perspective, but even with partners. Because we do understand wherever it comes to hybrid, when you talk about gigantic petabytes worth of load migrating, like Hadoops and other kinds of data, you do need a network which is reliable, and where you can offer SLAs. So support for interconnect that we have, and we have launched Interconnect with partners, Partner Interconnect, and offering SLAs for that interconnect so that your customers can come to you reliably, and at giving you the same infrastructure capability that we will have for our connected services, that's where we are coming from. So yes, services like Interconnect, giving SLAs on them, so they are enabling a lot of these data migration stories and allowing mission critical applications to be moved over. I have a question for you, I want to throw this out there, and might throw you for a curve, Bob, but you're smart, so I know you'll get a good answer here. The whole show's about AI, and software defined and virtualization, we've seen that go up and down the stack. How is AI or machine learning being used in networking because we see Cisco here, and the big theme that we're connecting the dots in is that network data is actually really good for working with things like containers, and Kubernetes, GKE, and Istio. So you're starting to see policy concepts of networking go up the stack. Correct. So how is AI being incorporated into this? Can you share your reaction and commentary on what's going on there, the vision, or any top product features? So, brilliant, so security, and machine learning, and AI, that's just in Google's infrastructure DNA, and I sit in infrastructure team, right? So, a product that I mentioned earlier, Cloud Armor, which is built upon all the learning that we have had from a security, and protecting our infrastructure against the global attacks. So we had been learning that. We had been offering that to our end users with the YouTube, and Gmail, and other services anyways, and a lot of that, right, search, right? So all of that has been going in, and we had been learning throughout, a lot of machine learning, a lot of that logistics has already been offered through that infrastructure, and we are now leveraging that, and we want to be able to offer that as services to our customers, right? So, it's been there. It's been there, it's been there. We just need to kind of bring that infrastructure learning into the cloud users, to the enterprise customers. We saw a demo this morning in the keynote to protect against DDoS attacks, which is a pretty impressive demo, and like you said, that's just there, it's an inherent part of the application. We have what we do, right? It's not enough to thought for us. How about the undersea cable infrastructure that you run? I always watch videos of that stuff getting laid, and yeah, I think you've laid down, I don't know, another three, four, five, even maybe five this year. Talk about why that's important, and how that's strategic to Google. Oh, very nice. 13 so far, like 13 subsea cables we have. So we have this concept of global VPC, and VPC, which is like a virtual construct, which manages maps to, let's say an organization, or if you can go multiple hierarchies, it's a construct that we represent in cloud, is global, and we call it global VPC, because of that infrastructure that is laid down. And the reason that when you go across Atlantic, when you go from US to, you know, in the region, the reason that we can still give you that guarantee and the speed and the bandwidth that you get in the network is because of that infrastructure that we have laid down. So that is very, in here in part, all that infrastructure that we have laid out, including subsea cables, it makes our global VPC and global infrastructure. There's no interconnect. There is no interconnecting there. It's straight Google. Exactly, right? Very good point. So if you needed to go, and if you were another kind of VPC, where you go regional VPC one, regional VPC two, then you'll be going to another service provider, then you'll be setting up contracts and commercial NIP site VPNs, or some kind of peering policies. You don't need all of that because you're just going, oh, what happened? It's more expensive. Oh, absolutely. So what's the product straight? Your head of product management, which means you look at the product features, you got to decide what to put in, what to put out. It's like deciding as a chef what to make the meal the best year. You know, it's like, and you got to balance customer needs and engineering, happiness and priorities, some foundational things. What are some of the things that you're working on that you'd like, that you want to share that you think is important for people to know about? So in this, at Next, we have announced a couple of things. One of the things we are very proud of is our capability within the container or the networking space. So we make a load balancing and networking native for containers. So we launched something called Ingress, what we call Ingress with a multi-cluster support. So for the first time, I would, for the first time I would say, from a product offering perspective across the board, from any provider, you would see load balancing working natively for containers. What it means, you know, the bandwidth optimization to reach to your containers and your services and the latency that you need. So keeping our promise of making containers as a native citizen or, you know, first class citizen in cloud, that's what I'm proud of, what the team has done. And the benefits of that native load balancing? Native load balancing is that now you get the same experience, you get the same value from global load balancer and you get the same CDN experience. You get same cloud armor experience because now the same infrastructure will support your VMs and your containers in the same manner. So same policy going back to your point about same policy, same way of configuring and same way of managing your infrastructure. Nice, it's continuous, consistent across. Well, and that enables more, you know, greater degrees of automation if you don't have to sort of deal with multiple different configurations. So talk about the Google relationship, Google cloud relationship with Cisco. Obviously, we're very impressed with Cisco here for two reasons. One is we think this is going to be a major benefit for Google because, you know. Not that you don't have any sales people out there, but you know, the people would say, oh, they don't have any sales people. Well, I think Cisco is one of the best enterprise sales companies on the planet. They have the most enterprise customers running their routers and switches and everything else. They also co-developed the cloud services platform. How is it affecting your product mix? Are you involved in that? Are things you guys working together on? Are you providing value to them? How do you relate to that relationship? So like any other, say, hybrid provider, I would say our focus has been, as Google has been that, you know, build, increase and enhance the open source ecosystem, right, so that cloud is real, so that hybrid is real, right? So taking Kubernetes, taking Istio, so first we brought up the container management framework, you know, that was the one story, or not just one our story, but that's just kind of one method of doing hybrid and multi-cloud possible, and then you bring in a service abstraction layer because like you said, policy and how do you deploy it and how do you distribute your load, that's important, how do you discover your services? So in all those areas, Cisco has been working, they have been contributors as well, and that's kind of, that's the way we work with them, so enabling hybrid because as you said, they understand enterprise networking, where enterprise scenarios vary well, so we can leverage their enterprise knowledge, we can learn from them about enterprise patterns, and we can build towards our common services platform, cloud services platform framework, and make it for the best use of cloud plus enterprise customers. Last week, tell me, take your head of networking, product manager hat off for a second, and put your industry observer hat on, and knowing what you know. What's the big story here at Google Cloud this year? In your opinion, what's going on? What's the big story? I mean, there's some nuanced points, we love Istio shipping 1.0, I mean, I love, I geeked out on that, obviously GKE, super nice, tons of, I mean, there's a ton of things. What are the most important stories that are being told here? So okay, I'll just, this is my opinion, personal opinion, and the fact that we have large enterprise customers on stage with us. This Google has been innovative company, this is an engineering company, so this company has that DNA already, right, like of innovation, but being able to understand enterprise customers, being able to understand partners, and then get them together to truly work on solutions that matters to enterprise customers. To me personally, I think that's what is really clicking me at this next, and we have worked really hard as product engineering and partners and customers, this is real, and I'm very happy about it. You guys, if I may, to me that coincides with the recognition, the strong recognition by Google that the world is hybrid, right? I mean, for years we've been hearing, oh, from all the legacy guys, the world is hybrid, by the way they're right, but they've had the advantage for a while that maybe you didn't recognize that, and others didn't recognize that, you've now embraced that, that's a big flip. In the mindset. It's interesting, you mentioned engineering culture, Dave and I was always at the cubes, our ninth year doing the cube, got all the enterprise events, and then years ago when Google's getting in the cloud and it's like, John, what do you think about Google in the cloud? I remember saying, Dave, their engineers are going to write an algorithm for the enterprise, so the algorithm is figuring out this math behind the enterprise. You got customers, what are their needs, you got partners, what are their needs, has the ecosystem work, how's the money shift, who makes more money, I mean, it's a business model, you just got to figure it out, and engineer the solution. Yeah, and then the best thing is if you heard that Diane's keynote, like Mike from Target, like the CIO of Target, he was Target, Mike Tamara, so when they asked him, so how do you make the decision, I think the question was around who made the decision, he said my engineers made the decision. So I think that's playing very well in our strengths, because we are an engineering company and we have understood now what's the business model and what's the partnership model, the engagement model with enterprises, we have the best of the both sides now, and that's what is clicking. Well, we really appreciate the success, we'd like to see the momentum. My final question for you is, I know you're doing a lot of women in tech advocating within Google, I attended your women in tech cocktail hour, I kind of gate crashed it, I mean, I was, it wasn't a sign that said no guys allowed, but I was the only guy there for a little bit. Thank you for that. I wish you on a gate crash, he's known. I'm weird. I know, I do weird things, but it was a nice moment, you were bringing all the Linux foundations, C and CF books together, you sponsored the party, so thanks for doing that. Thank you so much, yeah, and thanks to my team here at Google, I was very new at that time, like just couple of months, and then they supported me to kind of organize that even, it was a great opportunity to meet many other talent, and thank you for crashing in, because it's about women in tech, but you need all the people who can support that ecosystem. Well, we love the mission, love shining the light on smart women in tech, really as role models, and also just, it's a great conversation to have about the contribution, smartness, and the greatness of what's going on. Remember, half the population is women, and we need more women building products that represent half the population that uses it. And thank you so much for the article that you did for all the strong women that we have, engineering leaders and the product leaders at Google. Thank you so much, that was beautiful. Every word of it, I wish I had more lines to write. Almost 2,000 words, appreciate that. theCUBE, bringing you all the action here at Google Cloud, a lot of great things happening here. Of course theCUBE is bringing in all the action, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're in day two, we got a whole nother day tomorrow, stay with us, more coming on theCUBE today after this short break.