 Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great guest, Balaji Siva, Subramanian. Are you all right? Okay. Okay, VP of product and business development at Ops, MX, formerly with Cisco, doing networking, now you're doing a lot of DevOps. You guys got a great little business there on real time, real time hardcore DevOps. Absolutely, so we help large enterprises do the digital transformation to be able to help them achieve that transformation. You know, Stu Miniman and I were talking about cloud native and one of the reasons I wanted to bring you in was we've been talking about cloud native going mainstream and cloud native is essentially code words for cloud, microservices, essentially DevOps, DevOps 2.0, whatever you want to call it. The mainstream of DevOps, DevOps for the past 10 years has been kind of reserved for the pioneers who built out using open source to the fast followers, building large startups to now larger companies. Now DevOps is turning into cloud native. We see, you know, in the cloud, born in the cloud, on-premises cloud operations, which is hybrid and now the advent of multi-cloud, which really brings the edge conversation into view, really a disruption around networking and data. And this is impacting developers. Absolutely. And you know, pioneers like Netflix, New Spinnaker to kind of deploy. That's what you guys do. This is the real kind of thread for the next 10 years data software is now part of everyday developer life. Now bring that into DevOps, that seems to be a real flash point. Yeah, so if you look at some of the challenges enterprise have to get to the velocity that they have, the technology was a barrier. So with the Docker adoption, with the cloud adoption, cloud basically removed, basically made the infrastructure on demand and then the Docker really allowed the multi-microsoft architecture allowed the people to have velocity in development. Now their bottleneck has been, now I can develop faster, I can bring up infrastructure, but how do I deploy things faster? Because at the end of the day, that's what is the last sort of mile sort of say of solving the full puzzle. So I think that's where things like Spinnaker or some of the new tools like Tecton and all those things coming up that allows these enterprises to take their container-based applications in functions in some cases and deploy to various cloud, AWS or Google or Azure. Bology, tell me about your view on cloud native. You look at, I just looked at the basic data out there. You got AWS, you got KubeCon, which is really the Linux Foundation, CNCF. I mean, the vendors that are in there, the commercialization is going crazy. Then you got the cloud followers from Amazon, you got Azure, basically pivoting Office 365 and getting more cloud action. They're investing heavily and Google GCP, Google Cloud Platform. All of them talking about microservices. What's your view of the state of cloud native? Yeah, I think I talked to, I'll probably talk to hundreds of customers this last year. And these are large Fortune 100, 200 companies to smaller companies. 100% of them are doing containers. 100% of them are doing Kubernetes in some fashion or form. If you look at larger enterprises like financial sectors and other, what you call the Fortune 100 companies, they do actually do OpenShift. They've had OpenShift for their Kubernetes, even though Kubernetes is free, whatever, but they definitely look at OpenShift as a way to deploy container-based applications. And many of them are obviously looking at AKS, EKS and other cloud form factors of the same thing. And the most thing I've seen is AWS. EKS is the most common one. Azure somewhat and GKS somewhat. So I mean, you know the market trend that's there. So essentially AWS is where the most of the problems are happening. What do you think about the mainstream IT, typical IT company that's driven by IT, they're transforming just a few, I'd say about a year ago, most answer like, oh, could people, the big cloud providers are going to be not creating an opportunity for the splunks of the world and other people. But now with that shifting mainstream companies going to the cloud, it's actually been good for those companies. So you're seeing that collision between pure cloud native and typical corporation enterprise that are moving to the cloud or moving to at least hybrid. That's helping these companies, like the splunks of the world, the data dogs and all these other companies. I think there's, so there's two attacks on those companies that you talk about. One is obviously the open source moment. It's attacking everything. So anything you have in IT is attacked by open source. Software is eating the world, but open source is eating software. Because software is easy to be open source. Hardware, you can't eat it. There's no open source. Nobody's doing free hardware for you. But open source software is getting the software, right? In some sense, but anyway, so any software vendors are fully, everybody's considering open source first. Many companies are doing open source first. So if you look at, if you want to look at data dog or Prometheus, I mean look at Prometheus. If I look at IBM, U-Deploy or Spinnaker, I may look at Spinnaker. So everything, Kubernetes, or maybe some other forms of, they'll look at Kubernetes. So I think these vendors, as you talk about, one is that, one is the open source part of it. The other is that when you go to the cloud, the provider itself provides the basic things already. If you look at Google Cloud, I was actually reading about Google networking, a lot of things, a lot of the load balancers and all those things are inbuilt as part of the fabric. Things that you typically use at outer or firewall or those things that are inbuilt. So why would I use a FI load balancer and things like that? So I would say that, I don't think their life is that easy. But there's definitely- All right, so here's the question. Who's winning and who's losing with cloud native? I mean, what is really going on in that marketplace? What's the top story? What's the biggest thing people should pay attention to and who's winning and who's losing? I think the sort of the standardization of the cloud native technology is definitely helping vendors like AWS and basically the cloud vendors, because no longer you have to go to VMware to get anything done, right? They have proprietary software that they had and you don't have to go there anymore. Everybody can provide it. So the winners, I would say the customers, obviously, because now they have more choices, they're not vendor locked in, they can go to EKS or AKS in the heartbeat and nothing happens. And so customers are the winners, big winners. And then I would say the cloud providers are big winners. Open source is really hurting some of the vendors we talked about earlier. I would say, yeah, I would say the big guys are the- The big guys are the- The cloud is getting bigger and bigger. Yeah. More powerful. What about VMware? You mentioned VMware and you're hinting to their proprietary, they also run on AWS natively. So- Absolutely. They're still hanging around. They've got the operators, but they're not hitting the devs, but they have this new movement with the Kubernetes they acquired a company to do that. You know, I would say that the AWS, sorry, VMware on AWS, essentially is that, I would say it's almost a no-op for VMware in some sense, in some sense. But they have to be, it's almost like a place to sell their where. They used to be on-prem vendors already have the infrastructure and VMware goes sells to that customer A. Now the customer says that I'm not using it on on-prem server A, I'm on AWS, can you provide me the same software? So essentially, number one, by moving to the cloud, they're essentially selling to the same customer and the same stuff. Number one, number two is once now I'm in the cloud, I would obviously peel away my workload to native AWS or Google. So I think in the long run, I would say that it's a strategy to survive, but I don't think it's long-term successful. Operators don't move that fast, devs move much fast. So I got to ask you, in the developer world and cloud native and DevOps, kind of 2.0, 3.0, what are the biggest challenges that's slowing it down? Why isn't it going it faster? Or is it going fast? What's your view on that? Yeah, I think I would say that the biggest challenge obviously, as you said, the people, right? In some sense, people have to transform and in large organizations, there's a lot of inertia that allows people, they have deploying existing services the way they're deploying the services. Some of them are custom built, the guy who wrote it and they no longer exist. You know, they moved on. And so some of them are built like that. But so I think the inertia is basically like now, how do I transform them over to the new model? If the application itself is getting more broken into microservices, then it's a great opportunity for me to migrate. But if it's not, then I'm not going to touch something that's actually there. So I would say is that and then technology is complex. Actually, every day we have people, you know, there's a lot of interest. There's a lot of people learning, learning, learning new stuff. But I cannot hide one Kubernetes good engineer if I want to try it hard in the Bay Area at least. Because it's hard. Because they're working somewhere else, right? Well, they work somewhere else or the technology is still early enough that people are learning in droves. I mean, don't get me wrong there. But I think it's still fairly complex for them to digest all of them. I think in five years, fast forward five years, you'd see that technology knowledge would be more. So it would be easier to hire those people. Because if I want to transform internally, let's say I'm an enterprise, I want to transform, I need to hire people to do that. And what are the use cases, what are the top use cases that you're seeing in your work and out in the field in the business that people are rallying around, they can get some top three use cases for end to end, you know, cloud native development? I would say the use cases are like, if I'm doing any kind of container based applications, obviously I would like to do through the new model of doing things because I don't want to like build based on a legacy technology for sure. I would say that the other ones are like new age companies, they are definitely adopting cloud first and they are able to leverage the existing models and the new models more quickly. I mean, I would say these are the two things, the thing is that if I'm doing something new, I take advantage of that. The virtual answer to the question. Do you think microservices is overrated right now or is it hyped up or is it? No, I think it's real, absolutely. And what's the big use case there? It's a velocity that people get by adopting microservices, right? Before I used to work at Cisco when there's a software release, I have planned for six months to release the software because there's so many engineers and developing so many features, they develop it over a period of time and then when they actually integrate, there's two, three months of testing before it gets out because the guy who wrote the code probably left the company already. By the time the software actually sees the light of the day. Give some data from your perspective, you don't have to name companies, but like for the people that are successful with DevOps at an operating level, what kind of frequency of updates are they doing per day? Just give them order of magnitude numbers on what is a success in terms of? Yeah, I mean, the great examples are something like Netflix, we're 7,000 deployments a day, but obviously that's at the top of the pyramid, so to say. Many of the other customers are doing some of it in one to two a week. I mean, these are very good companies. This is at a per service level. I mean, I'm not talking of the whole application because the application may have 10, 20, 50 services in some way. So there's a lot of updates going on every week. So if you look at a week timeframe, you may have 50 updates for that service, but I think individual service level essentially could be one or two a week. And obviously the frequency varies depending on. There's a lot of software being updated all the time. Absolutely, absolutely. Apology, great to have you in. And I got to say it's been, we could use your commentary and your insight and some CUBE interviews. Love to invite you back. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here in the CUBE conversation. We have thought leader conversations and experts from our expert network, the CUBE, CUBE alumni. And again, all about bringing you the data here from the CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.