 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. We're here in San Diego, it's 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren, and happy to welcome two guests from the newly minted Platinum member of the CNCF, NetApp, sitting to my right is Matt Baldwin, who is the director of CloudNative and Kubernetes Engineering, and sitting to his right is Rob Esker, who does product and strategy for Kubernetes, and is also NetApp's board member on the CNCF. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you, I'm sorry I'm on this. All right, so, Matt, maybe start with you. NetApp, companies that know, I've got plenty of history with NetApp there. What I've been hearing from NetApp for the last few years is, the core of NetApp has always been software, and it is a multi-cloud world. I've been hearing this message since before, kind of the CloudNative and Kubernetes piece was going. Of course, there's been some acquisitions, and NetApp continuing to go through its transformations, if you will. So, help us understand NetApp's positioning in this ecosystem. In Kubernetes? Yes. So, what we're doing is we're building a product that allows you to manage CloudNative workloads on top of Kubernetes. So, we've solved the infrastructure problem, and that's kind of the old problem. We're bored to death talking about that problem, but what we try to do is we try to provide a single pane of glass to manage on-premise workloads and off-premise workloads, and so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say, it's now more about the apt taxonomy in Kubernetes, and then what type of tooling do you build to manage that application in Kubernetes, and so that's what we're building right now, and that's where we're headed with the hybrid multicloud. There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strengths of NetApp, of course. So, we're building, we are essentially already in market a capability that allows you to deploy Kubernetes in an agnostic way using pure, open, unmodified Kubernetes on all of the major public clouds, but also on-prem. But over time, and some of this is already evident, you'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp, and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds. With the idea that you should be able to take a project, so a project being a namespace, namespace having an application in it, so you have multiple deployments, that I should be able to protect that namespace or that project, I should be able to move that, and the data goes with it. So that we're very data-aware, and that's what we're trying to do with our software is make it very data-aware and have that align with apps inside of Kubernetes. So Rob, maybe step back for a second. One of the things we've heard a few times at this show before, and was talking about the keynote this morning, is it is project over company when it comes to the CNCF. Project. Project over company. So it's about the ecosystem. The CNCF tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fit in a space. NetApp moving up to a platinum sponsor level, participant here, NetApp's got lots of histories in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry is going. Where does NetApp see its position in the participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? Yeah, so great question, and actually I love it. It's one of my favorite topics. So I think the way we look at it is, oftentimes projects, to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard, a de facto standard. So not necessarily ratified by some standards body, and so we're very interested in making sure that in the scenario where you want to employ the standard, from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities, our products and our services, vis-a-vis, or in the context of the standard, but we're not trying to take you down a walled, garden path in a proprietary journey, if you will. We would rather actually compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating a proprietary set of interfaces. So Kubernetes, you know, broadly perceived as a de facto standard at this point. There's still some work to be done on running out the edges. A lot of underway this week. It's definitely the case that there's an appeal to making this more offerable by pardon the expression, mere mortals. And we think we can offer some help in that respect as well. Yeah, for us it's usability, right? I mean, that's the reason I started Stack One Cloud, was that there was a usability problem with Kubernetes. I had a usability problem with Kubernetes. So that's what we're trying to, that's how I'm looking at the landscape. And I look at kind of all the projects inside of the CNCF, and I look at my role is, how do we tie these together? How do we make these so they're very, very usable to the users? How we're engaging with the community is to try to align this basically pure upstream projects and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not going to, we don't want to ever say we're going to fork any of these projects, but we're going to contribute back into these projects. So that's one concern that I have heard from some customers, we were speaking with some of them yesterday. One of the concerns I had was that when you add that manageability onto the base Kubernetes layer, that often various vendors become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that. And when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem, so some customers say, well, I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded to any one vendor, because part of the benefit of Kubernetes is I can move my workloads around. So how do you navigate what is the right level of opinion to have and which part should actually just be part of a common standard? It should be along the lines of best practices is how we do it. So like let's take a network policy, for example, like applying a sane default network policy to every namespace, defying a sane default pod security policy. You know, building a cluster in a best practices fashion with security turned on, hardened and done, where you would have done this already as a user. So we're not looking at it in any way there. So that's, we're not trying, I'm not trying to curate any type of opinion in the product. What I'm trying to do is harmonize your experience across all of this ecosystem. So that you don't ever have to think about, I'm now, I'm building a cluster on top of Amazon. So I got to worry about, how do I manage this on Amazon? I don't want you to have to think about those providers anymore, right? And then on top of those, on top of that infrastructure, I want to have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way. So I'm scaling or I'm protecting an application on premise in the identical way that I'm doing it in the cloud. So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing that means that I should choose your option than something else? So we do have, this is where we have controllers that live inside of the clusters that manage the stuff for the users. So you could rebuild what we're doing, but you would have to roll it all by hand. But you could, we don't stand in the way of your operations either. So like if we go down, you don't go down type idea. But we do have controllers, we're using CRDs. And so like our app management technology our controllers are just watching for a workload to come into the environment. And then we show that in the interface, but you can just walk away as well if you wanted to. Cool? There's also a constellation of other services that we're building around this experience, that do draw again from some of those storage and data management capabilities. So, you know, stateful sets, your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can exist in all of those same public clouds. But moreover, over time, we're going to be in on-premise as well. We're going to be able to actually move, migrate, place, cash per policy, your persistent data with your workloads as you move, migrate, scale, burst, whatever you pay for it. Whatever the model is as you move across and between clouds. Okay. How far down that pathway do you think we are? Because one criticism of Kubernetes is that a lot of the tooling that we're used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure isn't really there yet. Hence the question about, we actually need to make this easier to use. How far down that pathway are we? Well, I would argue that the tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down the path. Now, what we haven't done is open sourced, you know, all my tooling, right? To make it easier on everybody else. Rob, NetApp's got strong partnerships across the cloud platforms. I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event. I know you partner the year, I believe, on some of these stuff. Help us understand how some of the things that the team are building interact with the public cloud. You know, you look at Anthos and Azure Arc, and of course, Amazon has many different ways you can do your container and management piece there. You know, to talk a little bit about that relationship and how both with those partners and then across those partners, you know, work. Yeah, it's, wow, so how much time do we have? So there's certainly a lot of facets to that, but drawing from the Google experience, we just announced the general availability of cloud volumes on tap. So the ability to stand up and manage your own on tap instance in Google's cloud. Likewise, we've announced the general availability of the cloud volume service, which gives you the managed push button as a service experience of shared file system on demand at Google. I believe it's either today or yesterday, in London. I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone conversion, not knowing what day it was. But the point is, that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from NKS to deploy a on-demand Kubernetes cluster and deploy applications from a marketplace experience in a common way, not just with Google, but with Azure, with Amazon. And so, you know, frankly, the story does differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the endeavor is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about, I want to live only in the Google or the Microsoft or the Amazon, because we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multi-cloud experience. Yeah, and Matt, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but it's that skill set that's really challenging. I was at the Microsoft show, and you've got people, it's not just about .NET, they're embracing and open to all of these environments, but people tend to have the environment that they're used to, and for multi-cloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still, we're still, we're making progress, but there's work to do. Yeah. What's the question? Yeah, so I just, I know you're building tools and everything, but what more do we need to do? What are some of the areas that you're hopeful for, but what are the areas that we need to go further? So for me, it's coming down to the data side, like I need to be able to say that when I turn on data services inside of Kubernetes, I need to be able to have that workload go anywhere, right? And because as a developer, so I have, I'm running in production, I'm running in Amazon, but maybe I'm doing tests locally on my bare metal environments, right? I need to, I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data that I'm working with in production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing, there's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed is, that's the path, that's where we're headed. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up actually, because one of the things that I feel like I heard it a little bit last year, but it is highlighted more this year, is we're talking a little bit more to the application, to the application developers, because Kubernetes is a piece of the infrastructure, but it's about those- It's the kernel. Yeah, yeah, it's the kernel there. So how do we make sure we're spanning between what the app developer needs and still making sure that infrastructure is taken care of? Because storage and networking are still hard. It is, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm approaching, I'm thinking more along the lines of, I'm trying to think more about app developers personally than infrastructure at this point. For me, so I can give you a cluster in three minutes, so I don't really have to worry about that problem. We also put Istio on top of the clusters, so it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one, day two type of operations. But, and that's for like an IT manager, so inside of our product, how I'm addressing this is you have personas. And so you have this concept, you have an IT manager, they can do these things, they can set limits, but for the developer who's building the applications or the services and pushing those up into the environment, they need to have a sense of freedom, right? And so on that side of the house, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling, so part of our product ties in to get, so we have CD, so you just do a get push, get commit to a branch, and we can target multiple clusters, right? But at no point did the developer actually draft YAML or anything, we basically create the container for you, create the deployment, bring it online. And I feel like there's these lines and the IT guys need to be able to say, I need to create the guardrails for the devs, but I don't want to make it seem like I'm creating guardrails for the devs because the devs don't like that. So that's how I'm balancing it. Okay, yeah, because that has always been the tension and that there's a lot of talk about DevOps, but you go and talk to application developers and they don't want to have anything to do with infrastructure, they just want to program to an API and get things done. They would like this infrastructure to be seamless. Yeah, and what we do, like also what I'm giving them is, like service dashboards, because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your QA, you're writing your tests, you're pushing it through CI, it's going to CD, you own your service and production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for services that the developers are running so they can dig in and say, oh, here's an issue or here's where the issue is probably going to be at, I'm going to go fix this. And we're trying to create that type of, like scenario for a developer and for an IT manager. So a slightly different angle on it by understanding that question correctly is, you know, part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also trying to provide a deterministic sort of easy button capability for to, you know, perhaps you're familiar with NetApp's Nissan HCI product, which we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple private cloud capability, and indeed, our NetApp Kubernetes service operates directly off of it, it's a big part of actually how we deliver cloud services from it. So the point is that if you're that application developer, if you want the effective NKS on-prem, the endeavor with our NetApp HCI product is to give you that sort of easy button experience because you didn't really want to be a storage admin or a network admin. You didn't want to get into the me-mired and the details of infra. So, you know, that's obviously work in progress, but we think we're definitely headed down the right direction. Turnkey on-prem. Yeah, it does seem that a lot of enterprises want to have the cloud-like experience, but they want to be able to bring it home. We're seeing that a lot more. Yeah, so this is like this turnkey on-premise, turnkey cloud on-premise. And like with NKS, we can, like the same auto scaling. So take the dynamic nature of Kubernetes, right? So I have a base cluster size of say four worker nodes, right? But my workload's going to maybe need to have more nodes, so my auto scaler's going to increase the size of my cluster and decrease the size, right? Pretty much everybody only can do that in the public cloud. I can do that in public cloud and on-premise now. And so that's what we're trying to deliver and that's very cool stuff, I think. Well, there's a lot of advantages to enterprises operating in that way because I have people out here, I can go and buy them, or hire them, and say, hey, we need you to operate this gear and you've already done it elsewhere, you can do it in cloud, you can do it on-site. I can now run my operations the same across no matter where my applications live, which saves me a lot of money on training costs, on development costs, and generally it makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. So Rob, if you could, just love your takeaway on NetApp's participation here at the event and what you want people to take away from the show this year. So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work. We like people to become aware of it. NetApp, of course, is not, I think we talked about this in perhaps other contexts, not strictly a storage and data management company only. We do draw from the strengths of that as we're providing full-stack capabilities in a way that are interconnected with public cloud, things like our NetApp Kubernetes services, really the foundational glue in many ways to how we deliver the application runtime, but over time we'll build a constellation of data-centric capabilities around that as well. Matt, I'd just love to get your viewpoint as someone that built a company in this ecosystem. There's so many startups here. Give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in this sort of ecosystem. So I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different at this point. I'm going to speak as Matt, not as NetApp. And so my thinking has always been it feels a lot like you're a big fan of that rock band and you go to the local club and we all get to know each other at that local club and there's like maybe 500 of us or 1,000 of us and then that band gets signed to Warner Brothers and goes to the top and now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now. I think, but what I like about it is that it just shows that the power of the community is now at a point where it's drawing in like cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people. And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community and like all the what are they called the Kubernetes summits that they're doing? I mean, we didn't have any of those back when we first got going. I mean, it was tough to fill the room. And now we can fill the room and it's amazing. And what I like seeing is people moving past the problem of Kubernetes itself and moving into like what other problems can I solve on top of Kubernetes? So you're starting to see all these really exciting startups doing really neat things. And I really like this vendor hall I really like because you get to see all the new guys. But there's a lot of neat stuff going on. And I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years. But it's, we've gone from zero to 60. Like it's insanely fast. Cause you guys were at the original KubeCon, I think, as well. It's our fourth year doing the cube at this show, but absolutely, we've watched it since the early days. I'm not supposed to mention OpenStack at this show, but we remember talking to JJ and some of the early people there. And, you know, we, we, we, we, we've at interview Craig McClucky back in his Google days and the like. So yeah, we've been fortunate to be on here for really day zero here. And definitely great energy. So much, congrats so much on the progress. Really appreciate the updates on everything going. And as you said, right, we're, you know, we've reached a certain estate and just adding more value on top of this whole environment. Yeah, we're now like, we're in like junior high now. Right, and we're in grade school for a few years. All right, well, Matt and Rob, thank you so much for the update. Thanks for having us. Hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. Thank you for watching theCUBE.