 Okay, welcome back to SuperCloud 3. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Fireside Chat here with a friend of theCUBE, industry legend. We've known him about 10, 13 years with theCUBE, going back way back in. Now he's currently at IBM, Jake Coothrell, here inside theCUBE. Great to see you. Great to be here, guys. We've seen the movie before. We've been together 13 years since theCUBE started, online, talking, he'd been on multiple times, CUBE alumni. We were chatting before he came on about this whole AI wave and the Microsoft news about mobile at 30 bucks a month. Everyone's going to be jumping on that, at least we will. Certainly, Azure sales will go up about the result. Absolutely, yeah. You're currently with IBM now. You've been VCE, you've seen the IT revolution, change, cloud one, cloud two, crypto. Now AI we're here. What's your take on the SuperCloud mega trend? I go back to when we were talking about edge to core to cloud and the world of many clouds and hybrid clouds, public, private clouds. SuperCloud really represents that super structure around all that. So what we're going to see is all the innovation that might've been taking place in one area, boom, let's distribute it everywhere. Simultaneous, very coherent, consistent experiences. Developers, it's going to be a play land, an absolute play land. And you know, it's been hard to get here. You guys probably remember, it was before we even met Chuck Hollis wrote this thing. Oh yeah. I think he called it a private cloud but he laid out what was essentially known today as the hybrid cloud, even had little pieces of SuperCloud in there. So it's taken decade plus, decades really, to get to where we are, where the experiences are substantially similar if not identical across all these estates. Yeah, and it's about getting to those carrier grade experiences that you just take for granted. It's just going to work. The interoperability is there, the pervasiveness. I think you've maybe heard it called the ubiquitous workload substrate in the past. You've got to have that because a developer is going to focus in an area to get something accomplished and you've got to normalize all that mess. You've got to make it simple and consistent. So I think that's where all of the rallying around SuperCloud is going to really open up the next wave of things we can't imagine yet. We maybe have seen it in sci-fi but now it becomes like transactional. I've heard the term cloud interpreter is another one. It's like, ah, it's just middleware. You know how it's like, the earth pad. The cloud is just the hardware. Like, okay, sounds familiar. One of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 13 years is you go to all the events, you hear all the narratives. And we see things early. It's about seven, eight years to get things done in the old paradigm, people scratching that itch. We were talking theCUBE 2015, horizontal scale ability, vertically specialized data. We, simplifying, but now when the world sees it and they go, okay, I get it. Now they snap into gear and they go, okay, we have to abstract away the complexity. It's essentially distributed computing that we're talking about here. It's architecture. It's like, we're talking about computing, software, hardware, moving a packet from point A to point B, storing it, using the data, writing an application, software. So, you know, all that concepts we've lived. Now you've got open source, kind of going on what's fifth, sixth generation. You know, there's no more software industry because that's now open source. So that's a new dynamic. The clouds are all up and running, hyperscaler clouds with elasticity. You have software open, you got AI coming. So, you know, I just think this data developer angle is huge combined with the resources that are now available. Okay, how do you rewrite distributed computing? And if you look at memory-centric distributed aggregated architectures, you know, going back and forth like an accordion, then there's the question of, as a developer, how am I gonna take something that ran on, let's call it a silo. It was a silo of excellence somewhere. But now I gotta put that out in the middle of nowhere and it's gotta be deterministic power, weight, cooling, and geometry. I've gotta be able to run that workload. I gotta run that data workload locally where the action's happening, send back the telemetry and the events that are relevant and pertinent to what we're trying to accomplish. That's only possible once you've moved beyond, well, you know, this is really the private cloud or the private cloud versus the public cloud versus the, I'm gonna only do repatriation for these things or these contrived, I would argue, arguments that really are gonna be opened up a little bit with FinOps, because you're gonna bring cloud fiscal responsibility to a lot of the decisions that are being made. You're gonna look at what's fit for purpose at the edge because those low latency experiences for a consumer or for industrial, all the notions of open virtual radio access networks with 5G, all those promises, spectral efficiencies, it's coming together. And so going back to the old days, like it's convergence. But so I feel like the pieces are there, but I'm always looking for what's the next disruption because to your point, these silos of excellence are not necessarily going to just move forward and determine the winners and losers. Disruptions are gonna come out of this. And I think about Warner Vogels when he's up on stage at re-inventing, he's awesome and he's up there, he's sweating, he's in his T-shirt, but he's talking about massively distributed systems. So the cloud guys are obviously thinking about this and on the opposite side, people say, well, the cloud's all centralized. You've got new silicon, you're talking about edge, you're talking about low latency, you're talking about low power. And I'm looking at ARM and saying, wow, they won the mobile battle, that actually is. And I look at what Apple's doing, I look at what Tesla's doing at the edge, AI inferencing at the edge. And I'm thinking about, well, are there gonna be sort of new economic models that emerge out of this that disrupt the economics of the data center and then eventually seep their way in? That's kind of a pattern that we've seen before. Very hard to predict, but when you look at some of the economics of some of the things that are out there, but haven't really penetrated the enterprise yet, you can see potential disruption bringing in AI and then it explodes the whole thing. I wrote about this and it was called social telecom. And I did that back in the old days in 2010, if you remember those years. And I did a re-refresher that, to imagine like, okay, that was then, now we're 2020, what's that gonna look like? And now everybody's like, what's it gonna be in 2030? Well, you look at the patterns and adopting what was the best practice or what was proven in this one area and you start to move the adjacencies, the white spaces. And I think that the story becomes, how do I take what was carrier grade trusted and true? And you're putting that into an enterprise setting because most enterprises, whether they realize it or not, are gonna have to become internal service providers themselves. They have to deliver that consistency of SLA for their constituents, the end users in their own company and their downstream customers. So how does a smaller enterprise or a medium-sized enterprise, a gigantic trying to figure out, how do I stay relevant for the next 10 years in this industry? That digital transformation, as people call it, is effectively embracing all of those things that you see that are distributed. But the companies that package that, put that together, like you just have VMware on, I think they're a great normalizer of all of these clouds. They're enabling a super cloud behavior. I would say Red Hat, that's a great example of open source and some of these other stories as they come together, you're gonna see where it enables these developers to do things more consistently than they've ever been able to do before. I think one of the things that you brought up, Dave, is interesting because all the stuff that's converging, you mentioned a lot of them, we do too. The thing that I see that's changed the game, and we've talked about it on theCUBE many times, that where the script has been flipped, is the developer influence. The old IT, okay, everyone, there you go, program. There's your, the gold guard rails were basically strict, semantically driven. Okay, that's all you got, help desk is available. I mean, you can call them a service provider, but really more of a infrastructure. Here's your stuff. Now developers are so active and so much driving change, they're dictating via the infrastructure as code movement down to the ops team saying, you need to enable me to be successful. So you have the convergence of distributing things everywhere, managing policies, all kinds of cool stuff operationally. But the developers are driving the change. They're the de facto standards bodies because they're driving change. And I just made that up, and then I'm a standards body, but they drive what they need. This is a new dynamic, and I think AI is gonna absolutely change the game with the developers. Yeah, I think it goes into the, whether the CIO acronym gets its next loose on life with like, is it chief information officer, is it chief innovation officer? Is it induction? Is it all these other I words you could try to put into that particular letter? It's about everything that you thought of that was a pair programming experience from your old days writing software. Now I can put down $30, and I've got like a best buddy that can help me. You know, I'm not so great at this particular structure when I'm trying to code this, is what would you suggest when I'm trying to accomplish these things? And you're doing that in a natural language, and you're getting back, not a seasoned developer that you can lean on, you know, the old goat that knows, oh, you would never do that, you should never do that. But you're gonna get examples. And like blogging, you blog great, but when you're an editor and you can corral multiple bloggers, that's how you built an empire. And so this could happen in software too. Imagine developers becoming the editors of the influences that come in from these models that are trained on the best and the brightest. The infrastructure is code, and now code is natural language, right? How much of an impact is that going to have? Are we underestimating it, or are we overestimating it? I'm a technology optimist in that sense, and I would say that it's a bar-raising event. I think that it opens up industry possibilities. It doesn't shut out industry possibilities. If you were saying you had a scale from one to 10 of how great your developer ops are, and I would probably rate myself about a two, some of these, I feel like I can get up about five or six pretty easy, right? I'm feeling confident, I feel enabled. Then you have low code, no code, which gives you another abstraction, ties you back into the SaaS platforms to participate in SuperCloud. It's an incredibly exciting time to be alive. Talk about that dynamic. The psychology, we're seeing a lot, we talk a lot with the VMware customers and their practitioners and other IT folks and developers with theCUBE, and the general consensus is, people are like, okay, where do I spend the next 10 years of my career? There's all kinds of certifications, I'm Cisco, there's that and the other. So that old mentality of the vendor certifying talent doesn't really apply to cloud. I don't hear people saying, I just got to be an Amazon expert because their reality is there's multiple environments. I got to deal with Amazon Azure, and they'll pick their favorite cloud, but it's not like they're just going to jump in on just one and bet their entire career on that. So SuperCloud is attracting talent to the concept of I'm going to think about my skills. How would you talk about the SuperCloud opportunity to IT practitioners out there who are going to go from racking and stacking to doing operational things to a new kind of operational thing? What would you say their opportunity is? I think you've never had this much access to massive open, to use that word again, learning modules, learning plans, just massive amounts of online training available. And you're not necessarily relegated to ClickOps. You can get into the weeds. You can declare things on a command line. You can begin to write. And I think these large language model influenced operational environments are going to unlock the ClickOps generation to become that DevSecOps or DevSec's Fin Green, shove them all in there, but all those best practices come along. And so I don't see it as putting people out of jobs. I think it's leveling up people to increase what the industry output's going to be over the next three or four years. That's an interesting point. Think about the IT practitioner. Think about the domain expertise that they have, the institutional knowledge of what they do, and you say, okay, ClickOps, which is essentially just clicking forms and doing stuff, to having a AI augmentation person, vehicle to help them take that knowledge, that's intellectual capital right there that they could scale. So to me, I think what you're hitting on is the opportunity with AI and IT is to scale the intellectual capital of the IT practitioner. Today, if you do chat ops and you're in a Slack channel or a Teams channel and you're acting with humans, that's great, what if you're not available? What if my AI buddy is right there with me, shoulder to shoulder virtually, and we're going to get more done together through that human machine augmentation than if we were just waiting for the next person to come online to help me swarm around this issue with other humans. He could do all the AI, he's playing golf right now, but he's only done 18 holes in about three hours, but he answered this question already, he's the other guy, he already answered this for that person, here is the answer. And so, no, but that's exactly what we're talking about here. The efficiency and scale of the IP and the intellectual capital and IP and the data domains that they have and the data sets, lost the human capital. I think Dave, that's the real, to me, the epiphany of the super cloud with security practitioners because security plus AI is the topic of this super cloud and yesterday we heard clearly that the pace of play and security is the pro levels, not like college ball, it's like, this is like, you can't fake it in security, you get high speed. What's the number one challenge every time we talk to CISOs? What's your number one challenge? Lack of talent, okay, to your point. Okay, look, yes, jobs are gonna be affected, no question about it. If you're not AI enabled, you're gonna be out of a job, so, but like you said, it's open, it's there, it's democratizing and so, how is that gonna affect security? It's like I was saying in the big dig, the highway, you gotta expand the highway or else you're not gonna have any ability to move from point A to point B. The bottleneck moves. Yeah, that's right, the bar's moving. Well, the question I have for you guys is that, we always talk about history, but like, I have to ask you guys this because we've talked about this individually, but never together, the three of us. If you had to look at two sides of the street now, now that we were talking about going forward, think everything's converging, what's the old side of the street and what's old that's not probably gonna make it and what's the new side of the street? So people try to figure out what side of the street is gonna, this wave's gonna hit. We know what's happening on the AI side. What of the old way probably won't make it, meaning either go away completely extinction or abstract it away from an IT, from a tech perspective. We've seen the storage stuff, the networking. I mean, networking's never gonna go away, but what's old and new? What's on the wrong side of the streets here? What's the old side look like? Have you had to kind of throw stuff out there? I think the relatively modern approach of having 15 different data stores with 15 different primitives and APIs that you have to dig in and know and understand intimately is gonna go away. I think that's gonna be abstracted. I think that complexity is choking folks now and I think the next wave is to be building digital representations of your business and that has to be abstracted. All those different data elements have to be coherent with perhaps a semantic layer or else you're not going to be able to do things in real time. Jay, what's your take on old infrastructure slash software models that... I believe that artisanal IT where you build it one stick at a time will be relegated to people that are doing very specific hardware intensive projects that require full vertical integration. The rest of it is gonna be heavily, heavily automated with an extreme prejudice for ultra standardization. So if you're still there manually installing your Windows or your Linux server, cool, great. That's commendable. But the rest of the world has things to do and the time that you spend in this one manual effort, you have robbed the future. It's gonna go the way of provisioning loans. Absolutely. Jay, great to have you on. Great that we're all together. Final minute we have, what are you working on? What are you excited about these days? Obviously you got a great blog, you got the newsletter. I noticed you got the newsletter going on. It's still always been prolific blogging. What are you excited about these days? What's got your attention? One of your guests I just met earlier, Joel, he was telling me about what his story is and I was like, whoa, I've got to learn more about this because it made me think about the just enough OS movement from the old days because if I can put a hundred more things, think about when people claim containers versus what the VM would be versus going full bare metal. This is exciting stuff. So again, I'm just a kid in a candy shop and I'm really happy to write about it every Sunday. One for our Sunday. All right. Jay Cuthill, thanks for coming on SuperCloud 3. All right, we'll be back with more coverage here. Live in Palo Alto for our live performance of SuperCloud 3 against SuperCloud 4 is coming in October. That's going to be all about AI, foundation models, all things AI. We'll be right back.