 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMworld and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to VMworld 2015. I'm Stu Miniman and joined with me as my co-host on the director set here for theCUBE is Brian Gracely. It's day three is where we say that these events, they're marathons, throat are a little bit raw. Be getting our steps in with the Fitbit and the head's starting to say, brain's full, can I go home now? But there's no keynote this morning because it's a little more time to dig into it. Brian, we haven't had a ton of time yet to talk about the developer community, what's going on. Really some of the shifts that are happening in the industry and what does that mean to the people? So I mean, you're a great case study yourself. You and I, both infrastructure guys, both been around the virtualization community a while and a Vexpert, I started, when you pivoted your podcast to talk a lot about the developers and everything, it was one that I listened to a lot. So can you give us a little insight as to your take, what did you do and what should the typical virtualization person be thinking about in this space? So for me personally, the virtualization revolution was right in the middle of it, but to me what was always interesting was these sort of new modern applications, you'll call them cloud native and other things these days and how that impacted the business. So the infrastructure piece always impacts the bottom line in terms of cost, this was going to impact the business. So for me it personally was very interesting. My biggest takeaway and what I'm seeing is, the industry gets excited about things. They get excited about buzzwords like DevOps and microservices and cloud native applications, but it's becoming very clear. There's a camp of the technology and people working on it that it's very technology-centric. The companies are very technology-centric. They're making technology-centric products. So we're out here in the Bay Area, lots of companies out here, but when you take it back to mainstream, that DevOps kind of gets teased apart and really what it becomes is, ops needs to be better in general. They need to automate more. We've talked about automation for a long time. They need to look to automate more. They need to make more consistent environments and they need to prepare for that new applications need different stuff. So that might mean object storage instead of block storage. It might mean SDN. We had a great talk yesterday with Armor about SDN and why you need dynamic infrastructure. And then I spent some time this week. We've had DevOps at VMworld. We've had sort of Developer Day at VMworld. Really what I think is coming out of that is a very kind of clear message to this audience, which is all the things we've kind of been talking about in terms of automating, you have to do, but before it was like, I'll save money or do it. Now there's a business imperative and that's becoming clear and clear to me. Yeah, so Brian, walking around the show, I've talked to a number of people that they're starting to use the terminology that you've put out there, structured and unstructured when we talk about these cloud native platforms. We're going to have a panel later today, digging into some of that. At least I know one of the people's, one of the main keynotes at the developer event here at VMworld, walk us through a little bit that kind of structured, unstructured and give our audience a peek of, into the research that you're going to be publishing. Right, so the simplest way to think about it is there are a lot of platforms, sort of platforms for modern applications. So some of them that people know because they're big brand names, so Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, HP has a Cloud Foundry variation, IBM, Red Hat has something called OpenShift, that's their Paz platform. And then there's a number of smaller companies, you know, AppSera who, you know, was founded by Derek Collison who started Cloud Foundry. And then there's a number of technologies that are coming together. So we had CoreOS on yesterday, HashiCorp's a company that's going to be on today, makes it vagrant that a lot of people know. The simplest way that I've found it to think about it is your application platform in a lot of cases is going to match kind of how your organizational structure is. So the more structured your organization is, so if your business is probably larger, multi-business group, compliance is a big part of what you do, you're probably going to look at these more structured application platforms because they've got compliance built in, they've got granular policy. If you are more sort of native DevOps, Greenfield, technology centric, the unstructured ones are a little better fit, they give you a little more flexibility, they'll let you kind of pick and choose what you want to do. And to me it's becoming clearer that they both have a place in the world this isn't a win or take all. And at the end of the day, they're both there to help people build newer applications and get them deployed quickly. Yeah, so one of the things I look at in this space, Brian, is when we talk about PaaS or we talk about containers and Docker, I should be able to just deal with my applications and help that really tough migration to a new, more modern, that cloud mobile type of application. But there's still some ties underneath. At DockerCon this year, there was a lot of talk about, well, how does this impact storage? How does it impact networking? What's going on here? And even with the platform discussion, it's, will there be a predilection? Does it matter? Oh, I can put it on Amazon or Azure or vCloud Air. Will there be some affinity there? Will there be things that baked in? Even Intel gets involved in this space a lot because they're going to make enhancements. So, am I going to be able to cleave apps from infrastructure or are there still going to be that ties and what does that mean to somebody like VMware from the Hypervisor standpoint? Yeah, so a couple of points to that. So, we did a panel session yesterday, really good panel session. For the VMware crowd, the thing that everybody will tell you now, and for, initially, it was like everything will move to containers, it's that typical technology buzz, like, you know, old's dead, we're going to move everything to the new, we all know that never happens. But the thing that we're hearing over and over again is containers plus virtualization is a reality. What we saw from VMware this week with Project Bonneville, Project Photon, those vSphere integrated containers, they're adapting the virtualization technology. They're realizing it's got to get faster, it's got to be a little more nimble. And the nice thing about that for VMware infrastructure people is if that vSphere layer is there and it becomes more appropriate for containers, now I can take advantage of the other tools that I have. Maybe vSAN becomes appropriate, maybe NSX becomes appropriate. And I think the reality is now that people are starting to understand containers, which means the net cloud native apps, they're going to start to align that infrastructure underneath it and it's not going to move as fast, which is good for a lot of this crowd because they've got enough things coming at them as it is. Yeah, I guess that's a big discussion point we've all been having is Pat laid out this 30 year vision. And talking about some of the hallway discussions, some people said, oh, some of these cloud piece here, you're too far out, we're pushing too far. How do you balance that, Brian? I mean, just one of my points I always look at is the typical enterprise, when you're a product guy, you're saying, oh, here's my release that's coming out today. Typical customers three years back and when you're given the roadmap of a couple years out and we just have a language barrier between where we're going and where I am today and that's one of the toughest things for customers is to kind of mine that gap. Right, so you and I are in a unique position, so the work we do at Wikibon, some of it's obviously, we're looking from a vendor perspective, what's strategy, how do the different players are, but we get to look at a lot of customer perspectives. If you're a customer and you're saying, look, it feels like it's going too fast, I think the question you have to ask yourself is, not, can I slow everything down? Do I have to do something different inside my business? And this is where you start to get into hearing people like Gartner say, by modal IT, you're hearing other people say there's different ways. I think what we see for the successful companies, and this is at enterprise companies, not just startups, they're beginning to have to figure out how to build an innovation team that's going to go look at those things and kind of build lighthouses. And we published some research about public cloud sightings, we've talked about it a few times. VMware is a company, six, seven, eight billion dollars in revenue, but Amazon and Azure, two giant public clouds, at least that much revenue or more. So you can't necessarily look at it and say, well, it feels like VMware's going too fast and I'm going too slow, because those other companies are going twice as fast. You got to figure out that dynamic. All right, so Brian, just want to give you an opportunity to share. What other takeaways do you have? What's the same? What's different to VMworld 2015? Yeah, so you and I joked about it. VMware is getting into a place where slow and steady is very good for them, right? People want infrastructure to be steady, they want it to be highly available. So there's always a certain amount of just progress at VMworld. I'm excited about that they're branching out into DevOps and developers and stuff. Still a little underwhelmed with some of the VCloud stuff. I think I need to see a recognition that customers want to interact with more than one cloud. But overall, I think people are excited about conversion infrastructure. I think there's a lot going on there. I think obviously 23,000 people, they're still super passionate about VMware, about vSphere, about all of that. It's been a very positive week. People have been excited. The rumors haven't overtaken the thing, which has been good. They're allowed to focus on learning. We talked about the VBrown Bag guys. We're going to talk to the VMug team. People want to advance their career, and that's a good thing. People are positive about technology, and whenever they're positive about technology, it's better for the whole industry. Yeah, it's funny. You bring up some of the community stuff. I mean, if you look at the social component of what goes on, I feel we actually went through the last two or three years, we went through, what's that, the trough of disillusionment, because we used to get all the bloggers together in the bloggers' lounge. And now like, well, there are people to blog, but most of us that ended up with jobs that you write, or you do some on the side, things there, but we're kind of back more, I feel there's more of the social component, the community's kind of there. It's not, I got real worried that it was just these echo chambers of, one new startup that just bashes everybody and comes out, or the large enterprise and trying to be the loudest out there, and there's still things we need to work through, but it's just settling down. VMworld has become very much like Twitter in that the users have sort of built the new features and done it. When you come to VMworld, yes, VMware dictates a message and what goes on, but there are so many other activities that got created by end users, from Vodgeball to VBacon to VBrownbag, and that's good for the community. It means there's opportunity, they can have a say in it, and it mirrors the open source community a little bit. All right, so last question I have here, Brian. One of the biggest problems we have at a show like this is I mean, it's not one fire hose, there's 20 fire hoses going on all the time, there's so much content, no matter what your focus is, you couldn't even cover, oh, I just want to look at the storage enhancements that VMware did. We've been going through rapid succession of so many interviews here. I mean, I'd love to say everybody go watch the playlist. There's 51 interviews we've done in the first two days, and we're going to do a ton more today. What advice do you give as to how people should systematically go through, how do you source it, how do you leverage content from a show like this? Yeah, a couple of things. Obviously, we're a little biased. We think what we've produced here is really good. The nice thing is we put it in small snippets, so you can go get the highlights from us, from theCUBE. The other thing, the next thing for me, sort of the next tier down is go find your favorite technology blogger, the person that's in that, in some cases they may still work for a vendor, but there's lots of people that do summaries of them. That's a great next tier, and then whatever your one passion is, your one area, then go dig into that. But I think you tier that, start with theCUBE, find a good technology blogger, and then dig into what you can find off of VMworld. Yeah, interesting point. So we're going to have some of our friends doing podcasts on theCUBE today. Geek Whisperers are going to have on Scott Lowe. Scott works for Vendor, he writes great stuff. Absolutely. And I mean, Brian, you and I both changed jobs and said so many people look at the hat and the title and who they work for, whereas if you read their stuff and if you look in the community, the community helps endorse and understands, it's really the person, their knowledge. We all have our kind of technology biases and preferences, but good content, find someone who finds an audience. Yeah, we've all learned that the content's not good, nobody reads it, and you're going to stop writing it. But no, it's exciting, and you talk about Geek Whisperers, this show is as much about technology as it is careers. Folks like that are helping you figure out, how do I navigate my career? What's the next big trend and so forth? So it's exciting to be part of all that. Yeah, and the last thing I'll say is, what we do is of course, we've got so much, just raw information, metadata, and getting back from the community, I mean, this streams its way out and more video will be doing back from the studios. Plenty more events will be doing if you go check out SiliconANGLE.tv. And of course, wikibon.com is where all the research is. Brian's banging out a lot on cloud. I'll be giving all my summaries on what's happening in converge and hyperconverged. And we've got a lot more content here. So please always welcome your comments, feedback, let us know what you like. If you say, Brian's socks are a little bit better than mine, that's okay. But any closing thoughts on day three? No, I'm excited about that. We've got a bunch of panels. We're going to be very community oriented today and wrap it up. It's been a good week. And hopefully, like you said, people give us feedback. We want to hear what we can help you learn about. All right, yeah, always happy to give feedback to share with the community what we can. So thank you so much for watching. Got a lot more content here. SiliconANGLE.tv's wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2015. Thanks for watching.