 Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of theCUBE coverage here at VMware, VMware Explorer, not VMworld. 12 years theCUBE's been covering. VMware's end user conference. This year it's called Explore. Previously, VMworld, we've got two great guests, friends of theCUBE alumni, and Clouderati, Keith Townsend, Principal CTO Advisor, air streaming his way into VMworld this year in a big way. Congratulations, and I call Chiefs Irkhardt Principal, technology of VMware at Tanzu. Clouderati, been in the cloud game for a long time. We've known each other for a long, long time. Even before cloud was cloud, so great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. It's a pleasure. I was happy to be here. So day three is our kind of like riff. I'll throw out super cloud. You guys will trash it, we'll debate it. It'll be controversial and say there's damage done by the over rotation of developer experience. We'll defend Tanzu, but really the end of the game is that guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time. We're totally into it, and we've been saying infrastructure as code is the end state. We want to get there, right? DevOps and infrastructure as code has always been the underlying fire burning in all the innovation. But it's now getting legitimately enterprise. It's adopted in large scale. Amazon Web Services, we saw that rise. It feels we're in another level right now. And I think we're looking at this new wave coming. And I got to say, the Broadcom thing has put like electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem because they don't know what's going to happen next. So as a result, everyone's kind of got to spring in their step a little, whether it's nervous energy or excitement around something happening. It's all cloud native. So, you know, VMware has got such a great investment in cloud native, but yet multi-cloud is the story, right? So, messaging's okay. So what's happening here? Like guys, let's break it down. You're on the show floor of the Airstream. You're on the inside, but with the seeing the industry, James will start with you. What's happening this year with cloud next level and VMware's future? Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is that we are beginning to see the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption and computing. And what I mean by that is the abstractions that sort of blood between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have sort of become separated much better. And I think Kubernetes is the strong evidence of that, but also all of the public cloud APIs are strong evidence of that. And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that were strong evidence of that. So I think what's starting to happen now then is developers have really kind of pulled very far away from anything other than saying I need compute, I need network, I need storage. And so now you're seeing the technologies that say, well, we figured out how to do that at a team level. Like one team can automate an application to an environment, but another team will, you know, other teams, if I have hundreds of teams or thousands of applications, how do I handle that? And that's what the excitement I think is right now. I mean, the developer, we're going on camera, before you came on camera, Keith, around your controversial statement around the developer experience. Now we, I mean, I believe that the cloud native development environment is doing extremely well right now. You talk to, you know, look around the industry, it's at an all-time high in relative to euphoria. You know, sit on the beach with sunglass. You couldn't be better if you were a developer. Open source is booming. Everything's driving to their doorstep self-service. They're at the center of the security conversation when shift left. Yeah, there's some things there, but it's a good time if you're a developer. Now, is VMware going to be changing that? And, you know, are they going to meet the developers where they are? Are they going to try to bring something new? So these are conversations that are super important. Now VMware has a great install base, and there's developers there too. So I think I see their point, but you have a take on this, Keith. What's your position on this? How the developer experience, core and tangential? Overplayed? I think we're doing a disservice to the industry, and I think it's hurting or debt. I think, I'm going to stand by my statement, it's damaging the industry to an extent. VMware. What's damaging to the industry? Focusing over focusing on developer experience. Developer experience is super important, but we're focusing on developer experience to the detriment of infrastructure. The infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry isn't there. So we're asking VMware, who's a infrastructure company at core, to meet the developer where the developer is at today with an infrastructure that's not ready to deliver on the promise. So when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations like adding a block storage to VMC on AWS, we collectively yarn. It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well, what does that mean for the developer? Down the road. It should mean nothing, because if it's infrastructure's code, it should just work, right? It should just work, but it doesn't. Okay, I can see the damage there. When you're thinking, oh, well, I should be able to just simply provide DR service from my on-prem service to this new block-level storage because I can do that in an enterprise today, non-cloud, we're not there. We're not at a point where we can just write infrastructure code and that happens. VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap. And I think when buyers look at what we say and we say VMware isn't meeting developers where they're at, but they're doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds, I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John, the unicorn we all talk about. And at the end, I tried to wrap up and he said, no, no, no way, I got to talk about vRealize. Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about vRealize and the importance of normalizing that underlay. And we just don't give these companies in this space the right latitude. So I'm trying to grok a little bit what you're saying. So from my standpoint, I'm generically speaking. If the developers are key to the cloud-native role, which I would say they are, then if I'm a developer and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood, I'm not getting in the weeds in which some people would love to do, I want to just make things work. So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service. I don't care about locking, someone else should figure that problem out, but I'm going to just accelerate my velocity, making sure it's secure, and I'm moving on, being creative and doing my thing, building apps, okay? That's the kind of generic statement. So what has to happen in your mind to get there? Someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move. AS 400 still propagate the data center. There's still HPUX running SAP ECC. There's still 75% of the world's transactions happen through SAP, and most of that happens on bare metal. Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that infrastructure's cold world. Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do DR between my on-premises edge solution and the public cloud, someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes consuming that. That work isn't done. It's on paper. It's an opportunity, though. I mean, we're not in a bad spot. So I mean, I think what you're getting at is that there's a lot of fix, a lot of gaps. All right, I want to bring you in because we had a panel on SuperCloud event. Chris Hoff, you know, Beaker was on here. He's always snarky, but he's been building clouds lately. So he's been getting his hands dirty, rollin' up his sleeves. The title of the panel was originally called the Innovator's Dilemma with a question mark. You know, ha ha, innovator's dilemma, a little goof on that, because there's challenges in trade-offs like Keith's talking about. He says we should call it the integrator's dilemma because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay, it's not as seamless as it can be or should be in the Nirvana state, but there's a lot of integration going on. A lot of APIs are key to this. API security, one of the most talked about things. I mean, I interviewed six companies on API security in the past couple months. So, I mean, I never talked to anybody about API security before this year. APIs are critical. So these key things of cloud are being attacked and so there's more complexity as we're getting more successful. And so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations. What's your read on this to make the complexity go away? You guys have the chaos rain here, which I actually like that, Dave does too, but Andy Grove once said let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. So we're in that rain in the chaos mode now. What's your take on what Keith was saying around? Yeah. So I think that the one piece of the puzzle that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative that I think is important is it's really not just infrastructure and developers. Right? It's there's, in fact, and I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, right? There's really sort of three layers of operations that come out of the cloud model in the long term and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and in the middle is platform and services. And so I think one of the, this is where VMware is making its play right now is in terms of providing the platform and service capability that does that integration at a lower level, works with VMs, works with bare metal, works with the public cloud services that are available. Makes it easy to access things like database services and messaging services and things along those lines. Makes it easy to turn code that you write into a service that can be consumed by other applications. But ultimately, creates an environment that begins to pull away from having to know to write code about infrastructure, right? And so infrastructure's code's great, but if you have a great platform, you don't have to write code about infrastructure. You can actually declare what basic needs of the application are. And then that platform will say, okay, well, I will interpret that. And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is. And that's what VMware's taking advantage of with what we're doing with that. Yeah, I remember when we first, Lou Tucker and I, I think you might've been in the room during those OpenStack days and when Kubernetes was just starting and literally just happened, the paper was written, going to go out and a couple of companies formed around it. We said that could be the interoperability layer between clouds. And our dream at that time was, hey, and we mentioned and Stratus in our super cloud, but the days of spanning clouds, the dream, we thought that. Kubernetes now has kind of become that de facto rallying moment for, I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've been talking about allows for right once run anywhere. I think to me that's not nowhere in the market today. I mean, nobody has that. Nobody has anything that could write once, write it once and then run on multiple clouds. It's more true than ever. We had one customer that just was using AKS for a while and then decided to try the application on AKS and they said it took them a couple of hours to get through the few issues they ran into. Yeah, I talked to a customer who's going from, who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle Cloud on Oracle Cloud's VMware solution and he raved about now he has a inherent backup, DR, for his OCVS solution because there's a shim between the two. And how did he do that? There's a solution and this is where the white spaces James talked about in the past exist. When I go to a conference like KubeCon, the Kube will be there in Detroit in about 45 days or so. I talked to platform group after platform group that's doing their work that VMware, Redhead, HashiCorp, all should be doing. I shouldn't have to build that shim. While we rave and talk about the power of Kubernetes, that's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60 to 65% of there for the platform. Right now, there's groups of developers within that sit in between infrastructure and sit in between application development that all they do is build platforms. There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform. VMware announced tap 1.3 and the thing that I'm surprised the one on Twitter is talking about is this API discovery piece. If you've ever had to use an API and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever and now it just magically happens, the marketing at the end of developing the application, think if you're in a shop that develops hundreds of applications. There's thousands or tens of thousands of APIs that have to be documented. That's beating the developer where it's at and it's also infrastructure. Well guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. We're on a time deadline, which we're going to do more. We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explorer. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Good to see you. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. Stay with us.