 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years covering theCUBE. We were at Moscone in 2010. Boy, a lot's changed, but it's still the platform that Paul Maritz laid out, with the stuff filling in 10 years later. Joking, he called it software mainframe and then Robin came in and said, you can't call it mainframe. And we have leaders from VMware's largest business unit, the cloud platform business unit, Kit Colbert to CTO, and Chris Prasad's SVP and general manager. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having us. So worlds, your business unit is smoking hot, it's very popular, like you were running around doing meetings, cloud platform is the software model that's 10 years later actually happening at scale. Congratulations. What's the big news? What's the big conversation for you guys? Yeah, the biggest news this week is the announcement of project specific. And it's about taking the platform which has hundreds of thousands of customers on it and bringing together Kubernetes which is now very popular with the developers and that platform together so that operators on the one hand can just deal with the platform they love and the developers can deal with the Kubernetes layer that they love. It's interesting to watch because you know, the whole end user computing stack that was laid out 10 years ago is actually happening now at SAS, let's see SAS business models, we all see the tap on the Amazon, the success of cloud. But it's interesting to see Kubernetes which we've been following since the report started to open stack days. You saw that emerge and everyone kind of saw that and it really became a nice layer that the industry just created as a de facto and you guys are actually driving that more forward so congratulations on that. But sitting it natively in vSphere is interesting because you guys have to spend a ton of time, this is a core product for you guys. So you're bringing something native into vSphere, I'm sure there's a lot of debates internally on how to do that, kid, what's the relevance for it? Because you guys have a lot of efficiencies in vSphere but bringing in Kubernetes is going to give you some new things. So the thinking is really, as Chris was mentioning, how do we take this proven platform and move it forward? Customers have moved millions of workloads on top of vSphere, operating them in production with production grade capabilities. And so they've been able to be very successful in that and so the question is, how do we help them move forward into Kubernetes? You know, as you mentioned, Kubernetes is still fairly young. The ecosystem around it, it's still somewhat immature, still growing, right? And it's a very different environment than what folks are used to who use vSphere. And so there's a big challenge that customers have around managing multiple environments, all the training that's different, all the tools that are different. So if we can actually take their investments they've already made into vSphere, leverage and extend those into the Kubernetes world, that's really powerful. And it'll help our customers take all these millions of workloads and move them forward. It's interesting because we was always speculating about VMware, I was talking to Jerry Chen when he was on yesterday. He's been at VMware since the early days, as you know. But looking at VMware when they went to there, you guys went back to your core, when vCloud Air kind of went its way and then the deal with Amazon since the stock price has been going great, so great shareholder, stakeholder value there. But you've got clarity around what cloud was. And as you look at the operator, target audience, you guys have the operators. And the dev and ops is critical. So you guys have been operating a lot of workloads. And I think this is fascinating. So the role of containers is super relevant because you've got VMs and containers. So again, the debate continues. Well, I think containers, VMware and it's interesting because Kubernetes is orchestrating all that. Well, the Snarky Tweet the other day, and you guys feel free to comment, was, oh, I thought we launched Pivotal so we didn't have to run containers on virtual machines. Now, we know that people run containers on bare metal, they run containers in virtual machines, but. Yeah, I mean, it's a debate that we hear pop up and the Snarky Twitter feeds and so forth. When we talk to customers about it, this whole VM versus container debate, I think really misses the point because it's not really about that. What it's about is how do I actually operate these workloads in production, right? There's kind of this three pillars we talk about build, run, manage. Customers want to accelerate that. They want to do that with enterprise grade capabilities with security. And so that's where it really gets challenging. And I think we've built this amazing ecosystem around vSphere to achieve that. And so that's what we're taking forward here. And yes, the fact that we're using virtualization on the covers, that's an implementation detail almost. What's more valuable is all the stuff above that, the manageability, the operational capabilities. It seems to me to the business impact because okay, people are going to go to the cloud and they're going to build cloud native apps, but you've got all these incumbent companies that are trying not to get disrupted. They're trying to find new opportunities to play in offense and defense at the same time. They need tooling to be able to do that. They don't want to take their ERP app and stick it in the cloud, right? They want to modernize it. And you're not going to build that overnight in the cloud anyway, so they need help. That's the key move that we made here. If you think about it, customers don't have Kubernetes experts today. And most of them in their journey to the modern apps, they are saying, hey, we need to set up two stacks at least. We have our VMware stack that we love and now Kubernetes, our developers love, so we have to stand that up. And they don't have any in-house experts to do that. And with this one move, we have actually collapsed it back to one stack. Yeah, I think it's a brilliant move actually. It's brilliant because the dev ops ethos is proven. Everyone wants to be there. And the question is who's leading and who's lagging. So ops has traditionally lagged if you look at it from a developer standpoint. You guys have not been lagging on the operating side. We certainly have tons of VMs. Virtualization has been standardized. So it's unifying the two worlds together. And it really, as we've been calling it cloud 2.0, because if you look at what hybrid really is, it's cloud 2.0. Cloud 1.0 was dev ops, storage and compute. Amazon, if you're born in the cloud, we have no IT department, 50 plus people. Why would we ever, and developers are the operators. So we're small, but enterprise scale, it's not that easy. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you guys would frame the cloud 2.0. Visa V, if cloud 1.0 is storage and compute and Amazon-like scale, what is cloud 2.0 to you? Yeah, well I think, so let's talk about the cloud journey. So I think that's what you're getting at here. So here's how we discuss it with customers. You are where you are today. You have your existing apps, a lot of them are monolithic, your slow to update, you know, so forth, right? And then you have sort of the cloud native Nirvana over here where like everything's re-architected, it's microservices. Yeah, it's got all those containers off. But it doesn't run my business. Well, yeah. Well, this is where you want to get to, right? And I think the challenge, and the challenge is it's a huge amount of effort to get there, right? All the training we're talking about, all the tooling and all the changes there. And people tend to look at this as a very binary thing, right, that you're either here where you are or you're in the cloud native Nirvana. People don't often talk about what's in the middle and the fact that it's a spectrum. And I think what we see at VMware is like, let's meet customers where they are. You know, I think one of the big realizations we had is not everyone needs to get every single application on this far side over here. Some apps, your ERP system, whatever, you know, it's fine to get them a little bit of the way there. And so one of the things that we saw with VMware Cloud and AWS, for example, was that people, there was a pent up demand to move to the public cloud. But it was challenging because to go from a vSphere environment on-prem to an AWS native environment, you have to change a bunch of things, the tooling changes, like the environment's a little bit different. But with VMware Cloud and AWS, there's no modifications at all. You just literally vMotion it. And so people are vMotioning things like insanely fast. Now, without modifying the app, you can't get, you know, it's not like you have to suddenly better scalable, but you get other cloud beneficiary. You get things like, oh, my infrastructure is dynamic. I can add host dynamically. I only pay for what I need. I can consume this as a service. And so we help to move their workloads a little bit in that middle of the spectrum there. And I think what we're doing with Project Pacific and Kubernetes is the same thing. I think I start taking advantage of these great Kubernetes capabilities for their existing apps without modification. So again, kind of moving them further in that middle spectrum. And then, you know, for the apps that really make a difference to their business, they can put in the extra effort to get all the way over there. And we saw that some evidence of some challenges of that shiny new trend within the Hadoop ecosystem. Big data objects to our, who doesn't love that concept, right? Yeah. MapReduce, but what happened was is that the infrastructure costs and the personnel human capital costs were so massive that, and then the cloud, cloud came along and said, I'll just go cloud. Well, there's also the other point about just the bespoke tooling that you're pointing out. The confusion. The process, technology, right? Then the disruptions we create, you know, to that, then the investments that it takes to transition over. And then you had a skills gap in terms of what people have to do, but so that brings us back to, so how do you address that problem? Because most of the audience out here are not developers. Yeah. Yeah, Pivotal has a developer's connection, so. This is one of the really cool things about Pacific, that what we've done with Pacific, when you look at it from an IT operations point of view, that person sees vSphere. It's the tool they already know and use, understand it well. When a developer looks at it, they see Kubernetes. And so there's these two different viewpoints. It's kind of like, you know, the blind men around the elephant, but the thing is it's actually, you know, a singular thing in the backend, right? Even though they have these two different views. And so the cool thing about it is we can actually bring IT ops and developers together that they can use their own language tools process, but there's a common thing that they're talking about, and they have common visibility into that. And that's super, super powerful. And when you look at it, all of a sudden what's happening on the Kubernetes side is fully visible on the vSphere side. So all these tools that already work against vSphere suddenly light up and support Kubernetes automatically. So again, without any work, we suddenly get so much more benefit. And the category busters that are going on too, you're changing, you're taking software approach that you guys know, and you're taking it to the software developer world. It's kind of changing the game. One of the things I want, Chris, I want to get your thoughts on Cloud 2.0, because you know, if compute and storage was Cloud 1.0, we're seeing networking and security and data becoming critical ingredients that are problem statement areas people are working on, certainly networking, you guys are in that. So as Cloud 2.0 is going to take into the fact that messy middle between, you know, I'm on here and then I want the nirvana. It's always the origination story and the outcomes end story is always great, but the messy, messy middle, as you were pointing out, is hard. So how do you guys find, look at the moves that we made in the market. Do you know about the Bitfusion acquisition that we made, right? Which happened like a month ago. And it was about preparing the platform for AI and ML workloads. So really what we are trying to do is really make sure that the vSphere platform is ready for the modern applications, right? AI, ML on one side, Kubernetes applications, you know, service oriented applications. All of them can land on the same platform. And more and more, whether it's AI, ML or other applications, they are being written on top of Kubernetes. That's infrastructure's code. Yeah, infrastructure's code, right? So enabling Kubernetes will help us land all the modern applications on top of the same platform that our customers are used to. So it's a huge kind of an inflection point in the industry from my standpoint. Well, to your earlier point, let me see how you talk to us. I want to get from point A to point B and I want to spend a billion dollars to get there. I want to have to hire some systems integrator and outsource to get me there. Show me how I get there without, you know, disrupting my business. How do we meet the customers where they're at, right? Like, the problem with this kind of either or model, either here or there, is that there's a huge opportunity cost. And again, a lot of people just need a little bit of goodness. They don't need the full crazy Nirvana goodness, right? And so we enable them to get that very easily in an automated way, right? If you're to spend any time refactoring or thinking through this app, that takes months or even a year or more. And so, you know, the speed that we can unleash here, the velocity for these customers is critical. Well, the benefit of that Nirvana is always taken out of context because people look at the outcome over iterations and saying, well, I want to be there, but it all starts on a very variable basis. In Shadow IT, we used to call it, but you can go into the cloud and do something really small and simple. And then, wow, this is much more efficient. I like this stack or this approach. That's ultimately how it gets there. So I got to get that point for infrastructure as code because this is what you're enabling in vSphere from when I see it. I want to get your guys reaction to this because the world used to be, and I asked Gelsinger this years ago and he kind of validated it because he's old school Intel. Infrastructure dictated to the applications what it could do, based on what it could do. Now, it's flipped upside down with cloud platform because platform implies enabling something, enabling platform, whatever you want to call it. The apps are dictating to the infrastructure. I need this. That's infrastructure as code. That's kind of what you're saying. Is that? Yeah, I mean, look, Kubernetes brought a paradigm which said, hey, I can declare what I want, right? And then the system will take care of it and maintain that state, right? Decide state execution is what it brought to the table. And the container based apps have already been working that way. What this announcement does with Project Pacific is that the VM applications that our customers built in the past, they are going to be able to take advantage of the same pattern, which is the infrastructure as code, declarative, and decide state execution. That's going to happen even for the old workloads that our customers are using. And they're going to still do VMs. I mean, they're scaled, they're going to have thousands of VMs are going away. But they'll operate the same paradigm. I mean, Paul Morris doesn't get enough credit for the comment he made in 2010 and he called it the hard and top. Do you really care what's underneath if it's working effectively? Well, I mean, I think the reality today is that even though containers that get a lot of coverage and attention, most workloads are being provisioned, new workloads even, are being provisioned in VMs, right? If you look at AWS, the public clouds, I mean, it's the EC2 or Google Compute Engine, those services, those VMs are the ones that are getting heavily used. And so the way we look at it is we want to support everything. And it's just, we want to give customers a bunch of tools in their toolbox and let's put and use the right tool for the right job, right? That's really the mentality. That's really cloud 2.0. Chris, I want to get your, I want to nail you down on the definition of a cloud 2.0. What is your version of cloud 2.0? You keep asking. Come on, we keep dodging your answer. I'll get it out of there, come on. No, I think, look, we touched on all aspects of it. One is the infrastructure as code, allowing the consumer of the cloud to be able to dictate the environment in which the applications will operate, right? And the consumer is defining it or the developer is defining it in this case. That to me is the biggest shift that we have gone through in the 2.0 era. And we are just making our platform come to life to support that. We're taking a Cube survey and we're going to put it all together and we want the community to define it, not us. What is it, to explain to the audience what it means to be a project and how does a project get into an offering? You can describe that. I mean, so project Pacific is vSphere, right? I mean, this is a massive rethinking, re-architecture of vSphere. Like pretty much every major subsystem component within vSphere has been updated with this effort. What we're doing here is what we've technically announced is actually what we call a technical preview. So it's saying, hey, this is technology we're working on. We think it's really interesting. We want to share it with the public, get the public's feedback, figure out are we on the right direction or not. So we're not making any commitment to releasing it or any time frames yet. But so part of that needed a name, right? And so, because it is vSphere but it's a specific thing we're doing with vSphere. So that's where the project comes from. I think it also gives that, you know, this thing has been a huge effort internally, right? There's a lot of work that's gone into it. So, you know, it has some heft and deserves a name in itself. Yeah, it's DevOps 2.0 as you guys bring in. You're making your infrastructure truly a naval program out, programmable. Yep, for apps. Yeah, application tsunami. The one thing I would say is we wouldn't announce it as a project if it was not coming soon. I mean, we still are in the process of getting feedback. Yeah. You know, we'll tune it and whatnot but it's not something that is way out there. It is going to come soon. It's a clear direction. It's a statement you're putting investment into as coding going on. It's got a course correct, get some feedback and figure it out. I mean, it's pretty obvious. You can go, a lot of pain or easy. Yeah, it's an easy button for Kubernetes. Yeah, it is an easy button. Easy on-ramp to the future. I think it's a great move. Congratulations. We're obviously big fans of Kubernetes. So the guys last night having a little meeting with Marriott, thinking up the next battle plans for game plan for you guys. Yeah, we got a lot. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We got a lot of really, really cool stuff we're doing. We're going to be following the cloud platform and your progress. Certainly we're covering cloud 2.0, looking at these new categories that are emerging. Again, the end state is DevOps, programmability for applications. The CUBE coverage, 10th year, covering VMworld. We're in the lobby of Moscone in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.