 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It's theCUBE's three days coverage. Live, I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Greg Muscarello, who's the vice president of products at Nutanix. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me, John. Good to see you, Kube alumni. So you guys are doing Kubernetes. You're in the throes of all the enterprise. You've got the hyper-converged action. A lot of that happening here. Yeah. So what's new? What's the update? What's going on with Kubernetes and CNCF? Well, what we're using, this is the opportunity to talk about the CloudNative stack that we built on top of our core HCI platform. So all the goodness that you get with the ease of management, you know, storage availability, et cetera. We've layered on top of that a couple of things. Certainly we have our own Kubernetes distribution called Carbon. Very easy to deploy. With a K. Carbon with a K? Of course, we got to keep it a theme, right? And get a high availability, you know, production-ready cluster going in a matter of, you know, 10 minutes or so. It's five minutes, or two minutes built to form in a few more minutes for it to deploy. That's the easy piece, but really we're designing this for enterprise applications. So it's about persistence as well. So we have our database management services, right? So Aero, which is another product which manages everything from your Oracle databases to your MySQL Postgres that you'd see more developers using to object storage with our buckets product, and then going on to our epoch monitoring and managing. You guys had great success with the product. What's the use case? Why are customers looking for, what is the use case for your customers? Obviously, you got a great infrastructure positioning, you know, network storage and compute all key to the enterprise. Where's the Kubernetes fitness developer? What's the use case? So first of all, Kubernetes and Cloud Native is a mode of developing applications that create really scalable distributed systems. We are, I mean, at our core, we are distributed systems from compute and storage. This is a way of building on top of that and letting enterprises really build out a Cloud Native application using these new types of tooling. Yeah, Greg, one of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning is the stat that they said that 40% of applications that are being running Kubernetes are stateful, which remember it was one of those things we've struggled with for a bit and people are wondering, oh, you know, where does state, does it belong there? Do I do something different with storage? Curious, what you're hearing from your customers, how that fits into what you're doing. So it's really coming, right? So Kubernetes and the ecosystem is evolving so quickly. If you look at where we are with, you know, pet sets, to stateful stats, to all the things you're going to do to actually manage or talk to storage underneath it, it's evolved very rapidly over the last couple of years. So I think what we're seeing is people who are very comfortable running their compute inside and maybe still wanting to talk to storage outside, whether it be object storage or a database that lives outside, maybe on virtual machines, we're seeing some of those services migrate to be more native within Kubernetes, so like using a CSI or something to talk to the storage. And now we have some customers that are putting databases inside as well, right? So it's a matter of how mature you are, how adventurous you are, and how much you really need that reliability out of your database, or whether you need the speed of deployment and ease. Yeah, so Greg, we talked some at the .next show in London just a couple of weeks ago. When you talk to your customers, how do they look at Kubernetes? Is this something that they're saying, oh, well, I'm going to be using Amazon and Microsoft, and therefore it's there? How much does this fit into their hybrid cloud environment? I would think that that would be a big piece of your story. It absolutely is, and there's obviously a lot of news around multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, and that's what's really special about Kubernetes and containers, as well as the standard interfaces we have for storage and objects and databases that you now have this sort of portability. And so I can actually run the same thing in the cloud. I can take that and run the exact same load down in my own data center without changing anything out. And the key to that is, of course, open and standard APIs, right? Of course, my data has to be there as well, and that can be difficult to move and migrate, but the same application structures, same development paradigms apply both in the cloud as well as on-prem. And that's what I'm seeing is a lot of excitement to be able to repurpose that as an answer to multi-cloud or hybrid cloud. What's the workload needs in terms of data because data becomes the critical asset in cloud. Stateful data has been a big discussion. Where is that here in the CNCF? What's your take on the status of how that's playing out, the need in the marketplace, ready for prime time? What's the evolution of that piece in the stateful applications? Yeah, I think that with the CSI and going GA in 1.13, I think we're seeing some maturity for that. Not everything will be, not all stores will be addressed over HTTP. A lot of it's going to be through traditional storage implications or interfaces. And I think what's interesting is seeing that move into try and meet enterprise developers or application developers, kind of where they are. Like if you have an existing app and you need to move it to a containerized application, it's hard to eradicate NFS, it's hard to eradicate block storage and go to something completely out of that. So I think that, and also there's some good reasons to use those types of things, especially if you're running a database itself. So if you want to run a database in Kubernetes, you're going to need something more robust than object storage, right? So that evolution, that maturity has been really fast and it's been interesting to see the Kubernetes community adopt that and then customers take advantage of it. It's been a top conversation. Yeah, Greg, I wonder if we could just kind of zoom out for a little bit here. We're talking about Kubernetes. What does cloud native mean in a Nutanix context and what you're hearing from your customers? What is cloud native mean? Well, I don't think it's unique from our perspective. I think, again, it comes back to, for some people it's going to be a 12-factor application. It's going to be using very standard and open APIs to build those applications. And then being pretty smart about how you address things that might tie you into any particular vendor or in particular operating procedure, right? So we see, for instance, a good examples around PubSub or streaming data. Like we see a lot of people are very rigorous about adopting Kafka, right? They want to use Kafka APIs. Even those are a whole bunch of other services that may use in their favorite cloud or whatever, because they're so interested in that multicloud or a hybrid cloud thing, they're going to choose their APIs pretty carefully. So I think that's maybe the only thing that's a little bit unique in terms of our customer base, is it's not a lot of startups that are like, I don't care, I'm worried about survival, it's all product market fix, let me go fast, and if I get locked into any particular vendor, that's fine, I don't care. That's tomorrow's problem, right? We have enterprises, right? And these are guys who are jaded, have experienced the contract renewals with some of their favorite vendors, right? And they don't want to relive those mistakes again. So they're very interested in having a very open ecosystem to play in, and we support that fully. And stability too with the workloads. They want mission-critical workloads to run effectively. Absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting. I hear you talk about APIs, and we look at, something might be good for a bit, but we get sprawl of every technology. Sure. We have server sprawl, we have VM sprawl. In many ways, we get API sprawl, is every single environment I work into. What's Nutanix's position on, how do you manage APIs? How do you make sure you're just not creating something completely separately? Well, I think, first of all, we really focus on the core APIs, right? So there's certain things that you just have to get these primitives absolutely right. And so if you look, and I applaud the KubeCon community to send similar things, so we do that, right? You got to get identity right. You got to get your data access layers right, and you have to give a lot of your provisioning things right. Once you start getting beyond that, you're into more esoteric lands, and things don't tend to be as tight in, so we can be a little bit more exploratory on other APIs that aren't as core to the service. So that's the attitude we take, and which I think is similar to what we see in the community as well. I mean, if you look at how many projects we go over this morning in the keynotes, you know, it's just like a lot of- Yeah, the CNC has up to 35 projects untold, so. Right, and then tons of things that are not in CNCF that are also being used, right? So it's a proliferation of things that all hope to be successful and kind of become the standard. So what's the update with Nutanix? Give us a quick company overview, get the plug in, what's going on with Nutanix? What are the big focus? Well, focus continues to be just, you know, modernizing the data center, right? Making all these applications easier to run, easier to manage, and easier to operate. So that, and that's what we're built on, right? That's the core. Again, for us, it's going up the stack. It's going into the networking layer, making sure micro segmentation can happen quickly and easily without needing a PhD or heavy lifting of things without taking over your entire network. And again, going up the stack with our cloud native applications. One of the things that's been clear in the industry of the past six months, certainly hard core, kind of we saw it coming before with hybrid, the validation of the on-premises, right? So on-premises needs low latency, they need mission critical workloads, aren't always going to the cloud that fast. So the on-premises and on-on-cloud dynamic is super important for enterprises that are, that are big enterprises, not like the small medium-sized enterprises, but like the big ones have legacy and, you know, containers is a nice bit there. So kind of a nice situation for you guys. How does that all play out? Do you agree with that or? So yeah, look, I think there's a lot of workloads that are going to, if they're not already in the public cloud, they're going to go back, or they're going to be built in the public cloud. I mean, if I have a gaming application and worldwide customers, I need to be in a presence where they can get me quickly. But similarly, there's a lot of applications that are best on-prem, whether it be because either I have regulatory constraints or just, you know what, that's where my data is and that's where all my systems kind of come back together. I need to build my application where my data is because that's a lot of user to move the app, in many cases then use, then to move the data. And a lot of people don't want to give up that ownership and that kind of control. They're uncomfortable with moving their data somewhere that's not in their four walls. And so we've seen, if you look at the CNCF survey data and you look at where Kubernetes is actually being run, you'll find that a lot of Kubernetes is being run on-prem. Like some 60% of respondents are actually running Kubernetes on-prem. Now 89% are running in the cloud, which is, which makes sense. As you start looking at folks who are much more mature, so they've been running Kubernetes for a little bit longer, their fleet size is 1,000 machines or more, you actually see them increasingly running on-prem as well. So this idea of having the same workload, the same APIs that can work, start developing in the cloud, move that application, the exact same application on-prem, work with my on-prem data, I think is very attractive. It was interesting too, we hear a lot of people talk, oh yeah, I'm running Kubernetes, well great, that's cool. Like what are you running it for? So this gets down to the, what is Kubernetes good for? Your thoughts? Yeah, I think it's starting, well, where people are comfortable with is really still to the stateless applications. So it's a lot of filter on a pipe, it's a lot of things that are going through a line of some sort. We certainly see a lot of our IoT applications being built on that, which is essentially that. So there's some intelligence at the edge where we're either, we're gathering the data but we're doing some intelligent things with it, doing some inference there, filtering the data, bringing it back to your data center and then doing additional things on that front. So there's both data gathering as well as some execution happening on the edge. So that's a big piece of it in our market. And then back to pipelines and just kind of core data services. The great following you guys, these guys are doing great, great product, now Cloud Native is here. What's on the portfolio roadmap for SaaS and Cloud Native for you guys? What's the priorities? Yeah, so continuing to fill out the portfolio so that customers can really easily run whatever application they want. So we want those primitives to be there for them. So database storage, we've filled out. The monitoring piece and observability piece is actually really interesting. And so we have a SaaS service that lets you monitor your clusters no matter where they may be. So if you're running them in your favorite cloud provider, fantastic. You can monitor those as well as what you might be running in whatever your on-prem data center is. We have plans to actually let that be run on-prem as well because again, some of our customers, especially who are running dark sites, don't want to have any of their information, even observability data go out. So we're trying to serve that customer that has pretty, putting your robust needs both around their compute environment but also around their data and how they manage your data and protect their data. And that's really our critical customer. Great, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate the time and insight. Nutanix here in theCUBE. John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Three days of live coverage at KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon here in Seattle. 2018, 8,000 people getting larger every time at its global conference. Back with more coverage after the short break. Thanks. Thank you.