 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix, .NEXT 2018. Here in London, England, we're going to be talking about developers in this segment. I'm Stu Min and my co-host is you, Piscar, and happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests. Bala Kutibotla is the general manager of Nutanix Era, and sitting next to him is Greg Muscarella, who recently joined Nutanix as the vice president of products at Nutanix. Both of you have been up on stage. Greg was talking about Carbon and CloudNative, and of course, Era is the database as a service. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Good to be here. All right, so look, developers. We were thinking back, I love the old meme, developers, developers, developers. Balmer had it right, his style might not have been there. Microsoft, company that does quite well with developers. My background is in the enterprise space. I'm an infrastructure guy that goes to cloud, and the struggle I've had a little bit is developers really work from the application down. It's like, that's where they live, and as an infrastructure guy, it's a little uncomfortable for me. So maybe to set that stage, because I look at Nutanix and its core, infrastructure's a big piece of it, but in its distributed architectures, it's built from the architecture from really the hyperscale type of environments. So help connect the dots as to where Nutanix plays with the developers, and then we'll get into your products and everything else after. Balmer, you want to start? Cool, okay. So as you know, Nutanix is definitely addressing the IT ops market. We kind of simplified storage, compute, networking, and build the infrastructure as a service. Obviously, if you look at the private cloud, the IT operators are becoming the cloud operators, and then giving them to the developers. We are basically trying to build a cloud for IT operators so that they can present their cloud to the developer. Now that we have this infrastructure pretty much there for Quartz and Tom, we're now expanding the services to other things, the platform as a service, now going back to the developer community, you will have the same kind of cloud-like consumption that these cloud operators, the IT operators are providing the cloud to you. You as developers get the same kind of public cloud consumption like ability, that the way that you are trying to do EC2s, AWS, and S3s and kind of stuff, EBS, you have the same kind of APIs for on Nutanix that you can spin off a VM, spin off a database, spin off a storage, and then do what you want to do, kind of stuff. So that's a natural journey for us, kind of stuff. Yeah, I have to agree. Look, the world has changed quite a bit for developers and it's gotten a lot better. If you look at the tooling and what you can now do on your laptop and spinning up, it would be a pretty complex environment from a three-tier application with a robust database, an app tier, and anything else you might have on the storage side. Spin it up, break it down, and with your CI-CD pipeline, you can have it deployed to production pretty rapidly. So what we like it doing is recreating that experience that the cloud has really brought to those developers and having the same type of tooling for those enterprise-grade applications that are going to be deployed on that infrastructure that is needed in private data centers. So looking at one of the reasons why developers love cloud services so much, it's easy for them. They can just consume it, it's very low friction. They don't even really need to go through a purchasing process other than credit card may be paid for themselves in the beginning. So low friction is really the keyword here. So I'm wondering, looking at the Nutanix, the ITOps perspective, how are you kind of bringing that low friction into the developer world? Yeah, so I'll take the question. So essentially what I'm seeing is the world in the enterprise world is very fragmented. People do in silos kind of stuff. As you rightly said, developers really want to be liberated from all this bureaucracy, right? So they really need a service kind of world where they can go click on it, they get their come to kind of stuff. There is a pressure on the ITOps to give that experience, otherwise people will flee to public law, as simple as that, right? So to me, the way I see is the ITOps, DBOps, the traditional DBOps engineering, they are understanding the needs that, hey, we got to be service-ified. We want to provide that kind of service-like interface to our teams who are consuming us kind of stuff. So this software, Nutanix as the enterprise cloud software, lets them create their own private cloud and then give those services to the developers kind of stuff. So it's a natural transition as a company for us. We got to start from the cloud operators. Now we are exposing the cloud services from the cloud operators to the cloud consumers, essentially the developers. Yeah, Greg, up on stage, you talked about cloud native and your premise is that cloud native is a term for a methodology, not necessarily that it's born in the cloud. Maybe help explain that a little bit and we think Nutanix is mostly in data centers today, so why isn't this just saying, no, no, no, we can be cloud native too? Yeah, fair point. And I think we're not alone in that as well in being an enterprise infrastructure company that was looking at enabling cloud native applications, out of cloud native architecture within the private data center. So hey, look, it's really it's a form of doing distributed computing, right? And that's the core to it, right? So you have a stateless ephemeral infrastructure, you're not upgrading things, you're blowing it away and rebuilding it. There's some core things like that that will move across whether it be in the cloud or on-prem. And of course you need tooling for that, right? Because that's not the methodology most enterprise developers or operators have really gone through, right? So everything's pets, not much cattle. And we're really trying to change that quite a bit and that's both enabling technology but it's also the practices that people will deploy. And we're actually seeing is it's not so much us trying to sell this, it's more like, hey, we're used to this in the cloud, why can't we do this on-prem in our private data center where we have all of our data and the other services that we need to interact with, like that's where the demand's really coming from. So it's that massive data they want to interact with with the type of architecture that they've gotten used to for rapid development and deployment. So one of the things, so you mentioned pets versus cattle, one of the things I've been seeing from an IT ops perspective is, you need a good ecosystem of management products around your pets or your cattle to be able to make it cattle, right? If you don't have the tooling, you're going to do manual interaction and it's going to become pets. So I'm wondering in that cloud native space, how are you helping the IT ops to actually make it a cattle experience in terms of management or monitoring or backup, stuff like that. So a lot of that is surrounded around Kubernetes as a center of mass. So it's not just us doing it, it's us pulling in a lot of the support and ecosystem that is being built by the community for that and leveraging that piece. And then we have other things we'll either add on to that as it integrates with our platform and some of the capabilities there or things that we may do, just again, pure open source. Give you a couple examples of that. So I mentioned epoch on stage, right? So it's sort of something that brings additional metrics to Prometheus, right? So in addition to CPU and memory storage consumption, you're actually getting latency and other more business metrics that you might be using to trigger things in Kubernetes like auto-scaling, right? I don't necessarily always scale on CPU or memory, maybe it's a customer experience that's difficult to measure. The other thing is because we have the storage layer underneath, we look at doing things like, again, it's early in Kubernetes but snapshotting from within Kubernetes, right? So if we have a CSI provider, why not from within Kubernetes let an application or a container trigger a snapshot underneath our storage layer, we'll take that snap and then it becomes an object that's available from within Kubernetes. So there's a whole lot of things happening. I just want to add a couple of comments to that. This PetSources candle is standardization, right? Like we're talking about it, right? In typical old legacy enterprises, there are, let's take the example of databases. Like every application team owner has their own databases, they are trying to patch, they are trying to do management around it, kind of stuff. But when we do a couple of surveys, like we looked at around 2,400 databases for a typical company, they have 400 different configurations of the software. It's like this is one of the biggest companies that we're talking about kind of stuff. With that kind of stuff, they cannot manage cloud, obviously. This is not no more a cattle kind of stuff. But how do you bring that kind of standardization, right? That is where the era as a product is actually coming into this. We are trying to standardize, but when you try to standardize this database environment for on-premise enterprise cloud, you have to do it at their terms. What I meant to try to say is, when you try to go for public cloud, you have this catalog 11204 or 12202 or 12102 PSC5, you can only create databases with whatever the software that public cloud guys are doing it, but on-premise needs are slightly different. So that is where Nutanix era and these products will come into. We allow people to create the cloud, and then we allow them to create their own catalog of software that they can standardize. That is what I call standardization at their customer terms. That's what we're trying to do. And let me add to that though. It also brings in this convenience because not only is it coming up with standardized, but we made it even more convenient, right? Because now a developer can go provision their own database, they're going to get a standard configuration for what that is. And so you've made it easier for developers and you're getting something that is more cattle-like. Yeah, Bala, I think you're in a good seat to be able to actually give us a little bit of independent commentary. The movement of databases is one of the hottest topics in the industry. I haven't seen whether Andy Jastee was sparring back with Larry Ellison at a re-invent this week, but we've been watching the growths of things like Postgres and a lot of these changes. Eris sits clearly in that space. So what do you see from customers? The modernization of applications is what I call the long pole in the tenant. It's the toughest thing for me to be able to do. I've said we usually want to first, you modernize your platform, Nutanix helps with that, Public Cloud helps with that, and then I can modernize my application. Database tends to be the stickiest application that we have in the industry. So what are you seeing? Yeah, so there are two classes of applications we see. This is completely greenfield. You're starting off completely. People love cloud-like experience and cloud-native databases. That's where the public cloud can kind of try to kind of help them. But if you see 70 to 80% of the money still is with all the traditional apps. You're trying to now cloudify them. The cloud-native stack that we talk about, the cloud-native database is not going to be the game. Like, you really need to think about how do you kind of take this big giant databases that are there with Oracles and DB2s and kind of stuff, but give the cloud-like experience, right? So that will be a very difficult game for any public cloud vendor. That's why you don't see rack provisioning and AWS is still not there, or even if GCP, natively. Oracle does that with little bit difficult. Data gravity forces people to come to on-premises. That's my humble take on this, right? But how do you build, how do you make this gray area, I call this a brown field, and convert them into more of a consumer-centric kind of stuff? That's where ERA actually tries to play it. It has two roles that if you have existing databases, we turn to kind of convert them into more of a cloud-like databases for you. Or if you have a greenfield, then we can get you directly onto the cloud-native experience. Or if you're trying to migrate from one technology to other technology, definitely we would like to help you. These are the three things that we try to do through ERAC. So looking forward, we're starting out with databases, making that simple, making that small, so that there's less friction in that. So maybe a question for Greg. So what's the future for Nutanix in enabling other services, other cloud-like services, on a Nutanix platform going forward? In addition to databases. Exactly. Yeah, so we're a big proponent of standard APIs, as I talked about, right? So we have that in storage for a long time that makes things easy. With databases, we have a standard client talk and a standard database backends. As we see other core building blocks, those are the kind of things that we're going to want to build and deliver as well. So S3 is a de facto standard for object storage, for instance, so people are following that. You look at PubSub with Kafka APIs, Druid. I think there's a whole bunch of things, especially from the Apache project, that have become sort of de facto standards. So really it's like, okay, well which building blocks are needed by developers to build these applications that they want, and so we really work with the community to establish those as open standards. Because we really want, I talked about the portability quite a bit. So we don't want anyone locked into our stack or anyone else's stack. It's like, hey, let's build with the best toolkits, let's use standard open APIs, and then developers get what they need, which is portability, or run the application where they want to run it. So that's our strategy of going forward. To sum it up, we have EC2 equivalent, which is AHV. We have EBS equivalent. We have our called Acropolis Block Services. We have S3 equivalent, which is called Buckets. We have Database, RDS equivalent, we have Era. Now we are going with containers, which we call Carbon. So we are trying to kind of look at those critical services for anyone, especially for developers to say that, man, it's all ecosystem. It's not like one piece, single piece. It's not just compute, it's not just storage, but it's the ecosystem of services that we need to kind of put it. Want to just come back to what we were talking at the beginning, the relationship with developers. How much of what Nutanix does is really kind of the IT ops that then enables developers. How much direct developer engagement is it? Is there development activity here at the conference going on that we should know about? I know that Nutanix goes to a lot of the developer shows, but maybe if you can give us some commentary on that. Yeah, I can start. It's a path, right? So currently, we certainly have the bulk of our interactions are going to be on the IT operation side. And so it's only through them, because their customers are the developers that we really interact primarily today. But you should see that changing quite a bit. And I think that you'll see that with the tools that we're providing directly to developers to interact with through the APIs like they have with ARA. So for instance, if IT is deployed ARA internally, then if I want a database, I can go straight to those APIs or command line to grab those things. You'll see that continuously be a trend as we let developers interact directly with our products. Just to give you the example, within the company, within Nutanix, we are drinking our own champagne. So we are operating a private cloud and we're exposing our APIs to all our developers today if someone wants a database. In Nutanix, they go to a control plane and say, I want a database, right? That's the API. How the infrastructure is getting, it's a means to an end for them, right? So that's how we are going with our customers too. Hey, here is how you build your private cloud. Here is how you expose all your service endpoints for different services. And your developers just need to enjoy them. And then there's a billing aspect of it. That's the nuance that private clouds need to deal with. How do they charge the developers? How do they charge meter and kind of stuff? People will know how to work through that. Yeah, so I definitely heard when I've talked to all the product teams, especially everything in this iCloud, extensibility with APIs is built into everything you're doing. So we're going to have to leave it there. Greg, we're going to be catching up with you and the Nutanix team in two weeks at the KubeCon show in Seattle. So thanks so much for joining us, Bala. Pleasure, thanks for giving us all the update. And thank you, we're going to be back with more coverage here from Nutanix.NEXT 2018. In London, I'm Stu Miniman and you, Piscar, is my co-host, going to be doing a Dutch session in a second. So be sure to stay with that first foreign language interview on the Kube. And thank you for watching.