 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco on a spectacular day. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host for the day, John Troyer. And we're very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE your distinguished CUBE alumni and Docker veteran, Steve Johnston, Chief Product Officer at Docker. Welcome back. Thank you very much, that's Scott Johnston, but that's okay. Steve, that's okay, you know, I get that all the time. I'm sorry, Scott. That's all right. So this event between five and 6,000 people, you were saying in your general session, keynote this morning that you, that this is the fifth DockerCon. You started a few years ago with just 300 people. And my was walking out of the keynote this morning and I took a photograph. Incredible people as far as the eye can see. It was literally standing your moment. It's crazy, right? And you think about four years ago, June, 2014, when we did our very first DockerCon here in San Francisco, 300 people, right? And we've gone from 300 to over 5,000 in that time, grown the community, grown the products, grown the partnerships. And it's just, it's very humbling, honestly, to be part of something that's literally industry changing. You gave us some great numbers during your keynote. We talked about 500 customers using Docker Enterprise Edition. Some big names. MetLife, Visa, PayPal, McKesson, who was on stage. And that was a really interesting story. I mean, McKesson is what, 183 years old, talking about data, life and death type of data. Their transformation working with Docker and containers was really pretty impressive. It's exciting that companies get their hands on the technology and they start maybe in a small project or a small team, but very quickly they see the potential impact of the solution. And very quickly, it's almost infectious inside the organization. More and more teams want to jump on, understand how they can use it to help with their applications, their business to get impact in their operations. And it just spreads, spreads like wildflower. And that was really the story that McKesson was sharing, just how quickly they were seeing the adoption throughout their work. I thought that was really interesting and they did point it out on stage, how that developer adoption did help them go to the next level and kind of transform their whole pipeline. So, now Scott, you've been here the whole line of time and that through line has been for Docker, that developer experience. That's exactly right. Now, as a product lead here, you've got the Docker desktop side and the Docker EE side. And it's clear there's some great announcements about desktop here previews today. But how do you balance the enterprise side with the developer centric desktop side and that developer experience idea? No, it's a great question, John. And it's almost, I'd reshape it almost to say if it's a continuous platform from developer experience to the operation side, you have to stand back and kind of see it as one and less about trading off one versus the other and how do you create an experience that carries all the way through? And so a lot of Garrett's demonstration and the Lilly Mason play was showing how you can create apps in Docker very easily as a developer, but those same artifacts that they put their apps into carry all the way through into production, all the way through into operations. So it's about providing a consistent user experience, a consistent set of artifacts that can be used by all the different personas that are building software so that they can be successful moving these Docker applications through the entire application development lifecycle. Does that make sense? It does, thank you. I'd love to get your perspective. When you're talking with enterprises who might have some trepidation about the container journey, they probably know they have to do it to stay agile and competitive. I think in the press release, I believe it was you that was quoted saying an estimated 85% of enterprise organizations are in a multi-cloud world and a multi-cloud strategy. So when you're talking with customers, what's that executive conversation like, sea level to sea level, what are some of the main concerns that you hear and how influential are the developers in that C-suite saying, hey guys, we've got to go this direction? No, that's right. That's a great question, Lisa. And what we hear again and again and again is that there's a realization going on in the C-suite that having software capabilities is strategic to their business, right? And that was not always the case. As much as a decade ago, recently as a decade ago, inside kind of big manufacturing businesses or big verticals that weren't kind of tech first, IT was a back office, right? It was not front and center, but now they're seeing the disruption that software can have in other verticals and they're saying, wait a minute, we need to make software capabilities a core capability in our business and who starts that whole cycle, it's the developers, right? If the developers can integrate with the lines of business, understand their objectives, understand how software can help them achieve those objectives, that's where it kicks off the whole process of, okay, we're going to build competitive applications. We then need an operations team to manage and deploy those applications to help us deploy them in a competitive way by taking them to the cloud. And so developers are absolutely pivotal in that conversation and core to helping these very large, Fortune 500, 100 year old companies transform into new agile software-driven businesses. Modernizing enterprise apps has been a theme, also a docker for a few years now. Up on stage, Microsoft demonstrating results of a multi-year partnership between Microsoft and Docker, both with Docker integrating well with Windows Server as well as you talked about Kubernetes now. Can you talk a little bit about what the implications of this are? The demo on stage, of course, was a very old enterprise app written in .NET with just a few clicks up and running in the cloud on Kubernetes, no less. That's right. Managed by Docker. That's actually very cool. But do you want to talk a little bit about, again, as your conversations? Absolutely. Is this all about cloud-native or how much of your conversations are also supporting enterprise apps? Tying back to Lisa's question, so how do we help these organizations get started on their transformation? So they realize they need to transform where do you start? Well, guess what? 90% of their IT budget right now is going into these legacy applications and these legacy infrastructures. So if you start there and it can help modernize what they already have and bring it to modern platforms like Docker and Kubernetes, modern platforms like Windows Server 2016, it's a modern operating system, modern platforms like clouds, that's where you can create a lot of value out of existing application assets, reduce your costs, make these apps agile, even though they're 13 years old. And it's a way for the organization to start to get comfortable with the technology, to adopt it in a surface area that's very well known, to see results very, very quickly, and then they gain the confidence to then spread it further into new applications, to spread it further into IoT, to spread it further into big data. But you got to get started somewhere, right? And so the MTA, modernized traditional apps, is a very practical, pragmatic, but also high, very quick return way to get started. Oh, go ahead. Oh, well, I just, the other big announcement involving Kubernetes was managing Kubernetes in the cloud, and I wanted to make sure we hit that. That's right, that's right. Because I think if people aren't paying attention, they're just going to hear multi-cloud, and they're going to go on and say, well, everybody does multi-cloud, Docker's no different than, Docker's just kind of catching up. Actually, you know, this tech preview, I think, is a step forward. I think it's something that- Thank you. I haven't actually seen in practice, so kind of curious, again, how you, as an engineering leader, make those trade-offs, kind of talk a little bit about what you did and how deciding, well, there's multi-cloud, but the devil's in the details, you actually have integrated now with the native Kubernetes in these three clouds, EKS, AKS, and- GKE, that's right, no, that's right. No, it's a great question, John, and the wonderful and fascinating, but double-edged sort of technology is that the race is always moving the abstraction up, right? You're always moving the abstraction up, and you're always having to stay ahead and find where you can create real value for your customers, and so there's two factors that were going on that you saw us kind of lean into that and realize there's an opportunity here. One is the cloud providers are doing a wonderful job investing in Kubernetes and making it a managed service on their platforms. Great. Now, let's take advantage of that, because that's a horizontal infrastructure piece. At Parallel, we were seeing customers want to take advantage of these different clouds, but getting frustrated that every time they went to a different cloud, they were setting up another stack of process and tooling and automation and management, and they're like, wait a minute, this is going to slow us down if we have to maintain these stacks. And so we leaned into that and said, okay, great, let's take advantage of commoditized infrastructure close to Kubernetes. Let's also then take advantage of our ability to ingest and onboard them into Docker Enterprise Edition and provide a consistent experience used to interface APIs so that the enterprise doesn't get tied into these individual silos of tools, processes, and stacks. And so really it's the combination of those two that you see at a product opportunity emerge that we leaned heavily into and you saw the fruits of this morning. I saw a stat on the Docker.com website that said that customers migrating to EE containers can reduce total cost by around 50%. Yes. That's a significant number. It's huge, right? And so you're reducing your cost of maintaining a 10 year old app by 50% and you've made it cloud portable and you've made it more secure by putting it in the Docker container than outside. And so it's like, why wouldn't you invest in that? And it shows a way to get comfortable with the technology, free up some cash flow that then you can pour back into additional innovation. So it's really a wonderful formula and that again is why we start a lot of customers with their legacy applications because it has these types of benefits that gets them going in other parts of their business. And as you mentioned, 90% of an enterprise IT budget is spent keeping the lights on. That's right. Which means 10% for innovation and as we've talked about before, John, it's the aggressively innovating organizations that are the winners. It's exactly right. And we're giving them tools, we're giving them a roadmap even on how they can become an aggressively innovating organization. What about the visibility in terms of an organization that's got eight different IT platforms on-prem, public cloud, hybrid? What are you doing with respect to being able to deliver visibility across containers and multiple clusters? That's right. Well, that's a big part of today's announcement was being able, every time we ingest one of these clusters whether it's on-prem, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's a hosted Kubernetes cluster, that gives us that visibility of now we can manage applications across that. We can aggregate the logging, aggregate the monitoring. You can see, are your apps up, down? Are they running out of resources? Do you need to load balance them to another cluster? And so it's very much aligned with the vision that we shared on stage which is fully federated management of the applications across clusters which includes visibility and all the tools necessary for that. Scott, I wanted to ask about culture and engineering culture. Thank you. The DockerCon here is very, I think we called it Humane in our intro, right? There's childcare onsite, there's spousivities, there's other places to take care of the people who are here and give them a great experience and a lot of training and of course and things like that. But internally, engineering, there's a war for talent. Docker is very small compared to the Google's of the world but yet you have a very ambitious agenda. This, the theme of choice today, CLI versus GUI, Kubernetes versus Swarm, Linux and Windows, not Versus, Linux and Windows. And Windows, that's right. And now, and all these different clouds and on-prem. That's very ambitious and each and there takes engineering resources. So I'm kind of curious how the engineering team is growing, how you want to build the culture internally and how you use that to attract people, the right people. Well, it certainly helps to be the startup that kicked off this entire movement, right? And so a lot of credit to Solomon Hikes, our founder and the original crew that Docker was a Skunkworks project and the previous version of our company and they had the vision to bring it forward and bring it to the world in an open source model with at the time was a brand new language, Go language. And that was a catalyst that really got the company off and running in 2013, 2014. We're staying true to that in that there's still a very strong open source culture in the company and that attracts a lot of talent as well as continuing to balance enterprise features and innovation. And you see a combination of that on stage. You're also going to see a wonderful combination of that on the show floor, both from our own employees, but also from the community. And I think that's the third dimension, John, which is being humble and call it aware that innovation doesn't just come from inside our four walls, but that we give our engineers license to bring things in from the outside that add value to their projects. The Kubernetes is a great example of that, right? Our team saw the need for orchestration. We had our own IP in the form of Swarm, but they saw the capabilities of Kubernetes is very complimentary to that or some customers were preferring to deploy that. So no if, ands, or buts, let's take advantage of that innovation, bring it inside the four walls and go. And so it's that kind of flexibility and awareness to attract great engineers who want to work on cutting edge industry building technologies, but also who are aware enough of those exciting things happening outside with the community and partnering with that community to bring those into the platform as well. So Scott, you guys are doing a lot of collaboration internally, but you're also doing a lot of collaboration with customers. How influential are customers to the development of Docker technologies? At ground zero, literally. And we have at DockerCon a coincidence, we call it a customer advisory group where the customers who have been with us, who have deployed with us in production, like we have them and it's a very select group. It's about 12 to 16. And they tell us straight talk in terms of where it's working, where we need to improve, where they give us feedback on the roadmap. And so that happens every DockerCon. So that's once every six months, but then we actually have targets inside engineering and product management to be out in the field on a regular basis to make sure we're continuing to get that customer feedback. And so innovation is a tricky balance, right? Cause you want to be out in front and go where folks aren't asking you to, but you know there's opportunity at the same time here where they are today and make sure you're not getting too far ahead. And so it's the old joke, Henry Ford, where if he'd just listened to his customers, he would have made faster horses. But instead he was listening to their problems, their real problems, which was transportation and his genius or his innovation was to give them the Model T, right? And so we're trying to balance that ourselves inside Docker, listen to customers, but also know where the innovation, where the technology can take you to give you new solutions. Hopefully many of what you saw on stage today. I'm sharing some of the exciting announcements that Docker has made and what you're doing to innovate internally and for the external enterprise community. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, John. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, Lisa Martin with John Troyer live in San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.