 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay, everybody in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, first time co-host, Alan Cohen, it's great to see you, man. Thanks very much for taking the time. We do this in theCUBE, we bring in community members, smart guys who can ask great questions and gals. So this is day one of VMworld 2018. And the big buzz here is AWS and VMware, the partnership coming together and maturing. Mark Lohmeyer is here, he's the senior vice president of Cloud Platform, GM of Cloud at VMware. And Michael Adams is the senior director of product marketing for the CPBU, the cloud providers business unit at VMware. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Great to be here. So we've been talking all week about this, garing up for this. You know, some people say, oh, AWS VMware, it's a one-way trip to the cloud. Others say, no, it's a boom for the data center. Which is it and why? So, you know, look, this is a great partnership. And you know, I think about this year as the one-year birthday of VMware cloud at AWS. So we announced the service last year at VMworld, you know, tremendous customer reaction to that service over the last year. And we've really been innovating together on behalf of our customers and giving them a pretty powerful set of, it's effectively hybrid cloud capabilities. We've done five releases over the last year, which is pretty amazing if you think about the bringing the full software defined data center stack into the AWS cloud and you're sort of pleased at the customer response and reaction to that. The customer momentum is incredible, right? And if you look at some of the use cases that's driving it, let me just highlight a couple, right? So one is cloud migrations, right? And you know, there's a significant portion of our customer base that wants to increasingly take advantage of the ability to run workloads in the public cloud. But if you look at what was required in the past to do that, it was pretty heavy lifting, right? Got a replat from the application, you might have to change your networking infrastructure, you might change your storage infrastructure. That process could take years, right? With VMware cloud on AWS, because it's the exact same VMware software stack that's already running in the customer's private cloud, is now running in the AWS public cloud, we can literally move those workloads over with zero replatforming. So we have customers that have moved thousands of workloads in a few weeks, as opposed to previously it might have taken them months, if not years. Yeah, so VMware's, you know, early on, your public cloud strategy is kind of a head scratch here, customers are a little reticent and you've cleared that up, like you said, clear, you know, momentum now. But so in, you announced a year ago, you had to do a lot of work to actually see that homogeneous vision through. What kind of work were you guys doing on the product side? Yeah, so let me give you one more example as you hit down the hybrid cloud point, right? So one thing that Pat and Andy Jassy announced today was really exciting was taking this partnership to the next level, right? So the first stage of the partnership was all about enabling VMware capabilities on AWS. But as we were out talking to our customers together, one piece of feedback we both got was, hey, we would love to be able to take advantage of some of these AWS capabilities on top of VMware and vSphere on-prem, right? A real hybrid cloud experience now. And so today we're pleased to announce that we'll be working together to bring the AWS RDS service running on top of vSphere on-prem. You know, if you think about the time and complexity it takes customers to manage their data workloads on-prem, we think this can have a meaningful impact in helping them simplify how they run that environment. And then from a strategic level, now you can sort of start to see the bigger picture, right? Where VMware is able to provide this consistent infrastructure of course in on-prem environments, extended into the public cloud on top of AWS, extending into the edge with project dimension which maybe we'll talk about in a sec. And then on top of that, a rich set of application and developer services. And what we're doing with AWS around RDS is a great example of that where we're taking their industry leading relational database service and bringing that back to on-prem, right? So now you're talking about a hybrid architecture across both the infrastructure and the application that we're delivering together. It almost sounds like you're effectively building a mobius strip between AWS and VMware, right? Which is, you know, we all thought a year ago that headscratcher, you know, one thing that was on my mind is, so you've been at this for a year and you went into the partnership a year ago with a certain set of expectations. If you could rewind the clock and say, I wish I knew this a year ago and we got this started because this would benefit the customers, what are some of those things that would have been? It's a great question, right? And I think one thing that's been good about the partnership is, you know, AWS is obviously a customer obsessed, they talk about it, but they really do take that to heart, right? And we do as well, right? So as we've spent time with customers over the last year, we've learned a lot. And if I had to, and you know, we're responding to that and delivering to that, if I had to highlight one thing I think I would have loved to be able to deliver to customers even sooner, it's all around the hybrid networking piece of this, right? What we've found is that when customers are coming in to this high ground, you might have, yeah, I might have mentioned it. Sorry, I'm sorry, inside voice. Yeah, that's fine. But no, I mean, it's the ability to be able to have workload portability across the private cloud and public cloud, the ability to maintain your security policies as you do that. Even things like being able to take advantage of technologies like AWS Direct Connect, to provide a high performance, a highly reliable network connection. You know, those are all things we delivered in our most recent release that we announced today, and the customer excitement's been off the charts, it would have been wonderful to be able to deliver that a little bit sooner, what we're happy to do today. But even having said that, I mean, one of the things we're highlighting is the customer momentum. We mentioned a couple on stage today, we mentioned MIT, we mentioned Stagecoach, and several others. And when you look at that, I mean, it's been so positive in terms of what they're trying to do, and they react to the use cases, DR, extension, cloud migration, all of that becomes pretty important. The MIT example, Pat gave this morning, they was talking about migrating hundreds of VMs in a few months. I mean, that's just absurd a couple of years ago, right? Just not possible. And so we want to continue to highlight that. In fact, tomorrow Sanjay Poonan's going to talk to Brinks, so we all know the Brinks trucks that are always riding around. They had a great use case around DR, and so we'll see that tomorrow in the live session. But so one of the use cases is obviously shutting down data centers, moving the data center into the cloud. How does that work from a data standpoint? How complex is it? How long does it take? I mean, you still have speed of light, network as great as it is, still network bandwidth issues. Give us some examples of how long it takes, what do customers have to do to actually prepare for this? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so maybe I can speak to that one a little bit. Yeah, and I'll add to it too, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, you're absolutely right, there's speed of light, and there's certain laws of physics that no one can overcome. But one thing we've done together between the two companies is really bring together, I think, a pretty unique set of capabilities that makes that much faster than was ever possible before. One thing to highlight is, as part of this recent release, we've significantly augmented our hybrid cloud extension solution that allows you to create a network that spans your on-prem environment in the public cloud. In that solution, it's got WAN optimization built in, right? So it's already sort of optimizing that the network. Right, and you just guys made an acquisition in that space, yes. Exactly, exactly. So we're building those type of technologies that layer on top of the existing network. And then we're also looking at how we can take advantage of some core VMware technologies in a new and different way in this new environment. And one example there is vSphere Replication. So we had a great customer example, you've talked about MIT. One of the feedback they gave us was, hey, why don't you guys leverage this vSphere Replication technology to actually move the data over into the public cloud? And then at the last minute, I want to click a button that says vMotion, that last little memory state between my on-prem environment and VMware Cloud AWS. They came to us with this idea, we're like, hey, that's a brilliant idea. Why didn't we think of it? Great idea. We spent the last three months sort of building this thing. And today we're pleased to announce this new capability, which we refer to as instantaneous cloud migration. That last step, you just click the button and the vMotion occurs, literally in a few seconds per VM. So just unpack this. So if I'm an end customer, I'm running vSphere. I have an on-premise data center. I make this migration. And you have replication already. You have replication. I bring it up in a vSphere environment in AWS. And then I click off my on-premise one. And for me, it's the same. I'm looking at the same dashboard. I'm running using the same tools. Nothing's changed for me. Same looking to you. Exactly. I think the same thing if I wanted to go back. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. You can go in either. It's bi-directional, absolutely. Same price, round trick. One way to get down. That's a big question that comes up. People want to know, just could they go back? And they can. I mean, the push to the cloud is pretty significant. Just even as a risk management strategy. You might not have a use case for it, but can I? And then two other pieces to the how, just quickly, we added this ability to use our cost insight capability to go look at what the cost is going to be and the movement to the cloud. And then another piece of that, we added to the service a log insight capability. So you get for free as part of the service now more detailed logging information and can correlate issues that may come up. And that's been a big piece with our customers. They want analytics on what's going on in their environment. And you guys made an acquisition in this space. If I wasn't mistaken in the last piece of time, which I think just adds more capabilities around this. That's great. You're providing all the instrumentation in the cloud that people used to have in their data center. That's right. That's right. Got to be the same experience or else it doesn't work very well. And you announced this hybrid cloud control plane. Project dimension. Yes. You call it obviously a key ingredient. Explain what that is and what else is there. Yeah. So there's been a ton of excitement around project dimension as we've sort of rolled it out to everyone today. And the one way you can think about this is we're taking everything we learned from VMware cloud and AWS in terms of delivering a VMware cloud managed service to our customers where we take responsibility for patching, upgrading the infrastructure on their behalf. And we're taking that same model and we're now extending it into the edge environment. So instead of running on a server in the AWS cloud, it's running on a server in a customer's edge environment, which could be manufacturing floor. It could be a hospital. It could be a retail branch. It could be an oil rig. Anywhere you might want to do some processing of self-driving car company. Anywhere you went, compute at the edge, we can provide that to them. And if you think about these distributed environments, last thing you want to have to worry about if you're a customer is sending someone to site to patch our software, patch the server underneath. We take responsibility for that entire life cycle on behalf of the customer because it's a VMware delivered cloud service. Yeah. People just want that cloud experience and whether they do it the edge or even on-prem, that's what they're really looking for. So we're trying to literally have it so you plug in the machine, you connect it to the service and away you go. It's basically kind of lights out management, right? And a lot of people want that. And we deal with this all the time where people don't have IT capability at certain locations. And so this is a perfect solution to work with our partners and bring that to life for people that are really investing in the edge and even the data center. Well, I mean, this is obviously extremely exciting because you're providing a level of maturation and capabilities that, I mean, a lot of the clouds were built were developer first and kind of enterprise second. And now it seems like you've now had the ability at the enterprise catch up from an operations point of view. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You'll have all sorts of applications run there too. So if you want to run containers, Kubernetes, a variety of newer applications that are coming online, no problem, we're going to build it for that. What about the underlying architecture? So you mentioned that, you're sort of embracing Kubernetes containers. Doc, I remember we asked Pat about it one year. He goes, hey, we containers have been around forever. We got a great container platform. But when you talk about sort of cloud native, cloud first, developing a platform on microservices, I'm inferring you guys got a ways to go there in terms of just building that out. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Maybe you'll show us a little leg on the road map. Absolutely, yeah. So part of what we did was we've always tried to make containers a first class citizen within vSphere, just like with VMs. So that's what we showed today. And it's really important that customers recognize that. You want to go containers, you want to go VMs, no problem, we can go either way. So we've had integration points with vSphere for a while. But the latest story we've been really pushing on is Pivotal Container Service, where now, okay, I'm using Kubernetes because that's the established way of doing clustering with containers. And that's the way I'm going to go forward as a developer. And so we want to embrace that. You want to use that great. And we're going to have ways to tie in, not only with vSphere, but also with NSX to set up that structure in a way that makes sense. What's your general thought on just open source? Obviously, in this world, you got to leverage open source. But in terms of contributions given back to the community, how dogmatic are you guys about that? I mean, look, AWS uses a lot of open source. They're often criticized for not giving back. What's your stance on open source? Yeah, so I mean, we're investing significantly in open source. If you take Pivotal Container Services as an example in the Kubernetes platform that's based on, that's obviously all open source. We're a significant contributor into that community. We actually even have a Chief Strategy Officer for our overall open source strategy at VMware that focuses on that area for the company. So it's something we take very seriously. Look, you have to be able, you have to give back as much as you're taking for this to work, right? And we believe we need to do that. Yeah, maybe one other kind of question. So I'm actually very excited right about this growing maturation. One question always comes up in the cloud environment has been kind of crazy is the security issue. So how does that play in also because that's been a core inhibitor for people making those migrations. Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the things that we announced today is a significant expansion of our ability to bring a new level of security into the VMware platform with something called app defense. Right, and if you think about what we're able to do with app defense, it's really providing security at an application level in a fundamentally different way where we'll observe the application and what it's doing and we can use that to define what good behavior looks like. And so as long as it's continuing to exhibit good behavior, it's not talking to someone it shouldn't be talking to or it's not spinning up additional processes that shouldn't be spinning up, everything's fine. The moment we see it something happening that maybe it shouldn't be doing, i.e. not good behavior, set up a connection to some outside link, we can immediately identify that and then give the IT team the ability to lock down that environment. Right, so effectively like a whitelist thing kind of model. Good known state, right? Everybody excited about it. Mark and I talked to a lot of customers and when you go in and talk to them even with compute security is a theme that comes up consistently. Right, and so adding this in, we talked to Tom Korn over six months ago and he was saying, geez, we really need to come together and bring out a solution and that's really where app defense and vSphere coming together was born. And I think the key to not, it's just about using two products together but using them in an integrated way. So we actually have a plugin inside of vCenter that will help you configure app defense and so that they call it, I love it, they call it security hygiene within the product and it helps you set up that hygiene level to know the good known state and to take effective action. Well, I'll tell you a little aside and Alan, you know, as a security person, these might be fighting words, but so we were down, John, Stu and I were down in DC for the Public Sector Summit, Theresa Carlson and you guys, of course, announced, AWS announced that the AWS VMware on GovCloud, you know, a little bit behind where the commercial is, makes sense, but the CIO, the CIA said, security in the cloud on a bad day, on its worst day, it's better than my client server on its best day, which I thought was pretty powerful. Staped out. Maybe that says more about the CIA security than it does about the cloud, but it's a good thing, if you're the CIO of the CIA, you probably want to say that anyway, right? I mean, you know, not that I'm worried about my phone, but you know, one thing, maybe you guys see this is that because the focus on GovCloud has such a heightened security focus, it was, I think, you know, they started paranoid, right? As opposed to became paranoid. And so I think a lot of the capability, so I think a lot of people who are writing the cloud first now have a heightened focus on security because they don't take anything for granted. Yeah, I just want to add into this discussion is, I think the other thing we're seeing is, customers don't want different security policies in these different environments. Last thing you want to have is one thing in your on-prem environment, something different in the cloud, something different in the edge, right? You want that to be consistent across those worlds because that's the only way you can effectively manage it at scale. And so the capabilities we were talking about before, even though we're introducing them first in the context of vSphere Platinum, it's obviously an on-prem product, they're getting sedimented into vSphere as we deliver that everywhere, right? So VMware, Cloud and AWS will enable this capability over time as we bring the full VMware environment into the edge with project dimension, we'll bring that same capability to the edge. And so then the customer has a single way to do this on-prem environment. He's got like a TSA pre-programmed. Yeah, exactly, you're always coming back. That's actually a huge point because I remember in the early days of cloud, the practitioners say, look, it's not that the cloud security is bad, it's just different than my corporate edicts. I want same-same, like-like, so. All right, guys, we got to jump. Thanks so much. Thank you. Great to have you here. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE.