 Hey guys, welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Ferrier are here live with theCUBE at KubeCon, South NativeCon North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up, it's maturing. Yeah, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage. All about Kubernetes, we're going about security, large-scale, cloud-native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's going to be really awesome. You have a fast-growing private company and a practitioner, big-name, blue-chip practitioner, building out next-gen cloud, first transforming, then building out the next level. This is class of what we call super-cloud-like interview. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to this. Any time we can talk about super-cloud. All right, please welcome back one of our alumni. Haseeb Bhujani is here, the CEO of Raffae. Great to see you. Santosh Pasula also joins us, the global head of cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks for having me. Thank you for having me. So Haseeb, you've been on theCUBE many times. You were on just recently with the momentum that is around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about on day one of the show? Well, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here and I live in this industry and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. I mean, it means that the community is growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other QCANs. Like when we hung out at, you know, in Valencia, for example, or even other places, it hasn't been this many people, which means, and this is a good thing, that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component, right? For their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. Definitely becoming foundational. Well, you guys got a great attraction. We had many interviews at theCUBE and you got a practitioner here with you. You guys are both pioneering, kind of what I call the next gen cloud. First, you got to get through gen one, which you guys done at MassMutual extremely well. Take us through the story of your transformation because you're at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here. You've had a lot of transformation success at MassMutual. So I was actually talking about this topic a few minutes back, right? And the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or insurance sector, it takes generations of leadership to get to that perfection level. And ideally, the cloud for strategy starts in and then how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? That's the second gen all together. And then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if you're talking about Kubernetes, in the traditional world, almost every company is running middleware and there are applications in middleware and the containerization is a topic that came in. And Docker is basically the runtime containerization. So that came in first. And from Docker, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, DockerSwarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And as he was pointing out, like we never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing and how important it is for your cloud strategy. So. And your success now. And what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now? As you look forward, what's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? So we are past the stage of proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, the real game now. So in the past, I used the code, like hello world to real world. So we are actually playing in the real world, not in the hello world anymore. Now this is where the real time challenges will pop up. So if you're talking about standardizing it and optimizing the cloud and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? You know, the demands that come out of regulations are met. And how are you going to scale it? And while scaling, how are you going to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it? So we are in that stage today. Haseeb, talk about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at MassMete2L. Haseeb, talk a little bit about who, you mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this KubeCon in Detroit is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here. Who's deciding in the organization, in your customer conversations, who are the decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? Well this guy. It's usually, one of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So consistently what I'm seeing is, somebody CTO, CIO level individual is making a determined decision. I have multiple internal BU's who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps and this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization and they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and sort of consume it. So what that means to us is, our customer is a platform organization and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer, who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer, who's a developer. Both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both constituencies, you're not going to be successful. You're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure. On the other side. It has to be both. Exactly right. So that, honestly, it takes iterations to figure these things out. But this is a consistent theme that I'm seeing and in fact what I would argue now is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy? Because if you don't have a platform strategy, you're going to have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things and some will be successful and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. Yeah, and Satish, I want to get to you. You mentioned that your transformation was where you look forward and your title global head of cloud SRE. Okay, so SRE we all know came from Google, right? Everybody wants to be like Google but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google. Google is a unique thing. Only one Google. But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure, but concept can be portable but the situation isn't. So board became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale, you're doing for mass mutual. That's kind of what's happening. Is that kind of how I see it and you guys are playing in their partnering? So I totally agree, Google introduced SRE, CitroLabel to engineering. And if you take the traditional transformation of the roles, right? In the past it was called operations and then DevOps came in and then SRE is the new buzzword and the future could be something like product engineering, right? And in this journey, here's what I tell folks on my side, like what work for Google might not work for a financial company, might not work for an insurance company. So it's okay to use the word SRE but end of the day that SRE has to be tailored down to your requirements and the customers that you serve and the technology that you serve. And this is why I'm coming back to this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're going to have a platform engineering team because you got to enable developers to be producing more code, faster, better, cheaper, guardrails, policy. It's kind of becoming the serve the business which is now the developers. IT's the serve the business back in the old days. The IT serves the business, which is a terminal. Which is actually true now. IT, the new IT serves the developers which is the business. It is the business. As if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. The hard line between development and operations, right? So that's thinning down over the time, like that line might disappear and that's where SRE is fitting in. Yeah, and then building platform engineering to scale the enablement up. So what's the key challenges? You guys are both building out together this new transformational direction. What's new and what's the same? The same is probably the business results but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You've got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructure and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? So the new thing, if I may go fast, so the faster market value that we are bringing to the table, that's very important. Business has an idea, how do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and take it into real time? So that journey, we have cut them, right? With technologies like Kubernetes, it makes an IT person's life so easy that they can speed up the process in a traditional way, what used to take like an year or six months can be done in a month today or less than that, right? So there's definitely speed, velocity, agility in general and then flexibility and then the automation that we're putting, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters, these are today, like it is possible to make that happen with a click of a button. In the past it used to take like probably a 100% team, an operational team to do it and a lot of time, but that automation is happening. And we can get into the technology as much as possible but blueprinting and all that stuff made it possible. We'll say that for another interview, we'll do it in time. But the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had, right? I want this in my lab now. How does the culture of MassMutual, how has it evolved to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? So once in a while it's important to step yourself into the customer shoes and think it from their perspective. Business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product and how easy it is to reach out to the customers and how well we are serving the customers, right? So whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Docker, Swarm or Kubernetes, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about it is if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So at that point the business will step in. So our job is to make sure from a technology perspective, how fast you can implement it and how efficiently you can implement it. And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance? So I was going to ask you if you have VMware in your environment. Because a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. I think that's what you guys got going on. I can say that, you're the vCenter of Kubernetes. I mean, as a metaphor, a place to manage it all, it's all one pane of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? So virtualization has gone a long way. Where we started what we call bare metal servers and then we virtualized operating systems. Now we are virtualizing applications and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes plays a key role. So you see the need for a vCenter-like thing for Kubernetes? There's definitely a need in the market. And the way you need to think is like, let's say there is an insurance company who actually implemented it and they gained the market advantage, right? Now the competition wants to do it as well, right? So there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that's very critical and it's a critical component of cloud strategy as a whole. See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say you're like the vCenter of Kubernetes. Explain what that means in your term. If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would you say PS or would you say on point? Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today, right? So in my opinion, by the way, vCenter in my opinion is one of the best platforms ever built. Like it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. It's VMware did an amazing job because they took an IT engineer and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VMs, multi-tenancy, access management, everything that you need to run a data center you can do from a single, essentially single platform. Utilities standpoint, home run. It's amazing, right? Because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well, why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So the premise man, Rafi was, well, I should have IT engineers, same engineers, now they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people at MassMesh who are able to do now. So to that end now, you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management, you need that. You know, all of these things that have happened before, charge backs, they used to happen in vCenter, now they need to happen in other platforms, but for Kubernetes. So do we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. Kind of, yeah. Are we a vCenter for Kubernetes? Yeah. That is a John Furrier question. All right, well, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the complexity and not make it more steps or change a tool chain or do something, then the devs move faster. And the service layer that serves the business, the new organization has to enable speed. So this is becoming a real discussion point in the industry is that, oh yeah, we got new tool. Look at the shiny new toy. But if it doesn't move the needle, does it help productivity for developers and doesn't actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot. What's your reaction? Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just hit my mind is, think about the hotel industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb, right? Or the taxi industry before Uber and after Uber, right? So if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is build their application and deploy it and run it, right? They don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers and then building the middleware on top of it and then do a bunch of testing to make sure they iron out all the compatibility issues and whatnot. Now today, all I say is like, hey, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application and then deploy it in a development environment. That's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together, make sure you see your application working. And then the next thing that you do is like, you know, go to production. Go to production. Press, go, release it. That's the Nirvana, but they were there. I mean, we're there now, we're there. So we need to see the future because if that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features. They have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built. Got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where this, I call it the architectural-less environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. Yeah, and on top of it, you know, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick, right? So how do you do it, right? And you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and customer in real time, right? So from an innovation perspective, you know, agility plays a key role. And that's where the Kubernetes platforms are, platforms like Kubernetes plays. You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Jassy, when he was the CEO of AWS, either one-on-one or on theCUBE, he always said, and this is kind of happening, companies are going to be builders, where it's not just utility, you need that table stakes to enable that new business idea. And so he did his last keynote, he did this big thing like, you know, think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators. I think that, I think, starting to see that. What do you think about that? Do you see that coming sooner than later? Is that in sight, or is that still ways away? I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level. Now, the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality, right? I mean, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then prove it out like, I got a new idea, this idea is great, and it's to the business advantage, right? But we really want to see it in production, live, where your customers are actually using it. And the board meetings, hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue. Where did that come from? Agile developer, again, this is real. Yeah, absolutely agree. Yeah, I think both of you gentlemen said a word in your, as you were talking, you used the word guardrails. But I think, you know, we're talking about agility, but you know, the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So it's automation with the guardrails. Guardrails are like children, you know, shouldn't be hurt, you know, they're seen but not hurt. Developers don't care about guardrails, they just want to go fast. They also bounce around a little bit off the guardrails. One thing we know that's not going to slow down is the expectations, right, of all the consumers of this, the dabs, the business, the business top line, and of course the customers. So the ability to really, as your website says, let's say make life easy for platform teams is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here is you're really an enabler of those platform teams. It sounds like to me. So great work guys, thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the evolution of Kubernetes, why, and really what the focus should be on those platform teams. We appreciate all your time and your insights. Thank you so much for having us. Our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon from Detroit. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around.