 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. Here in the CUBE studios, here at Abby Curran's executive director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. CUBE alumni, great to see you again. I think it's your eighth time on the CUBE chatting. Always great to get the update. Thanks for spending the time. My pleasure, and it's a joy to drive down to your actual studios. This is where all happens, Wednesdays and Thursdays when we're not on the road doing CUBE events. I think we'll have over 120 events this year. We'll certainly see you at a bulk of them. Cloud Foundry, give us the update. We've choked them before we came on camera. Boy, this cloud thing is kind of working out. I mean, I think IBM CEO calls it chapter two. I'm like, we're still in chapter one, two, three. Give us the update, Cloud Foundry. Obviously open source, things are rocking. Give us the update. I do feel like we're moving into chapter two. It's a bit, chapter one was a really long chapter. It spanned about 10 years. But I do think we're starting to see actual growth and actual usage. And I think a lot of people are like, no, there's actually been usage for a while. I'm like, no, no, no, not a real scale. And we haven't seen any of the workloads for organizations running at massive scale, at the scale that we know that they can run at. But we're starting to see interesting scale, like 40, 50,000 applications, billions of transactions now passing through a lot of cloud native technology. So we're starting to see real interesting volume. And so that's going to actually dictate how the next five years unfold, because scale is going to dictate how the technologies unfold, how they're used. And there's going to feed into this virtuous cycle of how the technologies unfold and how they're going to be used, which feed back into how enterprises are using them and the cycle continues. Give us the update on the foundation. What's going on with the foundation? Status, momentum, clouds out there. Obviously open source continues to drive hard. We saw a lot of acquisitions and fundings around people who are using open source to build a business around that. Your favorite conversation. But I mean, you know, the technical challenges with open source allow for, you know, technical challenges, but also the people side is their learning. What's the update with the foundation? Well, open source is really tricky. And I think there is a lot of people that are really enthusiastic as a business model. I mean, last year, 2018 was a pretty substantial year for open source. You know, the year ended with Red Hats Acquisition by IBM, one of their biggest acquisitions, $34 billion. But we saw in December alone, we also saw Heptio get picked up by VMware, which is a services company that is really based on Kubernetes on an open source technology. But we also saw HashiCorp get another round of funding and then earlier in the year, Pivotal IPO'd. And so, you know, if you look at 2018 at a bigger level, you saw a lot of momentum around open source and how it's actually being commercialized. Now, you and I were talking a little bit prior and I'm a big believer that open source has the potential and is going to change fundamentally how technology is used and consumed. But at the end of the day, for the commercial aspects of it, you still have to have a business around that. And I think there's always going to be that fine line and that line is actually always going to be moving because how you provide value in, around and on top of open source has to evolve with both the market and your customer needs. Yeah, and where you are on that wave, whatever wave that is, is an early wave or is it more mature? So the maturization certainly matters. Yeah, you could be early on, sitting at the table or if it's growing when there's some complexity. So it kind of depends. It's always that depends. Is it the cloud air? Is it the red hat? Is it, so there's different approaches and people kind of get confused on that. And your answer to that is just pick one that works for a good business model. Don't get hung up on kind of the playbook if you will, is that kind of what you're saying? Well, I think we're seeing this play out this week with AWS's elastic announcement, right? And there's been a lot of conversation around, how do we think about open source? Who has access to it? Who has the right to commercialize it? What does commercialization look like? And I think, I've always cautioned people that are proceeding down the path to open source is really be thoughtful about why you're doing open source. Like what is your, what are you hoping to achieve? There's a lot of potential that comes with open sourcing your technology. You gain ecosystem, community, momentum. There's a lot of positives that come with that, but there's also a lot of work that comes with that too. Managing your community, managing a much more varied share of stakeholders and people that are gonna have thoughts and opinions around how that technology unfolds. And then of course, is because it's open sources, there's more opportunity for people to use that and build their own ideas and their own solutions on top of that and potentially their own commercial products. And so really figuring out that fine line and what works best for your business, what works best for the technology and then what your hopes are at the end of the day with that. And what are some of the momentum's points for the foundation with Cloud Foundry? Obviously, you're seeing Pevill when public, you mentioned that VMware, I'm talking to Michael Dell all the time, the numbers are great coming from that operation, Pat Gelsinger, once they did the Amazon deal, things got clear on what VMware was. But still, you have a lot more cloud, multi-cloud conversations happening than ever before. Well, for sure. I mean, at Cloud Foundry, we've actually been talking about multi-cloud since 2016. We saw that trend coming based on user behavior and now you've seen everyone's multi-cloud, even the public clouds are multi-cloud. I think you had the first study out on that too, multi-cloud, yeah. We did, we were firm believers in multi-cloud. Last year, we've actually moved more broadly to multi-platform because at the end of the day, there isn't one technology that solves all of these problems. Multi-cloud is pervasive and at the end of the day, multi-cloud means a lot of different things to a lot of people, but for many enterprises, what it gives is optionality. You don't want to be locked into a single provider. You don't want to be locked into a single cloud or a single solution because if I'm an enterprise, I don't know where I'm going to be in five years. Do I want to make a five-year or a 10-year or 20-year commitment to a single infrastructure provider when I don't know what my needs are going to be? So having that optionality and also being able to use the best of what clouds can provide, the best services, the best outcomes. And so for me, I want to have that optionality, so I'm going to look at technologies that give me that portability. And then I'm going to use that to allow me to choose the best cloud that I need for right now, for my business, and maybe again, a different one in the future. I want to get your thoughts on this, just double down on this conversation because I think there's two things going on that I'm saying I want to get your reaction to. One is, I've heard things like, pick the right cloud for the right workload. And I heard analogies, hey, if you got an airplane, you don't need to have two engines. You have one engine if it works for that plane, but your whole fleet of planes could be other clouds. So pick the right cloud for the right workload, meaning workloads define spec. I've also heard that the people side of the equation, what people are behaving like, what they're comfortable with, APIs, tooling is potentially a lock-in, kind of by default, not a technical lock-in, but people are comfortable with the APIs and the tooling, and the workloads need a certain cloud, then maybe that cloud would be it. That's not saying pick that cloud for the entire company. So certainly the trend seems to be coming from a lot of people in the industry saying, hey, this whole sole cloud, multi-cloud thing argument really isn't about one cloud versus multiple clouds. It's workload cloud for the use case and the tooling that fits if the people are there to do it. And then you can still have other clouds and that's the multi-cloud architecture. So is that real? Is that what's your thoughts on that? Well, let's dissect that, because I think we're actually solving for two different outcomes. Like one, multi-cloud for optionality's purpose and workload specific, I think is a great one. There's a lot of services that are native to certain clouds that maybe you really would like to get greater access to. And so I think you're going to choose the best, for that, that's going to drive your workload. Now, also factoring in that, you're going to have a much more dis-immediated access to cloud based on what people are comfortable with. I do think at some point as an organization, you want to have a better control over that. Historically, over the last decade, what we've seen shadow IT really dictate your cloud spend, right? Everyone's got a credit card, I've got access to AWS. And they go both of that business, Amazon did. Yes, and that served them quite well. But if I'm an organization that's trying to digitally transform, I'm also trying to get a better handle on what we're spending, how we're spending it. And frankly, now if I have compliance requirements, where's my data? These are going to be important questions for you when you're starting to run production workloads at scale on multiple clouds. And so I predict we're going to see a lot more tension there, internal organizations, like, hey, I'd love for you to use cloud. This is no longer needs to be a shadow thing, but let's figure out a way to do it that's strategically and intentional. Versus just random pockets choosing to do cloud because of the workflow that they like. Now- Well, they bring a good point. The cost thing was never a problem. And then you have sprawl and you realize, well, there's a cost optimizer component, which means you might be overpaying. Because as you think about the system aspects, you got networking, you got cloud management factors. So you start to, as you get into that shadow IT expansion, you kind of realize, wait a minute, I'm still spending a lot of cash here. This adds up really, really quickly. I mean, I think the information piece a couple of weeks ago where they talked about the Pinterest bill, like this stuff starts adding up. And for organizations, this is like, not just thousands of dollars, this is now hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not tens of millions of dollars. And so if I'm trying to figure out ways to optimize my business and my scale, I'm going to look at that because that is not an insignificant amount of money. And so if I'm, and if that's money that could be better invested in more developers, better outcomes, a better alignment with my business, then that's where I want to spend my time and money. And so I'm going to spend more time being really thoughtful about what clouds we're using, what infrastructure we're using, and the tools we're using to allow us to have that optionality. So you would agree with the statement if I said, generally, multi-cloud is here, it already exists. And that multi-cloud architecture thinking is really the conversation that needs to be had. Not so much cloud selection, per se, it's not a mutually exclusive situation, meaning I'm not all in on Amazon, I'm going to have clouds, plural. Well, yeah, you are. We were already seeing, as of early last year, over half of our users, which right now are over half the Fortune 500, are already running multi-cloud, already. That number has gone up since last year, I'm for sure. Some workloads are on-prem and some are in a public cloud, be it GCP, AWS, Azure, or Oli cloud. And so that is a statement effect. And every executive I've talked to at every enterprise has been like, yes, we're doing multi-cloud. And they're going to have some sort of on-prem anyway, so we know that's there. That's not going to go away. That on-prem is not going to go away. And then IoT Edge and Enterprise Edge, SD-WAN, kind of comes back on the Vogue as people start using SaaS across network connections. I mean, SD-WAN is actually the internet, basically. It's not really, yeah. I feel like the older I get, the more I'm like, wow, didn't I have this conversation like 20 years ago? I was just talking about something earlier that came in. The old becomes the new again. It's what's happening, right? So, okay, distributed computing, now goes to cloud, you got the enterprise. One of the big players doing that, Google Next is coming up next month. It is, right, the week after Cloud Foundry Summit. They got a mid-savory, big news over there, they poached them from Oracle. So Tom's Korean, brought in Oracle, who's Oracle, who's a CUBE alumni as well. Really smart guy. Diane's not there. What do you expect at Google Next? What are we going to see there? What's the sentiment? What's the vibe? What do you see happening? Well, I think it's going to be about the enterprise, right? That's why Thomas was brought in. And I think to really give Google that enterprise focus and say how do we, because it's not just about, I'm going to sell to enterprises. That's not, you know, when you're selling to an enterprise, there is a whole different approach. And it's, you have to write, have the teams, the sales teams, you have to write, have the ecosystem, the services, the enablement capabilities, the support, the training, the product strategy, all of that takes a very different slant when you're thinking about an enterprise. And so I'm sure that's going to be front and center for everything that they talk about. And certainly he's very public about, you know, the position of Oracle Cloud. He knows the enterprise. Oracle was the master of enterprise gamemanship, for sure. Yes, for sure. You don't get a whole lot more enterprise-y than Oracle. What's, what do you think is going on with the CNCF? Any news there? What's, what's the land, what's happening on the landscape? What's the abbey take on the landscape of cloud? Well, speaking of someone that is not, does not run CNCF. Feel free to elaborate. But I do, you know, Cloud Native Computing Foundation for those of you that aren't, you know, aren't familiar is a sister open source organization that is a clearinghouse or a collective of cloud native technologies. The anchor project is the very well-known Kubernetes, but it also spans a variety of technologies from everything from LinkerD to CD to Envoy to, so it's just a variety of cloud native technologies. And, you know, and they're continuing to grow because obviously Cloud Native is becoming, you know, it's coming into its own time right now because we're starting to really think about how to do better with workloads, particularly workloads that it can run across a cloud. I mean, and that seems pretty pedantic, but we've been talking about cloud since 2007. And we were talking about what cloud brings cloud, what does cloud bring? It brings resiliency, you can auto scale, you can burst into the cloud, remember bursting. And all the things we talked about in 2007 to 2008, but weren't really a reality because the applications that were written weren't necessarily written to do that. That's exactly the point. And so now we're actually seeing a lot more of these applications written. We call them microservices, 12-factor apps, serverless apps, you know, what have you, but it's applications written to run and scale across the cloud. And that is a really defining point because now these technologies are actually relevant because we're starting to see more of these created and run and now run at scale. Yeah, I think that's the point. I think you nailed it. The applications are driving everything. And I think that's the chapter two narrative, in my opinion. Chapter one was let's get infrastructure as code going. And chapter two is apps dictating policy and then you start to see the microservices start to emerge. Kind of a new different vibe in terms of like what it means for scale. It's less of about, hey, I'm doing cloud. I got some stuff in the public cloud. Here the conversation around the apps, the workloads, and that's where the business value is, right? I mean, some of the people who was trying to do transformation, they're not saying, hey, I stood up a Kubernetes cluster, they're saying, I got to deploy my banking app or I got to do, you know, I got to drive this workload. And I have to iterate now. Like, I can't do a banking app and then update it in a year. Like, that's not acceptable anymore. You are constantly having to update. You're constantly having to iterate. And that is not something you can do with a large application. I mean, the whole reason we talk a lot about monolithic versus 12 factor or cloud native apps is because it isn't that monolithics are inherently bad. It's just they're big and they're complex, which means in order to make any updates, it takes time. That's where the year comes in, the 18 months come in. And I think that is no longer acceptable. Like, you know, if you, like, I remember the time and I'm going to date myself here, but I remember the time when, you know, banks would or any e-commerce site would be down. They have an orange, what they call the orange page, but the orange page come out of the site down tonight cause we're doing maintenance for the weekend, right? Under construction. Yeah. Under construction. You're like, okay, well, I'll just come back on Monday. That's fine. And now you're like, if it's down for like five minutes, you're like, what is actually happening right now? Like, why is this not here? Facebook went down the other day, like, what the hell, Facebook sucks. You know, the internet blows up of Instagram sound. Oh my God, my life is over. And I think, and our expectation now is not only constant availability, so, you know, always available, but our also expectation is real-time access to data, transparency and a visibility into what's actually happening at all times. And that's something that a lot of organizations are really having to figure out how to develop the applications to expose that. And that takes time and that takes change and there's a ton of culture change that has to happen. And that is the more important thing. If I'm a business, I care more about how do I make that a reality? And I should care a lot less about the technologies I use. It's interesting you mentioned about the monolith versus, you know, the decomposed application being agile, whatnot. Because if you don't have the culture and the people to do it, it's still a monolithic effort in the sense of the holistic thinking and the architecture, it's a systems architecture. You have to look at it like a system and say, and that's not easy either. Now, once you get that done, the benefits are multi-fold in terms of like, what you can do is, it's that systems thinking setup is becoming more of an architectural concept. That's super important. For sure, if I have a microservice app, but it takes 150 people to get that through change management and get it into production, well, that'll still take me a year. Doesn't matter if there's maybe 12 lines of code in that application, it doesn't matter. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time, even though I run Cloud Foundry, I spend a lot of time talking about culture change. All the writing I do is really around culture change and what does that look like? Because at the end of the day, if you're not willing to make those changes, you're not willing to structure your teams and allow for that collaboration. And if you're doing iterative work, feedback loops from your customers, if you're not willing to put those pieces into place, there is no technology that's going to make you better. I totally agree. So let me ask you a question on that point, great point, by the way, which to follow your writing, your blog posts and those little links. But I think that's the question. When do you know when it's not working? So I've seen companies that are rearranging the deck chairs, if you will, use that analogy. With all the culture, rah, rah, and then nothing ever happens, right? So they've gone into that paralysis mode. When do you look at the culture? When does the executive, what should they be thinking about? Because people kind of aspire to do this. Execution, as you said, is critical. When do you know it's not working? Or what should they be doing? What's the best practice? How does someone say, hey, you know what? I really want to be more holistic in my architecture. I don't want to spend two years sitting up in architecture and then find out it's now just starting. I want to get an architecture in place. I want to get the ground running. Well, I mean, it's two-fold. One, start small. I mean, you're not going to change, if you're an 85-year-old company with 200,000 people, you're not going to change that overnight. And you should expect that's going to be an eight- to 10-year process. Now, what that's also going to mean is you're going to have to have a really clear vision and you're going to have to be really committed. This is going to be a hard road. But conversely, when someone says, what does success look like? When you're looking at a variety of companies, how do you know which ones you think are going to be the most successful at the end of the day? Because no one's ever actually done any of this before. There's no one that's ever gone through this digital transformation initiative and come out on the other side. No one. There isn't. And so I think, what does success look like? And I said, well, for me, what I look for are companies that are investing and rescaling their workforce. That's what I'm looking for. I get real excited when companies talk about their internal boot camps or their programs to reskill or upscale their teams, because it's not like you're going to lay off 20,000 people and hire 20,000 cloud native developers. They don't exist. And they're certainly not going to exist for thousands of companies to go and do that. So how are you investing in rescaling because- It's easy to grow your own internally from pre-existing positions. They go out to a job board that has no available. And at the end of the day, that needs to be your new business model. It's like, what is digital transformation? Actually, it's just a different way of working. And there isn't, you know, there's no destination to the digital trend. This isn't a journey that has an end. And so you need to really think about how are you going to invest differently in your people so that they can continuously learn. Continuously learning needs to be part of your model and your mantra. And that needs to be in everything you do from hiring to HR to MBOs to, you know, how do you structure your teams? Like how do you make sure that people can constantly learn and evolve? Because if that's not happening, it doesn't, you know, everything else is going to fall by the wayside. There's a tech technology gap, easy to fill, a lot of tech out there, talent gap, hard to fill. For sure. That's the real challenge. If you have all the best tech in the world but you don't have the right people or the right structure, are you going to be successful? Probably not. Yeah, it's a challenge. All right, so final question for you. Where are you going to be? What's your schedule look like? Where can people find you? What events are you going to be at? Do you have an event coming up or? April 2nd through 4th in Philly. We're going to have a summit. You want to see some people that are actually running cloud at scale. That's the place to go. April 5th. 2nd through 4th. 2nd and 4th, I'll be in there. First week of April, Philly. I'm fingers crossed, good weather. Yeah. Lots of cloud talk. And it's a great way to. So your brother, we love Philadelphia. We're bringing it. They beat the Patriots. They couldn't make it to the playoffs last year but love the Philly fans down there. Paul Martino and friends down there. Abby, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for the update. We'll see you around the events. I won't be able to make your event. I'll be taking the week off skiing. Well, one of us has to. First vacation of the year. Two years. Thanks for coming in. You should do that. Abby Kurtz here. It's either Cube or Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.