Speaker 1: 0:22

Welcome to this new episode of Techzine Talks on Tour. I'm at KubeCon in London and I'm here with Venkat Ramakrishnan. You're the VP and GM for Portworx at Pure Storage, yes. So what are your impressions of KubeCon this year?

Speaker 2: 0:38

Well, it's been pretty exciting. There's lots of great traffic. You know the crowds are expected to cross. You know 19,000 plus people right soon and we see a lot of traffic in the booth, a lot of exciting conversations. I would say that I see previously, a few years back, you'd get a lot of people who were tire-kicking and seeing where the technology is. We actually have now serious production customers, large enterprise customers, running Kubernetes at scale. So that's a huge change. We did a cab yesterday. 10 of our largest enterprise customers in AMEA participated. They all learned from each other how they're operating their infrastructure. We learned a ton, a lot of great exchange of ideas and everybody is looking to bring more and more workers to Kubernetes. And just to be sure, a cab is a customer advisory board. A customer advisory board yes Well, maybe not all the listeners Not a taxi cab.

Speaker 1: 1:29

No, what are you doing in a cab? Talking about? This but yeah, yeah, and I have the. And have you had discussions or conversations at the booth already?

Speaker 2: 1:38

Yeah, I mean like I've had a few conversations, but you know I've been spending time in meetings and also talking to analysts and press.

Speaker 1: 1:46

like you, Unfortunately me as well, yeah it was great.

Speaker 2: 1:49

Look, I learned a lot right, because you also can. I learned from the trends and what's happening. What you're hearing and some of the questions kind of helps me calibrate what's top of mind for the community as a whole. But we had a visiting board. We had a great customer dinner where a bunch of our customers came together spending a lot of time with all of them here. It's amazing to just see face-to-face.

Speaker 1: 2:11

I hear what you say about the maturity of containers and Kubernetes in general, right, Because last year we talked a lot about platform engineering. I think I spoke to one of your colleagues last year about platform engineering at length as well. That's obviously the next step. Do you see that sort of the platform approach also taking hold?

Speaker 2: 2:33

Yeah, I think the platform engineering is here, right, I mean, you know, in fact, we have been catering to platform engineers for quite some time, right? I mean, if you look at the journey of Kubernetes, where you know, folks managing application infrastructure have to deliver an application platform for them to deliver a application platform for them to deliver cost control, governance, regulatory controls, compliance and overall self-service. And the teams that deliver this in large enterprises are the platform teams. And the fact that Portworx kind of holds true to all those three basic tenets, right, is that self-service deployments, full automation and delivering cloud neutrality or infrastructure neutrality, so it closely adheres to the principles of Kubernetes as well, right, so platform engineering is a great community we have been serving and I call them like they are the superheroes and they are the sidekicks, right, and I call them like they are the superheroes and they are the sidekicks, right, so we help them scale.

Speaker 1: 3:30

When I look at the things that I'm talking about this week, it's mostly about VMs and about VMware. It's not necessarily about containers that much, right, because there's a lot of. The impact of the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom is quite extensive, yeah. And now there's lots of talk about VM replacements and or complete VMware replacements or coexistence between VMs and containers, and is that something that you hear as well?

Speaker 2: 3:59

Definitely. In fact, we are helping customers move to Kubernetes based virtualization from their existing kind of legacy VMware deployments, as they look to kind of either save costs or bring everything to a future state where everything is, the containers and VMs are unified. So absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:18

But that's a very fundamental thing to do, right For companies to move. It is definitely a big shift.

Speaker 2: 4:24

It's a transformation for these companies to do, and they have built their business on a VM-based or a VM-based architecture for a couple of decades now. Well, vmware is a very sticky platform. It's absolutely sticky and it's a great platform. Right, it's a great platform. They're great partners, right, and I think it is.

Speaker 1: 4:44

you know, it's their business, is how they want to manage their business and it may or may not be applicable to some other customers, yeah, but the reality is it did get quite expensive for yeah exactly. Certain types of customers not all of them, but certain types of customers. So they are looking at something else maybe.

Speaker 2: 5:02

Yeah, so that's what is happening, is that again? I think VMware and Broadcom are managing the business to what their metrics are, what they want to achieve, and it's going to work for some customers very well, and some customers don't, and they are looking for choices. And some of these customers, what we are finding is they're already in their Kubernetes or containerization journey. Right, so they were always in this path of how do I simplify my stack, how do I make it more cost effective? Right, so this shift, this pricing shift, has actually accelerated that journey.

Speaker 1: 5:33

Is there an ideal sort of sweet spot kind of customer for this, for replacing an existing part of your stack with a new technology?

Speaker 2: 5:40

You know, we are seeing customers in all spectrums. We are working with the Fortune 50s doing this. We are working with the fortune 50s doing this, we are working with the global 2000 right. So you, essentially folks who have been kind of like looking to modernize or simplify their stack, we see them kind of be on, that is, that is that the main driver?

Speaker 1: 6:00

so, wanting to innovate not necessarily cut costs both, right, I mean mean.

Speaker 2: 6:06

So they originally wanted to modernize it, they were already on that process, but the cost pressures accelerate that, right? Is that you know? Previously they would have said you know what, I'll postpone this initiative because I have other things to worry about, right? So that's how these initiatives get, like postponed, or they don't take off, right. But there is a forcing function or a compelling event. The compelling event is well, my costs can be five x, six x higher.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Well, we recently heard the 16 to 72 course minimum requirement. I mean that's a big change.

Speaker 2: 6:34

So that's a prohibitive increase in cost. And that becomes a compelling event for a lot of customers to step on the pedal and say, you know what, let's just accelerate this, right, and that's what we see as a primary driver, right. But having said that, we have seen customers who have not been on Kubernetes journey, right. But also when take a step back and look at the whole picture and say, okay, I'm here today, I have, I can. You know, I'm under a lot of cost pressure because the prices are going up.

Speaker 2: 7:04

I could pivot to another provider who's similar, or I want to look at alternatives. That's more modern, right. That drives a better architecture, better efficiency, helps me build a, you know, like a get ready to go to public cloud. And what are those alternatives? And we are seeing them pivot to Kubernetes as well, and they are by themselves themselves making the choice is that you know I'd rather go Kubernetes, and then you know if I'm going to retrain my engineering team or my technical team on another legacy product, I would rather retrain them on something that's modern, and then I've ensured my next 10, 15 years that I'm on a more modern platform.

Speaker 1: 7:45

Yeah, that makes sense. But you mentioned people. Obviously they need to do this right. Is every engineer at a company suited or suitable or fit to actually carry out this transformation? And what do they need to know? Is it a big change that they have to make or you know it's.

Speaker 2: 8:07

I think you know I get where you're going, but you know, I mean I look back as to where we have come in the last few years. Right, yes, kubernetes was a little bit more complex a few years ago, right, but you know, I think the community and the companies around the community have done a pretty good job of simplifying and kind of making some of the complexities of Kubernetes invisible. Right, I think Red Hat has done a tremendous job with OpenShift. There's SUSE doing a tremendous job with Rancher as well, and then we have other companies like SpectraCloud, cubematic, doing a fantastic job around. How do you build a platform around Kubernetes that simplifies the consumption?

Speaker 1: 8:44

Because, at the end of the day, that's what platform engineering is all about. You want to abstract away from the foundational stuff. That's still important, but you don't want people to worry about that day in, day out, right, yeah?

Speaker 2: 8:56

absolutely right. So we have seen that movement come, and then folks like us Portworx. We simplify the data management and data security, data protection and even deploying data services at scale for Kubernetes, right. So, considering all of that experience, all the hardening we have done over the last few years, and remember, kubernetes runs at scale, right. Some of these customers are running tens of thousands of nodes in production, right. So we're also bringing all of that production experience into virtualization, into VM workloads, right? So when somebody asks me, can I run 50,000 VMs or 100,000 VMs, it's like, of course we run 250,000 containers or a million containers, right? So of course we can run 100,000 VMs, right.

Speaker 1: 9:39

So, scale is not new to Kubernetes right, so yeah, it's moving away from a locked-in environment like VMware. Is that also a driver for it is?

Speaker 2: 9:50

Kubernetes is more open and there's a much wider community support and there are a ton of great tools available, right. I mean for observability, for security, for policy management.

Speaker 1: 10:00

But that also makes it more complex to a certain extent, and that's where the platform engineering, that's where the platform teams and the container platforms come into play right.

Speaker 2: 10:07

So, from a skillset standpoint, yes, it requires a little bit of retraining, but also it prepares them for the future and at the same time, there's a lot of great products out there that simplify the complexity as well. So I think the gap to bridge is continuing to shrink. The gap to bridge is continuing to shrink.

Speaker 1: 10:31

And if an organization wants to do this, what are some concrete tips that you can give them to get going on this trajectory?

Speaker 2: 10:40

For sure, for sure. Yeah, I think you know. I would say spend time understanding a little bit more. What are the workloads you're running in your VM infrastructure, right, and what is it that you need to plan for? What are the kind of workloads that are going to move? And do spend time on performance and capacity planning. As you're moving to a newer infrastructure, Make sure you're mapping it correctly.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Does that come natively Sorry for the pun, but does it come natively to customers? Because back in the first wave of DevOps it was always like, oh, just start and just see what you can do, and start small and then think about expanding it. But that's not what you should do here, right? So here you should actually take a step back.

Speaker 2: 11:27

It's good to take a step back because, as you mentioned, vmware is sticky and customers have built their business for the last couple of decades on running inside VMs and so the typical DevOps of start small and iterate while it depends on the culture of your company or the kind of workloads you're moving. So if you have mission critical workloads, have a mission critical procedure and process and don't count on just like, oh, let's go iterate on it, right, because your app owners who are used to running in VMware or VMs, you know when they move to Kubernetes they need to kind of have the same experience, right. So let's ensure that can be done with a little bit of planning, not a lot, right, and there's just kind of a little bit of pre-production, you know, due diligence on how do you migrate, but you know the tools have come a long way. Red Hat has done a fantastic job helping folks migrate. Suse has the same thing and with Portworx live migration capabilities we have introduced with Portworx 3.3, we help these workloads live migrate seamlessly so the workloads don't even know they have been moved from one hypervisor to another hypervisor, right. And we're also adding more capabilities like storage, vmotion, storage, drs into the product so the customers get the same experience, the operators as well as the application owners, so that is going to be continuing to be invisible.

Speaker 1: 12:40

I mean, this is a nice view of the future, or maybe for some companies the present, but I think for the foreseeable future we will also see a lot of companies doing both right, both VMs and containers. That's something that I mean you need to be able to orchestrate and to manage.

Speaker 2: 12:59

Exactly right. I mean actually going to this Kubernetes, going to a Kubernetes, virtualization or Qbert or a solution enables that, right, because otherwise you're going to have two kinds of application clusters you have to manage as a company. You have a bunch of legacy apps running in the legacy hypervisor and then you have your modern apps running in Kubernetes or a platform for containers. But now, taking this step, you're to move everything to Kubernetes. It gives you one single control plane for all of your application infrastructure, right, so that means you don't have to train two different workforces. You train them on one and then you can continue to expand them on one, right, and then that's one. It gives you as a company to give a path to eventually containerize those workloads so you can get more out of your infrastructure. Right, because containers are a lot more efficient than VMs.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Are containers at the end of the day? Are containers better for every workload or is there still a good reason, besides all the stuff that we already talked?

Speaker 2: 13:56

about. That's a great point, right? I mean, it's like tape, right? You know everybody, every year they say tape is going to be dead and tape is still around, right, you know? And you watch Star Wars. You're still seeing the whole Death. Star's plans are still kept in a tape. Same thing VMs are not going to die, they're going to be workloads that belong in a VM.

Speaker 2: 14:15

There are apps that were written by developers a long time ago. Those developers are long gone. They are just used to running in that Somebody has to refactor the code. You know there is a lot of resistance to rewriting an app, right, you know? Because, like data, code also has gravity, right? So to understand an app, to deliver the same experience, for a developer to go rewrite it and kind of continue with the same purpose, that's a lot of work, right? So there is going to be VMs are going to be around, right?

Speaker 2: 14:42

So if these enterprises have to get better at efficiently managing this and the new apps are definitely going to be developed in containers so it is very important for them to unify that into one orchestrator, one control plane, so they can run their legacy apps and the modern apps with the same experience. Experience and, more importantly, by standardizing on something like kubernetes, they're making it cloud ready so they can go to any cloud, right, if you run it, once you build something on kubernetes and port works I call it a stem cell you could literally replicate that on any cloud very easily. Yeah, by any cloud you can also mean a private cloud, a private cloud, public cloud, a data center right, I'm from the, from the hybrid kind of multi cloud exactly perspective.

Speaker 1: 15:26

This is also a good move to make, yeah, and is it achievable for every company? I mean just sort of broadly.

Speaker 2: 15:36

You know it's achievable for every company. If you pick the right partners and the right level of planning. It's absolutely within reach for every company. The technology has come a long way, the ecosystem has matured and the skill sets are available. You just have to take that next step and then you're building that future. That architecture is going to ensure your innovation for decades to come. It's the same thing like how folks went from just servers to VMs and said oh, this is Devon, just straight upfront hit. It took people to move in there and they really gained the efficiencies and the productivity they had at that time. It's a similar journey, but it's even more powerful.

Speaker 1: 16:24

But, on the other hand, mainframe is still around as well.

Speaker 2: 16:26

Yeah, there's always going to be some workloads that are going to be stranded in certain environments, right? So uh, and that's again. I said, you know, that's why there's use cases in code and, you know, in architecture, right, I mean so uh and what's the impact on what you're trying?

Speaker 1: 16:41

because let's talk about port works just for in closing and because we're going to be kicked out of the room. I think in a couple of minutes We've outstayed our welcome. Maybe, from a Portworx perspective, what does that mean for you in terms of your data services?

Speaker 2: 16:58

So for Portworx it's actually an exciting time right, Because we have served container industry very well right. So now we are serving the overall virtualization movement and moving VMs to Kubernetes and the very well right. So now we are serving the overall virtualization movement in moving which VMS to to kubernetes and in the virtualization in cube vert. But, more importantly, we are able to bring our backup or data protection capabilities to it. Right, we are able to give customers a native kubernetes based data protection capability, part of the Portrix platform, so they can be assured that their VMS in k, along with their containers, are protected. They get the same RPOs, they get the you know, and they can do not just data protection, they can do DR.

Speaker 1: 17:34

They can do like async DR and synchronous DR with Portrix platform and then that may be a bit of an overlooked part of the entire equation, right.

Speaker 2: 17:41

Yeah, exactly right. And they need DR, right, I mean so. And then the data services. Now they can co-locate all of the data needs as well, along with the VM and your container needs, right, I mean so. And so for Portworx, we have always said you know we are managing, you know, application Kubernetes manages the application lifecycle and Portworx help manage the data lifecycle along with the app lifecycle. Right, now we are adding that to the VM lifecycle as well, right? So kind of our mission has become even more stronger for us and we're seeing a great demand for that with our customer base as well.

Speaker 1: 18:17

Yeah, and I take it you also use the other parts of Pure Storage to, for example, assessing your costs on your VMs and all that stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 18:28

Yeah, we're like using a non-pure as a very strong player in the VMware market. You know it's one of the proven solutions, right? So we're absolutely working with the wider Pure team on how do you help customers make those choices, and giving customers a choice is powerful, right.

Speaker 1: 18:44

All right, I think that's it for today. Thank you very much for joining.

Speaker 2: 18:49

Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1: 18:50

Yeah.