Cloud Foundry, PaaS, and the Future of Cloud

hi I'm James McGuire editor of data mation and today we're talking about all sorts of cloud related topics at Cloud Foundry the hybrid cloud platform as-a-service talked about that we're joined by a major thought leader in the field James Waters senior vice president of product for pivotal hey James how you doing today hey great to be here thanks for having me good got a you are here in cloudy rainy San Francisco today right that's right a you know put the hoodie up to get into work oh and they wonder why people in San Francisco where hoodies till they see the weather seriously so I want to talk about you know where pivotal is going where the cloud is going but let's just do a little nut shell on pivotal itself I have a few factoids here and correct me if any of these are wrong pivotal employees more than 2000 people in 20 offices around the world in 2015 pivotal generated more the 267 million dollars in revenue that's from ink magazine if s to be believed what what if one of pivotal chief offerings is Cloud Foundry it's enough open source platform as-a-service yeah and it will so companies to build cloud native add ups apps that run on Amazon Web Services as you or Google platform especially if it's the multi cloud world tool so what am i leaving out there what when cloud customers are thinking about pivotal what should they be thinking of in terms of how they can use pivotal yeah yeah I think that's a that's a good intro and we are an open source centric company we have two core open source projects at the least to the core of that cloud platform called Cloud Foundry and spring source both of which are open source projects and then we combine all that into one larger platform called pivotal Cloud Foundry that goes the whole way from embedded operating system so you don't have to buy anything from Red Hat ever again cloud orchestration and you don't need puppet and chef um middle where you don't need IBM web IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic load balancing and some API services the whole way up to then you know cloud native frameworks like spring boot which is the most popular you know Java framework for you know cloud apps in the world you kind of put that all together and that's the pivotal platform um the fact that it can go to any cloud is very unique but the most unique thing about it actually is its holistic vision and then as a company pivotal takes that even further we have something called pivotal labs which is essentially immersive environments where you can come build with us cloud native applications and so you know some of the largest companies the world Ford for instance you know when they want to do their new connected car service they chose our platform running on multiple clouds and then they also partner pivotal lab in terms of executing those apps so pivotal if you think about us is like the holistic player in the market I think is a good start and as certainly pivotal has relationships with many different vendors I mean actually specific technical issues with AWS as you're in Google Cloud not to mention IBM you know it's not HP I believe also yeah I think you know we run on anything with an infrastructure API so the way the system works that holistic system I talked about is give me some infrastructure that can automate with API it's like we're a lot of you know complexity and current enterprise IT comes from is handmade environments even if you're using scripts to automate them you still have humans involved in the creation of the platform or the creation of the environment so we really come in and say everything has to start with API now the beautiful thing is is that you know five or six years ago when we started there were very few cloudy api's around like it was essentially the vSphere API we had and we even modified that and performance tuned debt to be more you know friendly and then we had the emergence of the Amazon API but the beautiful thing of the last two years is just like Google and Azure come on strong OpenStack is more present and we run on all those I think this you know with all the relationships with pivotal has I mean it faces this competitive challenge in that you know in one hand pivotal is open source portable cloud multi cloud yeah and it's it's ideal for this hybrid cloud we seem to be going into on the other hand you know certain people are going to say hey wait a second we could just use AWS they have so many features they roll out more features every single week you know Werner Vogel is going to take care of all our needs all we need is Werner so what do you say to those folks that's certainly what any jassie you know I talked a lot of CIOs and they basically say hey you know want to compare your pitch for say Andy jassi's pitch James Andy is basically what are you going to go all-in like Netflix and just let us essentially own you you have to be pure Amazon um and in the thing is is that these large organizations they really actually value choice over time and they don't really want to beholden to one vendor and the you know the doomsday scenario is the ante is a brilliant nice guy but you don't want Andy to personally control Moore's law and I say this in a friendly way and this is about my CIO talktrac is like you know if we only have Amazon as a cloud provider that's the only way we get infrastructure like only when the dear leader gives us a discount uh-huh do we get access to Moore's Law and you know so I'm a Twitter bio so you know believer in Moore's law like I think that's just fundamental to how we've made so much progress is that you know no one corporation has been able to slow down the advance of Technology and control that so that's why I think multi-cloud is fundamentally important way to so Moore's law as you know the number transitions in a circuit would double it partial every two years how does it relate to an Tandy Jesse yeah so it the price would go down so you're paying about on Steven price for CPU chip right so if an Amazon says it's ten dollars for compute unit and they have it and they get to the side when it becomes eight dollars per compute unit right or done remember they're they're time slicing up all the chips that they buy from Intel with with with VMs right and right supplying that to you and so they actually control the cost the cost of compute in a fundamental way whereas we're normally even though you bought your server from you know put play it this way we never think of it as a dramatic price cut when the server's twice as fast in two years in the hardware world run but in the Amazon world they come out with a price cut that gives you more compute power in real life oh my gosh I just got a price cut yeah but of course the price cutting mean that so-called rich to the bottom seems more market-driven than it actually driven by the quality of the hardware yeah I think I think what's what's essential is that is that they are controlling the cost of compute and your access to that compute over time right and you know this became very real for pivotal you know when we we had a you know eight figured bill uh for Amazon to shoot yourself for using Amazon as a customer right yeah we're a cloud platform we've a hosted service we do all of our engineering mostly 80% of engineering on cloud and 20% went on a V block right and uh from you know parent company Dell technologies and had the the issue that hit though was we wrote and said hey we get into a huge volume here Amazon and all of our engineers are just doing on-demand instances but couldn't you look in arrears and give us like a volume discount reasonable request by a customer and they this is their response and I love those guys like I'm friends with them and I think they've done amazing things for the industry but the response right now from a sales negotiation perspective is you could never move we know that you've wired yourself in there's no way you can get your engineers to move so you have no bat not so you know enjoy your current pricing so so we're never gonna get divorced so you guys like you know do the chores from now on that's all there is to it yeah and to me just said it at a fundamental layer I think that technology's dynamism I mean it's kind of the same issue it's going on right now with Facebook in the open web which is the people are saying hey too much of the web is actually happening on Facebook right now and that's near and dear to my heart having started off the networking world right I actually think multi-cloud on the open web or shared sentiments that you don't want one monopoly provider who controls really important things well I guess it's you know it's in theory pivotal would would help customers avoid vendor locking because it's sort of like you know that by if I quote that 70s rock song meet the new boss same as the old boss you want to be able to avoid lock-in but it's still I mean it's still major headaches and cost and you know blood sweat and tears trying to change cloud vendors is it not no I mean this is the thing with with pivotal like we have a layer that's only driven by api's and so the developer experience is exactly the same between every cloud that you use that pivotal runs on so you couldn't tell the difference as a developer if you're suddenly on Google cloud versus Amazon and we were able to move in about a month and it everyone's mind oh it's really that easy seriously it when we were dealing with you know a major client they said oK you've talked about multi-cloud let's move that app to Asher and do it the next day we had it done in six hours basically the time it took to install the platform and restart the app okay I mean this isn't impressed yeah because this is this holistic automation that we have it which is that everything is just a virtual machine a disk or an IP address to us and that holistic breath has given us what really the ability to give cloud choice in a in a profound way so what's coming up for pivotal and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about the whole serverless computing craze you know AWS is lambda solution I mean huh what's it what's up for little and how do you relate to the whole service concept yeah I mean I think that they're really the elephant in the room like you know like I said multi cloud is one of the things we need to do and it kind of gender she'd your conversation where you migrate there you dropped you dropped out for a sensor so could you start that again please sorry uh can you hear me now i can yep we help enterprises build and migrate to cloud applications so if you look at the real enterprise challenge it's far less multi cloud in a sense it's more of like how do I enable my developers to start writing cloud applications that make sense in cloud um and Gartner came out and said you know I think pretty important thing that Java EE which a lot of enterprise apps were written in run essentially not cloud native it's not cloud compatible and they said that the whole java ee movement would turn to a cloud native movement and that's largely pivotal technology called spring but-- and the stuff we're doing a spring boot and spring cloud the framework that it brings java programming to cloud applications um so I think that's the first order topic is like how do we actually help these enterprises build cloud native apps and that's where between spring and pivotal labs we actually solve the first-order problem allowing them to run it on any infrastructure and get good rates they like but really the question is how are they getting the cloud you go to Amazon's convention now there's a lot of like cloud migration si showing up but the thing that's unique about we have an opinionated enough platform and framework that we actually can help you build those cloud apps versus sort of the lift and shift approach of I'm going to dump it in a VM and hope for the best right so what do you say to people who are you know they face it's somewhat confusing cloud landscape but I would imagine you talked with a lot of customers that are thinking about their cloud strategy not necessarily focused on one of the providers what kind of advice do you give them when they say please you know James help us make sense of the cloud landscape where should we go what should we do we usually start start with first principles which is this is really about application delivery and you know if you think about this as pure of a hosting environment then yeah maybe masking one or the other yeah that's negligible but where our platform really starts is you know continuous delivery and how you enable that and so we measure application delivery performance so we would come in and talk to a customer like how long is it take you to do a major deployment today a lot of enterprises would say hey five six seven weeks at best and you know one of our customers gaps said that they went from doing deployments and weeks to doing employments in under five minutes with cloud foundry that's really our unique thing is that the combination of cloud apps and continuous delivery can change the business and and then the benefit is a modern platform should be able to run in any cloud so we would always start with like let's get the application strategy right first before we go attack infrastructure hosting so it's faster faster faster and you can go out to any place you want to yeah that's it that's a baked in benefit that's really not the lead benefit mm-hmm so where is it all go where is cloud itself going even independent from pivotal I mean it's what what are we to be talking about say three to five years now when we're talking about the cloud what will be big coming up and how should businesses incorporate that kind of knowledge into the strategy going forward yeah I mean I think there's so many dimensions that is changing I mean so one that one dimension is is that you know stacks like PCF have actually made private infrastructure viable again um and you know this sounds counterintuitive that all these cloud apps you know just dealing with the customer yesterday they're like yeah we've migrated all of our apps the cloud they mint PCF it was actually in their own data center but the automation and the self-service characteristics of PCF actually made their own data center the better experience in price-competitive and the acronym a PCF pivotal cloud foundry pivotal cloud foundry anyway because in the customers mind now because of the characteristics and the performance and the automation and the self service of PCF they said hey we've migrated these apps to cloud and and and I think that's another important counterbalance to this kind of runaway monopolies a potential that you have with a single provider in cloud so I look at you know the next five years of cloud is having both more public clouds coming into play and also some consolidation and efficiencies coming to how people run private infrastructure that is more cloud like and therefore efficient and can be price competitive more couple of public clouds coming into play I was thinking that the Pakistani to be too deep if you hadn't gotten into public cloud by now you weren't going to you mean some second tier players no no no you know Google and Azure basically continuing their investments okay and you know challenging Amazon in a significant way right I think that's definitely happening and then also you know private infrastructure remains actually a pretty interesting vector for a lot of folks - yeah private cloud or just sometimes just known as regular old-fashioned data centers isn't going away even though private cloud I mean I saw recent IDC thing that said private cloud is going to continue on in the years ahead yeah yeah and that's I'm surprised by how many customers they really had a cloud application problem not a cloud hosting problem like what they really wanted was velocity and automation the fact that they might publicly or privately host that you know velocity and automation it was sort of a second-tier problem for them and so that that's I think the unique inside of pivotal is let's attack the cloud application problem James I think you said it that's a lot of good stuff thank you very much for joining us today I'll send it a link we can all tweet about it and look forward to the future of pivotal great to be here thank you but

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.