Digital Business Transformation Initiatives – Greg Muscarella, SUSE

This is texturong TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the thrill.

We're here with Greg muscarella who's general manager for container management at suse and they have a new study that they put together on what's going on with the adoption of cloud native applications, Greg. Welcome to the show. Great to be here.

Thanks, Mike. A lot of folks are let's face. It intimidated by Cloud native.

They got a master a lot of new technologies. They got a figure out how to Improvement and he's works most of the time they certainly have to deal with containers. Yet it seems like the benefits are outweighing the challenges.

And what did you guys find in your study? Well, a lot of things I mean and you sort of hit the nail on the head. There's a few things that are around adoption, right?

So whether you want to call a software eats the world or digital transformation people have different labels they put on but but that continues strong like every company is becoming a software company and that hasn't changed, you know, based on anything and Cloud native technology. So containers and kubernetes continues to be one of the leading ways that that company's actually look to increase their pace of software deployment and software development. Right?

So, I think that's that's one of the key takeaways in that front. And of course open source is the other underpinning the adoption of Open Source. Well, I'll tell you but yeah adoption of building Source continues again on invaded and you see it underpinnings so much the infrastructure the internet and increasingly of Enterprises organization it I know some of us been talking about this for the better part of a half a decade now, but it's still early days.

Right? I mean it's still feels like a lot of organizations are still in the early Innings of adoption. And so, you know, just how far is that Journey or curve?

And how far are people want it? In chin question, it's it's a little bit enable gazing I'd say, you know, I don't know if I'd use a Churchill phrase to say like, you know, we're at the the end of the beginning perhaps when I look at the types of customers that we're talking to I do feel like we're moving beyond the early adopters who you know want the latest and greatest and are just looking for the most the most tech amazing thing to see what they can do to play with and are interested, you know, not risk averse at all happy to take on a science project ready to kind of break some glass and all the effort to advancing the technology and kind of being ahead of the curve to more early early majority, right if you if people across the chasm thing where we are seeing people who have Direct business outcomes that they're trying to achieve a little bit more risk averse, they're not looking for a science project. They want to complete solution.

So we'll look into companies like ours to provide that sort of thing and help guide glide into that cloud native environment and you yield some of the benefits from Do you think we're on the cusp of a new era? I would say the first year of the cloud was we lifted and shifted all the stuff that was running on premise and a monolithic fashion and threw it up into the cloud and now we're kind of looking at it more as you know, what exactly is the optimal structure for these Cloud environments. Yeah, like it's interesting.

So I think people to loved to lift and ship to the cloud. I think we know a lot of that didn't work like you were refactoring which is moving on Prem to whatever your favorite Cloud providers, right? So from primarily, you know hypervisor based VMware environment to whether the ECT or is your virtual machines or Google version machines, right?

The lift and shift doesn't doesn't work. So there was some degree of refactoring there. I think what we're seeing now with Cloud native is more attention to to wait a minute, you know, we often group the public cloud and say the public cloud and we say our prayer is it the public cloud is kind of homogeneous monolithic but really it's almost like having three different operating systems up in the cloud and then you know, you get a fourth one that you're used to on Prem or maybe a fourth or fifth when you see how pram Simply a c Cloud native and kubernetes in particular is providing and abstractionally or in a common operating model across these public clouds and on-prem and that's one of the things that customers really like about this is like, okay.

It's a little like a little to use the job appraiser, right? So write once run anywhere. I don't want to yeah, it's not quite that simple, but there is a lot of commonality of what you can now do on whichever.

Your favorite public clouds are and on Prem without having to refactor rewrite a lot of things or significantly reducing the amount you might have to customize for a particular environment that you want to run it. We've been chasing this hybrid Cloud dream for a long time. And you know right now we have multi-cloud and part of the problem is is every time you add a new Cloud today.

You actually increase the total cost of it because you got Specialists and different consoles. So will we get to some centralized management capability if we move to This Cloud native approach and could we actually lower the total cost of it if we do this, right? Well, yeah and look I want to be careful here.

There's no Panacea. It's not like hey throw in Cloud native also and all your problems go away. I think this gives you a good chunk of the the journey towards it right but it also takes a culture or intelligent choices on top of that right?

So if you even if you go with containers and your standardizing kubernetes across, you know, that's gke or AKs or or eks, and maybe it's Rancher on Prem or something like that. You can still make choices that are gonna paint yourself in a bit of a dark corner. You can start using proprietary API some things that are unique to particular Cloud providers and then if you want to redeploy your application somewhere else in the future.

That's going to take more work and let's not forget data data has mass if you will obviously not physical Mass, but it's difficult to move all your data from one environment to another environmental replicate it so managing those things or other challenges, you know, I I it's it's interesting. I sort of talk to customers quite a bit about kubernetes and it's interesting. Sometimes they forget that all the same challenges that exist in distributed computing continue to exist, right?

So, you know, I could questions that disaster recoveries if we just magically solve a disaster recovery and like if one cloud provider goes down my data and applications will automatically be sink and ready to go in another cloud like no that takes a lot of work right Dr. Are still a difficult thing to solve and again, there's a lot of tools that a cloud native or Community brings to it, but it's not a Panacea. So I guess I really want to get that out there is that There's a lot of the goodness that comes from cloud native, but it still takes you know, smart architecture smart implementation and a culture to to really give all the value that you want from it.

Do you think most of these applications are Greenfield because you know back when I was much younger. They told me nothing good can happen when you move data, so maybe we just start with something fresh. It's a mix right?

So kind of like you said when you move to the cloud, it's a very similar thing going from Mom from culture people love to lifted shift. But honestly, you know, you don't get a lot of value other than you're renting Hardware instead of you know, buying hardware and paying on a different terms and there's a few other benefits you might get there as well. I don't need to diminish it.

But no, I think the biggest benefits come from refactoring and writing your application as a distributed computing application. That's a big change for a lot of applications that are reading written as monolithic applications that are tightly coupled to the infrastructure. So they run on in the storage and the data that's there.

So, you know, we're seeing only Greenfield. No, I'm definitely seeing you know, other other applications move over is the largest Advantage for you know, Green for the applications that are written and take advantage of this architecture. Yes, of course, I don't think I don't think you'd be surprised with that, right?

What is your sense of? The acceptance of kubernetes especially because a lot of folks are intimidated a lot of developers are not quite rushing to the platform only recently. I would say the it Ops guys are really got behind it because they figure out that they can scale resources up and down but it's really supposed to be and abstraction for building abstractions.

So we're only extractions are supposed to be built on top of it. They make this thing easy to access. What does that look like?

Yeah, you can always create more Simplicity by having an abstraction layer and you can always you know reduce. Reduce or increase performance by eliminating abstraction layer, right? So this this tension that always exists there.

I you know, it's I do think there is an abstraction later there and kubernetes. Well, maybe another way of saying is like kubernetes is distributed computing is difficult. I think kubernetes makes distributed computing easier, but not easy.

And so when people look at kubernetes in the learning curve and what would it take to kind of move your application to a distributed architecture and take advantage of kubernetes and container orchestration orchestration system. Again, yeah, I think kubernetes lowers the bar tremendously and really accelerates what you want to do that may not be what you need for your application. Actually, maybe that monolithic lives on a single search that made me precisely what you need in which case, you know, making a distributed application is overkill, maybe not what you want to do.

So, I think it's use the right tool for for the job and get the job done. And what I'm seeing is there's plenty of applications that in this day and age with the internet and customers everywhere in the need for scale and elasticity and Dr. Kubernetes brings a lot of value to a lot of applications.

So it doesn't sound like kubernetes and microservices will supplant monolithic applications as much as the two will live side by side together. Yeah, I think exciting is room for both and you know, if it were me making a decision like what's the cost of re-architecting versus the benefit I'm going to get out of it and for some applications. It's going to be a screaming deal to go and move it over and for others.

It's like yeah, you know, it's it's good enough as it is don't don't mess with it. You know, look at all the applications that still run on Mainframe. I'm not saying anything shockingly new year, right?

So I think people are making these calculations for for decades now and I think they're still smart and are making intelligent choices about the best platform to run their applications on So once your best advice to folks who are either maybe they got one or two clusters or they're just starting out but you've seen enough of this where you know, what's the thing that you wish people knew when they got started that people learned six months nine months later. I guess I'm asking you to help lower the idiot tax. What do you know?

Well, like we all went through it. So I mean, I think it continues to be the same thing is understanding that advantages of limitations of the application and you know, if you're a Hands-On keyboard kind of guy and actually, you know, that's the way I learned is write an application and actually get used to see what the the pros and cons are of it and learn it and I think you know, we obviously at Ranch we have Rancher Academy and it's very easy to get started with ranch or desktop and there's a whole bunch of tools that you can use to to do that get your hands dirty for absolutely free and not just us like there's tons on the internet, right? So there's loads of resources out there.

That is the best way of doing it if you're, you know further away from the keyboard. Think it's it's really kind of understanding the pros and cons in general distributed computing. And then what the specifics are around kubernetes and pros and cons versus other Solutions.

You might be looking at right so something I hear more about today too because you know, we we talked about portability and we talked about other things as the economic winds feel like they're changing anywhere right now. There's there's increased attention on cost conservation, right? and Some that means in in it land, you know having the freedom of choice or avoiding lock-in, right?

So we know when you have a vendor that has you locked into something they're a little bit less likely to budge on price when it comes to to negotiation or more times getting with tougher and that's what the advantage of having, you know, open apis and open source and that credible ability to move your application from one environment to another take advantage of different tools really gives a lot of Leverage to customers right or to organizations that have those workloads. So and kind of answering a couple of your questions. So way of getting started is like no if you value for you at the end of the tunnel like is it something worth learning like this is something that you you want it into is there is there a value proposition for you?

And if so invest appropriate amount of time to learn, you know, what it is, you know again, if you run a simple application that runs inside your data centers only consumed by, you know, a few a few people in there. Maybe you're monolithic is fine. Maybe there's no reason to go to microservices or kubernetes, but Running a Distributing your massive multiplayer online game.

There's probably a whole lot of value and that's why we see a lot of gaming companies that work with us. Right is there's a ton of value in there of moving to containers and something distributed like this. some of the report covered a lot of ground what surprised you most in this thing that you didn't expect to see but I hate to say I wasn't surprised there's maybe it's confirmation bias, but it confirmed things that I think I think many of us have been seeing so so nothing jumped out at me other than yet, you know kind of comes in about as I expected with the adoption of kubernetes the adoption of more more software and of course open source continue to play a massive role.

So I don't think any of those things when I say to you you're probably not falling off your chair saying you didn't expect it either. So it's it's a confirmation. I think the only thing that you kind of look at is the the speed the things you start ask the question, where are we in this adoption cycle and I see you know, it's pretty Broad and so we try and get a thumb on this but I'll say is you know, we're gonna We personally think that this is a trend that's going to continue for a long time because there's real value for customers there.

So whether we're early or mid or wherever we are in this trend We're just going to keep executing and keep helping customers can take advantage of the new technology. All right, folks. You heard it here just Jump On In The Deep End of the pool.

The water is fine and you'll figure it out as we go along. Hey, Greg. Thanks being on the show.

I appreciate it. Always a pleasure to talk with you. All right guys back to you in the studio.