It’s Tanzu!, a look at the VMware Tanzu portfolio with Jared Ruckle

Episode 164 · 51:22 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Now, guest, do you work from home regularly? I work from home probably about half the time, I think. Yeah? Yeah, a little bit more often these days like, well, a lot of other people. And I think maybe half of, I think you are perhaps the person who has been a guest on this podcast the most. And do you think on each of those episodes, what do you think the chances are that you're working from home at that time? Well, I'd guess about 50-50. I remember very viscerally a few in-person sessions that we've had together. Those are lovely. And I also remember a handful of the remote ones. So I'll go with 50-50 and kind of play the odds there. I think visceral is an apt discussion of a newly named Tanzu Talk in person. It's very visceral. Got the alliteration. So that's good. Now, do you think visceral, is that Latin? I think it probably is. If something is not Latin, it seems like it's obviously from some other language tree. That seems like it's got some Latin-ish roots to it. Yeah, I was, what was I, I was, oh, we were walking by the zoo the other day, back when you could walk around, not be 1.5 meters from other living humans. And, uh, there was a picture of an elephant in utero. And so I told my son, look, there's an elephant in utero, which I'm going to be honest with, with y'all in the listeners, I think was photoshopped because it looked like a pretty fully formed elephant that was like walking around, but whatever. And, uh, I, uh, my son, of course, asked what in utero means. So I tried to give my layman's, you know, uh, explanation that it's, it's in a womb and, uh, you know, going to be born sometime. And, uh, and then I went on this whole, like, I was in kind of a, uh, a bad mood that morning. And I went on this whole, like, uh, sort of Latin-splaining about how lots of words are based on Latin and where Latin is from and how it evolved. And, like, he asked why it became the language of science.

And I, and I came up with a theory. I think it's just because that's what everything was written in at the time. And, uh, maybe French wasn't the popular way to do it. I get confused about that. But, man, it was, I even thinking about it now, despite my mood this morning, at the end of this, like, uh, explanation, I was like, wow, I'm having a lot of fun. This is nice talking about Latin, uh, a language that I don't know. So, uh, I just like to take this time to think Latin. I can't wait for your next e-book. That's right. The origins of digital transformation in Latin. Now in Latin. Yeah. You know, a lot of people don't realize that Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius had a lot to say about transformation. You know, just one last comment there. You know, Marcus Aurelius gets a lot of credit nowadays, as he should. He's got a lot of good writing there. But a lot of people forget that the first chapter is all about the Greek gods and sort of just, like, full-on praising for them. Which I often wonder, is he just sort of pandering to everyone? Or is he genuinely like, you know, I know what happens if you don't, like, give respect to the gods. You get smote. And so he's doing it. It's a very, it's always an interesting thought exercise to think about, like, all these wise Roman and Greek people. Like, were they, did they really think that, like, there were gods who were, you know, changing into swans and things like that? Or did they just think that was a fun story? It's hard to say. Indeed. Why don't you introduce yourself, guest? Yeah. I am Jared Ruckel, which I think is, there's not a lot of Latin in there. There's some German, maybe, some Hebrew. And I am now a, something that's called a group product line marketing manager at VMware. So I've been at Pivotal for, I think, three and a half years, maybe, and now going on month three at VMware. Yeah. Group line manager. I like that. Or I got that mixed up. Yeah, it's just what I wanted to be when I grew up.

So childhood wish, dream, fulfilled. Yeah. It is nice. Well, speaking of working at home, you know, a lot of, I think, I think if you're listening to this, there's probably a chance you understand about flights being, you know, canceled. All in-person gatherings here in the, here in the Netherlands. I think you're, they just, let's see, today is Monday. And they, they shut down all the restaurants and the schools and the cafes. Also, there was a hilarious scene. There's something, you know, if you don't know what this is, you can go look it up. There's something called a coffee shop here in Amsterdam. And I didn't know this was happening, but they shut those down at 6 p.m. last night indefinite. Well, until April 6th. And so there were, there were mobs of people outside of those doors. But, totally unrelated to that last comment, we've got a great conference coming up on this week, on March 19th. Did I get that right? On Thursday. And it's our spring live conference. Now, Richard, you probably know whose idea it was to have this be a 24-hour conference, because I think that is perhaps the most awesome idea of this year so far. Maybe the most deadly. We will find out. But it's going to be a 24-hour, basically, software development, a little bit of DevOps, some Kubernetes. About 15 minutes from me on, I don't think there'll be any Latin involved, but just kind of going over some things. We'll have some tons doing there. It's going to be chock full across the globe called Spring Live. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes so that you can get to it. But I think if you search for Spring Live, you can probably find it and sign up for it. Yeah, it should be great. Yeah, it was our boss, Ian Andrews, idea to have kind of a replacement conference. And then myself and a few others kind of swarmed on what that would look like. And somehow, in like three days, we came up with the conference, had 40 speakers. And, you know, I think it's pretty cool that we could try to fill this gap as quickly as we did.

And I guess I didn't mention that it's all online. That's sort of the point of it. It is. That you can attend it wherever you may be across the globe. I think maybe, I don't know, I'll have to see if we have budget for this. But if you can somehow prove that you stayed up for 24 hours and watched it, maybe I'll try to send you some stroopwafels or something. I don't know. Yeah, at least you'll get a call out on the next time you talk. That's right. I don't know what the deal with sending stuff to people is nowadays as far as health concerns. But I should be able to send you some kind of food. That would be fun. But I don't know how you're going to prove it. Maybe you have a, they don't call it stop motion, do they? What is it? Speed up? You got the slow-mo video. And then what's the other one that are on phones now? Yeah, I forget what that is. Where it's like a picture every 10 seconds or something. That's right. Yeah. Maybe you take one of those. But I'm not really sure I would watch all of it to verify. Because that would be exciting. But do you, across the two of you, let's give people one tip for working from home. How about we start with you, Jared? One tip from working from home. You know, I think, yeah, I just kind of get back to caffeine. I had a little bit of a work from home victory today where I thought we were out of coffee filters. But I managed to root around and find a couple of spare ones so I can make a pot of coffee like usual. Yeah, so I feel like that's a good streak to get the day started. So make sure you've got some kind of coffee supply. If you can maybe walk to your local small coffee shop and do that safely, then that may be a good thing. Make sure you've got plenty of caffeine on hand. That's a good tip. I would not anticipate. I mean, if things go on, you might want to make sure you get the detergent out of some socks. And maybe those dress socks that you haven't had an excuse to use for a while because they're really thin, you could start using those. Yeah, I thought that maybe I could reuse the filter from yesterday, but that wasn't happening.

So it was just kind of a nasty, nasty brown mess with stuff. So, yeah, thankfully, there were a couple that I was able to dig up. How about you, Richard? What's your one work at home tip for people? Yeah, I think some people would disagree, but I'm a no chores person. Like, you're working. So I've actually got recent validation from someone who used to give me grief about that. Now that they work from home, they understand. It's like, you know, it's easy to say, oh, let me just go put a quick load of laundry in or do some dishes or run and get the mail. And it's good to get outside, like move around. But I've kind of tried to treat my however many hours in my office or wherever I'm working as somewhat sacred so you don't accidentally blend your worlds. Some people may disagree, but I like keeping it separate. And then at five, walk out and go back to real life. Yeah, I think, you know, the other way, there's another version of that, which is make sure to take a lunch break. Or like, you know, the time that you wouldn't be working. Make sure not to. I mean, not if you don't work all day and pretend like you're working. But you know what I mean. No, I accidentally work more hours when I work from home. So it's good to stop and take lunch and things. So productive. Well, uh, my, my, my tip is, uh, I like, I, you know, I've worked at home a lot and I think you need to establish like two to three places where you work in the house, maybe even four. And, and the thing I've done over the years is I have a lot of power adapters plugged in everywhere. So I can just take my laptop and plug it in wherever I might be working. And, uh, I don't know. It gives you some variety because sometimes I feel like I want to sit in my bed and work. Sometimes I sit on the couch. Other times a desk. Who knows? I just go. I'm thinking of all your alternative spots. Like Coté in the bathtub, you know, on the roof, you know, under the car. Like just, I would love that. Under the car. Just whatever. I like that one. Just like, wait, is he hiding from somebody? No, just, uh, you know, it's shady. Now in your dream scenario, am I on one of those rolly things so I can come in and out?

I think that's the only way that can work. Yeah. I mean, I think that's required. Okay. I like that. I'm going to look into that. Now, my first problem is going to be getting a car, but, uh, maybe I can just borrow one of them on the street. That's our next podcast. What is that whooshing sound? That's a lot of moving cars. That's right. Why, why, why, why, why is Coté's waist so flat right now? What happened? Is that a cat? Yeah. All kinds of things. Uh, and you see the joke is it's flat. Cause I got ran over not because, uh, I was dieting or going to CrossFit. Well, uh, you know, also if, if you're looking for something, uh, to read during your lunch break, I know you've already read, uh, Richard, probably Jared too, but there was a VMware came out with their state of Kubernetes survey, uh, which, which I think I forget the exact name. It surveys, uh, several, uh, organizations that are like a thousand people or more. So large organizations. And it has, you know, essentially momentum questions and blocker questions, and then also benefits questions around using Kubernetes and their organizations. And I have a little write-up that I did, uh, which, you know, was fantastic, I guess. Sure. And, uh, also, uh, Richard did a good, uh, let's call it a meta survey write-up over at InfoQ that is also about the CNCF report. And I think, was there a, uh, uh, the new stack report as well, but there's several surveys that, uh, that you wrote about there. And, you know, I think, I think the summary, uh, I forget who wrote the summary. Maybe it was you actually, you said the summary was more. That was me. Yeah. Yeah. That was good. That was funny. But, uh, you know, I, I think, I think I'll, I'll call out one, one thing, which, um, I didn't really go over it in my, uh, my write-up very much, but I think one of the more interesting parts in the VMware one and interesting in that it's validating is, uh, just kind of the benefits that people have. And I was looking at this this morning and the first one, you know, it's, it's a choose all that apply, which is, is, you know, you got to like, kind of, that's why it doesn't

add up to a hundred and adds up to a lot more if you add up to percentages. Uh, but it has improved resource utilization. Uh, let's see if we can have them punch up that phrase next time. Uh, which, which is to say, you know, I think that's a thing. That operations people are interested in, right? It's a sort of productivity of your infrastructure and making sure that you're both not overpaying and both not underusing something in some more efficient way of utilizing, using stuff. And then also, uh, coming in at 53%, just a 3% less than the 56% of improved resource utilization to be the Casey Kasem of bar charts here, uh, is shortened software development cycles. Otherwise known as, uh, you know, I, I, well, that means a couple of things. One, a bit more developer productivity, probably depending on how you look at it, but definitely giving you the ability to release more often and get more feedback, which I think is the, uh, the primary way to improve your software. And, uh, I think, I think those are good confirming things for why, uh, looking into a platform like Kubernetes is, uh, is interesting. It's always, it's always nice to know that, you know, the number one benefit wasn't like did something cool and it was very enjoyable. Although maybe we should ask that next time. Uh, that would be fun. How about, how about yourself, Richard? What, uh, what do you think was interesting in those surveys? Yeah, I've just, I've learned to really look at the, uh, the demographics right away in any of these, cause it's really easy to get a skewed perspective just because, I mean, even the CNCF survey was good, but two thirds of the people were from tech companies. So of course there's also going to be a certain amount of stuff. And what, I think a third or 40% or so were from big companies versus the state of Kubernetes one was a hundred percent thousand person or more companies. So all, all fine. But when I look at something, it's like 40% are using serverless. Is that really the case? And it's in the CNCF survey. Like, so I think people in cloud native, smaller companies, tech companies, sure. But they're also using containers like crazy. So to me, it was a, we're all building more stuff.

Serverless isn't cannibalizing containers, which probably isn't cannibalizing VMs, which isn't like, we're all just building more things. But the big company stuff was interesting in the state of Kubernetes one. Like, look, a lot of people running a lot of clusters and connectivity is tricky and management is going to be tricky. Like we're going to find new problems now that people are doing this at bigger scale. That's all expected. But it'll be interesting to see how the survey looks next year. Indeed. Yeah. That's, that's the best with surveys is when they're, uh, you know, every year, if not every quarter, every quarter, I think the CNCF people do it like at least twice a year, if not more, if I remember. Yeah. They're getting good, uh, good trend lines. Cause they're actually able to see like, Hey, container usage was here. Now it's here. This was here. So it's nice. Cause service mesh was something I'd called out to the new stack and serverless stuff from O'Reilly, but service mesh is low. It's like 18% in production. So that's fine. But you expect a lot of people are reviewing it right now. And a lot of things like STO and envoy and those sort of technologies are getting baked into products. You expect to see that rise over the next few years, but it's good. They've got a baseline now asking about it. Yeah. Yeah. There'll probably be a lot more service mesh talk through this year. That, that, that would make sense. Well, uh, you know, as a side note there, speaking of, uh, being, being part of Tonsuland and VMware, I, I, as I'm sure you all have, have discovered, they have a lot of interesting research and surveys going on, which, uh, kind of bubbles up to the top. So it'll be fun to write some more analysis of that and talk about it. I love a good survey, all sorts of charts, cross tabs, things like that. As, as you were saying, right? Like the fun thing to do is, uh, kind of looking at demographics and sort of like understanding what it, what the context is from there. Well, also, uh, back to container land over in, uh, Amazon web services land in your neck of the woods. There's a, they have a new project for basically, uh, as always, Richard, you can explain to be something I think I barely understand, but basically it's a, it's a, it's a,

it's a new framework they have for running containers just in VMware or on, uh, I guess on their bare metal install. So I assume it's, uh, if you're going for performance or you just want like, uh, I don't know, naked containers, is that an industry term? But, uh, is it, did I get that basically right with what bottleneck bottle rocket is? Yeah. I mean, I think it's the, uh, so yeah, it is a, it's an OS it's meant for containers. I think the shtick here is, and I need to dig into it more is also like the update process instead of updating all the individual kind of packages made up of containers and OS you're kind of doing it at once. So, I mean, there's, I think there's a different way of actually upgrading your environment. So it's meant to be a little more innovative. And I called this out in the news, not because this is, I don't know, I don't think everyone's going to run out and use it right away, but there's still a lot of innovation in this space. As much as there's commoditization, as we think of containers and most of us want to keep moving back up to the app tier, there's still some really cool stuff that we saw with VMware. We'll talk about in a little bit with native pods and what used to be project Pacific. And like, there's some cool stuff still happening at the infrastructure layer, as much as we all keep keeping our eyes above, above that for value and developers. I like seeing that there's still some cool things happening at network and storage and compute. Yeah, yeah, yeah, as you were alluding to the, for people who care about this kind of stuff, the, the, the, the, one of the more fascinating areas is how you do like just updating the software and managing that kind of stuff, all that configuration management stuff. Well, as a good segue, just to briefly touch on to speaking of wanting to talk about stacks and infrastructure and development stuff, the, the most recent RedMonk language ranking comes out and this is programming language. So sadly, nothing about Latin. But I think as always, Java was, was high up there as was JavaScript as always like there. I think, I think the results they get are pretty, pretty consistent over time, which is, you know, fine, right?

Like it allows you to make pretty solid decisions about the, the programming languages you might be interested in. And I wanted to ask you, uh, Richard and also Jared, what, what, uh, what's the deal with Python always being up there? And I asked this completely self-servingly because I, I've always wanted to like learn Python better. And in fact, I've got this, uh, this book Python for kids, which I bought cause my son wanted to learn Python, but it's really for me. I think it'll be at my level. Uh, and, uh, I don't, I don't really understand my attraction to Python, but people seem to like it. It's like way up there. So what, uh, what are y'all two's thoughts? Yeah. I mean, my son's learning it in, uh, whatever, what is he in seventh grade? That's their language. They're all doing programming. And I just, it seems like it's a good education language. It's obviously a machine learning friendly language, which is why it seems like it keeps rising up. And then these rankings now is tied to Java for number two. So I think that seems to be some of it, the ML thing, the education angle, and it, you know, it's had some nice durability. So, you know, in their language rankings to see any sort of movement in the top 10 is weird. So seeing Python move up, see typescript moved in. That's, uh, it's interesting to see some, some changes there. Yeah. Yeah. My son is also, uh, taking a online Python class starting today with all the time to fill now that there's no school. So definitely there's a big, big kid thing there. Um, the machine learning thing, it's also pretty good for data science and stuff. I think, right. I hear R and Python talked about in the same circle. So it's, you know, it seems like it's got this really versatile history of, you know, great for beginners. And then also great for these, you know, more pervasive use cases that we're seeing everywhere. Definitely. Yeah. Interesting. Well, speaking of pervasive use cases, that, that brings us to you, Jared. Now we like to, we like to come to you when we have a, uh, uh, a large announcement in the, uh, in, you know, as it used to be in the pivotal world, in the Tanzu world. And sure enough, last week we had a, uh, we, we, we alluded to this, I think in the last

episode, but there was a, uh, large, uh, kind of overview of VMware's application modernization portfolio and, uh, the new version of, uh, vSphere and how, uh, we have Kubernetes baked into that and available with it, all sorts of things. But, but, uh, we got, we have you on to kind of help us go through all of that, understand what the things are and why they're exciting. Now with my vague, I'm waving my hands here in case you can't see, but with, with my, my hand wavy introduction there, Jared, how, how do you, how, how can you like, how do we wrap our heads around this? We got a list of, you know, a punch list of things, but like, what's, what's the, uh, the kind of like, look at that big thing on the shelf sort of thing. Like what, what do we got going on here from a big picture layer? Yeah, that's a, that's a good place to start. I think if you, maybe sometimes, sometimes it makes sense to go back in history a little bit. I mean, clearly, you know, VMware, uh, led the virtualization, you know, revolution, you know, in, in recent years and, uh, that's, that's great. Uh, but obviously there's more, uh, more to be done there, more opportunities to go try and take down and all this application stuff has been, uh, you know, really on the forefront of everybody's mind for the last decade or so with public cloud things and all these different application services and so on. And so I think with all the tons of stuff from VMware is a really nice, easy to understand, you know, portfolio of services that, uh, you can use to, you know, build better applications, harness all the power of, you know, Kubernetes and containers and all that kind of stuff. And, and think about doing it on, uh, on any cloud that you would want. So kind of any cloud, any, any device, any application, this is really VMware's entree into that in a way that's, uh, curated, you know, selected and kind of ready for, you know, larger, larger companies to, to use, to tackle their, you know, most pressing, you know, digital transformation kind of initiatives, whether it's at the application level or at the infrastructure level.

And so sometimes when you're reinventing the company like that, it, it's just a heck of a lot easier to introduce a new brand and kind of call everything that. Yeah, it is, you know, one of the, one of the things, uh, uh, I think, I think we've been in, in VM world for several months now is, uh, it's kind of fun to be like, uh, very firmly connected to like everything, like, like, like, as you were saying, there's this kind of like, uh, like larger amount of, of products and solutions, if you will, to use enterprise talk that, uh, all the stuff we've been working on for years now kind of fits in and is part of it. And, uh, you know, it reminds me of my analyst days when I used to just like track all sorts of things, fun stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, where does it start, Jared? Like, is there a, you know, I know the sort of VCF and Vsphere stuff isn't technically part of Tanzu, but do you think the story kind of starts there? I mean, how do you kind of frame where, where the Tanzu stuff kind of the foundation of it is? Yeah, I think it probably, you know, when people think about, you know, VMware historically, it's been a infrastructure company and, you know, where all the public cloud started was in, you know, elastic compute network and storage. So I think the, the, the VCF, the V cloud foundation stuff is really kind of the evolution of the infrastructure bits with really kind of a rock solid, you know, story that's integrated for those, you know, core infrastructure elements, um, with, you know, Kubernetes being a part of that mix. So if you think about what the operation folks can do with their usual Vsphere upgrades, I think Vsphere six is what has, uh, was the recent version. You know, we've got Vsphere seven, there's just a regular cadence about how people are thinking about running VMware in their data center. There's a point upgrades that they'll do from different successive versions of VMware, but or from Vsphere rather, but this is a kind of a big leap because of how, you know, Kubernetes is baked in to, to that, that, uh, that environment.

Yeah. I'm fairly, fairly significantly, right? I mean, VCF is the combo of what VsAN, NSX and Vsphere. Is that right? Yeah. And the, the Vsphere stuff. I mean, this is what used to be called project Pacific. I believe that now it's Vsphere for Kubernetes baked into Vsphere seven, but I mean, the idea here, right, is that you more or less have the ability to manage what containers and VMs together, and you can actually spin up clusters directly from within and manage them within Vsphere. Yeah. And as you think about, you know, a lot of times in technology, we're always kind of chasing what that, you know, shiny new object is. And as you were just, you mentioned, Richard, with the Kubernetes stuff is that, you know, we're just building a lot more things and there's going to be more VMs. There's going to be more Kubernetes. There's going to be more containers. There's going to be more serverless. There's going to be kind of more of, of kind of everything. And so the more ways you can have some sort of operational efficiency across all those different, you know, layers of abstraction is a good thing for the operations folks out there. And so being able to have VMs and containers and sort of that one interface is probably one of the standout capabilities because it allows you to take advantage of all the containers and automation and increased resource utilization to the earlier point without having it be a big disruption to your day-to-day workflow. Yeah, this was something I was alluding to earlier, but I was reading a little more last week about native pods. One of those features in Vsphere 7 around Kubernetes where you're actually running these containers and like micro VMs, which are pretty cool stuff. This is where they get some crazy performance on this. So almost back to the bottle rocket stuff, firecracker stuff, these other technologies around infrastructure, even Amazon's been shipping, you know, we're doing some pretty cool stuff here that maybe some don't actually recognize, but there's some neat stuff versus just kind of squeezing Kubernetes into a hypervisor environment. It seems like it was a bigger deal than that. Yeah, I'd agree with that. And when you have the creators of Kubernetes as the ones that are helping, you know, build and launch this stuff, you think there's probably going to be some pretty slick, you know, engineering effort that is going to be really cutting edge rather than just kind of cramming

it into, you know, what you know and love about Vsphere. And I think that also the branding and naming is an interesting thing with something like Tanzu Kubernetes grid, where you think about the electricity grid, you just plug in and get your stuff in it and it works. I think that's really the idea behind this whole Kubernetes effort with VMware is that you just have a Kubernetes grid ready and waiting for your containers, for your containerized applications, and then you're off to the races from there. And you really have this another layer of technology melting around into the background. And it just kind of works. We all talk about technology is really at its best when it's boring. And this is, I think, a really big step into making Kubernetes boring. Yeah, it'll be certainly add to Ubiquity the more and more people who have, you know, a VMware stack already installed. If they can add in Kubernetes easily, it'll be boring in an exciting way. I don't know. I mean, is that completely bonkers when you're going to be putting, I mean, when, you know, tens of thousands of corporations are going to be incorporating Kubernetes into their environments? It doesn't seem nuts when you're making it that easy and ubiquitous and boring. Yes. It might be good predictions. In contrast. So you mentioned this, Jared. So what is a Tanzu Kubernetes grid? Yeah, I think that's the, it's the, it's the thing that is the Kubernetes dimension of, of the new flavor of vSphere. So it gives you the, the Kubernetes, you know, runtime where you can actually, you know, interact with, with Kubernetes and get it up and going. So it's going to, it has a really simple, you know, installation, really straightforward as part of, as part of vSphere. And it automates a lot of the, you know, multi-cluster operations. That's kind of a big, a big to do with Kubernetes these days. The hard part is getting it to actually work. And so Kubernetes grid just has some of that, you know, baked into, you know, streamline a lot of the operational bits.

And then it works on, you know, private cloud, public cloud, and then, and then at the edge as well, or at least that's the, that's the big idea. That's some of the vision behind it. Well, I mean, I think the other thing I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm assuming from all this with my, my long history with enterprise software is, you know, it's just, just a point in time release of certain products and things. There's a, there's a vision for many other ways of doing things, which, which is always exciting, but it does seem like, like the way I've been thinking about, uh, Tang Tzu Kubernetes grid, or as we like to say it in our emails, TKG, uh, is, I mean, it's essentially the, uh, the VMware Kubernetes distro, which, which, which I think is fun. I don't, I don't hear the word distro anymore outside of the world of Linux, but it, uh, I think that's another thing in going forward. That'll be fun to see is like just distro comparisons of things, uh, which, which should be hopefully straightforward as far as, uh, comparing them together. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a pretty, pretty key point there with, you know, compatibility with upstream, you know, Kubernetes and kind of how people play with the open source, you know, ecosystem and, and clearly, uh, a lot of enterprise buyers out there want, you know, open. They want that upstream compatibility with everything, um, which is part of the, the tricky part of, you know, monetizing all this open source stuff is, you know, proprietary extensions are one ways for vendors to stand out, but that also, you know, sometimes locks you in as a customer. So it's an incredible balancing act to try and strike. And I think with, you know, VMware and probably some of this is the heritage from Heptio and Pivotal really informing the open source strategy is, you know, playing, uh, playing well with the open source community. So there's that pure upstream, you know, compatibility with different, you know, flavors of, of Kubernetes. So I think this is about as, you know, pure and open source, uh, distro of Cades, as you're going to find out there. So now, now there's a few other things in the, uh, in the umbrella here. I'm going to, as the guest, I'm going to let you pick your next favorite one. I mean, sorry, maybe this is your favorite one, but I'm going to allow you to pick the, uh, another

one of your favorites instead of forcing it on you. What's, what's another component that, uh, that, that you like? Yeah, you can kind of, we can just kind of go, go, go through it. I think, you know, once you've got a bunch of Kubernetes clusters, you know, that's, that's fine. But then that's not the hard part, you know, spinning up clusters isn't, isn't the hard part. The hard part is, is looking after them and taking care of them. And, and Kubernetes, uh, is, uh, you know, pretty darn close to ubiquitous. It's on, you know, vSphere now and it's, you know, on all the public clouds. And so if you've got these Kubernetes clusters and they happen to adhere to the, uh, open source, you know, flavor of Kubernetes, you're going to want a way to, you know, manage all that stuff and get a handle on the observability, telemetry. And, you know, if you're working for a big company, you want to make sure that there's the right, you know, governance and doing version upgrades are all, uh, are all in sync across all the different flavors you've got. And so, uh, that was the other, one of the other big things that was announced was, you know, Tanzu mission control, which I think was alluded to a moment ago where you've got a nice view and a window into all the kids clusters you have, no matter what cloud they're running on. And then you can, you know, do all the usual, you know, day two operational kind of goodness from there. So, um, that I think is, uh, you know, once you've got the Kubernetes up and going, that's the next logical problem as an operations team that you want to go try and take down. Is there a certain feature of that that you think, Jared, as you've looked at that, is going to be the most compelling when you think of diving, just provisioning, managing and troubleshooting and inspection as anything when you've seen demos of that or things like that, what jumps out to you most at TMC? Uh, I think, and this is maybe where, you know, for, for VMware, it gets kind of exciting as well, where if you're running this, uh, in your data center on premises, get that extra S in there. Uh, you can see this kind of, uh, global control plane. And so if you work for a bank or a heavily regulated industry, that kind of idea of a global control plane where you can kind of, you know, get in and see at the very core of the

of what's happening, uh, across all the Cates clusters and you're doing that in your data center, that gives you another layer of access that is just, uh, uh, excellent in terms of a compliance, uh, point of view. So there's similar offerings. Everybody's trying to race, uh, you know, take a look at, you know, all your Cates clusters, wherever they're running. Um, but the public clouds, you know, won't give you, you know, easy access to that. So having that as part of your on-prem mix, uh, is another, I think, you know, point for, for TMC, if you work for one of those heavily regulated type of industries. And then, uh, another component is the application catalog. And now that's, that's like, uh, the Bitnami stuff, right? It is. Yeah. And that's a, that's another one that takes a look at some of these big, big, uh, big themes in the enterprise about containers, automation and open source and that kind of, you know, running full head into again, infosec and compliance, uh, where you have this, you know, this is really kind of been around ever since there's been the idea of containers where there's been a lot of, uh, good stuff for developers to help streamline the workflows and people want to get their stuff to production quickly. But then if you've got infosec and compliance folks in the mix, um, they'll often, you'll put the, put the brakes on that, uh, because they aren't really sure how to audit, you know, what's happening in the, in the container. And they don't have that, you know, chain of command or auditability around what was in that particular container. And so now with the application catalog, based on the heritage of Vietnam and all the expertise that those folks have into the mix, you've got this really nice curated set of, uh, open source titles that you can bring into, you know, this application catalog, you know, hence the name, attach it with a golden image and have all kinds of wonderful automation around the, around the patching and security, um, for those open source titles. And then as an operations team, you can then expose those, uh, curated images to your developers and they can use that for backing services for, you know, CICD type of workflows.

Um, they can use it for any number of other things they've used, you know, their open source, you know, stuff where typically even things like content management systems that we don't usually think about as a part of this whole software mix. So it's a great way to really responsibly harness the power of, of open source. And yeah, I, I think, I think, uh, you know, I think over, over the years, I think what, what are, what we've seen, I've seen our customers have seen as, as you were kind of alluding to earlier, right? Like you get a, the platform all set up and then you have what I, what I call the, uh, the blinking cursor problem, where there's just like a blinking cursor and now you need to do something with it, uh, you know, do some actual development. And I think this is what you were just going over is one of these, these areas that is important for basically enabling self-service for your developers, which matters because it allows them to like speed up their, their cycles. As we were talking about earlier, you know, getting, getting releases out more, which allows them to focus less on manual toil, valueless things from a customer perspective. So packaging up all that middleware or frameworks or things, one, just like, you know, it's nice to have them packaged up because then they don't have to worry about filing a ticket to configure something and it can be handled more. But I think the other side, which I've been thinking about a lot more is, uh, how you can basically use a lot of this stuff for, I don't know, automated enterprise governance. I'm always trying to stick governance into the conversation just to see who gets annoyed, uh, uh, it's such a word, but it, I think it really does allow you to more like scale up a lot of these benefits because you don't have to worry about the governance and checking things. I mean, you do have to worry about it, but you worry about it by automating it more and more. So we used to have some, uh, some funny ways of talking about this many years ago, but like you have more assurances of like this chunk of code that your developers are using. So you have to, you don't have to give them as much manual oversight because you, uh, you trust that the chunks of code that they're using, if they're packaged up and governed well

on such a thing, which, you know, doesn't seem like a thrilling, exciting thing, but it helps you do, helps you do something with that blinking cursor and have the wheels, uh, stay attached to your organization to mix all sorts of metaphors together. That chain of custody stuff seems pretty important. I mean, that's where, you know, I know there's some rebranding Jared, I think that's gone on as well, but as you think of the build service and things like that, it's also about chain of custody and sort of building materials in your containers and apps, you know, the app catalog, same for the sort of open source software you bring in. It seems like in large companies, when you have so much self-service and so many things pulled from lots of places, it's great to have a trusted set of sources that you can audit. Yeah. I, and I, you know, we all kind of love a lot of the wild west innovation that's, you know, happening in the open source, you know, community, and there's, you know, a ton of awesome things that are happening. Um, and if you're, you know, in an enterprise, you know, IT executive, or even a practitioner, you know, it's hard to kind of keep track of the velocity of things that are happening there, you know, let alone try to think about how you can harness some of that for the reality of what these enterprise environments, you know, really, really are. So I think companies that have tended to do well with open source have, you know, found ways to make this auditing, this governance, you know, pretty straightforward, um, as well as, you know, taking, you know, taking away some of the operational, you know, pain of things for, for day two, that all that day two stuff that you're just, you know, talking about, you know, Coté. So, uh, and even, you know, thinking back to, to mission control, uh, that to me seems like a new or an old, uh, a new twist on a familiar idea where in the early days of public cloud, people were spinning up, you know, VMs to get the, get the job done outside of IT ticketing circles. And then you've got all the kind of VMs running, you know, all over the place without, you know, centralized IT knowing about it. You know, now you've got Kate's cluster clusters spinning up all over the place and, you know, IT doesn't always know about it. So mission control helps you kind of, you'll reign in all those clusters, but it's really kind of the same movie that we saw say 10 years ago.

And now, you know, providing self-service access to, you know, all these wonderful services is kind of been an ongoing thing in the enterprise. And there's just kind of, you know, new ways that they're delivered and new ways you want that stuff to run. So it's kind of the same ideas that we see, you know, over and over again. So, so then another area, I, you know, I used to cover, uh, I used to work at BMC software a long time ago on monitoring things and systems management. Now we have a, it's a, it's a, it's a little bit of a rebranding, but we have something called a Tanzu observability, which, uh, helps, helps you keep track of all this stuff. So tell us, tell us what that is. Yeah, I think observability is the kind of the, the new word that we use to talk about, you know, metrics and logging and events and telemetry. And there's kind of something to, uh, to that, that name, being able to, you know, actually observe all the parts of your system from infrastructure to applications is, is really kind of what you're after, you know, because, you know, just getting your data streams of information here and there may be useful, but it may not be the complete picture. So I appreciate the observability term. Uh, so yeah, this is, you know, one of the companies that we talk about, you know, Vietnam, we talk about Pivotal, but then also there's Wayfront, a firm that VMware acquired that had this, uh, you know, pretty slick full stack observability offering. And so that's where, uh, it's brought into the tons of portfolio now. And I was really meant to solve that, that observability, uh, I guess, problem, you know, for applications, for infrastructure, um, with some pretty interesting, you know, analytics on top of all that stuff. So it's easier to, uh, help your systems recover, you know, faster. It's easier to diagnose what's happening with your application. It's easier to understand, you know, what's happening with all your microservices, things like distributed tracing, and then take a look at all your infrastructure, um, you know, whatever infrastructure target that may be, you know, on-prem, public cloud, what have you really kind of this full stack observability across any cloud for any application. So, uh, that's, uh, that's a story with that one. And interestingly, it's a, it's a SAS model. Um, so it's a pretty straightforward to get up and get up and running.

You just kind of, uh, sign up and turn it on and get the hooks into some of the infrastructure and whatever Kubernetes or app platforms you may be running. And you can get a pretty useful stream of, of telemetry without, uh, too much work. Yeah. And I haven't used it firsthand yet, but it does, it does look really nice. I mean, I, I really love monitoring stuff. That's great. Just all the dashboards and, uh, little charts. Yeah. There are other stuff, uh, you mentioned with observability, kind of the renamed way from what else got renamed as part of this Tanzu announcement from last week. Yeah. A couple other, a couple other things. Uh, a big chunk of the, uh, pivotal portfolio is now renamed, you know, Tanzu. So, um, I think people, uh, really felt strongly about keeping pivotal labs. So that is the, the one kind of your flagship thing that, uh, that remains, you know, pivotal branded. Um, but then from there, the, uh, pivotal application service is now the Tanzu application service. And then the pivotal build service is now the Tanzu build service. So a little bit of a makeover in terms of the brand hierarchy and all these things should hopefully make it a lot easier for customers to understand, uh, what's what that's certainly the, the intent of all these rebranding efforts. Um, so there's a lot of, a lot of work that people have done to get the website updated, you know, documentation, the Tanzu network where you download the bits. So you'll still see pockets of pivotal, you know, here and there, but the idea is to have, you know, Tanzu be kind of the, the big front and center brand for all these different things. And so if you, uh, see senior names for stuff, that's some of the rationale why. Yeah, it makes sense. Now, if you look at the whole set of things that got announced last week, which was huge, it's probably one of the bigger VMware announcement periods that they've had. You could, you could make the case. It was still pretty infrastructure-y. So if you're a traditional pivotal customer, maybe you looked at last week and went, wow, that's a lot of Kubernetes. So it feels like there's a, you know, I would think that our, our advice is stay tuned. Cause we, you know, you and I, we all know there's a lot more awesome stuff coming, especially for the app developer, heck spring live this week's going to be amazing.

So do you have any kind of words of, uh, words of advice for somebody who thinks that maybe we've, we've rotated completely the infrastructure? Yeah, I think, you know, we, I continue to, to watch this space. You know, I think the, the developer, uh, experience and developer brand was, you know, one of the really attractive things, you know, for pivotal, uh, you know, now that we're part of the VMware family. So certainly all the, all the spring stuff, crazy amount of investment, you know, happening in spring, you know, steel toe for.net developers out there, you know, crazy amount of investment, you know, happening there. Um, and then for our flagship offering, you know, the times of application service, uh, lots of innovation happening there as well. We've got kind of the usual quarterly release cadence. That is a, that continues a pace. We had the last version drop in December. There's another version that, you know, is going to, going to drop before, before too long. So lots of cool stuff happening there. And then, uh, a lot of other kind of crazy investments we've talked about, you know, in the past that are continuing to, to come along that, uh, really exciting stuff to, to unveil the folks. Yeah, no, lots of, lots of good stuff. And it's spring steel toe language stuff's exciting. So yeah, it's, it's a, it's interesting watching VMware become a company that's focused on kind of the outcomes all the way up the stack, back to like, are you building the right thing pivotal labs to kind of the build it right spring steel toe rabbit, all kinds of fun stuff. And then are you running it the right way with all this app, this, you know, the stack, it's an interesting portfolio. Now is this, when you look at this from your old pivotal days, where do you see like, oh gosh, it's nice to finally be able to cover this where we didn't get to talk about this before anything kind of for you coming into this, where you're like this, this makes my job easier or even harder. Uh, you know, I think, uh, certainly having the, the full, uh, the full infrastructure. Stack, you know, dimension is, is pretty exciting. Um, obviously, you know, vSphere was where a lot of customers would deploy the, the pivotal, uh, offering. Um, but then being able to talk about how deeply integrated some of the vSphere API, some of the NSX APIs, uh, is, is pretty exciting and have kind of that unified, you know, message,

you know, out there is kind of key. Um, but then there's all, all kinds of other things, you know, happening, uh, as well with, uh, things like, you know, service mesh. I think we talked about that a little bit earlier on today where there's been some, you know, service mesh components that we've talked about as part of the, the application platform, but you certainly VMware has got a really strong story there with, uh, you know, what we're calling the Tanzu service mesh. And I guess, you know, the NSX, you know, family of networking products, being able to take this, you know, really kind of, you know, confusing, convoluted service mesh pattern and use it to really, you know, solve a lot of really, you know, thorny ingress and egress kinds of issues across all those, you know, infrastructure targets and abstraction that customers may, may try and have. So there's, uh, just a heck of a lot of, uh, more, uh, value, I guess, that we can bring to our customers with kind of the core automation developer productivity stuff of, uh, pivotal kind of, you know, getting some deeper integrations and deeper hooks into the larger VMware, your family. And if you, you kind of really look closely at all these announcements where some investments are being made, it's really clear to see, you know, why all this modern application stuff is, you know, Pat Gelsinger's number one priority for VMware this year. All that story, all those pieces are really starting to come together in a kind of a unified way. And I think the stuff on March 10th was really kind of the first, uh, introduction of that. Um, and then you're just going to see tighter and tighter integration as the, as the year goes along. Yeah, that's, so that's a good, uh, good roundup as always. You did a good job exploring what's on the shelf there. I like that. And, you know, excuse me, as, uh, as, as we, uh, you know, uh, Richard used the phrase chain of custody, which, you know, uh, I didn't know we could get any more, any more, uh, technical in our, in our description of stuff, but what chain of tech custody is good. And, you know, it was making me think there's, uh, there's this, uh, uh, uh, not incorrect at all idea that like, you know, uh, technology is not going to fix things for you. It's, it's, it's all about the culture that you have. And, and I think, which has always like been a little too categorical for, for my likes,

but I think, I think there's something scurrying around here that, that, that y'all are making me think, which is like, you know, if we've got our, our product team, our people writing software, we always want them to be, uh, well, I don't know if always, but we would like them to be autonomous, which is to say they can work fast enough to like know the, the people they're serving the software they're doing and start to make product decisions so they can do them within a week, if not shorter, right? Like you don't have time to sort of like, uh, do they still say run it up the flagpole and see who shorts flap in the wind or something, but you don't have a lot of time to go check with other people. And it's, uh, to use lean terminology, the people who are actually closest to the line, if not on the line, have a lot of ideas as you would imagine about how to do things well and often have the best ideas. And it seems like a lot of the problem large organizations have is, is, uh, they don't trust people. And so if you can put a lot of this kind of governance stuff in place, then at the very least, it's just kind of a cynical approach to becoming optimistic, but you can end up trusting the technology and the tools a lot. And then if you have these people, you don't trust using the technology and the tools, maybe you can start to see that actually you can trust them just fine. And you probably should have all along and you can get closer and closer to that, uh, those autonomous teams who are working on things and hopefully making the software that we all use better, uh, which, which should be dandy, uh, for all sorts of things. I mean, tax season is coming up and, uh, you know, last, last time I interacted with filing my taxes, you can see a good example of actual software improving and making things better. It's always a pretty easy process to do versus when I used to, uh, I didn't ever have to do this cause I would do it ahead of time, but there used to be all these pictures on the local news of, uh, you know, the line of cars by the mailbox, the IRS service center and, uh, I don't think that really happens so much anymore, but the point being, uh, a huge like stack of enterprise stuff may seem a little like overwhelming and enterprisey, but I think

it has a really good forcing function in large organizations that if people don't already trust their people, they can start getting to trusting them through, uh, good governance like this and tools that they trust. So that's one to grow on and, and, uh, yeah, so thanks for being on Jared as I think, you know, people may have, since you've been on so many times, they might know how to keep up with you. They might have that memorized, but for those new listeners that we have, uh, who, how, how could they, uh, see what you're up to and see any more insights that you have, uh, whether it's time to related or, uh, you know, uh, otherwise or a makeshift coffee filter. That's right. That's right. They could follow up on my suggestion for using dress socks. Uh, hopefully, hopefully you can experiment there instead of me doing it. Yeah. I'm on the, uh, the Twitter at, uh, Jared Ruckel.com or just Jared Ruckel. No, no.com there. It's a non-commercial enterprise. Yeah. You should go, uh, register that quickly until someone else does. That would be great. I have a lot of enemies out there that may be squatting in there to, to sully my, my good name. Oh, just think of the hundreds of dollars they'll force out of you. Man. I know. Jeez. That's money you could be used to using to buy a coffee filter instead of using an old dress sock. Yeah. Uh, all right. Well, as always, this has been Tanzu talk. Uh, we'll be updating the URL, but there's two places, uh, you'll be able to go to. If you want to see the back catalog of everything, you can go to the original or legacy URL, which is soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations, or, uh, you should also be able to go to soundcloud.com slash Tanzu talk. Um, and, uh, you can also go to, uh, tanzu.vmware.com and, uh, look up the podcast page we have there. And you can see those show notes, including a link to our event this Thursday on, uh, March 19th, uh, where you can stay up for 24 hours or not.

They'll be recorded. So you don't actually have to stay up. They're not ephemeral. They won't disappear. Like, uh, like, you know, local storage state and a container managed by Kubernetes, or I should say a pod since all the pods, the containers in the pod share the same storage. I don't know. I'm going to have to learn how to talk about that. It's, it's a very, uh, it's, it's not a paradox. It's a very, uh, multifaceted thing. Uh, anyways, you can, you can check that out. Lots of development stuff. It'll be very exciting. And, uh, also some operational things if you're into that. But if you look, if you look for the, uh, the hashtag spring live and Twitter, you can also track it down as well, but hopefully we'll see you with that. And, uh, with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye bye.

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