https://www.thecube.net/about-thecube
THE WORLD LEADER IN ENTERPRISE TECH MEDIA
SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE covers enterprise tech thought leadership worldwide. Present at over 100 industry events and venues every year, theCUBE’s professionally produced and expertly hosted interviews offers live and on-demand insights into virtually every facet of a rapidly evolving landscape that’s redefining how business — and society — works.
Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley. It’s The Cube. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel.
>> Okay welcome back everyone. We’re here live in Palo Alto for The Cube’s special broadcast presentation and coverage of Mobile World Congress. Which is happening in Barcelona, Spain. I’m John Furrier here with The Cube. And of course we’re covering it here in Palo Alto. Bringing in experts and friends who have been following all the action. As well as have commentary and opinion on what’s happening. We’re going to roll up the news. It’s the end of the day in Barcelona. We’re just getting our sea legs here for day two of 8AM to 6PM coverage inside The Cube. And of course we want to break down the content. Our next guest is Val Bercovici who is the CTO at Solify also a governing board member of the CNCA the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF. Which was CubeCom which is now part of the Linux Foundation. Which if you know The Cube you know we’ve been covering that like a blanket. All these shows, The Cube has been there. This is in the world of Dockercon et cetera et cetera. Val, a CTO, 19-year veteran at NetApp of course knows the stories business, knows the converge infrastructure, know the Cloud. Val great to see you thanks for coming in.
>> Thanks for having me back on after all these years.
>> Yeah I mean it’s great to have you on. We see each other at some of the parties, at Georgianna’s place in particular. Georgianna brings all the storage and Cloud together but you and I had conversations a few years ago about where Cloud was going. And you can almost kind of connect the dots. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but I think we were right that the cloud was what we thought it would be. And probably more. For me I think I underestimated certainly the Amazon impact.
>> Me too.
>> But you look at what’s happening in Mobile World Congress. You have a bi-polar show. You have a device show. Rah-rah look at the fancy devices. And the other show you have a Telco show that’s trying to figure out their future. And that’s interesting because the Telco’s power the big networks that everyone’s using the devices for. So you have a consumer market. But the real conversation is 5G IoT. You have a collision course of enterprise issues, enterprise data center, enterprise technology, colliding with a Telco infrastructure, AKA mobile. Head on. So it’s not just more wireless. 5G’s certainly the story we talked to folks like Intel and others around that but you have essentially all these core problems that are going to scale up this next generation use cases, are enterprise-like. This is your wheelhouse. So are you looking at this saying hm I’ve seen this movie before. What’s your thoughts?
>> I actually haven’t. And that’s what’s so exciting right. As you said, there’s so much innovation happening. For me probably the big story is what’s not in the headlines at Mobile World Congress. Which is the back office work to support a 5G rollout. And I’ve had a lot of experience particularly on the side most recently. Speaking with all the big Telecos globally, and the implementations. Now what’s interesting is they’re all going through a gen two, or a re-architecture right now. A lot of first-generation MFE was done based on tradition or legacy now clad architecture which very VM based. And all of them are now architecting and implementing microservices based implementations. And a driver for that is just the explosion that 5G will enable in terms of connectivity between devices. So the least interesting stat to me is how fast I can download a movie off of 5G. The most interesting is how many hundreds of thousands or millions of devices within my domain are going to be communicating with each other on 5G.
>> We had Saar Gillai who’s going to come back today. He’s also a guest, former HPer. He built their communications group while at NFE. I’d like it if he was commenting on the same thing, he made a point I want to bring up which is I don’t really need more gigabit data, I want more battery life. So he’s kind of being a pedestrian but that really is kind of the consumer issue. You’re pointing about things that are going to be harder to do. In NFE you mention one of them. Can you explain the NFE’s current situation? Also we’ve been doing a lot of the open stag all the open shows since it started. That has become kind of a Telco, NFE storage show as well.
>> Val: Absolutely.
>> So what is the real issue with NFE and why is it important and relevant to the service providers right now?
>> So if you take a look at all the services we depend on on our phones nowadays. There’s obviously the basic connectivity. There’s additional services around location mapping for GPS, related services on top of that in terms of the collaborative apps that we use and depend on every day. Sometimes on S3 which is not always available as we’re reporting right now. There’s a lot of layers there. And from an NFV perspective from a back end data center perspective. Everything amounts to a session. So even though it’s packet switch it’s still a logical session you have to set up. So for every session, and imagine this happening millions of times at every tower, and more than millions of times at every regional or central data center. You got to have a session set up where you got to authenticate actually Who the user or the device is, make sure they have permission to be on the network and accessing certain things. You’ve got to authorize them to do certain things. You’ve got to log what’s happening. Then you’ve got to slap some firewall or security around them. Then you’ve got to layer in access to all the other resources you’re trying to combine into a service back to the end user. There’s a lot of things going on. And we have to set up these sessions for every connection. And if you try to set up a VM, for every connection, you would have to fund a multi-billion dollar data center Google can’t even afford. So this is where microservices are becoming essential right now. And a 5G hyper-connected world is where you have to have much more efficiency, in the speed with which you set up these sessions, the efficiency of number of sessions per server. And the cost, the processing of these transactions.
This is interesting. I want to just kind of translate a little bit for the folks that aren’t CTO’s out there. Essentially when you think about mobile we’ve all been, you know, since the iPhone in 2007, we’ve seen this just accelerate. You know with data and whatnot. You’ve been at a concert, you’ve been in a stadium, you’ve got signal but you can’t connect.
That is essentially the base station saying I can’t get a session. Now as a user you have a phone, so you’ve been provisioned by the Telco, so they know who you are. So you have a phone, you have a device, you just can’t connect a session to the radio connector and then get to the internet. That’s a known problem. Now when you think about IoT, internet of things and now people, your watches, your wearables, sensors on the airplanes, industrial equipment to traffic lights. Those are devices that are going to be provisioned and turned off and on. So it’s like a new phone every time. So you’ve got the complication of not knowing the devices that are coming on, and then trying to establish the connections. And figuring all this out. This is kind of a really hard problem.
This is a really really hard problem of scale at many levels. So to me what we’re hearing at Mobile World Congress is you need a dynamic network.
What are some of the tech involved? What’s the real enabler. You mentioned microservices, we know about containers. Linux Foundation’s opening up their kernel for a lot of variety of new configurations. You got solid state memory and you got new memory architectures. What are some of the key things from a technical perspective that are going to change that complexity to be seamless for users?
>> Probably the most fascinating trend to me and we’re just beginning to see some stories emerge around this is the rise of edge computing. I kind of hark back to when I started my career, I’m dating myself now but the client server era that succeeded from mainframes, we’ve seen a huge pendulum shift towards Cloud computing. And centralizing a lot of processing. Well back to 5G, back to millions if not billions of connected devices right now. There is no way Einstein introduced his problem for the speed of light. There is no way to process the exponential amount of data we’re dealing with right now at the core. And still provide useful feedback at the edge. So the rise of edge computing has a bit of a counterbalance to Cloud computing. And having more powerful, more intelligent processing at the edge, filtering a lot of data ’cause we can’t possibly store the exit bytes and yadabytes of data.
>> This is a paradigm shift. What you’re talking about is a new paradigm shift. Because it used to be a centralized computer, and then a master slave or connected device terminal then you had smart terminals, business clients, and then PCs and then smart phones, so what you’re bringing up is an interesting architecture that is an enterprise data center thing. And we were talking yesterday, and then I was telling the Intel folks, I pressed them on this ’cause they’re obviously in the data center business, that a car that’s fully instrumented like a Tesla or a future autonomous car is essentially a moving data center. So it changes the notion of data.
This is a paradigm shift. You agree with that.
>> Moreover. IoT is maybe the first technology buzzword that takes a lot of this digital world that we’ve been talking about. It’s really been largely abstract and virtual for the common person. And it makes it physical and real. So the impact of IoT is an actuator changing your traffic light. You know, it’s whether you’re getting water, you’re getting electricity at your house. Whether you’re finding your way to your location via GPS. That’s especially impacting your physical world it’s no longer just a virtual thing. So that’s where IoT’s going to become really really significant in our lives.
>> And the software program that needs to be created. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs certainly. Peter Burris and I were talking yesterday morning about the edge computing. He’s got a slew of research on this. He goes by IoT and p, IoT, things and people. And we were also talking yesterday about the relationship of the people to technology. So for instance in Telco’s they view the phone as the relationship that’s coupled to the carrier. And the premise we put out yesterday was that that’s going to be an uncoupling. It’s going to be a person’s relationship to multiple carriers if you will. So the question is how does business extract value out of this? And this is something again that Peter Burris was digging into. Which is the business value of technology. In the paradigm we just talked about which seems pretty obvious, how we get there not so obvious, but people are working on that. How should companies think about getting value out of this massive shift? A lot of moving parts.
>> The examples are already there. Let’s talk about one of the most talked-about companies around here. Uber. And not because of the reasons they’re attracting right now, but some of the classical disruption they enabled. Take a look at the fundamentals of what they do technically. It’s interesting. It’s somewhat impressive, but it’s not revolutionary. What made them revolutionary is digitizing the transportation relationship you and I have with our transportation providers. And when they tapped into that they realized the potential for that is limitless right now. ‘Cause we’re all physical beings, we still have to move ourselves and our food, our packages around. But digitizing transportation is really you know a great example of any industry. Whether it’s a 100-year-old industry or a brand new industry when you digitize the distribution, and when you actually add digital efficiencies in the back end, you end up with that 100 x effect, more than a 10 x effect. And truly earned the term disruptor.
Give us more examples that you’ve seen. I know you talk a lot of Telco’s but what other use cases. Because the whole notion of 5G and this new architecture is really coming down to use cases. And certainly the sexy ones. The car, the smart cities, I mean there’s a lot of policy, societal impact issues that need to be thought through. But just generally, what’s the low-hanging fruit right now?
>> You know instead of low-hanging fruit let me give you the most pedestrian example I can think of. Which is when I meet with some of the waste management companies years ago I took them for granted. There was no innovation here. It’s going to be an old enterprise discussion with some conservative tech leaders. I’m not even going to, I’m not trying to phone this is. I show up to meet with them, and they were truly innovating because they realized the whole customer experience of putting out your trash bin, your recycle bin, your organics bin, and so forth, your compost bin, can actually be improved. And the efficiencies added when you put GPS trackers on all the trucks. When you figure out when they have to go to the dump because there’s an inordinately high amount of garbage put out early in the route one morning. And the ability for you to know when your bins are picked up. So you can actually go and pick up those bins. Put them out minutes before instead of the night before. Bring them back minutes after. Just reinventing that very pedestrian mundane experience tells me that there are opportunities for innovation everywhere in our lives.
>> So really pick a spot to make efficient. Is probably easiest. Great, great feedback. Thoughts on developers. ‘Cause it’s something that we didn’t, and we’d love to bring you back for more time on this but the CNC the Cloud Native Compute Foundation which is now part of the Linux Foundation, you mentioned microservices, orchestrations, there’s a lot of software around composability, whether that’s an artisan light developer, or the hardcore developers down lower on the stack. How does autonomous vehicles and this new future use case whether it’s programming drones or writing cool software, to what’s going on in the developer community? Can you share any color on trends around what’s being done in traditional classic developing?
>> Autonomous vehicles is already a perfect example because CNCF fundamentally is about what we call Cloud native technologies and applications. In a typical Cloud native architecture is container packaged not VM packaged. And it’s dynamically orchestrated. So we say it’s basically declarative as opposed to opinionated to use back end speak technical developer speak. But what does that mean? Autonomous cars are not interesting if one car is autonomous. Autonomous cars are interesting when dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars along your route those are autonomous. The interaction between them, and making sure they don’t all try to occupy the same space at the same time. That’s pretty essential. But also keeping traffic flowing smoothly and preventing unnecessary traffic jams. So it’s the coordination of multiple processes, multiple things. That’s what really make Cloud native computing happen at scale. So CNCF actually is five projects right now. Most people know it as the Kubernetes project and it is very much that. I think a year ago no one knew how hot Kubernetes would be but certainly it’s taken off right now. Thanks a lot in part to Google. We’ve got new technologies around monitoring. So you’ve got a monitor your app obviously in the Cloud world to see what are the efficiencies performances for the end user. Around logging, distributed logging and monitoring. We’ve got new projects around actually debugging at scale. So debugging one process is simple as any developer knows. Debugging multiple concurrent threads or processes, that’s still a black art. And so we’ve got open tracing technologies around that, and there’s a new style of project, something known as link or d. But it’s around now and the IoT context the most important thing to me discovery of context. What other devices, what other sensors are out there.
It sounds like an operating system to me. You got linkers, you got loaders, you got all this orchestration. This is a global operating environment. It’s a great insight. It’s not an operating system.
Not in like a classic sense. But there’s some systems…
>> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services.
And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases.
There’s actually no economies of scale if you don’t go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn’t play without microservice.
>> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what?
Being disrupted. It’s literally you know there’s some great recent blogs. You’ve heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you’re using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription.
Now you know, I’ve gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp’s been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they’ve had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that’s coming. What do you see that’s exciting and what would you share for folks for insight?
I’d say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there’s a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we’ve talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we’ve yet to see.
Yeah we got to get
that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of
new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for
coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly
edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think
that’s going to open up a huge can of worms and an
opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon
S3’s down as we speak. We’re joking but you know we see
insecurity problems out there and we’ll stay on top of it. Of course The
Cube has got you covered. And that’s the hot themes really that’s
not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we’re
reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that
gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a
fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end
for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone
will get it done. Let’s see who
it will be. Of course we’ll be watching it. This is The
Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this
short break.
>> Not in like a classic sense. But there’s some systems…
>> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services.
>> And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases.
>> There’s actually no economies of scale if you don’t go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn’t play without microservice.
>> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what?
>> Being disrupted. It’s literally you know there’s some great recent blogs. You’ve heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you’re using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription.
>> Now you know, I’ve gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp’s been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they’ve had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that’s coming. What do you see that’s exciting and what would you share for folks for insight?
>> I’d say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there’s a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we’ve talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we’ve yet to see.
>> Yeah we got to get that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think that’s going to open up a huge can of worms and an opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon S3’s down as we speak. We’re joking but you know we see insecurity problems out there and we’ll stay on top of it. Of course The Cube has got you covered. And that’s the hot themes really that’s not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we’re reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone will get it done. Let’s see who it will be. Of course we’ll be watching it. This is The Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this short break.
Val Bercovici, CNCF – Mobile World Congress 2017 – #MWC17 – #theCUBE
Video Duration: 18:27
skip_previousPlay Full Video
It’s a great insight. It’s not an operating system.
>> Not in like a classic sense. But there’s some systems…
>> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services.
>> And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases.
>> There’s actually no economies of scale if you don’t go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn’t play without microservice.
>> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what?
>> Being disrupted. It’s literally you know there’s some great recent blogs. You’ve heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you’re using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription.
>> Now you know, I’ve gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp’s been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they’ve had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that’s coming. What do you see that’s exciting and what would you share for folks for insight?
>> I’d say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there’s a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we’ve talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we’ve yet to see.
>> Yeah we got to get that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think that’s going to open up a huge can of worms and an opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon S3’s down as we speak. We’re joking but you know we see insecurity problems out there and we’ll stay on top of it. Of course The Cube has got you covered. And that’s the hot themes really that’s not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we’re reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone will get it done. Let’s see who it will be. Of course we’ll be watching it. This is The Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this short break.
Val Bercovici, CNCF – Mobile World Congress 2017 – #MWC17 – #theCUBE
Video Duration: 18:27
skip_previousPlay Full Video
>> It sounds like an operating system to me. You got linkers, you got loaders, you got all this orchestration. This is a global operating environment.
>> It’s a great insight. It’s not an operating system.
>> Not in like a classic sense. But there’s some systems…
>> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services.
>> And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases.
>> There’s actually no economies of scale if you don’t go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn’t play without microservice.
>> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what?
>> Being disrupted. It’s literally you know there’s some great recent blogs. You’ve heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you’re using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription.
>> Now you know, I’ve gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp’s been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they’ve had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that’s coming. What do you see that’s exciting and what would you share for folks for insight?
>> I’d say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there’s a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we’ve talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we’ve yet to see.
>> Yeah we got to get that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think that’s going to open up a huge can of worms and an opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon S3’s down as we speak. We’re joking but you know we see insecurity problems out there and we’ll stay on top of it. Of course The Cube has got you covered. And that’s the hot themes really that’s not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we’re reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone will get it done. Let’s see who it will be. Of course we’ll be watching it. This is The Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this short break.
Val Bercovici, CNCF – Mobile World Congress 2017 – #MWC17 – #theCUBE
Video Duration: 18:27
skip_previousPlay Full Video
>> It sounds like an operating system to me. You got linkers, you got loaders, you got all this orchestration. This is a global operating environment.
>> It’s a great insight. It’s not an operating system.
>> Not in like a classic sense. But there’s some systems…
>> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services.
>> And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases.
>> There’s actually no economies of scale if you don’t go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn’t play without microservice.
>> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what?
>> Being disrupted. It’s literally you know there’s some great recent blogs. You’ve heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you’re using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription.
>> Now you know, I’ve gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp’s been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they’ve had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that’s coming. What do you see that’s exciting and what would you share for folks for insight?
>> I’d say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there’s a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we’ve talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we’ve yet to see.
>> Yeah we got to get that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think that’s going to open up a huge can of worms and an opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon S3’s down as we speak. We’re joking but you know we see insecurity problems out there and we’ll stay on top of it. Of course The Cube has got you covered. And that’s the hot themes really that’s not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we’re reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone will get it done. Let’s see who it will be. Of course we’ll be watching it. This is The Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this short break.
Val Bercovici, CNCF – Mobile World Congress 2017 – #MWC17 – #theCUBE
Video Duration: 18:27
skip_previousPlay Full Video
The big story The most interesting is how many hounders of thousands or millions of device within my domain that will be communicating with each other on 5G. All going through a gen two, or a re-architucture right now.
The least interesting stat to me is how fast I can download a movie off 5G.
A point I want to bring up which is I don’t really need more gigabit data, I want more battery life.
>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley. It’s The Cube. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel.
>> Okay welcome back everyone. We’re here live in Palo Alto for The Cube’s special broadcast presentation and coverage of Mobile World Congress. Which is happening in Barcelona, Spain. I’m John Furrier here with The Cube. And of course we’re covering it here in Palo Alto. Bringing in experts and friends who have been following all the action. As well as have commentary and opinion on what’s happening. We’re going to roll up the news. It’s the end of the day in Barcelona. We’re just getting our sea legs here for day two of 8AM to 6PM coverage inside The Cube. And of course we want to break down the content. Our next guest is Val Bercovici who is the CTO at Solify also a governing board member of the CNCA the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF. Which was CubeCom which is now part of the Linux Foundation. Which if you know The Cube you know we’ve been covering that like a blanket. All these shows, The Cube has been there. This is in the world of Dockercon et cetera et cetera. Val, a CTO, 19-year veteran at NetApp of course knows the stories business, knows the converge infrastructure, know the Cloud. Val great to see you thanks for coming in.
>> Thanks for having me back on after all these years.
>> Yeah I mean it’s great to have you on. We see each other at some of the parties, at Georgianna’s place in particular. Georgianna brings all the storage and Cloud together but you and I had conversations a few years ago about where Cloud was going. And you can almost kind of connect the dots. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but I think we were right that the cloud was what we thought it would be. And probably more. For me I think I underestimated certainly the Amazon impact.
>> Me too.
>> But you look at what’s happening in Mobile World Congress. You have a bi-polar show. You have a device show. Rah-rah look at the fancy devices. And the other show you have a Telco show that’s trying to figure out their future. And that’s interesting because the Telco’s power the big networks that everyone’s using the devices for. So you have a consumer market. But the real conversation is 5G IoT. You have a collision course of enterprise issues, enterprise data center, enterprise technology, colliding with a Telco infrastructure, AKA mobile. Head on. So it’s not just more wireless. 5G’s certainly the story we talked to folks like Intel and others around that but you have essentially all these core problems that are going to scale up this next generation use cases, are enterprise-like. This is your wheelhouse. So are you looking at this saying hm I’ve seen this movie before. What’s your thoughts?
>> I actually haven’t. And that’s what’s so exciting right. As you said, there’s so much innovation happening. For me probably the big story is what’s not in the headlines at Mobile World Congress. Which is the back office work to support a 5G rollout. And I’ve had a lot of experience particularly on the side most recently. Speaking with all the big Telecos globally, and the implementations. Now what’s interesting is they’re all going through a gen two, or a re-architecture right now. A lot of first-generation MFE was done based on tradition or legacy now clad architecture which very VM based. And all of them are now architecting and implementing microservices based implementations. And a driver for that is just the explosion that 5G will enable in terms of connectivity between devices. So the least interesting stat to me is how fast I can download a movie off of 5G. The most interesting is how many hundreds of thousands or millions of devices within my domain are going to be communicating with each other on 5G.
>> We had Saar Gillai who’s going to come back today. He’s also a guest, former HPer. He built their communications group while at NFE. I’d like it if he was commenting on the same thing, he made a point I want to bring up which is I don’t really need more gigabit data, I want more battery life. So he’s kind of being a pedestrian but that really is kind of the consumer issue. You’re pointing about things that are going to be harder to do. In NFE you mention one of them. Can you explain the NFE’s current situation? Also we’ve been doing a lot of the open stag all the open shows since it started. That has become kind of a Telco, NFE storage show as well.
>> Val: Absolutely.
>> So what is the real issue with NFE and why is it important and relevant to the service providers right now?
>> So if you take a look at all the services we depend on on our phones nowadays. There’s obviously the basic connectivity. There’s additional services around location mapping for GPS, related services on top of that in terms of the collaborative apps that we use and depend on every day. Sometimes on S3 which is not always available as we’re reporting right now. There’s a lot of layers there. And from an NFV perspective from a back end data center perspective. Everything amounts to a session. So even though it’s packet switch it’s still a logical session you have to set up. So for every session, and imagine this happening millions of times at every tower, and more than millions of times at every regional or central data center. You got to have a session set up where you got to authenticate actually Who the user or the device is, make sure they have permission to be on the network and accessing certain things. You’ve got to authorize them to do certain things. You’ve got to log what’s happening. Then you’ve got to slap some firewall or security around them. Then you’ve got to layer in access to all the other resources you’re trying to combine into a service back to the end user. There’s a lot of things going on. And we have to set up these sessions for every connection. And if you try to set up a VM, for every connection, you would have to fund a multi-billion dollar data center Google can’t even afford. So this is where microservices are becoming essential right now. And a 5G hyper-connected world is where you have to have much more efficiency, in the speed with which you set up these sessions, the efficiency of number of sessions per server. And the cost, the processing of these transactions.
>> This is interesting. I want to just kind of translate a little bit for the folks that aren’t CTO’s out there. Essentially when you think about mobile we’ve all been, you know, since the iPhone in 2007, we’ve seen this just accelerate. You know with data and whatnot. You’ve been at a concert, you’ve been in a stadium, you’ve got signal but you can’t connect.
>> Right.
>> That is essentially the base station saying I can’t get a session. Now as a user you have a phone, so you’ve been provisioned by the Telco, so they know who you are. So you have a phone, you have a device, you just can’t connect a session to the radio connector and then get to the internet. That’s a known problem. Now when you think about IoT, internet of things and now people, your watches, your wearables, sensors on the airplanes, industrial equipment to traffic lights. Those are devices that are going to be provisioned and turned off and on. So it’s like a new phone every time. So you’ve got the complication of not knowing the devices that are coming on, and then trying to establish the connections. And figuring all this out. This is kind of a really hard problem.
>> It is.
>> This is a really really hard problem of scale at many levels. So to me what we’re hearing at Mobile World Congress is you need a dynamic network.
>> Val: Absolutely.
>> What are some of the tech involved? What’s the real enabler. You mentioned microservices, we know about containers. Linux Foundation’s opening up their kernel for a lot of variety of new configurations. You got solid state memory and you got new memory architectures. What are some of the key things from a technical perspective that are going to change that complexity to be seamless for users?
>> Probably the most fascinating trend to me and we’re just beginning to see some stories emerge around this is the rise of edge computing. I kind of hark back to when I started my career, I’m dating myself now but the client server era that succeeded from mainframes, we’ve seen a huge pendulum shift towards Cloud computing. And centralizing a lot of processing. Well back to 5G, back to millions if not billions of connected devices right now. There is no way Einstein introduced his problem for the speed of light. There is no way to process the exponential amount of data we’re dealing with right now at the core. And still provide useful feedback at the edge. So the rise of edge computing has a bit of a counterbalance to Cloud computing. And having more powerful, more intelligent processing at the edge, filtering a lot of data ’cause we can’t possibly store the exit bytes and yadabytes of data.
>> This is a paradigm shift. What you’re talking about is a new paradigm shift. Because it used to be a centralized computer, and then a master slave or connected device terminal then you had smart terminals, business clients, and then PCs and then smart phones, so what you’re bringing up is an interesting architecture that is an enterprise data center thing. And we were talking yesterday, and then I was telling the Intel folks, I pressed them on this ’cause they’re obviously in the data center business, that a car that’s fully instrumented like a Tesla or a future autonomous car is essentially a moving data center. So it changes the notion of data.
>> Yes.
>> This is a paradigm shift. You agree with that.
>> Moreover. IoT is maybe the first technology buzzword that takes a lot of this digital world that we’ve been talking about. It’s really been largely abstract and virtual for the common person. And it makes it physical and real. So the impact of IoT is an actuator changing your traffic light. You know, it’s whether you’re getting water, you’re getting electricity at your house. Whether you’re finding your way to your location via GPS. That’s especially impacting your physical world it’s no longer just a virtual thing. So that’s where IoT’s going to become really really significant in our lives.
>> And the software program that needs to be created. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs certainly. Peter Burris and I were talking yesterday morning about the edge computing. He’s got a slew of research on this. He goes by IoT and p, IoT, things and people. And we were also talking yesterday about the relationship of the people to technology. So for instance in Telco’s they view the phone as the relationship that’s coupled to the carrier. And the premise we put out yesterday was that that’s going to be an uncoupling. It’s going to be a person’s relationship to multiple carriers if you will. So the question is how does business extract value out of this? And this is something again that Peter Burris was digging into. Which is the business value of technology. In the paradigm we just talked about which seems pretty obvious, how we get there not so obvious, but people are working on that. How should companies think about getting value out of this massive shift? A lot of moving parts.
>> The examples are already there. Let’s talk about one of the most talked-about companies around here. Uber. And not because of the reasons they’re attracting right now, but some of the classical disruption they enabled. Take a look at the fundamentals of what they do technically. It’s interesting. It’s somewhat impressive, but it’s not revolutionary. What made them revolutionary is digitizing the transportation relationship you and I have with our transportation providers. And when they tapped into that they realized the potential for that is limitless right now. ‘Cause we’re all physical beings, we still have to move ourselves and our food, our packages around. But digitizing transportation is really you know a great example of any industry. Whether it’s a 100-year-old industry or a brand new industry when you digitize the distribution, and when you actually add digital efficiencies in the back end, you end up with that 100 x effect, more than a 10 x effect. And truly earned the term disruptor.
>> Give us more examples that you’ve seen. I know you talk a lot of Telco’s but what other use cases. Because the whole notion of 5G and this new architecture is really coming down to use cases. And certainly the sexy ones. The car, the smart cities, I mean there’s a lot of policy, societal impact issues that need to be thought through. But just generally, what’s the low-hanging fruit right now?
>> You know instead of low-hanging fruit let me give you the most pedestrian example I can think of. Which is when I meet with some of the waste management companies years ago I took them for granted. There was no innovation here. It’s going to be an old enterprise discussion with some conservative tech leaders. I’m not even going to, I’m not trying to phone this is. I show up to meet with them, and they were truly innovating because they realized the whole customer experience of putting out your trash bin, your recycle bin, your organics bin, and so forth, your compost bin, can actually be improved. And the efficiencies added when you put GPS trackers on all the trucks. When you figure out when they have to go to the dump because there’s an inordinately high amount of garbage put out early in the route one morning. And the ability for you to know when your bins are picked up. So you can actually go and pick up those bins. Put them out minutes before instead of the night before. Bring them back minutes after. Just reinventing that very pedestrian mundane experience tells me that there are opportunities for innovation everywhere in our lives.
>> So really pick a spot to make efficient. Is probably easiest. Great, great feedback. Thoughts on developers. ‘Cause it’s something that we didn’t, and we’d love to bring you back for more time on this but the CNC the Cloud Native Compute Foundation which is now part of the Linux Foundation, you mentioned microservices, orchestrations, there’s a lot of software around composability, whether that’s an artisan light developer, or the hardcore developers down lower on the stack. How does autonomous vehicles and this new future use case whether it’s programming drones or writing cool software, to what’s going on in the developer community? Can you share any color on trends around what’s being done in traditional classic developing?
>> Autonomous vehicles is already a perfect example because CNCF fundamentally is about what we call Cloud native technologies and applications. In a typical Cloud native architecture is container packaged not VM packaged. And it’s dynamically orchestrated. So we say it’s basically declarative as opposed to opinionated to use back end speak technical developer speak. But what does that mean? Autonomous cars are not interesting if one car is autonomous. Autonomous cars are interesting when dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars along your route those are autonomous. The interaction between them, and making sure they don’t all try to occupy the same space at the same time. That’s pretty essential. But also keeping traffic flowing smoothly and preventing unnecessary traffic jams. So it’s the coordination of multiple processes, multiple things. That’s what really make Cloud native computing happen at scale. So CNCF actually is five projects right now. Most people know it as the Kubernetes project and it is very much that. I think a year ago no one knew how hot Kubernetes would be but certainly it’s taken off right now. Thanks a lot in part to Google. We’ve got new technologies around monitoring. So you’ve got a monitor your app obviously in the Cloud world to see what are the efficiencies performances for the end user. Around logging, distributed logging and monitoring. We’ve got new projects around actually debugging at scale. So debugging one process is simple as any developer knows. Debugging multiple concurrent threads or processes, that’s still a black art. And so we’ve got open tracing technologies around that, and there’s a new style of project, something known as link or d. But it’s around now and the IoT context the most important thing to me discovery of context. What other devices, what other sensors are out there.
>> It sounds like an operating system to me. You got linkers, you got loaders, you got all this orchestration. This is a global operating environment.
>> It’s a great insight. It’s not an operating system.
>> Not in like a classic sense. But there’s some systems…
>> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services.
>> And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases.
>> There’s actually no economies of scale if you don’t go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn’t play without microservice.
>> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what?
>> Being disrupted. It’s literally you know there’s some great recent blogs. You’ve heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you’re using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription.
>> Now you know, I’ve gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp’s been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they’ve had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that’s coming. What do you see that’s exciting and what would you share for folks for insight?
>> I’d say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there’s a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we’ve talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we’ve yet to see.
>> Yeah we got to get that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think that’s going to open up a huge can of worms and an opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon S3’s down as we speak. We’re joking but you know we see insecurity problems out there and we’ll stay on top of it. Of course The Cube has got you covered. And that’s the hot themes really that’s not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we’re reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone will get it done. Let’s see who it will be. Of course we’ll be watching it. This is The Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this short break.
