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Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix kicks off ATLTITUDE 2020 and
John Furrier of the Cube interviews Steve and Gartner Networking Analyst Simon Richard

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>> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE. Covering Altitude 2020, brought to you by Aviatrix. (electronic music)

>> Female pilot: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude. (upbeat music) Please keep your seat belts fastened and remain in your seat. We will be experiencing turbulence, until we are above the clouds. (thunder blasting) (electronic music) (seatbelt alert sounds) Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cruising at altitude. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (electronic music)

>> Female pilot: Altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers, cloud architects and enlightened network engineers, who have individually and are now collectively, leading their own IT teams and the industry. On a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds. Empowering enterprise IT to architect, design and control their own cloud network, regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them. It’s time to gain altitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. The leader of multi-cloud networking. (electronic music) (audience clapping)

>> Steve: All right. (audience clapping) Good morning everybody, here in Santa Clara as well as to the millions of people watching the livestream worldwide. Welcome to Altitude 2020, all right. So, we’ve got a fantastic event, today, I’m really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started. So, one of the things I wanted to share was this is not a one-time event. This is not a one-time thing that we’re going to do. Sorry for the Aviation analogy, but, you know, Sherry Wei, aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do has an aviation theme. This is a take-off, for a movement. This isn’t an event, this is a take-off of a movement. A multi-cloud networking movement and community that we’re inviting all of you to become part of.

And why we’re doing that, is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds, so to speak and build their network architecture, regardless of which public cloud they’re using. Whether it’s one or more of these public clouds. So the good news, for today, there’s lots of good news but this is one good news, is we don’t have any PowerPoint presentations, no marketing speak. We know that marketing people have their own language. We’re not using any of that, and no sales pitches, right? So instead, what are we doing? We’re going to have expert panels, we’ve got Simon Richard, of Gartner here. We’ve got ten different network architects, cloud architects, real practitioners that are going to share their best practices and their real world experiences on their journey to the multi-cloud.

So, before we start, everybody know what today is? In the U.S., it’s Super Tuesday. I’m not going to get political, but Super Tuesday there was a bigger, Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago. And Aviatrix employees know what I’m talking about. Eighteen months ago, on a Tuesday, every enterprise said, “I’m going to go to the cloud”. And so what that was, was the Cambrian explosion, for cloud, for the enterprise. So, Frank Cabri, you know what a Cambrian explosion is. He had to look it up on Google. 500 million years ago, what happened, there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex, multi-cell organisms.

Guess what happened 18 months ago, on a Tuesday, I don’t really know why, but every enterprise, like I said, all woke up that day and said, “Now I’m really going to go to cloud” and that Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I’m moving from a very simple, single cloud, single-use case, simple environment, to a very complex, multi-cloud, complex use case environment. And what we’re here today, is we’re going to go undress that and how do you handle those, those complexities? And, when you look at what’s happening, with customers right now, this is a business transformation, right? People like to talk about transitions, this is a transformation and it’s actually not just a technology transformation, it’s a business transformation. It started from the CEO and the Boards of enterprise customers where they said, “I have an existential threat to the survival of my company.” If you look at every industry, who they’re worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise.

What they’re worried about is the three year old enterprise that’s leveraging cloud, that’s leveraging AI, and that’s where they fear that they’re going to actually wiped out, right? And so, because of this existential threat, this is CEO led, this is Board led, this is not technology led, it is mandated in the organizations. We are going to digitally transform our enterprise, because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that. And so, IT is now put back in charge. If you think back just a few years ago, in cloud, it was led by DevOps, it was led by the applications and it was, like I said, before the Cambrian explosion, it was very simple. Now, with this Cambrian explosion, an enterprise is getting very serious and mission critical.
They care about visibility, they care about control, they care about compliance, conformance, everything, governance. IT is in charge and that’s why we’re here today to discuss that. So, what we’re going to do today, is much of things but we’re going to validate this journey with customers.

>> Steve: Did they see the same thing? We’re going to validate the requirements for multi-cloud because, honestly, I’ve never met an enterprise that is not going to be multicloud. Many are one cloud today but they all say, ” I need to architect my network for multiple clouds”, because that’s just what, the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run in whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that. The second thing is, is architecture. Again, with IT in charge, you, architecture matters. Whether its your career, whether its how you build your house, it doesn’t matter. Horrible architecture, your life is horrible forever. Good architecture, your life is pretty good. So, we’re going to talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network. If you don’t get that right, nothing works, right?

Way more important than compute. Way more important than storage. Network is the foundational element of your infrastructure. Then we’re going to talk about day two operations. What does that mean? Well day one is one day of your life, where you wire things up they do and beyond. I tell everyone in networking and IT — it’s every day of your life. And if you don’t get that right, your life is bad forever. And so things like operations, visibility, security, things like that, how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it’s not just about configuring it in the cloud, it’s actually about how do I operationalize it? And that’s a huge benefit that we bring as Aviatrix. And then the last thing we’re going to talk and it’s the last panel we have, I always sayyou can’t forget about the humans, right? So all this technology, all these things that we’re doing, it’s always enabled by the humans.

At the end of the day, if the humans fight it, it won’t get deployed. And we have a massive skills gap, in cloud and we also have a massive skills shortage. You have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects, right? There’s just not enough of them going around. So, at Aviatrix, we said as leaders do, “We’re going to help address that issue and try to create more people.” We created a program, what we call the ACE Program, again, aviation theme, it stands for Aviatrix Certified Engineer. Very similar to what Cisco did with CCIEs where Cisco taught you about IP networking, a little bit of Cisco, we’re doing the same thing, we’re going to teach network architects about multicloud networking and architecture and yeah, you’ll get a little bit of Aviatrix training in there, but this is the missing element for people’s careers and also within their organizations. So we’re going to go talk about that.

So, great, great event, great show. We’re going to try to keep it moving. I next want to introduce, my host, he is the best in the business, you guys have probably seen him multiple, many times, he is the co-CEO and co founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. (audience clapping)

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>> John: Okay, awesome, great speech there, awesome.

>> Yeah.

>> I totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I’m excited, here at the heart of silicon valley to have this event. It’s a special digital event with theCUBE and Aviatrix, where we’re live-streaming to, millions of people, as you said, maybe not a million.

>> Maybe not a million. (laughs) Really to take this program to the world and this is really special for me, because multi-cloud is the hottest wave in cloud. And cloud-native networking is fast becoming the key engine, of the innovations, so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming. We have a customer panel. Two customer panels. Before that Gartner’s going to come out, talk about the industry. We have global system integrators, that will talk about, how they are advising and building these networks and cloud native networking. And then finally the ACE’s, the Aviatrix Certified Engineers, are going to talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed. So, let’s jump right in, let’s ask, Simon Richard to come on stage, from Gartner. We’ll kick it all off. (electronic music) (clapping)

>> John: Hi, can I help you. Okay, so kicking things off, getting started. Gartner, the industry experts on cloud. Really kind of more, cue your background. Talk about your background before you got to Gartner?

>> Simon: Before being at Gartner, I was a chief network architect, of a Fortune 500 company, that with thousands of sites over the world and I’ve been doing everything in IT from a C programmer, in the 90, to a security architect, to a network engineer, to finally becoming a network analyst.

>> So you rode the wave. Now you’re covering the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi-cloud, is really what everyone is talking about.

>> Yes.

>> Cloud-native’s been discussed, but the networking piece is super important. How do you see that evolving?

>> Well, the way we see Enterprise adapting, cloud. The first thing you do about networking, the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way. Is usually led by none IT, like a shadow IT, or application people, sometime a DevOps team and it just goes as, it’s completely unplanned. They create VPC’s left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and they have Direct Connect or Express Route to any of them. So that’s the first approach and on the other side. again within our first approach you see what I call, the lift and shift. Where we see like enterprise IT trying to, basically replicate what they have in a data center, in the Cloud. So they spend a lot of time planning, doing Direct Connect, putting Cisco routers and F5 and Citrix and any checkpoint, Palo Alto device, that in a sense are removing that to the cloud.

>> I got to ask you, the aha moment is going to come up a lot, in one our panels, is where people realize, that it’s a multi-cloud world. I mean, they either inherit clouds, certainly they’re using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever. When’s that aha moment? That you’re seeing, where people go, “Well I got to get my act together and get on this cloud.”

>> Well the first, right, even before multi-cloud. So there is two approach’s. The first one, like the adult way doesn’t scare. At some point IT has to save them, ’cause they don’t think about the tools, they don’t think about operation, they have a bunch of VPC and multiple cloud. The other way, if you do the lift and shift way, they cannot take any advantages of the cloud. They lose elasticity, auto-scaling, pay by the drink. All these agility features. So they both realize, okay, neither of these ways are good, so I have to optimize that. So I have to have a mix of what I call, the cloud native services, within each cloud. So they start adapting, like all the AWS Construct, Azure Construct or Google Construct and that’s what I call the optimal phase. But even that they realize, after that, they are all very different, all these approaches different, the cloud are different.
Identities is constantly, difficult to manage across clouds. I mean, for example, anybody who access’ accounts, there’s subscription, in Azure and GCP, their projects. It’s a real mess, so they realized, well I don’t really like constantly use the cloud product and every cloud, that doesn’t work. So I have, I’m going multi-cloud, I like to abstract all of that. I still want to manage the cloud from an EPI point of view, I don’t necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products, but I have to do that and in a more EPI driven cloud environment.

>> So, the not scaling piece that you where mentioning, that’s because there’s too many different clouds?

>> Yes.

>> That’s the least they are, so what are they doing? What are they, building different development teams? Is it software? What’s the solution?

>> Well, the solution is to start architecting the cloud. That’s the third phase. I called that the multi-cloud architect phase, where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud. Fact, even across one cloud it might not scale as well, If you start having like ten thousand security agreement, anybody who has that doesn’t scale. You have to manage that. If you have multiple VPC, it doesn’t scale. You need a third-party, identity provider. In variously scales within one cloud, if you go multiple cloud, it gets worse and worse.

>> Steve, weigh in here. What’s your thoughts?

>> I thought we said this wasn’t going to be a sales pitch for Aviatrix. (laughter) You just said exactly what we do, so anyway, that’s a joke. What do you see in terms of where people are, in that multi-cloud? So, like lot of people, you know, everyone I talk to, started at one cloud, right, but then they look and then say okay but I’m now going to move to Azure and I’m going to move to… (trails off) Do you see a similar thing?

>> Well, yes. They are moving but there’s not a lot of application, that uses three cloud at once, they move one app in Azure, one app in AWS and one app in Google. That’s what we see so far.

>> Okay, yeah, one of the mistakes that people think, is they think multi-cloud. No one is ever going to go multi-cloud, for arbitrage. They’re not going to go and say, well, today I might go into Azure, ’cause I get a better rate on my instance. Do you agree? That’s never going to happen. What I’ve seen with enterprise, is I’m going to put the workload in the app, the app decides where it runs best. That may be Azure, maybe Google and for different reasons and they’re going to stick there and they’re not going to move.

>> Let me ask you guys–

>> But the infrastructure, has to be able to support, from a networking team.

>> Yes.

>> Be able to do that. Do you agree with that?

>> Yes, I agree. And one thing is also very important, is connecting to the cloud, is kind of the easiest thing. So, the wide area network part of the cloud, connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple.

>> Steve: I agree.

>> IP’s like VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route. That’s the simple part, what’s difficult and even the provisioning part is easy. You can use Terraform and create VPC’s and Vnet’s across your three cloud provider.

>> Steve: Right.

>> What’s difficult is that they choose the operation. So we’ll define day two operation. What does that actually mean?

>> Its just the day to day operations, after you know, the natural, lets add an app, lets add a server, lets troubleshoot a problem.

>> Something changes, now what do you do?

>> So what’s the big concerns? I want to just get back to the cloud native networking, because everyone kind of knows what cloud native apps are. That’s been the hot trend. What is cloud native networking? How do you guys, define that? Because that seems to be the hardest part of the multi-cloud wave that’s coming, is cloud native networking.

>> Well there’s no, you know, official Gartner definition but I can create one on the spot.

>> John: Do it. (laughter)

>> I just want to leverage the Cloud Construct and the cloud EPI. I don’t want to have to install, like a… (trails off) For example, the first version was, let’s put a virtual router that doesn’t even understand the cloud environment.

>> Right. If I have if I have to install a virtual machine, it has to be cloud aware. It has to understand the security group, if it’s a router. It has to be programmable, to the cloud API. And understand the cloud environment.

>> And one thing I hear a lot from either CSO’s, CIO’s or CXO’s in general, is this idea of, I’m definitely not going API. So, its been an API economy. So API is key on that point, but then they say. Okay, I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers, aka you called it above the clouds. So the question is… What do I do from an architectural standpoint? Do I just hire more developers and have different teams, because you mentioned that’s a scale point. How do you solve this problem of, okay, I got AWS, I got GCP, or Azure, or whatever. Do I just have different teams or do I just expose EPI’s? Where is that optimization? Where’s the focus?

>> Well, I think what you need, from a network point of view is a way, a control plane across the three clouds. And be able to use the API’s of the cloud, to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do day to day operation. So you need a view across the three clouds, that takes care of routing, connectivity.

>> Steve: Performance.

>> John: That’s the Aviatrix plugin, right there.

>> Steve: Yeah. So, how do you see, so again, your Gartner, you see the industry. You’ve been a network architect. How do you see this this playing out? What are the legacy incumbent client server, On Prem networking people, going to do?

>> Well they need to..

>> Versus people like a Aviatrix? How do you see that playing out?

>> Well obviously, all the incumbents, like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NSX.

>> Steve: Right.

>> They want to basically do the lift and shift part, they want to bring, and you know, VMware want to bring in NSX on the cloud, they call that “NSX everywhere” and Cisco want to bring in ACI to the cloud, they call that “ACI Anywhere”. So, everyone’s.. (trails off) And then there’s CloudVision from Arista, and Contrail is in the cloud. So, they just want to bring the management plane, in the cloud, but it’s still based, most of them, is still based on putting a VM in them and controlling them. You extend your management console to the cloud, that’s not truly cloud native.

>> Right.

>> Cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch.

>> We like to call that cloud naive.

>> Cloud naive, yeah.

>> So close, one letter, right?

>> Yes.

>> That was a big.. (slurs) Reinvent, take the T out of Cloud Native. It’s Cloud Naive. (laughter)

>> That went super viral, you guys got T-shirts now. I know you’re loving that.

>> Steve: Yeah.

>> But that really, ultimately, is kind of a double-edged sword. You can be naive on the architecture side and ruleing that. And also suppliers or can be naive. So how would you define who’s naive and who’s not?

>> Well, in fact, their evolving as well, so for example, in Cisco, it’s a little bit more native than other ones, because there really is, “ACI in the cloud”, you can’t really figure API’s out of the cloud. NSX is going that way and so is Arista, but they’re incumbent, they have their own tools, its difficult for them. They’re moving slowly, so it’s much easier to start from scratch. Even you, like, you know, a network company that started a few years ago. There’s only really two, Aviatrix was the first one, they’ve been there for at least three or four years.

>> Steve: Yeah.

>> And there’s other one’s, like Akira, for example that just started. Now they’re doing more connectivity, but they want to create an overlay network, across the cloud and start doing policies and things. Abstracting all the clouds within one platform.

>> So, I got to ask you. I interviewed an executive at VMware, Sanjay Poonen, he said to me at RSA last week. Oh, there’ll only be two networking vendors left, Cisco and VMware. (laughter)

>> What’s you’re response to that? Obviously when you have these waves, these new brands that emerge, like Aviatrix and others. I think there’ll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork. How do you respond to that comment?

>> Well there’s still a data center, there’s still, like a lot, of action on campus and there’s the wan. But from the cloud provisioning and cloud networking in general, I mean, they’re behind I think. You know, you don’t even need them to start with, you can, if you’re small enough, you can just keep.. If you have AWS, you can use the AWS construct, they have to insert themselves, I mean, they’re running behind. From my point of view.

>> They are, certainly incumbents. I love the term Andy Jess uses at Amazon web services. He uses “Old guard, new guard”, to talk about the industry. What does the new guard have to do? The new brands that are emerging. Is it be more DevOp’s oriented? Is it NetSec ops? Is it NetOps? Is it programmability? These are some of the key discussions we’ve been having. What’s your view, on how you see this programmability?

>> The most important part is, they have to make the network simple for the Dev teams. You cannot make a phone call and get a Vline in two weeks anymore. So if you move to the cloud, you have to make that cloud construct as simple enough, so that for example, a Dev team could say, “Okay, I’m going to create this VPC, but this VPC automatically associates your account, you cannot go out on the internet. You have to go to the transit VPC, so there’s lot of action in terms of, the IAM part and you have to put the control around them to. So to make it as simple as possible.

>> You guys, both. You’re the CEO of Aviatrix, but also you’ve got a lot of experience, going back to networking, going back to the, I call it the OSI days. For us old folks know what that means, but, you guys know what this means. I want to ask you the question. As you look at the future of networking, you hear a couple objections. “Oh, the cloud guys, they got networking, we’re all set with them. How do you respond to the fact that networking’s changing and the cloud guys have their own networking. What’s some of the paying points that’s going on, premises of these enterprises? So are they good with the clouds? What needs… What are the key things that’s going on in networking, that makes it more than just the cloud networking? What’s your take on it?

>> Well as I said earlier. Once you could easily provision in the cloud, you can easily connect to the cloud, its when you start troubleshooting applications in the cloud and try to scale. So that’s where the problem occurred.

>> Okay, what’s your take on it.

>> And you’ll hear from the customers, that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the clouds by definition, designed to the 80-20 rule which means they’ll design 80% of the basic functionality. And then lead to 20% extra functionality, that of course every Enterprise needs, to leave that to ISV’s, like Aviatrix. Because why? Because they have to make money, they have a service and they can’t have huge instances, for functionality that not everybody needs. So they have to design to the common and that, they all do it, right? They have to and then the extra, the problem is, that Cambrian explosion, that I talked about with enterprises. That’s what they need. They’re the ones who need that extra 20%. So that’s what I see, there’s always going to be that extra functionality. In an automated and simple way, that you talked about, but yet powerful. With the up with the visibility and control, that they expect of On Prem. That kind of combination, that Yin and the Yang, that people like us are providing.

>> Simon I want to ask you? We’re going to ask some of the cloud architect, customer panels, that same question. There’s pioneer’s doing some work here and there’s also the laggards who come in behind their early adopters. What’s going to be the tipping point? What are some of these conversations, that the cloud architects are having out there? Or what’s the signs, that they need to be on this, multi-cloud or cloud native networking trend? What are some of the signal’s that are going on in the environment? What are some of the thresholds? Are things that are going on, that they can pay attention to?

>> Well, once they have the application on multiple cloud and they have to get wake up at two in the morning, to troubleshoot them. They’ll know it’s important. (laughter) So, I think that’s when the rubber will hit the road. But, as I said, it’s easier to prove, at any case. Okay, it’s AWS, it’s easy, user transit gateway, put a few VPC’s and you’re done. And you create some presents like Equinox and do a Direct Connect and Express Route with Azure. That looks simple, its the operations, that’s when they’ll realize. Okay, now I need to understand! How cloud networking works? I also need a tool, that gives me visibility and control. But not only that, I need to understand the basic underneath it as well.

>> What are some of the day in the life scenarios. you envision happening with multi-cloud, because you think about what’s happening. It kind of has that same vibe of interoperability, choice, multi-vendor, ’cause they’re multi-cloud. Essentially multi-vendor. These are kind of old paradigms, that we’ve lived through with client server and internet working. What are some of the scenarios of success, that might be possible? Will be possible, with multi-cloud and cloud native networking.

>> Well, I think, once you have good enough visibility, to satisfy your customers, not only, like to, keep the service running and application running. But to be able to provision fast enough, I think that’s what you want to achieve.

>> Simon, final question. Advice for folks watching on the Livestream, if they’re sitting there as a cloud architect or CXO. What’s your advice to them right now, in this market, ’cause obviously, public cloud check, hybrid cloud, they’re working on that. That gets on premises done, now multi-cloud’s right behind it. What’s your advice?

>> The first thing they should do, is really try to understand cloud networking. For each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitations. And, is what the cloud service provider offers enough? Or you need to look to a third party, but you don’t look at a third party to start with. Especially an incumbent one, so it’s tempting to say “I have a bunch of F5 experts”, nothing against F5. I’m going to bring my F5 in the Cloud, when you can use an ELB, that automatically understand eases and auto scaling and so on. And you understand that’s much simpler, but sometimes you need your F5, because you have requirements. You have like iRules and that kind of stuff, that you’ve used for years. ’cause you cannot do it. Okay, I have requirement and that’s not met, I’m going to use Legacy Star and then you have to start thinking, okay, what about visibility control, above the true cloud. But before you do that you have to understand the limitations of the existing cloud providers. First, try to be as native as possible, until things don’t work, after that you can start thinking of the cloud.

>> Great insight, Simon. Thank you.

>> That’s great.

>> With Gartner, thank you for sharing.

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