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In this Tech Barometer podcast, Tobi Knaup, general manager for Cloud Native at Nutanix, explains what’s accelerating cloud native application development and how enterprises run these apps across hybrid multicloud IT environments.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript (AI generated):

Tobi Knaup: Cloud Native really is a concept that describes how to build and run modern applications. Those applications are typically microservice-oriented, they run in containers, and they’re dynamically managed. On top of a container platform, typically that’s Kubernetes, that’s really become the industry standard. Kubernetes runs anywhere. You can run it on the public cloud. You can run it on a private cloud. You can run it on the edge. So if you’re building applications on top of Kubernetes in containers, that makes them truly portable so you can run them anywhere, hybrid multicloud.

Jason Lopez: That’s the voice of Tobi Knaup, the general manager for Cloud Native at Nutanix. In this short podcast, the editor of The Forecast, Ken Kaplan, chats with Tobi about the integration of cloud-native applications and hybrid multi-cloud environments. In this discussion they touch on cloud-native applications across various cloud environments; the synergy between AI and Kubernetes; and the shift to Kubernetes for consistency and portability. 

[Related: Flattening the Cloud Native Learning Curve]

Ken Kaplan: What was the limitation that’s been unlocked with Kubernetes?

Tobi Knaup: The limitation that was there before is there wasn’t a consistent sort of packaging format for applications that made them really easily portable. And containers kind of provide that abstraction. In computer science, we sometimes call it a layer of indirection. So it abstracts applications away from the underlying infrastructure. And containers are a very lightweight way to package an application, so it’s very easy to ship them all around, all over the place.

Ken Kaplan: And their connection to managing data in different ways, is that something that you have to think about?

Tobi Knaup: Yeah, absolutely. So containers, or Kubernetes when it was first launched, actually did not have support for data. It purely ran stateless applications. So only a few years later, the community, it was actually our engineers at Data2IQ together with Google, created what’s called the container storage interface. And so that became the industry standard for attaching storage to containers. But that was still very bare bones, just simple volumes attached to containers. And so what we did here at Nutanix recently with NDK (application-level services for Kubernetes), really takes that to the next level. Really adds capabilities for disaster recovery and resilience. So makes it really, really easy to run these kind of sensitive stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Ken Kaplan: Awesome, and we’ve been hearing the word resilience and it sounds like the hybrid multicloud, building your apps in containers, these kinds of things are bringing some more control and flexibility for things that you need to keep your business running. Talk about hybrid multicloud in the sense that it’s a choice or it’s where people are today. How did we get here?

Tobi Knaup: Yeah, so I think there are many reasons for why people choose hybrid or multicloud. It’s typically not what a lot of people think at first. I think when hybrid cloud or multicloud first became a concept, people thought, people are going to look for the cheapest compute all over the world and that’s where things are running. I talked to some customers that are doing that actually, but they’re kind of rare and they’re typically hedge funds. So of course they look at market prices. But for most people, the constraints are different. It could be regulatory constraints, right? Data needs to reside in a certain geography or frankly just what an organization is comfortable with, where they’re comfortable putting their most sensitive data. Some don’t want to put it on the public cloud, right? But they appreciate the flexibility and the dynamicism of a public cloud for new developments. So they’re sort of running their steady state production workloads on prem, but they’re giving cloud environments to the development teams for building the next generation of apps, which then may move on prem later when they go to production. So I think a lot of organizations are looking at what’s the best environment for each app and that’s how they’re choosing. And now in large organizations, what we see too is that’s where the multicloud strategy is very common. Sometimes also for regulatory reasons, they have to go with a dual vendor strategy. But also large companies, they tend to acquire a lot of other companies and so the cloud that the company uses that they bought may be different from the cloud that corporate uses and so now they have to manage multiple.

[Related: Containers Progress in a World of Data Center Virtualization]

Ken Kaplan: That’s a lot of complexity. Yes. I guess we could finish here with what are some of the things that you’re seeing, you’re excited about, they’re grabbing your attention, are rising, they’re coming up, everyone’s talking about AI. AI and containers and Kubernetes, they are going together, what’s on your mind?

Tobi Knaup: Yeah, 100% they’re going together. So AI is my other passion besides cloud native. Been doing a lot of work there over the years actually. And it’s worth mentioning that Kubernetes came out of Google. It’s sort of built on the same ideas on which Google runs and they’ve been running their own AI workloads on that platform internally for years. And today, the leading AI companies in the world, like OpenAI, they’re running in Kubernetes. So if you’re using chat GPT, that’s running on Kubernetes. And so it’s a really great fit for these AI workloads because AI workloads, they tend to be very dynamic. They need to share resources, very expensive resources in this case. GPUs are very expensive and in short supply. So it’s a great fit. Also organizations want to iterate on AI very quickly. So Kubernetes really enables that, enables people to ship software fast. So with GPT in a box, which runs on Kubernetes, we’re really making it easy for organizations to put these models into production. And we’re also putting AI into our Kubernetes product, into NKP to assist Kubernetes platform engineers. So there’s a co-pilot type chat bot that’s built in that answers their questions, both sort of generic knowledge questions as well as questions about the environment. They can use it to troubleshoot. So, you know, really simplifies their lives.

[Related: Cloud Native Architecture Critical to 5G Success]

Ken Kaplan: Everything’s coming together.

Tobi Knaup: It is indeed.

Jason Lopez: Tobi Knaup is the general manager for Cloud Native at Nutanix. Ken Kaplan is the editor in chief of The Forecast. They spoke in Barcelona, Spain at .NEXT 2024. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, a production of The Forecast. For more podcasts, video and articles about technology and the people in tech, check it out at www.theforecastbynutanix.com.

In this Tech Barometer podcast, Rene van den Bedem of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division discusses the future of AI and how cloud computing is evolving to power more aspects of life.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript (AI generated):

Rene van de Bedem: When I started, the personal computer was becoming more miniaturized.

Jason Lopez: Rene van den Bedem says when he started his career in computing it was 1994. The trend was smaller and more compact machines. Windows 3, with a more user-friendly, graphical interface was the dominant OS. It was a period of diversification in personal computing. This is the Tech Barometer podcast.  Rene van de Bedem is Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, where he does a lot of work in cloud and digital transformation. We asked him about the state of enterprise computing and he ushered us into a sort of timeline, that ends up at AI… but starts in the 90s with computers becoming more miniaturized.

Rene van de Bedem: And then the networking constructs had just come out. 

[Related: Focus Shifts to Migration in Wake of Broadcom’s VMware Acquisition}

Jason Lopez: The emergence of ethernet, token ring technology, and TCP/IP, ithelped establish the building blocks for the interconnected world we live in today. It was the beginning of the transition from military and academic use to the public.

Rene van de Bedem: Jump 10 years later, we went from narrowband in telco, so you know, like PSTN, dial-up modems, 64k data circuits.

Jason Lopez: This shift from slow to faster connectivity, laid the groundwork for the high speed internet technologies that would make cloud possible.

Rene van de Bedem: Jump to let’s say 2001-2002, you had the explosion of the internet. The internet really became this mainstream thing.

[Related: IT Leaders Get AI-Ready and Go] 

Jason Lopez: This was the dot-com era, with faster chips, advances in hardware. It moved us from dial-up to broadband, It was a time marked by the spread of wi-fi. Mobility was becoming a big deal.

Rene van de Bedem: So you had all of these building blocks coming together to where we are now, with the invention of the cloud back in 2006, I think it was, with AWS.

Jason Lopez: There was a fundamental transformation in information technology, where physical infrastructure was being replaced by the cloud. It gave users unprecedented levels of accessibility, efficiency, and scalability.

Rene van de Bedem: And now in 2024 with AI, we’re now on this cusp of this next rocket launch that’s coming.

Jason Lopez: AI is becoming a tool with a wide range of uses, much the way calculators did back in the 80s and 90s. Microsoft, Rene says, is integrating AI into all its products. That’s called “co-pilot.” This change signals a transformation to the era we’re entering, where AI is a must have technology.

[Related: Creating AI to Give People Superpowers]

Rene van de Bedem: People who work in an industry, if they don’t adopt these new tools, they’re going to be left behind. So in 10 years time, all jobs around the world, most of them will have some type of AI-based co-pilot that you’ll need to use to do your job, and those that don’t, they’ll just be left behind.

Jason Lopez: It’s a continual evolution. And it especially applies to tech companies which must adapt to the changing needs and challenges of storing and processing an ever-increasing volume of data.

Rene van de Bedem: Obviously, having very, very fast, expensive storage, you need that for a part of the workloads, but then the ability to archive petabytes of data so that you can derive business value from your data sets, that’s a necessity. So storage is always evolving. I’m sure it’s similar is going to be true for quantum computing. We’re going to see a shift in the way that we build our traditional computing models so that that can harness and integrate with AI as well as quantum computing.

Jason Lopez: Cloud service providers are beginning to offer quantum products in a limited way, though scalable quantum computers are not yet a reality. Right now, it’s in the realm of researchers and developers to experiment with quantum principles and algorithms.

Rene van de Bedem: Most of the cloud providers have a service that allows customers to play with quantum computing.

Jason Lopez: Unlike traditional computing, quantum computing stores information in a more complex way, with an exponential increase in processing power for certain types of problems. Rene says the future looks like a hybrid.

Rene van de Bedem: Quantum computing is not going to replace traditional computing. Every technology has got pros and cons. Quantum computing, even though the processing is happening, is not really able to maintain its state once the problem is solved. So what happens is you’ll have your quantum computing model that’s running, and then you’ll have traditional computing services wrapped around that, and all of the data, once it’s solved, goes into traditional computing software constructs, I suppose you would say, to maintain the results of that data and the history and the archives and all the reporting and everything. It’s a hybrid technology where the two need to work together. 

Jason Lopez: With the rise of the cloud, many businesses rushed in. There were and are all sorts of very good reasons: reduced IT costs, scalability and flexibility and agility, access to big data analytics, access to AI. And then, simply, it was a trend. There was a sort of peer pressure to move to the cloud.

Rene van de Bedem: When they got there, they realized, “Oh, the business goals that we’ve been trying to achieve are actually not being met,” or they weren’t considered. Typically, cost and operational complexity, because there’s a level of skill that you need to have to work in a hyperscaler correctly, regardless of whether it’s Google, Azure, or AWS. It may turn out that the laws of the land, the laws of physics, or the laws of economics are very, very important to them. So they’re constrained as part of their business goals that they’re trying to achieve. And it turns out, “Okay, running in the cloud is not such a good idea. And then they’re forced to go back. So I have seen that a few times. Because obviously, you’ve got people, process, technology, and financials are the four major domains. And if one of those is weak, then you’re probably not going to be successful.

Jason Lopez: This is what hyperconverged infrastructure was born to do: to consolidate storage, compute, and networking resources into a single, easily managed platform which is software defined, and helps reduce capital and operational expenditures. Nutanix launched its first HCI product in 2011, focusing on making data center infrastructure invisible. Rene says that when it comes to virtualization he’s seen a variety of platforms such as VMware and HyperV, though the Nutanix platform offers a more user-friendly experience. Nutanix Cloud Clusters, also known as NC2, is aimed at more easily managing workloads on hybrid clouds. Rene’s job is to make sure these platforms work inside Azure.

Rene van de Bedem: The beauty of running NC2 on Azure or Azure VMWare solution, to use Microsoft as an example, because that’s all being extrapolated in the back end and the customer doesn’t see it, it’s a lot more easy for them to consume, because really the main requirement is “do you have an Azure landing zone” and then you can build whatever service that you want on it.

Jason Lopez: Rene van den Bedem is Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, thanks for listening, I’m Jason Lopez. Tech Barometer is produced by The Forecast, where you can find more stories on technology. Check out Jason Johnson’s article which profile’s Rene, entitled, “Simplifying Hybrid Cloud and Migrations to Azure Public Cloud.” Just go to theforecastbynutanix.com. That’s theforecastbynutanix, all one word, dot com.

Editor’s note: Learn about Nutanix’s hybrid multicloud capabilities, compare offerings from VMware by Broadcom and Nutanix, see how to migrate to Nutanix then explore the VMware to Nutanix Migration Promotion.