Amanda Blevins VMware Explore 2022 - VMware CTO
Transcript
>> Welcome to VMware Explore 2022 with the CTO advisor studio. Come on in and consume some content. >> Welcome back to our coverage of VMware Explore 2022. The massive CTO Advisor studios next to our Airstream. We've been having incredibly fun conversations, challenging conversations. And I have one of my favorite people in VMware, Amanda Blevins, VP in America's CTO of VMware. Welcome back to the show, Amanda. >> One of my favorite shows, if not the favorite show. >> I appreciate it.
But you know, we we're going to get right off the bat. Amanda, you sent me a DM of a pitcher that both, you know, me and my brother Kedar is behind the camera. He's going to want to know the answer to this. Cause we both had the same question. Why in the world do you have such a ridiculously big air compression? >> Well, Because when I was younger, it was okay to put a vehicle on Jack stands and crawl underneath it and reach up there and do all sorts of work on it.
And now that I am not younger, if I try to do that, I can basically not move. Right? So now I need to have a lift, so I can just walk underneath it, do a few things for a little bit and walk away and have a good time. So I need a shop that's laid out where I have a work area where I have an area to storage vehicles because my partner and I have a problem, we just keep purchasing them in various states of running and not running.
So we have a lot of projects everywhere. And I also have a little OCD where I like things a certain way and I like to be clean. So it can't be too cluttered. So, just a combination of want to be able to expand for the future. I still have a lot of life ahead of me. So I need more room for future toys and then to be able to organize the other stuff well. >> So last question about cars.
And I promise we're going to get to some technology. Cars are technically technology. So we are having the conversation. What's your favorite new tool or what's your most needed new tool in the shop? >> Definitely most needed is a drill and a drill bit. So we're, mostly my partner, but we got this 07 Tundra and it was, you know, pretty inexpensive buy, especially during the pandemic and it was lifted and whatever. But people tend not to maintain vehicles like that.
So, completely replace the suspension with a three inch lift kit, you know, replace the- I don't think these brakes have ever been changed or pulled off and did a whole stop tech kit on there. And then drain the fluid which I don't think I've ever been replaced or having in the last hundred thousand miles. So I had to do that, but as she was pulling some stuff off like the transmission pan. Well, there's like 12, 14 bolts or something. Three of them got stuck, not just one, not just two, but three bolts broke off and got stuck.
And so, of course it's like when you pull up the transmission pan, there's not only a bunch of gears but there's a bunch of electronics even back in 07. So I'm like up in there with my drill and my drill bit, the size of, I don't even know. It's very small, cuz these are not big bolts. And so I'm trying not to rub any of those wires or whatever. And luckily only a chance to do one because I had to come out here pretty early.
I've been here almost eight days I think now, but I only got a chance to do one before I came out. But luckily I didn't need like the reverse drill bit. I didn't need a tap like just enough vibration and heat drilling into the bolt, pulled it out. So hopefully got the vice scripts on it, took it out. Hopefully the other two are very similar. >> Hopefully there are the same. You don't have to go back and get a reverse drill bit and all that.
I hate it. When I worked on cars and I haven't done it since I was a kid. One of the worst experiences is having something break off and you don't have the proper tools to get it off. >> Worse. That back when I lived in Chicago everything would always break. Right? >> It's cold. That's what it did. >> All that salt. And so in Colorado, it's not a very common issue. But of course, three of 'em not one, not two but three.
>> So this is not, I think there's parts of this story that resonates with, if you're part of enterprise IT, enterprise infrastructure and cloud building, there's this frustration that we have just across the different environments. You know, We move, you know, We read these developer level publications and they talk about abstraction. They talk about moving the workload from one environment to another. And all I think about is the complexity of making that actually work. Yes. The Kubernetes is sweet. I can just take my- my thing and put it in one Kubernetes distribution and move it to another Kubernetes distribution and it works.
More or less. >> Amanda: In the POC. Sure. >> Yeah. In the POC. Sure. But behind that, there's somebody deploying the Kubernetes distribution. vSphere, as simple as vSphere. It's simple. I can take a VMDK more or less from one environment bring into another environment, few button clicks, it's back up and running. But somebody had to make that happen. So my argument on social media and my peers and Allens community is VMware's out doing that dirty work, that work of making that underlay normalized.
So we can go back and lay back the tools. I'll be the proxy for my peers in industry. They're like, nah, that's not VMware. That's not what they do. They need to be focused on the develop. They don't have a close enough relationship with the developer. They are just in their own business. They're not talking about the right part of strategy. Would you push back on that? >> I would push back on that. We'll talk about Tanzu application platform and things like that that are built for developers.
All of our secure software supply chain work for developers. But a lot of our portfolio is to make the developer and admin or operation relationship and experience so much better. Right? So if I'm a developer and I do want to deploy container based workloads on Kubernetes and I have an IT organization that has governance and security requirements and privacy and everything else that I have to follow. If I just go out and do it on my own in a public cloud or something else I deployed, I'm probably not meeting those requirements.
Right? So then either I do it myself and then IT looks at it and says I have to redo 70 things or I can have a better relationship with my cloud operations folks. And they can put all that in place for me and give me advanced features like networking still hard, still hard with Kubernetes, even more difficult. Now we have containers that need to be exposed through service boards. How do we encrypt that traffic and all those things. And that is what VMware is solving, right?
With Kubernetes built into vSphere NSX, out of the box, supports Kubernetes load bouncers. We have NSX advanced load bouncing, adversity's applications, Tanzu service mess to secure and encrypt traffic across multi-cloud applications. So it's about, yes, we need to help the developers. We are a company of many, many, many software developers. So we know something about that, but it's also about helping the cloud operators and the relationship and the experience between the two teams. >> So let's talk about kind of that cloud operations portion of it.
I have this saying that enterprise IT is cumulative. Accumulative. We don't get rid of anything. I've gone - >> Amanda: There's still mainframes. >> Yeah. I go in environment. There's mainframes. There's AIS. There's Solaris. There's HPUX. >> Amanda: There's some sort of VAX system somewhere. >> There's some type of VAX systems AX400, there is- >> Amanda: We're hoarders. >> Cover your ears. 5 and a lot of environments. And then on the flip end, There's Kubernetes.
There's OpenShift. There's Pivotal Cloud Foundry like Pivotal Cloud Foundry Proper not Tap. But Pivotal Cloud Foundry. There's Spring. There's Serverless. I have all of the things. >> Amanda: Hundreds of services, on each hyperscaler to choose from. >> So when you're going in and you're talking to other CTOs at customer sites, and they're telling you. 3, I love the idea that I can automate the discovery and cataloging of APIs. Wonderful. But how do I connect that to my AS400?
That's still running my mission critical, the most Ernie application. >> Yeah. And so we have a bunch of super smart folks in our Tanzu labs division that you might be familiar with. And they're the folks that for decade, more have been helping people, rewrite, refactor, modernize their applications in the environment. So even if the organization is not interested in migrating off that a AS400 or something, they do have the experience of helping to connect back to those mission critical systems that the business does run on.
And that can be, so then that migration can be done in phases. When folks do start to refactor, where they have to be able to migrate off those systems, they'll take that monolithic application and in chunks, start to modernize and pull out a functionality. Now it's container functionality. Now it's a container. And then, so it can be a slow and comfortable process rather than something terrifying where you're pulling the plug. >> So let's talk about the complexity of like all- VMware can't do everything.
I talked to Victoria right before you. And I said, it sounds like Victoria, sounds like you're bowling the ocean. All this stuff that needs to happen over the course of the next couple of years, VMware can't do all of that. Talk about whether it's open source or partners. How's VMware making that real. Like when someone says, okay, man, I hear you. That's awesome. Come make it happen. >> It's one we have to ask who are your strategic partners or is your strategic partner in public cloud, Azure and Microsoft, for example.
Do you have a big spend with AWS that you need to meet? Do you have a large investment in OpenShift? Whatever those things are. Is there a preferred hardware vendor? Is there an automation tool say you already- Do you have Ansible in place? We have solutions in these areas, but it doesn't mean that you always have to use our solution either. So if you've made a large strategic investment, you have people trained on it. It's embedded in how you do business.
Then we will compliment that, we will add additional features. We will make it easier. We'll give you observability. We'll make it more secure. And so that way folks don't have to rip and replace everything they can choose to add from our portfolio, what they truly need. Sometimes they do replace cuz sometimes they have three or four tools that can be replaced by one VMware solution. And that's good, but we don't require it. We want to be an, and we want to be the core platform.
We want to provide value but we don't want to make it more difficult on folks. >> So let's shift the focus of the conversation a little bit because I hear that from the CTO, CIO, cloud architect level. People who understand that. Let's talk about the doers, the people who have to actually do the work. If I'm a V, traditional VI admin, and I'm watching this video. And I'm thinking that seems like the place to be. If I'm a CTO watching this or CIO watching this, I'm thinking that sounds great.
I don't have the people. How do we bridge that gap? If I'm a VI admin and I've spent the past seven years of my career, skilling up, getting my VCP, maybe even studying for my VCDX and learning vSphere. But there's all this other stuff I have to learn. Where do I start? >> Kelsey Hightower talked about it during the gen session yesterday, I had a cross cloud solution keynote with Victoria, Richard and Kelsey. And I got to have a quick chat for a few minutes about it.
And so I just want to summarize quote him. I can't directly quote him, but he talked about how if you're a VI admin, you already have these skills. Like you said, we're collectors, reporters. We already have all this tech forever. We know everything. We know how all the systems work together. But specifically if you know virtualization, you know the foundation of cloud. If you know virtualization, you know containers. You know the concepts and it's the same concepts can be applied.
And then it's just a matter of learning maybe a little different interface or it's used in a different context. So I don't get to be hands on as much as I used to be. But a couple years ago I was like I'm going to learn Kubernetes. And I started with it built into vSphere. So I just had to go into V center, which I know quite well. And I just had to enable that workload cluster. And then I had a supervisor cluster.
I could create, name spaces and other workload clusters. And I could start playing with YAML files to my heart's content. And then I had to learn things about networking and how do I expose this and so on and so forth. And so conceptually, I get it. It's just a matter of understanding the mechanics to be able to do it. >> There's a control pane, there's storage network compute. I just need to know the language in which Kubernetes delivers. I still know that, you know, what, if I can't reach a- I know the troubleshooting steps.
If one workload can't ping another workload. I know the troubleshooting steps. I think to reapply it to this new platform. >> Exactly. Exactly. So there's a little, couple different concepts, a couple different tool sets. That's the other thing we're trying to, at VMware is how can we minimize those differences? So you can use the same tool set to do troubleshooting whether it's traditional workloads or public cloud services or containers. So you can see that network topology, so you can see how the workloads talk.
And so that way folks don't have to continually learn and implement new tools. They can use the ones they're already familiar with. And then as they have modern workloads or use other services, it's still part of that tool set. >> Amanda, I really appreciate you taking out time in your busy schedule sitting here and talking to me about the 07 Tundra. If you came for the Tundra, then you should have stayed for the tooling around modernizing your cloud infrastructure. It's always a great time talking to you.
com. If I missed a question that I should have asked Amanda, you can DM me. The entire VMware team is available to answer these questions, whether it's online and the hands on labs, the tools that the company has put out. Regardless of whether or not you're going to go with a biased solution for VMware or not. If you want to learn more about cloud native, this is a great community to learn that in. Stay tuned for more coverage from Moscony Center, San Francisco, VMware 2022, the place where the conversation happens for cloud infrastructure.
