VMware R&D - Chris Wolf VMware Explore 2022
Transcript
>> Welcome to VMware Explore 2022 with the CTO Advisor Studio. Come on in and consume some content. >> Alright, another editorial conversation with one of my favorite people that I love to interview, Chris Wolf. We're here. VMware Explore 2022. Chris Wolf, you're Head of Research and Innovation at VMware. Welcome back to the show. >> Thanks, Keith. Always a pleasure spending time with you. >> It is. We always have great conversations, and I'm going to start the conversation with: I think the thing- the number one question that I've gotten at the show is, how did you convince your significant other to RV?
>> Chris: How do you convince? Well, in my case Keith, as I've shared with you, roughing it for her would be staying at a Hampton Inn. So- >> There's some pretty sketchy Hampton Inn's. >> That's right. So when you have Hampton Inn, or, you say, you can sleep in this motor home with a toilet and a shower, (Keith laughs) or a tent. It's a pretty easy sell. >> You've been RVing for about a year, year and a half now?
>> I would say maybe about three years, actually. >> Keith: Okay, three years. >> Chris: Yep. >> So the family enjoys it. We get this question quite often. We're here with the Airstream next to us, and surprisingly, I feel like I'm an Airstream salesman, this VMware Explore. And companies can get to be known for a thing. Like, I think at this point, me and Melissa are known as the Airstream couple. VMware is known as the VM company.
There's been tremendous innovation since the creation of vSphere. We're talking, vSAN, NSX, Tanzu, the tap presentation from today's keynote, >> Chris: Yep. 3- I haven't been, I got to be honest, you know, I've been fairly honest. I haven't been excited for Tanzu, I don't think ever, until now. The dynamic API provision. I'm an infrastructure guy, so these things that scale matters. Mission control with cluster fell over. These features that we've seen in hypervisors for years, we're starting to see that capability and processes come to Kubernetes and cloud native.
But, again, that is the past. I want to talk to you about the future. What's the top handful of projects that we haven't heard about, or heard enough about, that you're excited about? >> Yeah, there's quite a few, and we're going to be showcasing them at various breakout sessions this week. I'll be posting a blog on some of these later in the week as well. So, one is a project we call project Kezik, and this is taking a get-off style management approach to ESXi.
So, we see this really interesting for edge based use cases where you have a small footprint. I don't want to deploy vCenter instances. I want very lightweight get-off style management. So, through project Kezik, we can literally push our updates to the end nodes that are infrastructure services on ESXi simply by logging into GitHub. Same thing for your application updates. So I'm seeing your face already. You're like, whoa. Right? That's pretty cool. Right? >> Keith: Right.
>> We're really excited about this. >> So, there's going to be the obvious question around, well, the edge, when we think about the edge we think about low power. We think about Arm, etc. Are we going to see innovations around ESXi for Arm other than what we're seeing in Monterey? So, a straight on use case for ESXi on Arm. >> I've gotten this question from some customers here already and folks that we work with regarding ESXi on Arm, and we're really excited about it.
What we're waiting for, is the inflection point. When we have a large enough body of customers with sufficient scale, we've built a technology, we're ready to hit the switch. It just comes down to when is the market ready for this at a larger scale? And that's really, I think the deciding factor for us. >> So on a tangent, how important, as you're looking at partners, such as HPE, who are coming out with Arm based ProLiant Servers, how important is that to that inflection point?
>> It's really important because, as you have that broader ecosystem, and then you start seeing a broader application ecosystem as well, then those are really those points, or those data points we need to see that there's sufficient market and then sufficient demand. And then that's the right time to enter with this virtualization substrate. And for us, just like on X86, ESXi is all about choice. So, once I have that virtualization foundation down, right, I can run containers, web services, cloud services, traditional apps or VMs, all on a single consolidated platform.
And then as there's changes that might happen in the business where I might have a new need, that change is just a software update. I don't have to go and buy another piece of hardware and run another application. So you're going to get a lot more flexibility with this approach going forward. And that's still what we see, why virtualization is so relevant for edge computing today. >> So, that's one project. Second project? >> Alright. So I have a lot of favorites.
(Keith laughs) So, we have another project called project Trinidad. We'll also be talking about this tomorrow. And what project Trinidad is doing, is really taking a much deeper and much more intelligent approach to detecting malware and zero-days. So, if you look at a lot of the way inspection tools or in SecOps tools are working today, they're looking at point based anomalies. So it's like, I can see this API header looks strange. Maybe there's something there. What we've done is, we've built intelligence to look at sequence based anomalies.
So we can understand that- An example would be an eCommerce transaction. I log in, I do a search. I find a product, I add it to my cart. I do a search, I find something else, right. Then I go to the cart, then I start checkout. So there's a sequence of things that happen that's fairly predictable when somebody's buying something online. But what if, all the sudden, somebody is pretending to have a pre-populated cart and then just making a call to my payment system?
Right, things were out of order. >> That doesn't hap- That's not the natural process. >> Chris: Correct. >> So instead of looking at the bits, so to speak, Is a bit changed? Is it not changed? And then, bit readable, not readable? Does this business process make sense? >> Exactly. And we're looking at the API header. We're looking at the payload. So we can model the application behavior end to end. This is what we ingest, and this is how we build our ML models.
And then when there is any of that anomalous behavior through a particular call or through a sequence of calls, we can understand that, and then we can then alert SecOps, integrate with the other tools that the customer might have that they're using to manage their security posture. >> That's pretty cool. Next project. >> Next project. Okay. So, let's see. Where do I want to go next? Let me talk about crypto agility. So this is something where people talk about crypto agility, and they're like, well, are you talking about quantum computing?
Ya know, what is the big deal? I don't know when I'm going to have to be ready for quantum, so do I care? But what we see from customers is, they're operating in lots of different countries, they often have different cryptography standards that they have to navigate for their applications. In some cases, they're maintaining different builds of applications to meet these different local standards. In other cases, we have customers that just want to strengthen the ciphers used for certain applications to increase their security posture.
So, what we've been able to build, and this is- 'Scuse me. This is technology that's leveraging service mesh, and leveraging technologies or projects like envoy sidecars, to be able to inject cryptography around an application, so that I can get the benefits of strengthened ciphers without having to modify the application itself. We think it's super exciting and it allows customers to start to separate and modularize cryptography from the applications themselves, and have more flexibility in how you're managing security going forward. >> So Let's talk about the practicality of that a little bit and how you folks envision implementing that.
I'm a developer. I'm writing- Not necessarily- I don't know what my module will be used for, eventually. I'm just writing a module that's going to be a microservice that can be used in any other process. I'm a consuming developer that, I see that project on GitHub, I pull it down, but we have cryptography standards. How do I use that technology to apply my company's cryptography towards that repository? >> Well, I think that's what's exciting here. What we're working to do is really decouple that decision making, so the software engineer doesn't even have to be involved.
So I can expose these capabilities through the service mesh- Also with something like Tanzu service mesh, I have a global name space. And now, I have a consistent unified way to enforce security policy, regardless of where the application runs, whether it's a cloud service, whether it's on-prem, doesn't matter. You start to get all of that consistency, and it saves that challenge for the developers as well. >> So, can I wholesale change out microservices without worrying about cryptography? Saying, okay, I'm making an API call.
Today, it's a project from, I'm going to mess up, the flying cloud group. And tomorrow, it's a project from the international group. Does the same thing, similar APIs, but different security standards when they wrote it. I'm no longer worrying about those standards from the developer perspective. This cryptography project takes care of it. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's our intent. Completely isolate, and separate that, and then give our customers all of this flexibility. So, if you want to use a quantum-safe cipher with an application today, do it.
If you want to go and just start to have that modular architecture so you can flip the switch, great. You know, we're ready for you. >> So, you know what, if the Twitters does not determine the things that we talk about on our program, where else can we get ideas? If I don't ask you about VMware blockchain, the VMware blockchain hashtag will kill me. (Chris laughs) What's going on with blockchain at VMware? >> It's pretty exciting. You know, some of the core technology behind VMware blockchain was invented in a research organization at VMware.
Our approach, our Byzantine Fault Tolerant engine is industry leading. If you look at the impact, or the resource consumption of a VMware blockchain solution, we're close to on par with what you see with an enterprise database today. So, we're not these massive carbon-sucking entities that you read about in other areas. And a lot of that is due to our efficiencies. The other thing that's, I think, significant, is, in a lot of these cases, especially around financial services, the intent of the customer is, they want to be able to run these solutions, on premises, in their data centers.
So, we can provide an end to end solution, down through their VMware infrastructure, giving them the data privacy and sovereignty that they require, and being able to do all this in an efficient way. The blockchain solution from the company, we're moving even further now into Ethereum. And that's really emerging as really the open ecosystem for blockchain globally. So, I think these are all really good stepping stones, but I think sometimes people get lost in the part of blockchain that thinks this is all just about digital currencies.
Really, where we see this going is, blockchain's about having a decentralized application platform, so that consortiums of companies can get together, and they can run an application that's decentralized. It's running in lots of places, but they still have consistency, they still have full auditability of the application itself. And that's just a whole new wave of applications that have yet to usher in. So blockchain's just a first use case. >> So connect two dots for me, the cryptography project and blockchain, and this open ecosystem to create applications that are secure, agile, I can change my part of it, put it onto the Ethereum network, and use that as a application development platform.
But it's not just- There's not just traceability. It's also secure. Is there a connection between the two? >> Yeah, we're looking at- For some of the work we're doing, like, if you look at our crypto agility work, you have to have full auditability if someone has swapped out a cipher. You want to have an undisputed audit trail. So, I can always see that through the blockchain or through the distributed ledger. And that's where we start to see these technologies start to come together.
So, if there is a change, that change is saved in the ledger. I'm going to know about it and there's going to be an irrefutable trail that change has happened. >> And then the other thing around just blockchain technologies in general. We've always talked about smart contracts, this ability to create applications, some stuff that we're seeing real in the infrastructure space. We typically think about end user applications. Are there infrastructure applications that can benefit from these blockchain technologies? >> Yeah, we think so.
Definitely when you get down into auditability, absolutely. And where we're- So some of your core infrastructure services, we think we can get there. The question is, do you need a blockchain for it? >> Keith Townsend: Fair question. >> So a lot of the configuration data we have is stored in databases, and that's been fine for the use case. Exactly. So it bears watching, but right now, we haven't seen that demand there, but it doesn't mean it won't come in the future.
>> Yeah. I think where it becomes interesting, is when you need to trust external authority. So, if you're ingesting logs from a third party vendor, and there's not an implicit trust between that, then there may be a use case for blockchain. Maybe not. I think the important thing is to do what VMware is doing, in which, is to get the consumption of blockchain on par with enterprise databases from an energy and efficiency perspective. There's a lot of work to be done before we see some real practical use cases.
So, Chris, as always, it's great to talk everything from family to geek, to industry, to VMware. I didn't even ask you about Broadcom, because that's not what this conversation is about. We'll get to it another day. That was another up-voted question. com, latest projects, forward slash projects where we take a lot of this technology, put it to use in our own data center, and report back to you on whether or not you should have taken it seriously or not. Until the next time, make sure to follow me on the web @ctoadvisor DM me if I didn't ask Chris hard enough questions.
We didn't get to the question about what's your worst black tank story after RVing for three years? Talk to you next CTO Advisor. Coverage at VM world- VMware Explore 2022.
