VMware Telecom Strategy with Principal Engineer Bryan Liles
Transcript
[Music] hey you're watching in listening to episode insert whatever makes you feel good it's not really important of the cto advisor hybrid infrastructure podcast most importantly we have brian lau principal engineer in the telco space at vmware but we'll talk about how the label of telco doesn't necessarily matter because he's a principal engineer in vmware if you're familiar with enterprise i.t technology companies or principal engineers the equivalent of a vp level position but quote-unquote uh individual contributors so i don't know bro i don't think brian
you don't have any direct reports right i'm i actively rebuff them all the time so no direct reports but you have the responsibility of a vp so before we get into the topic of telco kind of help help me understand that how do you have the responsibility of a vp but not the the people org of a vp okay well if we think about what a vice president does uh vice president is generally the facilitator or actually the facilitator the owner of multiple strategies at a
at a large level and you know that could be in operations it could be out in consulting land but in my case it happens to be engineering and the vp of engineering what they're responsible for generally is delivery of software across the domain or across a couple different products and with that comes management of resources and people they're not the same thing i actually operate at the same level but what i'm thinking about is another few aspects of this the integration of software at large levels
and that's large levels inside of vmware but also large levels outside of the company as well and then also thinking about the architecture at a large level and then also um my most important job is i'm a vp that is basically put in a position to make good decisions for vmware not any particular product or any particular person so sometimes that the principal engineers in this case are are there to make sure that we're doing the best thing for vmware not particular not any particular part
of the company something smart that a lot of more companies should do sounds like you have the dream role of any like engineer like we always you know have this this picture in our head that we'll be at a position that we can make change but we don't have to actually deal with people but you have to deal with people that's a huge part of your job is dealing with people so um there i talked about the good part the bad part is because i don't
have i don't have people i don't have budget so i am i don't i am not i mean i have access to budget but i don't have direct budget it's not allocated to me so a lot of my job is i don't rule through fiat or anything like that i actually roll through influence my my goal is to make people think the way that i'm thinking at a large scale so we can move everybody in the same direction not by you better do this or you'll
lose your job you know same same thing another vp would do but a different tactic i do think that you need the carrot and the stick so i am the i am the chief carrot officer of my group i love that so let's talk a little bit more about your group which is the telco group it is a big deal to have a principal engineer with the responsibility of primarily telco so let's talk about what is telco today at vmware all right so before i do
this let me level set and talk about what is telco in 2021 so everyone um if you have a new phone you go pick a phone up right now and look at it and you see that 5g in the corner and you're like oh 5g it's one more g then 4g but it's actually more than that at the the transition from the fourth generation telcos to the fifth generation telcos the biggest piece of that was the ability to run these applications that support telco on commodity
hardware so before now you would have to go to a big vendor and they would they would happily sell you a very very large expensive stack of custom hardware and software that uh did all the telco bits and with the 5g specifications now with the introduction of cloud native practices and actually talking and consuming kubernetes what we've been able to do now is um your your telephone provider so if you're in united states at t verizon t-mobile and soon some others that you will be able
to um use commodity hardware so you could go to dell or hp or supermicro and you could actually buy hardware and then you could work with a network provider so a nokia and ericsson and altio star on avenir and other names that you might not have heard of you can integrate that software yourself and you could actually run and here's the best part you could run uh you could actually support telco operations in your data center or in the cloud so this is a whole brand
new space but um and this is where vmware comes into the picture is that you know what if you have to manage a suite of integrations yourself that becomes very difficult and vmware over the years has actually created a great base of virtualization and running and then um things for running software at scale that allowed us to have telco the core part of a telco network support so let's talk a little history here because this is really interesting i've heard this line of thought way back
you know 2013 2014 in the open stack days that the ability to virtualize telco resources uh to enable to offer new faster services uh would be improved that's still going on but what was really interesting your heart you're kind of reminding me of when we first met which was at uh kubecon san diego back in 2019 one of the vendors i sat down with uh talked about using kind of the spare capacity of that infrastructure they're talking about to deliver low latency 5g type applications so
the telco could or a service provider could build kind of this virtualized network that could provide the 5g infrastructure services there would be spare capacity in the service provider whether it's att or a smaller provider could then sell cloud services on top is that vision still part of the overall modern telco or is that you know kind of yeah it actually is um we're still working on on actually making it be real in the large scale but let me let me take a step back and
explain telco one more time and i'll use a little bit more technical terms to help you understand like how this can all work so with the telco network before um before 5g you had the radio access network side the radio what basically called the rand and that part is close to cell tower so if you see a cell tower think between a kilometer or two from there there's a computer attached to it and that has a backhaul back to some data center somewhere and that's called
the core and there's where you do basically the core is where um in 4g land we would actually have internet access all the accounting everything else in 5g we actually have that as well and we have the ran and the core but in the 5g with the with the newer protocols and the newer technologies one thing that we have is the proliferation of this idea called the mec which is mobile edge computing which means that we can actually take applications that are either latency sensitive or
they need a lot more bandwidth or their um low um low energy which is like the three things the 5g telco anyways and we can put those where they need to be so um we if we had we could be close to a cell phone tower for um for low latency things for like um um like cars that drive themselves in the future and we could actually take that bandwidth and we could actually slice that piece off and we could push it out too far out
to the edge close to the telcos and we could have that compute there it doesn't have to make any round trips back to the core so we can shave off milliseconds of time that's happening but the problem is is that no one is used to thinking about that in the large yet and that's what we're trying to figure out so i think this is where we can all get a little bit confused at as telco consumers when i see if i when i see a cell
tower because it's not necessarily a 5g tower when i see a cell tower that's probably based on you know some legacy technology 4g and older i automatically assume that there's a set of services there but that wouldn't be a correct assumption in the legacy context there's that that ex that equipment was and this is my you know kind of layman knowledge of it that equipment was rather expensive so you would have a tower but that tower would then have a backhaul to where that 4g infrastructure
lived so just because i saw a tower didn't mean that i have kind of all of these modern services i would expect as a consumer no that's correct actually even to the day whenever you see it it's 5g so um in current and using the current words you have user equipment and that's your cell phone or whatever talks to a tower within a kilometer or two of that tower is going to be a computer and that computer is going to run a piece of software called
the distributed unit and what that does is it basically takes the signal coming off the tower and it basically converts it up the osi stack so it goes from layer one maybe to layer three and and then there's there's other things there's something called the central unit the cu that actually moves things along but um what we can do now is you don't actually need a tower you don't need a comp you don't need a whole big bunch of compute next to a cell tower you
just need that one computer that actually does that translation and the reason it needs to be within a kilometer or two is because we have not milliseconds we have microseconds that we have to deal with here and we have speed of light issues so there is going to be a computer fairly close but if the data is not going to be processed it's just actually um it's just actually changed to a format that is better for moving across networks so i'm tempted to go in like
eight different ways from technology perspectives you know i'm thinking just density of edge compute i'm thinking about control plane i'm thinking about uh the actual hypervisor and technologies that's going into these devices thinking about capacity management all of these questions which one of these topics or set topics are kind of in your purview at vmware okay so i'll take a step back and i'll just say why is vmware you know vmware oh the virtualization company actually we do way more than that now um that was
like the first chapter of vmware the second chapter you know we we definitely have things that we are running in uh we have things like airwatch and other and other applications we're running in organizations why does vmware care about telco well you know what um vmware is actually making this new transition and the writings on the wall that um edge compute is actually in my opinion i don't quote me on actually quote me on this one don't quote the company on this one edge compute is
going to be bigger than cloud compute public cloud compute one day why because it's more accessible and the barrier of entry one day will be super cheap and you know what why do i need to run computers on somebody else's hardware whenever i can get the compute that i need where i need it reason we didn't do that before is because it was hard so i work in the edge part of vmware and as part of edge solutions we're thinking of a couple things we're thinking
of things like zero trust networks or thinking of running um workloads wherever they need to run but if you squint and you look at it well hold on telco is a edge is actually edge computing it's a different type of edge computing it's telco edge but we're running we're running lots of compute in an inverted fashion most of our compute doesn't run in data centers it runs in inverted it runs out in the field and then we're and then we're bringing it back to a smaller
core in the data center so that's why vmware is doing this because we actually have a huge interest in edge computing and all from big to small and with that you can't just dip your toe in the telco so you actually have to create a telco practice to be able to do this and that's why we've done the investment because we really want to talk we want to tackle edge but to do telco right you actually have to make an investment so i'm struggling with kind
of two major different areas because i'm thinking about telco from the end user error watch type of perspective uh controlling and not it's not just controlling this enabling devices pat gelsinger ceo of intel former ceo of vmware i'm just coming out of the intel innovation keynote in which the team was talking about that each individual user in the future will have basically a teraflop of computing process at their disposal disposal that's a massive kind of edge challenge when you think of like corporate data and enabling
and protecting the data at the edge zero trust etc then i'm thinking about the telco side of it there's the movement within one microsecond of that much data within the telco network so yes pushing out the the infrastructure to the 5g edge helps with that but the orchestration of that seems like a really big problem from not just the telco side but the end user side can you help kind of help me tease out my thoughts of where vmware is helping customers focus on both sides
the the edge consumer and the edge provider all right so we'll start at the edge provider and how we're looking at this is from a big from like the 100 000 foot level is we're thinking about automation orchestration and observability and fault detection and all sorts of things so we're thinking about if instead of having all these tendrils of um of complexity that are floating around how can we actually package that up and in a way that is flexible but still powerful so that's that's what
we're doing in this space so um not to drop my product names but i have a product called telco cloud automation and what that does is it helps it actually assists service providers as we call telcos and when it comes to installing all the software they need across all the servers they need and you can think in some of these telcos we're thinking of the number of cores is in the seven digits how do i move software and and at that scale to where it needs
to be and then how do i not only do i upgrade the software i upgrade if we're using kubernetes keep that upgraded if we're using virtualization keep that upgraded and keep the firmware upgraded too and then make it move as it needs to move and then not only do that then we need to look at the other side how is it working you know is this talking to that are we getting enough bandwidth are there any faults so these are the products that i work on
thinking at that level so really what i'm trying to do is provide an ecosystem for service providers to be able to build on and use whatever software they want but be able to build at the scale they want to what the flexibility they want to to get the power they want to and make sure they have the resilience they want to so that's from that side but also from the from the consumer edge side you know this is interesting and this is actually an area right
for innovation of thinking um we tend to think centralized we thought centralized data centers you know what um i'm i'm gonna i smile as i say this but we still think about we talk about aws and we talk about azure and we talk about google and ibm and oracle and whomever else we talk about them but that's still centralized we don't talk about putting compute where it needs to be if i have a let's see if i have a if i have a chain of restaurants
and i have point of sale and security there why am i actually shipping security footage over the internet back and now i gotta pay for that why don't i just you know what the the ubiquity gear i have my basement can detect events why don't you send events back that's what edge computing is going to do for us or you know what i have a factory that has you know ten thousand hundred thousand a million devices in it i just want that thing to take care
of itself why do i have to ship all that back to a central core every bit should be autonomous and that's where um we're working to help actually define what that actually means because no one literally no one yet has built software to control things at that level and that's actually the more experimentation more experiment side of what i do but we're still thinking through well what does that mean what are the best interfaces and i'll end with this one is that you know a lot
of people didn't get kubernetes um what kubernetes ended up being was a better substrate than linux for dealing with compute that needs to work across multiple machines if you think about like that it makes a lot of sense forget all the complexity of it we don't have that substrate for edge computing yet and it's not just you know building a control pane that actually touches these things like how do we infer how do we set up networking how do we set up storage how do we
do faults how do we do accounting how do we do security and and that's that's really that's what it all comes down to what the world that i live in looks like yeah you're reminding me some of the conversations i've had over the past couple of years with some of the large retailers as they were thinking through their digital transformations and enabling applications you know i would challenge them to think about are they thinking about their stores in the right frame will the applications that i
run in my stores in wisconsin be the same applications that i run in my stores in california should they be the same applications should i be thinking about building a infrastructure that allows me to think of my stores as a as a basically a platform as a development platform to uh to meet the needs of the local market and even to an extent you know you think about kind of the centralized control versus distributed control and ability cannot create regional teams that can take advantage of
a common infrastructure or a common uh platform across all of the footprint these are really i think heady things that people need to think about a lot because you said as you said it's ripe for innovation and there's not a single vendor it's more of a community of folks that think about this and getting involved in those conversations back to the telco side of things so i kind of understand vmware's portfolio enough to understand why the vmware story would make sense to the telcos from a
technology perspective uh one of the things that you have to deal with as a vp level engineer you just can't solve a problem from a technology perspective and not think about the cost benefit from a partner perspective as you're talking to your telco partners kind of uh you know let's i know it's way beyond just virtualization but let's let's take esxi for an example obviously esxi would have a lot of benefits in the telco edge but telco has stayed away from esxi because of the licensing
model how is vmware thinking about the technology alongside the business challenge of making it work financially for both the telco provider and vmware as a publicly traded company all right so i won't i will i will dance around this one this gets into a touchy area for a lot of people but you know the idea that there is cost associated with running you know a non-free hypervisor at you know many thousands of locations is um not something that is unheard of in my space and you
know how how would i rationalize that well look at this um it's actually easier to rationalize that if you unders if you in the position of being able to have having to support um these types of installations so if you are a one of the 200 and some odd providers and service providers in the world you understand that um at the end of the day the cost of esxi actually is is material but there's a whole bunch of things that come along with that esxi and
vsphere when it comes to driver integration and things like that you know we're almost we're pretty much bar none our hdl allows us to understand what um works on a particular piece of hardware in any given case better than you having to manage it with um bare metal and then also with this is that because it's bare metal because it's um not bare metal in this case you know now we get into these positions where we can do some more interesting things where we can um
have flexibility where there was no flexibility and things that might not be provided and i am definitely being vague here because i'm not sure what i can and cannot talk about but i will say this um we did demonstrate something at vmware our vmworld i don't know if it was this year or last i think it was this year where it was this new project project monterey and what project monterey is is this idea where we can take the virtualized piece of the server and put
it on the pci bus so basically you know just take a smaller server and put it in the pci bus and now what we can do is you get the best of both worlds and why would you want that well you know what there's lots of flexibility in being able to manage hardware with what we bring to virtualization but you know what if you want to eke out all the performance that you need from this from this actual server we can allow you to do that
as well so back to your question it's like you know what's the value of esxi well whenever you're um whenever so es6i is just it's just the the hypervisor um you know there's dubious value there but the whole ecosystem whenever you attach vcenter to it means that you can actually have control of lots of things from a centralized place and with some of the plans that i've seen where vcenter now we can actually build up these constructs where we have managing virtual compute from in a
lot of places and we can actually have a central place to for it you basically turn off that the idea that i need to think about every single site individually and that means upgrading firmware so basically upgrading firmware bios and then operating system and then what happens to be running on that we can actually take that and we don't have to worry about provisioning things the hard way so i'm dancing around this because so the great thing i don't work for being aware so i can
i can i can see all kinds of stuff and uh yes you can and it's okay but you know if you think about it if you have esxi all the way to the edge uh talking about this driver piece i can have a really small piece of equipment and if it's a rural tower i can have the same services in the rural tower as i can in the big city tower because i've normalized it i've abstracted it with esxi so you know think of project monterey
some pci bus fpga accelerated thing that runs some nsx type features but on a really low power pro profile device something that that takes the power footprint of an intel nook then versus you know scaling that all the way up to a system with multiple fpgas and and uh several xeon processors in a really dense area like a uh stadium that has 5g and there's a specific application that the stadium wants to run whether it's uh security or ticketing or geofencing all these cool things you
can do uh when you think about kind of localized 5g you need a control plane for that you need to manage it you can't scale you can't do you know we're going to this conversation in the data center is it still worth the money to pay for esxi in the data center versus a kvm hypervisor is a hypervisor yeah hypervisor is a hypervisor until you need to scale it and things start to break along the seams and you end up spending people cost opex versus the
the uh opex or capex when it comes to software licensing software licensing is cheap compared to people and uh you're coming out of the kubernetes uh cloud native community you know how hard it is to source that skill set and how important it is to put those resources in the right place you're a vp of uh engineering you know how important it is not to have your smartest uh peers working on solved problems so this is you know this is a solved problem versus an unsolved
problem uh type of discussion and where you want to make your investment in people i think no i i agree and it is hard to you know i never want to come off personally saying you know i am i i mean i advocate for my employer but you know if there's a better solution actually this is one of the best parts of my roles i can advocate for that better solution does esxi work in all cases no shouldn't no it doesn't it doesn't kvm people who
are still using things like zen you know there's things where it doesn't work bare metal can work better but i will tell you that and i've seen the numbers the things that we can do with the hypervisor because we have these engineers who know intel so well we can give you hypervisor like performance and i'm not just saying this like as a ad thing i've seen the numbers we can give you hypervisor like performance but still give you the flexibility to basically have that workload being
protected by a vm and that's super important and especially in telco because we use a whole bunch of esoteric things like we're using sctp instead of tcp and i or tcp and i and udp in some cases we use things like um precision time protocol um ptp um we're actually doing things like sending um gprs which is like a which is a packet um format for communications and we're sending that over the network there's all sorts of low-level things like we are super um friendly with
all these hardware vendors like all of them like i talked to like engineers at intel who who can tell you about this specific nic and where we're at that level so this is the benefit of using um virtual virtual machines in some cases because we can we can actually not just have that that intelligence for us we can share it with you our expertise is your expertise we bottle it up and you know in telco you know certain places you know it might not work um
i was talking about the distributed unit earlier and that thing is you know imagine 40 50 cores at the at the upper end and use all the memory in the box because you know at a cell phone tower you have many gigabytes or gigabits of data coming out per second you know we're talking the the newer ones you can go you can have um you know we're talking at 40 gigabits and that's coming in just just coming in all the time and you have to do
this in real time there's no you can't drop packets so you know what um there's benefits for virtualization and and we are trying to use those in the best places but then there's also places where virtualization doesn't doesn't need to be um if you have a a small custom piece of hardware and you know what we actually have products and in my business group um we have a we have a sassy or our sd-wan product fellow cloud that's kvm and that's fine or you know what
you can have another smaller product like if you get into like the um the old like dd wrt where you don't even have that you could just have this a little tiny device you know you might not even need any virtualization on that you could just probably put kubernetes on it and you'll be fine because so just for workload management um so you know what we really you know that's the old vmware where we're just it is funny that's our name the old vmware was vms
only now we think you know what's the best tool for the product given the use cases in the caveats and we work from there so brian i really appreciate you spending the time to kind of one give us the basis of telco modern telco because this is something that the enterprise i.t industry has been talking about for at least eight or nine years and kind of wedging themselves in and talking about how they add value for the telco piece and secondly we went a little long
compared to our normal podcast but i think it was worth it one uh we don't get a vp level engineer resource often that's kind of hyper focused on a segment and i wanted to give the topic the time that it deserves uh you uh i think we'll next time that we see each other in person i don't know when that's going to be but i love to kind of uh get a update on your vision around you know this distributed compute problem at the edge where
does kubernetes fit into that is it kind of the the correct way to think about it from a control and control plane orchestration level or is there other stuff there's just a ton of things that i'd like to pick you're bringing route but for people who want to follow you online how can they do that um i have a linkedin page it's very bare um it has my current job on it and that's just because you know what i'm tired of people coming and asking me
about what i did 15 years ago decide to ask me about what i do now that's important so you know brian lyles b-r-y-a-n-l-i-l-e-s on linkedin and then i use twitter um i don't know i'm not sure if i'm super effective with it um i like to share things that i find interesting and so on b-r-y-a-n on l on there um and you know i i i like chatting on there that's how actually how keith and i um keep up with each other he'll post something and
i'll just come right behind him and say this is what i thought at least yeah i've learned an incredible amount from you on twitter i think you use it extremely effectively uh you post both social issues and technical issues and uh industry topics that i just love interacting with you if you want to learn more about the cto advisor you can find us on the web the ctoadvisor.com uh for slash podcast to find all the previous podcast episodes there's you'll even find a conversation with me
and brian from two years ago at cubecom where he kind of explained he i credit him for helping me understand kubernetes not from a technical perspective because that part i understood but he has this really great uh spill about the the business value of kubernetes is well worth the listen you can find me on twitter at cto advisor dms are open you can challenge me you know this is not a sponsored podcast and i think i was pretty i had some pretty tough questions of brian
he you know the the whole pricing thing he he punted but that's okay if there was other questions you thought i should have asked him dm me and i'll be more than happy to pass those along talk to you next cto advisor podcast
