00:01
Thank you everybody for joining us for this month's coffee break, August 9th 2022. Like it says there, the hardware free zone, a career arc from network to VM Ware to stores to cooper Netti there was even like Citric in there. All this other stuff, John, we're gonna talk about that later.
00:17
I am joined today by John Owings uh fancy title director of cloud architecture and we'll introduce him in just a minute because he's the one who's actually gonna hit on all that stuff that we promised in the title as always, this is a series. Thank you so much for joining us this month. It's actually August 2022. If I've got my timing right?
00:34
I think that we are at about 2019 or 20 months here. If you ever want to catch any of the previous recordings, they've aged better than usual. I think due to the solutions focus everything from security to technical architecture to ransomware pieces like last month with Andy Stone to public, private and hybrid cloud and even file strategy and architecture all over the place,
00:54
right? Uh This is in the follow up email that you get, you can click any of these links or hit the link up there. I recognize there are some incentives here, you know. So thank you so much. If you're joining us partly or maybe only for these, that's fine, we'll see that by no later than tomorrow based on attending.
01:10
Uh There are some folks we appreciate you being here, but as you know, we can't send you gift cards as well. If you're waiting for the drawing, there will be a drawing at the end, an ember mug value of 100 and $30. It's the kind of cool mug that you can control your phone just because actually my wife really likes the one that we have that kind of thing. But it's a little bit of like,
01:25
hey, because we can do that and finally two items next month because it is a series we're gonna have Anthony. No, Tino with us going over what's new in Microsoft sequel server and pure storage. Yes, we'll explain why it says, you know, hey, your personal database time machine, spending time in space, the sequel, that kind of thing.
01:43
If any of you remember, you may remember last year just about a year ago. Actually July of last year, we actually had our Geni Fernandez on to cover that topic in a different flavor, right kind of thing. Uh Does anyone remember you can put in the chat? Uh what was super unique about our genus that month he chose.
02:02
Thank you all so much for joining us the whole time. He joked that it was, the title was, oops, I did it again on my sequel server and five minutes before it court. He was like I got a wig, I'm gonna put it on. So um I'm not expecting that from you John to be very clear. Um And I don't think I should or you should.
02:15
Yeah. No, I have no wick but it was fun, you know, kind of thing. Uh OK, then as well. Let's get back here down to that. And there we go. Last item before intros is we do have a very cool kind of interesting event. Next, it's this month, it's actually my birthday, August 18th.
02:34
Look at that. I shouldn't say that publicly but oh, well, with Justin Emerson technical evangelist, I want to break free while it is about breaking free from the complexities of data storage and links into our recently huge announcement from pure accelerate around Flash blade s. Then the second part will be the ultimate queen tribute, almost queen band.
02:51
A very non-traditional event. I hope you join us for that. OK. We're doing the housekeeping in almost record time, you know, a couple of minutes. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Miller. Appreciate you being here. I've been wandering through technology pieces for a while.
03:03
I'm not going to introduce myself in general on these topics, but I'm gonna throw in some color commentary because while, while John you've got me beat on the citric side, I did there was networking in there and VM Ware and we, we met each other in storage days one or two or three companies ago. Give or take. I don't know.
03:19
So I'm around there, there's uh there's some shared hands on background and otherwise with that John, do you mind introducing yourself as far as kind of your current role? And then the rest of this, we'll kind of dig deeper into your history. Yeah, definitely. So John Lings, I am the director for cloud native strategy at pure storage.
03:36
And um before, before uh port works was acquired by pure storage. I worked, I was, I was an sme for containers for a couple of years and some things like that. So, but for now, right, I'm working a lot on P DS port works data services. If you've heard of it, we will definitely talk about it a little bit later. But uh I do uh spend most of my time, you know, kind of introducing it to customers and getting
04:01
our as it's just gone g A getting new customers on board and, and using it. So cool. Thank you. Oh, that's hard because like some of this, we're gonna go through the extended history. So like it says there today is a little bit different each, each month. Uh we try and mix it up a little bit so where
04:18
it says the hardware free zone, everything that we're gonna talk about once we eventually get to the pure product pieces of it is actually software only. You can run it with pure hardware and hopefully you will, but you don't actually have to. And then as part of this is I was chatting with John, he actually joined us.
04:29
As you may remember a year ago, along with Michael Front, he went to the previous um first edition of Coffee Break on Cotti and then Port works. But John's career path, I mean, he's actually very, very interesting in that. And that's actually the agenda here. He started out a little bit of shared stuff, you know,
04:43
starting out from ground zero, starting with storage virtualization networking. So we're actually gonna do for the first half of today is actually walk through actually John, some of your career and history. I appreciate you being willing to be kind of open and transparent there in a in a decent form. But with the goal of helping you give you nuggets pieces of insight that might help you
05:01
as you're thinking about various career transitions and navigation. So that's both starting out from ground zero, you know, always learning and sharing, learning in public into the storage vendor landscape and beyond a snowy day in Austin, maybe uh some folks will be able to guess what that means and then we'll finish up with both from a port work standpoint kind of continuing leadership and new things
05:21
since we covered this topic last year. Hopefully that feels fair for everybody. Please make sure to use the chat, put questions in the Q and A and we've got David Castellini Castellani, hope I get your name right. And Emily here to help with the chat in the Q and A really appreciate that and like it says, there, we're just gonna jump to the end and
05:40
then we'll jump back to the beginning. But I think John does uh does Cotti solve everything is that, is that basically the way things work? There's no doubt. I mean, uh you know, everybody, everybody out there saying hello, it just keeps going by and that's like a micro service to us,
05:57
right? It just keeps cotis keeps rolling by ding ding ding. So um I'm pretty sure for folks who, who know Dover and like Dover, this is one that I remembered when John and I were preparing, we prepare for these not to make it scripted, but we've got, we know what we're gonna go through.
06:11
Hey, co is great. That doesn't feel like a so good for good for Winfield there. Thank you, you know, kind of thing. But, but the, but there is the classic and this 10 years ago, this could have been something else. But you know why moving all our apps to the cloud? The cloud didn't solve a problem, your
06:23
architect to be native can't solve a problem just by saying techie things, Kubernetes, hopefully, uh nobody on here identifies with that. If you do, we're absolutely not making fun of you. We're making fun of the industry, you know, other random people but, but not you. So starting out a little bit John,
06:38
I mean, so you're today focused on all things, Kubernetes and, and port works and not really doing much kind of in traditional data center, but you didn't, you didn't start there and you mind kind of helping us just explaining kind of where you started in your career because for some folks, it might be where they started too or even, even, maybe where they are right now.
06:59
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, probably like most people that the, the intro to it work was I was on the phone, answering, answering, uh, help, help center, help desk calls, help call center, help desk, something like that. I was answering phone calls.
07:17
Um, I mean, it actually went all the way back to, to school, but when I first graduated, I kind, that was my side job while I was at in college. But also when I graduated, that's just something that was easy to find because everyone needs someone to do that. So, you know, I spent a couple of years resetting passwords and getting yelled at by
07:34
people who broke their computers. But it's fun. Executives. Never forget passwords. Never ever, you know, it was the worst in window in windows 2000. We required them to have, you know, seven characters or, you know, and, and a capital, it wasn't even that hard.
07:49
Right. And they're like, but I can't make it password anymore. No. Sorry. And they would threaten to talk to my boss. I was, like, go call my boss. Like, he's the one who made that, like, so have fun.
08:03
Actually, I had one point where I, I had a boss. Actually, I worked to help desk because while in college where he was really wanted us to put a lots of information into the tickets and I started putting like little things and like um his, his name wasn't Fred, but Fred, are you reading this? And, and he never commented and then about a year after that the ticketing system crashed, we found out that he'd been running skunk works
08:22
and hadn't had it backed up by it operations and all that ticketing data was lost. It made me very cynical about uh ticket notes more than I should be. So, you know, keep going John always back up. But yeah, yeah, definitely. And, and from there, you know, obviously I was kind of just while I was sitting on the help desk,
08:39
I was just doing the best I could to learn new things. And some of that was Cisco, some of that was citric anything, basically, anything to get off the help desk. I don't know if anyone else relates to that. I was like, I will learn anything, you know, I, I learned some sequel server, anything to, uh, to escape from answering phones all day long.
08:59
So that was, uh, that was definitely my path into more of sis admin after that. So, and there's even, I mean, I think you, um, you started and saw VM Ware even, maybe around the same time that I did, I think maybe a little bit earlier actually. So like V I three and started in some training there. Yeah, that, yeah, that's actually, that's, that's funny because that,
09:21
you know, the last thing I did as a customer was I went to a, like a VCP training class and I, you know, I was by then I was a, a man like I was basically responsible for anything that had power and my boss, he read a magazine on a plane that said VM Ware was cool. So he sent me to this class and I was, of course like,
09:39
yes, let me get it. I'll go do that, that I've actually been trying to use that for years and then he wouldn't pay for it. So, um I was like, yes, let's do it. And so I went to the class and um it was, yeah, it was definitely like, it was like the V I three class. Um There's, it was still when, when uh V or not, it wasn't even called V back then,
10:01
right? Virtual infrastructure. Three was very new. It wasn't even like 3.1. It was XIV motion. I think, uh, DRS was brand new back then. We were in V I three. I remember that I'll shut up and let you keep going. Yes.
10:16
Yes. And so, um, from that class, I, you know, I met a guy and this is kind of where I left being a customer as I met this guy who was in that class to learn, but he was, he was basically starting an MSP and a and then we just, you know, kind of talked and after he, after the class a few months and I passed the test, I was like, he kind of reached out. And so I went and started working for this MSP.
10:42
And from there, I started doing, you know, post sales presales, you know, a little bit of every, you know, uh also running the VM Ware environment that hosted all the M SPS clients. So that was definitely the change. And that's actually where I first probably had, I had a storage array before, but I had a storage array with VM Ware. So, um it was like my first touch of storage
11:05
which led to, you know, more, you know, I don't know how far, how, how far in the future of the store you want me to go. But, um, yeah, from there, you know, that, that company didn't work out, you know, nobody's ever heard of it because it's gone now. Um And so from there, that actually opened up an opportunity to move to Atlanta from
11:26
Tennessee. And that's where, that's where I was really truly on the, like, I did nothing but VM Ware from then on out and uh and did post sales. Basically, I went with that, that um that V to P CD and like went into someone's went into someone's business and like just started consolidating servers. I did that for a couple of years.
11:50
And uh that's where I really dug into every, you know, everything that the touch VM ware, you had networking, you had, you know, V lands and Izzy to, to ecologic, I did a lot of ecologic back then. Um a long, long time ago, it was like 2009, 2010. Well, and, and there, there were two themes that I wanna make sure to kind of pull out
12:10
because this is like, this is also your story and even kind of the navigation points. But one was even when you were back on the help desk side, you had mentioned that you're doing a lot of automating, you know, the good, like being lazy in a, in a good way. I think, you know, that you were trying to, if you, if you didn't touch stuff,
12:24
it just ran because it, it was set up well and you automated anything you could. And then also when you had the opportunity to look wasn't kind of embraced a little bit of the fear of like being, you know, Mr it or the it person actually working in large environments which then broadened out your perspective a lot. So maybe, maybe then you can keep going too. But I just want to make sure to highlight what
12:46
we talked about that theme of automation and leaning into scary stuff a little bit from a care, both of those from a career standpoint. So, yeah, that was kind of one of the things that motivated me to kind of move towards doing VM ware. I mean, out of, out of my comfort zone of the, I had my own office at the company and this customer that I worked for and,
13:06
but I had everything automated and I kind of just, it was just boring at that point. Like, unless somebody purposely tried to break something or we would need to upgrade something, I would, I would go back and, and I would just have, you know, scripts that would throw, you know, alerts for security alerts or if a switch port wasn't running at um one gig, it was for some reason negotiating at 10,
13:27
like I, you know, ok, I'll go fix it. But like, you know, I kind of had everything set and it was like pearl script back then. But, um and you know, it was just, it was one of those things where like I need to go find something that changes a little bit more. That's what I got into post sales and started, you know,
13:44
delivering vmware services. And even from that, it was all about automate. Like, how do I, how can I automate this install? Like we built this little, uh, my coworker and I, my friend, like we built this box that would actually like bootstrap and install vsphere. So we would come in, plug that thing in and
14:01
like just, you know, use Pixie boot and install it, you know. Yeah, almost to the point where it looked too easy, you know, customers are like, well, I look too easy. We should have done that ourselves. But I'm like, ha you're paying because I know how to make that machine. So, yeah, so no, you know, definitely automation like always trying to always trying
14:19
to do that and it at right about that time and when I started doing that is when I started to blog, right? So I think the key theme is learning in public highlighting that keep going. Yeah, you want, you want like, I think, and I encourage everyone to do it like, you know, and don't go, you know, I, you go put a Google analytics on it and like freak out
14:39
like if there's only five hits, you know, or if there's 100 and 1000 hits. Um is that you, you know, you sharing that once you can regurgitate that information in a way that you think is explaining it to someone else. Um You really, that's when you really know it, right. And I go back still and I find stuff that I did and I'm like,
14:58
oh I did that. And um you know, so that was, that was one of those things that, that uh that I learned along the way. And that's kind of led into more and more involvement in the community which, you know, like, so John, if anyone remembers John Reyer, uh he found my blog, it was all about VM Ware. I was like learning ESX commands,
15:19
cli commands back then. And you know, hey, you know, he found it and put it on the aggregator and kind of the rest was history because even when that company, the MSP failed, I, I like the community. Some people that I work with, actually somebody who works here at pure now reached out and said, hey, let's, you know, how can I help you? Right. And so 12 things like learning in public in
15:43
front of everyone, you know, you really know it when you, when you share what you're learning and also when you get in the community and get involved and help others, like, you know, they also, they also end up uh helping you when sometimes things don't go the way you planned that actually, if you don't mind Emily, going ahead and launching um the first poll, we're gonna break this up.
16:06
I mean, there, there's too much actually interesting in, in our, so we had to trim it down, but this is almost kind of a little bit of a fun thing and we'll leave this up here for a while while we keep going. So, you know, first question, what version of VM Ware did you first use? Um And maybe for some folks since you didn't even use it,
16:21
you know, because, hey, this is a, this is about Cobert. He's in part works, right? You know, so, hey, that's cool too. As well as pop quiz. If you worked in help desk, you've worked in operations. Uh SRE if we use the modern term today, you know, whatever uh the thing is down,
16:33
the problem is always, you know, take your pick or if you want to put other ones, uh you can go ahead and uh and put that in the chat too. So hopefully we keep it a little bit, a little bit fun and light. I love John the comment though about blogging. Um John Troyer and the expert picking it up and you met folks through that community.
16:50
I mean, there's, there's some of the stereotypes rightfully so about it. Communities being more introverted. OK. That's not about, do you like to talk to people or not? It's about where do you get energy? How do we recharge, right, kind of thing. I'm actually a little bit balanced on that. But, but then actually that led to you moving off of the MSP and the,
17:06
you know, kind of partner provider side into the storage vendor landscape. Am I kind of talking about how that happened? Because that's a hard jump sometimes. Yeah, it was so it was, it was, I was happy doing what I was doing. It was fun. I mean, it was weird hours installing and doing VM ware stuff,
17:24
but that was gonna last forever. Right. Eventually we would have virtualized everything. Um But, uh you know, I went over to the, um to the, the, the big storage company at that point, they were building a team of specialists basically to go in and talk about, you know, basically bridge the gap between VM Ware and their storage, which, you know, is that kind of theme of kind of taking kind of an old legacy
17:51
business and trying to convert it to be relevant to some new to a new customer, right? And uh and doing that with, you know, you could, you know, I had one of those cool bowling shirts that from E MC, that V specialist shirts. And, um, you know, honestly, that was a great time. There was, you know,
18:10
really great people that I worked with there. And um that's where you actually, that, that's where you and I first met, I think we met at a VM world or through like a thing in North Carolina. And, and, you know, I learned a ton there. Right. I um learned a ton about, you know, being in front of customers,
18:28
um learned a lot about um obviously E MC. But um you know, and I blog too and, and that was one of the things too is I always wanted to keep that blog as a history. So, you know, when I first came to pure, it was kind of a like, should I like kind of all this stuff? And I decided to keep it.
18:47
I was like, hey, you know, you know, one like the V si plug in for vs Ford do like nobody cares about anymore. But I wanted to show that like, there's, there's nowadays, oh gosh, there's probably like 14 or 15 years worth of history on there. Um Honestly, so, you know, it's some of those links probably don't work. So if you find the blog and you're looking at
19:08
some of the super old stuff that probably links to things that have long since been erased. But yeah, I wanted to have that out there and uh and work with them. So, yeah. Oh, there's, there's a good portion of the, the current version of the blog. So it did start off as is two vcps in a truck. So um that was the, that was the big thing is two vcps because,
19:28
you know, I had the, I had two VM Ware Certified Professionals and the story really came out was, is that a coworker and I, we both had passed the test and we were at the MSP, we weren't happy. You know, we're like, let's just go start our own. We'll just have a truck, we'll drive around and we'll be two vcps in a truck kind of building off the,
19:47
out of. If you in the, in the U si think it may be a southeast thing, but they have two men in a truck. It's like a moving company company. Keep it simple. All you need is a truck and some people to help you. So yeah, and so I thought, man, we just get a
19:59
truck and we'll go help people. Um And it kind of became a joke with him. And I, and so we, you know, I started the blog around that and then recently, you know, just because of Kubernetes and I honestly haven't renewed my VCP for a little bit. I won't admit how long. But the, yeah, the, I still remember how to create a VM guys.
20:19
Um But the, the um moving over to Kubernetes, I was, I kind of like rebranded it. That's why it's called, you know, Crash Loop back off, which if you use Kubernetes and you see Crash Loop back off, it usually means something bad is happening and I just thought it was a funny word. So I am watching Time here and I hate this, but maybe in there was a point then where you,
20:40
when you went over to pure. It was a big jump because there were no flash arrays in the Southeast and, and I think maybe I'll just even kind of with this, of, of any lessons learned as you were going to pure. And even there, there's one great cause story in there before we go to the third section and
20:57
close down the pole. Yeah. Yeah. Oh I mean obviously when I, when I came over to, to Pure from E MC, it was right at the time when that like, you know storage war flash war is basically what I called it, right? It was like all the new flash, all flash products and there were no flash arrays. So everyone here that's a fa customer,
21:17
you know, flashlight didn't exist flash array was nonexistent. So we had to explain who we were to everyone we went to. Um and that's, that's changed a lot. But 11 funny story is the very first time I had to wear a suit at Pure and probably the last time I wore a suit at Pure, we were meeting the cio of a large beverage company and he cause was coming in.
21:41
So coz the founder of Pure um he comes, he comes in and uh I have a suit on my sales guy has a suit on. We're meeting the cio of, of this company who you know, he's very important and coz has like some cool new things that he's gonna talk about and he's got a t-shirt and some new balance tennis shoes and because it was 29 degrees that day in Atlanta, he had sweatpants on instead of the gym shorts.
22:08
So anyone's ever met him, he usually has those gym shorts on. Like he, you know, he, but he, he put on the pants because it was kind of cold and windy that day. Um, but yeah, that's definitely like something I always remember as kind of folk folklore of uh of old pure storage all the way back to 2013. But honestly, like just seeing the things exp explode and grow over those times.
22:31
It was, it's been a long time. I think that the themes that I wanted to pull there is sometimes it's, we can wrap up our identity as technologists, we enjoy what we do in the products that we've worked with, right? So it can actually be kind of scary. Like you mentioned, like you had all that stuff on the blog.
22:43
Like, do I pull all that stuff down? Am I not being true to myself? Like it's, it's fine to change technology stacks? It should never be like, oh, I hate the previous stuff or it's, it's often usually more about what am I running toward? What do I find? Interesting?
22:54
We all vote with our feet from an employment standpoint. And frankly, when you see that, as long as it's not about casting throwing stones or casting aspersions that. That's fine. Right. And we do progress and learn, like 10 year ago, Andrew said different things than today. Andrew and I'm actually fairly comfortable. I don't think I was a total idiot 10 years ago
23:10
though. Hopefully, I know more now, you know, because things have changed from a poll standpoint. Thanks everyone for, uh, contributing. It looks like we had, uh, 8% that said what's VM Ware never used it. And then we've got this split between like 34 and five.
23:23
It's pretty close. That's fun to see. And then uh pop quiz. The thing is down, I saw in the chat and folks saying um you know, hey, that you, you should make sure to include citric. So there's a, there's a shout out for you John and history. I always got blanked Crick always got blamed. So I worked with some developers and whenever
23:41
anything went wrong, like if their query didn't run, it was, hey, is the network broken? So I, I lived that definitely. Or citrics down. No, it's not. Well, see the network there. It's number 1 43%. So now section three. All right, before we jump into um kind of the
23:57
update on pure in this space, but this is now bringing you into this space. So you were focused in on, you know, VM Ware storage, all these previous pieces, not there was automation and pearl scripts which kind of starts to wander toward that. But there was a point where you started to shift almost totally and you started to shift away from storage, working at pure and then even totally,
24:18
which is kind of crazy to work for a company called Pure Storage. But to move away from doing storage stuff, we got a dramatic headline there on a snowy day in Austin. Tell us the story and play it out. Oh yeah. So I mean, at that point after kind of pure IP O there was the flash ray, the flash blade was out.
24:35
Um And if you've noticed a theme with me, like I don't want to always be learning new things and I just saw that, you know, there were some, some big customers asking about containers, you know, how can we help, you know, how can we help them? I had been switched over to be more of an sme and VM ware at that time. Um Surprise, surprise and I was like, well, I wanna, I wanna learn more about this and also
24:56
it was, you know, hey, let's just jump in and help this customer because that's kind of what we do at pure, just jump in, make sure we make sure we make sure we make them happy. So I'm learning about containers. I end up going to um do which I, I learned a lot at but then that following winter or beginning of the winter, um it was the first cub con that I had been to and it was in Austin.
25:18
I think this was 2017, maybe beginning of 2018. I can't quote that right year. But you know, that is where I, that kind of light bulb went off because you see like these big um vendors, Microsoft oracle Red Hat before they got bought, I think it was before they got bought uh by IBM. But IBM was also there and I'm like, this is gonna be, this is gonna change the way people, you know,
25:44
deliver their services, deliver, applications, deliver, whatever and whether it was whether and luckily there was a way for us to tie in storage so I can like keep a job and work, but I really saw how that would change, right? And so I did, I dug in, um I, you know, obviously I started with Docker at first and then I kind of started doing more and more Burnet and this is probably like 1.12 1.13 back then.
26:11
Um It was before C si was a thing. It was before, you know, any of that. There's even 11 class you mentioned that was really helpful back then I think. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So like I jumped in, you know, if anyone's out there looking like for a quick and easy class, that's easy to kind of follow and follow through with is I did the Nigel Poulton Ktis
26:29
class um back then. So a plug to um plugged to him out there. Um And yeah, I did that class. It kind of introduced me to the concepts and then honestly from there, it was, you know, because we had software that we were trying to introduce, that would help people, you know, use pure storage. I just started doing it over and over and over again.
26:50
So, you know, it, it's true, it takes thousands of times to kind of learn and same thing. I just start blogging on it. So you go back to my blog, you'll see stuff about the, the original, you know, flex volume plug in or the p or about PSO and then eventually morphed into, you know, into port works, right? So, you know, there is a, it's definitely where
27:13
I, you know, kind of jumped in. Um, and, but that I call it the snowy day in Austin because, you know, it, if anyone knows it does not snow a ton in Austin, Texas. And when it does, we were out somewhere, I was with my, I was with my good buddy Simon Dods and, and some, and some others,
27:31
you know, from pure and it just started snowing and it was snowing and sticking right like, and, and that town shut down, I was able to luckily get on a plane the next morning and leave before it because it kept snowing before they shut the airport down. But that was a, that was a, um, that was a fun time. That was a fun, that was a fun week. But also I've learned,
27:55
I learned a ton while I was there. So I was super, super excited and kind of definitely uh pushed me to uh do more and more with the series. So cool things I want to highlight is one. So like you were this, this sense of like always wanting to learn and grow and change, I think in it, we, we know data center stuff, uh information technology.
28:15
It's either you, we can be the ones driving change or have it driven upon us. It doesn't mean that we're out here to make anyone's life difficult, but those are the two options because it keeps changing. You gotta ride the change or get have it come, come down on you and then as well that you continue to, I mean, iii I actually left it here because,
28:30
you know, for a while there was a holy war about ephemeral or persistent as far as containers continuing to learn in public. And even sometimes for folks that are like trying to wrap their head around like you have if we have technical backgrounds, like what, what does this thing actually do? I'm looking at a slide like so I want to highlight your blog as a way to help people
28:46
with like what does it actually do down the stack and maybe accelerate them as they're trying to wrap their heads around some of this, I think. And a lot of times it's kind of like what's next, you could go learn how to install it and then it's what do I do now? And so they get kind of like, change my, from an infrastructure background, had to change what I was thinking.
29:04
Like, how do I consume this? So you see some of the later ones, I'll have stuff like how to connect to a or how to do Cassandra, like those types of things. So we're getting more than just like, hey, here's how the storage provisions it was jump in, you know, provision Cassandra, which OK, like I can click the buttons that and I can teach
29:21
anyone on the like there's 1400 people on the call. I can teach everyone how to provision Cassandra with P DS if you click two buttons and say go like you could do it. Uh The, the challenge is writing an application to actually work with Cassandra and that's, you know, that's what I wanted to show here, you know,
29:40
kind of how it, how it does that, how is it, how it works? So, very cool. So I think Emily, if you don't mind launching the last poll there, I put your uh blog in the chat and uh this is before we kind of go on to the last section here, which is where we're gonna, this actually kind of follows.
29:56
Well, yeah, II I, in this case, I actually forgot to show, show the, the, the Dover Joey. But, oh well, um so this is kind of bridging both your career, John, where you started to engage in this. But also even, you know, so for folks on the call, I'm very curious and these are all anonymized by the way. But um I think this might actually be useful
30:11
for people on because we'll share the results here. Um So are you running Ktis in production? Yes. No planning maybe a little bit of snark. What would I do that? Are you running state full workloads in Cober Netti? Uh I don't think we're probably going to embrace too much John the whole state full versus stateless today,
30:29
but that was kind of a holy war for a while. Maybe still is a little bit. And then um how are you running Cober Netti today? You know, and obviously I don't have to answer that. That one is a multiple choice because I think for a lot of customers that you talk to John, I mean, they've got a cloud hosted one, they've got something on prem,
30:45
I mean, it's all over the place. So, yeah, I'm, I love watching those numbers go up. This is amazing. So, so I'm gonna leave the pole open here while we kind of start going into a little bit of port works update since last year. So I wanna make sure to give kind of an advertisement if you will for if you're
31:02
wondering like what is port works? We're not gonna do as full of the walk through on that. How you know that it's a, a basically a data plan kind of thing. We did a lot of that a year ago. We'll do a little bit of that. Now, do want to highlight that if you're in analyst territory, we just recently had this come out.
31:17
I, I believe, I think I saw our Ceo Charlie Giancarlo share it within the last couple of days. So I'm pretty sure it's new. Um So if you're like Gartner Gigaom, pick your analyst. Giga home is one of the space uh port works continues to be the leader in cloud native COTIS data storage and there's two of them in enterprise COTIS data storage.
31:37
So if you're looking at the, I think I need to do something in the space. I'm not sure who to look at. That's where we use analyst reports and sometimes stack rank, you know, who do we start looking at? Especially if you can download it for free and play with it. But I think John maybe let let's do um It's all
31:49
right. We'll do an update um on on port works overall, a little bit of an update for folks on port works data services because that's brand new. And then we'll talk finally about kind of port works backup as a service and even some of the partnership with AWS. So this is where I toss it back to you. Thank you for covering the hard stuff. So give me a little bit of an update on maybe a
32:10
brief overview on Port Works Enterprise in general and then kind of what's new in 2.11. I'll, I'll try and follow the slides along on you. All right. Yeah. Um I was actually mesmerized by the polls still but, you know, that's ok. Yeah. So obviously, um Port Works enterprise. This is like on the foundation of what we do
32:31
with, with Port works, right? Is built to make your storage developer ready, but even more so is to is to move you into pro into production, right? The the big thing there is you, you can go and have a lab and play around and there's free stuff out there. But Port works because of what it has, you know, when it comes to delivering uh container native
32:53
storage, right? Is that it now allows me to get, get more of my project into past like that kind of break point of, should I, you know, should I do this go and get into production, actually run it, get my uh my apps running in production and, and, and go from there, right? And, and then it it comes with that like the
33:15
reasons that you want to do that, there are things like, you know, I want performance, I want business continuity or Dr um I want to optimize the cost because I can't, you know, I'm new to Kubernetes. I can't just guess how much of the, of the cloud I want to consume. So, you know, that's what this was built for. And that's,
33:36
and that's really, you know, the foundation of what we're doing. If we want to go to the uh next slide, we see if we can touch on some of what was new. So, since last time I was here with, with Michael is that, you know, obviously some, actually, I think we've had about three big releases. So it's like 2.11 we took the last one.
33:55
They, you know, there's 2.10 in June. So one of the cool things about uh being on the port works team is the the slide, the slides don't keep up all the time with what's new in port works. This is the latest though. Um We're, we're lucky for that, but the um flash ray direct access. So if you're a flash ray customer, this now means so everything that was in um some of the
34:17
previous plugins that we had at pure is now in uh you know, into in port works, right? So, but what that allows you to do is kind of bypass the port works file system and now consume a flash ray directly. I PV six is something that um that we're doing for our larger customers. And um that are like either hyper scalar or they are
34:45
running, you know, edge device, lots of edge devices, right? And I PV six is required for that kind of stuff. Um Another big one is VM migration. So openshift virtualization and or cooper, if anyone is out there looking at that, like um being able to add things that you can't get really from any other kind of storage system when it comes to these, these um running a VM inside of Kubernetes,
35:12
which is kind of blows up my brain when I think about it is now I can migrate, I can do backups and and um those types of things. So, um and then if you're an IBM customer, there was a update for that. So you could do cloud, that was uh probably a little more specific to probably a few customers any.
35:31
And I do want to highlight there was one or two comments in the chat of you can run port works entirely on prem. You can run entirely in the cloud. You can live behind cloud hosted KUTI services and provide that same data plan provisioning backup dr capabilities as if you run it on Prem with openshift, right? So it's, that's about that common data plan
35:48
regardless of where one of the big things. And we have a couple of customers that have actually done this is they've taken the data from on Prem and moved to the cloud or they've gone from one cloud to the other. That's not just a, that's not just a marketing hand wave like that's something that we could do that allows people to do that so you can run it in the cloud on Prem both at the same time doesn't
36:09
matter. So number two or making sure, looking deeply in your eyes, make sure. Ok, so we continue doing more on port works. So this is if you're running Cobert, you frankly want to get ahead of the question of data and not have it become an issue for you down the road from a costing your portability or protection standpoint. All those classic data challenges because data
36:28
still needs to be handled like data regardless of the Cobert or not. We've gone further though of often we talk with folks where they don't even want to care about the plumbing at all. Like even when it's really cool plumbing like and port work plumbing they just wanna care about. Do I have a database provisioned? Quickly?
36:43
Take it away? Yeah. So data services is brand new. This came out at the end of April. It's A G A so you can you can get it today. It is the it is the database as a service platform for for any database. Um It is a one click provisioning. It is based on port works enterprise. So if you look at ports enterprise,
37:07
you know what we were talking about earlier, it it takes advantage of all those features. It needs those to provide that production grade database platform. Um The Kubernetes provides the management of the CPU and the memory and the, you know, scale out and you know, and all of that. But you know, the main key point here to look at is a lot of us can go find like a Yao
37:29
file to run uh a mysql database, but to run it at scale and to run it in a way where now um I'm able to provide that to my DB A S or my data team or my developers where they can now request that and then also give them just a, a single platform, a single U I. So it does have a, it has a fancy cool uh web page or a single um
37:59
API. So if you're like, I don't even I, I am too cool for a web page. I'm just gonna use rest and do it like we absolutely can do that right. So, um you know, uh those API S are there, right? It's, it's available, it's right now hosted in the cloud and you can um you know,
38:18
provide that. So most of the customers I talk to when we share this with them that are running, they go well, that's, that's actually kind of what we're trying to build on our own. We just wanted a database, that's what we actually wanted. Yeah, we, we want to build this, you know, to provide these databases to our to our internal
38:34
customers. Thank you for doing it for us. And now we can kind of speed that innovation, right. So, um right now it provides Cassandra Kafka, Pores Rabbit, MQ, red and Zookeeper. Um but it is extensible. So we're gonna be able to add more and more
38:52
services. So, you know, just keep watching if there's one that you, you know, if there's something you love, like I really love Maria DB and I, I can't wait till you have that. Like let us know, let let your pure team know and it, it will let you know when it's when it's uh coming up. So huge amount of work here. I think this is a little bit of a category
39:11
creator product, maybe in the same way that port works is a little bit. I want to be careful about bold claims but there's no one else quite as doing this partly they can't do it because they don't have the port works pieces underneath to make it, make it dance and sing kind of thing. But the getting you as a customer or your internal customers faster too.
39:27
I need these databases in this environment. Having to think and understand each one of them and how you have to handle the day two automation and all the other pieces last but not least is around backups. We're back to backups. Really, John? That's crazy. It's like we still have to protect data or something.
39:43
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, obviously uh the way that you approach a Kubernetes application is different, right? So um PX backup, right? We wanna, we wanna be able to provide all these things like we wanna be able to have a backup and restore one click what, no matter where it's running in the cloud or on prem migrate those applications anywhere.
40:04
So it's the way that it backs up, I can back up off of Red Hat and restore to Azure, right? So, and that it, that's kind of the promise of containers is that should be portable and the the backups and the migrations should be portable, should be portable as well. Um Simplify your compliance that, you know, I'm just gonna read it straight from the the
40:24
marketing thing. But this is absolutely important. Like if you, if you have someone telling you, you just to do snapshots, you, they're wrong, like you just need to tell them they're wrong and you need to throw them out more than that. Um because you need to be able to take that data like yes, snapshots are good to restore to really quick,
40:40
but I want to take that and move it to another, you know, another place to restore. So ransomware, of course, we spent a long time that with Andy. But what if, what if you actually want to do this as a service or you wanna do it via Aws? Do, do we have anything to offer those folks.
40:58
Yeah. So if you're, if you're in a spot where, hey, I, you know, I'm, I've deployed Kubernetes. I don't really control the backup infrastructure, but I need a backup. That is application centric, right? Like PX backup. We actually just provide that as a service. You don't need to install it.
41:15
You can just, you spin it up, it all runs in the cloud. You provide, you know, the bucket to your object store, whether that's, you know, on prem or in the cloud as well. And we just, we it all runs from there and then you just log in, set up your jobs and you're ready, you're ready to go.
41:30
So, um that is actually, you know, that's, that's very new this summer as well. So, you know, there's a lot of new things and this is gonna get better and better as we go. Um But yeah, that kind of gets you out of the business of running that the infrastructure for that. So you can just go, go to town. So, and sometimes sometimes when I'm thinking about stuff,
41:46
you're hearing some of this, like you're on the other end of it from the end of these sessions and it's like, ok, the side looks really polished. Is this actually legit or is it just kind of cool they're trying to launch it? But one thing that I look at signs is who are the partnerships? So there's this company out there called Amazon web services.
42:00
They're a little bigger than we are. They actually sign a specific agreement with us around port works backup as a service related to EK si think this is actually our last point, John. But you kind of kind of explain that a little bit to folks. It's, it's more than just a credibility check box.
42:15
It well and it's not just backup, right? It's for all, all integrations with Aws. So we signed the agreement, we have this partnership with Aws. So to provide that disaster recovery, high availability, that's, that's port works, enterprise um P DS would what is also integrated into, into that as well. So you can go to the marketplace,
42:33
you can buy um Enterprise P Ds is coming soon. So if you look for P Ds, so you can actually just get it from the marketplace, um the backup and protection through the, the, the PX backup as a service is actually will once you sign in, if you provide it, the credentials like an im role that has the right permissions and it could just discover all your Eks clusters. So if you're like,
42:54
hey, I don't wanna add um 25 clusters by hand or 2500 clusters by hand, whatever you have, um you can, it'll just discover them and bring them all in to, to back up. Um and data migration, right? Obviously, Amazon loves that. We can help people move more clothes into them. So so they're a little biased there. But yeah,
43:14
so obviously we team up well with them. And so if you're, you know, if you're an Aws customer and you have a team that you work with at, at Aws, tell them to reach out to, uh, the Port works team at Pure and we'll, we'll definitely help everyone kind of get the best solution that for what you're trying to accomplish. And if you have folks on your team,
43:32
by the way, just recognizing probably who the folks are that are attending, may we may have more infrastructure team folks on, hopefully there's folks focused on cloud or et cetera. Uh do make sure to share this webinar with them. They can, if they want to hear the 1st 20 minutes of kind of history and fun and stories and whatnot or they can jump to the end. But these are capabilities that sometimes we
43:47
find that people in the cloud teams don't even necessarily know exist. I mean, they're, they're dealing with the challenges and the problems but they just assume, well, I got to write scripts or this is just how it is or once they realize it, there's a lot of data and now it's hard to deal with kind of thing. I think with that John actually let me, I'm gonna, we will go just a minute or two past the
44:05
45 minute mark. Folks, we will go ahead and do the drawing in just a second but I wanna make sure to end the poll and share it back because we had a solid 800 plus, you know, responses. Thank you so much for everyone responding. This is interesting for us and hopefully it's interesting for you too, to be honest. So first one, are you running Kubernetes in
44:25
production? Uh 43%? Yes. So that's a clear majority, especially if we add the um planning two in six months, I think, I guess it's a 58% John. Um and, but the why would I do something crazy like that?
44:39
You know, that's I'm never gonna do it. That's only four state full workloads and kubernetes. Um I think we decided not to embrace that kind of holy war item but, you know, for folks who know what it is, you know, what it is or even enterprise applications. Um So that's a good, the two yeses there actually make them a majority there,
44:57
I think as well with, you know, some are saying no and then last but not least. So. So who, what would you have guessed there, John before? You know, so Eks came in number one. But what, what, what have been your guess before we did the poll? Um Honestly, I would have been split between, I thought I would have been split a little closer
45:15
between openshift and Eks to be completely honest, just the conversations you have. Yeah. Yeah. Um from the conversations I have, yeah, but that's, uh, still healthy. I, I like, yeah, if, if, if to everyone that puts something else that'd be that I, I'll have to go back to the chat. I want to see what the something else is.
45:35
Are. Yes, the chat. We're not closing the chat down yet. I'll, I'll stop this poll sharing here in just a minute. But, um, so eks first A KS second open shift and of course, you know, we've got a cross sale here. That's just really cool to see. Thank you everybody for being willing to put
45:47
some information in. I I'll actually, so let's stop the poll sharing here, John. Thank you so much for being a great guest. I was pretty sure you would be, but, you know, it's always a little bit of a leap of faith to jump into a live zoom together, you know. So, hey, uh and with an amazing t-shirt for those who stayed around,
46:05
we're going to do Q and A in just a second. That's a little more relaxed. But if you stayed around for the drawing, hey, it's your time. Uh The drawing winner is Peter G uh from North Carolina. Hopefully you are still on. We will be reaching out to you. Emily will be reaching out to you to make sure to get you the ember mug.
46:21
A retail value of 100 and $30. The kind you can control with your phone, go read all about it on Amazon or role model or any, any website that you like next month, please make sure to join us again. Uh We'll be covering going into Microsoft sequel server 2022. And what's new with Anthony? No, Tino.
46:40
Uh he won't be wearing a wig either, you know. Sorry, nor will I, although, you know, just being real, maybe I need to. But hey, that, that's, that's a topic for another kind of podcast or webinar. Not this one, John, we're at the home stretch and we've got a little bit of time left for some uh for some questions here.
46:56
Yeah, I'm gonna pull up, I'll make sure the music is kind of low. Sometimes I'll have people saying they can't hear it. So if the music keeps you from here in the Q and A, please, uh please don't be shy, it's here to make it good for you. But there was one here that I want to make sure to put in.
47:10
So just uh and, and David's done an awesome job at answering these by the way. So maybe first how does a I'm gonna expand this one? It's from, I think if I'm saying the name, right? Um How does a user interact with port works? And maybe John, let me expand that to like how do you get port works?
47:28
Do you mind kind of hitting on both of those? Yeah. So, I mean, you can download a free trial, you can go to central dot port works dot com and download a free trial um and install it and you can actually, there's a forever free version that's essentials if you only have five nodes, um you can, you can definitely pull that down and,
47:47
and play with. But if you wanna try out all the enterprise production grade features, um you can do enterprise for 30 days and try it out. So, you know, that's the central dot port works dot com again, is the uh place to go. But I like David did answer it, but definitely a a user,
48:05
once you have it installed, a user would, would just uh launch an app with, you know, however you would in Kubernetes that has a storage class request. So just say, hey, port works, I need 100 gigs and port works would make it happen, right. That's the simplest way. Like if anyone wants to know all the magic underneath it,
48:24
like that's a whole other hour long session, which we'll happily do and we probably actually have some of those on them. They go look, they're on youtube, they're on the webinars like they're, they're out there good stuff on tech field day peers stores dot com slash webinars. That's where I often go for the previous ones.
48:40
Ok. So next one does, well, this is a little bit of a and I appreciate and you know, this is at least it feels like a softball. I'm guessing you didn't mean it that way. But we, we like it anyway. So the question is port works, run in the cloud. Can you have, be a Port works customer and use
48:55
Port Works without any pure hardware at all? Right. Yes. 100%. Right. I just talked to a company that was born in the cloud. Like, it's a software company. I won't say who it is because they'd probably get super mad. But they, they don't own any data centers or
49:11
hardware. Right. And they're 100% in the cloud and they're probably, you know, they're kind of, we'll never come back. Right? Because they were never there, maybe different clouds, multi cloud and all that kind of stuff. And they, and now they're, there's, you know, they're all in one cloud,
49:26
they're big partners with one of the cloud providers and they're, and they said, well, you know, I, we probably need to have a way to fail over to another cloud. Can you help with that? Yes. So you don't need to own pure. All you need is, is, um, some block storage from one of the cloud providers and you can definitely use port
49:44
works to your heart's content. Next question. And we didn't have a ton. By the way, I'm guessing this may be a topic that is a little bit further out for some folks, some more educational. That's the goal here after all. Uh, does port works provide.
49:58
Is it getting a little bit in the weeds? But that's good. Uh Thank you again to does port works provide the persistent volumes and dynamic provisioning for openshift workloads that need persistence such as databases. No things like that. Absolutely. And it really is the best one for openshift that exists. So I'm biased.
50:17
But yeah, um we do have, we have times there's certain workloads that even red red hat will come to us and say, hey, can we work with you to use for work? So um it's the it's in the operator hub. If you, if you're an open shift for customer go to operator hub, you'll see that um enterprise operator in there and you were even referring to this a little
50:37
bit earlier, John um central dot port works dot com. Um There's a whole bunch of stuff there. You can sign with github or with Google. I just kind of calling it out to folks. And I think and, and keep me honest here John, actually, folks can log in there at central dot port works dot
50:51
com and actually play around with some demo environments and whatnot just, just help me out there. So there's some, there's some training and demos that are in there. Um There's also like a, a link out to some classes. We do have a certificate. If people love certifications,
51:07
there is a certification out there that's I think in beta are coming out So you'll, you'll see that very soon, like a class and they certification for everyone that likes to have, uh you know, that's cool stamps. Right. You know, a lot of the pure um and David and, and, and our Cloud architecture team, like, they've all, they've all gone and, and passed the,
51:31
the preliminary version of that. So they, they all have those uh what do they call it on linkedin? Like you post it, it's like the little bad accolades skills or badges bad. So if you want badges for a linkedin, like totally can do that. I I have a feeling John, I haven't endorsed you for knowledge. So I'm I'm sorry and II I may get to it someday,
51:51
you know, maybe so somebody knew us. I think that is the uh the end of the questions I did want to make sure just to kind of highlight that, you know, you can actually go, this is self service. You can actually download the software yourself for free to try, try this out. I sometimes put it going into a little bit of
52:06
kind of career coaching mode. A little bit of like even if you don't, even if you don't care about Kubernetes, Kubernetes cares about you. So this is a good way to start out, especially with some of the free classes you can start to experiment and learn. We mentioned the Nigel Poulton one earlier. I put that in the chat for folks hopefully that's a good way to start to wrap your head
52:22
around this. I think with that John, there's, there's one other question uh not from uh William Ball. Uh William, sorry, I'm trying to be good about his first name himself. William. Uh The question about how does it get billed? Can you do a brief rundown there, John? Because we've got port works,
52:39
enterprise data services. We've got P DS, we've got backup as a service. Can you give a flavor of some of the different kind of consumption based or other billing approaches? Yeah, so it it's it's priced um kind of in two ways. There's a, there's a for port works, enterprise and backup it. It's priced on node ba basically node hours.
53:00
It's the number of hours. You, you have a worker, node that's running port works, right? You usually almost always. I mean, you can do pay as you go. We have a way to do that where you kind of pay. That is the most expensive way, but it's ok if you want to do that but not you prepay, you basically prepay for a year, you buy a year's worth of,
53:18
you know, hours. It's like 9000. We round up. I think it's technically 87 62. But um yeah, you round up and that's how that's how those are built up. Now port works, data services is, is built on node hour or pod hours. So basically if you run 1000 databases. You, you,
53:37
you know, for an hour, that's an hour. Right. And it's, there's a price based on that. So cool. And you, and, uh, like before, if you buy years, if you buy years in advance of ours, that's when discounts come in. Oh, so there's one last question, uh, web, you stuck it in right before the finish line.
53:55
Uh, one more thing to quote Colombo. Hey, I always love good Columbo quote. So or uh Steve Jobs one more thing either way uh security for hi, a encryption. I know that I think we left out the slide that talks about some of the encryption and security capabilities. But do you mind kind of giving a, you a sound bite or two on HIPA encryption and security
54:14
pieces? Yes. So it absolutely has the um pretty, pretty unique capability of bringing your own key for encryption for the data no matter, you know, basically in flight and at rest no matter where it's sitting. So if you're a cloud customer and you, you, you, you know, because it's I, you have, you have, you know, so we don't change HIPA.
54:35
That's kind of, that's compliance. But what you do is you use PX secures the module to answer those HIPA questions, right? So you can say, hey, we do have our back so that um John can't mount Andrew's, right. Um We have encryption so that if Andrew did somehow mount my volume without the key, it would be useless.
54:57
So, or if some bad guy got in and stole, you know, move the data off, it would also be useless because you wouldn't have the key and you manage the keys based on whatever, you know. So if you're in Amazon, you use their key management, you can bring hashi hashy vault, any, you know, any of those key management systems into play.
55:16
And I think even there too, um there's even some pieces around auditing as well. Uh So this goes into security auditing and being able to go back and look at stuff. So the main thing is to make sure that someone who uh wasn't supposed to didn't get mountain and look at the data. I realize it's not on this slide, but there's actually really kind of six modules, key modules and port works enterprises and one
55:36
of them is actually secure security modules. So there's a lot more we glanced over that because we're kind of hitting on the new stuff. Um but autopilot like all those like those are all sessions in and of themselves, we could talk for another hour about those with that. I think we're um think we got all the questions. Thanks for the questions.
55:55
Thank you David for helping out with the Q and A and Emily as well. As always, I think with that, we are going to wrap it up, John. Do you have any last thoughts to bring us home and queue it up for next month. No, like this is super fun. Like thank you so much for your time.
56:08
I appreciate everybody joining like this great, great turnout. Um Definitely come. So my one promo on Anthony is he did, he wrote the book on Kubernetes and sequel server. So he's also one of my favorite people. So make sure you check that out next month. So next month will be sequel server. But if you actually check out Anthony's blog,
56:28
literally no tino dot com, you'll find recently actually more kubernetes content than sequel server content, which is really cool. Actually, you know, he's been working with stuff all over the place. Anyone was wondering that's where it's going. Microsoft's taking Kubernetes in and sequel server and putting them together. So you're you're not wasting your time by learning this.
56:47
Yep, John again. Thank you. Thank you all so much for joining us. It's always amazing to me how many folks stay around through the fuel time for the through the full time, even as we get a little more relaxed, you know, kind of going through the questions. I hope this was informative educational if you have questions about the pure side,
57:02
but please don't hesitate to reach out to your local teams. John and I are pretty accessible. You can find us on Twitter and linkedin. After all, there's a reason we can pay for the coffee cards and other ones. But as Always John. Thank you for being such a great guest. This is the end of your August coffee break, Andre Miller with pure storage.
57:19
Have a great day.
