Brad Maltz, Dell Technologies | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Hey, we're back here.

Live in Chicago, CubeCon Cloud Native Con Day two, continuing our coverage. It's, we've got some great people lined up to bring you today. We, we started just now with Dan Garfield from Argo in Codefresh, and my next guest is my friend Brad Melz.

Meltzer Maltz. I screwed this up. He's my friend.

And why do I think Meltzer? I Don't know. Good New York name.

No, I Knew a Richard Meltzer. There you go. I'll tell you a great story about him off camera.

This, he was a tech entrepreneur, a miserable failure of a tech entrepreneur. Okay. His wife though, invented the things, you know how think you got Holes and Crocs?

Yes. His Wife, wife invented the things that go into those holes. He closed down his venture back startup.

His wife sold those to Crocs, and they've lived happily ever after. I don't hope he's watching this. Richard Melzer, he's from Boulder, Colorado.

Hey man, how are you? Meltzer? Anyway, that took me down to Rabbit.

That Brad, excuse me. Brad is with us. Actually shout out.

Right. Uh, Dell Technologies is sponsoring our broadcast this year from CubeCon again, as they did in Amsterdam last year. And a large part of it's due to Brad.

Brad is the, is a director, senior Director of senior director of the DevOps portfolio in Dere Of Dev. There, you said it. Now, a lot of you may be asking at home.

Wow, I didn't know Dell was involved in DevOps and Dev Re or in CNCF. Yep. Laptop.

I buy, I got a Dell, right? I got a Dell Box server and, and stuff like that. But there's, there's more to, to today's deal right.

Than, Than the boxes. So, Brad, I don't want to embarrass you, but I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Go For it.

Talk to us about, I want, I want everyone at home to understand what your group does and how evolves you are not just in CNCF, but in the DevOps community, the Dev Rel Community. Yeah. So basically over the past year and a half, we've been making sure to kind of expand our community outreach specifically around the DevOps stuff.

Um, when I took over the role in product management to help kind of build our further our container strategy, our infrastructure as code strategy, we did realize that we needed a dev rail like function to help kind of expand our community outreach, our advocacy back into Dell. And the reason for that is, what a lot of people don't know is, I mean, we play across the entire ecosystem of CNCF. Absolutely.

Right? We bring containers and Kubernetes, uh, uh, solutions to market. We play in the AIML space, the security spaces.

We're enabling ecosystems around us with our technology. So because of that, having devel was extremely important. We spun a podcast.

We have what we call our DevOps dispatch, which we're actually recording here at C NCF F you can get that on YouTube. com, which we relaunched last year, and now it's kind of taken off hands-on labs and blogs and a whole bunch of stuff on there. So for us, the evangelism's important, but the advocacy for our end users is more important back into Dell.

Got it. You know, so I I we talked about the, I don't wanna use the word infrastructure, but the infrastructure of how you're reaching out infrastructure Matters. Absolutely.

But behind I, I want people at home to understand that behind that infrastructure though is real solutions. Exactly. Right.

Because that's part of the whole Dell Technologies thing is, is it's solutions. It's not just a a PR marketing kind of, though we see it here on the show floor, on the podcast and all these things. Let's talk about the solutions.

Yeah. So I mean, a great example is, and this show is actually a big one for us. Uh, we just recently have launched our Apex Cloud platforms, and we did one with Azure Stack.

We just, uh, did one with Red Hat with OpenShift. And that's actually one of the big things here. And what you're, you're gonna see more and more of from us is the ability to take our compute with our storage, our networking integration with our ecosystem partners, but give you more of that easy button experience, give you more of the turnkey experience or even the DIY we're always been good at the DIY.

Yeah. That, that's, that was DNA, But, but right now can we get you more of those easy buttons? Right.

And that's exactly where something like ACP for Red Hat here is if you just want to be able to get OpenShift up and running from the factory as quickly as possible with the least amount of hands as possible, you're looking at things like our solutions like ACP and the the trick is, when you look at solutions, are they just white papers ref arcs, which are really invaluable to certain people? Or is it a factory delivered end-to-end platform experience that delivers that cloudlike experience and developer experience on top of the infrastructure Plus, plus That guys, you know, let's not minimize that, that makes life a lot easier. I mean, you know, I think back to the first, uh, Docker Con I, well wasn't the first, but it was the first one in Austin because before that Docker Con was in Seattle, right?

It is going back a while. And I saw Kubernetes there. 8 was the release that, you know, it wasn't, it was early.

It was early. I came home. 'cause at the time we hadn't launched Cloud Native Now before that it was Container Journal.

I hadn't launched it yet. We were still coming up with the names and we were toying around with names with Docker in it, which would've been a mistake. 'cause that's a whole, well, on multiple levels.

But I came home and told the, the, the team, I said, look, everybody at Docker Con's talking about this thing called Kubernetes, but it's never going to catch on. It's so g*****n hard. I don't know how anyone would use it.

Why do you didn't bet on that? Well, this is why I still work and I'm not retired, Brad. Yeah, fair.

Another brilliant insight from Alan Shimel. But, um, so now, you know, with that being said, I'll stand by my original point. Kubernetes is still hard.

Yes, It is. I don't care. You know, I'll work till I die, I guess.

But it's hard. KU Hard Kubernetes is hard. And I think I so Kubernetes hit a maturity point, right?

Right. So definitely it won. No doubt Everybody needs it.

Yep. It's leading the cloud native application kind of, you know, abstraction battle. So it's there, but that doesn't mean you don't need to be a jack of all trades to be able to understand all the nuances in the abstraction.

And you basically have to be able to operate everything under the covers of Kubernetes to make Kubernetes work properly. Absolutely. So how, what is the real long-term easy button?

That's, I think an open question right now for Kubernetes opportunity. Uh, absolutely. I, I don't want to get caught.

Maybe the easy button is something other than Kubernetes That is always a potential. Yeah. But let's get back to our point here though.

So now you get like Red Hat OpenShift, right? Red Hat OpenShift is probably, I guess the most, certainly in top two, uh, Kubernetes platforms, if you will. You know?

Yep. If you're, if you're using Kubernetes and it's still a little hard, right? I mean, you can go download it from Red Hat and You Can get it In the morning, but you still gotta have some knowledge behind it to do the basics.

But this is where the easy button comes in. Yes. And, and well also, I want to make clear, when we talk about this easy button, a lot of people say, look, why do I get it from Della?

I don't want hardware. I'm, I'm hosting it in the cloud. But are you, that's the question.

So when people talk about, you know, I wouldn't have asked you if it was the, With cloud, it's always, yeah, you have the super easy button in the public cloud. They, they've done an amazing job there. But you get to deal with things like egress fees.

You gotta deal with things like, you know, costs for ongoing costs for a lot of services behind that. And at some point people start to become cost conscious. Yeah.

So that's one angle that you deal with. Second angle in this new AI world that we're now officially in as of 2023, uh, you do start to wonder where's your data living? Where do you, where do you want your data to live?

And you got the governance compliance side of not security as much, but it's more the ownership governance. And we're seeing a lot of people say, you know what, with all those GPUs, there's a cost and a governance angle to hosting it in my data center in AP cloud adjacent and cloud aware. Yep.

So that's where I see things like ACP for Red Hat 100%. Making sense? I, I agree with you a hundred percent.

I think there's another angle here though, and that is this, unless you're really in it, you may not realize this, but Kubernetes on bare metal Kubernetes in a data center, not in the public cloud Yeah. Has always been a big component of the Kubernetes, uh, footprint. Yes.

Everybody just assumed puts the words cloud native and Kubernetes cloud native, that it's all in the big three clouds, right? Yep. Yep.

Well, even beyond Oracle, IBM and the rest. But there's always been a Kubernetes on prem. There Always has been.

And there Always will be and continue will be. And I, I think it's gonna grow. Right.

Well, I think for the reasons you've outlined, right? People are worried about control. They're worried, they are worried about compliance.

They are worried about, you know, how's AI play in all this? And cost containment and finops and everything else. So I think that again, is an insight that if you're not really kind of wired into the Kubernetes community, you don't recognize, don't think about it.

Yeah. Excellent. Um, let's talk about the show a little bit.

So you guys are podcasting here live, as you said. Yep. But what about like, conversations?

I, I don't know, I heard today there's maybe eight, maybe up to eight to 10,000 people, Something like that. Feels like that. Yep.

Um, conversations with people. What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

A lot of the conversations right now are actually, so I've had a lot of AI discussions. Yeah. Um, which I, I so do We, I mean, I expected it, but they're kind of interesting 'cause they're not just about how do I build AI things?

It's how do I use AI operationally? Mm-Hmm. And I think that's the nuance that I'm seeing kind of the CNCF maybe in the forward looking view of the world is how do we apply AI in the operational side of things like Kubernetes and security and all that.

That's been a handful of not a large percentage of conversations. Uh, there's always, they're actually the easy button thing. Honestly, that's probably one of the biggest things.

People are just, they don't have enough skills out there. And actually one of the other things is platform engineering. So one of the things you can see on my shirt, right?

We have this, I Saw it. I, David, this Is our order that we have here is, uh, at Amsterdam we kind of have this DevOps operating model yin yang where dev and ops have to play well together. Cats and dogs have to come and be nice.

Well enter platform engineering and these folks building the platforms that are like products inside of the, uh, end user environment. They need to adopt and embrace the DevOps operating model in their world. Platform engineering has been one of the buzzwords, I think has been a big conversation for us here as well.

Absolutely. Hey, just a quick plug for Techstrong, if you don't mind. Yeah.

On the topic of operationalizing ai, we actually, you know, I, I mentioned to you off camera, we did this hackathon about two months ago at our office with some of the founders of the DevOps movement around operationalizing ai. And we recorded it. Oh, we recorded, that's awesome.

All the sessions. And we've just about got done editing now to make it manageable. And, um, it'll be out on text on tv, I think in the next week or so.

So if operationalizing AI is something you are into, go check that out. Um, edited, created totally by our text from video team and starring some really cool people. So that's awesome.

Looking to hear that about it. Um, all right. Enough of my own plugs.

Brad, what else you got for us? Uh, I mean, right now I think it's just an exciting time to be in CNCF in the community, in the industry. Right.

I mean, what's interesting, I had seen a funny enough, a meme that popped up in some one of my social media threads I talked about, you know, over like 2000 years. The acceleration was like the horse and buggy to the horse and buggy and everything was very flat. And all of a sudden the last a hundred, 150 years acceleration has taken, and right now it feels like this year and the past one or two years, technology is accelerating at such a fast rate that we as an industry, can we keep up with it skills wise and keep wise and career-wise.

I feel like going into the next few years, we're definitely gonna have this skills challenge. And I think that's one thing that I'm gonna be focusing on a lot is how do we enable the industry as technology just keeps evolving around us. I think that's a big thing personally for me.

So I will tell you I'm a little older than you. A little, Um, I, I don't disagree with you, except I think it's even bigger than it's not just about this industry. Yep.

I think the kinds of changes we're seeing now is almost akin to when the internet first went public. Right. So I, this is how I divide things.

There are technology innovations that have a profound impact on the technology industry. Right. I'll give you a perfect example.

The cloud, the cloud changed a lot of how we do tech. Mm-Hmm. Right.

I mean, your grandma may say, where's your pictures Grandma? And she says they're in the cloud. Wouldn't really, whether they were in the cloud or in the server clause or whatever, didn't make a difference to grandma.

But it made a difference to us in this industry. We had to know about cloud security and, and deployments and everything that goes along with cloud and it kind of rocked our, our world. Mm-Hmm.

Then there are technology innovations that rock civilization. Yes. The internet, rock civilization.

Think about life before the internet. It's, it's, it's a very different cell phones, rock civilization. So there are things that transcend technology markets and I think we are in one of those layers right now where things like AI and, and quite frankly, look, quantum is, is gonna be real At some point.

It's gonna magic to be happen to everybody. Yeah. I I read an article last week the very first time they broke RSA 2 56.

Yeah, I Saw that With Quantum. That's, that's crazy stuff, you know, if you're not up on it out there. But I feel like all of these things are converging to create another civilization changing and it couldn't come at a better time.

'cause God knows we need it. We do. AI is, I, I believe I'm with you.

AI is gonna be the next, it's not even gonna be, it is the next thing. Yeah. And, and one last note on that for me, it's when we talk about in product management and, and Dell Technologies land, like our end users, our people, not anymore.

The end users of our technology might actually be the ai. So we have to figure out what is the personality of an AI in the future. It's, there's a lot of things to think About what AI looking and look wanting and looking for.

That's it. Nuts. All right.

Hey Brad, you know what we didn't mention? com now. Okay.

com. Go there, you get all the latest events, newsletters, sign up, hands-on labs, you name it. And you can, uh, reach out to me on LinkedIn and if you have any questions, we'll help you out.

Fantastic. Alright. We are live here in Chicago.

We're gonna be back with our next guest in a second in Q Con. com. And many thanks to Dell Technologies for sponsoring us here at Q Con.

We'll be back in a minute.