Agentic AI & CNCF–Docker Alliance | TSG Ep. 933

AI agents and Mondays never get me down. You're watching Textron Gang. Hey, everyone.

Happy Monday. Wow. Another weekend, actually, last weekend in September.

We're rolling into October this week. Wow. Time.

It just, it, it, we're in an accelerated, I feel like we're in warp speed or something. In a wormhole. I don't know.

Maybe it's the AI doing it. Um, I'm Alan Shimel. Welcome to Text Strung Gang.

We've got a lot of agentic AI to talk to you about today. And a little piece, I don't know if it's world peace, but it's peace in our lifetime. Um, we've lot to go over.

We've got, we've got the Colorado contingent in today. Let me quickly introduce you to our three is the right word. Coloradoans or Coloradan, I don't know.

But we've got Andi Mann, who sounds funny for a Colorado guy, Camberley Bates and Mitch Ashley joining us. And of course, everyone's favorite Yankee fan, Mike Vizard. And I'm Alan Shimel.

Welcome to Textron Gang. Gang. Welcome.

We've got, uh, a lot to go over today, but I, I, we were talking off camera. It has already snowed in the mountains up there, so all you guys are smiling, getting all your, your ski gear ready and your warm weather stuff. And I've never seen people who love the snow as much as my friends in Colorado.

Yeah, we do. Yeah. We swish, swish.

Yes, exactly. And just A bit of a, a geography lesson. Andy is actually from the southern hemisphere of Boulder, so that's why he has that.

Yeah, makes sense. So That's the Boulder Republic, right? Republic of Boulder, yes.

The Republic of Boulder. We have our own international, um, policies. Yeah.

Just so You know, I don't blame you. Um, but anyway, let's not go there. Let's jump into our agenda stuff.

Mike, why don't you take us out? What are we, what are we talking about today? Well, let's get started with HashiCorp.

'cause they've been core to DevOps for as long as anybody can remember. And they have the whole Terraform project that they helped start and now are trying to commercialize pretty aggressively. But it was interesting to watch them talk about this at a conference they held late last week.

And what they're really poking at is that they're gonna start a AI project, and this is gonna start with MCP servers and it's gonna expose Terraform and the code to AI agents. And the idea here is that, um, eventually AI is gonna, I guess I don't want to say paper over, but integrate this so-called day one versus day two, IT operations mindset where things like Ansible will become more integrated with Terraform because they'll all be in using the same core baseline of AI agents. Which kind of changes the way you think about it.

It could be, you know, maybe we don't need as many specialists, but Kimberly, I know you've been looking at this space for a while. What's your thought about? Well, just how is it gonna evolve in the age of AI agents?

Well, if they can solve this problem day one, day zero, day one, and day two, that is gonna be absolutely fabulous. I think this natural progression of what we're seeing, I mean, with the announcement of, you know, what MCP stood for in terms of coming out of an, um, coming out of Anthropic, what it's supposed to do in terms of some of the unifying capabilities that it has. And then we're seeing, you know, an ongoing pattern of announcements of people adopting that kind of architecture within their systems in order to integrate the different pieces of it.

And, um, we've needed this for a long time. I mean, if you think about what happens with acquiring of the technologies by these companies, and it takes so much work to have them work together. I mean, when I read this, I was like, you know, I remember this time in our lab when a company that will go unnamed to three, you know, one in three letter companies that was asking us to do a test with these three to show a solution with these th these products that they could use for data protection.

And the screaming and yelling that was coming out of the lab because they had like four, you know, books open, if you will, virtual books or Uhuh on their desk trying to figure out how these things work together. And yet the marketing people had said, this works together, you know, but it really didn't. And so I think what we're talking about, and maybe I'm way too far out on the ledge on, on what, you know, HashiCorp is doing here, but it's, we're trying to make sure that, that all the pieces that come into the company, um, work together and having an AI agent or an agent AI go out there and look at all these pieces that's going to find some things that maybe us humans don't detect as long as we have somebody that's overseeing the kind of work to be able to start to unify this, these pieces together.

And I think that's got some, you know, real possibilities. Um, you know, you guys are better DevOps people than I am, but, you know, that's kind of my, my looking at, you know, what this does. And it's got great opportunity and it's got some risks to it, but we'll see how it happens.

Maybe I could take those three run books and figure it out for you, Kimberly, but Yes, totally. No, it was RU that was trying to do this and it was loud. It was ugly.

No, RU was struggling with the man. It, yeah. Oh, complex.

Well, you know, it, it's interesting because we'll see, I think we'll see a lot more of this of IBM, red Hat HashiCorp coming together more in their product strategy, um, but not just in a communications way of getting the products to work together. I mean, you think about it, what more of a natural fit than using not only Terraform and Ansible, but using AI to help automate those things together and start, start to cross those boundaries. So who knew that, you know, AI would create the kumbaya moment to help Kumbaya moment to help us kind of get these things working together.

But I think we'll see a lot more out of this. And, and, and if you think of where we're heading, yes, terraforms been the automation platform for infrastructures code. Now, you can do even more of that with, you know, automation through AI and through GI and make it much more declarative along with other tools at the same time.

So it doesn't have to be just Terraform that you're automating. Um, HashiCorp released what they call the, I think it was GA of their, uh, HashiCorp stack, um, Terraform Stack, excuse me. And that, and that, and that represents something that's not just within one environment, but across multiple environments, multiple clouds, et cetera.

So it's, it's a, I think a succession of things that we're gonna see from HashiCorp, but also most likely IBM and, and, uh, red Hat in the near future. Yeah. Look, I think it's really interesting to see the integration happening.

It was always gonna happen this way. Uh, IBM is a master at acquisition and integration, right? Uh, and so getting, uh, HashiCorp alongside, uh, Ansible some time ago, this was very obviously going to happen with the very important for IBM to integrate these products, provide that sort of combined offer.

I do wonder a little bit if it's, uh, very customer driven, you know, Ansible look, great product, great solution has been around for a long time, but a little bit of a fading star. So it's interesting to see whether IBM can sort of relight that star by injecting this ai. But I, I'm, I'm totally with you on, on the logic of the AI injection here.

Actually, uh, Mitch, the confi is a knowable outcome, right? So when you're thinking about provisioning and configuration, um, I hate the word best practices, the known good practices in configuration and provisioning are known notes. So we've been talking, but yeah, we've talked about this quite a lot.

The idea that this is the sort of thing that AI works really well with. Mm-hmm. Um, and I'm super excited actually seeing them release, uh, stacks.

I saw them announce that last year, and I'm like, oh, it's pre-announcement. Is it gonna be what it needs to be? It really is.

And that, again, is very logical for the integration of all those piece parts and components and all on the sort of open source side of the house, right? Red Hat OpenShift, uh, uh, Ansible HashiCorp, this is a really good play for IBM, uh, bringing in a lot of opportunity for customers to provide the, you know, this end-to-end automation, the end-to-end platform engineering across, as you said, Mitch, multiple different estates. So look, this is gonna keep going.

We're gonna see more and more of this. This is great for IBM and great for its sales reps. Uh, we'll see if the customers actually pick it up though.

Um, very excited for HashiCorp. A little bit less excited for the Ansible stuff personally. But it's also, I believe if I'm looking at this and understanding correctly, they're looking be, it's not just Terraform and Ansible.

It's, it's looking well beyond that in terms to the other disciplines that are going on and the other environments. They're, It's not just I, IBM m either they talk About Amazon, you know, Microsoft, and, and, and kind of what I was looking at as well, is this, this bigger trend of what they want to, you know, what you're gonna be doing and what we should expect to see this replicate into some other companies doing similar kind of things to make life simpler, if that's possible. So let me play cynic here a little bit.

I'm glad to see that there's anyone left at HashiCorp who worked on this. 'cause I, I thought, I thought the brain drain was pretty severe when, you know, from the acquisition and the, and the whole open source wars. Andy, to your point, HashiCorp, you know, part of the reason that they're part of A IBM is, you know, they, they, they, they had a little run in with the open source community when they changed their licensing.

And, you know, had they not, I don't know if they'd be part of IBM today, to be fair. You know, you, you mentioned IBM is the masters of, of, uh, integration of acquired companies and skill sets and products, you know, but their philosophy's always been that you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. Mm-hmm.

And, and some things do get broken. I, I think there's almost like a, a natural progression to assimilation by the Borg. Um, I, I think first you go through this brain drain phrase phase, you know, the people from the acquiring acquiring companies have cashed out their stock options and they're moving on.

Then there's the IBM, let's not just let 'em be for six months before we come in with our drones. Then there's the assimilation phase where it seems like, oh my God, they're gonna break this thing. And then eventually it comes out the other end where, you know, they kept 60 to 70% of what the company used to have, and they've integrated into the IBM portfolio, and we'll keep it there until we send, sell it to some Indian company where software goes to die or something.

Right. That, that's the life cycle of an IBM acquisition. Um, I, maybe it'll be different.

I, I, I do think there's an affinity between Hashi and Red Hat in general, not just the Ansible, right? They do share open source roots, though. They both change their licensing to a certain degree.

Uh, they both play in that DevOps space developer space. And it'll be interesting to see how they come together. But today's Red hat isn't the red hat that we all knew as the darling of the open source industry either.

But there is a trend Later. It's also what, it's 10 years later with the Red Hat. Yeah.

And I mean, they didn't, it didn't start changing until a few years ago. Really? No, no.

It Red Hat retained, its, its Raleigh attitude. Mm-hmm. Right?

For, for five, six years, I think. Yeah. Mike, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I think it's pretty obvious. And a lot of these companies just simply don't care all that much about the great unwashed open source masses. They're after corporate enterprise customers and the people who pay for stuff and all the rest of that community stuff is, you know, we'll salute it as we drive by.

You know what? But that's the same people who say DevOps isn't about culture. DevOps isn't about people, then it's all about tools.

And there are people who do say that and do, and companies that act that way. But sooner or later they find out that it is about the culture, and it is about the people. So it's very much a financial interest meets business objectives.

So let's change our model, right? So we can demonstrate more direct value from this open source that we've created. And that's what happened in Red Hat happened with HashiCorp.

And, and we will continue to see that over time. I, I think one of the things that we, we haven't talked about yet is, what's interesting about this is ai, particularly generative AI, has an affinity for structure. And that's why it's so good at code.

It's why it's so good at ingesting JSON structures. And you put prompts and things like that, and you, it's less likely, and I don't have data to prove this, but it's less likely to hallucinate when it's doing those things because it's operating in a much more structured semantic world. When you think about infrastructure, whether it's terraform, whether it's automation with Ansible, or pick your favorite tool, those environments, I think we're gonna see a real revolution in how AI will help us not only manage, but construct infrastructure across product, across environments.

As that gets better and better, um, maybe we'll have some more flexibility. Maybe we'll have a little bit less technical debt. I'll be optimistic.

I'll play your, the optimist to your cynic. Um, maybe we'll have a little bit less technical debt, or at least technical debt that can be solved, uh, in a reasonable timeframe. But I'm, I'm curious to see where this will go, because I think there's a lot more possibility here, because we're talking about code and not writing text for your document.

IT management is code it MAC. Mm-hmm. Okay.

I think it's, IT management is code for everybody. I think the part of this that I'm excited about is that, you know, you may not necessarily always have to be a DevOps specialist to automate stuff using code. Yeah.

I think that's gonna be pretty cool. Love it. Well, if it works, what's That?

There's always that Andy will remind us, oh, yeah. And who's gonna operate all This stuff now? It's always the question, isn't it?

Right. And look, I'll be, I, I, I am actually energized by the idea that we're, we're seeing some really interesting, uh, innovations from what our fundamentally ops companies though, right? Um, Ansible, HashiCorp, uh, even Red Hat, uh, we've seen so much great AI innovation in the dev sector.

We've talked about Claude and code and five coding and all this sort of stuff. But, you know, a lot of, a lot, not all, a lot of the IT ops environment is knowable, you know, good known practices around integrations, around, uh, uh, provision, around configuration, around security scanning, you know, these sorts of things. There's a lot of goodness there.

And if we can take that, uh, mundane routine work of figuring out configs out of human hands, then we free up IT ops to do more interesting things around architectures and development and stuff, um, and DevOps. So yeah, look, I, I, I will always stand up for my ops peeps. Uh, they are the ones who s who who, who bear the brunt of so much of this.

But in this case, they're actually the beneficiaries. And that makes me happy. All right?

If Andy's happy, we're happy. Let's take a break here on the gang. We'll come back to our B block, which is also around agentic ai, but a little different, uh, this is for, uh, AI agent management, which is the race has been on a long time, but you're watching Textron Gang, You've earned it.

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Hey, folks, we're banking, as Alan alluded to. Yeah. There is a fight now on as to who's gonna be the dominant sole or platform for managing all these AI agents.

Salesforce just came out with a version of MuleSoft that orchestrates and manages all these AI agents. But then there's a little company called Glean that took it up a little bit further and said, here's this entire AI work platform, and we'll manage all your AI agents for that. And by the way, and users won't even have to know anything about prompts or all this other stuff, because the graphs are gonna be super smart.

But, you know, as you kinda look at all this stuff, let's start with Andy, what's your take on what's going on here? Because to Alan's point, these are just one of maybe two to three dozen entrants that are gonna be in this space. So is this the new, the new big fight in it?

This is innovation disruption. This, I'm, I, I live for this. This is so awesome to watch.

You know, uh, Salesforce has got good property there for with MuleSoft, you know? Great. We're talking about integrating and managing AI and AI agents across the estate.

Uh, as we get more and more AI agents, of course, they're gonna talk to each other. This is the API economy. We're now talking about the AI agent economy.

Uh, and it's, it's essentially a similar kind of thing. So this is why MuleSoft is in a really good position to stake a claim on winning this space. Uh, they've got great integrations across a broad s swathe of it.

Good integration. This is a really strong opportunity because ultimately we do need to manage these IT agents. They're just like people, right?

Where we've, I think we've talked about this, the idea that I get my agent to do some work, and then it talks to another agent that do some work. These are sort of like managing people. You need to understand what the connections are between them, whether they're performing well, whether they're making mistakes.

You need to be able to get them together to work well together in groups and teams. And so, bringing in together multiple agents, and every time we do this sort of thing, we face complexity. So two agents talking to each other, pretty straightforward, just like two APIs.

But we get a bunch of different APIs, or in this case, AI agents talking together. And now we've got death star architectures again. So we definitely need to have this management layer.

And Salesforce is gonna try and stomp the terror, but then this is a disruptive moment. There's no reason why Salesforce and MuleSoft should be the dominant approach when you've got smaller companies like Glean using newer and more interesting, uh, approaches. You know, looking at MCP servers, defining, uh, your environments, having the agent reiterate itself so that it creates better prompts so that it does its job.

Better agents working on continuous improvement themselves. So these are already interesting opportunities for disruptive tech. Yeah, look, Salesforce has got a huge customer base.

It's got a dominant place in the market. MuleSoft is good technology, which seems to apply really well to this space. But this is a new space.

And so every time we have a new space, we have this disruptive innovation. And I'm excited to see it. Well, in the second Star Wars movie, during the Agentic Wars, there was a phase where the AI control planes were battling it out.

And that's actually what we're living out today, is, is we're entering this phase of who runs the control plane for agents who runs the observability plane for agents. And I think what we're gonna, we'll see a lot of introduction of technologies to do that. The question is, will enterprises adopt one a couple?

Will they go with a, a known player that they've been working with, you know, ServiceNow introduced their own AI control plane. Maybe it's a Splunk, who knows where this is gonna go? But to your point, Andy, this is a, this is a period of peak innovation where it's, it's, we're seeing a lot of things come out that yes, there's a need for it.

And it's not MCP standard that everybody says yes. That's the answer. It's everybody has an answer.

Which one's gonna win the end going to, to be the ones that survive? So, Mitch, you are wrong about the second Star Wars movie, it was actually Empire Strikes Back, and that's what this Is. I meant in chronological, You meant in chronological water.

But in terms of release, it was the Empire Strikes Back, and they're knocking out the Rebel Scum. Yes, sensei. I, I Agree, like glean and stuff like that.

But seriously, this is, and, but that's a very good analogy of what's going on in this market right now. Let me explain to you why I say that. I'm watching to see, is AI a big boys game, right?

When you go to a VC and you pitch, and we've all, I think most of us here have pitched to VCs, right? What did the VCs look for? Is it a big enough market?

That's the first thing they want to know, right? Is it a big enough market where we can make a lot of money? Well, agentic AI managing agentic, uh, AI is a big market.

Secondly, what's the barrier to entry? Is there some proprietary IP patents that you have? Or, you know, can anybody come along and do this?

Is somebody with more resources just gonna come along and do it? Are you gonna be the missionary who hacks the path in the jungle and someone else just walks through easily to this point? AI has been a big boy game, certainly in the us right?

That was, I think, part of the big thing with deep seek. The Chinese did it on a shoe string. You didn't have to have billions and billions of dollars, just millions.

I think when it comes to managing agents, and we all realize what a golden opportunity, what a pot of gold this is at the end of the rainbow. 'cause we're all gonna have agents upon agents, oodles, and oodles of agents, and they've gotta be managed, right? Someone's gotta do this.

Now, most enterprises, I don't think are going to, and I, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but they're not gonna trust some company named Glean to manage all their agents. They're gonna go to the big boys that they, to the empire, right? To the Darth Vader and, and Admiral Thrones of the world.

And those are Salesforce and ServiceNow and IBM and names that, you know, like that. Now, historically, what happens in the tech space is that the innovation doesn't reside with those people. The innovation does reside with the gleans of the world.

But what happens is when the gleans get too good, one of those empires buys them up, they take over the planet, right? And, and that, you know, big fish, eat the medium fish, the medium fee fish, eat the small fish. That's the way of it.

And the way of tech. And I think that's what we're gonna see here. I, you know, you might, you might get one company that's kind of a new name that'll break into this as an AI manage, as an agent management platform.

The rest of them will get bit bought off by the big guys, because the barrier to entry on this is going to be very, very high, is very, very high. So, Yeah, to your point, to your point about that, I think the issue is who has access to the data and the legacy apps. 'cause that's what the AI agents need.

And if you're a startup, you don't have that. You gotta go build all those different connectors and go try to install that. And I think whether it's, uh, MuleSoft or a Boomie or any of those integration platforms, they have an advantage there.

But that's just my take. Is there a barrier to entry with the quality of the work that you're doing with semantics in terms of integrating those pieces? Because when you look in technologically, you know, what you're saying is that I don't want, a company's not gonna adopt it unless it's a big company, because it's such a big control plane, right?

Mm-hmm. So that's the, that's one barrier. But on the other side, the quality of the data piece of it, which is the semantic analysis of looking at all these pieces, that is really tough technology.

Yeah. Um, and so a company like Lean or, or others that are coming up that have unique innovation in terms of how they do that, that becomes, I think is the core of the, the barrier. And, and that's why someone, someone will pay a couple billion dollars for them, but it's chump change.

It's not chump change to glean or their employees, right? Or the VCs who are looking at a 10 X are on it. But, but to an OpenAI or A IBM or, or a Salesforce, it's chump change.

I wouldn't mind a bit of chump change Me either or a little. That's right. But that's, but it, so again, I, I've been in tech 30 years.

Yeah. For the most, 90% of us live off the, the breadcrumbs that fall to the edge of the table from these companies. That's the way it's always been.

You know, Alan, I think your, your analysis of how this will unfold is I would've given the same story, right? So the innovation happens here. Somebody will pick somebody up, and the question is, does does one of these kind of catch fire enough to capture intention and that gets acquired?

Or is everybody say, I need one of these, and they gobble up early before it's Really, well, they, you know what Brad Feld though, he says, right, you gotta be in the top three, because those are the ones that'll get gobbled up early and get the lion's share of the, of the pie. Now. But at every, here's another thing I've learned in 30 plus years of doing this.

At every technological rung like this, there's always one, maybe two companies that achieve escape velocity. Mm-hmm. And they become the next big guys in the next round.

So in the whole generative AI thing, right? Think about all the companies that were trying to do models and doing everything open. AI clearly is a, a, you know, going on in the next round.

Congratulations to Hunger Games of Tech. So OpenAI, you know, made this, what, what's the, what's the term from Hunger Games? May something smile apart, maybe the odds be in your favor, right?

OpenAI made it through Anthropic. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if one day they're just part of Amazon, you know, call it as I see it.

Mm-hmm. Um, but this is, this is the way of the world. This is, you know, this is the Way, so the competition then, go ahead.

The competition then becomes between, which as you started out with Salesforce, ServiceNow, potentially Amazon, The good guys. Those are the big, so, so that, but that still is a big decision for Oh, yeah. A it organization to decide which one of those big companies I am going to stand Up.

Isn't that the turf four that we, they fight every day. Yeah. Is in IBM always fighting Microsoft?

Is it Microsoft always fighting? Google is in AWS, right? And then, and then sitting on top of them, you have the Accentures and the, and you know, the big integrators who they line up with, though, we all know, they'll line up with whatever makes sense and where, where they're gonna make the most money, um, you know, meet the old boss, same as the new boss or the new boss.

Same as the old boss. There's another new boss though, and you mentioned that. And that is, does OpenAI by one of these companies to help propel them?

Absolutely. Accelerate them to that escape velocity become one of the big behemoths to be able to do this. I, I think they're well on their way.

You know, I, I saw a video the other day of Sam Altman, Sam Altman in Abilene, Texas. And my, my son used to be a TV sportscaster in Abilene, Texas. I've been to Abilene, Texas, you know, and he's sitting back there and they're building this Monmouth AI factory.

And it's, and it's Sam and, and uh, uh, SoftBank and Oracle, I think are the three partners in that particular one. And they're building a power center. And they're, they're talking about using a gas powered, power centered, you know, to keep all those cowboys happy.

But if you've ever been to Abilene, you know what you see for miles and miles? Windmills. Windmills, because it's really windy there.

Mm-hmm. And, and that's what's gonna really power those AI factories out there. But clearly Sam, Sam is gonna be, uh, Steve Jobs, bill Gates, you know, surgeon Larry, or whatever you want to, you know, whoever it is, they are moving on to the next round.

You see all those windmills. 'cause there's nothing, it's all flat. There's nothing to stop the wind.

So, well, No, there's some hills out near Abilene. I think there are, but it's pretty much, yeah, I don't wanna miss, sorry, Andy. I So set.

You know what? That's the Colorado in you guys. Yeah.

You guys in your hills, Right? Size. Some of us say size doesn't matter.

I, yeah. No, no, no. So I'll let Andy talked for, um, but I gotta say this.

I don't wanna overlook what, what you said, Kimberly. And that is, I think another big play here is the, the semantic graph, the, the, um, database side of this. Um, so we've talked about a Neo four J or maybe a Clean or some one of these other companies to really accelerate adding that con contextual information that you need.

Mm-hmm. It's gonna be a super play in this. So I'm gonna play Alan for a minute.

Andy, what do you think about this? What would you like to say? Oh, yeah.

Look, I, I, I just think that it, I, I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with Alan in this case because, uh, this is such a radical revolution. This is virtualization or the internet or cloud, right? And in some of those cases, the first mover had the big advantage and some didn't.

In this case, I actually think that the first mover has advantage because, um, someone like a Salesforce is able to lean into all its existing work on integrations. And so, look, MC P's gonna make a huge difference in terms of agents working with each other. So maybe Glen gets a handle on it, but they're gonna go down one direction.

A smaller company, they can only focus on one direction. They can't spread their peanut butter too thinly. Salesforce is gonna spread their peanut butter all over the place, and they're gonna go with what works and what wins.

So look, it may, I, I, I thought it was interesting, you maybe Boomie, it could be a couple of other integration plays mm-hmm. Like a step logic or something like that, right? The integration players have that leg up.

And so I think in this case, first mover advantage makes a difference. Um, and not just because of that large enterprise play on the trust factor and the relationship. You're right, Alan, you know, a a a huge enterprise is not gonna go with Gleam for its entire estate, but you know what one or two teams are.

And if that happens to be on the right path, then that could pop. But I, so you're telling me we, it's a new paradigm. Things are different this time.

You know what, I'm gonna tell you the checks in the mail, Babe. So I, so I wanna know on this Star Wars, I wanna know on this Star War, on the, on this analogy you guys are using here around the empire straight back. So exactly who is Emper Palin in this, uh, little Emper?

This one? I, I would think it's Mark Benioff, Not Sam Al. Sam Altman's leaving the Rebel Alliance.

Is that what it is? So what Sam, Sam Salesforce is, is the big dude. Yeah.

I mean, because there's so many more application environments. I mean, Salesforce is only one major, granted, it's a major piece of the application environment for a company, but it's, Has I I agree. And they were first Into this.

You're rrp lemme tell you, they're not ERP. No, they're not hr. Mm-hmm.

Nope, they're not. But Salesforce is a big dude in it. It's a big Dude, I Think.

I think. And so I think about, okay, so I am, as I, I'm responsible and maybe I'm looking at, you know, the, the 10,000 employee kind of place, right? Where I've got a unique group here, I'm gonna be doing my development.

I've totally, I don't talk to the other guys. I have nothing to do with, well, I had occasionally I'll, I'll have to work with them, but, so I'm gonna implement mine. And then the other guys, you know, and then somewhere along the line it starts bubbling up that they've, they've advanced on this kind of technology.

One person talks to another person. Uh, I'm not, I can hear where you're saying, you know, v VMware kind of virtualization of this, but we're talking application space, and they tend to be unique and they tend to be somewhat separate. Here.

Here's, I think a point to make about that camera Lee, is we're talking about the control plane, which is an operational security right? Aspect of this. Does that, you know, you may come with your application environment Yeah.

Like a Salesforce or ServiceNow. Eventually that rolls down into an ops role, the animated world say, wait a minute, that's all you guys. Oh, it's self fun and games.

But it's, it's real here. Let's talk about what tool we're gonna use. I wonder if we're gonna enter that kind of a phase where we'll Not stop.

No, but you could see a place for an SAP or an Oracle. You know, I Glo I, I think Larry Ellison and I think Larry Ellison and Oracle is gonna be a bigger emperor than Mark Benioff ever dreamt To. I mean, Mitchell though, Sam Altman clearly has all the potential to be a young, uh, Anakin Skywalker.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and wind up a sth.

Lord, I am your father. All right. Hey, let's take a break here on the gang.

We're gonna come back for our C block. We're gonna get off the agent AI for I hope this one, and talk about, uh, politics makes Strange Bread Fellows, and there's hope for world peace. I don't know.

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And as Alan suggested, we are not gonna talk about AI agents. Everybody got that? No AI agents for this section.

If anyone mentions AI agents shots. Go ahead, Mike. So, um, it turns out that Docker and the folks over at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation have had a little, I guess the signing of a Peace Accord is about all I can kind of describe it.

And they're gonna work together and kind of try to make things, uh, better for most end users. I feel like this has been overdue maybe a long time in coming. I seem to remember back in the day, Docker Khan was the biggest show in town, and then CubeCon came along, and it looked like Docker never got over the fact that they got usurped by CubeCon.

And there was just bad blood in the system for a long time. But Mitch, is there more to it than this? Is it just politics, or is there some technical aspect of this thing that leaps out at you?

Well, I'm not gonna say the, you know, a word that would banned from this segment, but, um, I think Linux Foundation, CNCF, is the senate of this analogy where things kind of come together and happen together. And that, that's essentially what Docker has done, is, is aligned with CNCF to say, what can we do to solve some of these problems with, at the very introduction of creating open source projects, bringing libraries, um, whether it's a MPM kind of issues that we've seen happen, and GitHub aligning to do those to help solve some of those problems. We're seeing the technology providers aligning with open source organizations to say, how do we move further into the earlier into the cycle?

So you aren't pulling stuff out of repost that's already has issues in it. You aren't using, uh, container images that have issues inside of them. Uh, we have, we have now methods to be able to, uh, use these policies, use these principles, let's align that into, at the project level scan code, do all these things that we know are good, useful things.

So I think we're gonna see a lot more of these alignments with the Senates of the world, with the CNCS, with the Linux Foundations to say, here, we're gonna help have our technology help what you do at the open source creation phase. And hope that that kind of helps them accelerate their, uh, access into other development organizations, enterprises, doing software development using those same technologies. Because we used it here.

Let's use it Here. So I think somewhere in the many alternate universes of the multiverse, there is a universe where Docker Swarm is the standard orchestrator Oh. For all cloud native container based applications.

And Docker is, has a market cap larger than Salesforce, and they build a big building in the Embarcadero, uh, in, in San Francisco. And, and the CNCF is just another one of the 40 some odd organizations that the Lennox Foundation manages. Ooh, that, that's dark.

That's really dark there, Iowa. Well, no, there's, you know, and as Carl Sagan would say, in a universe of billions and billions of stars, right? Anything could happen.

But the fact of the matter is in the universe that we occupy in Docker, Docker had this in the palm of their hand. And Mike, to your point, I remember being a docker con in, in, uh, in Austin, Texas, and we were thinking about launching a site around containers, and I wanted the site to have the word docker in the domain name, but Docker, of course, owned the ip. I couldn't.

So we decided to make a, a site around with the word container in there. And I went down to Austin, Texas, and I came back. I said, you know, there's something, this other thing called Cuba, something that the Google people had that is now open source.

And everyone's talking about that, but I don't think it'll catch on. It's way too hard. And of course, I'm still here.

And in that alternate universe I'd be sitting with, uh, who, who was the founder of Docker. Uh, he was their CTOI don't remember, I don't remember his name off the top of my head right now. He has another company.

Anyway, Yeah. I, I, look, I'm, I'm gonna take a marginally, uh, uh, negative view on this one. Look, uh, I feel like I'm in Cino Man or something at this point.

I'm waking up and I'm like, what century is this? Docker? We're talking about Docker.

Look, don't get me wrong, we're still using Docker and Area State. Uh, it's good. But they blew the opportunity of a lifetime.

You are, look, you're absolute, they right in, in that alternative universe of yours. Uh, and by the way, I'd love to live there. That sounds like a fantastic place, uh, in that alternative universe.

Uh, yes, Docker could have been everything to all people. It was such a good technology, and they blew it in a way that someone like an AWS or a VMware or Kubernetes did not. And so we're, I feel like this is a lagging indicator of Dockers trajectory, the idea that we're now getting into bed with, uh, what is ostensibly competitor.

So this is not innovation. This is chasing a tail. Mm-hmm.

So look, I, I think it's possibly good. I don't think it solves a lot of problems for a lot of people, but it really makes me Wonder, it makes me sad for what Docker could have been. Yeah.

No, I, it doesn't just, I remember going to the, I, I remember going to the Docker offices right? By the Embarcadero for Pratts briefings, Solomon hikes, by the way. And Mitch, I didn't, I don't have a, a computer here to look stuff up.

It just, I, I, I, it hit me, um, for you, Solomon was the founder of Docker. I remember going there to interview him. And you know, they were a little arrogant, to tell you the truth.

Andy, if you remember right. They, they really, they had the tiger by the tail, and they thought they knew it. But, but we're not talking about that Docker, that docker got broken up.

They sold half their crap to Mirantis. They open source the container, which is, I think part, you know, is just open source. I think CNCF might even be managing the container, uh, images.

What Docker is today is a repo. Mm-hmm. It's a repo of what's supposed to be, what is supposed to be secure container images.

Right. You download, no, Mike's giving me this. I don't know, Mike, what do, what do you got then?

I think, I think there's, there's a small sliver of those images that are certified and validated to be secure And the rest Oh, you're, you're not taking exception with security. I, okay. I I, yeah.

I'll Give it to you. The rest of them are just basically, you Know, garbage, not garbage. They're just what people put up there like in every repo, They're, they're, they're a take your chances kind of thing.

But every repo is like that, that, you know, part of the issue is we, we live in the wild, wild west of repos, But isn I Think that's What they're trying to change With this alignment. Well, that, and that's what this is about. Yeah.

Yeah. Seems, I'm sorry, Kimberly. Well, this seems to, what it's doing is giving breathing air into Docker and those people invested in Docker, which is pretty, seems to be pretty extensive.

And it gives life to those environments to continue to extend. Or am I missing something here? No, No.

It, I, I think it does, but I, I think really what this comes down to is supply chain security. I think, I think the biggest, and I know I, I wasn't on earlier this week, you guys did that open source, uh, thing. I think it was yesterday, Mike, or last week, right?

Last Thursday or Friday last week. Um, I think the biggest issue facing open source development security DevSecOps, is supply chain security. SBOs don't solve the whole problem.

I think the, the biggest single issue in supply chain security is that 80% of the software, 85% of the code in our apps is be, are being downloaded from repos. Whether it's a docker repo of a container image. So I can quickly build a, a cloud native, uh, app or, or, or an artifact from Jfr Artifactory or something from Maven Central or JavaScript or whatever, bad code malware.

We, we saw it with the, uh, the shy haud, the worm last week or the week before. That's how bad stuff's getting injected into our software from software. I'll Give you an alternate reality though.

Think about this for a Minute. I give this one, but go ahead. You give us, it's the convinced you can have your own reality.

Give, I I, I'll give you a whole other possibility. So GitHub is getting sucked up into Microsoft. So now the open source community rallies around the repository from Docker instead as an alternative.

And they build out their own little ecosystem. And by the way, they make it a little more secure than what GitHub has been historically. So maybe there is another future for Docker.

Yeah. And Docker as the repo for Cloud Native is perfect. 'cause it's containers where the other stuff is snippets, artifacts, you know, what have you.

Yeah. But critical mass and GitHub is gonna be extremely hard to overcome, I think. Oh, I'm not saying GitHub's going away, But to overtake it I think is pretty big challenge.

But, you know, maybe, maybe Thanos could do it, but I don't know if anybody else could. There you go. I'm Iron Man at The projects, or did, Um, but we'll, we'll see.

But you know what, good for Docker, because a, as I said, the, you know, Microsoft isn't the Microsoft of the nineties when you talk to them, it's not Steve Balmer's, Microsoft and Docker isn't Solomon, he's Docker either. Not at all. Yeah.

And, um, I, I, you know, if if it, if it's good for the community in, in terms of a more secure supply chain. Yeah. But I see here's here, I, here's where I don't know that it really does serve the community or serve customers particularly well.

It's a step in the right direction in some cases. But look, if my team just downloaded anything from Docker hub and put it in prod, I'd have their guts for guards, right? And so it's like the V store, remember V apps, we were gonna solve the software supply chain issue with v apps a hundred years ago.

And again, it fell into the same problem. If we don't have maintainers, if we don't have, uh, you know, people who are, uh, tasked with authority to maintain these images and certify them in some way, then again, it is the wild West. So I just like VAPs, there was no control over that.

Anyone could load a V app. There's a big difference between that and say the iStore or whatever it is. Um, or, or the Android marketplace where these things are tested and verified and there's a governing body which says, yes, this is okay, this is safe.

Even then stuff gets through, right? Um, but when we've got the wild West of yeah, a GitHub repository, a docker hub or whatever it is, if there's not some mechanism, some authoritative mechanism for developers to know this has been tested. I don't need to test that.

And oh my God, I just hate the, the idea that my developers would say that phrase ever. Um, but that's, that's where it's gonna be beneficial. And I don't see them doing that.

I just see them providing more, I won't use the word slop 'cause they provide attaches to a different conversation we are not allowed to have. Uh, but it, it, I don't see that this really does serve the community that well, because you're still gonna have to go through testing and compliance and governance checks and all the stuff on someone else's repo that is unintelligible for you in a lot of ways. So, I don't know.

It's, yeah, for, if it's a good repo that you can use that has the right things in it, that you are prepared to check and validate, great. But I don't know that this does that. I think, I think though, the, the thing we have to remember is this happens at one point, and that's the developers.

The developers are the ones who submit these things, right? The code to the repo images, to Docker, et cetera. And maybe we're seeing a little bit of a shift, um, GitHub announced their, uh, trusted publishing.

They're implementing some of those standards as part of putting things into GitHub, more of an aggressive, a force enforcement. Maybe it's a lightly aggressive enforcement. Where we see the, the, the dockers and the, and the open source projects and GitHubs, if they start to enforcing some of these things, I think we're, we're likely to see better security implemented because of it.

It's still gonna take developers' effort to be able to do that. 'cause at some point, if it's a bigger hassle than it is worth their time, they'll find another way around it. And that's when your alternative universe happens.

You know? But, but Mitch, we, we are seeing it too. I mean, Seuss Seuss announced their own container image, you know, certified containers of secure, like the most popular stuff you're going to use.

Mm-hmm. And I've seen others do it. I don't remember who, if it was Muntu or, or one of the Chain chaining Guard is probably the biggest player in That space.

Yeah, right. Where they're giving you, they are, you know, use our repo, basically. 'cause we're, we're saying it is.

Um, but look, let, let's see how this plays out. We'll, we'll be a cube con in, uh, I guess it's November, um, in Atlanta. And, uh, it'll be interesting to see how the community is, is, uh, adopting to this.

But guys, we're about outta time here. It was, I just wanna, I just wanna say there's gonna be baseball in October in New York, so we're happy. Ooh, That's right, Mike.

And they, you know, so are they in first place now, or they're tied. And if it's a tie, the Blue Jays are the Well, this is Monday and through the magic of the internet, we won't really know because it's Friday. All right.

We'll know, we'll know soon enough. Anyway, my Coloradan, thank you for, uh, coming on here. Let's pray for snow.

Yes, Mike, I pray for Yankee Winds. I, there's a lot of things I pray for World peace sanity in this world and everything else. Oh, we got world peace.

CNFC. CNCF and Docker. Yeah.

Do CNCF and Docker can make peace. There's peace. Peace.

There's hope. There's hope. Um, we'll be back tomorrow though, God willing, Tuesday for, for more Textron Gang.

Until then, as a reminder, as always, we have Textron TV immediately following this. So stay tuned for that. If you're not watching this as part of the Daily Stream, whether you're watching on Textron TV or our Textron tv, uh, YouTube channel or our Textron tv T channel, apple, uh, apple, Google, Amazon, fire Stick, Roku or Apple tv, check it out there.

But for now, there's Alan Shimel. We're out.