Techstrong Gang – December 6, 2024

Hey everybody. Welcome to Textron Gang out, Mike Baard, and we got a little bit of everything today. We got Espionage Cyber Monday and some cloud native app dev stuff.

So we'll be back in a minute. All right, welcome back. And the A block.

Well, it's pretty serious stuff. Uh, there's all kinds of reports coming outta Washington about the extent to which the Chinese may have compromised our telecom networks. Of course, this has been going on for months now, at least.

Well, it's probably been going on for years, but, uh, we've been aware of it for months, and yet we don't seem to be making a lot of progress. And then suddenly somebody appears to have, uh, made some closed door testimony to senators and Congress and everybody's flipping out. Um, John, you know, what is up with this whole issue between us and China and espionage?

It seems like we've known about this since. I don't know. I remember John Chamber screaming about this stuff and Yahweh equipment, and we had money set aside to get rid of all this equipment, and yet it's still in there.

So what's our problem? Oh, it, Yeah, it's been going on. It's been going on for years.

There's this, this form of warfare, digital warfare, asymmetrical warfare that's been going on between the US and China, and to a lesser extent of Russia and Iran. And this latest example, you know, Mike, I have to admit that I got this confused with yet another breach that we can talk about. But this one in a sense, it involves several large telcos, which evidently this started in the spring, if not earlier, and it's still going on.

Uh, SEA I admitted, which has led to all sorts of angst and, uh, a rare joint advisory between the FBI and NSA recommending that people should use strong encryption. Yes, strong encryption to battle this group that's called itself Salt typhoon. So in recent months, this group has gained access into it environments of several ISPs.

And, um, there, as you mentioned, there was a US government agencies held a classified briefing, I believe it was on Wednesday. And, um, was it the F-B-I-D-N-I-F-C-C-N-S-N-S-C, csup, they all got together and a closed door briefing to talk about this. Um, you know, one thing I was gonna mention, there's a group, not Saul Typhoon, but something called Full Typhoon, which, um, the FBI director Ray, referred to as the defining threat of our generation.

And that in included a Chinese sponsored group that was focused on prepositioning themselves within the US critical infrastructure to launch cyber attacks in the event of some other major crisis or conflict with the us. So, as you said, this has been going on for years. I think it's gonna escalate given the political climate and, um, the uncertainty around tariffs and ai, et cetera.

It's just, it's a can of worms and I, I don't know if we can put the top back on it. Uh, Mitch, you've been around this space forever, but, um, what do we gotta do here? Do we just gotta rip out all the gear that we got from China that's in those networks?

Or is it more complicated than that? Well, lemme just comment on it first. First of all, we've taken our eye so far off the ball on this and not paying attention to it.

We've been, you know, goofing around with, you know, the election and insurrections and whatever and all this other bologna. And this is serious stuff. This is, this is a far five alarm fire.

And I'm not trying to just be hyperbolic about it, but let me be hyperbolic about it. Everything touches our, our telecommunications networks and our telecommunications networks touch everything. And this isn't a hack, this isn't like I'm stealing credit card data and social security numbers.

This is, this is an infiltration into our networks. It isn't one server that got hacked and then they did something. This is them getting into those networks, not only gaining control of the things we know about, but getting themselves into other systems and servers.

So it isn't just computers, it's applications, it's network equipment. 'cause all, all of these networks now are software defined networks. They're software elements.

They're not hardware gear like they used to be. So it is, if you can get in and move laterally, it's not just move laterally one direction, it's 360 degree lateral movement all across these networks. And I think, I, my prediction is we will find this is 100 x more extensively infiltrated than what we're reading about in the media.

So I, I'm serious. This is, this is deadly serious stuff. So you wanna see airplanes starting to fall out of the sky.

You wanna see money go missing in, in financial transactions. You wanna see your 401k disappear. You want to see our military, um, you know, become ineffectual.

You know, while we're goofing around with who should be the defense leader or the, you know, CAA, whatever this is real stuff. This, they're, they're, they are doing some real serious damage here. And it's, and it's a low and slow kind of activity.

That's what's hard to detect is when something takes months to do, it's kinda laying in weight, right? And when you see it, it only is such a big thing because it's happened over such a long time before we've discovered it. So we need to get serious about this or, uh, we may, uh, the electricity lights may go off.

Yes. That, that's interesting that you mentioned that ish, because years and years ago I went to this summit, uh, I was invited, uh, on backgrounds. It was in Monterey and there were defense department officials there, various people from the, the Pentagon, et cetera, private enterprise.

And they were talking about this is pre AI's growth. And they were talking about, uh, our water supplies being shut off, electricity, financial systems being, uh, neutered, so to speak. All these different scenarios because a lot of the countries and the groups within these countries that are waging war against us, they can't, I mean, in a conventional warfare, they can't compete with the United States.

So they have to find another way. And, um, it goes both ways By the way. So they were mentioning some of this stuff they had tried in the Middle East back in, back in these, back in the early two thousands.

Um, and this is just, it's just escalated. And I think you're completely right. There's, there's a level of this that we have absolutely no idea of.

And that's intentional, by the way, in terms of the adversaries. They're just probing and seeing what they can do and biting their time and infiltrating. Yeah.

And it's a lot about compromising, getting in and then just staying there, having a presence there. So you can, you can do things with compromise systems or networks. So when we see announcements from the FBI and from Apple and Google or whoever about don't text, use a, use an encrypted application, that's, that's a very edge symptom of what's going, that's not the issue.

So think about what they're saying. They're saying don't send text messages. 'cause any of those are susceptible to being read by by the Chinese or anyone else that's in our net.

They are in our networks. And so that they can see all that is what they're saying. So don't use a system that's an encrypted.

Now is it end-to-end encrypted? That's the real question. But anyway, my point is, using a WhatsApp is, is a symptom, a solution to a symptom, not a, a solution to the cause.

And that tells you, at least gives you an indicator of how pervasive this is. If we're that concerned about our text messages being read, trust me, it's much more significant than just your text messages. It's everything.

So you Go ahead. Uh, sorry Mike, I was just gonna, putting the onus on the, the average end user to encryption is your friend is not this the right solution either. And this is the who, what, when, where a phone calls with, you know, all of these pieces of information put together, they can determine personal information about people and, and the onus having to be on the end user, I think is, is a huge mistake.

We have heard from Verizon T-Mobile lumen and at and t and all have said, Hey, from what we understand, know, customer data has been compromised. However, I think given that it's the who, what, when, why of phone calls, all that metadata together can tell stories about people. And we don't know who, is it everyone, is it spec, is it specific individuals?

Probably. But it's, it's gotta be something that has to be done that the end user doesn't have to worry about. 'cause that's that, I think that's, um, that's a huge problem right there.

I think we should clarify what the carriers are not saying there, which is, um, the metadata seems to have been stolen. And if I have your metadata, I can tell a lot about you. And then two is apparently, uh, you know, adding insult to injury here, they did steal, uh, espionage or surveillance data that our agencies have been collecting, and then the Chinese now have access to it as well.

Mitch, there's a debate going on in Washington about whether or not the time has come that we need an actual cybersecurity department and a and a cabinet level person to go drive this conversation. Because it seems like, you know, CSUN and all these folks and the FBI, they're doing a great job, but it still feels a little disjointed. So do we need to bring all this together?

I'd have to go back and look when I said this, and not to say I told you so, but I said the exact same thing probably nine months, maybe a year ago, of we have to elevate cyber, cyber and cybersecurity to the top most. It's as equally as important as aircraft carriers and nuclear devices. I mean, this is literally, you know, ending a society kind of activity.

You, you could complete, if you imagine if you corrupted the water supply, electricity is not something that you can depend on anymore. All of our communications potentially either be interrupted or intercepted and used against you. You, you have total control over a society, right?

And so I, I think we need to quit goofing around. This is serious business and it's one of the things that frustrates me about Washington. People are, you know, upset about, uh, about, uh, inflation rates.

Trust me, we have, those are, those are low levels compared to what could happen to our society if we really are, if we really are disrupted by, by the Chinese or other entities. So it's, it's time to get deadly serious about this and put competent people in leadership roles that can, can lead us, because there's good things happening in, in, in c in CSA and other parts of the, of the organization, but they're, they're kind of hanging out there doing their thing without a real strategy and somebody leading across all those agencies and conducting it. You know, this is, this is the 2001 nine 11 event that, that we're looking at that could have a massive impact on us.

I'm, I'm serious. It's, to me, I'm scared. It's a very scary thing.

Well, to make it a a little more interesting, John, there's a report in the New York Times talking about how the Russians have put a satellite up at the highest levels of space that includes a dummy warhead. And the idea here is that they're testing the theory that they might be able to blow up a satellite that takes out every other satellite that's out there. So are the stakes in this whole thing just getting raised to a level that we're just starting to comprehend?

Yeah. Yeah. That, that's interesting.

I saw that story that you sent earlier today, and it's, it, it raises the stakes and it, it, it's, and I don't, and I'm not being flippant here, but this is like James Bond stuff coming to life, and I'm like, Mitch, I, having heard about this, having written and having written about it, and Mitch actually was a source for the, a book where we did as part of what the book that we did years ago. This was kind of something we looked at on the side as something happening in the future. And it, it is frustrating, um, given what's at stake and, and what our government isn't doing.

It's trying to, uh, with AI in a certain sense, it kind of opened their eyes to the possibilities of things that could go wrong. And they actually, to the credit of the government, they have enlisted people who actually understand the technology and and use them as advisors. Um, so there is some sort of progress.

But I, I actually, I was thinking of the same thing that, that Mitch was, I I'm thinking we're gonna have some sort of incident, um, some sort of digital, they used to call it the digital Pearl Harbor effect, right? Or a nine 11 type of effect. Something like that is inevitably going, going to happen.

It's really weird too, because I think Trump in, in a kind of a weird way, mentioned like a, a, a Star Wars defense of some sort when he was campaigning. So, um, somebody's chattering chatting into his ear, or at least they're, they're, they're trying to think of it in, in like a kind of a space defense or a cyber defense issue. I, I just, I'm just afraid though, just given the uncertainty of who runs what and the change in administration and where eyes are are not on the ball, we're thinking about, we're all distracted by things like tariffs and inflation and, and this is the really important stuff that we should all be concerned about.

Deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic, just Yeah. Careful what we're arranging. Yeah.

Um, Lisa, I feel like the carriers are still treating this as some sort of PR marketing issue and not a national security issue, so that they need to kind of step up the way that they are talking about this because, um, you know, the first thing that they're putting out is a statement about, you know, well customer data, this is like a bigger issue than just whether or not, you know, your texts or my texts went miss it, Right? No, it's a huge issue. And I think from what I gather, there's a lot of information that, that, as Mitch is saying, we don't know that the carriers don't know either.

I think because breaches are so common these days and everyone is worried about my data being stolen, that's the first response in terms of no customer data was compromised. Or several weeks ago, Verizon said, we became aware of this. Um, they say, Bryson said, we understand that focus was quite narrow.

I don't know that they know that, and it's probably not even true. So they have to manage this from a marketing and a PR perspective very carefully. But they need to get, be more informed.

And I think they're probably struggling to try to get the information from the government and from, and even CISA said they couldn't offer a timetable for remediation. So I think in some cases the carriers might be flying a little bit blind and are trying to put out messages that will as squash the concerns. But like I said earlier, I think putting the onus on the end user for, you know, encryption is your friend is, is the wrong thing.

But maybe right now it's the only thing. It's it's the first line of defense, which just seems so odd to me that, that that can't be it. And We have tensions with China across the board here, right?

We're talking about Taiwan and semiconductors, and we're limiting access to equipment to them for building semiconductors. And now they're saying they're gonna limit access to the metals that we need to build semiconductors. So John, is this just part and parcel of, you know, a whole slew of things that are maybe we're sliding into something without realizing just how big it is and What Yeah, I was thinking about that.

You're a historian. It might be in the early days of World War I, right, Right. Yeah.

This, it's, it's form of escalation, like on multiple fronts that leads to an aggravation and antagon and agitation between multiple countries and, and their, their whatever their end games are. So in a sense, it does build into it, and it also puts the tech industry in a weird, kind of difficult situation, not just with terrorists, but the relationship in general with China. And we're so dependent on China.

And when you think of a company like an Apple or a Qualcomm, uh, and it affects the entire ecosystem, the, the critical infrastructure, the supply chain, uh, what have you. The the results, I mean like 15 to 20% normally of Apple's revenue emanates from China. So this is a, um, not just a a milit a military or defense related issue.

It's a economic issue. And, um, I just, I think we better, we better be careful about our sabre rattling with, with China, because I think we're, we're playing with fire in a way that, um, has longer range, deeper implications. I think that becomes the ultimate question, right?

To what degree are we willing to make certain sacrifices that would be required to disengage for China? I'm not saying we need to go to war per se, but, um, there will be an argument that says we need to have a strategic policy that says we're going to quietly over the next four or five years, start moving strategic things outside of China and not be dependent upon them for manufacturing. I mean, you've heard all these, uh, issues before and you know, Mitch, how long might that take?

Well, it's, You know, think about how we've, um, progressed in our, our thinking about national security with Homeland Security Department. And one of the first steps was coordinating information flow and access between agencies. You know, one of the fundamental problems that we recognize in in nine 11 was, you know, it's is sort of the, uh, police and fire and the sheriff department were all on different frequencies of, of radios to be real simplistic about it.

Um, and so getting people to be able to communicate effectively, share information both at the time of, of an event, but you know, just as importantly in the background of understanding what's happening, um, 'cause it's this tech detected in one area. You know, we all watch shows like, you know, FBI on TV or whatever, they have all those great screens where they can kind of connect all the di uh, dots in, in four minutes and find who the bad guy is and where they've walked across the city, and then they co arrests them. But to do that is, is really a complex task.

So that information sharing is vital, I think. I think the, the next part of it though is yeah, that has to be, to take it to the next level. You have to back it up by a strategy.

Think about our national defense strategy from a military standpoint, right? The kind of wars that we're prepared to fight, the defensive, uh, posture that we have to take, um, changing from World War II to Vietnam or guerrilla warfare to cyber defense. And, and we've worked on pieces of those, but I think the real challenge is, I think the, the bigger issue is, is our cyber, uh, both, uh, offense and defense capability has to be equal or at above what our physical, uh, t um, uh, tactical, not tactical, tactile military, uh, d capabilities are.

And, uh, I'm not saying we aren't doing anything there, not, and by, by any stretch, it's not an area that I'm, I'm directly involved in and have, you know, lots of clearances to see and everything, but that is the world we live in. And that's, that's how you then roll the tanks in after, you know, all the power's down and everybody's, you know, clamoring for, for water and you know, food. So it's a totally different strategy.

All right. Well, folks, I think we're gonna shift gears here a little bit, but I would just say next time you're crafting that email or sending a text, be aware of it wherever you're sending it to. There's a lot of other people looking at it.

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All right, we're back with something that hopefully is a little lighter than the previous block, but, um, looks like Cyber Monday hit another record in terms of the amount of revenue, how much money was spent. John, I know you covered this in there. Continue to look at what's going on with digital e-commerce, but what's your take on this?

Because, you know, theoretically we're all supposed to be involved in some sort of recession, and yet we find money to spend for Christmas. Uh, uh, yes. Maybe we're spending before the recession fully hits us.

I don't know. Or before inflation even gets worse, I, I don't know. 3 billion was the figure on Monday.

I kept having to update it for the story. I got the numbers from Adobe Analytics, so that number is up 7% from last year. 7 million was being spent per minute.

I think there were about 73 million people or shopping that day. According to Adobe, Salesforce, a actually to its credit a had another report. 8.

So anyway, they're looking at, we're looking at several, uh, influences. Uh, AI driven chatbots and assistance is spurred shopping habits, consumers. So the Black Friday traffic, for instance, to retail sized from chatbots was up 1800%, 1800% compared to the same time last year.

There's also this, of course, the buy now pay later, or BNPL as what they call it, um, which was up significantly. 5 in 2022. 5.

In other words, people are gonna buy, buy now and, and, uh, pay pay later through a bot models. One, one other thing was Amazon, Walmart and, and Target were, because of the, the fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, we're pushing, uh, sales and pushing certain promotional events earlier. So that played into the momentum and to, to experiment.

I, I actually did go in on to a Best Buy on Monday and, uh, just to ex to actually make a purchase, but also to just experience what was going on. I talked to some of the people there and it was in absolutely insane. Um, and I, I thought about you, Lisa, when I was writing the doing this story, because I know you're gonna have a lot of, you have a lot of insight into, into what's going on.

But it was, again, a continuation of, of AI actually really goosed things on, on this, this year's edition. One of the things that surprised me, John, and I wonder if it surprised you about the Adobe survey of 5,000 consumers, was that 20% of those consumers were reliant on AI chat bots. And that surprised me because we hear so much negativity on chatbots.

I'm one of those people that's, I'm very patient with chatbots because I know we have the opportunity to train the models and help it learn more. Um, but did that surprise you that the number was that high? It did.

I, um, yes, but you know what, I'll admit something. I used the chat bot that day. I was looking for something, I was looking for a charger, I was looking for a secondary charger for my, for my laptop, and I did actually fall into that.

And it actually was highly effective, I have to admit. And it was, the experience was much better than I expected a year ago. I never would've done that.

So, um, yeah, that was, uh, that, that number, that number was, was high, but not entirely surprising. Um, because a lot of the purchases, the most popular purchases, and Adobe looks at those as well, involve things like digital cameras, uh, chip, smart speaker televisions. Yes, yes.

Uh, Sony PlayStation five, for example. A lot of, a lot of electronic gadget trees. So there are, people want more kind of a specialized idea of, of based on price range or what's available.

And the other thing is, before you, I I, I will not make a purchase unless I know it's actually gonna be there. So I I, I buy before I go, which may be a little bit crazy, but, um, this, there was a lot of that going. I, I went to the pickup area for the orders, and that was a zoo.

3 billion from, with the help of AI up 7% over last year. But another thing, thing that struck me is, um, not just fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2024, but the, the, the BNPL, that that number is forecasted. John, you said to be over 18 billion people want what they want, and if they can do the, the old, the, the, the modern layaway version of buy now pay later, they will, and they haven't, they demonstrated that.

So I think it just goes to show that consumer demand is there regardless of the state of the economy. People want what they want, they wanna be able to give gifts to family and friends for Hanukkah, Kwanza Christmas, the New Year, et cetera. Uh, they certainly showed up on cyber, uh, uh, black Friday throughout the weekend into Cyber Monday.

And we obviously see the numbers trending in that direction, that show, um, a lot more spending than last year. And maybe that's a trajectory we're just gonna continue to see up into the Right. Well, let me ask you, because, um, we saw, at least here on the East Coast, lots of reports around Black Friday where people were saying, eh, there was no really good deals.

There wasn't a lot of traffic in the malls. And is it all shifting to Cyber Monday now? Is that the trajectory we're on?

We have seen That's a great point, yeah, Mike, we have seen a lot of, of, oh, sorry, John, a lot of organizations, um, shift Doorbuster deals online. So Black Friday doesn't have to be the chaos that it used to be. Um, I think a lot of people were online shopping on Black Friday as well, because they can, looking for great deals.

Um, there's a lot of tips out there from experts on what to be looking for, what to avoid, how to do safer transactions, use the H-T-G-P-S, for example, that's your friend as well. Um, and so I think that we're seeing a lot of those retailers just want to go where the consumers are. And if the consumers wanna transact online, then they have to shift, and they've done, they've been doing that Black Friday to the cyber sphere.

All right, so professional shoppers are online and the amateurs are in the stores, right? I get so Well, that's, that's a lot what the people do. I mean, in a sense, some if you, if you don't wanna wait for the delivery a lot, a lot of the folks were, were buying mass buying online, say from a Target, and then they would just pull up, pick up, pick up their, their goods, and then drive off.

So their experience at Target lasted all of like four or five minutes just to pick up what you had, what you had ordered. And I think that's actually becoming quite common, especially out here in the last few years in, in, in the Valley. Mitch, do you think the websites that we built, they're more resilient these days?

I have yet to hear about the catastrophic e-commerce crash yet, but it's still early. Um, or do you think the IT folks, you know, have their arms around this whole issue? Well, it's a good point.

Hadn't thought, I thought I hadn't thought about that part of it, Mike, but it may be that, you know, this isn't the, uh, flash mob sale or the, uh, you know, the gone viral moment. This is a buildup, right? We've been increasing, increasing our usage of online buying, not just events around Black Friday and things like that, but on an everyday basis.

Um, it's kinda like the, uh, you know, the airlines, you know, highest volume day was like on just July 12th or something. You like, set some records. Um, so we're just experiencing so much more overall volume, I think that helps us handling the peaks, um, because they aren't so drastically different than the day-to-day operations.

O one thing I'm really fascinated about this is, you know, I'm, I'm not a chat bot fan, but it really, it, it, because they're kind of the low hanging fruit of generative ai. It's one of the easy things to, to relatively speaking to implement with generative ai. And we're seeing agents come on board more sophisticated uses of generative ai.

Um, but to put, to hear, you know, Lisa and John talking about, you know, John saying sort of closet Yeah, I actually used a a a chat bot. It was helpful. Yeah, it wasn't intentional.

It wasn't intentional. It was almost an accidental event, you know, it was, it was actually fine, but, you know, I don't, I'm not a I don't have a high regard for it, and I, in a sense, I think, yeah, it is low hanging fruit, but yeah, it was actually okay, What it, what it made me think of is, you know, don't, I'm saying this to myself, don't judge, you know, I, we, we judged chatbots as being, you know, of limited use because, so for so long, chatbots were, hi, how may I help you? And you type in whatever it would come back with.

Well, are, is it one of these three things? That's all I can do for you. And if unless you're in that, those three things bucket, you're outta luck.

Now it's much different with gender, the ai. So, you know, maybe even if you don't admit it to your family over, you know, over the holiday break that you actually used a chat bot, you know, maybe we give it a try. Give it a second.

Look, Lisa, is that generational? And I asked this question because my father-in-law who's up in his seventies, can't stand anything that doesn't involve a human for customer service, right? And my, my, my youngest son or who's in his, or one of my younger sons who's in his twenties, you know, if he never spoke to another person in customer service again, he'd be perfectly happy.

Yeah, I think you bring up a great example within your own family of the generational differences that we see. Um, mm-hmm. I think those people that didn't grow up in with computers, um, in their pockets, um, are probably have less patience.

And that's something I think patients dissipated during the pandemic, and I don't think it's coming back. Um, I think we see a lot of that where, where people of, of older generations want to have that human connection to be able to, to do a transaction more seamlessly. Um, and I think the younger generations have more patience with that or understand they probably can get what they're looking for by not having to go through a human.

But of course we've got how many generations, you know, in the workforce today, what five? Um, and that keeps growing. So I think we have to companies, retailers, et cetera, the big box stores and, and everybody have to go where the consumers are.

And they have to be able to have the cyber conversations. They have to be able to have the, the human conversations as well to meet their customers where they wanna be met. John, you said you accidentally fell into using that agent, and I cannot help but wonder if the people who designed that website, that didn't happen by accident.

They had a plan and I, and, and you know, basically No, I know. It was all intentional. Yeah.

That was the fish that they caught. Yeah, no, they, that's um, that's a good point. Yeah.

I'm like the, this, this is, it's all, it's all designed to take advantage of, um, people like me. You know, actually I had to be honest though, I actually then did call the store, but the reason I, I actually did want to talk to a person 'cause I wanted to make sure that the part was available. And also I didn't quite tr I'll be honest, I didn't quite trust the chat bot and, but what happened was, like a lot of people, I ended up talking to somebody.

I think the person was in the Philippines, right? They, they have no association with the store except be they're, they're part of a call center. And, um, it was, it was fine, but I kind of used the human element and thing.

But going back to what you, you said about your son, I have the same situation with our youngest is 24, and I don't think he goes to stores, I mean, only at the last minute to buy like a knick-knack or something because he has, there's a time elements, right, where only has a couple of hours to show up at a party, but otherwise, course he, he will not go anywhere close to a physical store or location on DoorDash and Uber delivery, right? We don't even go to pick, no, Get everything delivered. He has a Lot of, I I'll tell you, my youngest is a huge fan of going to certain stores.

He will go to Microcenter here, walk around, create a list, and then go home and order it online. Microcenter is the mothership. Oh, ING that's my favorite.

I'll admit. I did all my shopping online. I don't think I, I didn't visit one store, um, outside of Whole Foods, um, on Black Friday throughout the weekend because I could do everything that I wanted online.

I knew what I was looking for, I could get it. Um, and I generally have decent experiences with chatbots. I was saying earlier how I, I like to be patient with them.

I did have one poor experience and it wasn't related to, um, the holiday shopping season. I was trying to book an appointment for my car for service. And this, it's either the vendor or the dealer that forces you to go through a chatbot to book everything.

You can't get to a human. Um, you, there probably was a service number I could have called and I was able to book the appointment, but it, I tried four times to get a, a loaner car and the chatbot handoff to the human was just disconnected. It just wasn't able to happen.

Um, that's probably the worst chatbot experience I've had. But I generally, uh, if I know, and I think what most folks know what they're looking for, they're able to do the transaction pretty seamlessly without having to get to a human. So what, Lisa, what is the future of the store then?

Because outside of the holiday season when I go to the mall, it's practically empty and Yeah. Walking around. And it's not a destination that it used to be where people used to just come and hang out.

So, um, do we need to upgrade the mall experience or is it just passe? Well, I think the mall experience here in Silicon Valley is outstanding. There's one thing that's been seriously upgraded, um, that I've seen in the Valley over the last maybe five years.

But something I saw recently, I think I saw this on the Today Show yesterday was that, um, the rise of the, the resurgence of brick and mortar bookstores, people want to go into a bookstore to have that sort of legacy experience. So I think that, again, it's like what I was saying before, you know, you gotta meet the customers where they are. I think both experiences are equally important.

Um, and some folks, and just like, like some folks still, I still like to have a fiscal book. Um, I was never a Kindle user. I don't like to read things on my iPad.

I like that legacy experience. And I think we're seeing, at least in the bookstore, um, uh, sector, we're seeing more folks want that in-person old fashioned experience. It is true.

Uh, a lot of folks are buying records now because they want that Yes. Cotton experience owning Something. Oh, the vinyl sales.

Yes. That's why, that's what my son wants for, for Christmas, was a record player, like a vinyl record player, really? That it's a comeback.

That's awesome. Yes. It's the comeback.

It's a comeback of the, of the vinyl record and, um, it's tactile rights. Exactly. Yeah.

Um, and I was gonna mention Lisa, you know, the one reason, well, one thing I think is an absolute factor in the success of almost every mall near where I live, that presence of an Apple store, no matter, oh, what's the situation? What is surrounded by Yeah, it is swarming with people always. And it is used as a, it's, it's like a, it's like a century, uh, movie theater.

They did the same thing here, where they would, they would plant that in an Apple store and, and the other, other stores would benefit from it. Yes. So it was, it was, that was a drawing card.

It's a hundred for are, are those for sure. Are are those, are those people actually shopping or are they just lined up at the Genius bar waiting for service? Uh, I, yeah, I'm, I'm among them.

Um, yeah, so I, I will, I will go in there. 'cause the customers I have, I mean, I, I, I sometimes am a little hard on Apple, but their customer service experience is absolutely outstanding. Um, and it's quick and a lot of people there go there to get something fixed, but then you get upsell and, uh, other areas.

Um, but anyway, just, I found that, I found that interesting. Um, versus the other electronic store. It's, it's usually kind of hit and miss.

I did though, and I go, if the Apple experience is great outcomes, there's so many people lined up at the Genius Bar training and something fixed This plan, I that something on Cyber Monday. Speaking of Apple, I had to buy a new Apple Watch and I was able to do the entire transaction online and pay a courier a few bucks to have to actually deliver it to my house. I, within two hours of the order, there was the, the watch.

So it was, of course, I didn't get a deal on it. I thought I might get a deal from Apple on Cyber Monday. I did not.

Uh, but I have a new watch and it works well. All right, folks. Well, I'm pretty sure that Sam is still working on his naughty and nice list.

It's just like most things, it's gonna be online, it'll be back in a minute. Cloud native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem. com is your destination for news, thought leadership, features and webinars on cloud native architecture, Kubernetes, serverless, cloud native application development, microservices, service mesh, cloud native security, and more.

Stay on the cutting edge of modern application development at Cloud native now. All right, folks, we're back and we're gonna geek out a little bit because, well, the folks over at Salesforce, Heroku have announced that sometime early next year, they're gonna bring a platform as a service environment to Kubernetes. And if you've been watching this show, we all went to CubeCon and talked about what was going on in cloud native space for a long time.

And one of the issues is it's still too hard to build these applications and people are struggling with these things. So maybe, um, this paths from Heroku will be the answer. There are other paths for the platform, Mitch, but what's your take on what's going on here that it's still too hard for developers to build these applications, but does Heroku make it simple?

Well, you know, Heroku's a little bit nostalgia here. Heroku was really a darling of the early kind of DevOps days, maybe pre DevOps days of, I think of it as, as before it was bought by Salesforce. It was essentially the, you know, the, uh, the dark art or shadow it for developers.

You could, I remember developer coming to me, ah, I built this and here's what I did. I'm like, yeah, hey, where'd you do that? I did it in the cloud on Heroku.

What's Heroku? You know, so developers are using it. Is it a complete environment to both develop and then run applications?

And Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2011. And in all honesty, it, it's really languished quite a bit. It has not kept up.

Um, it, it's been an environment where you could build an application and run it. Um, but sort of the rest of the organization isn't ready to run Heroku apps, right? Operations doesn't know what Heroku is and how to work with it.

Um, it's not a substantial platform to, to run, run businesses on today. At least it, it's languished in that ability. But what, what's happened now more recently, and, and Heroku was part of a recent, um, ab dev field day that we did, uh, through their tech tech field day, uh, group within futur and had a chance to talk with them behind the scenes before these announcements were made.

So they're, they're coming, they're making some significant investment to, to not only catch up ruku, uh, technically, but also to, to kinda with how we're developing software today. So you see what's happening in the cloud, is it used to be or it has been, get into Amazon's cloud and then we kinda lock in 'cause this is all the stuff there and we just kind of tacitly support other things. Yeah, we support Microsoft, but not really.

We support this not, but not really. We want you to use our stuff now. You see, for example, um, Oracle, uh, offering in, you know, in native support within Microsoft Azure environment.

So, so the, not only the cloud providers, but the, uh, software tech providers are recognizing they gotta run their stuff, not just in their cloud, but in other people's cloud and do it with high fidelity, with the same kind of capability and support that you can get natively from that, that vendor's offering. Same thing with this. So what they've done with Heroku is they're upgrading the underlying platform.

So moving it on to Kubernetes, and if you're don't know about Kubernetes, Kubernetes is essentially gonna become everywhere. It's the workload kingpin operating system, workload system, if you will, for software running and from the edge to the core of the network and even into the enterprise. So they're modernizing it that way.

The other thing that's hap happens since heroku's kind of heyday is we have something called, um, remote development environments and essentially setting up a dev environment so that I can, you know, set it could dynamically allocate the resources that I need. There's companies like Dev Zero where, you know, I don't pre pre allocate what I need for resources. It detects that, oh, you need a GPU 'cause you're using the Cuda library.

Okay, great, we'll provision that for you and do it all for you and set up your development that way instead of, you know, hand building it or a platform engineering team building. It. Kind of the same thing here is Roku is trying to reposition itself as that kind of current generation or next generation of remote development environment and, and, and catch onto that wave again.

So I applied, I applaud them for, uh, working really hard to make the kind of investments that they need to make to not just modernize it, but have Heroku be part of what the current generation of development environments, et cetera, and the technologies that you can use, you know, they just added support for dotnet. So I don't mean to ramble on about this. There's so many good things that are happening here.

There's a lot of work for Heroku to, to real become a player in this. Again, I'm not underestimating the challenge that they've got. Right?

Well, here's the map that I kind of look at and I find interesting with this is that I think, you know, last estimates I saw maybe there's 8 million developers that have built an app or Kubernetes, and a lot of them built it once and decided not to do it again. So, and so I have to say that, um, if we can get the base developers who are familiar with Heroku on the Kubernetes, you could easily double that number of developers building cloud native applications, and that would be huge for that community. So they may not be the most sophisticated apps in the world compared to some of the things that, you know, larger enterprises are building.

But the overall pool of developers and the number of applications being built, you could see some math in your head that says maybe the number of cloud native applications being rolled out in the next two years is twice what it's been for the last seven. I don't know. What do you think Mitch?

Well, with, with the proliferation adoption of Kubernetes? You know, it's, it's been said a million times. It's a, it's a very complex environment, you know, uh, Kubernetes is simple, said no one.

Um, but, but one of the side effects of that is you see a huge amount of investment in companies, whether it's observability or configuration or operational tools, gen AI tools to help you understand how to, how to better operate Kubernetes. So it's, it's the developer part of it, but even more so, it's the operations team, how, how it ops, how do they manage and run Kubernetes platform engineering is, is also a, I think, a key part of that solution. So with the proliferation Mike, it's kind of like, yes, you know, it is complex, but it's happening anyway.

It's being adopted so widespread. I mean, it's showing up at the edge of, you know, data management platforms. Um, office 365 runs on Kubernetes.

You don't know that, but it does. Um, it is that it's forcing the, oh, well, then the market needs to, to simplify it or make it easier to operate. So I think we'll see more and more kind of, um, abstractions or, uh, tools to help us better leverage it and also run it.

All right. Well, to that point, you know, and John, I'll ask you this question because when I talked to the folks at Heroku last, or this earlier this week, um, you know, I kind of forgot that Salesforce owned Heroku. Mm-hmm.

And yeah, that, that's that you just stole my point. Thanks, Mike. Um, I was gonna say the most, one of the more fascinating things I think about this, and there are several fascinating things about this topic.

They bought this company more than a decade ago, and it still existed in some sort of form, and yet they, they found value in and, and, and turn it into leverage into something else. And I'm trying to think how often does that happen? Um, I, I have friends who you who sold companies to, uh, Salesforce, who are long gone after their company was, was absorbed and evaporated, or they just tossed aside the idea.

And I, it just, um, to me that was, was interesting. I can't think of anything really comparable to it that, that was kind of the one thing I wanted to ask Mitch, or, or you, Mike, have you ever come across a situation where something that a company acquired, actually they put it to use that long afterwards. Well, hey John, I got out my bell-bottom jeans again from the seventies, they're back, you know, so Yeah, yeah.

You know, white ties and narrow ties or no ties. So, you know, it, it, and my point is, timing is everything with, with the resurgence or with the, you know, rise of remote development environments. Um, and that's one of the things that Heroku did really well.

It was also an operating environment that's the platform as a service part of it. Um, and you can argue that, you know, Amazon developer queue is part of that, um, you know, copilot and so much of what happening with, with GitHub and actions and, uh, those kind of environments. So the, I think the timing, if I was sitting back and I don't know this is how it happened, but if I'm the, you know, CFO of Heroku in, in talking to the CFO of Salesforce saying why should we invest all this money?

I'd say, here's what's happening in the market. People are adopting these environments, this's, we what we have. We just have to present a modern day version of that.

I, that's my guess why, why they've invested so much money in bringing this back. Yeah. I think there's a storyline that's gonna emerge though, that will feel something like this.

Salesforce is investing in all these AI agents and some of those AI agents will be used to build applications, and I can put those things at the front end of Heroku and come up with something that's pretty compelling. I think if you put those things together, um, I'm not quite clear that that's what they're absolutely gonna do, but it seems like that's the logical flow of the thing and the, and where we should be headed that. And if that's the case, then, you know, mere mortals can create interesting applications using AI agents on a pass that they don't have to know anything about Kubernetes about.

So maybe, I don't know, Lisa, I'd like to get your thoughts here. You know, is Heroku a hidden asset for Salesforce, or is this something they're just gonna spit out some? That's a great point.

Uh, I, I think you all bring up such great points about how long ago the acquisition was, and we're seeing this now in their release. They had, um, nice commentary from customers from healthcare organizations to cardio based car collect kilter set. So looking at the improving the developer experience, I improves the consumer experience.

Whether you're consuming a product on, uh, an e-commerce website or you're a patient trying to get reliable, uh, care from a healthcare provider. I think this is something that if they can demonstrate with Heroku that improving the developer experience is improving the lives of patients and improving the lives of people doing transactions online or whatnot, um, then it could be an interesting resurgence for, um, this platform as a service technology. All right, so Mitch, lemme ask you this.

So much of what currently exists in the land of Kubernetes is, you know, do it yourself platforms, and everybody's talking about moving to platform engineering, and the thing about all those platforms is, you know, somebody had to not just build them, but they have to maintain them and update them. Do you think that there's folks out there who are gonna say, you know what, I don't wanna do that anymore. Let me just swap this out for a pass, even if it's not Heroku, there's a couple other options out there.

You know, have we gotten to the point now where we're kind of sick and tired of custom everything? Well, I was talking with, um, one of the, one of the vendors that has an offering running on Kubernetes, and, and this is during, uh, coup con couple months ago, and they described it as, yeah, we were, we lived in the days for a while there of, you know, the, the buyers would say, yeah, let me do it myself. I want access to all the, the bells and whistles and knobs and buttons so I can kind of don't limit me, right?

Don't, don't stifle my creativity. Right? And you find out what, what that really entails.

Now that you have that responsibility with great power comes great responsibility, the market's now shifted to, I don't have time to mess around with that. I, it my resources cannot be spent trying to figure out how to manage Kubernetes or how to manage the development environment or, or integrate these, you know, stick-built, integrate these things all by myself. Let me find people who will take that burden off my, off my shoulders.

And that's what's happening in Kubernetes, and that's part of the operationalizing Kubernetes in a way that ops can, uh, can adopt it, develop more developers can use it, you know, extracting, extracting away some of the complexity and, and, and, but letting me have access to the capabilities if I need it under the hood, if you will. So the, the market has shifted from, I'm gonna build this myself to, I, I still want lots of control to the just take care of it for me, and if I need to do something, you know, gimme some, some, uh, abilities to, to step under the hood, at least to some degree. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, there's a lot of irony in this conversation for me because early on it was a handful of developers who were like saying, we're gonna use Kubernetes, whether it likes it or not. And then it eventually discovered that Kubernetes does all kinds of interesting things on the ops side. So now oddly enough, it ops teams are telling developers we're using Kubernetes, whether you like it or not.

Yeah. Karma. It's karma.

It's, it is, it is karma. It definitely comes full round. All right.

Well folks, we invite you or suggest you should go experiment with all this stuff because, you know, decisions you might have made four or five years ago. Don't have to lock yourself into that forever. Things change and things do move on.

Hey, I wanna thank our guest today. We have Mitch Ashley who is, uh, vice president and practice lead for application development and DevOps over the protium group. Mitch, thanks for being on the show.

Absolutely pleasure being here with the team. All right. And of course we have Lisa Martin, the CMO advisor who's out there aligned with our folks at Butum Group, but also works with all kinds of different vendors out there and has all those great insights around what's happening in the holidays.

And I'm sure we'll be talking about that again soon. Lisa, thanks for being here. My pleasure.

It was really fun. Thank you. And the, uh, I guess somewhat tech strong anointed czar of Silicon Valley.

Oh, God. Uh, was al and wait, is al whispering in your ear right now, Mike? No, it was fun to be here.

It was also good to see you all at a AWS reinvent as, as short as the time I was there. That was fun. Good.

All right. Always good to break some bread with you, John. Yeah, well, I was gonna exactly my exact sentiments Always.

Thanks. Always good to see everybody in per in person. In fact, hey, if you see any of us at the show, stop by and say hi.

We'd love to take, get in touch with all of you. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this show. Stay tuned.

There's some awesome content on text, on TV coming up right behind this. We'll see you next time.