This is JSA TV live the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals I'm Dean Perine of JSA and we are coming at you live as the name might suggest from Fort Lauderdale, Florida at Metro Connect 2023 and I am here with my new best friend Mr. Michael Donahue Michael is the managing director of business development for cumulus data Michael welcome to JSA TV. Yeah, it's great to be here Thanks for the nice introduction. Yeah, you bet and thank you for the amazing reception last night That was a great party. Yeah, we had a lot of fun last night You did a great great job. The music was good. The food was good. The the conversation was great So thank you excellent. Thank you very much for that But for our viewers that don't already know why don't you tell them a little bit about cumulus data? Absolutely, I would love to you know part of the reason why we had a big event last night was kind of like the new kids on the block we are We're an energy company that's getting into the data center space So we own a talent energy is the parent company of cumulus energy cumulus data And we own 20 power plants across the nation and our flagship is our nuclear power plant, Susquehanna And if we go back a few years ago, we're basically we're selling our product to a market that didn't want it anymore And we look to you know 200 miles down to northern Virginia and we see everybody wanting our product And so what we try to figure out is well, how do we how do we move our product to where everybody wants it? So we said why don't we just go build a data center directly connected to our nuclear power plant Which is carbon-free reliable and extremely low cost and so you know a year and a half later. We're here We energize the site two weeks ago, and we can't be more excited to you know, think about the rest of the year Yeah, I love it and you and I kind of got into this a little bit last night You know I was thinking that you know we used to 10 20 years ago Think about data set data centers as you know space and power and things like that but that power piece Has really come back into the spotlight because with sustainable energy being a big focus You can't really provide that power for the long term without thinking Environmentally and that's exactly what what you folks are doing and exactly what you know JSA has been talking about I'm here now for for many months many years actually But let's talk a little bit about sustainability and that energy and you just energize. I love the word energize You just energize your data center, but let's talk a little bit about that energy and that and as it relates to your Sustainability efforts. What can you tell us about that for sure? So the data center industry in general I think has done a tremendous job at trying to you know be the point of the spear in Driving the climate agenda across the world Yeah, and Everybody's gone out and put these ambitious targets to you know buy all these raw offsets and whatnot to off to offset the power usage in the data center and you know that I think that is a Extremely noble first step, but what we found is that people are buying offsets from Texas to offset Virginia and in different places where their power really directly isn't and Again great first step, but we want to take it to the next level and what we're trying to do is actually Provide clean electrons directly into the data center and so by putting our data center directly connected to our nuclear power facility Those are those are clean carbon-free electrons powering our data center We think of our solution not as you know, you know if for then or binary But it's you know just the next step in the evolution of data centers We think that you know We're gonna be the first of a trend of people moving their load closer to where the generation is You know closer to maybe where wind and power is Closer to a lot closer to nuclear. No way. I love it. I mean when we talk about the edge Often we're talking about putting that data center as close to kind of the end user kind of that that data process But we're also You know with this model We're getting it as close to the power source as humanly possible to exactly there's efficiencies there as well This to me feels like the future of data center power and sustainability within the industry So there definitely is and I think that do you have give a little plug on nuclear? one of the things that people don't realize is that Over the life cycle of the of the power generating facility nuclear actually has the lowest greenhouse gases Lower than wind lower than solar. We're building wind and solar. We love wind and solar Yes, but I think we have to make sure that we help elevate all the pieces of the equation so that we can get to Net zero as quick as possible and that because these generating facilities like so our our Nuclear facility at the life cycle is at least another 40 years Mm-hmm if 40 years of clean power being produced and we need to find a home for those electrons and Like if we think about what what is the best industry out there that wants to pay for those clean electrons That is gonna be around for the next 40 years.  That sounds like a really good idea to me for sure But so speaking of the future and I feel like we can talk, you know another three hours about this But we don't have that kind of time But so speaking of the future Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about what the future holds or what you believe the future holds for For a cumulus data. No, absolutely. So in 2023, I think our primary goal is to get a customer in the first building We put a we built a 48 megawatt shell and And we have the ability to scale up to about a thousand megawatts on our campus So, you know, we have to start small get out get our customer in the first building and then we'll think about expanding You know complete phase one and into phase two and three. I love it And hopefully there's many many phases for you and your future customers to come So thank you very much for being here. We appreciate it. Excellent. Thank you very much You got it and thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon


Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Day two live coverage here in Seattle of the CNCF, KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman here all week, the three days, it's multiple years we've been covering KubeCon. Covering this community, oh, back to the OpenStack days to now CloudNative and Kubernetes, Rise of Kubernetes and KubeCon, it's been great, CloudNative Computing Foundation, and the center of it has been an individual Kube alumni that we've talked to many times, Lou Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems, great to have Lou on. Good to see you. Great to be back again. We got a great history of conversations, and every year we kind of have a pinch me moment where it's like, it's so awesome right now, the technology's coming together. Now more than ever, the standardization, the matureization of Kubernetes and what's going on around it is probably one of the most exciting trends. It's not just about Kubernetes, it's about what that's enabling, ecosystem, storage, networking and compute now though, is working now magically, creating a lot of value. So we've talked about it, what's the update from your perspective, how do you see it evolving now? I see it very much the same way. I had a short little keynote yesterday and was talking about, actually, I think we've entered this kind of golden age of software where because of the number of projects that are now going into the CNCF, for example, and elsewhere, and GitHub repositories, we just have a major driving force which is the accumulation of the software that's used now to power the clouds, power data centers, totally transforming infrastructure. We're no longer cabling, as I sort of say, and now become code. And that's all about the software that's being developed through the open source community. We've been talking before we came on camera about the, and we've had other conversations about the historical waves of innovation. AI's been around for a while, all these things have kind of been around, but now with cloud computing and the resources available in terms of compute power, storage and networking now, programmable, is creating a lot of innovation. And this has been a tailwind for some and a headwind for others, companies that have transformed and understood that have been leveraging it. We've seen conversations from NetApp, Cisco, you guys are transformed, you're turned it into a tailwind for Cisco because now all that magic can come in for the programmability on the networking side. Exactly right, yeah. Now we see AI's having a big impact across the board on all of these waves. We're big contributors also into Kubeflow, for example, because on top of Kubernetes, the biggest issue we're going to have an AI going forward is we don't have enough AI engineers. We don't have enough people who are trained in that. And so we need to create these tools and the services that we see coming out in the cloud now for AI are designed to make it easy to consume AI. You don't have to be an AI expert in order to use it. And that's what I think is really exciting. How is the cloud native environment changing IT investments? Because again, the old days I have to throw a machine at something, I got to have by this and siloed, you got now horizontal capabilities, you got vertical specialization with machine learning and AI, as you just referenced, how is it changing investments? Because people now are looking at reimagining their infrastructure, they're reimagining how apps are built. How is Kubernetes cloud native impacting IT investments? So we found, for example, when we talked to our customers and everything else, they're all using multiple clouds. So I think a term that we're getting to see arise here now is this multi-cloud environment that we have. And so Cisco with what we've been doing with our hybrid solutions for AWS and hybrid solutions that we're having with Google is making it so that you can have the same environment within your data center as you have in the cloud. And then we connect the two. So now the IT infrastructure really is looking like a cloud and there's many clouds and multiple clouds in your own data center and multiple service providers. That makes it easier for IT to really consume cloud native technology. Yeah, I wonder if you can drill us down a level from what we're talking about. You can talk about Kubeflow and machine learning. Remember back to big data, it was like, okay, well what do we have to do with the network? Well, I need some more buffering, but how are we, what is just the base infrastructure layer and where Kubernetes and this ecosystem just becomes the platform for all of the modern applications and what has to be done differently? I wonder if you can help. So one of the big challenges I think is this, how do we connect the different clouds together with your own data center? And that's why we, the hybrid solutions where Cisco is driving now are designed specifically to make that easy because it's scary for IT organizations to say they're going to open up some part of their firewall to have connections coming in. And so we provide a solution that makes it easy for people. And that means that things such as Kubeflow and things like that, they can be running, perhaps like they might do some of their research in a public cloud provider such as AWS or Google and then they want to run it now in production within their own data center and they don't want to change a thing. And at the same time we're seeing other capabilities, you want to access some service in the cloud as a part of your enterprise app. You know, one of the things people have a hard time understanding is what is just kind of standardized? Okay, I've got compliant Kubernetes, it can run all these places and then there's areas where, you know, Cisco has done, you know, deep integration work with both Google Cloud and with AWS. Maybe help understand what are the standard pieces and what's the extra engineering work that needs to be done to support some of these? Well, I think what has helped us all is the fact that Kubernetes has really taken off. So we really are seeing, if you have a Kubernetes platform and you adhere to the public APIs of Kubernetes and everything else like that, you then can have a portability of applications back in the Java days we were going after that and now we're seeing it with Kubernetes. And so by what we've developed has been with the Cisco Container Platform is an on-premise managed Kubernetes environment that looks identical to what you find in the Kubernetes environment at AWS or at Google. So the same interfaces are there, the IT doesn't have to relearn things, they can actually get the advantage of that standardization. And that's key for operations in IT because that is the promise of cloud operations, similar on both platforms, on-premises and in the cloud. And the next question is, okay, from a networking perspective, we've had many conversations with Suzy, we at Cisco around network programmability or net DevOps as you guys call it, which is kind of a play on DevOps. This is the future because with multi-cloud the apps don't need to know about where to provision workloads, which cloud when, is a better region over here, latency, network factors come in, you still got to move things around, what A to B, edge of the network for IoT, talk about the importance of network programmability now more than ever with cloud native, why it's so important. Well, the first and foremost, it has to be driven by APIs. The old days of actually going out and having people configure network switches to make connectivity or open up provisions and firewalls and things like that, that's behind us. Now we have that all because of programmability of the network through what we've been doing with ACI and other technologies, we can make it so we can connect these clouds and maintain the security. We're also seeing other things such as Istio and edge-based computing and things like that come into play, where again, the ordinary developer doesn't have to learn all of the details of networking and security, but the operations people need it to be secure, need it to be able to be moved around and need to be able to have telemetry so they can tell what's going on. Yeah, one of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE, Stu and I were yesterday riffing on this, but for a while, but it's also now trickled into the Silicon Valley conversations around some of the tech elite people around architecture. Cloud architects are in high demand and there's two schools of thought. There's a persona of around a systems architect, more of a systems view, operating systems kind of view, that's cloud, that's operating environment, serverless events, these are kind of concepts that is a systems oriented thinker and then you have the application developer that looks like an app server kind of world. Those are old paradigms that you've lived through. Now coming together now in one, horizontally scalable cloud, that's a system, vertical specialization around the apps and with DevOps layer, having these guys work together. Talk about this dynamic, your thoughts on it, how this shapes employee selection, people who lead projects, because the CTO and architect roles now more important with systems perspective, but the software side's just as important. So I think one thing that's become very clear is that we need to make it easier for the domain experts in an application area to just take care of their part. And so that's why like one of the previous episodes we've talked about here was about Istio where we've actually separated out essentially the data plane, the transport of data around with security, encryption, identity and everything from the actual application code of the microservice. That makes it much easier because now the engineering teams are too large, you can't have everybody know everything anymore. Like you say, we've got specialists in different areas, we need to be able to provide them underlying systems that connect these things and that underlying system that has to be managed by your operations people. So we've got DevOps, we've got where the application people are writing code actually that the develop that the operations people use so that we can actually have this kind of uniform infrastructure that is maintainable. And security's super important and all that good stuff. Yeah, so, Lou, it's interesting. We've been watching so many of the pieces we worked on, the open stack, it was really from the bottoms up building the infrastructure. We've seen a dynamic the last few years, Kubernetes sum and serverless even more coming from the top down. I want to get your thoughts on that. We've been digging in and trying to tease out some of the K native pieces that are being discussed here versus some of the functions things that are happening especially in Amazon and Microsoft. I'd love to get your take. I think we're always seeing this progression in platforms for computing and programming languages and paths we've talked about years ago. All of these things are designed always to make it easier. So like you're right, we've got for example K native now really coming on a thing. Can we standardize away specifically helping Kubernetes people move into this area? Like I mentioned before the Q flow again, how can we start to standardize these pieces? The beauty of this is these standardized pieces are coming out in open source. So everybody gets it and that means it's deployable in your public cloud, it's deployable in your data center and then through a lot of the hybrid technology that Cisco's working, you can connect those together. But you're right, we're going to continue to see innovation, that's great. Because we need that, we need that constantly. What we need to be able to do is make it easier to consume and then integrate into these systems and that's what I think Kubernetes has a lot to do with how we make it easier. Final question on Cisco that I want to go in on a more personal note with you on your situation which is news breaking here on theCUBE. Cisco has successfully transformed its direction. It's been always a great leader in networking, always a great business, billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Now with cloud native and Kubernetes, the relationship I've saw with Amazon, you got Google, you guys have taken that systems view, you're making things programmable. Explain the Cisco strategy from your perspective as a CTO and as a legend in the industry. The people that know Cisco know the old Cisco. What is the new Cisco and how does Kubernetes and how does all this cloud native fit into the new Cisco? Yep, I think the new Cisco really is focused now on where customers are taking their computing resources and it is in this multi-cloud world where we're saying it's not a fight anymore. You can't say I have a reason to keep things here in my data center, I'm never going to go to cloud and other customers are saying I'm never going to have a data center. Now we're saying we're probably going to both. And Cisco is a networking company that plays right into our strength because what you have to be able to do is now connect those environments in a secure way, in a manageable way. And so this plays right into where Cisco's growth I think is going to be, it'll be in much more of these kinds of services that allow that to happen. And then the relationships and partnerships we have with the major cloud providers. This basically the decomposition of monolithic applications into sets of micro-services is connected by the network. This is the fundamental beauty of where you guys see that tailwind. Exactly, awesome. Well Lou, you've been a legend in the industry. I've been following your career from the beginning. You have products that's in the Computer History Museum. You've done amazing work at Sun Microsystems. I mean, just a great story career. The work you've done at Cisco, you've been on theCUBE so many times, like I don't know the number. You really contributed to the industry and there's news now about your situation. Share the news about what's happening to you. I made an announcement at our CNCF board and our OpenStack board meeting that I'm leaving Cisco. And so I'm having to withdraw from those board positions as well as Cloud Foundry. And that's sad in a way because I have relationships with those people. But in many ways after I want to spend some time to really see where the future is again because as you know in my career I've changed several times. And I'm so looking forward to actually now going into sort of a new direction which may be much more moving up the stack. I think there's very exciting things going on in AI. There's exciting things going on in genomics. There's a lot of activity going on. So we've been building this technology for a purpose to allow us to have those kinds of things. Now I want to start focusing much more directly. And you're leaving Cisco on what date? Leaving Cisco beginning of January. Well congratulations, great work. And I think one of the trends I think this speaks to is I see a lot of computer scientists, a lot of people who have some DNA from the old ways like you do and been there and contributed at a seminal level just some great contributions. Seeing computer science as an opportunity to solve problems. This is kind of a renaissance from seasoned pioneers and young people coming together. This is a great opportunity. Is that kind of what you're thinking you're just going to tackle a problem? There's 8,000 people here. This show is sold out. And this is almost all developers. So people who have a background in computer science who are getting online and learning it themselves. This is an opportunity and a time to get in. You've been a great mentor to many. You've been a great contributor in the open source community. Again, your contribution at the systems level and you understand certainly what's going on with cloud native. Looking forward to following up and congratulations. Yep. Well I hope to be back again. Yeah, of course. If you're VIP CUBE alumni. Lou Tucker, exciting news. Cisco's transformed. He's moving on to some, taking on some big new challenges. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Lou Tucker, Vice President CTO Systems, Cisco Systems. Moving on to some new endeavors here in the CUBE. We're covering the live coverage here at CUBECon, cloud native.com, John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Back with more day two interviews after this short break.


From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Bobby Allen, who's the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Evangelist at Cloud Genera. Bobby, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, thanks for having us. All right, so, Bobby, we had a great conversation with your CEO, Brian Kelly, talking about Cloud Genera, helping customers, in my own words, I'll say. There's this great mess of the cloud and service providers and data centers and things are changing all the time. And here's a great tool to help people understand this. Now, I've had people asking me for years. It's like, hey, I've got my app or I'm building a new app, you know, where do I do this? And, you know, I've always said, well, there's certain things that are really easy. You know, if it's going to be up for a really short period of time and it's something there, it's like, you're not going to spend the time to rack and stack and build and do this. You know, hey, cloud was great for that. And on the other end of the spectrum now, the public clouds might disagree, but if I have something that's just like, it's going to be cooking along and it's not changing and it's there, you know, the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center. But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle that is, well, it depends.  So bring us in a little bit as to some of the thinking as to how CloudGener helps and, you know, where it lets to get into it. That's a great question, Stu. So we feel like the market has actually changed in the sense that information is coming faster and faster. There's more and more information that people are inundated and honestly overwhelmed by. And so when people ask us for more information, we typically tell them you don't need more information in our opinion. You really want to move from information and clarity to insight. What should I actually do? And so to go back to the real estate analogy you talked about, I think people think of Cloud as a house. Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state and you need to figure out where should I live within that state of that neighborhood. So let's take AWS for example. AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services but also different flavors of how you can run things. So before people would look at CloudGener as a company that could compare different execution venues. Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google? Stu, we increasingly get people that want to understand which flavor of Amazon should I do? Do I do the multi-tenant? Do I do the dedicated? Do I do the VMware Cloud and AWS? And those are all valid choices for us. And so for us, we don't really care where a customer wants to evaluate. Let's define what you need and map that to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace and then take the guesswork out of it so you have some data-driven decision-making. Yeah, I love that because I've been coming to cover on Amazon for many years and boy, I go to the show and it was like, all right, I thought I got my arms around Aurora and now there's the serverless-based Aurora and there's 17 different database options inside of Amazon. So, oh boy, and then, right, let's not even talk about all the compute instances. I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put something in my own rack these days. Yes, yes, it is. So, but that being said, I want to, for a second, before we talk about the public cloud, talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in kind of the service provider to data center world and because that's a complicated and very, I'd say fragmented space. How does Cloud Gener help there? So, Cloud Gener deals with the consumer, so ones who actually want to benefit from the technology themselves but also from the service provider side. So, if you're Joe's Cloud Check, a regional cloud provider, a VMware service provider, anyone who's offering technology services, you may want to know, number one, how do you compare with the large hyper scale providers? And then, number two, how can you showcase your value proposition next to those? So, maybe Amazon and Azure and Google are on the top of people's minds, but how do your services compare to those? So, in our platform, you can actually show a Joe's Cloud Check next to an Amazon, next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity. So, options inside and outside the data center that you thought about and then ones that you didn't can all be kind of presented in a fair way, so you take the guesswork out of how they compare to each other. Yeah, it's interesting.  And it's like, well, it's not a utility and therefore I could stand up something in my data center or I could put a pass in my environment or there's so many layers of the stack and so much nuance that it's the paradox of choice, I think that most people have. So, maybe walk us through a customer, when do they tend to come to you, what are some of those patterns and what are the things that really help get accelerated when they use a platform like yours? So, some of the things that people think about are, they have workloads that they wanna move, maybe they wanna exit a data center or what really happens commonly is there's a new leader in town. New CIO comes in, we're gonna have a cloud-first strategy and we're not opposed to that. The biggest principle for us is, do you understand why you're doing and whether this is the right time to win? Because if you don't do the right thing at the right time for the right reason, there's a hole in your strategy. And so what we look at is, okay, what is it that you're trying to move or change or transform? What are the things that are interesting to you or strategic? And then let's look at putting those things together. Now, when you define what you need, you shouldn't define what you need in terms of where you're going, right? I don't decide my venue based on the airline I wanna get on, I decide I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time and then I see the airline that can get me there on time for the best price, hopefully. And we take that same approach when it comes to helping customers. Let's talk about what you need in a vendor agnostic way that's divorced from the options in the market because your needs are not impacted by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell. And so then after we define your expectations and your requirements, let's map those to the things that you're curious about or that your leadership says are strategic and then let's make sure that we understand what we call the concept of logical equivalence. The spirit of your requirement may be called X and one provider and Y and a different one. Are they really the same as a tomato tomato or are they really two different types of, excuse me, services or entities all together? So let's evaluate then how well your needs are met by these different vendors. Is it just a semantics issue or are these really two different things? Yes, they're both different types of block stores but the requirements are different. The latency is different, the redundancy is different. The pricing is certainly different. How close are these things to meeting the spirit of what you asked for? And the other parts do that I'll just offer that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost. How much does it cost? And we feel like the problem is not a problem of cost, it's a problem of value. People go to look for cost calculators but really what they need are value calculators, right? I take a portion in F-150. An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the portion is more expensive for a reason. There's a different experience than just space. And so the reality is people don't mind paying more if they know what they're paying for. Transparency is really the key.  So I think about my data center, there's everything like the power space and all those pieces.  We try to be pretty comprehensive Sue. So if you go to a public provider, for example, you're not paying for power but you're paying for a certainly hourly charge typically on an OPEX basis that accommodates a lot of the things that I'll say are platform or hypervisor and below. Now where I think a lot of the other people that are in this space maybe fall short in our opinion is that they don't look at things above the hypervisor. If I move a workload to an AWS that may have some great services I can take advantage of, the labor and the licensing and the other considerations that we consider to be carryover costs are things that I still need to accommodate. If I put a workload in Amazon, someone still needs to patch the OS, maybe manage the database, maybe audit security. Those are things that have labor and licensing and software considerations that we try to look at. So we try to be as comprehensive as possible but we also look at SLA, we also look at security. So you may need to bring in other managed services or consulting or software packages to fill those other gaps. So we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. Yeah, what other kind of patterns and data do you bring for cloud genera? So thinking things either from a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company. I just think there's been certain movements in virtualization and containers and the like where there's been kind of that data and how do I understand what's gonna make sense for me? So what does cloud genera get into any of that? We do get into some of that. So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat. We try to look at where you are but also understand that there are some patterns. So for example, when we talk about different industry verticals, it's very aligned to security and compliance for example. So we know that there are certain providers that are interesting but not ready for prime time because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust. Things that are typically relevant for the healthcare industry. So we're very quickly able to say this is something that may not be right for you just yet or if you have certain regional concerns, maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe, you're looking at IRAP in Australia. We can again typically guide them to this provider has some very interesting services but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need. So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down. The other thing that we're seeing those do is that honestly many enterprises are biting off more than they can chew. They try to do too much at once. And so some of the things that we talked about even off camera is I would ask the question, does the industry have a pot problem? Are we trying to do too much at once? And when I say pot, I'm using that to represent the acronym of to me three pieces we need to break this down to. Number one is parity. Number two is optimization and then number three is transformation. Many enterprises in our opinion are trying to eat an elephant with a spoon. They have no idea how to get there and they really don't understand what is too much in terms of the cost. And so when they're evaluating how much they can handle, how much change is too much in terms of people, process, and technology, the thing to us is what does parity look like? And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases it may not, but you at least have to define what success looks like if you take what you're doing in your data center and move that somewhere else. But then the middle ground is optimization. How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing? Move it to that venue and then kind of clean it up or optimize it a little bit. And then once I'm there and I can evaluate the unintended consequences of change, what are the things that I didn't think about? The impacts to my people, the retraining, the other software packages I need to put in place for monitoring and management and so forth. Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally move from optimization to transformation, but that's not glamorous. That's not interesting. People don't want to talk about that. They want to go whole hog and change everything all at once and we get in trouble doing that. But Bobby, you've given me flashbacks. I worked in the storage industry for a decade and migrations, you know, you still kind of wake up in the middle of the night, you know, screaming a little bit because it's always challenging. There's always all of those things to work through.  You know, database migrations, big discussion going on there. From Wikibon, David Fleurer has just been like, you know, it's so many horror stories. People get there, but it's, if you don't have to, maybe you don't want to, but there's so many reasons why you want to. So I guess I want to highlight, we're not telling people not to change. And moving faster and getting on board, some modernizations, a good thing, whether you, you know, everywhere. It's, you know, you've got a virtualization environment. There's lots you can do today that we couldn't do two or four years ago. So how do we get over this pop problem then? I think part of it is, so again, going back to the moving analogy, if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish for me to move without getting an estimate. And there are times when an estimate should be able to come in my house and tell me, it's actually better for you to sell that piano than to try to move it, because it's not worth it. I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today, to tell me, don't waste your time focusing on this. This is really where you need to focus your time because this is going to be the Pareto principle that saves you the time and the money. The reality is bringing someone who's benefited from the landmines and the pitfalls. So in our opinion, bring in whether that's an SI, a consultancy, a data service company like Cloud Genre that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen in the industry. Don't hit things on your own that other people have stumbled on, right? Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you to take a look at the whole thing. So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu, is that we're proficient in talking about these things. There aren't enough use cases in terms of mature cloud transformations to really look back at anecdotal data that's comprehensive. We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out, and I know people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion.  Maybe bringing on some new people to handle some of these new areas. How do you handle that side of it? I think part of it is honestly, and this may sound a little trite, I think people that are willing to raise their hand and say that we need some help, or that we don't have this all figured out, or that there are some things that we need to bring in a little bit of help to help us get that estimate before we look to move everything. That's really the skill set you want to have. People that are not saying, I'm the grand negus juggernaut of everything cloud, because those people don't exist yet, in my opinion. There are people that have pockets of expertise and things that they have really deep knowledge about, but we need to mix that with, I think, a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still a lot of things that we're learning about together. The other part of that, Stu, is it's a community and it's a network. You may know storage migrations. I may know database migrations. Let's put our heads together about how we can work together as an enterprise to make sure that we minimize impact to the users, because at the end of the day, that's really the challenge. It's not to do a cool project. It's to deliver value to the business, and that's what I think we're losing sight of with all this cool technology sometimes. All right, so, Bobby, you've got over 1000 people using the tool. What are some of the big areas that people are like, oh, wow, this is the stuff that's saving me either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business, and, heck, if I'm running the show, keeps my job. I think storage is a big one, so people are oftentimes unaware that there are so many different ways that you can run storage in a given provider, so Amazon, for example, has four to six different ways you can just run block storage in their particular multi-tenant cloud, and people aren't aware of that, so there's a case that we did for a major bank. We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon can run from $300 up to $26,000, depending on the level of performance that you wanna hit. Egress is another one. So what does the network behavior look like in those applications? Because people often will estimate the resources, but not the traffic. What are the estimates to have a level of parity around security? So I don't have HIPAA compliance or SOC compliance in this particular provider. What is it gonna take me to get to that level of parity that I need to have? Because if I save money stew, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer because my data got accessed, then I've still got a problem. I've just kinda moved that down the road.  Again, information that's out there that we just don't have the filters defined. What I would say is a lot of people think that cloud is a commodity. We're not there yet. They're providers to this day. I can't give any names who protect the innocent, but the same service is literally triple in one provider what it costs in another one for almost exactly the same service. And there are examples like that that have been out there for years. We just can't see them. So Bobby, last question. Somebody wanted to get started with Cloud Generers. They're like a trial version or how would somebody get involved? Yeah, so a couple of things that are really interesting. So there's a try now button on our website that lets you kind of answer a few questions and actually get a sample mini assessment, download a sample report and actually see the type of analysis that we provide, number one. Number two, Cloud Gener is a software company but also services company. If you want to purchase the software, great. And we actually have trials that we can set up for you to do that. We also do what we call proofs of value. If you want to engage our team to come in and do five to 10 applications to see how those might look with our analysis and then to go at scale and look at your whole CMDB. We want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the business and not trying to bull the ocean if they're not ready for that yet. Bobby Allen, CTO and Chief Evangelist at Cloud Generer. Thanks so much for joining me. So much happened in the Cloud world. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage as well as wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.