Hello and welcome back to SuperCloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s, my name is Dave Vellante and our SuperCloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, Sanjeev Mohan, is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjimo and Keith Townsend, is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today, good to see you. Great to see you. Thanks. Let me start Maribel with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of SuperCloud the other day and he said, Teva, you know, I like to work here, don't be, you got to simplify this a little bit. So he said, quote, a SuperCloud is a platform. He said, think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. And then Neilu Mihai said, well, wait a minute, this is just going to create more stovepipes. We need more standards and an architecture, which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing Initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on to SuperCloud and architecture, a platform, or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword and then we could just, you know, kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to SuperCloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So having said this, I think we've been talking about SuperCloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks of that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So, you know, one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And, you know, some of the questions is where that lives. You know, and you could call that an abstraction layer, you could call it cross cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that, you know, are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds, you know, what is that layer? And maybe that's what the SuperCloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with SuperCloud is, you know, what are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the SuperCloud layer? Is a SuperCloud just another variant of what, you know, AWS, GCP or others do? You know, you spoke in Walmart about its cloud native platform and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, you know, I do think it's something. I think it is, you know, we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about SuperCloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at is in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that SuperCloud evolves. So thank you, Mayor Bella Keith. You're Brian Graceley, Graceley's Law. Things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so this, what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of, you know, a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture.  But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's a distribution of Linux managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, server.net, databases, Oracle, we think of those as platforms. Things that are fundamental we can build on top. SuperCloud isn't today that it is a framework or our idea kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmart's that's kind of supersized the idea of SuperCloud or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize a cloud native infrastructure, AWS, multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a SuperCloud. Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a SuperCloud example and now would presumably be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture. Maybe that more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for SuperCloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show at least currently there's not a lot across cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier, but how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot, but even, we don't talk about MongoDB in this light, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, is it's a centralized proprietary platform and they are building the capabilities that are needed for SuperCloud. So they're building things like, you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite, data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great, as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, SuperCloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service, irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user and I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud, like Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model, maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need serve a hybrid cross-cloud data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they've built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. So we need some like Marieville and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill, it's tens of millions of lines, tens of millions, because they have over 1,000 teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about super cloud, we've got multiple clouds and hybrid on-prem and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. It's interesting, Marieville. Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud, but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point that Hatsanji was making about hybrid, it's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that, but how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanji's point, we're in a real struggle now where, one hand we wanna have best of breed services, and on the other hand, we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like Geospatial Analytics and BigQuery, you're gonna have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like, that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now we're kind of layering this concept of super cloud on it. And some people think super cloud's about, basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet, but it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data?  They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go though, Dave. Hey, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, and you're right, Maribel. Cloud hasn't really been about, just about cost savings, but I reached out to the ETR guys and asked them, how are customers, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable, was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, could you go look and see if you can find it? Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot.  It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmart's in the world, maybe not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talked to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with Enrico Signoretti, who is an analyst over at GigaOwn. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there, whether they're completely on-premises data centers and they own assets or their partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera. They have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explorer and we can talk about this a little bit later on, but there are customers net new, not a lot, that were born in the cloud and they get to this point where their workloads are static and they look at something like a Kubernetes or a OpenChip or VMware Tanzu and they ask the question, do I need the scalability of cloud? I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason though I think internal IT operations are just naturally coming to this realization, hey, I have these resources on-premises, the private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it right sizing for the operating model that I have. That makes sense. If I may say something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation, I don't, I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error, in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud cost a lot, I'm moving it back to on-premises. Like capital one, as an example, they got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now the number one killer use case is FinOps.  Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what do we see in here, right? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak, right? The second thing is some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about. If they were more static workloads, if it was already there. So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally from a trend standpoint, you know, these things aren't binary, right? Everybody, for a while, everything was gonna go to the public cloud. And then people are like, oh, it's kind of expensive, right?  And it's like, well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads. So, you know, I'm gonna put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require a cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on-site, then I'm gonna do that there because that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And you know, now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. You know, a number of practitioners leading up to SuperCloud too have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in mono cloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. They're like, in my group, we use AWS or in my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. And, you know, we just kind of keep it separate.  Is that, you know, risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap? Best of breed? What do you guys think about that? Everybody thinks they're mono cloud. Is anybody really mono cloud? It's like a group is mono cloud, right? This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think you're mono cloud and you go like three doors down and figure out that the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, you know, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of mono cloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources, right? So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on and that they try to optimize. And, you know, we still have forked workloads.  So these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud and maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peeked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual mono cloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. Yeah, we're... Sorry, go ahead, Keith. Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS servers every day, just, you know, in your inbox, get learning about a new AWS service personally. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of mono cloud, I'm in violent agreement with Maribel on this that yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud and that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried to license Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether it's via M&A, licensing, data sovereignty, I am forced into a multi-cloud management style, but I do agree. Most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you, you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud, whether you want to or not, via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. Thank you, Sanjeev, you had a comment? Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is mono cloud, at least if it's a large organization, large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the problem arises. As Keith said, there are 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS but then say, let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see mono cloud as being predominant, because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks and then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured. The identities in Active Directory are federated and you can just start using a database in one cloud which is OCI and application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or was off camera, so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying with AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my snowflake. He said, I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools. So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit some of the vendor talk that, oh yeah, we're so customer-focused not to pick on Google, but everybody will say that and then you say, well, if you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do ABC? So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Kate, at our first SuperCloud event that was on August 9th and it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included, said, all right, cuts are coming. Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's SuperCloud 22 and presumably VMware Explorer, the company really, certainly US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explorer Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Haktan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services slash SuperCloud? So I think our friend in a Cube alum post, Stu, the even more offended at this statement than he was, when I sat in the Cube, this was maybe five years ago, there's no company better suited to help industries or companies cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard at VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem. Even more so than the US, data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU.  They hit very serious questions about this. I've talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads? My projects that are building around Kubernetes and the CNCF infrastructure, why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on premises? But they're dealing with the, I don't wanna deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of, the problem I think we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially, $4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is an unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about Keith, industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross cloud great? Yeah, so VMware obviously, to your point, OpenStack is another way, but it's actually OpenStack uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack, so they're, as you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps and Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, even on-prem, and the machine pulls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes, no human involvement.  We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does super cloud fit? So, great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Dhani started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not, is analogous to data products. Data products basically are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals or it may be a retail data product. It may be an investment data product. So it's a prepackaged extraction of data from different sources, but now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added and it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data, who's using that data based on the usage of the data. I may have new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be super cloud where I'm making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine, where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction and then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of products coming out, data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products and then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream, but it's starting this year. They subprime mortgages were a data product, but definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the super cloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HPE, Hashi, IBM, Cloudflare, there's many others, Cohesity, Rubrik. Keith, I wanted to start with Cloudflare because they actually use the term super cloud and just simplifying what they said, they look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the cloud for infrastructure.  What are your thoughts on Cloudflare, this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? You know, as Larry Ellison said famously, once before the network is the computer, right? Wait, I thought that was Scott McNeely. It wasn't Scott McNeely. I knew it was someone Oracle-aligned. Oracle owns that now, owns that line. By purpose or acquisition, it would be better. They should have just called it cloud. Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. It would be easier. But if you think about the Cloudflare capability, Cloudflare in its own right is becoming a decent-sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of Cloudflare and points of presence literally across the globe, you have all this SS compute, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation about talking about data. When they say, you know, we're gonna give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about super cloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from Cloudflare. And now I've disrupted this Roche Motel data structure and that I'm freely given away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of Cloudflare's serverless approach or super cloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model or a compute heavy model or a network heavy model. Cloudflare has taken away those knobs and I'm just giving a code and allowing that to run. Cloudflare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the Cloudflare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While serverless is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Tognito or RDS or all these other services that make AWS, GCP and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start and it's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers but kind of hiding the compute behind the serverless architectures a really unique approach. Yeah, and they're dipping their toe in the water and they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got a wrap. So I wonder Sanjeevan and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeevan, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds and to the extent that you can simplify that for users. It seems to be a logical strategy, maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been, but are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game or ones that you think are a good model for the future? Yes, Snowflake definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much and Keith mentioned a little bit was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lake house and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark horse. Oracle seems to have revived its cloud module to some extent and it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is another one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lake house, unity, data catalog and some of those pieces, but they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of a super cloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. Yeah, and if I'm one of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM, I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes, but Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you wanna do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you wanna try to do a more cross cloud, multi-cloud, cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers and that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing I think could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they wanna differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they wanna be like the person that is really transformative. They talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads that maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered either startups or more established independent companies but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes, I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? You could argue both sides of that but it was quite a gift to the industry and there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. You know, I throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player in Kubernetes and HashiCorp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment and Terraform across clouds and there are many, many others. You know, I know we're leaving lots out but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in SuperCloud 2. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier in the entire CUBE community. Keep it right there for more content from SuperCloud 2.


Can you see the presentation? I cannot share my screen at the moment, because I think you're still sharing. Wait a second, wait a second, Nikoleta, good morning. So now we continue this presentation by Nikoleta Marilova. Repurposing size of fossil plants with advanced nuclear reactors. Let me just quickly introduce Nikoleta. She was working with IEA the second year already. And the first reactor technology development team. Nikoleta receives her PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in National Sciences in 2022, just last year. And then he started her work in the IEA. Also, Nikoleta receives her Master of Science from Akol Polytechnica Federale de Lasagna, EPFL, and from Power Shredder Institute in Nuclear Engineering in 2016. Okay, Nikoleta, welcome to the workshop. Hello. Please start your presentation. I will stop sharing now, and you will have a chance. Thank you. Just a second. I will probably first make full screen presentation, and then return to this Zoom browser window and start sharing window with full screen. Okay, one second. So can you see this full screen, okay? This is not full screen, I believe, so this is like standard PowerPoint window, I think you start full screen. Okay, you stop, then you start full screen, then you return to the browser window and start sharing and select full screen window. That's the way. So you say first full screen, and then share. Then I'll tap back to the browser window and start sharing and select this full screen window to share. Okay, again, so let's try to, you simply just try to maximize this window and then go because it doesn't work like this somehow. Maybe because it's different. And now? Yes, yes, now perfect, perfect, perfect, Nikoleta. Okay, great. So Radis, so hello everybody. Today I will be presenting a lecture on rather a novel concept, repurposing sites of fossil plants with advanced nuclear reactors. Now this lecture is more of an overview of this concept and recent developments in this area, and I hope it can turn into an interesting discussion with you all. It is not really a novel concept. It was mentioned in the literature already in 2012, but most of the efforts, the evaluations and financing really started last year in 2021. So what is this concept really about? A call to nuclear transition means citing a nuclear reactor at the site of a retired coal power plant. Now, as we'll see later, it is not necessarily restricted to coal power plant. It may be also oil or natural gas plant, but at the moment the spotlight is on coal plants. Across the globe, the communities and the energy industry are working to decarbonize the energy generation and consumption and implementing actions to achieve net zero emissions, zero carbon emission goals. Therefore the environmental and climate change concerns place more and more pressure on utility plant owners to retire the coal power plants. Also increasing number of coal power plants retirement has been seen across the globe, across many countries to support these lower carbon plants. Now as the nations around the world increase their climate ambitions and accelerate their plans to decarbonize, what we can see in this figure one showing the number of countries with net zero commitments versus the share of the CO2 emissions, the next decade and beyond will bring the prospect of increased deployment of nuclear power as we need to cover the retired capacity of this base load energy. The International Energy Agency Net Zero by 2050 roadmap also projects that the nuclear electricity generation will need to double between 2020 and 2050 if the world is to meet its net zero ambitions. We'll have around 550 gigabit of new nuclear capacity which will be needed by 2050. So some of the key points I would just like to mention are the following nuclear energy is key to achieving global net zero objectives, working in partnership with renewable energy sources and other low carbon options as part of a sustainable energy system to decarbonize electricity and also non-electric energy production. Now the nuclear power can help complement and integrate the expected large share of renewable generation by ensuring 24-7 energy supply reliability and dispatchability. The matching low carbon generating capacity is essential and by safety extending the operational lifetimes of existing nuclear power plants as well. As many nations opt for nuclear energy to meet their climate objectives it is also important to note that other low carbon energy technologies are also expected to deliver a bulk of the carbonization in particular renewable technologies such as solar and wind which are also likely to be included in electricity mix as well as energy storage technologies and other low carbon fields such as hydrogen for example. So nuclear power can help to complement and integrate all these large shares and I have taken this figure from the IEA Nuclear Energy for Net Zero World Green Book also referenced here, it's a very good read. And in this green book which was published by the IEA after the COP26 it is highlighted how the nuclear power plants can be envisaged as cost-effective solution for replacing or called repowering coal plants. Now at the agency we have also conducted a webinar on this topic called Repurposing Fossil Fuel Power Plant Sites with SMRs to East Clean Energy Transitions and we had five experts, we had experts from US, India, Romania, UK and France which provided their insights on this topic for the first time here at the agency and many information was presented at this webinar so I will also get back to that a little bit later. So let's discuss what type of advanced reactors are best for this repurposing approach. So here we have SMRs for coal-to-nuclear C2N, this is the shortcut that is being used for this approach. One of the new nuclear technologies being developed is the SMRs. React to design to reach the market and economically and safely make power. I mean there was already a whole lecture yesterday so I will just be brief and introduce only what is most relevant for this concept. So to reduce the direct cost and to ease the connection to the grid the SMRs capacities are limited to approximately 300 megawatt electric which is less than one-third of the size of a conventional NPP but it's similar in output to many conventional coal boilers. So this reduces the physical size and simplifies manufacturing even allowing for the factory assembly. SMRs are typically designed to be very simple and to use passive systems to further reduce the complexity and facilitate high levels of safety. Using the multiple modular small and safe reactors allows the NPP to be scaled to meet the local needs and to support the power generations for applications which are beyond the electricity generation. As we know also the increased safety reduces the size of the emergency planning zones and that allows for easier sighting. These technological advancements provide more certainty in the NPP development and deployment time and costs. So the collective benefit from the SMRs designs promises low cost and safe operation. Now I have put a question mark here because the NPPs are always running over budget and over time so here I would like to see the final cost once an SMR is already deployed and then we can say that it is really low cost. These all these attributes make SMRs and advance reactors of particular interest when considering this coal power plant to nuclear power plant conversion. The reuse size also allows for flexible deployment options since physically smaller reactors, less material. Nikoleta, we cannot hear you. We cannot hear you. Could you check the connection? We cannot hear you. Now yes. Keep speaking. Now yes? Yes, now it's okay. Please go ahead. So you just lost me now? As I said, so the smaller reactors have reduced nuclear material inventories making sighting easier and as all the components will be combined in a single pressure vessel. Also these integrated designs tend to incorporate passive systems like natural secretions and so on. So this is why the SMRs are now highly discussed for this. Now let's discuss the benefits of coal to nuclear. Excuse me. We lost your screen. We can hear you but we don't see the screen. Can you see this now? Now it's okay. So let's discuss the benefits of this coal to nuclear concept. One must know that the technical differences between the coal power plants and the nuclear power plants exist and this must be considered to identify the right candidate coal plants and sites for this transformation. That's not every coal plant we can just pick and repurpose. So if this plan is feasible, the benefits we gain are the following. So of course the low carbon emissions, reuse of infrastructure such as roads, warehouses, administrative buildings and potentially more if the plant is really being repurposed and not just the site or just around the plant. Then of course the reuse of transmissions and grids as the small modular reactors have also similar outputs as many coal plants. As mentioned in a previous slide around 300 megawatt electric. Now the job retention is very important. As many times the coal plant is employing a huge part of the local community and retiring a coal plant would have a very negative impact on the lives of the workers and this community because of the high loss of the jobs in the area. Now retraining of the workers may be needed in certain areas such as maintenance of specialized equipment and reactor operator of course, nuclear engineers but many other jobs may be retained in engineering, project management, maintenance, operations and other support functions. The next benefit is retaining the value of the assets as approximately 200 coal power plants shut down between 2010 and 2019. The average power capacity was about 200 megawatt electric and these retired plants in 2010 were on average 20 years older than the ones retired in 2018. So the average age of plants being retired is now comparable to the age of the operating fleet. As well the average power of the retired plants has increased over the years and the average power in the current operating coal power plant fleet is about 350 megawatt electric. So these plants retirement appear to be removing the older and lower power units, preferentially increasing the viability of the remaining fleet. So going forward the retirements of these larger and newer coal power plants are to be expected and the newer power plants will have newer components and potentially therefore higher value in their relatively new equipment. So retaining the increased plant value and the eccentric value of the site should provide also with more incentive to repower and repurpose rather just than to retire completely the plants. And at last since I mentioned before the negative or the complaint about nuclear is the slow construction and deployment as well as the high capital cost, the repurposing approach will provide for faster deployment lower construction costs. But of course these exact numbers for the costs are more on the case by case basis for this repurposing. So who can benefit from this approach? Now as of 2022 the world has more than two terawatt electric of coal fired plant generating about 12 gigaton of CO2 emissions per year which is amounting to almost one third of the global total forecast net annual emissions of approximately 40 gigaton per year. Now let's look at the few countries which could benefit from this concept. So in this graph we can see the countries energy mix from the year 2021 and you can see in this graph the order is from the decreasing contribution of coal in the energy mix of these countries. First with the countries that have nuclear in the energy mix and then in the rectangle you can see the same. So decreasing of the coal contributions but in the countries that do not yet have nuclear power. So you can see in the orange coal and the red oil are in the yellow gas which will also be important and in the blue nuclear and the remaining is either renewables or others such as bio. In some US coal plants have been actually converted to natural gas to reduce the production cost and reduce the carbon emissions and to avoid required emissions upgrade by using a more efficient heat source and while this is definitely a positive step forward it may in some years be preferable to also convert these plants to nuclear power plants so to achieve because of course they are also from the gas plants so in order to achieve the net zero commitments they may anyway decide to convert this to nuclear. So the step to call to nuclear directly will get rid of this intermediate step. So as I said you can see also the significant contributions from not so much oil but really gas also in this graph for many countries. So I would like to now introduce you a few cases in countries already taking concrete step in this approach such as US for example or countries that would highly benefit from this approach such as India or Poland. Also during our recent conference at the agency we had a speaker from South Africa and she also mentioned that she thinks that the country might really consider adopting this approach as well which is very interesting because as you can see this is really the first country here with really really high coal contribution in the energy mix. So I personally think that once this concept is proven where we really have a repurposed coal plant maybe more countries would follow and express interest. So I would like to start with the US case. Currently in the US we have about 110 coal plants operating that are planned for retirement by 2014 and from this it's 100, this will be 120 KW of electricity capacity that would need to be replaced hopefully by advanced nuclear reactors. This would then amount for 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year that would be eliminated and repurposing these plants would also amount to 1.5 billion hours of construction employment and 35,000 power plant jobs and 32,000 manufacturing jobs. So one plant that is this concept is called Natrium Plant which is by Terra Power Company and this Natrium technology is a 345 megawatt sodium ultrafast reactor with a molten salt based integrated energy storage system which is planned in camera in Wyoming USA and it is planned at the site of a retired coal plant not a coal plant. And this power plant is according to the company estimated to be completed by 2028. The financing for this plant came from the US Department of Energy with so called Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program which set to commit nearly 2 billion dollars and Terra Power matched dollar for dollar. Now the power output here is a little bit higher than this number that we keep hearing for SMRs 300 megawatts. So that is always open to interpretation maybe Chirayu who is an SMR expert can say whether this is still an SMR. So the difference is that the majority of this discussed SMRs concepts are water cooled reactors and this is interestingly a sodium cooled fast reactor which means that this project will also build the supply chain for sodium fast reactors in the US. The estimated jobs for this plant is 2,000 construction jobs and 250 jobs at the operational plant itself. So I would just say something briefly about the Norton power plant. So the advantages of this sodium plant as mentioned by Terra Power are that it has this flexible and small footprint and attractive size that the thermal storage has the potential to accommodate the system output to 500 megawatt electric of power for approximately five and a half hours when needed. And this flexibility to quickly load follow to accommodate the increased impact of solar and wind due to the molten salt storage system as well as the rapid construction as they mentioned this will be finished by 2028 which is really only five years away actually. Emergency planning zone at the site boundary. Inherent safety and also grid connection and at least transmission lines which are able to tie directly into the substation and the grid is already like ready for the power level. And at last the workforce since the local community is supportive and also available for the constructions and operations jobs. Regarding the cold plant that's being repurposed the Norton cold plant. So this is a three unit plant with total generating capacity of 700 megawatt. And the units one and two are coal fired and have capacity of approximately 450 megawatt while the unit three was converted to natural gas few years ago in 2019. So now we are discussing the units one and two which are set to retire in 2025. Now I would like to highlight here that the plant will not really directly replace the power plant but it will be located about four kilometers south of the power plant. This is due to the soil ground and water ash contamination as was discussed by the speaker from TerraPower during the webinar. And in this particular case they can reuse the workforce. As I said the roads, the water rights, the grid but if the plant is being repurposed directly next to the site we could reuse more of the infrastructure as well such as buildings and on site even more like cooling towers, generators and much more of the equipment. So there are of course more companies that are developing SMRs and also discussing the potential of this approach but I have for the US only presented now this one particular case. The second case I would like to highlight today is for Romania. Now in Romania in November 2021 the company Nutia Electrica, the Romanian company signed agreement with the US company New Scale Power to build a six-module OGR SMR with the capacity of 462 megawatt electric at the site of the former Dojcesti called Fired Power Plant. In this case the SMR is planned to repurpose directly the plant directly on site and the estimated cost of this project including construction and installation is approximately $1.6 billion and they also plan to complete it by the end of the decade. So far the mentioned cost savings, capital cost savings could be approximately on average about $100 million. Now this New Scale SMR Power Plant which can build on an existing coal power plant site they mention a very small land footprint of around 10 hectares and they can reuse the existing hard infrastructure such as cooling and potable water the site physical protection warehouses, buildings, grids, roads, etc. This is all supporting these projects and with this replacement of a coal plant with a comparable installed capacity by the New Scale SMR the power plant will require very little changes to the transmission systems if any according to the company. So regarding the capacity building for this case as I mentioned they want to retain the coal power plant workforce and mention that the many positions are directly transferable from coal to nuclear while other positions might need some cross-training. So of course this will then provide for a greater economic impact in the existing coal communities. I would also like to highlight that this year in August the agency has concluded a seed mission seed standing for the site and external events design review of the seed mission in Romania. And here the first European SMR should be built and this seed mission was also the first ever IEA seed mission to look into the site selection for an SMR. You can also see here and I put this link for this reference if you want to read more about the mission or about this particular case this is available here. The third case I would like to touch briefly is a country with a high potential for this approach India. Now what you see on this slide this is mostly the information that we was delivered by the Indian speaker during the IEA webinar and he has made some very interesting points and really also convincing of why this concept would be beneficial for India. As majority of the coal power plants are situated in India in zone with low seismic activity they can be replaced, repurposed with the nuclear power plants and India would most likely for water cooled technology as this technology would not require much more further investment in research as compared to the sodium cost of fast reactors which we have seen now is now the case in the US. Two things why this concept would be beneficial or two things that I could think of now are most likely the small exclusions on for this SMRs like we seen it was at the site of the boundary for Romania, the plant boundary and this can be interesting as due to the high population density in India. And the second would be the desalination of the clean drinking of the water so to supply the clean drinking water. It was reported by the predictions made by the government of India that India may be water stressed by 2050 and since India has about 6000 kilometers of coastline on the mainland and on this coastline there is about 20 coal fired plants 5 diesel power plants and 17 natural gas power plants instilling SMRs and having a desalination plant would be able to produce up to 900 cubic meter of clean water per megawatt electric. Now India was also second on the chart I have shown earlier and it has really a huge contribution of coal in their energy mix. So the last case I would like to mention today briefly is Poland. As we can see here they have at the moment no nuclear contribution in their energy mix a very high coal it's no secret very high coal contribution in their energy mix but they have also recently expressed interest in including nuclear. So why is it really interesting for them? Now there was this one case study one paper published this year really discussing the possibility for coal to nuclear for Poland so the power system in Poland is currently dominated by coal fired units which have reached an age and a technical condition where they will have to be gradually shut down in the coming years 2033 onward Poland intends to commission nuclear power plants and the installed capacity in 2043 is expected to be between 6 and 9 gigawatts. Now a double effect of decarbonization can be then achieved by nuclear powering of their coal fired plants with replacement of the coal boiler island with nuclear reactor systems. These repowered plants could then benefit if they would operate also with the thermal energy storage systems using molten salt. In this paper published in 2022 the authors were presenting a techno economic analysis of three cases if they would be repowering a 460 megawatt super critical coal fired unit in Poland and the authors have focused on assault cooled reactors in this study. So the retrofit would assume the replacement of the boiler island to be the system of nuclear reactors ensuring the production of heat for the needs of stiff generators and the authors considered three cases of the structure of the nuclear unit so the two would assume the operation of the system without its integration with the thermal energy systems thermal energy storage systems while one case involves also connecting two tanks for molten salt constituting the heat storage system between the nuclear island and the turbine island. So the first case assumes the use of a system of three KPFHR reactors standing for the kairos power fluoride cooled high temperature reactor so it's a reactor in the design and each of these would have a thermal capacity of 320 megawatt coming to total to about 960 megawatt which is very close to the nominal thermal power of the removed boiler. Now in this KPFHR reactor the two closed loops transfer heat from the reactors to the steam turbine we have a primary heat transfer system the flyby salt and in the intermediate heat transfer system so called solar salt is used and the temperature of the salt at the outlet of the reactor and at the inlet of the steam generator is set to 100 degrees celsius. Now this temperature means that this reactor can be considered for direct repowering of most super critical cold fired power units. This case was also the option with the highest investments cost of course because of the need to purchase and build the three nuclear reactors the second case considered in this study was similar to case one but the number of the reactors would reduce to two and the third case study used two nuclear reactors equipped with the molten salt thermal energy storage system as a buffer for the heat produced by the reactor system. So the authors have performed quite a detailed economic analysis where they refer to the issues of investment costs operating and maintenance costs and assumptions regarding construction times and operating times of the units that may be the result of the nuclear retrofits which would be carried out. So the result of this conducted analysis showed that the integration of the nuclear units with the TES systems may allow for a significant increase in the flexibility of electricity production with a simultaneous full use of the production potential of the nuclear reactors and this is of course desirable due to the significant share of the purchase costs of the reactors in the total investment costs. This economic analysis demonstrated that the integration with the TES system may be beneficial if considering the current levels of daily variation in electricity prices and in the current market conditions. This was the most attractive investment. This would be this case with the two reactors and the TES system capacity of 800 megawatt hour. So here also another approach was presented where perhaps this integration of this thermal energy system is something that may be adopted more in this repurposing approach and also in the US they also considered the molten salt storage in the natural plan. So we will see how this will develop. And before I conclude here is another sort of alternative as some countries with high contributions from nuclear and their energy mix such as France for example or Slovakia as you can see in this graph may consider repurposing coal plants to actually replace their retiring nuclear power plants with new nuclear power plants either with advanced reactors of their own designs whether that is SMR or another type of advanced nuclear reactors. So I would like to mention again if you would like to watch a webinar where this topic is really discussed with experts from different countries then here is also the link available and so thank you very much for your kind attention. This would now conclude my lecture on this overview of this concept and if we have few minutes I would like to even discuss with you all about this topic as I would be really interested what is your opinion whether you think that this concept can be applicable in your countries you come from many different countries and you may have also different insights so I will then stop sharing my screen. Thank you very much Nikoleta for your lecture. Any questions or comments from this audience? Please go ahead. Please use this microphone. Thank you for your lecture Dr. Morelova. I have a question about the issues that happen when you try to convert a whole plant like for example the exclusion zones, the security issues and even the safety issues for trying to adapt the containment building and maybe rebuild this containment building. Interesting question indeed I think this will be something that once this is really done and this is really finalized then they will release what were the challenges as this is very early in the stages so of course no companies would say with challenges they are facing and why it would not work since they are promoting why it will work at this point but it may be that they will really decide to build it very close of these issues as you say and then just use really the workforce and the grid and the roads but actually sort of really build it just next to the power plant so they can then use the knowledge that we have and all the safety considerations that we have when building new power plants but that is really something that I also think would be coming more to light as this concept will develop more and more. Any other questions? Please. Hello, Roman Glushnikov, Ukraine I have one important question about the best technologies that we can choose for such replacement what do we think do we need to consider especially some special technology for this or it have to be dependent we have to choose it we have to analyze current system from different countries and choose the technology taking into account this current current system or we need to have just some special one So for the technology it would depend on many aspects it would depend of course for the maturity of the technology in each country when I have discussed this with the Indian speaker and they already have a fast reactor program I said why not use a fast reactor if you would decide to repurpose then they said the speaker said well because this would require much more investment in this technology and we already have a lot of maturity in what to call the reactor so we would probably if adopting go this way but then we can consider whether they would like to couple this hydrogen production resalination do they need high temperature do they want to then go that direction rather because it would be economically better or for that purpose better so as you can see in the USA have opted now for for this first sodium called a fast reactor whereas the other company was opting for the water cooled reactor in Romania this SMR so probably it will really be country dependent maybe money also play probably money will play a role and also the purpose and which country is willing to let's say take maybe more risk adopting newer technologies with the idea that they might get some reward out of it because they can have they can have other benefits from this high temperature other production so this is my opinion on this currently okay thank you thank you again Nicoleta now I suggest that we move on to another lecture it will be