A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with Colin and others and I realized that we were talking about open source sustainability in general as a topic for the conference and a theme we wanted to touch on, given how hop-on of an issue it's been over the last year or so. And as I was thinking about that, we realized it's been over a decade since MySQL was purchased by Sun just under a decade one since Sun was purchased by Oracle. And I started to think I was talking to Peter about the Percona sponsorship and about their presence here and talking to the MariaDB folks about all of their presentations. And I realized we actually have quite a few leaders from the MySQL diaspora, as I was calling it here. And that this is an interesting one to me because it's a very vibrant community, despite the fact that it all sort of branched in a weird family tree about a decade ago. And yet, when I decided to write some code to query databases, it mostly just works across all of the different database distributions. And when I start to think about what databases are, the default around a lot what we use in Linux, again, MySQL or MySQL derivative or branch of some sort. And I thought this is weird. I don't think I've seen any other open source communities that have done it in this way. And I'd love to get the experts in the room to talk about it. And so Colin Charles was kind enough to help organize this and put it together. So we've got folks from Percona, from Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba. And of course, Maria Dibi. And so with that, I'm going to leave you in the capable hands of Charles to start an interesting conversation about how we got here and where we go next. Thank you, Ilan. Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Ilan, the scale team for having us here. Many came from afar, even on this panel. And it's probably not a stretch to say that on this stage, there's probably a combined 100 years' worth of database experience from the people that are here. Some of you are still streaming in, thanks to probably daylight savings time. You've got one less hour worth of sleep. This used to be a problem with database replication, possibly a long time ago, though I guess now we fix that all since we all run with UTC time, right? All right. So Oracle apologized that they could not be here as stewards of MySQL, largely because their executives don't work on weekends. So without further ado, we start with the first panelist, Peter Zaitsev, CEO and co-founder of Percona, formerly of MySQL AB, and author of this wonderful tome called High Performance MySQL Third Edition. To the right of me, we also have Yoshinori Matsunobu, production engineer and MySQL tech lead at Facebook. He is the man responsible for leading MyRox development, and he's going to tell you a little bit more about what MyRox has done for Facebook. They migrate, they use the database, message, and so forth. Also, formerly from MySQL AB, also made a wonderful tool called MHA for high availability, still in use today. And it's his first time at scale, so give him a warm scale welcome. We also have Sunil on my left. He's the principal group program manager at the SEO data team responsible for MySQL, MariaDB server, and Postgres. They recently also acquired Citus data, showing the commitment to the Postgres community, and it is also his first time at scale, so give him a warm welcome. Thank you. Furthermore, we have Jimmy Yang, team lead for PolaDB, storage engine at Alibaba Cloud, formerly also an NDB architect at Oracle, and it is also his first time at scale. Someone should convince him to tweet as well. And all the way to my left, we have Vicente Keobaro, software developer team lead at the MariaDB Foundation. He got into hacking on MariaDB server via Google Summer of Code, and he has graduated to being the program administrator and mentor for the Google Summer of Code program at MariaDB. It is also his first time at scale. Okay, oh yeah, and then there's me been around for a while, and I've had the pleasure of working at all the server manufacturers, so yeah, next slide please. So that's the one thing that I'll give you from Oracle. So several years ago at Open World Keynote, Larry Allison came late to his own keynote, and then his clicker would not work, and then he would keep on saying things like next slide please. It's a wonderful video, you should go check it out on YouTube. So just to get things in perspective, MySQL's been around since May 1995. Anybody used it since then? 95, wow, excellent. So Oracle actually acquired InnoBase in October 2005. InnoBase makers of the InnoDB storage engine. It's the engine that probably all of you use. How many here don't use an engine that's InnoDB? Besides maybe Yoshi. Okay. MySQL also did acquire Sun for a billion dollars in January 2008, and Prokona server's been around the first ever branch since November of 2008. Oracle then acquired Sun, and it took a very long time because there were fears that MySQL would be killed at Oracle. And the MariaDB server actually came around in February of 2010. So, next slide please. Yeah, so is MySQL tired? And that's what I have as a question for the panelists because Prokona has also dabbled with MongoDB and most recently Sun offering Postgres. Alibaba is making PolarDB. Microsoft decided to acquire Postgres company, not a MySQL or MariaDB company. MariaDB itself doesn't contribute or more accurately cannot contribute upstream any longer. And this particular slide that some of you may see, not on the video stream, is when in 2011, Michael Stonebreaker himself said, he famously said that Facebook is operating a huge complex MySQL implementation equivalent to a fate worse than death. And the only way out of it is to bite the bullet and rewrite everything. So naturally, Facebook doubled down on MySQL, made T-shirts and mocked him. So, what do you guys think? Is MySQL tired, Peter? Well, I think things have been different, right? So, then I started to be involved with MySQL, started Prokona back in 2006. The MySQL was practically the only game in town, the only relational database out there. It was kind of Postgres, but that was much more niche database. And if you look at the companies found at that time, Facebook or Twitter, Yahoo, right? All there MySQL. Now, more than a decade later, we have much more choices out there. There are many good relational databases, MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB, and also many different kinds of non-relational databases, even many kinds of databases, right? We have graph database or database focusing on the time series and many kinds of no SQL database, right? And I think while MySQL is not as dominating that as before because there are many wonderful choices, I think it is still going strong. And I think those choices are wonderful for all of you. And they're also wonderful for MySQL community because competition brings up best in developers and in companies. Yoshi? Yeah, I think MySQL current state is better than I expected 10 years ago. So 10 years ago, I worked at MySQL as a consultant for MySQL software. Then lots of people said NoSQL would take over MySQL database, so MySQL had no future. 10 years ago, many people said that, but now MySQL is still everywhere. So even at Facebook, so there was a discussion that HBase was a superior database, so let's duplicate MySQL and put all engineering efforts to HBase. But actually, after a couple of years later, the opposite thing happened. So now the largest HBase back in Facebook was we migrated from our Facebook messengers, HBase to MySQL called MyDogs. So actually, it's pretty interesting. So many people, what many people have predicted didn't happen after 10 years. So more workloads for MySQL at Facebook. Yeah, actually. And what about from a cloud standpoint, Sunil? That's what I was gonna say as well. I think being such an old, relational open source database, MySQL has garnered an ecosystem that is second to none. And people only think about how do we replicate that? It's so pervasive and the path that MySQL took early on trying to be a pervasive, like an embedded database I think played out very, very well for them. And then slowly graduating to more and more B2C or business to consumer type of applications. And I believe the next, I think the accelerant to MySQL has been the cloud. And it's in fact not just MySQL, it's been for all open source relational databases. Now, making it much more simpler and easier to use and then compound that with other cloud benefits around security, performance, auto tuning and so on has kind of given a new life for these open source relational databases. And from our perspective as we operate a very large cloud, we see MySQL being used in many diverse type of applications and continues to be one of the favorite database engines. So from our perspective, we from Microsoft and Azure in particular, we believe in giving our customers and developers the full choice and flexibility and working in their terms. And towards that, we see huge opportunity around MySQL and we are here to actually provide them the best managed database on Azure platform. And what's a workload situation like at Alibaba Cloud, Jimmy? I think MySQL is the biggest audience provider of the database in Alibaba Cloud. So we support tens of thousands of customers just on MySQL ideas. And it is one of the most stable products in our cloud. So in terms of the new features ever released, it comes new features that people likes. So I think MySQL is still going very strong on the cloud. And even if we develop any variant of MySQL, it still proves MySQL is one of the very stable, one of the best open source databases to start with in the cloud. Thank you. So Vicente, you obviously work on MariaDB server. Is MySQL tired for you? Is MySQL whatsoever? Tired. Tired? Yes. Is it boring, old fashioned? No, so I think... Or is it wired? I think we should recognize that Oracle has done a lot of work towards improving MySQL. However, it always is in the back of my mind that is this development that Oracle is doing always done because they want to develop the server or is it done as a response to the competition that has formed around MySQL? And that is MariaDB. One project that comes to mind is actually my project which I did in 2013. That was SQL standard roles. And MySQL has got this feature, but it's only now recently in MySQL 8.0. So I think it's important that other forks exist because that creates a competitive ecosystem and that people have to keep improving their products. Both Oracle and MariaDB have to keep evolving to keep up with their requirements. So now, I don't think MySQL is tired, but I think it's important to keep everybody on their toes by doing the right thing. Excellent, so it's kind of wired, but thanks to also the branches and forks then. So where is MariaDB used today out of curiosity? If anybody is running Linux, I guess that if you are installing MySQL, most major distributions are actually defaulting to MariaDB. So that's one of the big points that it shows that MariaDB is used not just in simple websites, but also across large systems. There's even the banking sector who's migrated. Also the Wall Street is moving towards MariaDB and pretty much any large scale website ends up using some form of MariaDB behind the scenes. Any of the cloud vendors willing to share a big MySQL or MariaDB win?  HSBC comes to mind that are running thousands of transactions a second and chose MySQL. And yeah, I mean, you're free to go to the azure.com and look at the customer testimonials. So we have a wide, wide range of use cases for MySQL in the financial industry, in the healthcare industry, and of course it is the default database of choice for WordPress, and we all know that. But then we also see opportunities around and we've seen good, big installations of MySQL in the context of Magento. And really when we see where MySQL is used and when we see these opportunities, right, so like Marketo, big user of MySQL, Adobe, big user of MySQL, of course, MySQL is not the only database they use. They use MySQL, they use Postgres, they use multiple databases, and that's the world we live in right now. So it's not about, in this customer, in this label, only MySQL is used, or only MariaDB is used, or only Postgres is used. In fact, we see all these databases being used for different applications and for different purposes. And that's where I think it's actually a goodness. And now that the fact that the developers are really empowered to use whatever favorite databases they want to feel comfortable with and deploy their applications. And that choice and flexibility is what kind of provides the total freedom and use the best database for the right purpose. Right off. Any other? Yeah, we also offer MariaDB in our IDS offering. Another thing to note is Alibaba also invest a lot of money in MariaDB Foundation. So I think we agree that the competition brings the best of the MySQL ecosystem. So we want to keep the competition to be there. Speaking of foundations, on this stage, we have Alibaba who has invested in the MariaDB Foundation and invested in the corporation as well, actually. Microsoft also sponsor of the foundation and even Precona as a sponsor of the foundation. Is there a reason why everyone is sponsoring the foundation? So Alibaba is obviously looking at the foundation as competition, but you've also put money in the company. So is there a good reason there? Basically, I think we want to also help MariaDB to be able to develop its own feature that helps the cloud, the open-source community. I think that's the one big thing that we want to make sure we also contribute financially also in terms of open-source community. That would be good for the whole thing. For Microsoft perspective, we take a very principled approach to how we look at open-source. Of course, there are multiple different lenses that we can use and of course, we come across some of the customers that will say, I prefer MariaDB because I don't want my business to do anything with Oracle and sometimes, it gets into a religious conversation, but there are customers that say that and are genuinely concerned about it. Now, from the foundation perspective itself, it is for Microsoft to put the money where the mouth is and look at sustainability of the open-source projects that we decide to invest and go deep into. And especially around the open-source relational databases, Postgres and MariaDB are the two big bets that we have taken on in the context of how we enable and contribute with the community, partner with the community and ensure that these communities thrive and are able to sustain for the long haul. And that's the spirit behind us investing in the MariaDB Foundation. We've also started contributing code back to MariaDB. It's not as easy to contribute code to Oracle for MySQL and we also see this as a way for us to open channels and innovate in the open, which is our deepest desire and intent and we've already started following through that. This is also the same principle that we applied behind our acquisition in the Postgres space with Citus data. With Citus as an extension, also having an open-source version of it, having made a lot of contributions to the base Postgres as well as Citus as an extension, we believe that was complimentary to the strategy that we are following in terms of making sure that we are deeply committed in the projects that we are highly investing in. Thank you, Sunil. So Peter, why are you re-entrant as a Foundation sponsor? Well, something may not recognize it, but besides having our own software per Kona server for MySQL and per Kona server for MongoDB, we also have a support a lot of customers on MariaDB or on MySQL server. And it felt right for us to make sure that we contribute to MariaDB ecosystem through a sponsoring foundation in addition to the code, what we do. Now, having said that, I would say that I am not super thrilled with MariaDB Foundation in terms of, I would love to see that being more focused on the larger needs of MariaDB community, and kind of being less tight at the hip with MariaDB corporation. And for a long time, this was the reason we did not support MariaDB Foundation because in fact, that would be at large extent funding our competitor. But then in the end, we decided to still go ahead and support MariaDB Foundation. Fair enough. Facebook, are we gonna support the MariaDB Foundation as well or? So, the situation at Facebook, it's pretty different from other companies. So, we are not offering a software service. So, and we are heavily using MySQL 5.6 right now and seeking to migrate to 8.0 in the future. So, we heavily rely on the Oracle based MySQL. So, that's the reason we are not much considering about sponsoring foundation. But we are still having a relationship with MariaDB as specific employees. For example, there is a senior engineer called Sergei Petronia, who was the first big contributor to Myrox, which is a rock-stabby storage engine that is able to use that Facebook. So, we have a relationship with MariaDB for that case-by-case basis. Fair enough. And we'll come back to Myrox in a bit.  Right. So, I actually wanted to interrupt Peter and bring a comment, but so the- Let's argue. Yes, let's start doing that. That's why they're on the end. So, they can't throw punches. So, the MariaDB foundation is the steward for the MariaDB server. We, it is true that it is in a tricky position in that we share a trademark with the MariaDB corporation. But the thing is that the foundation is the nonprofit and it's goal as I can highlight in our annual report. I have lots of these and I can share it with you. So, our goals are adoption, collaboration, free public access, and to promote the development of the MariaDB server. And I do agree with Peter that we should focus more on community and which is why we are. And I am actually in charge of the team who is going to be reviewing and encouraging more community contributions in the future. We are specifically hiring people to do that. But just to show a quick statistics of what happened before, compared to Oracle, we have four times as many pull requests accepted into the MariaDB server as opposed to how many pull requests Oracle accepted within MySQL. So, we are collaborating with developers, with package maintainers, with distributions as a whole to make sure that the server is working properly, not just the main platforms and distributions, but also the exotic world of, say, ARM, our PC, MIPS. I know ARM is not really that exotic, but it is not something that people immediately think about. So, all these are tasks that Foundation takes care of. In some regards, we do need outside developers to help. Most notably, the corporation provides mostly development resources for the server, and that's fine. We don't want to be the main developer for the server. We want outside entities to come and build the best server that can be. So, the Foundation is the steward and is working on becoming better. Do you think this is a good model going forward, steward-wise? Well, I just want to make a point where my concern is. I think what Vicente just mentioned is what MariaDB Foundation is focused on MariaDB server. But the server is only one component. Same as Linux kernel is important, but not the only one component of your Linux distribution. And the fact what MariaDB Foundation yields all that other stuff to take care of a MariaDB corporation, which often would provide non-open source tools for that, I think that is a really very bad scope for a mission. So, for example, you would see what in the MySQL MariaDB world, where people are standardizing on the proxy SQL to use for their traffic management, right? And it's not just us. You would find, for example, a lot of even Oracle blog posts accepting what that is a very good alternative, right? But I have not seen what MariaDB Foundation, MariaDB Foundation embracing that. And why don't we do that? Well, of course, because there is a BS license mark scale which MariaDB Corporation produces, right? And I believe that as the time goes, you'll have more and more and those tensions created because guess what? MariaDB Corporation is then to find a company which accepted by this time how much? Is it 100 million bucks? Yes, under 100 million. Just under 100 million bucks, right? And those guys, while they may slightly care about open source, they care most and foremost about returns, right? And what that means is what MariaDB Corporation will naturally pursue wherever strategy which we'll have to do, right? To provide the chance of those investments, right? And that is why I do expect what there will be, will be more tensions between the open source MariaDB goals and the commercial goals of MariaDB Corporation. So some of you may have been at Stephen Wally's talk yesterday and he said, Parking your identity brand on any open source project you own instead of the product solution your customers buy creates confusion for your messaging to customers. And the famous example around this is of course how Red Hat managed to have Red Enterprise Linux and Fedora and Vicente has already mentioned that with MariaDB, it's shared and Peter's also talked about the fact that the corporation is heavily venture backed. And so they're likely generally two stewards. Now, Oracle is the steward of MySQL, next slide please. And they actually made promises to acquire MySQL. They made 10 promises, next slide please. And of course they removed it from the internet so it's only on archive.org. And to be fair, they made five year commitments and now it's been more than 10 years. And do you think Oracle, as Oracle killed MySQL or have they stuck by their commitments and are they doing a good job? Yoshi. Yeah, I think they are good. So if they hide the duplicate storage engine in PIS we get screwed but I'm pretty sure Oracle won't do that. I think Oracle is doing pretty good so far. Still lots of engineers like InnoDB or replication teams that continue to work at Oracle so which is a good sign to me at least. Jimmy, you were also part of the InnoDB team. Is Oracle a good steward of MySQL? In general, yes. I worked for Oracle in MySQL. I was in the InnoDB team before they acquired the MySQL team. So it has been like nine years. I just left the Oracle last September. So in general, I think they did a pretty good job. At least leave MySQL alone. Now it's saying that really sponsoring but at least leave MySQL alone and it's developing and it's thriving. So it has one of the biggest in MySQL, InnoDB I think in the world. So they are still getting out a lot of good features that keep the mainstream still very attractive. So everyone wants to move to MySQL 8. That's the latest release. So I think it shows they're still doing a pretty good job. Are you seeing a similar interest as your MySQL? I mean the way I would answer that question is I think if you look at from a business commercial interest standpoint, I think Oracle has done a phenomenal job. And it still garners a lot of revenue for not just Oracle but the entire ecosystem as well. So I think that has really thrived. But if I have to be critical, I would say around the fact that were they able to upheld the open sourceness or preserved the roots of how and why, the reason behind why MySQL became the database it is, then that's perhaps they have not paid much attention to. So I think I've draw the similar kind of parallels like to Peter's point around MariaDB as well between the foundation and the corp. I think there is opportunity there, I believe. There's huge potential and opportunity for MariaDB. And in fact, another foobar database that might come out as well.  I mean, there's gonna be tons and tons of use cases and opportunities for hundreds of databases. But important is staying focused. And I would really like to see MariaDB come out of the shadows of Oracle and MySQL, build their own identity. And also, I think this is for the community at large, once you have a mission, once you have a vision, people align to it. And I see a lack of that alignment, but there is potential, there's huge opportunity. And I truly hope and wish that MariaDB will capture that opportunity and create their own identity which will create a new ecosystem, which will create a new coalition of enthusiast trying to and building support for that. And with our investment behind MariaDB, we believe that we can hope to achieve that. Right off. What do you think, Peter? Have Oracle been good stewards? Well, from technical standpoint, I like Larry's MySQL a lot more than like Monty's MySQL. And I've been out there during MySQL five zero times, right? And this was, I would say, entirely, filled with checksbook features, right? You would have things like views or store procedures or subqueries designed which would not work well together or work well at all, right? To a point, for example, what Google in one of the later releases would have to disable subqueries on the partial level, if you remember that, because they were so bad and they couldn't teach their developers when exactly they are useful, right? Now, I think if you look at the Oracle, they have been doing a lot of solid engineering, right? And some features have been taking its time to come, but they generally come is quite solid, well-documented, well-integrated. Now, speaking about the other side, Oracle, of course, is Oracle and they pursue their open core model for MySQL, so not everything is open source, there is a commercial version, but they have been actually quite nice about that. Wherever they have implemented as a closed source, which is done through plugins, with public APIs, and we at Percona implemented our own open source versions for majority of them. We could do it both from technical standpoint and they did not make it hard and we could also make it from legal standpoint, right? Not getting into any legal trouble with Oracle. So I think what Oracle have been pursuing their own business interests with MySQL Enterprise, but they have allowed the other companies to implement the open source alternatives, which if they choose so, which we did.  So we heavily rely on the storage engine API, so we call the new storage engine called MyRogs, and we also rely on the audit plugins, so we have a custom audit plugins that are sending the MySQL query logs to internal queue subs called Scribe, so it uses an audit plugin, so we heavily rely on the plugin development by Oracle and MySQL 8.0 pushes further about plugin or component architectures like MySQL applications, like same thing, so I think this is a very good trend that I hope Oracle continues that. Fair enough, so you know, we sent you, I guess, quality features are important so that people also don't disable features. Is this a focus of MariaDB server, like fully documented, full-on quality features? So we should be fair and say that we still need to work on our documentation, there's things we can improve there, and we are focusing on fixing that. One thing that MariaDB really focuses on is ensuring that your server, which can be from version 5.3 all the way to 10.3, it will always work, you can always upgrade from an old version to a new version, so we care that your application will keep on working even if you were using an older server and then migrated to a newer one. This is something that makes it difficult to do quality features in an efficient manner, so we have to make sure we maintain backwards compatibility all the time. This slows us down, but we believe this is important because users should not be worried of upgrading, and I can make a statement that MariaDB 10.3 is more compatible to MySQL 5.7 than MySQL 8.0 is compatible to MySQL 5.7 when it comes to upgrades. So... Full statement. And I think there are pages that can prove that this is so. Fair enough, so you know, Cloud vendors famously love to disable features of servers, so are you disabling less features on MySQL or are you disabling less features on MariaDB? Thank you. So, it's not about disabling features or not taking the features and putting it in the hands of the customer and the users. As a managed database service, we have to package it in a way that is reliable and not that just works 80% of the time. We have to design it such that it works 100% of the time. And in ability for us to deliver on that promise, we have to take some of the capabilities out of the hands of users because not all users are created equal. And there are some users who can really hurt and bring their databases down and in which case we as a managed database service are kind of reliable for some of those actions. So we take those very seriously and there's a reason why it's not that we think about it as taking features or pulling features away from the users but enable as much as we can provide the guarantees that we are liable for the user that this database is going to be up and running all the time, 24 by seven by 365. So fair enough, not quite saying which one's got more disabled functionality. What about on the Alibaba side? I think similar to what Sonia just said, we are basically a manager of the database for the user and a large part of the cloud service for the database we spend on is on the control system which we provide monitoring and the control and but we cannot release all the configure variables attract to all the users. So something we manage by ourself and that take a lot of, just like Sonia said, they cannot shoot themselves, right? So it's easier for them to use. That's basically the thing. We also provide as many features as we can to the user. So that's mostly the thing that we try to provide as many as we can, but in terms of some dangerous, very tricky configure options, we'll probably will handle ourself or even show it from the user. Okay, next slide please. So, now some spicy stuff. Just last week, Michael Howard, the CEO of MariaDB Corporation said that many cloud vendors, he wouldn't name them but you will know whom apparently, are strip mining open source technologies and companies and abusing the license and privilege and not giving back to the community. And of course, he also believes that proprietary and closed licenses are dead. You're gonna be a general purpose database. Now, what do you think about this, Peter? Well, I will start by saying that it was interesting to see the person talking about open source license dead and then having Clark StrixDB, which as I understand is commercial license and as I hear there is no plan to take it open source, or MariaDB Corporation have a history of taking the open source things which was first with max scale and then taking that to the non open source license. So, on that fact, I think that makes a very good and quotable statement but I don't think that has the truth behind that when it says to in this case. Now, in terms of a strip mining open source and this general concern about the cloud vendor, I think what is very interesting is you hear those concerns from a lot of venture funded companies, right? And I think what is interesting in this case, it looks like the people went ahead and embraced the open source license because of adoption, right? And one of the reasons that adoption with open source is because that doesn't provide their possibility only for one vendor to make the money on the software, right? Allows that to do everybody else. But then as the time comes and as some strong competitor as a cloud vendor arises, they claim, oh, that's not fair. We have to be making sure what we are making all the money from the software. Well, in this case, you guys should have probably not going open source routes, right? Or choose the different license, right? For your software which would have prevented cloud vendors from doing so, right? So, I think in this case, as the open source software works as expected, right? And that is the privilege open source license gives cloud vendors which they use it. Now, another interesting thing in this case is if you don't ask those companies, but if you ask the end users, right? What do you think about that? And then here, you'll find the opposite thing. You will find what a lot of cloud vendors made open source databases much more accessible and ever to use than ever before, right? Especially, I think the rise of Postgres those days is a lot because of the cloud vendors because PostgreSQL often was hard to manage for beginners and then Hiroku and later databases as a service and many major cloud vendors make it not a problem at all, right? Not an issue. So, I think in this case, that there is a lot of benefits even our unnamed cloud vendor provides as a value to the open source ecosystem which is just not in the sense of code at this point. Would they like them to contribute more code? Yes, of course, I would, right? But I don't think what we have, you know some abomination here. So, Jimmy, you represent a cloud vendor. Do you think you're a strip mining open source? I think I don't agree. So, basically, if you look at the cloud vendor when we put a database on the market, a lot of portion of the work is not really database itself. A lot of them are the hardware. A lot of them are the control system, how to make it easier for use to use. So, in terms of cloud, actually it promotes the open source, the MySQL to a lot of customer that don't know how to use them. Now, they make it easier for them to use that. Even for those small customer, most of the 95% of us are small, medium customers. They even, they build themselves, they probably hire somebody and download the open source and do this work. But for us, we just make it easier for them to do that. And a lot of investment is just not in the database itself. It's on the control system, the interface, and also the hardware. So, I think in a sense, the cloud actually make, promotes the open source. It doesn't really, you know, try to strip the revenues from the open source company. Fair enough. What about Yusin, what do you think about this? I mean, like I mentioned earlier, in Microsoft, we've taken a principled approach. And we believe actions speak louder than words. And the acquisition of SIDES on the Postgres side actually echoes our deepest intent and continuing the open source and contributing back to the open source. We are already contributing to MariaDB, of course, in small quantities. But here, strip mining, I don't want to associate with quantity. Even if you contribute one line of code, it's one line of code. It's a contribution. So, we are already walking the talk. And I do worry about strip mining in the harshest sense. And it is, I understand that there is always going to be some commercial interest and some technology that you build as extension that you want to keep for a closed source. But I also believe it is fundamental for the sustainment of the open source projects that vendors contribute. And the contribution can come in multiple flavors. It should not just be measured on a single yardstick of how many lines of code. And really, that's how the community operates. And different companies and different users bring different strengths to the table and as a whole, we create an ecosystem. So, I would also like to see as much as these comments do make airwaves and grab headlines that we really see this as more holistic and not just kind of create our own yardstick and then uphold somebody else on that yardstick and say, hey, they are doing this or they are doing that. And I think this is where partnership, collaborative engagement is very important to the overall growth and the funneling of these things. Sorry, I just want to add one thing that even during the recent, we are importing mysql eight that we like a five, like a six, seven bucks in a month to the upstream. So that's like a one way for us to really test out the open source data so other user can benefit. So that's something that we have the resource to really try out the new things and both in the performance or the code stability side. So that's one thing that we can also contribute making the open source much better. So Vicente, do you prefer code or cash? So before I answer that, gives me a bit more time to think. So I really want to support Sunil and Jimmy and also Facebook Yoshinori. We've gotten significant contributions both from Microsoft, from Alibaba, and we certainly couldn't have gotten my rocks into MariaDB without their help. So this proves that large companies can and do contribute to open source. There are players that are obviously on the other end of the scale. But there are companies that are not just strip mining open source. And now to answer the other question, if I prefer code or cash, why not both? So I suspect largely it's a situation where a foundation likes both code and cash but a corporation probably wants more cash and some will even go up to Facebook and say, look if you've made so many hundred millions this particular quarter, a certain percentage should be going to us since you're running in this very large database. Do you get vendors coming to you and saying that, Yoshinori? So we operate my skin production. So we care much about reliability and efficiency. So for example, if the database fails 10% more often, then our production engineers get burnt out, so which is very problematic for us. And so if we can save the number of servers by 10% that's a huge cost to be in for us. So that's why we care so much about reliability and efficiency, which might be quite different from many small companies. Fair enough. So we've got approximately less than 10 minutes left and I'd like to open up to questions in a while. So in the meantime, we'll have 30 seconds per panelist to tell us something interesting about what you're up to. So Yoshinori, tell us in 30 seconds what Myrox is and why it's important. Okay, so Myrox is a MySQL's new storage engine based on the Rockstay-B. So Rockstay-B is a key value store based on not the B3 but on the rock-structured merge trees, which is similar to Cassandra or HBase. So we created Myrox just for saving space, which means saving the number of servers. So we migrated from InnoRev to Myrox on Facebook.com, the main Facebook database and we migrated from a Facebook messenger from HBase to Myrox, so which eventually saved the number of servers by half compared to InnoRev and we improved reliability quite a lot on the messengers. So it's mostly for saving space and improving reliability. So there's a good chance you all interacted with Myrox today, yesterday, and so forth. What about from a Percona standpoint? Can we get Myrox and Percona? Oh, yes, yeah. Myrox is available in the Percona server and if you want MySQL compatibility plus Myrox, that's really easy way to go. And as Yoshinori said, if you want to stop wasting money, then you should try Myrox. What's unique in Microsoft's offering of MySQL and MariaDB? I mean, so first of all, on the managed database side, we are building on top of the community editions and we do that deliberately, we do that in purpose from our user standpoint that prevents them lock in. And which is what I mentioned before, that we want to serve our customers on their terms and not get them locked into the platform. And once they come, we provide them the most unique value in terms of built-in high availability without having to set up replicas. We are the only cloud that does that and which means you can set up a highly available MySQL or MariaDB database and spend half the cost, even when if you're running on hosting on a virtual machine. That and then providing the enterprise security and enterprise performance. We are working on building and making performance optimization easy and simple. And we call it intelligent performance and it's really about providing users with intelligent insights, recommendations, auto tuning so that they can spend more and more time developing and writing apps as opposed to managing and optimizing databases. Thank you Sunil. Alibaba is famous for also offering MariaDB TX, the enterprise product. Also does offer Max Scale in the cloud, which used to be GPL and now business source license. And you're also developing PolarDB. So I'll give you one minute to tell us why you've gone the enterprise route and tell us more about PolarDB. That's too much favoritism. Okay. So we actually use Max Scale in for our PolarDB as well as RDS. Basically that's used by a surprise by MariaDB. And that use it's doing pretty well. For the PolarDB side, PolarDB is a unique cloud database based on MySQL and it does the physical replication and also separate the computer node from the storage node. So you can scale the computer node or you can scale the cloud node. So that's like a similar to Amazon Arola, but it's different in the design. But it's our new generation database that it's growing very fast for us. And Vicentio, why MariaDB in 30 seconds? Like what's new? So you should choose MariaDB because it's guaranteed to be the server that will always be open source. There is the MariaDB foundation which guarantees that being a non-profit organization. And if you do want to contribute something to MariaDB or you want to make sure that something gets fixed, making sure your voice is heard either via April request or by commenting on our mailing list or knowledge base, you are guaranteed to get an answer from us. You are not just talking to a brick wall. See, I suspect that MySQL as we all talked about is probably still going to remain open source. And Facebook, for example, is a big user of 5.6 and on the path to migration to 8.0. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you're still sticking to MySQL and not MariaDB and what's the path look like for you? So we are using MySQL because personally I want Oracle to continue to support MySQL. So we want to support Oracle as well, but we also have a good relationship with MariaDB and also from technical perspective, so we are like a MySQL GTID and GTID format is different from MySQL and MariaDB, so which makes migration really hard. So migration is hard and you stuck with MySQL GTID. Now why did MariaDB switch to another form of GTID and can people move between both databases? I'm not going to answer that question fully. Just that the GTID implementation from MariaDB was a decision based on sound technical principles. We did not try to be incompatible with MySQL on purpose. If I remember correctly, our GTID implementation was the first one that became stable compared to MySQL, which was a bit later. That's true, it became stable at first in a Percona server release and then might have shifted. That was group commit. So I'm surprised you didn't mention one of the key features which is SQL mode equals Oracle. So are you seeing mass defections of Oracle to MariaDB server now? So it is true that a few large customers from the MariaDB corporation have migrated to Oracle. I don't have access to more users to know if they have, but just seeing a few is probably that a lot more are following and seeing their example. Quite a few people are moving from Oracle to MariaDB. I think the number, the main reason why they switched is that cost wise it's potentially 100 times cheaper to run MariaDB than to run Oracle. Fair enough. Are you seeing such defections, Peter, at Percona? Well, yes, but mainly to Postgres. Yeah, I think what if you look at from the target open source database for migration for Oracle is Postgres is very far ahead from MySQL and MariaDB combined, right? If at least 10x more folks are looking to move to Postgres than to MySQL and MariaDB. So as a last question for all the panelists, if you're going to start on MySQL today and I looked at the manual is 6,028 pages long, what advice would you give to someone starting with MySQL today? What's the quickest advice you can give to someone, Peter? Learn, explain. Learn, explain. Okay, Yoshi. Very high-performance MySQL. Sunil. And SQL support. We also have a lot of wiki blog on MySQL, so we can share that. Okay, we'll send you. Start using it. If you're running into troubles, start asking for help. Okay, so I guess we don't have time for questions. Or do we? Okay, we have time for at least a question. Okay, please. Okay, so the question was, how does Microsoft balances between its own proprietary interest with SQL Server and all the other open source databases? I mean, I believe we have done, like we are doing a phenomenal job there. And that comes with the realization first that Microsoft is building and continues to build a relational database platform. And the platform which supports multiple database engines. And in other words, we are not selling a database allegiance to the user. Our user comes in to us saying, I have these database needs, I want to use MySQL or I want to use SQL or I want to use Postgres or anybody or MariaDB. And we provide them the platform on which they can be successful. So we want to contribute in all, across all, and there's absolutely zero conflict of interest, if you will, in terms of contributing one versus the other. There is no favoritism on contributing more here or contributing more there. Because regardless of the database engines that the user has chosen, we want to be the best platform for them. Okay, and we have one more question. I had a question, which is maybe a follow up on the cloud vendors having to turn off services. Is there more work that needs to be done, like with, I guess, respect to multi-tenancy? Are there other changes that, so when you're dealing, I guess, in a cloud offering, which might not have been the additional kind of design, what might not have been conceived at the time, are there more things that could be made where then you could turn on the features and, I guess, charge for them and not lose the whole system? So it's got less to do with charging more or charging less. It's really the biggest friction of a managed service that we are unable to provide is control on the customization as it relates to the parameter tuning. You could, for example, you could tune the parameter one way that maximizes the performance, but then completely doesn't take into account the durability. Or you could create tables like MySAM, as like a classic example, without, and then lose the table and then lose the data. And it's these type of fundamental key features that we don't give access or control back to the user. Otherwise, from a SQL programming surface area and the language functions, et cetera, they're all fully supported. Like, you have the 100% programming surface area that you would use, like on-premises, on your desktop, laptop, anywhere. Another question? The main reason we changed from MySQL to Postgres was because of the GIS. And I haven't seen you guys mention anything about it, so I'd like to know what's coming ahead for all of you guys. Well, I would say what GIS was very substantially improved in MySQL X, I think it was like at least 10X, a difference between 5.7 and 8. So you can give it another look if you are interested in this space. And MariaDB has said GIS for quite some time as well, possibly even before MySQL did. Yes, I'm not really that familiar with the GIS system. Yeah, so it's been around since 5.3 and got improved further. As MySQL implemented GIS functionality, MariaDB also then follows on. So this push actually goes both ways, right? So to make it more compatible, like GeoJSON and stuff has come into MariaDB as well. So we do have a dedicated developer working just on GIS and improving it, so we do care about it. I guess one last question from the internet. It seems like data stores as of late have an increasing trend of changing their licenses to things that are less than... To other OSI licenses. Is there something that makes databases specifically a target for this? I mean, there's folks on stage that have done this as well with some of their product. And is there some other way that we should be looking to make this a more sustainable space other than playing with the licensing? So my personal opinion on licensing is that it's usually VC-backed companies that play with it. And after MySQL got sold for a billion dollars, it turns out lots of VCs-funded databases, right? They're probably like 100-odd databases that have been funded.  I mean, many have passed away recently as well. And it's a way to drive revenue. The good news is just this weekend at scale, MongoDB actually withdrew the SSPL license from trying to be approved at the OSI, which is interesting. So they're actually not going to be a proprietary database, which maybe makes it fairly interesting for even you, Peter, because you actually make MongoDB product. Well, yes, yes. I would say that is a very unfortunate choice for MongoDB, right? If you would be at this choice, now we would not have added to MongoDB portfolio. But now we always have a lot of customers and they made commitments to them. And that means we'll continue to develop your corner server for MongoDB and SSPL license, even though it is not open source, but we don't have any choice. At the same time, what we are looking for is the good open source and not open source alternatives for MongoDB users, because again, competition makes things better. I'm very glad to see, for example, there is Amazon now has a document DB as a comparability, right? I am very glad Microsoft has a Cosmos DB, MongoDB comparability, even though those solutions are not open source. I am even more excited we have a foundation DB, document layer, right, which is 100% open source. It's not 100% compatible, yes, with MongoDB. But I believe with those variety, right, we will see more alternatives, truly open source of alternatives for MongoDB merge. And Alibaba, of course, famously also has a MongoDB service to be fair. Yeah, I think we were kind of worried about the, well, pay very attention to this license issue. And that also, I think one of the reasons a lot of people using Postgres also is because the license issue. So I guess this, unfortunately, is some kind of issue that we all pay very much attention to. And I suspect the good news here is that MySQL and MariaDB server are GPL v2 licensed. And it's fairly strong with lots of external contributors. Getting them to re-license code would be a lot harder. So I think MySQL is going to be GPL v2 for the long haul, as is MariaDB server. All right, thank you very much for listening. Thank you, all panelists. Thank you. Thank you.


Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of CloudNative SecurityCon, the inaugural event in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in the Palo Alto Studios. We're calling it theCUBE Center. It's kind of like our sports center for tech. It's kind of remote coverage. We've been doing this now for a few years. We're going to amp it up this year as more events are remote and happening all around the world. So we're going to continue the coverage with this segment focusing on the data stack, entrepreneurial opportunities around all things security. And as obviously data is involved and our next guest is a friend of theCUBE and CUBE alumni from 2013 entrepreneur himself turned now venture capitalist angel investor with his own firm, Ofer Kahane, managing director. Sonoma Ventures, formerly the founder of Origami Solta in two and a few years back, focusing now on having a lot of fun angel investing on boards, focusing on data driven applications and stacks around that and all the stuff going on and really in the wheelhouse for what's going on around security data. Ofer, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure, great to be back, been a while. So you're kind of on easy street now, you. You did the entrepreneurial venture, you've worked hard. We were on together in 2013 when theCUBE just started Excel partners had an event in Stanford, Excel and they had all the features there. You know, we interviewed Satya Nutella who was just a manager at Microsoft at that time. He was there. He's now the CEO. Yeah, he was. Lots of change in nine years, but congratulations on your venture you sold and you got an exit there and now you're doing a lot of investments. I'd love to get your take because this is really the biggest change I've seen in the past 12 years around an inflection point around a lot of converging forces. Data, which big data 10 years ago was a big part of your career, but now it's accelerated with cloud scale. You're seeing people building scale on top of other clouds and becoming their own cloud. You're seeing data being a big part of it. Cyber security kind of is not really changed much but it's the most important thing everyone's talking about. So developers are involved, data is involved, a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities. So I'd love to get your take on how you see the current situation as it relates to what's gone on the past five years or so. What's the big story? So a lot of big story, but I think a lot of it has to do with a promise of making value from data, whether it's for cybersecurity, for FinTech, for DevOps, for RevTech startups and companies. There's a lot of challenges in actually driving and monetizing the value from data with velocity. Historically, the challenge has been more around how do I store data at massive scale? And then you had the big data infrastructure company like Cloudera, MapR and others deal with it from a scale perspective, from a storage perspective. Then you had a whole layer of companies that evolved to deal with how do I index massive scales of data for a quick querying and federated acts of et cetera. But now a lot of those underlying problems, if you will, have been sold to a certain extent. Although they're always being stretched given the scale of data, I mean, its utility is becoming more and more massive in particular with AI use cases being very prominent right now. The next level is how to actually make value from the data. How do I manage a full life cycle of data in complex environments with complex organizations, complex use cases? And having seen this from the inside of origami logic because we dealt a lot of large corporations and posted acquisition by Intuit and a lot of the startups I'm involved with, it's clear that we're now on to that next step. And you have fundamental new paradigms such as data mesh to attempt to address that complexity and responsibly scaling access and democratizing access and value monetization from data across large organizations. We have a slew of startups that are evolving to help the entire life cycle of data from the data engineering side of it to the data analytics side of it to the AI use cases side of it. And it feels like the early days are an extent of the revolution that we've seen in transition from traditional databases to data warehouses to cloud-based data processing and big data. It feels like we're the genesis of that next wave. And it's super, super exciting for me at least as someone who's sitting more on the coach seat rather than being on the pitch and building startups helping folks as they go through those motions. So that's awesome. I want to get into some of these data infrastructure dynamics you mentioned, but before that talk to the audience around what you're working on now. You've been a successful entrepreneur. You're focused on angel investing. So super seed stage. What kind of deals are you looking at? What's interesting to you? What is Sonoma Ventures looking for? And what are some of the entrepreneurial dynamics that you're seeing right now from a startup standpoint? So at Immaculable, just a little bit of background of my history because it shapes very heavily what I'm looking at. So I've been very fortunate with my entrepreneurial career. Founded three startups, all three of them are successful. Final two were sold, the first one merged and went public. And my third career has been about data, moving data, passing data, processing data, generating insights from it. And at this phase, I wanted to really evolve from just going and building start number four, going through the same motions again, then your adventure a little bit too old for that I guess. But the next best thing is to sit from a point whereby it can be more elevated than the one I'm dealing with and broader into if the variety of startups I'm focused on rather than just do your own thing and just go very, very deep into it. Now what specifically am I focused on at Sonoma Ventures? So basically looking at what I refer to as a data-driven application stack. Anything from the low level data infrastructure that helps any persona in the data universe maximize value for data from their particular point of view for their particular role, whether it's data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, cloud engineers, DevOps folks, et cetera. All the way up to the application layer in applications that are very data heavy. And what are very typical data heavy applications? Tintec, Cyber, Web 3, revenue technologies and product and DevOps. So these are areas we're focused on. I have almost 23, 24 startups in the portfolio that span all these different areas. And this is in terms of the aperture. Now, typically focus on pre-seed seed sometimes a little bit later stage but this is a primary focus and it's really about partnering with entrepreneurs and helping them make a few original mistakes before the mistakes I made and take it to the next level whatever the milestone they're driving with so I'm very, very hands on with many of those startups. Now, what is it that's happening right now in history why it's so exciting? So on one hand you have this scaling of data and its complexity yet lagging value creation from it across those different personas we've touched on. So that's one fundamental opportunity which is secular. The other one which is more a cyclic situation is the fact that we're going through a down cycle in tech as is very evident in the public markets and everything we're hearing about funding going slower and lower terms shifting more into the hands of typical VCs versus in pern or friendly market and so on and so forth and a very significant amount of playoffs. Now when you combine these two trends together you're observing a very interesting thing that a lot of folks really bright folks who have sold a startup to a company or have been in the guts of the large startup or a large corporation have hands on experience all those challenges spoken about earlier and to maximizing value from data irrespective of their role in a specific angle or vantage point they have on those challenges. So for many of them it's an opportunity to know let me now start a startup, I've been laid off maybe or my company stock isn't doing as much as well as it's used to as a large corporation. Now I have an opportunity to actually go and take my entrepreneurial passion and apply to a prominent experience as part of this larger company. And you see a lot of folks who are emerging with these great ideas. So it's a very, very exciting period of time to innovate. It's interesting, you know, a lot of people look at I mean I look at Snowflake as an example of a company that refactored data warehouses. They just basically took data warehouse and put it on the cloud and call it a data cloud. That to me was compelling. They didn't pay any cap X. They wrote Amazon's wave there. So similar thing going on with data you mentioned this and I see it as an enabling opportunity. So whether it's cybersecurity, fintech, whatever vertical, you have an enablement. Now you mentioned data infrastructure. It's a super exciting area as there's so many stacks emerging. We got an analytics stack, there's real-time stacks, there's data lakes, AI stack, foundational models. So you're seeing a explosion of stacks, different tools probably will emerge. So how do you look at that as a seasoned entrepreneur now investor? Is that a good thing? Is that just more of the market? Cause it just seems like more and more kind of decomposed stacks targeted at use pieces seems to be a trend. And how do you vet that? Is it, you know? So it's a great observation. And if you take a step back and look at the evolution of technology or last 30 years, if you longer, you always see these cycles of expansion, fragmentation, contraction, expansion, contraction, go decentralized, go centralized, go decentralized, go centralized as manifested in different types of technology, paradigm, from client server to storage, to microservices to et cetera, et cetera. So I think we're going through another big bang to certain extent. We're about to end up with more specialized data stacks or specific use cases as you need performance, the data models, the tooling to best adapt to the particular task at hand and particular personas at hand. As the needs of the data analysts are quite different from the needs of MNL engineer, which is quite different from the needs of the data engineer. And what happens is when you end up with these siloed stacks, you end up with new fragmentation and new gaps that need to be filled with a new layer of innovation. And I suspect that in parts of what we're seeing right now in terms of the next wave of data innovation, whether it's in a service of no FinTech use cases or cyber use cases or other is a set of tools that end up having to try and stitch together those elements and bridge between them. So I see that there's a fantastic gap to innovate around. I see also a fundamental need in creating a common data language and common data management processes and governance across those different personas because ultimately the same underlying data these folks need, I'll date in different mediums, different access models, different velocities, et cetera. The subject matter, if you will, the underlying raw data and some of the taxonomies that are right on top of it do need to be consistent. So once again, a great opportunity to innovate whether it's about semantic layers, whether it's about data mesh, whether it's about the ICD tools for data engineers and so on and so forth. I got to ask you, first of all, I see you have a friend and you brought into the interview you have a dog in the background with made up of cameo appearance, that's awesome. Sitting right next to you making sure everything's going well. On the AI thing, because I think that's the hot trend here. You're starting to see the chat GPT has got everyone excited because it's kind of that first time you see kind of next gen functionality, large language models, where you can bring data in and it integrates well. But to me, I think connecting the dots just kind of speaks to the beginning of what will be a trend of really blending of data stacks together or blending of models. And so as more data modeling emerges, you start to have this AI stack kind of situation where you have things out there that you can compose. It's almost very developer friendly, conceptually. This is kind of new, but kind of the same concepts been working on with Google and others. How do you see this emerging as an investor? What are some of the things that you're excited about around the chat GPT kind of things that's happening? Because it brings it mainstream. Again, a million downloads fastest application to get a million downloads, even among other the successes. So it's obviously hit an error. People are talking about it. What's your take on that? Yeah, so I think it's a great point and clearly it feels like an iPhone moment, right? To the industry in this case, AI and lots of applications. And I think there's a high level, probably three different layers of innovation. One is on top of those platforms. What use cases can one bring to the table that would drive it on top of the chat GPT-like service? Where by the startup, the company can bring some unique data sets to infuse and add value on top of it by custom focusing it and purpose building it for a particular use case or particular vertical, whether it's applying it to customer service in a particular vertical, applying it to, I don't know, marketing content creation and so on and so forth. That's one category. And I do know that as one of my startups is in Y Combinator this season, a winter 23, they're saying that a very large chunk of the YC companies in this cycle are about GPT use cases. So we'll see a flurry of that. The next layer, the one below that is those actually provide those platforms or the chat GPT, whatever will emerge from the partnership with Microsoft and any competitive players that emerge from other startups or from the big cloud providers, whether it's Facebook, if they ever get into this and Google, which will clearly well as they need to survive around search. The third layer is enabling layer. As you're going to have more and more of those different large language models and use case running on top of it, the underlying layers all the way down to cloud infrastructure, the data infrastructure and the entire set of tools and systems that take raw data and massage it into useful labeled contextualized features and data to feed the models, the AI models whether it's during training or during inference stages in production. Personally, my focus is more on the infrastructure than an application use cases. And I believe that there's going to be a massive amount of innovation opportunity around that to reach cost-effective quality there models that are deployed easily and maintained easily or at least with as little pain as possible at scale. So there are startups that are dealing with it in various areas. Some are about focusing on labeling automation. Some about fairness, about speaking about cyber protecting models from threats through data and other issues with it and so on and so forth. And I believe that this will be to a big driver for massive innovation infrastructure layer. Awesome. And I love how you mentioned the iPhone moment. I was, I called the browser moment because it felt that way for me personally but I think from a business model standpoint there is that iPhone shift. It's not the blackberry, it's a whole other thing. And I like that. But I do have to ask you because this is interesting to mention, iPhone, iPhone's mostly proprietary. So in these machine learning foundational models you're starting to see proprietary hardware bolt-on, acceleration, bundled together for faster, faster uptake. And now you got open source emerging as two things. It's almost iPhone and Android situation happening. So what's your view on that? Because, you know, there's pros and cons for either one. You're seeing a lot of these machine learning models that are very proprietary, but they work. And do you care, right? And then you got open source, which is like, okay, let's get some open source code and let people verify it and then build on with that. Is it a balance? Is it mutually exclusive? What's your view? I think it's going to be, market will drive the proportion of both. And I think for a certain use case it'll end up with more proprietary offerings. With certain use cases, I guess the fundamental infrastructure or chat to be like, let's say a large language models and all the use cases running on top of it, that's likely going to be more platform oriented and open source and will allow innovation. Think of it as the equivalent of iPhone apps or Android apps running on top of those platforms as an AI apps. So we'll have a lot of that. Now, when you start going a little bit more into the guts, the lower layers, then it's clear that's for performance reasons, in particular for certain use cases, will end up with more proprietary offerings, whether it's advanced silicon, such as some of the silicon that emerged from entrepreneurs who have left Google around TensorFlow and all the silicon that powers that. You'll see a lot of innovation that area as well, that hopefully intends to improve the cost efficiency of running what large AI or the workloads, both in France and in learning stages. You know, I got to ask you because this has come up a lot around Azure and Microsoft, Microsoft pretty good move getting into the chat GPV and the open AI because I was talking to someone who's a hardcore Amazon developer and they said they swore they would never use Azure, right? One of those types. And they're spinning up Azure servers to get access to the API. So the developers are flocking, as you mentioned, the YC class is all doing large data things because you're now programmed with data which is amazing, which is amazing. So what's your take on? I know you got to be kind of neutral because you're an investor, you got Amazon has to respond, Google essentially did all the work. So they have to have the solution. So I'm expecting Google to have something very compelling but Microsoft right now is going to just might run the table on developers, this new wave of data developers. What's your take on the cloud responses to this? What's Amazon? What do you think AWS is going to do? What should Google be doing? What's your take? So each of them is going for a slightly different angle, of course. I'll say Google I think has massive assets in the AI space and their underlying cloud platform, I think has been designed to support such complicated workloads, but they have yet to go as far as opening it up the same way a chat GPT is now in that Microsoft partnership on Azure. Good question regarding Amazon, AWS has had a significant investment in AI related infrastructure. Seeing it through my startups, through other lens as well, how will they respond to that higher layer above and beyond the low level? If you will, AI enabling apparatuses, how do they elevate to at least one or two layers above and get to the same chat GPT layer? Good question, is there an acquisition that will make sense for them to accelerate it? Maybe, is there in-house development that it can reapply from a different domain towards that possibly? But I just suspect we'll end up with acquisitions as the arms race around the next level of cloud wars emerges. And it's going to be no longer just about the basic tooling for basic cloud-based applications and the infrastructure and the cost management, but rather faster time to deliver AI and data heavy applications. Once again, each one of those cloud suppliers or vendors coming with different assets and different pros and cons, all of them will need to just elevate the level of the fight, if you will in this case, to the AI layer. It's going to be very interesting, the different stacks on the data infrastructure, like I mentioned, analytics, data lake, AI, all happening, it's going to be interesting to see how this turns into this AI cloud, like data clouds, data operating system. So, super fascinating area over thank you for coming on and sharing your expertise with us. Great to see you and congratulations on the work. I'll give you the final word here. Give a plug-in for what you're looking for for startup pre-seeds. What's the kind of profile that gets your attention from a pre-seed candidate or entrepreneur? Cool, first of all, it's my pleasure. Enjoy our chats as always. Hopefully the next one is not going to be in nine years. As to what I'm looking for, ideally smart data entrepreneurs who have come from a particular domain problem or problem domain, that they understand, they felt them in their own, you know, 10 fingers or you know, millions and billions of neurons in their brains and they figured out a way to solve it. Whether it's a data infrastructure play, cloud infrastructure play or a very, very smart application takes advantage of data at scale, these are the things I'm looking for. One final, final question I have to ask you because you're a seasoned entrepreneur as now coach. What's different about the current entrepreneurial environment right now vis-a-vis the past decade? What's new? Is it different, highly accelerated? What advice do you give entrepreneurs out there who are putting together their plan? Obviously, global resource pool now of engineering. You know, it might not be yesterday's formula for success to put an adventure together to get to that product market fit. What's new and different? What's your advice to the folks out there about what's different about the current environment for being an entrepreneur? Fantastic, so I think it's a great question. So I think there's a few axes of difference compared to let's say, five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. First and foremost, given the amount of infrastructure out there, the amount of open source technologies, the amount of developer toolkits and frameworks, tying to develop an application, at least the application layer is much faster than ever. So it's faster and cheaper, Tim. So most part, unless you're building very fundamental core deep tech where you still have a big technology challenge to deal with. And absent that, the challenge shifts more to how do you manage my resources to find part market fit? How are you integrating the GTM lens to go to market as early as possible in the product market fit cycle? Such that you reach from pre-C to C, from C to A, from A to B with an optimal amount of philosophy and a minimal amount of resources. One big difference specifically as of let's say, beginning of this year, late last year is that money is no longer free for entrepreneurs, which means that you need to upgrade and build startup in an environment with a lot more constraints. And in my mind, some of the best startups that have ever been built and some of the big market changing, generational changing, if you will, technology starts in their respective industry verticals have actually emerged from these times. And these tend to be the smartest best startups that emerge because they operate with a lot less money. Money is not as available for them, which means that they need to make tough decisions and make protocols every day, which you don't need to do. You can push this, kick the count down the road when you have plenty of money and it cushions for a lot of mistakes. You don't have that cushion. And hopefully you end up with companies with a more agile, more, if you will, resilience and better cultures in making those tough decisions that start to make every day, which is why I'm super, super excited to see the next batch of amazing unicorns, true unicorns, not just valuation, market rising with the water type unicorns that emerged from this particular era, which we're in the beginning of. And very much enjoy working within thepreneurs during this difficult time at times. The next 24 months, there's the next wave, like you said, best time to do a company. Remember Airbnb's pitch was, we'll rent cots in apartments and sell cereal. Boy, a lot of people pass on that deal in that last down market that are going to be in danger. So the crazy ideas might not be that bad. It's all about the entrepreneurs and a hard percent. This is a big wave and it's certainly happening. Oprah, thank you for sharing. Obviously data is going to change. All the markets, refactoring, security, FinTech, user experience, applications will be changed by data, data operating system. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing, appreciate it. My pleasure. Have a good one. Okay, more coverage for the cloud and native security con inaugural event. Data will be the key for cybersecurity. The cubes coverage continues after this break.


How's this week working for you? It's been good. It's a little cold early in the week. Kind of warmed up today. But it was good. Great week. How much did you did last week to shut it down for a week? How much did that kind of help you? Yeah, no, I feel good. It was just precautionary reasons and things like that. They made a decision. But I'm ready to roll. How excited are you about that? Who are you able to maybe get back out there?  I feel great. Like I said, I'm just ready to go. Just got to keep it on simmer right now. We play Sunday night. So for me, just getting the last details in, come in tomorrow, do what we have to do. Like I said, just keep it on simmer and be ready to go Sunday night. How do you help ensure that from here, you kind of constrain the rest of the season along and not having to set back to be able to go? It just, I mean, if we knew earlier, new, like you know what I'm saying, it would have been done it. But for me, it's just taking care of myself. Just doing a little more here and there. So it's nothing crazy to do. It's just small things. I had to critique and just work on. It's kept it on simmer and look like compared to a full oil. Because if the game was at 12 o'clock or 1 o'clock, you'll be ready to go.  Then the post of like, OK, I'm game planning. Then like, let's get going, I'm ready to go. You know what I'm saying? You're going to sleep, you're thinking about the game. Early night of sleep, all that kind of stuff. So we have a little more time now, so you take your time. Has it been for you in the lineup for a week or so, out of the lineup, back in the lineup, that sort of thing? For me, I never get frustrated. You know, it comes with the game. I've been doing it for a long time. You just, like I said, just finding ways to limit it. And for me, great training stuff here. Just being able to communicate with them, head coach everything, just all of us communicating and making decisions. But I'm ready to go right now. Gabriel always says that when it comes to health and conditioning, every individual player has their own plan. It's not a one-size-fits-all. How does, I guess, that work for you? Is it you come in on Monday and figure out what the plan is for that week? No, for me, like I said, just coming from injuries and stuff like that will not necessarily I would injure early on. But it's now just making sure I'm good to go. Don't want to have setbacks, right? That's the biggest thing, is not having setbacks where you're down four or eight weeks, right? So it's like, okay, we can take a week here and impose it for eight weeks. So just those type of decisions and things like that that we make collectively. Is there a payoff at the end of that where you get to a certain point and it's not a week-to-week thing and you can just sort of play every single game? I mean, who can answer that question? Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, we don't know how to go out there and play and then we'll go from there. Close to, at any point, saying maybe it would be better to shut it down for a couple of weeks to get fully healthy rather than being in and out. I'm good to go. Would you like to see Adrian come in and get the two guys with Hall of Fame and resume kind of joining us to try to help this team?  The way he practice, he listens very well.   He's just coming in and just being an AP, right? We ain't next to him to be nothing else but himself. But throughout practice, he's been doing a great job for us. Do you know him well from the past pro goals? Yeah, I met him, I met AP in probably 2007. I think I was getting looked at by Oklahoma as well.   So if you want to shake his hand, you know what I'm saying? I'm just, yeah, I probably already know that, but I'm just, you know what I'm saying? Let you know. Yeah, get ready. Have a wide receiver here, exactly. Yeah. It's a very, very tightly ended stuff. I think it's just a standard, right? It shouldn't be no pressure on us because I want to do that. We all want to do that in the receiver room. It's just like the offensive line or the running back.  So, you know, we all got to work together collectively and everybody's just got to go out there and just do your job. Like, so, I mean, I love it though. It's no, I don't feel like it's a chore to go out there and run block. AJ Brown talked about how he felt not many people are picking you guys to win the game on Sunday, most likely kind of an underdog feeling going into Sunday. Do you feel similarly? I'm not on social media like that. So, I don't know what people are talking about though. You see what I'm saying? For me, yeah, I don't listen to nothing. I'm really not on social media. Anything is like that to be communicating or looking at things.  Like, I don't really go what they have going on, who they got, you know, four day guys here, we going on the road, we going to compete. What are some of the challenges that Rams bring, especially defensively?    You feel like right now the teams will be looking at you guys, thinking that AJ's the number one guy to stop? I mean, if I was another team, I would be looking at AJ's the number one receiver to stop the last three games or so. He's been playing his butt off and, you know, doing a great job for us here. What are the challenges going up against a guy like Jaylen? I don't, like, I'm just going out there just being me, man. I don't look at, like, he has to cover me. Like, I don't go out there and be like, okay, Jaylen's this, that, whatever he talks, whatever it is, I just, I'm lined up and playing football every play. Like, you got to deal with me for four quarters. I mean, it's not hard. I don't look no more into it.  I don't never like, okay, how can I beat this guy? How can I beat this guy? I'm just going to go out there and give my best on every play for four quarters. So what about the antics that he brings? It don't matter about antics, man. I ain't into all that going back and forth with, you know what I'm saying?  This is football. This ain't no street fight. This ain't, this ain't, none of that. You know what I mean? Like, I'm just playing football. So you don't talk a lot on the field? I don't say it. A lot of people don't talk to me. Like, you know what I'm saying? So, I mean, if it comes to that, I'll play between the woods if it comes to that. What'd you tell Derrick, what'd he kind of do going to try to lift his spirits and tell him to hang in there? Yeah, Derrick hit me up, but he'll be all right. You know what I'm saying? Like, he's a strong individual. He know we're here. We love him. We care for him. He's going to get through it. It's all the mental thing at the end of the day.  Cause things happen within football. Even myself, like, I'm never frustrated. Like, stuff happens. Like, you know what I mean? Like, people want you to be one way, but I am who I am. You know what I mean? So it's just like, things come and go. So, but if you let people get you down, you're going to always be down. So, I just focus on myself as an individual and I always have my mental clear.


Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jeffrey Snover. He is a technical fellow, O365 Intelligent Substrate at Microsoft, most famous for being the father of PowerShell and one of the key architects of the Windows server. Thank you so much for coming on, for returning to the show. Yeah, thanks, it's great to be back. So first of all, Defant, you're relatively new to this role. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing and what is the Intelligent Substrate? Yeah, so you know, a lot of people get this confused. There's the Intelligent Substrate, there's O365, the Microsoft Graph, and what I do is I say, hey, the best way to think about this is an analogy to an operating system. Operating systems are complex, but at the end of the day, they're really, really simple. They only do three things. They manage and protect resources. They provide services for developers, services, APIs and common controls, and then they provide a base set of applications and a way to get additional applications. So in Windows, manage CPUs, memory, the services, Win32 APIs, and then the applications like the browser, et cetera. So O365 can really be viewed as an operating system. This sounds strange, why? Because most operating systems have been operating systems for devices, an operating system for a phone, an operating system for a PC, an operating system for a server. This is an operating system for people and organizations. So when we think about those three responsibilities, resources and protecting and managing resources, these are the resources for people and organizations. So it's their identity, their emails, their chats, their documents. Services for developers. These, where there's Win32 for Windows, we have MS Graph. That's our public API. But then we have services to be able to create, collaborate and communicate documents and interactions. And then the applications are things like teams and Outlook, et cetera. And so then, oh sorry, then the substrate. The substrate's sort of at the core of it. That's one of our core services. It is storage and then a set of services to manage that and set of services. So the storage is basically a planetary scale, no SQL data store. So every time you create a chat, an email, document, whatever, it gets stored in the substrate and then three additional copies are created, one of them at least 250 miles away. That's why our data availability and the high availability are one thing. So everything gets stored there and then that allows us to do common services like search against it. Does that make sense? So, Jeffrey, one of the biggest challenge people have is when you learn about something and then it has changed an awful lot. I think back to the first time I used Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, it wasn't connected to the internet. Exactly. Let alone talking about the era of global scale and AI and all of these things that you can do in. So maybe give us a fresh as if I'm a brand new person and I don't have all of the legacy history with the Microsoft Office family. What is the new people OS that you're talking about? Yeah, so I like to think of it as back to the original Office 1.0. If you remember the original Office 1.0, it had Word, Excel and PowerPoint. And I like to joke, I say it was integrated with the advanced technology at that day called Cardboard, right? We just took the floppy disk from each one of those products, put it in a cardboard box and said it's a suite. But then it was a vision too, a vision of how things should work together to help the individual. And then after that version one, then we reorganized the organization to have common technology teams. And that's when we started to get common controls, common user experience, et cetera, common file formats. And then it became a true integrated suite. Same thing happened when we went to the cloud. We had all these products that would have a front end coupled to a back end, another front end coupled to a back end, another front end coupled to a back end. Each one would have one or more SDKs, et cetera. And when we first brought them to the cloud, it was the same sort of thing, integrated with an offering and a name. But there was a vision there and then that vision drove the reality. And what we did was we said, hey, let's figure out how to have a common storage for these things, common back end, a common way to communicate, a common way to do messaging. And then that took a number of years, but that's what drives this consistency. And so that's why when you go and you say, I don't want to like to search for something, you'll find that term, whether it's in your word documents or it's in your emails or your team chats or anything. It's that commonality. Did that make sense? Did that answer your question? It does. So, right, it's, I think about the era of collaboration and there were competitors to Microsoft that came out that were built on the internet and delivered those solutions. So this week we've talked to, we haven't dug deep into Teams, but everyone we've talked to that's using it is like, no, no, really, this is a really great product. And almost like, forget about some of the things you might have remembered through some of those iterations and changes and things not working together. Teams has been built and is allowing some great collaboration communication with remote workers, smaller businesses and the like. So it's tough because especially if you were using one tool and you've gone over to some other tool set, it's like, why would I go back to that? But it's a very different Microsoft productivity suite today than we might have used in the past. That's exactly correct. And then the intelligent substrate is this layer of AI on top of the substrate, right? So part of that is search, but then we're also doing natural language processing. So basically imagine you store a file in OneDrive.  And that workflow then goes and analyzes the contents of that file and creates search terms, et cetera, so that we then have common search. And then we've got natural language processing that'll go and find, hey, what are the key points for that document? How do I summarize that document? So then if you see it somewhere, you can say, oh, show me the file card. And I'll say, here's this document. You don't have to read the whole thing. Here are the three key points about it. And so to answer the question, why would a platform guy be working in office? It turns out that to build this AI infrastructure, it's really sort of a platform play. There's key advances that need to be made in AI, but actually when you get involved in AI, what you realize is what we really need is more engineering than more science. We need more science, no doubt about it. But boy is there a need for engineering. I need to figure out how to get three to five to seven orders of magnitude, more volume of AI going through the system. So when you talk about these key advances in AI that need to be made in terms of applying them to O365, describe them for us and talk about how they will change the future of work and the way we collaborate with our team members and the way we communicate with our team members and in our productivity. Yeah, so this is where I get so excited about Microsoft's play, right? Because when I decided at the end of last year that I was going to make a new change, I had a number of opportunities both inside and outside the company. And so the thing that really made me say this is where I want to go was, well one, it was most important new technology, AI, on our most precious business asset, our customer's data. So that was very exciting. But what really got me over the edge was Microsoft's approach to AI. Microsoft takes a very different approach to AI than our competitors, right? The heart of most AI is trying to figure out you and you to achieve some result. Now our competitors do that to try and get you to click a button to buy an ad or to buy something you don't need or subvert some government that they want subverted, right? That's none of our objectives. We want to understand you for exactly one reason to make you successful, right?  What they're really saying is that they have to understand the tools to get their job done. They have to navigate the tools. What we're trying to do is have the tools understand the person to help that person get their job done. So there was this great show, I think it was called The Remains The Day, the movie with Anthony Hopkins. He played a butler and in that he did some research and he talked to the butler of Buckingham Palace who had been there for 50 years. And he said, the essence of a great butler is that he makes the room emptier when he enters. What's that mean? Well, when someone sits down, the magazine that they want is there, the drink that they want is there, it just all works out. Well, that's not my experience with computers today. I mean, how many times do you end up at the end of the day and your spouse says, what'd you do to your day? You're like, I don't know, I don't know, I'm just exhausted. Well, it doesn't have to be that way. What we want to do is to have the computer understand you, understand your objectives and not have some big splashy AI, it just, oh, things just work. Oh, I'm coming to this meeting. Oh, the information I need for that meeting is just there. Oh, it prepped me. It knew that I had a few minutes and so it gave me a few minutes worth of prep and things just flow. And at the end of the success will be when you end the day with more energy than you started. Like that's a big tall effort, but that's what we're going for, the gestalt. Yeah, we found that the word that has summarized this week for us is one that Satya said over and over again and it was trust. So in today's day and age, there's a lot of cynicism and especially looking at big tech companies. You did a presentation talking about AI and social responsibility. You teach out a little bit of it there as to why you believe Microsoft is well-intentioned with AI, but maybe share a little bit more about that vision for social responsibility and where we need to go with AI as an industry as a whole. Yeah, exactly. So there's kind of two key points. First is, I think there's a very vast misunderstanding of the state of AI, okay? It really is best understood as software 2.0 and we've been at software 1.0 for about 75 years and I don't think anybody thinks we're doing a particularly great job at it. I think we started to make progress starting around the 1990s with the core principles of the World Wide Web. That's when we started to really make some progress but we still have lots and lots of problems. So we're at software 2.0, we're at the very beginning of the beginning of the beginning. Now here's the point. The innovators set the field. The innovators set the path. And in AI, it's important for Microsoft to be one of the key innovators here because of our approach. Because we're standing up and saying, wait, there's great promise, there's great challenges, right? There are privacy challenges, there's data bias challenges, there's inclusivity challenges. There are things that really need to be addressed by governments, local legislation and global governments. Brad Smith has been particularly vocal on this and the need for a digital, the only way you're going to solve the problem of autonomous killer robots, which is a real thing, is by a digital Geneva Convention. Microsoft can't solve that. IBM can't solve that, Google can't solve that. Governments need to solve that. And so Microsoft's being very proactive in engaging the communities around these problems. For myself, for instance, I've been working with some of the security researchers to say, okay, well, software 2.0, how do you do threat model on machine learning? Nobody knows. Like literally nobody knows. And so we've been working over the course of the last year to produce a taxonomy of attacks. Now this is the initial thing, but it sparks a conversation as we've shown it to various government people and other competitors. They're very excited about this, about trying to join this in to identify the class of attacks. Because once you can understand the class of attacks, then you begin understanding, well, how do I defend against those? But literally it doesn't exist. So. So talking about autonomous killer robots, I'm very worried now. So how do you, Jeffrey Silver, you're talking about Microsoft's more measured approach. And as you said, you are working with governments and reaching out to policy makers and regulators to talk about these things. Maybe unlike some other technology companies that aren't doing that, how do you, are you a tech optimist at the end of the day? Or does it keep you up at night? Nope, not at all. Not at all. No, I'm a wild tech optimist. People are very pessimistic and I just like, yeah, you know, no. Like let me give you an example, right? There's this thing that says, oh, an autonomous car turns the corner at a high speed and it has to decide between killing two old men and a woman in a baby carriage, right? And that's what, this is a philosophy problem called the trolley problem.  In the a hundred plus years that that's positive, there's been exactly zero trolley drivers ever put in this position. It's just not an issue. Look, there are real issues. We do have to work these things. I'd say the biggest worry is not these killer robots or the autonomous cars going wild. It is complacency. It is overconfidence. It says, oh, I got something to work. Let's just ship it. Like there's a lot of brittleness in these AI systems, right? Oh, this works and it can be spectacular, but then this is a complete disaster and that's a complete disaster. So how do we get that taxonomy of like, hey, when do we know when we're done? How do we test these things? How do I have like a secure supply chain for the data models as well as the code itself? You know, so I think that Software 1.0 does not provide us any of the answers to the challenges of Software 2.0. But I do believe that Software 1.0 and its challenges tell us the areas that we need to apply our mindset to. And that's what we're doing. So, Jeffrey, before we let you go, we do need to get the update on PowerShell. I have to say, ever since I've first talked to you, I feel like more and more when I go to shows, I hear people just talking about how it's helping their career, helping their business in doing it. I don't know if it's just because, you know, it was brought to the front of the mind and it's like, oh no, I'm used to seeing that car model out there, but give us the latest on PowerShell, even though you're no longer in that group. Yeah, if I continue to meet with them all the time, I'm very active in PowerShell. So we took PowerShell and made it cross-platform to run analytics, we've talked about that. And I don't know where we were when we talked about that, but basically, we sort of did it for our own purposes, right, we need to manage the world's estate and so we want to have a common infrastructure for doing that. And the joke was at the point is like, look, we're not confused, we don't think that the Unix people are going to greet us as liberators, like, oh, thank heavens, you know, I've been dying under this bash and such. Thank God, Microsoft came to save us, right? There's no confusion. Well, surprise, we shipped it and then the vast majority, the numbers are crazy, how many Linux people are using PowerShell? It's just insane and we don't really understand it, we're out there talking to people, but they just love it. So anyway, so PowerShell version seven is coming out, they'll come out officially at the end of the year, beginning of next year. And this really is the tool that then you can use to manage everything, both Windows and Linux, we have parallel for each so you can do massive scale, but that's the one that really just brings all the pieces together and gains the critical mass. So we're very excited about it. Jeffrey, always a scintillating conversation when you come on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.