Bobby Allen, Google Cloud | Google Cloud Next ’24
[Savannah Peterson]
Welcome to Google Cloud Next
Good afternoon, cloud community, and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We’re here on day three of Google Cloud Next. My name’s Savannah Peterson, joined by a fabulous trope of gentleman, Dustin John.
Analyst Seats
So nice to have you here in the analyst seats. You’re just sitting here smiling. Have you been having a great time?
[Dustin Shiffman]
Amazing, yeah, absolutely. Great food, great environment here in Vegas, wonderful guests, good conversation. What more can you ask for?
[Savannah Peterson]
Google’s Cloud Therapist
Exactly. I’m not asking for any more except a fantastic guest, and we have that in Bobby Allen, Google’s cloud therapist. Bobby, thank you so much for being here.
[Bobby Allen]
Thank you, team. Thank you for having me.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yeah, I mean, this is a part of our thing now. It is. If we’re at the same show, we’ve got to get you on the show.
[Dustin Shiffman]
We do. For a therapy session.
[Savannah Peterson]
Exactly. I was just going to say, it’s day three.
[Dustin Shiffman]
I’m ready for some therapy.
[Savannah Peterson]
So that’s exactly why we put Bobby where we did on the schedule.
Google Cloud Next Highlights
Thank you. You have had a packed week. You’ve done four sessions. Google’s made a million announcements. Give us some highlights.
[Bobby Allen]
Five live demos. That’s got to be at the top.
[00:01:01]
Five live demos. How many worked? All of them worked. Wow.
[Savannah Peterson]
All of them worked. Nothing blew up. I didn’t break the cloud.
[Bobby Allen]
Several AI demos, some non-AI stuff. Three in one of the spotlights, kind of the mini keynotes. So I left it all in the paint. I left it all on the field.
[Savannah Peterson]
I love that. I love that. What would you say was the core theme or the energy that you found throughout all of those activations?
[Bobby Allen]
Touching the Future Now
I think the energy throughout all of those is we’re trying to just let people touch the future now. So a lot of the things that we thought were impossible before. So one of the inspirational things that we try to channel is I love the movie Hidden Figures, right? When I think about what those women did at NASA to put people on the moon and back with the tools that they had, they didn’t let the tools that they had limit their imagination. And I feel like we’re getting back to that now. It’s a great book. Yeah. It’s phenomenal.
[John Furrier]
The creativity, the productivity, the creativity enhancements. A lot of good stuff coming together. And one of the things we’ve been riffing on theCUBE, Bobby, is that 10 years ago when Kubernetes started, it wasn’t looking good off right out of the gate.
[00:02:03]
And it could have failed many times in the first couple of years. But it’s now 10 years later, it’s working. It’s becoming boring, as Hen says. That’s a big part of the cloud now. It’s enabling a lot of that layer serverless containers. That’s a big part of it.
Impact of Kubernetes
And now you’ve got the developer action going on. So big hybrid cloud growth coming is a big part of the end-to-end workloads. What are you hearing here around the impact of what the solidarity around Kubernetes, the cohesive network, what’s it enabling?
[Bobby Allen]
So I’m hearing that people obviously want to look for ways to innovate. And building on some things that we’ve talked about before, you don’t need a new platform this time. Because I think what people are waiting for, John, is like, do I have to do something different to achieve all these new features and capabilities and outcomes? And Hen emphasized something that we talked about before. You don’t need a new platform this time. Kubernetes is the platform, directly or indirectly. So either you’re building on top of Kubernetes, or one of the things we talked about here, I got to do a session on how Alphabet is powered by part of Google Cloud.
[00:03:05]
And so, for example, Vertex AI runs on GKE. So even if you’re not touching Kubernetes directly, you’re touching something that runs on Kubernetes. So pretty cool stuff.
[Dustin Shiffman]
Gen AI in Customer Roadmaps
I know that you’ve got a really interesting position at Google that puts you in touch with a lot of customers, a lot of developers. And you get some insight into their roadmaps. I do. Tell us a little bit about how Gen AI is fitting into their roadmap and how Google is helping accelerate that.
[Bobby Allen]
So I think customers obviously want to talk AI all the time. They’ve got to come up with, like, I need an AI plan. And so then we’ve got to break that down. Are you talking a plan for AI-assisted development? You want to create AI workloads? You want AI-infused insights on your platform? You want AI-assisted collaboration? Yes. Right? They want all of those things. And so we have to kind of break down exactly what you’re looking for at the time. But the other thing that I think comes to mind is I want to make sure that when I talk to customers, I’m listening.
AI in its Proper Context
But I’m also putting AI in its proper context.
[00:04:00]
And so here’s what I’ve said before. AI is not the thing. AI is the thing that makes the thing better. And so if the thing is the dish or the application, AI is the sauce or the spice that makes that better. So you wouldn’t put paprika or sriracha sauce on a plate and call that a meal. Right? You’ve got to use it to hit something else. And so I think the challenge that we have is let’s make sure we’re thinking about the application. Right? Don’t feed a barbecue to a vegetarian. Right? Don’t go with Bob’s brisket out of Texas and give it to a vegetarian. Like, does the application fit the context? But what is happening, though, is once people are getting a flavor of AI, they want it everywhere now. That sauce or that spice, they want it woven throughout everything else to get extra value. And it’s becoming table steaks now.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yeah. I think you’re right. Everyone does want a little sriracha once you’ve had it or a little tapatio.
[Dustin Shiffman]
Or on something. Right? But not just by itself. Right?
[John Furrier]
Yeah. Only with cowboy boots. Right.
Biggest Surprise at Google Cloud Next
What’s the biggest thing you’ve seen here that surprised you this event?
[00:05:01]
I mean, obviously, the live demo is a huge accomplishment. The alphabet use case. I mean, dogfooding, we talked about it earlier. They love to do that. Drink your own champagne, as Hen says. What surprised you this event that you didn’t expect to have happen?
[Bobby Allen]
Bridging the Old to the New
I think one thing that surprises me a little bit, or maybe I’ve been reminded of, is our customers want to be reminded about some of the things we’ve done before. Right? So we’re so focused on the new stuff, but sometimes they need help consuming the things we’ve done before. We’ve had customers that have said, Bobby, this is great, but I need you to also help me come along because I couldn’t absorb everything you did last year. And so we’ve got to bridge the old to the new. So one of my favorite sessions, again, it’s hard because you don’t want to pick, like, your favorite challenge. Yeah. But there was a session that actually one of the guys on my team and my boss did called the past, present, and future of Kubernetes. So think part origin story, where we are now, and kind of the ghost of Christmas future. Yes.
[00:06:00]
All in the same session. Right? It was great because we got people on ramps. We showed them where we’re going. We showed, you know, in the beginning, moving from monoliths to one of the things we talked about in that session, for example, in the beginning, GKE was a monolith, if you can believe that. So we were talking to folks about microservices, and that was a monolith, and that’s evolved over time. So I think giving people an opportunity to say humbly, this is great, Bobby, but I’m not there yet. You’re on step 10. I need to pick it up at step 2, and then let me go on that journey with you. Like, we’ve got to slow down and listen to the customers. Moving at the pace of Wall Street is not the same as the pace of customers being able to consume all the news.
[John Furrier]
Therapy Use Case
I love the cloud therapist angle because I’ll give you a therapy use case, and I want you to take me through, doctor, on this one. I’m a customer. I hate change. We did it this way before. I got some Brownfield in there. I don’t know who built the project, but I got to run it. I don’t want to get fired. With all this AI in here, I don’t know if I have the prerequisites. I’m not confident. Everyone’s enthusiastic. My boss wants me to do this.
[00:07:00]
The board’s forcing the pressure. Take me through the, get me pumped up.
[Bobby Allen]
Starting with Questions
So we’re going to start with some questions, right? Because I think what, and I’m a product manager, right? So cloud therapist is like my superhero name, like Spider-Man, but Peter Parker is product manager.
[John Furrier]
That’s your day job.
[Bobby Allen]
So it’s like what happens often, John, with product managers, we try to solve everything by these engineering feats of strength, as opposed to let me talk to you about what you’re trying to accomplish. Let’s start with the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. And so these are typically how I start the conversations, not roadmap, not features, typically two or three questions. What does better mean to you? What are we willing and able to change? And what do we think is going to happen if we do X? And then I just let them talk. The first question is interesting because most customers don’t agree. People at the same table from the same company don’t agree on what better means. And this is the grenade I throw in the room just to kind of prove my point. If I’m willing to invest in whatever your most valuable application is, and I do that for free, if you can tell me what that is, I’ll commit to that.
[00:08:05]
It’s taken a year sometimes for people to tell us what their most valuable application is, right? Mapping science fair projects and products to values where people struggle. So I try to start, John, with simple questions. What you want to achieve? And then if I earn your trust, you’ll know that I’ll bring the solutions to bear that’ll let that come to pass.
[John Furrier]
Grenade in the Room
What happens when you throw that grenade, that bouncing betty out there and gets people shook up? What happens next? Do people just kind of reveal their point of view? Is it more of a cultural challenge? Is it a personal challenge? Is it an organizational challenge?
Cultural, Personal, and Organizational Challenges
What are some of the things you see there?
[Bobby Allen]
So I have to go back to you all know my personal mantra, right? Technology is the easy part of tech. Tech is the easy part. People are the best part. Behavior is the hard part. Humility is the worst part. What ends up happening is tech is like the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. All the other stuff is below. And it’s much bigger even though it’s invisible. So what happens is we need to talk about the tech, but we need to talk about all the other things that need to happen also to achieve that change. And so people struggle with role definitions.
[00:09:02]
Sometimes, for example, people fight the things that are happening because they’re losing control of their empire, right? I’m fighting serverless because I’m in control of the Kubernetes platform and I don’t want my job to go away. Folks don’t understand that the entire pie is getting bigger. We don’t have to fight for these victims anymore. Like we need all of us bringing our best ideas and our best innovations to kind of take this new ground. So I want to give kind of an adjacent answer to your question, John.
Family Analogy
So I like to put it in the context of family, right? So when you go over to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, baby, what do you do? I work in the cloud. Great. Can you fix my printer? And so what used to happen was we were computer people. Then we became cloud people. Then we became AI people. You can’t even say I’m an AI person anymore because what type of AI are you talking about? Are you AI training? Are you AI inference? Are you AI developer assistance? Like what’s happening is those specializations and those skills are coming down because we can’t be this technology junk drawer.
[00:10:04]
The technology is so complex now that we’ve got to understand it at a deeper level to explain it simply. And the printer is still broken.
[John Furrier]
The printer is still broken. I’d say what’s a printer? People still use those?
[Bobby Allen]
I know.
[John Furrier]
They do sometimes. I’m serverless at that point. Exactly.
Five Demos Behind the Scenes
Printerless?
[Dustin Shiffman]
I don’t know. Maybe not. I want to get back to those five demos that you and your team put together, right? Yes. All right. Take us behind the scenes, backstage just a little bit. I know that a lot of work goes into pulling that off. Yes. It’s a team sport, team effort. Yes. Give the viewers a little taste of what does it take to put together something as complicated as this?
[Bobby Allen]
Thank you for the question, Dustin. First, I want to ground this in. I got to be kind of the face or the demo dolly, but just know that there are literally hundreds of people behind the scenes that I want to kind of thank if they’re watching this. They did a phenomenal job pulling stuff off. Five live demos going flawlessly at a conference in Vegas with a few hundred or thousand of your closest friends watching is not an easy feat.
[00:11:00]
But the things that we talked about were, so, for example, in the spotlight with my GM, Hen Goldberg, we did three demos in that one session alone.
Cloud Run Application Canvas
The first one was on what we call Cloud Run Application Canvas. And, again, you can’t pick your favorite child, but, like, that one is really exciting. So the cool thing about it is you’re literally using AI to create AI. And so Cloud Run was already the simplest way to deploy your code to a container. Now it’s the simplest way to get a JNI application up and running. Literally, and I’m not exaggerating, in five minutes, you can get an application running. You can say, I want a JNI application that looks like this, and it’ll build it. It translates your intent into architecture, and you can deploy it, and it’ll tell you, enable these APIs, set these privileges, deploy. And it’s running in five minutes talking to Gemini and Vertex. It’s amazing. So that was the first demo. So using AI to build AI.
Gemini Cloud Assist
The second demo was what we call Gemini Cloud Assist, right? Gemini Cloud Assist is where you’re using AI to help you operate and optimize existing workloads in a platform like GKE.
[00:12:03]
And then the third demo was security posture, right?
Security Posture
Because, unfortunately, our pace of innovation is increasing, but the bad actors are still doing the bad acting, right? They’re still doing their thing. So we’ve got to make sure.
[Savannah Peterson]
They’ve got the same tools.
[Bobby Allen]
They have the same tools, and their tools are almost more juiced up than they were before, too. So security posture has reactive and proactive, threat detection, and compliance. So things that are broken and things that might break wrapped around your AI and your non-AI workloads because most of our teams have to do the new stuff and also maintain some of those. You all know I don’t like legacy. I like vintage. But sometimes there are modern workloads that are non-AI that already feels like they’re old because everything is so AI whitewashed now. We’ve got to protect those, too.
Impact on Platform Engineering
Yeah.
[John Furrier]
Absolutely. I love the point about the cloud run. Reduce the steps it takes to do something. Make it easier. Penn talked about that on theCUBE. So that’s a great formula for innovation.
[00:13:00]
Phenomenal. Simple, intuitive, easy to use, reduce the steps it takes. Great. Thank you. The question is this. You both can chime in if you want. Impact on platform engineering. If Rob Stretchay was here, he couldn’t make it. He had that personal issue to go to. Platform engineering is hot. This sounds like it’s a huge impact, the platform engineering. How do you see this impacting the platform engineer and those teams that now have to work together? Because this is a game changer, the cloud run.
[Bobby Allen]
Innovation at the Intersection
So I’m going to give you a different slant on this one. I love this question, but I’m going to go kind of more logical platform than, like, even physical or virtual platform. So Hen made a statement in her spotlight that we kind of partnered on together, which is this. Innovation happens at the intersection of where the model lives and where the app runs. Because if you just have a model, you don’t have any magic. And if you just have an application, you don’t have something that seems cool enough. You need those things to come together. So here’s what happens. In terms of the model, the model can live in Vertex in a managed environment or in something like GKE. If you want to go to Hugging Face, pull down an open source model, the application can live in Cloud Run or can live in something like GKE.
[00:14:05]
And so what does that look like? We call that the crisscross diagram. So I can have a model in Vertex and a runtime in Cloud Run, a model in Vertex, a runtime in GKE, a model in GKE and a runtime in Cloud Run or both of them in GKE. All of those are four logical platforms to deliver AI applications. So what’s happening now is you could be a heavy GKE user, but then have these kind of bespoke or POC-type scenarios where someone can spin up AI without having to have a platform team behind them.
Optionality at its Finest
I love that. So optionality.
[Savannah Peterson]
That’s optionality.
[Bobby Allen]
Optionality at its finest. Agreed.
[Savannah Peterson]
First of all, you’re full of an incredible slew of analogies and metaphors that I feel we could all learn from. You bring up family a lot. I know you have two teenagers.
[Bobby Allen]
Teenagers and AI
I do.
[Savannah Peterson]
I’m curious, how are they using AI? What are their opinions about all the stuff we’re doing here?
[Bobby Allen]
Oh, my goodness. Well, so they think AI is cool. So what I want to say is we use a lot of superheroes in my household.
[00:15:01]
So my family thinks I’m Captain America. Are you a Marvel? I’m a Marvel guy.
[Dustin Shiffman]
Not DC. I’m a Marvel guy.
[Bobby Allen]
I can do this all day.
[Savannah Peterson]
That’s my guy.
[Bobby Allen]
Steve Rogers is my guy, right? So I’ve got some who have seen my stuff on Twitter know I wear workout shirts and Captain America is like the guy. I’ve even seen kids at the gym like Captain America is black. He is today.
[John Furrier]
He is today.
[Bobby Allen]
And so part of what happens is I think some of my kids are looking at, like, you know, there are some things that are exciting here.
Building Jarvis, Not Ultron
There are some things that are scary. But, like, dad is in the mix to try to make sure we build Jarvis, not Ultron, right? So I think they do like the fact that someone they know and someone they can touch is playing a role, a very minor, very humble role in what’s happening in the world of AI. But even though they don’t understand it all, they know that we talk about things like can you do this but should you do this? So they know that there are folks like myself that are thinking about the ethics and the implications, not just the possibilities.
[Savannah Peterson]
And the fact that they’re aware of that is powerful. Does it make you seem cooler in their eyes since you work in AI?
[00:16:02]
[Bobby Allen]
Cool Pockets
You know, sometimes it does. So, like, for example, one of the things that there are some cool pockets at times, right?
[Savannah Peterson]
So not AI related.
[Bobby Allen]
Not hot pockets but cool pockets. So when my cool pockets. When my son found out that Street Fighter VI runs on GKE, all right, dad, that’s a little bit cool. You got some street cred there. If you’re a gamer, it’s like, all right, dad, I’ll give you that one. Don’t get too excited. But, yeah, there are some little pockets where you get some cool pockets.
[Savannah Peterson]
I like that. I know I’m thinking hot pockets, cool pockets.
Next Time on theCUBE
That’s fantastic. Okay, Bobby, I think I’ve asked you this question maybe before at KubeCon. What do you hope to be able to say the next time we invite you back on theCUBE? Because we’ll obviously have you back, favorite cloud therapist, that you can’t say today?
[Bobby Allen]
I Couldn’t Create Things Before
I want people to be able to say that I couldn’t create things before. I can create now. I don’t have to necessarily be a programmer. But I can go further now than I could before, right? Just like I talked about with Hidden Figures. Hidden made a statement that I want to emphasize quite simply.
[00:17:02]
Our capabilities, your possibilities. And I want people to feel like our capabilities are propelling them to reach for things, aspirations that they wouldn’t have before. I couldn’t do this in April. I can in August. That’s what I hope people feel like. They’re taking new ground and reimagining things that they thought were impossible before to make the future relevant today.
[Savannah Peterson]
New Class of Business Creators
Yeah, absolutely. Dude, just following on that, do you think that we’ll see a new class of business creators and entrepreneurs or even business models as a result of that?
[Bobby Allen]
I do. I think we’re going to see a lot more non-developer, non-traditional development background creators, right? So you’re a marketing person with a great idea. You’re a product manager who maybe doesn’t have a programming background. When you can literally give the intent of what you want to create to something like Gemini and it can turn that into architecture. So one of my buddies, Richard Sirota, great guy, Google’s chief evangelist, he talks about shifting down, and I want to build on that, shifting down and pushing up. So let’s shift responsibilities down, infrastructure, managing a lot of things, FinOps, so I can be pushed up to focus on the bigger picture.
[00:18:06]
[Dustin Shiffman]
It’s unlocking potential.
[Bobby Allen]
Unlocking potential, right? Unlocking the creativity of people that have domain knowledge and different ways of thinking about things that don’t have to be traditional programmers, right? Because that code on the screen intimidates a lot of folks, and we’ve got a lot of people with great ideas that now are unleashed to say, I can create this without learning programming. I think that’s where I want the future to go, and that’s really exciting to me.
[Savannah Peterson]
Beautiful Note to End On
It’s beautiful, and that’s a fantastic note to end on. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us again.
[Bobby Allen]
Thank you for having me.
[Savannah Peterson]
Dustin and John, always a pleasure. And a shout-out to your son and daughter as well. Hello from all of us here in Las Vegas. You’re watching theCUBE’s live coverage here of Google Cloud Next. End of day three, believe it or not, here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson. You’re watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.