Innovation theater is rampant in government. Organizations tout their agile credibility and tech chops, but true mission outcomes are hard to come by. By engaging, experimenting, and iterating in production with real users, risk and cost is significantly reduced and outcomes become possible in fractions of the time.
Speaker 1: On behalf of VMware IMPRES, and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around how to detect Innovation Theater and fine tune your outcome delivery with VMware Tanzu Labs, where Mikey McCormick, Senior Manager at VMware and Aaron Swain, Director of Digital Transformation at VMware will discuss how VMware Tanzu can help your organization.
John Podolak: Good afternoon, everybody. I'm John Podolak:. I run the defense sector for IMPRES technology. And on behalf of Empress in partnership with VMware care software excited to bring you this VMware Tanzu training. Today I want to talk briefly about impressed before we get started. Impressed as a technology solution provider, our motto is mission. First, we've got a strong history with over 20 years of experience serving government customers just like you, we've got a top secret facility clearance. And the bottom line is we leverage our IT experience and the relationships we have in the industry to deliver you technology solutions that enable your mission success. I like to think we've got some of the best people in the business. We're weighted heavily with former mission experts, and industry veterans. So a partnership for impressed in addition to our strong understanding of the Federal markets, we're also a small business and a HUBZone certified small business, which is very attractive to many contracting officers. We've got our own staff of IT professional services, we've got a strong team that does contracts and proposal development. And we've got technologists that specialize in data center hardware, software, and services solutions. And additionally, we've got the financial stability that when it comes time to make a purchase, we've got the credit and background to execute, not just on small deals, but the large ones as well. So just a quick peek about who we are. I mentioned I run the defense team, this is my partner, civil Parker and her team that services, the civilian side of the Federal business, just want to take a look at their smiling faces. And I'll transition over to my defense team. And so you get a look of the size and scale of who we are, we've got like 16 field, sales executives supported by 11. On the inside plus overlays plus engineers. One thing you'll see on this, I mentioned mission veterans of this do D team, we've got 10 guys that served and you can see the branch of service that served by them. So again, we value people that understand the mission, and we bring together the technology and the partnerships that will help enable your mission success. Lastly, you know, we talked about who we are and what we do, and you got a peek at us. But how do you get to us? Well, we've got a broad portfolio of contracts that you can get to us and we can conversely deliver to you through I'm not going to read them all through but I will highlight two new acquisitions that we got the da AI site three contract as a new ad for us is for it as well as the Air Force two GIT contract, which replaces the old nut sites. But you can see the list of other contracts. We have GSA NASA tube and many others as well. Our team is distributed in customer concentrations across the United States. And if there's a situation where we're not were near you, we will get on an airplane and bring a solution team to you. So we're all about getting in front of the customers that are willing to you know, with COVID restrictions, hopefully in many parts of the country released and I'm here in Texas, and things are feeling much more back to normal. And as we get more back to normal, what we're absolutely available to come touch you and bring you the solutions you're looking for. So let's start the conversation. So today we're gonna collectively bring you a VMware Tanzu training, and we're gonna discuss how we can help you be great at modern software development, security and operations and accelerate and move the needle on your mission, which is what it's all about them tomorrow. Let our team bring VMware Tanzu to you How do you do that you contact us at Sales@imprestechnology.com. Sales@imprestechnology.com take a little note on that, I'll leave that up for another five seconds or so and, and we will bring the conversation to you specific to your use case, and the things that are important to you. And with that, I'll pitch it over to Aaron Swain here and take it away my friend.
Aaron Swain: How y'all doing? I'm Aaron Swain, from VMware Tanzu Labs, it's really cool to meet with you all today, and allow us training we're gonna be given but we're definitely gonna talk to you today about how to detect innovation theater, and how we can help fine tune your software delivery over here at VMware Tanzu. The minute I'm going to hand it over to Michael McCormack to really get into some of the details. But the bottom line is, the future is digital companies in government how to government, God, wherever you are, is you compete in this digital world, I can't tell you how much time personally I spend on the inside this digital world via software on my phone or my computer, My children are learning how to how to just live in this digital world. Everything is done through software currently, and those that want to win this digital world become great at software, folks who have worked with us AI company Tanzu Labs are able to fine tune that delivery by optimizing something called cycle time, which is how frequently can go from a business need business problem to actually you know, accredited functional software in in production, users using that and it actually moves the needle on the mission, companies that have worked with us have been able to get down to a cycle time that's actually measured in days, instead of instead of you know, the typical years, which I see quite regularly in government can go to the next slide. So you know, my company, VMware Tanzu, does two things. One, we provide the software to help you build run and management, manage that application inside of any environment. And then we also enable we train your teams to modernize yourself, we're practicing culture, what do you bring those things together, a transformation happens across your development, security operations teams, and that cycle time gets really, really low. How we do that, I'm gonna hand it over to Mikey to kind of dig into the fine-tuned points of this. But we're gonna kind of do it I love the lens of this entire thing around Innovation Theater, and highly refined that thing with some of the clients that we have worked with Mikey.
Michael McCormack: Yeah, little quick bit of history here on who we are. Our heritage goes back for about 30 or so years. The original company that that I come from, used to be called Pivotal Labs. And in the early 2000s, we worked with pretty much every startup that has an app that's running on your smartphone right now some of the logos are up here on this slide. Twitter, for example, hired Pivotal Labs to help solve a scalability problem at the height of Twitter's growth as a company that was in 2008. Others other quote here that there are more startups in stealth mode, and larger clients that are a little shy about mentioning Pivotal Labs, as customers be interesting to know who those really are. That was in 2008. After 2008, round 2011 2012 timeframe, we took the innovation engine of Pivotal Labs, which teaches startup organizations how to discover and hone these very disruptive skills of software development, and tune that pointed it at the largest organizations in the world, GE Boeing, Liberty Mutual and others, and helped teach these organizations to be able to rediscover their ability to move at startup software speed so that they were not disrupted by the 1000 little startups coming out of Silicon Valley at the time. So this is Pivotal Labs starting to grow up. And at the time, we met the fortune one we met the United States government. That was in 2016. And from 2016. Until today, we have worked with a lot of different very large organizations and some of the most powerful digital transformations in government. Since I'm a software engineer that hails from that. And we'll talk about a couple of these transformation stories in the context of innovation theater, or what the defense innovation board calls agile BS. The way that we help organizations do this is that we bring together a product called Tanzu, which is Kubernetes Open Source Kubernetes. And a set of software teams that bring Silicon Valley software practices using Kubernetes. To develop a cloud native software organizations are formula for that. So we work on your most important software products. We provide you a hosting platform for that software product and all the other software products like it in development and in production environments. And then we get that software from the lab into production as quickly as you possibly can. So that that software can start impacting your business impacting your users. And then all the while we are teaching you how to do that yourself. So you don't need our services arm for very long thereafter. And then we help you scale that digital transformation to be a lasting digital transformation. So that's kind of how we do this. In the last few years, we've gotten kind of famous for this Kessel Run was the big program that that we were the prime supporter of we helped the air force, develop a lot of software and develop the organization from literally the ground up the entire Kessel Run organization with us. Here's Eric Schmidt, talking in front of the House Armed Services Committee about the Kessel Run program about this innovation engine of Tanzu Labs and Tanzu. The platform. And a lot of words were getting thrown around at the time that had never really been uttered in government before like user centered design, or software factories or Pivotal Labs or lean startup, all these your continuous CTO, these were all terms that were very new at the time. This is 2017 2018 timeframe. But this is what we do. Eric Schmidt and his organization, the defense innovation board, then studied our work, and published a book called software is never done. Refactoring the acquisition code for competitive advantage. They published that book in 20, in 2019. And inside of that book is the slide that's right here in the middle of this of this, or sorry, this image that's right here in the middle of the slide, which is questions that program managers can ask themselves to determine whether or not they are engaged in innovation theater, or actual digital transformation. Instead of very simple questions that can be answered, I urge you to go look at this. Defense innovation board software has never done a book to really dive into this as deeply as you want. But we're going to hit the larger points here. Now, just to kind of like really set the tone here. There are a lot of organizations in the federal space that say that they do agile, that say that they are digital organizations that say that they do user centered or Human Centered Design, or that they do Scrum or whatever or Kubernetes or continuous Agios. There's a lot of words out there that people throw around to kind of give them weight, and they put up these smoke screens. But when you look beneath all the words and all the fanfare, often what you really find is companies and government organizations doing Innovation Theater, instead of real innovation. And inside of Tanzu Labs, Aaron and I have come up with a set of questions that are effectively a distillation of Eric Schmidt's defense innovation boards guide to detecting agile Bs, these are the questions that we ask of our own teams to hold ourselves accountable to whether or not we are doing innovation, theater, or actual innovation. So with that, I'm going to dive in. Here are the five questions that we ask. So if any team that we work with internally or externally, these are the questions we ask, is your software fully accredited and running in production? Right now? Yes or no? Given your software is fully accredited, and in production, has it been adopted by the user group that you're building it for? Yes or no? Given it has been adopted by our mission group, does it matter? Is it moving the needle? Is it actually affecting your business or your mission? And given that software is affecting the mission? How quickly can you go from the next most important need that can be manifested in software to that being in production pushed into the actual operational environment? How long does it take you to do that? And then can you do this at the scale of your enterprise? Our objective is to be able to answer yes to every single one of these questions. We are fully accredited, we're in production, software's adopted, it's moving the needle on the mission, we can get a feedback from our users and push a change into production tonight. And we can do this at the scale of 50 product teams at a time. This is what we strive for. This is what right looks like. I would argue that not a lot of software organizations are able to answer yes to all five of these questions. I'd argue that most software organizations are not able to answer yes to any of these questions, but they will give you a lot of words that put up a good smokescreen. So let's walk through these is your software fully accredited and in production right now. Here is the origin story of the Kessel Run program. In 2016, the Department of Defense had put a contractor on contract to deliver a major defense program called the air operations center weapon system. And after 10 years, and $750 million spent the answer to are you in production was no $750,000,000.10 years answer was no, we are not in production. And it was described as a requirements nightmare. And users who are supposed to be scheduling the refueling of fighter jets in the Middle East at actual war, we're doing it using dry erase markers and just their brains manually with calculators in their hands. This is a problem. This was Innovation Theater, a lot of organizations in here saying we're doing agile, we're doing Scrum. We're doing retrospectives user centered all day long. But no software accredited no software in production after 10 years. So what we did, our organization got asked to help with that. And the first thing we did is we made it possible to say yes, we are accredited and in production. This right here is the CICD DevSecOps pipeline that we built with the Air Force and did it in 11 days in 11 days, we constructed this pipeline that runs all the functional tests on the code that we needed to write, and runs all of the security scans on the code that we needed to push to production so that a team in an unclassified setting in San Francisco could automatically deploy software to Doha, Qatar into a sipper air gapped environment. All of this running on a globally consistent Kubernetes container based cloud orchestrator then called Pivotal Cloud Foundry now called VMware Tanzu. CIO, this made it possible to say yes, we are accredited. And in production, we did it with a continuous authority to operate, I believe this was the first actual continuous authority to operate in the United States government, this was in 2016. Here is how we do continuous authority to operate. Basically, the idea is we are doing straight up traditional RMF with one little change, which is to inject trust, but verify with a relationship between the engineering team and the security team bring security as far left as you possibly can, and then automate as much of the manual security checks that the security validators do into the CICD pipeline that I just showed you right here. And from there, teams are able to continuously deploy software into production day in and day out that is fully accredited, that is it continuous h2o. This was the software that we produced. This is called tanker planner or project jigsaw got written up in a couple of newspaper articles and magazine articles. But the idea here is that this application, which went to production in 120 days, fully adopted by its user group in the Middle East, scheduling all the actual fighter jets that flew in the actual war in Afghanistan and Iraq stopped using their whiteboards and spreadsheets and started using this application here. So to the question of is your software fully adopted by its mission users? Yes, 11 days to production 120 days to fully adopted by users in an actual operational wartime environment. After 120 days, this thing is now handling all of the refueling of every fighter jet in the Middle East at war in 20. This is now in 2017. Okay, so keep on going here now. All right, who cares? So you're doing that your users are using this to schedule their refueling missions? So what is that moving the needle on the mission and if so, how? This application when it went to production, it costs a little under $2 million to build in 120 days, and it started saving the air force a million dollars a week in jet fuel. So the application paid for itself in two weeks, and then it paid for itself. Again, two weeks after that. And it is now saved for the Air Force north of $400 million since this application got released now compare that to 10 years $750 million. No software delivered $2 million 120 days $400 million savings to taxpayers that is moving the needle on the mission space was big article set of articles got published about this, that you know, right here it's saying saving hours every day, millions of dollars every week, and Air Force folks working with pivotal now Tanzu to step in, where a $750 million dollar contract had produced nothing over the last several years. It also resulted in the cancellation of that major defense program, john McCain before he passed away personally on behalf The Air Force cancelled that large modernization contract because it was innovation theater and the Air Force have now seen what right looks like when organizations do real innovation. That gave rise to this program called Kessel Run. So that right there is moving the needle on the mission space, creating a literal software organization of organic government, people who know how to build software in an actually innovative way. Now, can you get a request for a code change and push that change to production? Today? I'd argue most organizations don't get this far, a lot of their software is work in progress. Right now. They're doing agile, they're doing Scrum. They're doing all the ceremonies, but there's no software actually in production at all. But let's assume for a second that there's like one of these software companies has actually gone to production.
It is really hard to hear feedback from an end user and be able to make a change and push it back into production later that afternoon that requires a continuous Hto. It requires architectures that can change. It requires cloud architectures on a globally consistent cloud hosting environment. It continuous CTO did I already say that it requires relationships with the end users to where and it requires trust from a government leaders to be able to make changes that rapidly that is really, really hard to achieve. But this is what we do this is these are the practices that we teach here at Tanzu Labs. And it's very basic, you got users who provide feedback to development teams who produce working software for those users and more quickly get around that loop, the more actual innovation you are doing. And you know, using a globally consistent container based cloud infrastructure, and using the practices of Lean Startup user centered design, extreme programming, and modern security practices that give you continuous authority to operate. That is how you can get that cycle time down to really producing new SOT lines of software in production multiple times a day, if you choose to. This is kind of like a, you know, quick comparison of innovation theater versus actual innovation at the top here is what I would describe as innovation theater. This is standard acquisition and software development. In government, which often takes over a decade to produce something meaningful for an end user, it starts by gathering a bunch of requirements getting on contract to satisfy those requirements. And then once you're on contract, you do all the design and architecture to build the final solution. And then you build the entire solution. And this is where organizations say Well, I'm not just going to build my software in any way we're going to this is the moment where we do agile, right? We're going to gather all the requirements are getting on contract, and then we're going to design the whole system, and then we're going to put together Scrum teams, we're going to do safe. And then once we've kind of built the whole solution using our Agile process, we're going to go test it, we're gonna hand it over the wall to our QA department, they're going to test it for six months. And then we're going to hand it off to our security assessors who are going to take nine months or whatever it might be to give me an authority to operate. And then I'll put my software in production. And this is why organizations often will say, I've tried agile in my government organization, and it has not worked and has failed. This is why agile is not a thing that you shoehorn into a traditional acquisition or waterfall software development process, it is a totally different way of thinking that is how to cross that bridge into actual innovation is to fundamentally change the way we think. And it really starts with the acquisition process. So if you could go back and look at all the requirements that any kind of major government program comes up with, a lot of those requirements are not really important. They're usually in a giant bag of requirements, there's like two, maybe three requirements that are like super important, got to have them right now. But because of the way traditional acquisitions are done, we stuff as many requirements as we can into the list, because we're gathering those requirements one time, and then we're gonna put somebody on contract, and we got to know all the things we might ever build. So then all those requirements go unsorted into a list that goes into the design and architecture phase. But the reality is, if there's really only two or three critically important requirements, what if you could just figure out what those two or three motion report most important requirements are, and put them into production tonight?
What if you could do that? And if you could do that, what you wind up with is these very thin slices of functionality that are usable and useful and joyful for end users. And then you just get into that loop that I showed you before where your users provide feedback. Your developers listen to that feedback and produce new working software. And if you've got that all designed out in a way that you put together a cloud orchestration environment that's globally consistent. You've got a security team that is bought in on the idea of a continuous agio. And you've got an engineering team that is able to listen to their users. Take feedback, have them funneled to someone who practices user centered design, who produces a vision, and hands it to someone who prioritizes work. And then a person who prioritizes work gives that to the engineers who do the smallest amount of work they possibly can to get through the security process, using both people to do the manual checks they need to do, and then a CICD pipeline that runs an automated gauntlet against the code. Now with a globally consistent, low side and high side environment, you can now have trust that software that is built, for example, in a San Francisco unclassified lab can go all the way deployed to an air gapped secret environment halfway around the world with an automated security process. This right here is another slide I could talk to you about for four hours. But this right here is how we apply that formula in terms of structuring tools and people and process to make this possible. Now, okay, cool. This is the formula. But now how do I do this? Every single day, at the scale of a major enterprise at the scale of something like Kessel Run? Well, basically, you take that formula that I just presented to you on that board. And once you have that globally consistent environment down below this Tanzu, hybrid cloud DevSecOps tool chain right here, once you have that, you should be able to put many, many, many product teams on top and give each one of those teams a relationship with one of your users. And now given the number of users that you may have, and the number of use cases that you may have, all the automation in that tool chain allows your development teams to focus on just developing the software that matters most to their users, and relying on the automation of the tools below Tanzu, hybrid multi cloud and DevSecOps, CICD tool chains. And once you can do that, we're able to achieve the kinds of things that we achieve with Kessel Run, where you have many products running simultaneously with a bunch of different use cases all on top of this globally consistent hybrid cloud toolchain. So this is what success looks like at scale, each one of these teams moving 1000 miles an hour to the extent that last year, this team Kessel Run presented a 2020 Year in Review. And I just direct your eyes to the top right corner of this screen here where they produce some metrics. They measured how they're actually doing. And this is what I would, I would argue, find me a modern Silicon Valley startup that is posting numbers like this, and this is the United States government. This is the DOD running their own software organization just like Silicon Valley does, and putting up arguably better numbers than Silicon Valley. They are pushing software to production every four and a half hours, they have a meantime to restore have less than two hours, they have a lead time of seven hours, seven hours, and their change failure rate is less than 10%. Again, and it's 12 157 employees, at least it was in 2028. But there's more people than that now 43 teams led by government, show me a commercial company that can post numbers like that. So that is what actual innovation looks like, at scale. This is what we do. We make it possible to answer yes to all five of those questions. And we've done it 200 times in the last four or five years in the federal government, many different modernization engagements, many platform installations, and we go to production on an average of 90 days. And it is getting to production one time that is often where most of these innovation theaters, innovation theater exercises tend to fall down is that they can't get in authority to operate, they can't get to production. And they're building up all this value that they think will be awesome for their users or for the mission when they get it to production. But they often never do get to production. And so all that value is just sitting in a garage with the parts just strewn about on the garage floor. So we fast forward a little bit. We did the same thing with space force us space force, we took the formula from Kessel Run, and we applied it this time using Kubernetes under the hood with the United States space force. And the same thing now where the where Eric Schmidt's defense innovation board, went around and looked at organizations that were engaged in innovation theater, right up here, they looked a there's a there is a sign that your software program is in trouble. And they called out the space force JMS program and they pointed us at the JMS program. And now they are delivering coalition friendly platforms. They're putting together new c two tools. They're claiming all these accomplishments. This is what we do. We are training the United States government to look and feel just like Silicon Valley software companies. And then we took the space force work and the and the Kessel Run program and we integrated them. So now space assets, looking at a mission that's getting performance being watched by an air Operation Center can trade data across their two globally consistent platforms that that is what real looks like. So now over the last, like 18 months or so the army has come to us and said, Hey, army futures command wants to do something similar to this, we have our eyes on something like a software factory and army software factory, can you prove to us that you are legit? Or are you Innovation Theater? And they gave us this group of people here standing against this wall and said, Can you teach this team of soldiers? How to build software? In a way that answers yes to all five of those questions? Tell me whether or not you are legit. And that is exactly what we did. We put together a continuous Hto playbook that was signed by the by the army CIO. And then we produced an application and pushed it to production in 99 days, 99 days from Nice to meet you army, let's go do that to software fully accredited and in production, changing the way the army sorts and picks the parts that they get out of their warehouses every day. Aaron, anything else you want to say on this?
Aaron Swain: No, I think like literally the second day after we put up production, it was adopted. And then within weeks, it was wildly adopted across the army. I've never seen something adopted so fast. In the software world.
Michael McCormack: Yeah, totally. You know, here it is. 99 days, this is an article I'm just like reading text from an article that got published just like two days, two weeks ago, 99 days they produced this castle pics order. And it allows users to put a PDF and it sorts the PDF and tells you where to go in your warehouse to pick your parts. And it resulted in 3400, man hours saving every day 173% increase in picks up parts and a 65% cost savings through optimize cloud development. So this is not like stuff. Those are those are not numbers that will come in the future, which I know government is, you know, very good at, you know, claiming accomplishments for things that are in the future. This actually happened in production. And it validated the hypothesis that soldiers’ government can build their own software. And that resulted in the construction of an army software lab. And this memo, published here by the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Secretary of the Army that effective immediately, army futures command will establish a soldier led software factory in Austin, Texas, the ribbon cutting ceremony for that happened. When was that, Aaron last week? Yeah, a week, a week ago, last Thursday, where again, these soldiers are learning the techniques that we teach here at Tanzu Labs. This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cutting the ribbon at the army futures command software factory on the 15th. So this is what real innovation looks like. Put software in production fully accredited, get it adopted by your users, move the needle on the mission space, and then be able to make changes based on feedback you get from your users, and then be able to do that at the scale of your enterprise. That is what this looks like, is here's a bunch of articles I got published about this. If you're curious, you can take a snapshot of this and go look them up.
Aaron Swain: Does Tanzu help an organization avoid agile BS?
Michael McCormack: Yeah, fundamentally speaking, when we made the transition from working with Silicon Valley startups, to working with commercial organizations, and then working with the federal government, what we realized is that we can build all the cool software we want in our labs. But if we can't put that software in production, then it's meaningless. And the amount of regulatory stuff that we need to get through when we work with big enterprises, or we work with the federal government means that we can't get to production unless we have a path to production. And what Tanzu is, is a set of tools that automate and streamline your organization's path to production.
Aaron Swain: The other question like it, I kinda, I think the answer already, which is, would you say that the customer run applications have been adopted by users? Oh, yeah.
Michael McCormack: I you know, don't listen to me go ask Kessel Run. But yeah, I mean, they're their software is in production, helping the Air Force fight the air war in the Middle East. And they've been doing that hand in hand with their users continuously developing new features with their users based on user feedback for the last three years. So yeah, absolutely been adopted.
Aaron Swain: You know, Mike, Michael, had we kind of highlighted Yeah, at the sixth. Oh, at the sixth on knife that is who is the primary area supporting the SATCOM AR which is where the war has been going on for the last 18 years?
Michael McCormack: Yeah, one of the key themes of user centered design or of lean startup is the idea that you got to kind of start somewhere. So because the air war is getting fought out of the 609 k EOC. We focused on the users and the use cases there and put that software into production there as quickly as you possibly Good. And then once we had traction and got that flywheel of continuous delivery established, that was when we looked at the sixth, third and the sixth 13th. So yes, that software is in production sixth, third, sixth 13th and elsewhere now.
Aaron Swain: Triton was listed as Triton another program utilizing Tanzu.
Michael McCormack: No. Triton is a software product that is part of the Kessel Run, baseline. And its job is to collect all of the plans that the Air Force puts together for a given execution day, and puts it together into the what's called the ATR or the air tasking orders of Triton is a product team that works with the users and the creators of the air tasking orders. And then there's a space tasking order. And the space tasking order team and space force is connecting the space tasking order to the air tasking order. And that was why there was that connection between a OC, our Triton and space.
Aaron Swain: Cool. Michael says he's actually a customer now, are these collaboration via direct contracts or through partners? Like us? It's Yeah. Yes, some people direct contract with us and some people use partners in the middle.
Michael McCormack: I'd argue if you're listening to this, and you're thinking, oh, my God, how do I get started? What do I do the hardest piece and all of this is establishing that path to production. So I would, I would recommend strongly that you get access to the VMware Tanzu toolset, and get that laid out. So that the path from a one line of code to that one line of code running in production is streamlined. When you turn on the afterburners and put software development teams to work building features for their end users. If you can't get it to production, then it's all kind of meaningless. So I would say, focus on putting together that path to production, which is in the form of the Tanzu tool suite.
Aaron Swain: What if I want to all akok capabilities? Like its SEO service mesh, key cloak, rancher? rk, e two, etc.?
Michael McCormack: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd say that there's two main offerings within the Tanzu suite. One of them is a pretty opinionated path to production, it's kind of like, I just want to press a button, and I want a path to production. And there, yes, you can bring in all sorts of third party tools that integrate with that with that system. That's called the Tanzu application service. But a lot of the container orchestration and like auto failover, and high availability, and like networking work is kind of handled by the application service. And then you can bring in any databases you want, or event streams that you might want key cloak, for example, all those things would integrate with the application service. That's one of the offerings. The other is, hey, I want to do full all the card, and I just want Kubernetes. And I want to connect my Kubernetes using my own system, and I want to just do all the wiring myself. And you can do that too. Tanzu provides what's called the Tanzu Kubernetes grid, and you can bring in the Tanzu Kubernetes grid. And by the way, VMware is the number two contributor to open source Kubernetes. And you can just wire that up with anything you want. It requires your engineering teams, your infrastructure teams to do more architecting than they might need to do with the application service, but you get total freedom of maneuver. And there are a set of other capabilities in the Tanzu suite, like build service, which builds containers in an automated way that you can use in that sort of thinking, grab all the kind of tools that exist in the modern cloud toolkit. And you can put them all together using our tools and any other tools that you want. Again, I'd strongly advocate for focusing on getting the ability to put software in production at all, because the question number one is, are you in production? If you can't answer yes to that, then it is it is theater, you are just planning for success sometime in the potentially distant future. So focused on being able to get your software into production. And that is a combination of the platform and the security processes through CICD that allow you to put one line of good software into production.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or VMware can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at vmwarefed@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.