PurePerformance - Dynatrace Cloud Innovation and Roadmap Florian Ortner

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Florian Ortner reviews some of the top Dynatrace integrations and support for all the major cloud IaaS and PaaS platforms. He shares a few ideas about AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Kubernetes, in addition to looking into what Dynatrace plans to release this year.

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance! Hello from Dynatrace Perform 2019 in Las Vegas. I'm Andy Grabner, and this is Up Close and Personal with product management on Pure Performance. I want to introduce you to my guest that I just happened to bump into, I think after your session, Florian Ortner. Hey, Florian. Hey, Andy. Nice to see you here. How is Vegas so far?

Well, you know, I've been many times to Vegas, but every time. It's amazing again. It's a great venue. You know, the Cosmo, cool location. Yeah, I mean, we've been to different venues before, but I believe we all agree that the Cos it's a great venue. You know the Cosmo, cool location. Yeah, I mean we've been to different venues before, but I believe we all agree that the Cosmo is a good location for this event. So Florian, I'm interviewing breakout session presenters because unfortunately not everybody could make it to Vegas.

And so we want to give people an overview of what they missed and maybe encourage them to also watch the recording. So you just came out of a session. What was it called? We talked for 30 minutes about what Dynatrace can help you in cloud environments. And so with Dynatrace, we typically call it simply enterprise cloud. Because what we see, especially with every large IT and software company out there, they're not just using one cloud. So typically you start somewhere,

you have your own data centers, you use stacks like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift, and nowadays you also move them into the public cloud. So the environments are getting quite complex, and our mission here at Dynatrace is really to make the life of you, of our customers, really simple so that you do not have to understand everything, every technology, every public cloud vendor out there, and still know what's going on within your

application workload. That's pretty cool. Now, also maybe for people that don't know you, even though in the Dynatrace universe, Florian Ortner is, I think, a well-known name. Can you just quickly say, I think, you're Chief Product Officer. Yeah, So I'm with the company for more than 12 years. I started as an engineer, but then sometimes there are funny things in life that are happening. So our CTO back then came to me and said, what about product management?

And so I grew into that. And over the years we built up a pretty strong team that we are really proud of. It's about 40 plus product managers globally and I think more than half of them are actually here at the Cosmo. Yeah and now I think Florian also with your background right you went through this whole transformation that Dynatrace walked through over the years. We've been talking about this so we also moved from on-premise to the cloud and now you are heading the product engineering or the product management perspective to exactly bring Dynatrace

to a place, the product, that can support all of our customers that are doing a similar journey, right? That's a cool thing and I'm really happy to, well, sort of coincidentally end up in a role like that because if I go back and I think well is it possible to create a product with 650 plus engineers and then deliver it every two weeks and how would you do that if you have data centers there's a lot of management overhead you you would have to have but that's why we are adopting public cloud ourselves for our software service offering we are we recently started to go multi-cloud,

so especially to drive our synthetic use cases where it's about the geographic footprint. So suddenly you end up being cloud agnostic. So you go AWS, you go GCP, you go Azure, and then we went Alibaba about a month ago to get the global footprint in all of the continents. And I just can't think of a way without public cloud and also Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry as a technology stack to make this work.

I think Alibaba, that's amazing. I didn't even know about that. So that's awesome. So Florian, we know the background. We know that obviously we did this transformation ourselves. We can shape the product based on our own experiments and the stuff we hear from our customers. For those people that couldn't join your session and they are having a cloud initiative, they're

doing application modernization as it's called and moving workloads to the cloud, what are some of the key use cases that you see from customers that drive the product innovation that people can either already use or are going to be able to use in the very near future? Yeah sure. So I think there's a maturity curve when we ourselves but also our customers going into the cloud. So in the beginning typically it's infrastructure as a service. So you have to need more hardware, you need more virtual instances, so you pick the cloud vendor of your choice, you go there. But then suddenly you realize there are so

many services that are related to your cloud footprint, like DNS, like for example with Microsoft, with Amazon, DynamoDB, you have SNS, you have EBS, you have EFS, and so on and so forth. So our goal and this is what we're delivering with Dynatrace, we want to make it as simple as possible for you to manage your application workloads in Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds by not just helping you out with the infrastructure service but tying everything together. So the Dynatrace out of the box provides integrations for all of the most important services that are provided by the

specific vendor. We tie them into our model. So I mean, and you're a pro so you know this is what we call SmartScape. So we are connecting the infrastructure with the apps, with the microservices but also with the cloud services that are out there. And then weave everything into the model, which then flows into Dynatrace Davis, which is our artificial intelligence engine, to really provide the value add to proactively identify issues that I think a human being cannot see anymore. Yeah.

And I think this is actually a great point, especially when you go multi-cloud. In each cloud and also on each tech stack, you have your own little tools, you have your APIs, so you could theoretically tap into all of this data, but then you have separate data islands, right? Yeah. And also you have knowledge islands. You have knowledge islands too, yeah. You might be a pro in AWS, but you might be pretty new to Azure, for example.

And so with Dynatrace the goal is to not just be cloud agnostic but be cloud specific in a sense that we are not making you configure Dynatrace to mimic how you structure your cloud environment but to really make Dynatrace pick up everything automatically so regardless of how you're structuring your AWS your your GCP and Azure footprint, you see a very similar view than in Dynatrace. So speaking your own words, I think the product management team always says,

we are speaking the same language. And it's not the Dynatrace language, it's the cloud-specific language. And so this is what we are trying to achieve. That's pretty cool. Actually, I'm going to deliver a breakout with SAP. SAP, one of our partners and customers, obviously. Tim, he's talking about large-scale monitoring and automation with Dynatrace. Also multi-cloud as they have it. They also, the product, we call it management zones.

So still monitor everything with Dynatrace, but then having the ability to take the metadata that we automatically pick up and slice and dice it and say, you're responsible for infrastructure, that's your view. You're responsible for this app. The app may run across different vendors, across different clouds, different regions, but still you get the view that you need, and I think that's pretty fantastic. And oftentimes when you think about the cloud, cloud is a nice term, but there's public cloud and private cloud

and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So usually what you see, you see a mix of many things. And what I find all the time with customers, they're really blown away when you just deploy Dynatrace on a larger scale because they do not have to know what runs on their instances. they don't necessarily have to know what services are being used, they can tie everything also into their data center views so you know all this all the visibility that you're getting can be yeah it's simply amazing but you

have to you have to basically do free trial or look at it yourself to believe how cool it is. Seeing is believing as you always say. Exactly. Yeah, cool. So Florian, is there anything else? I know it's always hard to ask somebody from product management to look into the future because we don't want to nail you down on dates, but is there anything after perform coming in, plan for the next weeks or months to come or sprints in our case that people should be aware of when they are doing the evaluation of the monitoring strategy? Absolutely so let me just pick out two specific

things. One is that we are investing heavily in log analytics or log monitoring because if you think about log in a cloud native world you'll see that sometimes the log file is not there. There is no log file. There is no machine that you can pick the log file from. So that's why on the log side, we are working on what we call simply log data ingest. So that helps you also in container environments when there is no way to write a log file to disk. So even with that, you can simply push the data on the fly in real time into the Dynatrace backend or into the Dynatrace platform. So that's one piece.

The other one is then more technology-driven. So I think years ago, whenever you heard the word container, you were thinking Docker. But nowadays, there are so many more container implementations thinking Docker. But nowadays there are so many more container implementations out there and you as a cloud native software team you typically do not care about it. But we as Dynatrace we want to make it as simple as possible to do the full stack instrumentation you know without any config. Of course we have to care about the container stack and we are already working on container D.

There are other container stacks out there like Cryo, there's Rancher OS. So some things make more sense also in a sense of adoption because tech can also go away. But so we are investing a lot into better container tech that is unrelated to Docker. That's why we also changed the user interface recently from Docker to containers. Containers, yeah, makes a lot of sense. Wow, that's pretty cool. Hey, Florian, thank you so much.

If people happen actually to be at the conference and listening in right now, you and your team, I think, can be found obviously in different breakouts, but there's also a place, I think, in the marketplace area. Exactly. So we have the innovation center. So it's really hard to not see it.

So there are five big towers with screens and, you know, a crowd of Dynatracers, but also customers standing around it. So just swing by, have fun, grab the right folks, and yeah, just talk to us. We're always excited to learn. Also, the good things that you have experienced so far, but also the bad things. It's always about feedback and about honest feedback, especially. Because every feedback is valuable. That's what it is, right? Okay. Well, thanks, Florian. For Pure Performance, I'm Andy Grebner.