Main
[00:00:00] Cote: [00:00:00] Rita's back as always for an interview episode. And we have a 
guest here. Why don't you introduce yourself guest? 
[00:00:05] Ajay Patel: [00:00:05] Hello on Michael and Rita. Thank you for the opportunity.  
I'm Ajay Patel. I run the modern application, business unit at VMware, and really  excited to 
be here with you.
[00:00:14]Rita Manachi: [00:00:14] I'm excited that you're here. I've been wanting to do this 
for a while because of your, history, if you will coming at this with some of your background. 
Specifically, you were right there front and center on the front lines during what I would call 
the app server Wars, right?
[00:00:30] WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, all those things. And so I was super excited to get 
to work with you again. Tell us a little bit about that, about your experience during that time. 
[00:00:40]Ajay Patel: [00:00:40] My own history, as you know is early days I'd be I wasn't 
really part of the app server team.
[00:00:44] I was part of the integration team. So I caught the EAI bandwagon, if you will, and 
so I'm kind of dating myself, as you can see from just the use of the terminology. And then 
very quickly that EAI became a SOA metaphor. But if you look at the history we went from 
monolithic [00:01:00] applications to n-tier apps, to PaaS, platform as a service, and now 
we're hitting microservices, right? And the whole notion of public cloud and cloud native as 
we call it. And consistently across those, I think of both the whole notion of middleware and 
people hate when I use that word almost not right. It's a bad word, but if I look at what all of 
these application and data services are, they're nothing more than granular middleware 
services.
[00:01:22] They were part of these larger platforms we built. So one trend I've seen as, this 
general trend of breaking these large suites, that software vendors love to sell to the 
enterprise because that's what we sold to enterprise, made it easier to package up this thing 
and sell to now more of these, you know, services that are easy to consume and are 
managed and accessible to developers, right?
[00:01:42] But at the end, these are really about productivity. So the idea is how do you give 
developer the set of things that they can quickly build applications and not have to worry 
about whether it's transactions, whether it's security, whether it's messaging whether a 
database, persistent layer, et cetera. That notion has always existed.
[00:01:57] And so I think middleware as a layer [00:02:00] to give you portability developer 
productivity, being able to scale those benefits or those patterns haven't changed. The 
architectural patterns have gone better. I would say more refined over the time, but there's 
a lot of learnings in my view.
[00:02:13] When I looked up an app server, and if I break up it's parts and I see a 
microservices architecture today, the component still exists. You still have a messaging or 
event driven architecture. You still have a transactional system that you need to build, 
usually backed by a database, right? You still have scale up, scale architecture so
[00:02:30] the learnings are, you need some kind of a productivity app platform, whether it's 
an app server, whether it was a PaaS or now moving to the world of Kubernetes. I think 
there's a gap here, that'd, we've got too fine grained and there's a need to package up a 
more modular platform. And that's really the opportunity as I see from my history.
[00:02:48]Rita Manachi: [00:02:48] That is spot on. I, this occurred to me. I was a few years 
ago, reading an analyst report with a taxonomy. It was a PaaS taxonomy, and there was like 
19 PaaSes and it had everything from like [00:03:00] MOM PaaS pads, which was message 
oriented middleware PaaS, to iPaaS pads, to DBPaaS, to aPaaS all these different PaaSes so 
spot on with that.
[00:03:10]It's still some of the same components just broken up and renamed as a service. 
[00:03:16] Ajay Patel: [00:03:16] Yeah, the architecture pattern loosely coupled right? More 
and more developers own responsibility of the app. I think with Docker and the whole 
container and now kubernetes has generated, it's really made it easy to package up and 
make the deployment easier.
[00:03:29] So now developers can take everything they need. And so the granularity of a 
component or an application has really shrunk. In a world of SOA that a business contract 
and the services contract are much more coarse-grained in microservices, you have much 
more smaller components.
[00:03:45] Like I remember the promise of EJBs 20 years ago, right?
[00:03:49] The idea was, creating at BEA, I think in 2000 our company bought 20 
components that were  e-commerce components. And the whole idea of modularity was 
that you could take this building blocks and [00:04:00] quickly build an application, but these 
are the components. You change the word component to microservices, you know, you 
squint, I know it's not the same, but you can start to see the principles haven't changed. The 
problems do change with the microservices as well. So things like dev ops as a delivery, as a 
practice for how we deliver software becomes even more urgent, more critical as you break 
this down. But it's an improvement of a lot of good practices, a lot of learnings we carry 
forward. Every generation has taught us something new.
[00:04:23] And I think the PaaS productivity has been just unbelievable. Something that I 
wasn't directly involved in. I competed with it. And so not being part of that Spring PaaS 
platform owner, if you will, it's pretty exciting. It's pretty 
[00:04:36] Cote: [00:04:36] exciting. 
[00:04:37]Tell me if what you're reminding me of is wrong, but when you're going over, EJB 
the promise of Enterprise Java Beans and SOA stuff is I'd forgotten that a lot of that effort 
was modularizing business process and workflows, right? Like that, like this  EJB is for paying 
for something. Or this EJB is for like [00:05:00] approving. A job title change, right? There 
was a tremendous amount of what did they call it? Like industry working groups that were 
trying to codify what this service looks like and therefore have the reusable component, not 
just be like a technical thing.
[00:05:17] Like here's how you, I don't know.
[00:05:19]A "
[00:05:19] Ajay Patel: [00:05:19] business service"... 
[00:05:21]Cote: [00:05:21] And, I hadn't really thought about that, but we don't really like do 
that yet in, in like our are microservices 
[00:05:28] Ajay Patel: [00:05:28] days, 
[00:05:29] You're seeing some of that now. If I'll pick on something else, if you look at Twillio 
, And some of the communication services that you now just use.
[00:05:37]So you have a little bit of 
[00:05:38] a mix of both, right? You have higher level services that you're not procure, you 
don't even buy. So we call it, PaaS or application services or public cloud services that the 
abstractions are getting more well-defined we went from complex, schemas and XML and 
web services.
[00:05:55] It's something much more simpler with REST, jason, et cetera, the pr- or 
[00:06:00] the protocol, we're also starting to see that business services, you can actually 
just consume the entire company like Twilio is formed around communication API, and also 
don't have to worry about those, right? So it's a mix of that's happening.
[00:06:11] The big trend is you're buying it as a service versus setting up that component, 
building it yourself and operating it. So one big trend as you consume it as a service is one 
trend. The second trend you'll see here is my own application. I'm breaking it down into 
smaller pieces. Yeah, main driven design, is really becoming really critical. So I'm starting to 
self-contain everything real around a capability or function, but a much more granular level. 
And then the application developer job is to build an app or solution or workflow by 
composing these pieces together. Some things are bits of code I wrote self-contained,
[00:06:46] as a service, some things that I'm procuring or acquiring some things are libraries 
I'm taking from open source to build these things as well. And so this world of a new app is a 
composite app, that's combination of images code, you build [00:07:00] services you're your 
wiring in at runtime, not even at uh build time.
[00:07:05]And so how do you start to manage this? That's so new, fun world we're living in  
[00:07:08] Cote: [00:07:08] flexibility. 
[00:07:10]I like that that explanation where they, that those business modules have shifted 
to SaaS things essentially. Like it kinda, it gets, it gets to Rita's point of all the different types 
of cloud things.
[00:07:21] I remember those reports there's lots of them. And I think a lot of those 
categories were trying to, a lot of those analyst reports are trying to categorize exactly that 
the types of business services versus just lower level technical things, like how do we  render 
a UI or whatever?
[00:07:37]Those kinds of services are great, right? Like it takes care of a huge amount of 
operational problems that you would have in the pre-SaaS days, which is wonderful 
[00:07:48]Ajay Patel: [00:07:48] And global scale.
[00:07:49]So I build an app. I need to deploy in another region. How do I deal with all the 
local constraints or leveraging infrastructure? And this is why communication is a big 
problem is like SMS. I was [00:08:00] talking to another company, that's doing something 
similar in this space and they're like, we provide SMS as a service so developers don't have 
to worry about it. And we provide a very simple programming model by which you can 
consume this service, but we deal with make sure the messages are delivered to each of 
these 20 countries in Africa and they've set up the infrastructure to do that. So this is where 
the world is coming together between cloud and a traditional, self-contained application 
server, right?
[00:08:26] The deployment model was much more... app server was the box you put 
applications into the internet. Yeah, the cloud is the platform on which you're deploying 
these services. So all of a sudden the problem statement has changed, right? It's no longer a, 
a foundation of a pass or a container of an app server, or a Java instance, if you will, that you 
want to set up on a JVM somewhere, it's now a collection of these things running at scale 
and your wiring them up to talk to each other. 
[00:08:51]Rita Manachi: [00:08:51] You're making me think -  when we think about cloud 
services for developers, right? We've talked about this there's hundreds yet
[00:08:56] the onus is still on the development to stich them together to build the [00:09:00] 
thing they're trying to build. What we propose is, as you said, put it all together. They have it 
all in one place and not have to worry about that reducing even more toil for them. That's 
what I'm thinking about, the evolution of that.
[00:09:10]The other thing that strikes me is we talked about Conway's Law in a previous 
discussion and you know how this, evolution from SOA to microservices and just, thinking 
about it as granularity, but also how it impacts your, operating model. You can't talk about 
microservices without talking about DevOps without talking about domain-driven design.
[00:09:33] I'm not talking about agile practices, so that's probably been an interesting 
evolution to, for you to watch and see, especially having left in the middleware world and 
gone to infrastructure software. And now back
[00:09:44]Ajay Patel: [00:09:44] I used to I'll talk about my buddy Yefim and Massimo from 
almost a decade ago when I used to work in the middle, we 
[00:09:49] Cote: [00:09:49] I call them 
[00:09:50] Rita Manachi: [00:09:50] Mister and Mister Middleware. 
[00:09:51]Ajay Patel: [00:09:51] Uh, and, and, And we used to talk about this concept and 
we didn't know what to call it even then. And we said, there is this layer above [00:10:00] 
infrastructure, but it's more flexible than an opinionated PaaS. And then those that 
compeating with the products that now I am responsible .
[00:10:06] And we call it this IaaS plus layer. It was this flexible modular PaaS that gave you a 
lot more productivity above infrastructure, but was not as constraining. If you will on 
support it all application deployment stuff. And what's happened is with containers with 
Kubernetes, you effectively now have a toolkit
[00:10:25]that allows you to package up application, give that control back in the hands of 
developer, there's this constant battle of how much control you give the developers where 
between or the platform has been an ongoing battle between the app architects who own 
enterprise architecture teams, right? Who need to set up the guardrails, if you will.
[00:10:43]The developers need more self service flexibility. We've been in this constant tug 
of war where the line is. And I think the beauty of Kubernetes and some of the workers we 
can start to now, we layer this both as an infrastructure IaaS but also the platform on which 
to deliver capability. And so we've, we are all on this [00:11:00] race to take what TAS [the 
Tanzu Application Serivce] has successfully done for the largest enterprises, but make it 
much more ubiquitous and much more pervasive.
[00:11:09] To leverage the kind of the breadth and the ubiquity of cloud. And so that's really 
where the next innovation is going to happen. And so I'm pretty excited about the practices 
are evolving. The platform is becoming more richer. It's becoming more open and more 
standards driven allows us to start to really layer on and take all the experience and 
capability we built with TAS and the productivity that unbelievable productivity that I've 
seen in what, and what TAS continues to deliver.
[00:11:36] But extending that to a Kubernetes world or leveraging the kubernetes more 
natively, that is really a huge opportunity for us. 
[00:11:42]Rita Manachi: [00:11:42] I want to go back a little bit too, to talk about the 
evolution of microservices, right from SOA. When it when microservices was first coming on 
the scene, if you will, there was a lot of talk about how microservices is, you know, people 
where, "it's just SOA well done." But there's more to it than that. 
[00:11:56]Ajay Patel: [00:11:56] I think the key difference was SOA also was one of those, 
[00:12:00] architect, enterprise, what, Michael, you were saying at a business services level 
the intent was really much more to say, how do I take my, either my legacy application, wrap 
them up or start to build these kinds of building blocks that led to this whole BPM or 
workflow.
[00:12:16] I also had a technology called BPEL business process, execution language. If you 
remember, how you wire these things up. So it was much more at a higher level, if you will. 
And as you said, it was more on process automation, and driving those new applications that 
are taking legacy ERP applications and providing the customization layer on top.
[00:12:33]That was where bulk of the SOA efforts. It was also a next generation integration 
using well-defined services contracts versus doing it in a more one-off adaptor manner, et 
cetera. So those are the kinds of problem or EAI evolution, that's where it ended up more in 
the business process, automation space more in terms of,
[00:12:51] no wrapping up capability. It didn't really become the way you build your new 
next generation application. It was how you connect to something that [00:13:00] you 
wanted to integrate with, right? 
[00:13:01] On the other hand, what I saw with Pivotal PaaS and by the way, what a surprise 
when I took this business over how Spring had evolved, Spring often was viewed as this thing 
that drove the injection model into reality, but it was considered heavy framework, right? 
And now you look at Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and some of the work we're doing around 
Spring Cloud Gateway or Data Flow, it's really putting the power in the hands of the 
developer. It's becoming more lighter, it's becoming more productive.
[00:13:27]And so what was exciting was the PaaS revolution was really about simplifying the 
life of the developer, wanting to get some basic web application or transactional application 
out. And so I saw these two parallel evolution. One is more in the integration evolution, if 
you will, with SOA and the application development evolution with PaaS And we're now at 
an interesting juncture, which says, okay, what have you learned in the world of public cloud 
and microservices?
[00:13:53] How do we now bring the same productivity, the simplicity, the security, the 
management value into this [00:14:00] world, right? Because now we've got a whole bunch 
of toolkit. I got 400 piece parts. I got tremendous power at my hands, but I have to be an 
amazing expert to pull it together and build one at scale.
[00:14:10]Cote: [00:14:10] That's interesting. The first of all, I haven't thought about BPEL in 
a long time. I keep trying to remember the name of this book, but there was a book that I 
read way back then that was like, we all read these books that have these breathless books 
about how awesome the future is going to be because of computers .
[00:14:24] And I remember I read one that was about before, like business processing stuff 
and it was just gonna, revolutionize everything for us, which it was. Yeah, that was what, it 
was one of those books that I remember reading all the way to the end, and then I realized I 
have no idea what that actually means I should do now other than anticipate an awesome 
future.
[00:14:43] I think it's interesting to look at. The branching of let's just call it SOA from, I 
think, what microservices ended up being. And to your point a lot of SOA ended up being 
about the XML standards, the WS-*, or as people eventually [00:15:00] started calling it WS 
Deathstar.
[00:15:02]And that, as you were saying is all about integration and not just in what's the 
other "i" one being able to talk with each other and 
[00:15:09] interoperability was a big thing. 
[00:15:11] There you go. Exactly. And and I think, that was right at the tail end when I was 
still a developer. And I feel like what the developers were frustrated about, is, it had very 
little to do with coding. Like those concerns are more about standards and controls and it 
always seems like I'm reaching for a connection here, but it almost seems like that 
frustration led to more of microservices thinking which was it still is largely about the actual 
coding and defining the APIs, not so much about the business process and then, but 
eventually those two parts they eventually need to come back together. 
[00:15:44]Ajay Patel: [00:15:44] So if you see the evolution right, a lot of the quote, process, 
SOA companies have become low code automation companies.  What's happening is, you 
know, there are layers of productivity and layers of granularity.
[00:15:56] If you want to think about that way? As an application developer or [00:16:00] as 
an, if I were to now an application architect responsible for building my next generation, e-
commerce, my banking app, my prescription platform, et cetera, et cetera. What I want to 
do is I still want to have all the principles of modularity loose coupling well-defined services, 
contracts.
[00:16:18] But more and more APIs are becoming critical, not just between how I publish 
and make myself exposable to the world, but how my two different teams of 20 different 
teams that have broken this down expose a set of contract or services. And so you're 
starting to see in the world of microservices, notion of east-west API contracts between two 
development teams.
[00:16:39]My own application is a combination of using somebody else's services. We'll be 
able to discover what other API and services exist in my company's portfolio that I reuse. 
And so those problems of reuse still exist. Service discovery still exists. Being able to late 
buying still exists, right?
[00:16:57] Being able to deploy and manage and iterate at a [00:17:00] component level. So 
I don't have to change the entire system. Can I not just change my part? Right? These ideas 
of AB testing, where I want to try something new and see if it doesn't work, roll it back. All 
the things public clouds do at scale and the DevOps practice we all aspire for.
[00:17:12] And I say this because not every enterprise is really mastered this yet. That is 
really the opportunity, everybody wants to be able to push out code every day, repave 
environment if needed every day. So there is no malware sitting up there, be able to change 
just their piece without breaking the whole thing.
[00:17:29] Test this thing called a system. I'll give you a simple example. My old lab server 
did, we used to have a massive environment, one of the largest banks running in at Oracle, 
because I had to figure out how to debug it, and not only they can do it once we can do that 
scale. How do you do this now in a modern cloud world?
[00:17:43] Where you don't own the infrastructure, but you're using all these services. So 
the new problems are starting to emerge around day two operations and things like 
observability as a category have emerged because you can reproduce that problem. You've 
got to you've to diagnose what happened in the [00:18:00] environment itself.
[00:18:00] And hence you need a lot of observablity to know what happened. Cause you can 
go and come back and we found the reproducibles in the lab. Let's get a reproducible done 
so we could then figure out how to debug it. But no reproducible. I'm going to go get the 
data. From the live environment and make the change in the live environment and deploy it 
without bringing the system down.
[00:18:17]So the scale problems, the management problems, the operations problem 
become even much larger than just the developer productive thing. We tend to get indexed 
on her. So these new systems have to be designed for resilience. How do you do that? 
[00:18:30]Cote: [00:18:30] That's a good segue into the next thing that I thought would be 
interesting to extract from you, so to speak. Like I think like a lot of us, one of the fun things 
you get to do, usually it's fun. Sometimes it's not, but one of the fun things you get to do is 
talk to, a lot of the executives and teams at various enterprises and organizations. And I 
think having that bird's eye view of what everyone does gives, it allows you to collect a lot of 
what you were just talking about. And in talking with all these organizations, like what are 
the common to put it in a a [00:19:00] negative way? What are the problems people have 
now, right? The, to put it in a more neutral way, what are the management concerns that 
people have, whether they're new or old what are they. What are the problems they need 
to solve? 
[00:19:12] Ajay Patel: [00:19:12] So a couple things, and I'll pick, I've been fortunate enough 
to be now an executive sponsor to several large banks just happened to be all financial 
services, but this problem there's more broadly. So I'm using this just as an example, right? 
And you're starting to see some kind of either a CTO office or platform office, trying to figure 
out what are the common building blocks at each line of business CIO and teams need so 
that we can pull that back and make it a common platform.
[00:19:40]In some ways the principles of SOA were exactly that right. Build a common thing 
once, make them available. So from a principal's perspective, it follows the same desire to 
have a set of core components. This notion of pipelines that reflect the CI/CD, DevOps 
operating model is another thing we're seeing.
[00:19:58] Can we create these three or [00:20:00] four common pipelines by which they'd 
reflect the different application patterns? And the deployment patterns we need to support. 
So there's this on one side, it's about the generalization of providing, ready to use 
infrastructure or platforms and decoupling that from the developer who doesn't have to 
worry about setting up all of this stuff.
[00:20:17] He just is a user of these pipelines. The second thing we're seeing is having a 
more curated set of what we call accelerators of some forms, and we've seen this in from 
our experience with Spring. The Spring starters demonstrate a tremendous opportunity to 
take a whole bunch of curated capability, whether it's images, whether it's blueprints, 
application patterns and make it available.
[00:20:39] So when a developer starts and I pick up a particular type of application type, 
they have a recommended set of patterns to start with so that they can start to build this 
new composite application. So one side is really about reducing complexity. Removing the 
concerns from the development for all the infrastructure concerns, if you will, and making 
them highly productive.
[00:21:00] [00:21:00] Second one is around this whole dev ops practice, making it 
mainstream, really creating the art of setting up a centralized or set of pipelines that 
developers can use. And the third piece is really this application patterns and the curated set 
of images that they can expose to the developers for productivity.
[00:21:16] And the fourth for them is really how do I wire in security. Into this right from the 
get-go, right? Because if it's too late, by the time it's gone. So this notion of the secure 
software supply chain is starting to get a lot more discussion at least topic and top of mind. 
So those are the kinds of problems.
[00:21:31] So there are developer productivity, deployment concerns, general secure 
concerns, and then day two operations management concerns. And under management I'd 
put observability put  cost, being able to predict costs and manage those set of being able to 
patch and upgrade right.
[00:21:47] At scale. Those are the kinds of problems I hear when I talk to customers. Or 
challenges that they're trying to deal with in your words. 
[00:21:53]Cote: [00:21:53] One of the first things you were talking about is we don't really 
use this phrase very much anymore, but there was a big debate a [00:22:00] couple of years 
ago about like "full stack developers."
[00:22:02]The idea that your - your application developers would be in charge of everything 
down to the infrastructure, which was the reality of early cloud stuff. 
[00:22:12] Rita Manachi: [00:22:12] Yeah. I met one of those once, I was like: oh, you're a 
full stack developer. And he was like, what? 
[00:22:17] Cote: [00:22:17] And somewhat similar to what you're saying.
[00:22:19]As I've talked to organizations over the years, I think one of the major things they 
struggle with is like that doesn't actually work, right?
[00:22:26] It's almost like the question they have is so how much stuff do I actually want the 
developers to do aside from the application. 
[00:22:34]Ajay Patel: [00:22:34] That's been the Holy Grail, right? We've always, we want 
application developers to work on the business logic, the customer experience, et cetera. 
And give them a  palette that they can quickly.
[00:22:45] Draw these beautiful pictures or this beautiful applications on the other hand, the 
problem with PaaS it typically has been, it's been a hard line. So if you are not able to fit 
within the jacket, which is where the challenge of low-code no-code has been. It's great for 
my own. Yeah. I show my bias [00:23:00] here.
[00:23:00] It works great for very specialized problems, because then you can say for that set 
of problem, that can provide your phenomenal developer experience. And it can give you 
very high productivity. As you go further right you get a lot more flexibility, but now you 
have to be responsible for wiring the things up.
[00:23:15] And that line is a fuzzy line, right? And most customers that I speak to are trying 
to get the largest number of developers, highly productive, having to worry the least about 
infrastructure. And maybe there's, five or ten percent that need to be the sophisticated 
developers, I would say that need to break glass and dive into infrastructure and be those 
full stack developers for a set of concerns.
[00:23:36] And when they do that, they should hopefully create components of services that 
others can use next time around as part of this accelerators so that not everybody has to go 
solve for that over and over again. So I think this is going to be an evolution, Michael, we've 
been at this for 20 years. So when I look back, it's the same set of problems.
[00:23:54] We just have a richer palette and sometime more complex pallette. 
[00:23:56] Cote: [00:23:56] Yeah. So we got middleware BPEL, [00:24:00] business logic. I 
think these are good. These are good phrases and words we can put in the Rosetta Stone 
from for new developers to, to explain what  
[00:24:09]Ajay Patel: [00:24:09] Accelerators and starters. 
[00:24:10]Cote: [00:24:10] Sure, yeah.. 
[00:24:11] Ajay Patel: [00:24:11] Frameworks being more lighter weight but more in the 
control. So they don't pull in rest of the world. We love this idea of injection. We liked the 
idea of being more declarative or intent driven versus imperative. So some of those are the 
new principles.
[00:24:27] We still like, the domain driven design, where we can start to create a well-
defined contract fully encapsulated set of capability. The fact you can now package your 
own database as part of that. So you can have your own persistence layer as part of that 
fully integrated versus having to depend on the whole thing.
[00:24:44] So those well-defined contracts I think, are really very critical and then have a 
platform team that gives you a place. You can deploy this at scale. And it's part of the 
pipelines in the platform, you can start to define your policies and I'm introducing a new 
concept, I've [00:25:00] got a new terminology or policies, which says my policies dictate 
where this thing gets deployed, who talks to who, who has access to the data that it's 
speaking to. And more and more, you're going to start to see this become described both 
application intent, controls as policies being brought together through an automated 
platform. That defines where the application runs and what controls we need to put in place 
and has to be done at scale without human intervention.
[00:25:28] And so the driven by data, things like observability that allow us to then react and 
act, on things like this, right? So that's the future we're talking about. Hopefully a matter of 
creating the book that you read and said, I don't know what to do about. 
[00:25:39] Rita Manachi: [00:25:39] I have to say one of my favorite things that you've said 
as big as layers of interoperability and layers of productivity, right?
[00:25:47] Because to CotŽ's point. Those things sometimes seem antithetical, especially 
when you bring in standards and stuff. Are we, is that, are we making this, are we fixing this 
for the future? 
[00:25:56] Ajay Patel: [00:25:56] I am very 
[00:25:57] bullish. I'm a simple, I'm not, I'm no longer a [00:26:00] technologist as much as I 
sound one back here.
[00:26:02]I'm a more of a business guy now. And so when I think about the world for me 
right Spring and the productivity that Spring and frameworks like Spring offer. Kubernetes as 
both a platform and a platform of platforms, if you will, standards by which we could 
package up content ways, we can then have well-defined services that we can engage with 
new operating models, like serverless like this isn't when I look at all that this is nothing 
more than a new middleware. It's a platform that runs on any IaaS infrastructure, whether 
it's VMware or public cloud. And so I'm hinting at where we're going  uh, stands. Right? We 
see an opportunity here to build the kind of next generation application platform, a modern 
multicloud application platform that takes the ubiquity of Kubernetes and containers brings 
in the productivity of frameworks and and patterns.
[00:26:53]And brings the DevOps automation of CICD into this kind of holistic platform with 
strong [00:27:00] distributed connectivity, application runtime. This is a distributed 
application runtime. So application connectivity, things like service mesh to become even 
more critical. So those concerns are getting more.
[00:27:09] When I look at an app server, you took on some concerns. I didn't have to worry 
about it. I think the service mesh does something similar on security and app connectivity. I 
don't have to worry about those things. I can just turn them on or off, and then you start to 
add API management and API collaborations on top.
[00:27:24]Now you see a shape of a new platform emerging. And I think that platform is 
what customers need to get all the benefits they're looking for developers while driving the 
level of kind of guardrails and controls, they need to operate at scale across any cloud. So 
and cloud is not just a big data center clouds or the backend clouds, but more the edge 
clouds as well.
[00:27:44]So to me, cloud is ubiquitous of any location where I can spin up a computer on 
time and manage it at scale. And so the world is going to be, this internet is the new cloud 
platform. And we've said that for many years, Internet is a new platform. How do you not 
put a layer or application across that?
[00:28:00] [00:28:00] And what is the infrastructure middleware to unlock that value, right? 
And I think that's a pretty exciting, bold opportunity. So bringing a lot of the infrastructure 
and bringing a lot of the middleware of expertise to bear.
[00:28:11]Rita Manachi: [00:28:11] I know, I remember having those conversations as well, 
many years ago. Awesome. 
[00:28:17] Cote: [00:28:17] Yeah. And like you were saying, like we said when you see 
everything in effect and that, that productivity goes up and everyone leads a better, I don't 
know, to make a grandiose leads a better life because they have less stuff to worry about.
[00:28:29] Like it's it's very rewarding. 
[00:28:31]Well, Great. It was it was good having you on for this discussion. We'll have to 
have you back on and Yeah. Do you have anything you want to point people to you like 
promoting your Twitter handle? You have a web blog, anything like that?
[00:28:43]Ajay Patel: [00:28:43] Watch out for are a big cloud event end of March as well as 
if you haven't looked at Tanzu Advanced, it is the start of this journey of building this new 
platform. As well as if you're an existing Tanzu application service customer rest assured 
we're going to continue to invest heavily there.
[00:28:58] And a lot of the work you're leveraging [00:29:00] and driving and the industry is 
the expertise we're trying to capture and bring to the masses. Thank you again for the 
opportunity, and I'm looking forward to working with you again, Michael, and being on the 
pod again next time.
[00:29:09] Cote: [00:29:09] Yeah. All right. Great. As always, if you listeners want to get the 
archives, you can go to TanzuTalk.com, check them all out and we'll see everyone next time. 
Bye. Bye. 
[00:29:19]Ajay Patel: [00:29:19] Thanks, Rita.
[00:29:20] 
[00:29:38]