What Real-World IT Teams Want from Infrastructure with Paul Nashawaty

Bruce Kornfeld

Welcome to Pod Magic, real conversations about solving real IT challenges. My name is Bruce Kornfeld and I’m your host. I’m the chief product officer at Store Magic. And we are always exploring how simple, reliable technology can help benefit you and the people you serve, whether that’s retail stores, manufacturing sites, healthcare operations, whatever you may do where you’re supporting end users. Our goal is to bring interesting guests, deliver some value, and have fun along the way. So let’s dig in for today’s episode. We have Paul Nashawadi and welcome Paul. It’s good to see you again.

Paul Nashawaty

Bruce, always good to be on with you. Great to see you.

Bruce Kornfeld

All right, a quick bio that will jump in. So Paul is principal analyst for the Cube Research and officially connected, where he provides insight into application development, including deep research, very deep, and analysis in build, release, operations, and DevSecOps. Prior to this, Paul has held senior roles with large and small companies, as well as six years as an industry analyst.

And that’s how Paul and I know each other from the industry analyst days. So welcome Paul. And I don’t know if you want to give any other quick bio background info that I didn’t touch on, feel free to, and then we can jump in.

Paul Nashawaty

Now, Bruce, super excited to be here. This is a great time to be talking about all the industry challenges that are happening across, whether it’s the edge, containers, DevSecOps, build, release, and operations in the CI-CD pipeline. Lots of great things happening. Great to jump right into this podcast with you.

Bruce Kornfeld

All right, well, let’s start with an easy one that should be right up your alley. I don’t know what questions are going to come out of my mouth, but I’m sure we’ll have some fun here. one is let’s just talk about something that I think you spend a lot of time on is application development. What’s happening there? And if you can think about it from an edge perspective at small sites or remote sites, what’s going on there? What’s new? What’s exciting in the world of application development for the edge?

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, Bruce, this is really top of mind right now for many, many organizations that I speak to, that I talk to. It’s the number one goal for CIOs right now is to do application modernization. Right? So they’re looking at it and that’s a treadmill. You know, there’s always this modernization exercise. In my practice, I typically deal with the context of past, present, and future. And as we start looking at the context of locale, whether it’s the core, to edge, to cloud.

There’s always kind of some pivoting, some moving around where those applications are being developed, how it’s being developed, and then what tech stacks being used at each area. So when we look at growth in applications at the edge, what we’re finding alone at the edge, just at the edge alone, we’re finding that over the next two years, there’s going to be an explosion of growth in applications of 500 to 1,000 net new production applications at the edge locations alone. This is largely due to AI.

largely due to processing information, where it lives and where at the specific location. So a lot’s happening here. And in that modernization strategy that we hear a lot to talk about here from the CIOs, they’re trying to figure out how to do it, right? And try to figure out what the skill gap issues and complexity issues. And we know that the tech landscape is changing quite a bit as well.

Bruce Kornfeld

So did you just say that the cloud is dead? Is that what you’re saying, Paul? Is that what I’m hearing from you? No, listen. All right, I’ve got… Yeah. Well, let’s talk about it because cloud isn’t going anywhere. Companies are still using them and it’s growing as well. I’m just wondering, are you seeing movement of applications that are saying, okay, we used to run these in the cloud.

Paul Nashawaty

I don’t know if I said that, but I I said, yeah, I think that there’s an opportunity to kind of move around.

Bruce Kornfeld

But it’s better off to run them at the edge or are seeing predominantly there’s just so much newness, the economy’s growing, there’s so much new opportunity that new applications might be deployed at the edge or somewhere in between. What are you seeing there?

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, Bruce, that’s a great question. I when we think about, you know, these applications and what’s happening, there is a decision that organizations have to make. Are they going to refactor these applications? Are they going to move to containerization? Are they going to, you know, leverage their existing ecosystem and infrastructure? Are they going to move to a different one? What we find in our research is we find that 48 % of organizations are building cloud-native applications in a private or public cloud.

OK, interesting. But we also see that on-prem, only 11 % of respondents indicated that they’re building their cloud-native applications on-prem. Now, here’s what’s interesting, Bruce. We asked about two years from now, where is this going? And what we found is there’s a repatriation of those applications back from the cloud to an on-prem ecosystem or an infrastructure. And what we’re kind of understanding here is as we unpack this data, is we understand that organizations are doing two things. They’re bursting to the cloud. They’re using the cloud resources for their production or whatever or development. And then what they’re doing is they’re modernizing their on-prem or their edge location or whatever it may be. And then they’re moving the applications to those specific locations. What we see here also is 20 % of respondents indicate that application portability is critical. And 67 % say it’s very important.

So being able to move around is incredibly important, but also to modernize your existing infrastructure makes the cloud a useful tool to do so.

Bruce Kornfeld

Okay, so when you say private cloud, a lot of applications are going to start to move private cloud on-prem. Who’s going to win that battle? This is all opinion, right? But the whole Broadcom, VMware thing, I’m almost sick of talking about it, but I’m not because it’s so exciting. But where do you think people are going to put applications these days? Are they looking at different technologies? Is it all containers? What do you think’s happening there?

Paul Nashawaty

Well, okay, I don’t think it’s all containers. And you touched on a couple of things that I’ll not, I have some strong opinions of the tech stack. But the tech stack matters, right? And I think if we look at…

Bruce Kornfeld

Bring it on, Paul, bring it on.

Paul Nashawaty

Again, I’m going to fall back to the comment that when I talk to CIOs and they say, the two things that I run into challenges for this monetization effort, the complexity and skill gap issues. If they’re looking at that and they go, okay, well, we know we have a tech stack that might be heritage.

that they want to move away from, or they want to modernize to more of a containerization approach from VM, say. That requires an evolution, a change, right? That has to occur. That also requires skill to do so. So you either take that hit.

from the organization and invest and train your staff to do something. Or you figure out how you’re to leverage your existing teams. So Bruce, what we’re seeing in our research is 67 % of respondents in our latest study that came out of our App Dev Summit that we just did recently, we found that 67 % of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists.

And the reason they’re doing this is not because they can’t find this, not because they don’t want to hire a specialist, they just can’t find it. And also generalists are now able to do the work with the assistance of the tech stack with AI. So there’s a lot happening there. So to answer your question, this modernization treadmill is occurring.

Bruce Kornfeld

Right.

Paul Nashawaty

It’s going to keep going. Moving from one tech stack to another, as long as it’s frictionless and it’s addressing the company’s needs with the resources and reducing complexity, that’s where there’s a big green light. Also, you take into consideration here, Bruce, cost. Cost is a factor. There’s licensing costs that get accelerated in certain scenarios. So those things you have to think about as well.

Bruce Kornfeld

So you’re saying that there’s some hope for companies like Stormagic that has a newish platform that we’re looking to bring more more applications to the edge. It seems like there is an open field now. the fact that the whole Broadcom VMware thing, it’s just created a level playing field out there for lot of vendors like us, which is awesome.

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I mean, it’s freedom of choice at this point, right? You have freedom of choice to pick what tech stack you want to do. And frankly, again, the way I see it, organizations that are finding, working with vendors like Storm Magic that can provide a solution that’s frictionless and easier to deploy with a generalist to do the work versus a specialist, you don’t have to bring in a team of people when you can actually have that.

pushed a big green button approach, so to speak. I know everybody promises that, but it’s true. If you’re just looking at moving from one heritage environment to a modern environment, you want it to be frictionless. So that’s where I think Storm Magic is going to excel very well, especially at the edge locations.

Bruce Kornfeld

Yeah, I think part of your research, I think we’ve talked about this a little bit in the past about talent and talent acquisition. It just seems like, if you think about it, the last 20 years, where have most IT people been focused? It’s been virtualization, not necessarily containers, it’s been virtualization. It’s primarily been VMware. And there’s a whole ecosystem of VMware and tools and management processes that

everyone’s familiar with it just feels like the movie containers is real but it’s it’s not going to be easy there’s a there’s a retraining effort almost that has to go on there is that my understanding that right

Paul Nashawaty

Well, yeah, I agree with that. Now, I think that it requires an evaluation from the business, right? mean, refactoring for the sake of refactoring doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get better results, right? You can actually refactor and get worse results, right? So if you’re to spend the time and refactor from a VM to a container, that might not be the right direction. And frankly, what I’m seeing, Bruce, is a lot of organizations are saying, you know what? We’ll take our heritage environment. We’ll encapsulate that, move it to a modernized platform, and then build our new systems of engagement on containers that use those heritage systems as systems of record, so their data. So especially when you start thinking about AI and workloads around that, there’s data sets. That data set’s not going away. We used to call it data pools and data lakes and big data and all these other words that no longer people say because now we have LLMs and SLMs and all these other AI things.

But basically it’s the same thing. People are not abandoning their data. That data is the lifeline of the business, right? So they all encapsulate that. There’s no need to refactor a relational database, but you can use a new front end experience to access that same information. So I think that there’s a kind of a hybrid approach where a, I’ll call it this way, Bruce, a new landing zone for heritage VMs to land on is based on a modernized infrastructure approach.

Bruce Kornfeld

All

Paul Nashawaty

And I think that is really where the application growth has gone.

Bruce Kornfeld

Do you see a world, just stay on the container thought for a second, do you see a world in the future, if so, how many years away do you think that we would be in a pure containerized world and VMs are the thing of the past? Does that happen at some point and if so, when?

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, good question. So did we say that mainframes are no longer going to exist? If you’ve ever banked or traveled, you probably were on a mainframe. I mean, that’s just that.

Bruce Kornfeld

That’s true.

Bruce Kornfeld

That’s true, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

So do I think that there’s a need and a functionality for a tech stack that’s going to support your business needs? Yes. I think from a modern application development perspective, the rapid application development, by the way, I wrote a book on this, a Wiley book, a For Gummies book, which is really cool. That’s a little plug there. anyways, what we see is, look, in our research, we find that organizations want to release code very rapidly.

Bruce Kornfeld

Nice.

Bruce Kornfeld

You can plug it, it’s all good.

Paul Nashawaty

Cadence in their delivery cycle in the SDLC. We found that 24 % of respondents indicate that they want to release code on an hourly basis, yet only eight are able to do so. So it’s a big challenge here, right? So pushing code out of door fast. You can’t do that with heritage VMs or siloed or mainframe applications that use more of a waterfall effect kind of delivering your applications every like twice a year.

But if you’re going to release code on an hourly basis, like a SaaS-based application, it really does need to be containerized, right? It needs to be microservices so you can carve it up into the elements that you want to update. You don’t have to update the entire thing all at once. You can only update the microservices and get what you need to get done. That is where I think you’re going to have that, I’ll call it that bifurcated approach where you’ll have your heritage systems. Those will live on. Those will continue to live on. And then you’ll have your modern.

Systems of engagement, those will continue to be containerized.

Bruce Kornfeld

Okay, so it sounds like that we’re aligned here is what I think is the world of 100 % containers is probably too far into the future. It feels like we’re gonna be in the world of mixed VMs and containers. And I’m thinking Edge. I’m not necessarily thinking data center, but for Edge, it feels like that’s gonna be around for quite a while. Probably during my lifetime, at least my working lifetime. How’s that? Yeah, there you go.

Paul Nashawaty

I mean, Edge is gonna have that same approach. Think of any vertical that you can think of at the Edge, retail, insurance companies, medical, healthcare, what you name it. mean, they have systems of record at these Edge locations that in order to process data, you need to process it at that location. So…

encapsulating and keeping a VM for that system of record is incredibly important. And again, having that call of that landing zone for that VM, have a place for it to live.

That’s incredibly important. Now, new front end applications for you doing rapid application development and pushing new systems of engagement out there. Sure, that’ll be containerized. That’ll be React applications. That’ll be something that will give a new look and feel. It’ll make you feel good if you pull up your phone and you can click on something. Great. But that’s basically what the new front end applications are going to be. But they’re going to work with those systems of record.

Bruce Kornfeld

Is there an angle here about, it’s one of the things that we talk a lot about is uptime at the edge and the importance of mission critical. Do you find, obviously you’re pretty deep on the application side. Do you find applications that are needed to run at the edge that don’t really care about HA, that they can come and go as they please, or where do you see high availability playing in the application world for edge environments?

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that when you think about DRBC, like disaster recovery or business continuity, right, and you’re thinking about the application, there’s all sorts of things that kind of impact the application. First of all, applications cannot be decoupled from data because applications without data are useless. Data without applications are useless, right? So they have to be together. Second,

Disasters and things that happen can be manmade, can be natural, can be whatever disasters that occur. And that means your business needs to be operational. So you have to have some type of way, especially when you start talking about verticalization, Applications that are in healthcare or retail or finance or FinCert, those are kind of…required to keep going at pretty much at all costs, right? mean, some of it’s life or death, literally. But when you start looking at manufacturing, maybe manufacturing at the edge can afford downtime. Maybe it can afford, like, OK, if the robotic arm doesn’t move this part into place, yeah, you’re to have business outage, right? You’re going to have loss of revenue, but it’s not life or death.

Hopefully. But the other side of that is, you have some tolerance there. I think from my perspective, what I’m seeing from the application world, in my previous life, when I was in the vendor side of the world, I lived in the five nines or more space where you have guaranteed uptime. And that was, you had synchronous replication of your data from location to location because it was that critical.

Bruce Kornfeld

Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

On the application world, the thing I’m hearing most is three nines or maybe four is tops. That’s what I’m hearing across the board. Again, it’s about making sure the infrastructure is in place, but if the infrastructure is up and the application is not, it’s still down. And if the application is up and the infrastructure is not, it’s still down. a lot of organizations are moving away from typically that I’m hearing, they’re moving away from SLAs.

And they’re moving more towards SLOs. So these service level objectives and trying to make sure that the objective of the team is to all kind of row towards that same North Star.

Bruce Kornfeld

Right, okay. All right, what about, I want to change topics a little bit. I want to talk about AI in two chunks. One would be on the application side, and then I do want to also talk about infrastructure and edge. But what are you seeing? is the, this thing is, it is, AI to my, like in my opinion, is accelerating, like each week or each month, it just changes. It’s different than it was a month ago. So my question is in.

Paul Nashawaty

For sure.

Bruce Kornfeld

For application development, what are you seeing in the world of apps? How is it impacting things? Do companies need less resources to build applications? Do things go faster? What’s happening?

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, Bruce, that’s a good question. mean, I was just at open source summit last week, I think it was last week, but anyways, I was just open at open source summit recently. you know, change is absolutely the key point in AI. I mean, one of the big announcements that came out of OSS was if you’re following agents and how agents are working with AI.

there’s, there’s like kind of, there was two schools of thought, you know, you have this MCP or you have a to a, which is typically like Google, but any two, a now is just kind of released into MCPs. And now it’s like, no, that announcement’s out there saying that you can use these things together. And that’s a big factor. Now, the reason why that’s important, especially at, you know, edge and applications and such is what we see in the developer world is, you know, you have app dev.

You have SREs, have platform engineering, you have a whole infrastructure team, but then you have this new category of what I call an application developers, prompt engineers. These prompt engineers are not typically professional developers, but they’re developers that live within a line of business. So think about this from the edgeverse. If you’re a retail shop,

And you’re trying to do a business analysis of your day’s run. And you say, what did I sell today? What I need? I need my information, whatever. And I use AI to distill the information I need now. I need to have the right prompts in place to produce the right information so I can send it up to corporate or whatever I’m sending it to. That is not a technologist. That’s the retail manager. Right? And so this citizen developer…

Bruce Kornfeld

Thanks.

Paul Nashawaty

Right, is out there creating applications, right, at the, AI. So the tech stack is, it’s enabling, call it regular people to be developers, which I think is really cool.

Bruce Kornfeld

Yeah, it really is. It’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have, like you’re saying, you don’t have to be a software developer and you can get answers from data by just asking really smart, organized questions. It’s crazy where it’s going. What about on the infrastructure side? I know it’s not necessarily a forte, but what are you hearing about enterprises and the impact that AI might have on their infrastructure at the edge. Have you heard anything there?

Paul Nashawaty

Absolutely. Infrastructure is necessary. It’s very critical to the overall application development part. if you don’t… That’s right. That’s right. You need to have infrastructure.

Bruce Kornfeld

Can’t run software without infrastructure, Paul. I’m just saying. AI can’t work unless there’s something to run it on. I’m sorry, keep going.

Paul Nashawaty

Exactly. Exactly. you know what, what I’m seeing, especially when we start talking about, we were talking about virtualization earlier in the side, you know, from a, from a, platform engineering perspective, engineers, in DevOps teams perspective is like infrastructure needs to just provide, provide what they need to do their jobs. Right. And if you look at it from that lens, you go, okay, well, if I’m the DevOps person, and I need storage and compute, right? Cause I’m to run this new workload. I’m just going to flip things off, right? This is where the problem is, Bruce, I think with, with, AI, not a problem. This is where AI helps the problem of infrastructure, usage, DevOps teams, app dev people, they’re just going to turn things on because they don’t, they don’t have budget responsibilities.

Right? They just say, look, I need to provision because I need to get my job done. Three, four, 500 % more than they need provision at great. Now the reality of it is, is that’s wasted resources where AI comes in and goes, wait a minute, we need to look at that and reevaluate that. Your usage is only 85%. We’re going to throttle back some of that. So AI ops kind of comes into play, starts putting back the resources into the pool because you’re going to harmonize this pool, right? It’s going to be.

Bruce Kornfeld

All.

Paul Nashawaty

Somewhat virtualized, right? You harmonize this pool, put it back into the pool. So now other people can use those resources. And this also, Bruce, this applies to cloud, this applies to the edge, applies to data centers, applies to anywhere. But like, if you’re just flipping things on and you’re in the business that’s paying for it, then you’re going to have these cost factors that can have a major impact. So I think that’s where AI is going to really excel on the infrastructure side by right sizing what is available to the teams to get their jobs done.

Bruce Kornfeld

That’s really where we’re focused is, you our goal is to make infrastructure boring and just it works, it runs, it does its thing, but let the scientists, let the smart people, let the application developers not have to think about their infrastructure and let’s just give them the platform to do what they need to do at the lowest possible cost. And so the IT team doesn’t have to think about installing it. It’s just super easy to use and manage. The things that we’re trying to do on the infrastructure side. OK, so I’m trying to think. I’ve got a couple more, but let’s see.

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, that’s cool.

Bruce Kornfeld

What if, sorry, I’m sure Tom can cut out some pausing here.

Bruce Kornfeld

All right, two last questions for you. about, since I’m not sure, I think you still talk to vendors in your world, but I know you’ve got a lot of experience in the analyst days talking to vendors, but what advice might you have for the vendor community to align with modern buyer expectations these days? Any advice for us? Yeah, go ahead.

Paul Nashawaty

No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely Bruce. So I do talk to vendors on a regular basis. That’s part of my practice. I actually spend 30 % of my time talking to, I’ll call it established vendors and 70 % of my time is talking to emerging vendors. So I spend a lot of time working with the vendor community about positioning and such. So, you know, I guess when it comes to advice, right? When you think about…the environments that we’re talking with, you know, times have changed quite a bit in IT and tech, right? In general. And the more we start bringing, AI and automation and, and, you know, the reality of this kind of new, new tooling kind of going in place, it’s going to change what organizations are doing with their skillset. Now.

I mentioned it earlier that the number one challenge for CIOs is to modernize. They also have now carved out, and most of these CIOs have carved out in their budgets, about 25 % of it annually is to an AI project. So you have an AI project that’s in a budget. Now, they don’t necessarily even know what that’s going to yet, but they’re just saying, hey, that’s what it needs to go to because the board said we need to have an AI project. So cool, they have this money aside.

The talent that’s coming up is a different set of talent than what we historically had. It’s reducing the complexity, increasing the ability to be more, like I was talking about earlier, that prompt engineering kind of approach. So to make the infrastructure invisible, again, that big green button, if you can do that.

Now you’re going to accelerate business demands and business goals and reach those SLOs that everyone’s rolling towards and meet the business KPIs because they’re focused on the business logic. Now that’s kind of what I would recommend is reduce friction, reduce complexity, make it so a generalist can do the deployment and then roll in your automation, tie your deliverables to an AI use case because that’s where the budget’s being spent.

Bruce Kornfeld

And certainly as you’re saying that I’m thinking, I don’t want to reveal how many years I’ve been doing this, but it’s been a while. And the things you just said are completely different from what they were 20 years ago, right? It’s just amazing how things have changed. Okay. And then I think I got one last question to wrap up with and let’s get your thoughts on what would you, what advice would you give.

Paul Nashawaty

Absolutely. You and me both.

Bruce Kornfeld

The end user side that are looking to buy, purchase, and build infrastructure for running applications, what would you say their priorities should be? Or give some thoughts on where they should focus in 2025 and beyond.

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, that’s a great question. mean, you know, the thing about it is I kind of already alluded to is the way I see it, again, I have the lens of an app dev kind of practice, but the way I see it is the end user side, the citizen developer, right? I’ve mentioned the citizen developer, the lines of business have a goal. Okay. But here’s the thing. Business KPIs.

no longer afford the ability to say, I put a help desk ticket in and three days later, maybe somebody might open it up and look at it. It doesn’t work like that anymore. That just does not fly. So the more you can enable a self-service model for your end users to do their own deployments and their own environment.

Now you enabled your end users to be productive. You’re reducing the friction, but in your end users, your lines of business to meet their business KPIs without having to have a delay of having an IT ticket in and working through bugs and whatever, maybe something happens when it really, could be just flipping a switch and just allocating the storage or allocating compute or whatever it may be. But that needs to have the self-service ability, which also means that vendors really need to be worried and concerned about regulation, compliance, and governance. And those are the things that you need to be looking at as part of your deployment model. So those are the things I would recommend, especially from the lines of business side.

Bruce Kornfeld

Nice. All right, Paul. Listen, that’s all I had to ask. If there’s anything else you wanted to say, feel free. Otherwise, it’s been great. I’m thankful for you for spending the 30 minutes or so that we’ve gotten together. And it’s been great. So thank you very much.

Paul Nashawaty

Yeah, Bruce, it’s always great jumping on with you and talking about, yeah, I love what Store Magic is doing. You really have a great future where it’s happening and how things are going. I can’t wait to see what’s coming out next. So yeah, absolutely looking forward to it.

Bruce Kornfeld

All right, thanks Paul and thanks to everyone for joining Pod Magic, Real Conversations About Solving Real IT Challenges. If you enjoyed today’s program, like it, forward it, favorite it, tell your friends, tell your uncle Lou, we’re here and we’re gonna be here for a long time. So thanks very much for joining.