MJFChat: Navigating Azure: IaaS, PaaS, FaaS and more

We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”

In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.

Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)

Our latest MJFChat, recorded on September 14, is focused on Azure Compute (Iaas, PaaS, FaaS and more). My special guest is Microsoft Corporate Vice President Erin Chapple.

Erin has the keys to the Azure Compute kingdom and can riff on everything from Azure Kubernetes Service, to Azure Functions, to Azure infrastructure, all up. She is going to be one of the headliners at Microsoft Ignite 2020, and this chat will likely cover some of the key areas she’ll be addressing during Ignite.

If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, send me a note at [email protected] (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there….

Transcript:

Mary Jo Foley (00:01):
Hi, you’re listening to Petri.Com’s MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be all about Azure Compute. And my special guest today is Erin Chapple, who is the Microsoft Corporate Vice President in charge of Azure Compute. Thank you Erin so much for doing this chat with me.

Erin Chapple (00:37):
It’s amazing to be here today, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (00:40):
So all you listeners, I first met Erin virtually in 2010 because I was writing a series called “Microsoft’s Women Worth Watching”. And I found out that in 1998, Erin was hired by Microsoft to work on Small Business Server and she spent four years there working on the first four releases of that product. And guess what? She’s still here.

Erin Chapple (01:07):
When something’s good Mary Jo, you don’t leave it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09):
I know. I know. So then just over a year ago you became Corporate Vice President of Azure Compute after being a key executive in Windows Server for years. So I think it would be interesting for our listeners and readers to hear what you do in your new job. Like what do you do as the head of Azure Compute?

Erin Chapple (01:29):
Well, Mary Jo in the simplest form, my job is all about creating Azure fans, right? Cloud customers are evolving and so are the requirements. They not only expect the cloud to work. They’re looking for the best cloud platform. They’re looking for services to run everything from their legacy workloads to mission-critical workloads, to cloud-native workloads and everything in between quite frankly. And so it’s really my responsibility to ensure from the smallest customer like those SBS customers, initially all the way to the largest customers in our Enterprise customers that we deliver, both the fundamentals, but also the latest innovation that’s really necessary for them to run their business. Whether it be existing enterprise customer, who’s looking to migrate Windows and SQL workloads to the cloud.

Erin Chapple (02:19):
And they’re looking for comprehensive migration tooling or whether or not it’s an organization that really requires a broad set of flexibility and range of IaaS offerings and the Enterprise grade security and management to operate their environment. Or if it’s a cloud native startup, that’s looking for agile PaaS offerings that integrate with developer tooling. You know, all of these are things that I think of on a day to day basis. And it really is about enabling the end to end experiences for customers across both those IaaS and PaaS layers, as well as the common management experience in tooling, that I live in breathe. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (02:58):
Do you also have oversight for Azure Storage and Azure Networking as part of your domain as well?

Erin Chapple (03:06):
I work very closely with the Azure Storage and Networking teams, right. We really think of compute, network and storage as the core of Azure. And so that isn’t directly in my kind of line of responsibility, but my partner Tad Brockway who leads the product for both networking and storage and I are joined at the hip and we really share, right that mission around delivering Azure fans.

Mary Jo Foley (03:32):
So I think it would be interesting for our listeners to hear how someone like you, who knew all about Windows Server, like everything from the base components, like the Kernel, the hypervisor containers and storage, prepared you to move to Azure. And the reason I’m asking about this is I know we have a lot of IT Pros who always wonder how much skills transfer is there really between on-prem and the cloud?

Erin Chapple (03:59):
Well, I like to think that my journey really mirrors that of our customers, right. I migrated from on-premises to the cloud.

Mary Jo Foley (04:08):
Right.

Erin Chapple (04:09):
So I really see, you know, in some sense, the, having the perspective from both of those, you know, points of view, how it really helps me be a better leader and deliver better products. And so I have knowledge of the environments and the reality that our customers faced, right. That few businesses are going to be 100% in the public cloud. And again, I think that makes me better at my job because I deeply understand the requirements and challenges that our customers face. And, one of the benefits of you know, Azure and the work that we were doing on Windows Server and the operating system all coming together is that even though my predominant focus is on Compute in the public cloud, you know, I work with many enterprise customers that are hybrid today and they want that flexibility and choice as they use our platform to solve their problems.

Erin Chapple (05:01):
And I get to continue to work deeply with the Windows Server organization. And that’s a treat for me, given my history and all of the people that I know there and the amazingly talented engineers that we have. But it also really helps us work together in thinking about how we help enterprises and small businesses like really modernize their end premise, on-premises environment and embrace the cloud.

Mary Jo Foley (05:25):
Okay, that’s great.

Mary Jo Foley (05:27):
You know, I will say one more thing, which is that in terms of skills transfer, I don’t think that you know, the change that we’re going through from on-premises to the cloud is very much unlike the transition that we saw you know, over a decade ago, when we thought about moving from physical servers to virtualization, right? If you remember back there during the transition, you know, IT Pros found themselves faced with a new set of challenges, right.

Erin Chapple (05:54):
A new you know, set of challenges in their environment, how do they manage the explosion, right, of virtual machines that came from this newfound ease that you could just create one easily, and that’s not unlike what you can do in the public cloud. And so, you know, when they were used to controlling the environment through the depth of knowledge they had in the physical world, new challenges emerged around things like governing the environment, around securing it, around automating it. And so if you fast forward today, the challenges in the hybrid world are similar. You have VMs running on-premises and in the public cloud, how do you govern across them? How do you set policy? How do you get your arms around what can seem like chaos, right? When any developer can spin up a container. But how do you really think about, and get your arms around and attest to the health of your estate, which, you know, I think at the end of the day, IT Pros really see themselves as stewards of the safety and the governance and the compliance of the environment that they’re running for the business.

Erin Chapple (06:58):
And so in the public cloud, you know, there’s still, there’s still containers in the cloud. You still need storage. You have to understand your network, you need a set of corporate standards. And so while the tools may be different, the same foundation and the same conceptual thinking you know, still, you know, persists whether or not you’d be on-premise in the public cloud or in your hybrid world.

Mary Jo Foley (07:20):
Yep. Okay. That’s good. So the next question I have for you is very high level, and I’ll tell you why it’s so high level. So when I am looking for things to write about or topics regarding the cloud, I go to azure.microsoft.com and there’s literally hundreds of services up there, right? So, sometimes prioritizing and figuring out what’s really exciting? What’s really new? What’s really happening, is tough because there’s so many things going on simultaneously. So I wanted to ask you, in your opinion, what do you think is the most exciting thing happening in Azure compute right now and why?

Erin Chapple (07:59):
Mary Jo, I knew you were going to ask me one question that was gonna, you know, have the potential to stump me in some sense. And like, this is the one, it seems like maybe the most basic question, but it’s the hardest thing you’ll ask me. And it is because of what you said. There are so many things that are going on, but you know, I think the thing that most excites me about the work that we’re doing is where we’re solving real customer problems, either given the current environment that they face or, you know, where we see the future of cloud computing going. So if you’ll humor me, I kind of have, you know, more than one thing that I’d love to of tap in on. The first I would say is if I just look at the current environment you know, what we’ve seen as a result of the, you know, global crisis going on around COVID-19 and the pandemic is just customers really need to move securely to remote work to, you know, take advantage or think about how they’re future-proofing some of the investments that they have on premises.

Erin Chapple (09:06):
So, you know, the work that we’ve done in WVD in the Windows Virtualized Desktop, you know, we saw tremendous growth in that initially. And we just see it as being the only solution out there that really offers, you know, Windows 10 multi-session, virtual desktops, which are super important in today’s environment. And, you know, customers were able to quickly get off the ground with what we’re doing in WVD. And then the innovation in there continues with integration that we’ve done with Teams, right, to be able to offload and encode work from the call to the endpoint. So you get better latency and more natural calling experience. It’s all about that user experience at the end and helping to make users productive. So WVD it definitely is an area that really excites me. Along with that, the work we’ve done in migration, and I know you covered this recently but just the tooling work that we’ve done and really shifting to take more of a workload focus so that we can get those customers who, you know, they may be looking to move out of an on-premises data center because the lease is expiring and, you know, they want to have both the cost-benefit of the cloud, but also maybe not have to rely on having you know, workforce going in physically to their own data center in order to manage it.

Erin Chapple (10:20):
Or they’re looking at, you know, migrating you know, just those legacy workloads in order to be able to take advantage of some of the no cloud operations. So all the work we’re doing in migration really, you know, from inventory to helping create a clear strategy to workload based productions, all of those pieces are I think really exciting and help address a customer’s current problem.

Mary Jo Foley (10:46):
Okay.

Erin Chapple (10:47):
I do want to talk a little bit maybe about the future, cause, you know, that’s sort of the reality of today, but the work that we have going on in the Confidential Computing space to me is something that’s very forward-looking in terms of helping customers to be able to encrypt data in use, right. You know, today we encrypt in transit and encrypt at rest, but how, what happens if someone manages to get admin access to a VM, right.

Erin Chapple (11:16):
In Confidential Computing space, they now, you know, they can’t get encrypted access to the enclave and the data and the code that’s there is secure. And so there are just a set of scenarios, I think in finance and healthcare and government that this unlocks that, you know, we’re going to see more and more of in the coming months, years. And so the investment we’re making there now in order to prepare us for the future is another area that really excites me.

Mary Jo Foley (11:43):
Cool. Okay. I’ve written a little about Confidential Computing, but I always feel like I’m in way over my head on that one whenever I do write about it.

Erin Chapple (11:51):
Me too, sometimes Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (11:55):
So speaking of being in over your head, when I first started covering Azure, I remember it was at that point a platform as a service play, and then Microsoft later expanded it to an infrastructure as a service play. And a lot of people thought that was because, you know, that was the easy way to get into the cloud. Like an easy way to stick your toe in the water was to start with IaaS and then commit all the way to new applications being built from the ground up for PaaS. Is this still a pattern that you are seeing, like, are people still going IaaS then PaaS or some people really just going all in, on PaaS directly?

Erin Chapple (12:33):
You know, Mary Jo it’s all over the place in many sense. And it can be that even within a single organization, right. If an organization is large enough, they might have a department that really is looking right, they’re more nascent in their cloud engagement. And they’re going to start from an IaaS point of view and look at how can we get the benefit of the cloud and start to move from a cloud operations point of view, by taking some other more legacy workloads and doing that more lift and shift in some sense into IaaS. But there also might be other parts of the organization who are building out net new applications. And, you know, at the end of the day, I, you know, I love to talk about infrastructure, but infrastructure is in and of itself, isn’t really valuable at all, right.

Erin Chapple (13:16):
It’s about powering the business application. And so, you know, let’s think about even in today’s world, let’s talk about retail, right? Retail has gone through some pretty dramatic changes over the last six months. And so as you think about a retailer, that’s had to respond to new ways of customer purchasing, things like curbside pickup scenarios, other online changes, you know, they’re gonna potentially be building a net new application and they might start more from a past point of view either, you know, kind of containers at one end of it or all the way to server lists in the sense that they want to be able to focus their expertise on the business logic and the business application and not have to worry about that underlying infrastructure. And so, yeah, we have, you know, people who start with PaaS, people who start with IaaS and almost everything in between, even within the same company. And that’s, I think what we’re about, we’re about providing customers with that flexibility of choice and being able to do it in a consistent environment with consistent tooling and a consistent experience with the Azure Portal and the command line tooling, and then integration with our developer tools, right, and be and be it (Visual Studio) Code and Git in order to provide that end to end solution where you can, it’s almost choose your own adventure. You can start wherever you want to and it is driven by your business need.

Mary Jo Foley (14:29):
Okay. on the topic of IaaS, it was just about a year ago. I think that Microsoft said Linux was about 50% of the IaaS workloads in Azure, which, what I remember when we wrote about that, people were like, no, that can’t be true. There’s no way that can be true. And I’m like, Nope, it’s true. So I’m curious, is that trend still continuing and I don’t know if you can give us an updated number on that or not, but like, is Linux still the main kind of growth spurt in iOS right now?

Erin Chapple (14:59):
Yeah. I don’t have the exact number off hand, but I can definitely confirm that our Linux workloads continue to be a growing trend in Azure and we continue to be over 50%. And, you know, there’s a number of things I think that are driving that, one, you know, our engagement and our relationship with our large enterprise customers. Large enterprises are not a homogeneous environment, right. They have both Linux and Windows. And so as they bring their workloads to the cloud, you know, we’re going to see growth and we’re going to see growth across both the Windows base, as well as the Linux base. The other interesting thing is the AKS service, the Azure Kubernetes Service, you know, it’s our fastest growing compute service ever. And until recently we only supported Linux containers, right? The general availability of Windows container support was earlier this year.

Erin Chapple (15:49):
And so AKS is almost entirely Linux at this point in time. Again, I think that will change over time. But I think that you know, one of the things that we’ve really done from a Microsoft point of view is to engage and be very thoughtful about how we think of our relationship with our contribution, with our support of the open source world. And so, you know, we have many Microsoft employees that hold elected positions in the open source community. Many of our employees have been awarded community participation, and I think that’s a real shift in terms of the value we place on that and how we see that not only helping the community, but also helping ultimately our customers because they are engaging with and using various components of the open source community that are critical to their running their business.

Mary Jo Foley (16:43):
Okay, on the topic of AKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, I still find myself a little confused about AKS versus Service Fabric, because when I read descriptions of these or hear people talking about them, I’m like, wait, aren’t these kind of doing the same thing. So I’m curious, are they doing the same thing? And does Microsoft still actually recommend customers other than Microsoft itself, which has a bunch of products built on Service Fabric to continue to use Service Fabric at this point? Or do you just say, you know, if you’re trying to achieve those kind of goals, use AKS.

Erin Chapple (17:20):
Well, our investments in Service Fabric predate Kubernetes by many years, and you’re familiar with Mary Jo. It still powers lots of Azure’s internal infrastructure. So we continue to support Service Fabric, it’s a place we continue to invest in. It’s very much a thing. I think that the thing that sometimes gets missed is that Service Fabric supports stateful workloads natively, right? Which means you can store data inside the Service Fabric cluster versus attaching to an external storage the way Kubernetes does. And that’s an important capability for Azure, and it’s also important for some customer workloads like gaming, where stateful capability helps really decrease the latency and makes the application more performant. So it really is gonna depend upon the application. Now for most customers, I would say Kubernetes provides the right feature set and has a lot of momentum in the industry. And again, that’s why AKS remains the fastest growing service that we’ve launched in the history of Azure Compute. The one other thing that I’ll call out though, is that we are looking at our investments in Service Fabric and looking at how we can use that to power the next generation of the serverless container platform inside Azure. And so, you know, we can apply some of those perf and scale benefits from Service Fabric, even in the container based world so that our customers can benefit from that investment in the capabilities that we provide.

Mary Jo Foley (18:46):
Hmm. I’m glad you brought up serverless because I feel like a few years ago I was writing a lot about serverless. Like I kept getting briefed on Azure functions and it seemed like, you know, AWS was doing a lot with serverless and Microsoft was, and everybody was, and now I just don’t hear about it as much. So I was curious what’s happening in serverless. And is it still a hot button?

Erin Chapple (19:09):
So the short answer is yes, it’s still a hot button and there’s lots happening. The longer answer I’d say is that, you know, we’ve learned more about the developer community and what developers are looking for is the right tool to build modern applications. So similar to how I’ve talked about providing flexibility on the infrastructure, we won’t really want to provide that flexibility and choice to developers. So all the way from your low code options, right, that really are focused on maximizing productivity to more serverless options, which balance both that productivity, but as well as control, and then all the way to kind of the spectrum of Kubernetes and what you can do in the container space. And if you look at that frame, you know, even within the serverless space, it’s a very broad term that, it crosses a lot of territory. And you know, when we talk to customers, they often have specific needs that they’re trying to address.

Erin Chapple (20:01):
And so I think one of the reasons you’ve heard us move away, maybe from the serverless as an umbrella term is we really want to focus in on, you know, Azure Functions. Azure Functions is extremely popular with customers who have, you know, value high productivity. They just want to write the business logic and not have to worry about the infrastructure, but it’s not just Azure Functions. It’s things like Azure Web Apps, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Container Instances, right. That serverless container investment that we’ve made and we continue to make. And so it’s all about how do we provide customers with attractive economics, you know, as well as the flexibility of invisible infrastructure in order to accelerate their software teams. One of the places that I see is pretty hot right now is actually in the API management space.

Erin Chapple (20:49):
So we have a large kind of restaurant franchise. That’s working with API management and they’ve been able to publish the APIs from their services that are running on app service to both first party web and mobile apps. And so think about it in the recent months as the delivery, you know, service, food service has taken off even more so than it was, you know, by exposing those APIs to food delivery partners in their environment who can then build applications on top of it, right. They’ve been able to create, you know, a new stream of both customers for them and then ultimately business. And so, again, I think there’s a number of different options here, and it really is about providing customers with that choice to be able to tailor the platform to what it is that they’re trying to do for their business and their business applications.

Mary Jo Foley (21:40):
Okay. can I ask you about Azure Arc, as a question? Okay. So last year at Ignite, I think, which was the last time I saw you in person, we talked and heard a lot about Azure Arc, which I felt like is taking Microsoft’s management experience to the next level and making it multi-cloud. I thought when I heard about this at Ignite last year, I was, I have to say I was a little confused and I was trying to kind of parse what it meant and what pieces were there and what pieces weren’t there yet. But I’m curious now, a year later, do you think customers understand what Microsoft’s trying to do with Arc and are they buying into it?

Erin Chapple (22:21):
I’ve been delighted by the response to Azure Arc and how our customers are seeing the value. And I think it goes back to what I talked about earlier in our chat around, you know, hybrid is here, right? It’s not going away. In fact, most customers are running a hybrid environment. And as those customers think about ways to move from on-premises to the cloud, the thing that’s most challenging is not necessarily the technology, it’s the management and operations. And so, you know, for me, Arc at its core is really around providing customers with two things, consistency, and flexibility. You know, the first challenge that Arc addresses is providing that consistent way to govern and operate across Azure on premises and multi-cloud. And we do this by taking a Azure’s control plane and extending it on-premises, into multi-cloud environment.

Erin Chapple (23:16):
And what this enables customers to do is to use Azure’s management capabilities on resources that live outside of Azure. For example, customers can use Azure to set policy, to secure, to manage virtual machines, physical servers, Kubernetes clusters that are running, right, in their on-premise environment, maybe on top of their Azure Stack HCI cluster, maybe on top of a Windows Server machines on top of, you know, other providers infrastructure. And so that really helps the customers have this consistent experience, this single pane of glass in order to be able to reduce that chaos and the complexity they see. So let me give you one example, Fujitsu is a service provider that we work with and, you know, in working with Azure Arc in preview, they’ve been able to quickly deploy a common set of Azure policies on servers that they’re managing both across on-premises and multi-cloud, to be able to optimize their business operations.

Erin Chapple (24:12):
And that has real tangible value in terms of the time and money that they’ve been able to save. Now that the second challenge is really around flexibility, right? And, you know, the reality of most customers being hybrid, providing flexibility on where to run the applications. Cause again, as I said, infrastructure is really all about enabling the applications. That ability to run those applications anywhere they want to is equally important. And so that second challenge that Arc really addresses is providing consistent services across Azure, on premises and multicloud, to enable the portability and flexibility of application deployment and development. So with Azure Arc, it enables customers to deploy, for example, Azure Data Services on any Kubernetes environment. It could be Red Hat OpenShift, to PKS, to VMware. And then with Azure Arc enabled data services, customers can benefit from the evergreen data service and pay only what they use.

Erin Chapple (25:08):
They can leverage the existing infrastructure they have in place. And they have that ability in some sense, late buying to where they want to deploy the application. And so you know, I get example of this KPMG Ignition Tokyo is rolling out a next generation AI-based audit software. That’s built on Azure and they’ve implemented Azure Arc to deliver that seamless solution for clients across multiple hybrid data estates using Azure Arc enabled data services. So consistency of the management and operations, and then the flexibility of the application and services cross, right. That reality of what we see as a hybrid world.

Mary Jo Foley (25:47):
That’s great. I want to talk to you about Gartner. Gartner, they periodically publish magic quadrants for cloud infrastructure and platform services and their latest one is still very bullish about Azure, not surprisingly, but they did ding Microsoft on a couple of counts. And I’d be curious to hear your take on their criticisms. Excuse me. One of them, they said was that Azure has the lowest ratio of availability zones to regions of any vendor. And the other was about guaranteed capacity. And they were talking even before the pandemic that Microsoft was having trouble meeting the demands of customers who wanted guaranteed capacity. So I’m curious if you could talk, even in the most broad strokes about what is Microsoft doing in these two areas, if they are areas of concern for the company.

Erin Chapple (26:42):
Resiliency is incredibly important to our customers and to Microsoft. So let me talk about both the availability, zones and capacity. Microsoft has the most regions globally by far and while our disaster resilience strategy historically has relied solely on region pairs, right? Which we still continue to believe is the best approach to protecting against true disasters. Availability zones are a huge part of our strategy to enable customers to choose the best continuity solution that’s right for their organization. Availability zones are fault isolated locations within an Azure region, and they provide redundant power, cooling network and allow customers to run mission critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to data center failures. Today, we have 14 availability zones that are offered across 10 total regions, including the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Erin Chapple (27:40):
And our roadmap includes delivering availability zones in the 60 plus cloud regions announced with specific new region availability zones to be announced later this month and throughout the rest of the calendar year. So it is important to us and it continues to be an area where we work towards providing coverage across the 60 plus cloud regions that we have currently now today. From a capacity standpoint, we designed Azure to operate at global scale, right? And Microsoft has a global all hazards approach to our business continuity and crisis management planning. Now, during the initial month of the panndemic, we did need to address capacity demands for a small number of customers and the company. You know, I was part of it, acted quickly, prioritized the capacity first for our life and health first responders. And then we came together to support all of our customers and capacity was restored for all the regions and restrictions removed in April.

Erin Chapple (28:40):
And we were encouraged by the positive trajectory that we continue to see from the steps that we learned and took during that period of time, you know. For example, you know, we did see significant increases in our cloud services. We have some more than 200 million meetings in a single day in the month of March that generated 4.1 billion meeting minutes. And and so being able to respond to this and take care of our customers and continue to invest you know, and learn from what we’ve done. We again are very encouraged by the trajectory we’re seeing and the steps that we took.

Mary Jo Foley (29:21):
Great. I have one more question for you before we’re done. And, I wanted to throw in a WVD question, Windows Virtual Desktop. I know this because of the pandemic and even before the pandemic, this service, which is hosted on Azure is one of the fastest growing services of all time for Microsoft. And so I’m like kind of trying to figure out how to think

Mary Jo Foley (29:42):
About WVD, right? So I’ve got some of my readers who say, WVD, that’s the future Windows like from, you know, in the near term, everything is just going to be a virtual desktop and there’s not going to be any more local desktops. Then you’ve got other people saying, no, I want there to continue to be locally installed Windows clients. And I want to keep working that way. So my question for you is when I’m thinking about WVD, do I think of it almost like I think about hybrid and cloud or is the end game someday WVD is the future of Windows.

Erin Chapple (30:20):
This is Erin’s personal opinion. I think it is exactly like hybrid.

Mary Jo Foley (30:26):
I kind of do too. So I’m glad to hear you say that.

Erin Chapple (30:30):
It’s about choice, choice and flexibility for the customer. And there are going to be scenarios, like, are you going to be cloud connected with the right internet bandwidth in some, you know, super remote location, or when you’re out on a oil rig? I don’t know, and so I think for governance compliance, you know, all of the reasons we see customers continuing to invest in, on premises infrastructure, as well as wanting to have redundancy of their solution. I think you’re going to continue to see both the on premises, so to say, which is the Windows client and the Windows desktop, in it’s form that we know and love. As well as WVD be places that we continue to invest in that we see customers delight in how they use that in order to be productive and get their work done.

Mary Jo Foley (31:21):
Okay, good. I’m glad I’m on the same page with you on that because so many people are like, Nope, this is it. Like WVD, they’re not going to do anything more on Windows. And I’m like, ah, I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right to me, but yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (31:35):
Anyway, Erin, thank you so much for doing this chat. I know how busy you are, especially with all the work from home and craziness. So thanks again for making the time.

Erin Chapple (31:44):
I have to say Mary Jo, it’s been a delight and honestly, you know, we’re heading into Ignite, which is my favorite time of year for many reasons. But one of is that we normally, you know, get to connect in person and catch up. And so it was lovely to chat with you today, and I hope you have great plans for Ignite. I hope your listeners have registered and are going to join us. We’ve got some amazing demos, customer testimonials and just announcements that you won’t want to miss. So thanks for having me today.

Mary Jo Foley (32:13):
Yeah, I’m excited. I also love Ignite and I’m looking forward to it next week, going to be covering it all around the clock. Well, not really, but sort of and for everyone else, who’s listening to our chat right now, or reading this chat. I will be posting more information soon on Petri about who my next guest is going to be. Once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter for that guest. And in the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these MJF Chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.