Given the latest numbers from Amazon.com, Inc.’s Amazon Web Services, it’s clear that Cloud has crossed the chasm into the mainstream and is consistently producing value. This is good news for Jerry Chen, a venture capitalist and partner at Greylock Partners, who made an early investment in Docker, Inc. Chen joined theCUBE during DockerCon 2015 to talk about how he sees the waves of innovation changing the industry.

“I always say you want to ride a wave bigger than you,” he said. “So you’re going to fight Oracle in the database market; and you’re Cloudera, you’re going to ride the Big Data wave. You’re going to fight Oracle’s old business, or Microsoft, or even VMware, you ride the Cloud wave. So you look at the SAS companies like Salesforce.com, Workday, ServiceNow, how do you fight the previous generation? You ride a wave bigger than your opponents, and that’s going to be the Cloud wave.”

A fundamental change in IT

This is fundamentally changing the way IT is done, Chen said, including “how it’s purchased, how it’s used, how applications are built, how it’s deployed.” He thinks Docker “is really at the center of a lot of this transformation.”

The shift to containers and programmable hardware is enabling something that Chen calls DDI, Developer-Defined Infrastructure.

“You look at these waves, and [in] the 80s and 90s you had physical-defined infrastructure …. We debated CPU architectures. And then you had kind of software-defined infrastructure, where you separated the logical from the physical. Operating systems, Red Hat, Microsoft …. VMware was kind of the pinnacle of that software-defined world,” he said. “But what happens is when you define infrastructure in software, you can program it.”

The beauty of the Cloud wave

That’s where the real innovation comes in.

“That’s the beauty of this Cloud wave, and why I call it DDI. … Every piece of infrastructure, from storage to networking to compute, has an API … and just like Docker really is the API for the Cloud, it enables developers to define how they want to build their applications, how to network them … and how you want to secure them, how you want to store them.”

This change gives developers ultimate control, allowing them to finetune their products.

“So the beauty of this generation is, now developers are determining how apps are built, not just at the end-user, iPhone app layer — the data layer, the storage layer, the networking layer [too], so every single level is being disrupted by this concept of DDI,” Chen said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon.

Image source: SiliconANGLE.tv