“Hybrid cloud,” “hybrid infrastructure” and “hybrid IT” are all terms bandied around Silicon Valley lately. Industry experts say that businesses will need a mix of on-prem, public cloud and private cloud to enter the Digital Age. But, practically speaking, what does this really mean? Can an application really live in several different places?

John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer of VMware Inc., during day two of the AWS re:Invent event to try and breakdown hybrid IT in real world terms.

“Most applications don’t live in seven places,” Miniman said. He added that Amazon’s definition of hybrid is more about building on applications rather than dividing them across environments.

This may entail taking VMware [virtual machines], hosting them on AWS and then putting server-less devices on the edge, not just for IoT, but for other applications as well. This “new hybrid,” as Miniman put it, “is definitely very interesting, and there’s a lot of nuance there.”

Poonen spoke enthusiastically about the company’s recent deal to run the VMware cloud on AWS.

He stated the result of this synergy is to bring developers and IT operations together to “take an existing application, extend it into the cloud and then build a bunch of the developer services that Andy [Jassy, Amazon Web Services Inc. CEO] and the team are doing such a prolific job of expanding.”

Database turf war

Poonen said his takeaway from the re:Invent keynote is that Amazon is going after the database business in a big way.

Furrier noted the extra staying power a database foothold will give them along with APIs. “The world is certainly API driven. The database and APIs seem to be quote ‘sticky, lock-in specs,’ if you will. Competitively, that’s an advantage,” he argued.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: AWS and other companies sponsor some AWS re:Invent segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE