As a company well established on the journey to all-flash storage computing services, Pure Storage Inc. has worked hard to find hybrid cloud issues that combine both the cloud and on-premises for storage. Pure Storage has learned a lot along the way to help customers find their way through countless questions and complexities when it comes to storage and cloud technology — because, as it turns out, full-on usage of the cloud isn’t always a cheaper option.

Matt Kixmoeller (pictured), vice president of strategy at Pure Storage, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed all-flash storage, the cloud, and navigating hybrid solutions (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Your thoughts on the strategy for the cloud?

Kixmoeller: We’re about 10 years into the journey here at Pure. When I met with CIOs two, three years ago, you often heard, ‘We’re going all cloud, or we’re going to be cloud-first.’ And you know, now they’re a few years into it, and they’ve realized that cloud is a very powerful weapon in their arsenal for agility, for flexibility — but it’s not necessarily cheaper. And so I think the swing back to really believing in hybrid is the model of the day.

I think the other thing people have realized in that journey is that the cloud really works best when you build an app for the cloud natively, but what if you have a bunch of on-prem apps that are in traditional architecture? And so one of the things we’ve really focused on is how we can help customers take their mission-critical applications and move them seamlessly to the cloud without re-architecture, because for most customers, that’s where they’re going to start.

As you guys have been successful on-premises with the cloud, how do you make those economics be seamless, as well as the operations?

Kixmoeller: It’s been nice to see over the last couple of years people realizing that both the cloud and on-prem are cost effective in different ways. I think about owning a car. Owning a car is relatively cost effective for me, and there’s times when taking an Uber is relatively cost effective. And I think they’re both cheap. When you look at one metric, though, about what I pay per mile, it’s way more expensive … to take an Uber. If I look at the acquisition cost, it’s way more expensive to own a car, right? So I think both of them provide value in my life in the way that hybrid does today, but once you start to use both, then the operational part of your question comes in. How do I think about these two different worlds? And … we believe that storage is actually one of the areas where these two worlds are totally different.

And so a couple things we’ve done to try to bridge them together. First off on the cost side, one of the things we realized was that people that are going to run large amounts of on-prem infrastructure increasingly want to do it in the cloud model. And so we introduced a new pricing model that we call the ES2, Evergreen Storage Service, which will essentially allow you to subscribe to our storage even in your own data center. And so you can have an optics experience in the cloud; you can have an optics experience on-prem. From the operational point of view, I think we’re trying to get to the same experience as well, such that you have a single storage experience from a manageability and automation point of view across both.

This is the renaissance of application development right now. How do you guys attack that market?

Kixmoeller: The mindset around data is one of the biggest differences between the old world and the new world. And if you think about the old world of applications, you had monolithic databases that kind of privately owned their own data stores. And the whole name of the game was delivering that as reliably as possible, kind of locking it down and making it super reliable. If you look at the idea of the web scale application, the idea of an application is broken up into lots of little microservices, and those microservices somehow have to work together on data — and so what does it mean at the data level? It’s not this kind of monolithic database anymore; it’s got to be this open, shared environment.

And so I think one of the bigger interesting challenges right now is, ‘How do you get data constructs to actually go both ways?’ If you want to take an on-prem app that kind of is built around the database, you’ve got to figure out a way to move it to the cloud and run it reliably. But on the flip side of the coin, if you want to build in web skill tools and then be hybrid and run some of those things on-prem, well you need an object store on-prem. And most people don’t have that. And so … this whole kind of compatibility to make hybrid a reality, it’s forcing people on both sides of the wire to understand the other architecture and make sure they’re compatible both ways.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.):

Photo: SiliconANGLE