To understand the direction of the storage industry is to grasp the transformation taking place as the computing world becomes cloud-native and developer-centric.

While many enterprises have adopted a hybrid model to leverage capabilities offered on-premises and in the cloud, the overall infrastructure has also become programmable as developer-generated applications manage key tasks. Eleven years after its founding, Pure Storage Inc. is moving into its next decade with a vision to match this reality.

“We looked at what we wanted to do in this second decade, and we created this vision that basically said that storage should not be something that customers need to work on every single day, it really should be something that developers can just call upon by declarations in their code,” said Charlie Giancarlo (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Pure. “Think of it as storage as code. That’s what the cloud did when you’re in the cloud and we’re doing exactly the same thing when you’re on-prem.”

Giancarlo spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio. They discussed how the recent acquisition of Portworx Inc. fit with Pure’s vision, an update on the company’s beta project with Microsoft Azure and a future where infrastructure becomes invisible.

Developers define services

Pure’s acquisition of Portworx in September was a clear signal that the storage company would further its vision by embracing the developer community. The combination of Pure’s expertise in data storage services with Portworx’s Kubernetes Data Services Platform created appealing options for the software DevOps ecosystem.

“The beautiful thing about Portworx is that now we can do the same thing for cloud native applications that are container based,” Giancarlo explained. “They brought a software defined layer for containers that allowed developers to get up and running very quickly, with a full set of high-reliability and high-resiliency storage services for their container environment. Now customers will have a Kubernetes-based orchestration layer that allows developers to really define what type of data storage services that they want in their code and have it delivered.”

This model of defining necessary services and then having them automatically provided is at the heart of an “as-a-service” business. Pure has built its own bridge with hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure, to span public and private clouds in delivering data storage services.

Last year, Pure announced that its Cloud Block Store offering would enter technical preview on Azure and the results have been promising so far, according to Giancarlo.

“We’ve gotten a number of large customers who have committed to moving to Azure and are on Pure today,” Giancarlo said. “They have bought Pure-as-a-Service because it provides them with a unified subscription to both environments.”

Pure’s strategic embrace of developers and cross-platform storage service delivery is a harbinger of a not-too-distant future where processing power is transferred from the user and infrastructure becomes invisible.

“The way I think of the future is infrastructure as code,” Giancarlo said. “In the future, you may not have a computer sitting on your desk anymore, just a monitor for you to see and a way for you to interact. The processing power may exist on a private cloud or public cloud or a SaaS provider, and from a user’s or developer’s point of view, we make the infrastructure disappear.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE