>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural DevNet Create event targeting the DevOps open source community as they put their toe in the water, their foray into a community approach to build on top of their success of their classic developer program, DevNet, which is only three years old. Shouldn't call it classics. It's actually emerging still and growing. Arnesc is our pitch, Joshipura GM, Network and Orchestration at the Linux Foundation. I'm also joined with my cohost Peter Burris. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again, welcome back. Cube alumni. Obviously open networking. You guys are involved, you're having a great show, we cover it every year. Open Networking Summit, among other things. Huge demand for the technologies. An appetite for content in your area. Here at Cisco DevNet Create, you're seeing the emergence of Cisco taking their roots in networking and plumbing and operations, which, by the way, you know from the networking world. Sacred cows all over the place. Bringing it to the wild west, agile developer who wants infrastructure at Cisco is bringing that application meets infrastructure saying, we're going to bring programmable networking. That's music to the ears to the developers so we are getting infrastructure as code. That's your wheelhouse. What's going on in the Linux Foundation to continue this momentum? How do you guys look at this trend, give us the update on how the Linux Foundation is participating, supporting, getting involved with this programmable networking infrastructure as code trend. >> Sure. So first of all, let me baseline everybody. Linux Foundation is here to create the largest shared technology investment by building sustainable ecosystems. That's the mission in life. Within the Linux Foundation obviously the most successful open source project is Linux. But we're way beyond Linux. We host a whole set of open source projects starting from cloud native, CNCF, cloud foundry to blockchain projects like hyperledger, automotive grade Linux and a whole variety of Let's Encrypt, you name it. That we facilitate this shared technology investment. The area I own, which is networking, has several projects up and down the stack. All the way from data plane acceleration to orchestration, analytics and it's intended for carriers, enterprise, and cloud service providers including one of the most recent, highly successful and much in demand project called ONAP which is a full network automation stack. Open network automation platform. Which again, is an open source way to connect apps to infrastructure. This is the movement that you just mentioned and I'm really excited that the community's finally realizing the implications of the three letter acronym that started this whole thing called SDN. (laughing) >> SDN, SD when, a lot of stuff going on. Software defined, data center, obviously Cisco has a huge dominant preposition in the enterprise, data center in particular, but also they have a huge service provider business MSL. All that, they've been connecting networks on internet scale since the '90s. Really doing a great job. Now they got to really think about the future. What's your view there because I think Linux Foundation, you guys have been great stewards for sustainable ecosystems, but now Cisco has to put their toe into the new ecosystem. What's the meaning of that? What's the view, outlook? What's your take on where they're at? It looks good off the tee, middle of the fairway as we were saying earlier. Messaging's good, 90% of the content's community, agenda's relevant, looks good. >> I think our perspective is there's a major disruption happening. But it's not a technology disruption, it's an end user disruption. What I mean by that is the end users, whether it be carriers, whether it be enterprises whether it be cloud service providers, they are demanding that open source be part of the agenda. The reason for that is very simple. It's providing more agility, providing the access to the source code to allow for much faster feature development. They want to contribute, they want to develop the ecosystem to meet their requirements and everybody is unique as we all know. What is happening is, in this new environment, vendors, service providers, carriers, everybody is re-inventing themselves. They're re-inventing themselves with a new business model and the business model is essentially, how do I take a leadership role in developing this shared technology investment? It's not about a box. It's not about the fastest and the smallest and the largest switch routers, etc. It's about a software plan. >> It used to be about free software. Now, nothing's free because people are putting their company's name on the line. Their business models now are integrated to open source and they have people involved in other parts so technically it's free software but it's really, technically not free. But this is the new business model, this is what people are doing. >> I think you can-- >> It's tier one resource. >> If you look at the world's largest carriers today, whether it's in China, whether it's in US or in Europe, they have deployments that are built on open source. Open source networking specifically is becoming mainstream in terms of deployment. >> What's the hottest mainstream product right now? Is it SDN? What's the hottest in the-- >> SDN is a technology. SDN, NFV, network function virtualization. Those are technologies that enable the deployment of open source projects. We got projects like Open Daylight, ODL, OPNFV, ONAP, these are just names. Again as networking-- >> What's the hottest here, NFV or-- >> Right now ONAP is the hottest. As networking guys we always make these three or four letter acronyms so sorry to bug you. >> That's okay I don't mind. >> But that's how it is. >> So one of the observations at least we made at Wikibon and we made it here a couple times, is that open source has proven to be magnificently successful when the target is well defined. Other words, conventions of an operating system, there's no disagreement about what an operating system does. Hence open source could create a Linux that has just been wildly successful. Open source has not been as good at redefining the new use cases or where the technology might go. Therefore, a lot of times open source developers end up looking at each other and making each other's tools work. Which is, for example, in the big data universe, restricted the adoption of Aduke and the ability of Aduke for example. So getting value you out of it, but it's not as successful as it might be. That raises a question. I'm wondering what role you play in all this. Is there a need for a degree of open source leadership that can set the big picture, the longterm trends without undermining the innovative and inventive freedom of how developers have demonstrated they want to work together? What do you think? >> I think that's an excellent question. What happens is just by throwing software on say, Github, doesn't make you an open source project. I mean yeah, it does make you open source but that doesn't make you a successful open source project. You need a community behind it. You need a community of developers and a sustained ecosystem. One of the things we are championing, and I'm personally driving that agenda, which is thought leadership on how do these pieces fit together. As we are moving from components that were disagregated in networking to production ready software components, to production ready solutions, these all need to fit together and developed in its entirety. When you look at it holistically, from a solutions perspective, the most important thing that matters are use cases. So what we have done-- >> Totally agree. >> What we have done is for every project, strategically, when the requirements are laid down, I think of that as a requirements document. Or when the architecture is laid down. The end user use cases are explicitly defined for the community. The architecture is laid out. In that framework, the Linux Foundation facilitates the developments, the infrastructure the devOps, the agile model to come and co-create this technology in this area. >> So that's how you're doing the ideation. Are you then taking that and stepping up and also doing some of the design work? And it sounds like you are. >> We facilitate the community to do the design work, we give them architectural part leadership, we give them inter-project cross-leadership. For example, we have, in my group, in networking we have about 11 plus projects. There are multiple data plane acceleration projects. When you're putting a solution, you want portion of data plane acceleration to ride on a control plane, to ride on orchestration, to be tested end to end. Projects like OPNFV for example, they test all the pieces. They test things like FDIO, which is an acceleration project, they test open stack. Which again, it's not Linux Foundation but we do bring all the pieces together. Effectively the end user has it relatively easy to adopt and start installing. >> Congratulations, I saw that the Linux Foundation recently hired Sheryl Chamberlain as the Chief of Staff. Cube alumni been on many times, shout out for Cheryl. So you guys are growing. How are you guys handling the growth? I want to get your thoughts and you don't have to speak for the whole foundation but in general, for the folks not necessarily familiar with the inner workings of the Linux Foundation, like open source, you guys are always evolving and growing. How are you serving your stakeholders, your members and taking care and maintaining the sustainable ecosystems? >> The difference between a typical, throw the code up on GitHub versus actively managed, sustainable ecosystem is where Linux Foundation comes in. What we provide to projects in different capacity, is everything from IT as a service, marketing as a service, program management, thought leadership, executive directors, PR, media, and most importantly, events, global events to get the word out. All of that service, if you may, is what facilitates the community. Once the community is all coming together, things happen. I'll just give you an example, we just completed a developer summit on one of the projects called ONAP. Ran out of capacity, clearly. 200 people from world-wide, top-notch architects got in a room and they discussed how to merge almost 15 million lines of code. And they figured it out in four days. >> Over coffee. >> Not over coffee, it's like four days. >> I'm kidding (laughing). >> But they figured it out. I think that level of facilitation that we can provide, because you can't have it on a blank piece of paper. You need some framework, some governance, some model and some processes on how to do it. That's what Linux Foundation excels at. >> I want to move into the third area I want to discuss with you, us. You mentioned the three major customer and end users. Carriers, enterprises, cloud service providers. How do you guys relate and serve those customers when there's other stuff going on in the industry? We see Open Compute, Facebook's doing a lot of stuff, Google's throwing in a ton of open source. We have yet to see Amazon make their move with donating really good networking stuff. Certainly we've seen some machine learning out there, but, we're expecting to see an arm's race of presents coming in. It's like open bar at the hotel. More goodness is coming in from the big guys sponsoring great code. >> My mission is this year, at least, one of the things I've laid out at ONS this year was to harmonize the ecosystem. And harmonization doesn't mean merge it all so now we're one solution. Harmonization means understand where each other solutions interwork, inter-operate. If they overlap, we end up merging the projects, like what we did for ECOMP and OpenAL. That's one of the missions. Now in that process, we're looking, not just within the Linux Foundation and in my role, but also outside. That includes not just the software stacks, but also the hardware infrastructure layers. That would be OCP, that could be TIP, etc. And several others that are coming up. As well as harmonization with standards bodies. We believe that standards and open source coexist and there is a complimentary relationship there. We've been actively working with several of the standards. MEF, Team Forum, etc., etc. Trying to get a view. We just published a white paper on the Linux Foundation website on harmonizing standards on open source. There is a whole movement of ecosystem because at the end of the day, a carrier wants to solve a problem. They don't care how we solve it. I mean they do but not in a fragmented sense. And that problem is different from what an enterprise wants to solve and it's different from what a cloud. Now to your earlier question, the great news is cloud carriers and enterprises, they're looking and smelling the same as cloud native apps, cloud container networking and open source networking, they're all start combining, coming together. >> So I want to share with you a comment we had the other day. There's a story of the four wolves that were put into Yellowstone Park and changed the ecosystem cause Yellowstone had a river problem. So they injected four wolves into the ecosystem. Turns out, the deer went away, things started growing, and the whole ecosystem became so much more sustainable. Not that I'm trying to get at who's the wolves, but balancing and coexistence is the point here. You can live with wolves and not get eaten, unless you're their target. But there's a balancing act on ecosystems. And to have a good, sustainable ecosystem you need to have freshness, certainly standards and new blood, new ideas. What is your vision on coexistence because this is one of those things that we're seeing right now emerging, less about my project's better than your project. You're seeing a lot more collaboration going across communities. >> Correct. >> More than ever. >> A hundred percent agree. I think the fundamental problem has always been only the technical geeks understand the differences between the projects. And then the layer of abstraction in people, whether it's management or media, they start looking and feeling as if they are competing. I'll give you an example. In the data plane acceleration kit, we have projects like FDIO, DPDK, Iovisor, OVS, there's lots of projects there. And people like, oh my god, there's so many. Well, guess what? One of them is a kernel driven thing, other one is a set of libraries, third one builds on the libraries. So that level of understanding is missing. >> John: Interplay between all the projects. >> It's interplay. >> Peter Burris: And dependency. >> And dependencies. So that's one of the things that we want to highlight here, very significantly this year in terms of just sheer education. Because part of the coexistence is understanding each other. If we understand each other on what role each of the projects play, it's easy. Whether it's Linux Foundation or outside. So that's the first step. The second step is if they're complimentary, I want to take the next step and test them out for inter-operability. Because now you have put two pieces together. Remember, networking was a fully black box five years ago. >> Literally. >> We took it, blew it up, fragmented it, dis-segregated it, and now we got to pull... And we got tremendous innovation out of each of these layers. We were very successful on the whole disaggregation and SDN disruption. Not it's time to put it into a production ready solution. As we put those things in, we'll see that harmonization is going to play a big role. >> Arpit great to have you on here, sharing the insight. Always great to get the inner workings plus a great perspective on the industry trends and congratulations on your success and we'll continue to follow you and all your work in the networking area, all the projects Stu Miniman and team. We're going to continue to see you at the Open Networking Summit, among all the great shows. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, live coverage here in San Francisco, as part of our exclusive two day coverage of the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create event. I'm John here with Peter Burris, we'll be back with more after this short break, stay with us. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director