(computer mouse clicking) >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at Google for the sixth annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards and we're very excited to be joined by one of the award winners, Beth Cohen. You are with Verizon, congratulations on the award, Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, yes. >> So tell me what you do for Verizon. >> So what I do for Verizon is I come up with new products, and we've been focusing over the last few years on software defined networking, which is a brand new, cutting edge area that not only Verizon is new to but also the entire world is new to. So what we're doing is we're taking cloud concepts and applying them to network services and I'm actually involved, in addition to that, in a new initiative called edge computing. So there's going to be white paper coming out shortly on that and that all came out of my work at Verizon on the products, the software defined networking products I've been working on. >> Wow, so you are a pioneer. We'll get to more of that a little bit later but what are some of the things that excite you about being on the leading edge of software defined networking and edge computing? >> Well, what's really exciting to me is working with the customers and getting them excited about this new technology and how it's really changing the world. And they're all excited about it because they understand that the future is here and that they need to embrace it. >> So one of the things that I found was really interesting when I was doing some research on you is you've worked with several technology companies to help them change their product strategy direction, taking advantage of the cloud. So I mentioned the work pioneer earlier but you're clearly influential. How have you been able to work with companies of presumably diverse cultures to help them change direction? >> So that's an interesting question. The company has to be ready for it and some companies are not, actually. But the companies, fortunately I've had the opportunity to work with some companies that were ready for either whether they recognized, in one case, their market was disappearing, literally, as their customers were leaving and they didn't have any new customers and they recognized that they needed to take a new direction to survive. And what they did is they had some really unique, interesting technology around high availability and survivability, which is something that companies really need but theirs was a hardware based solution and what I helped them do is to really come up with a new way of looking at it that was a software based solution that they could apply to classrooms. >> Wow, so tell me about the influence there. What's that process like to show them, like you were saying, some of them, customers are drying up, obviously this is an impetus for change, what were some of the obstacles that you helped them identify and overcome to identify, "This is why we have to shift direction, "this is going to be much more beneficial?" >> So, they obviously were in great pain, as their balance sheet was drifting down but they had to realize that their skill sets, that they had some people that had some great skill sets but they had to really think differently about what they were doing. So one of the things I did is help them understand the new technologies that they were going to be adopting. So I did some training, worked out some training with them and gave them a two day training session on a cloud technology and what it was about and how it could apply to them. I also had to understand what they were doing and their secret sauce so that I could really extend that and say, "Okay, your job's not going to go away "but you really need to add some additional skills "to be successful in this new direction." >> What are some of the fears, technology fears, that you've heard as, not just an influencer helping companies to make the right directional changes, but also even at your current career at Verizon? What are some of the things that people are afraid of regarding technology that you can help them see, "Ah, it's not so bad?" (laughing) >> So, you know, Verizon's a telecom and telecom's, what I like to say to people is, "What we're selling is reliability, right, "so every time you make that cell phone call, "it goes through, right?" And Verizon prides itself on that and every time you have that connection, it works every time. Well, there's a lot of technology and a lot of operations and a lot of support services that go on behind the scenes to make that actually happen. And the general public's probably just not aware of that. But the people inside the company are very afraid to get away from, "Well, we've always done this and we have to continue doing "this because we do have that five nines reliability that we "have to deliver," and so it's very difficult to say, "Oh, well we'll do it differently now." So, there has to be a lot of education around, and gaining the trust that yes, this new technology can be used and can deliver those five nine reliability statistics and SLA's that you're used to delivering. >> Do you think it's more of a fear of maybe cultural change than it is actual technology? >> I'd say it's probably a combination of both. Verizon's a technology company so obviously we embrace technology and we have a lot of really smart people working for the company who love technology. But we also, we want to service our customers and we don't want to get that angry phone call about, "The network's down." So, there's kind of a combination to make sure that we deliver to our customers what they expect. >> Exactly. So I mentioned the word pioneer earlier, you have a really interesting career path that I think is very inspirational. In the last couple minutes that we have here, share with us about, how did you get from what you studied in school to being a leader in software defined networking at Verizon? >> Wow, so I studied architecture, as in building architecture, I went to Rhode Island School of Design, which is completely, totally opposite. Although, I do tell people, I learned a whole lot about creativity and critical thinking, which is very valuable skills to apply to being a pioneer because when you're in cutting edge, what I spend most of my time doing is connecting the dots and saying, "Oh, this technology can be applied here," or, "These two technologies can work together, "have you ever thought of that?" "Oh wow, never." (laughing) So that's why I end up spending my career being on the cutting edge of things. >> I love that. You bring up a great point that is, in a lot of fields, no matter what you study, there are great lessons to be learned from, for example, applying the creativity and technology, there's a great value there and so I think that's very inspiring to others who might be interested in different things and know that there's a lot of cross pollination. Last question-- >> I have one more comment about that. >> Oh, please go for it. >> There's no such thing as wasted time, everything I've done over the years has always ended up being a learning experience for me. I spent two years being a cook at a fancy French restaurant in Phillidelphia and that was a learning experience too. (laughing) >> And I love that and you're absolutely right, all these experiences build one on the other on the other and I agree with you that, and I hope a lot of people feel the same, that there isn't a waste of time, it's not a wrong step, it's something that you can learn from and they'll be a better person, a better worker, a better boss for it. >> And a mean cook. >> Exactly, I got to get some recipes from you. So last question, the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud award, really quickly, how did you find out about that and what does this award mean to you? >> I'm very excited about it. I have to admit, it was a big surprise for me. Somebody nominated me and they sent me a note on LinkedIn and I had completely forgotten about it and then I get this email and so I was like just stunned so I'm very excited about it. >> And it seems, like I've said, I've used the word pioneer a number of times, and you're very inspiring and I'm sure that the people that bestowed the award are very thrilled to have you in the class as this is the sixth year. >> Yes. >> Well Beth, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your story and again, congratulations on the award. >> Thank you again. >> I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at Google, thanks so much for watching. Bye for now. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation; Red Hat, an additional ecosystem of support. (upbeat synthesizer music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my cohost John Troyer. This is The CUBE, worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Coming into the show this year, here, at OpenStack, discussion of edge was something that had a little bit of buzz. Last year's show in Austin, the telecommunication all of the NFV solutions were definitely one of the highlights. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Beth Cohen, who is the SDN and NFV Network Product Strategy at Verizon. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, yes. >> All right, so Beth, I mean, we hear cloud in a box, Edge, all those pieces in the keynote, Monday. People are excited, you know, telecommunications. I worked in telecom back in the '90s. I'm excited to see that people are getting involved and looking at this, but before we get into all the tech, just tell us, briefly, about you and your role inside Verizon. >> Sure. So, I actually work at Verizon as a New Product Strategist, so I come up with new products, so I do product management. This is actually my second product for Verizon. The previous one was Secure Cloud Interconnect which is a very successful product. Who would have thought that connecting privately to the cloud would be a good idea? It turns out, everybody thinks that's an excellent idea, but I worked in telecom back, for GTE, back in the 1990s and through BBN, so I've been in this industry for a while and I've always stayed kind of on the cutting edge of things, so I'm very excited to be working on these cutting-edge projects within Verizon. >> All right, so speaking of cutting edge, let's cut to the Edge. >> Beth: Cut to the Edge (laughs). >> And, give our audience a little bit about what the announcement was, >> Sure. >> the actual product itself. >> So, Virtual Network Services, is the product. We originally announced it in July with a universal CP box. That box was not a, what we're calling a white box which I think is the industry term, now. That one was based on the Juniper NFX250 which is, we call, a gray box, so it's using the Juniper NFX software, but the new, new announcement is this is truly a white box. It's an x86 box. It's generic, any x86 will work, and, in fact, the product has, we realized, actually, working with customers that some customers want to have a very small box, very small footprint, low cost, that only supports maybe two, possibly three, NFVs, Virtual Network Functions, all the way up to our largest box, is 36 core. So, we have four core at the bottom, so that's used for the coffee shops or the small retail-type functions where they're only looking for security in routing or security in SDN or SD-WAN or whatever, so very small, compact use all the way up to 36 core which can support, you know, 10 or 12 different functions, so load balancing, routing, security, whatever you want, >> Yeah. >> cloud in a box. >> There's so many pieces of OpenStack and they've been, for years, talking about the complexity. This, really, if I understand it right, I mean, it's OpenStack at the edge in a small box, so how do we kit such a complicated thing in a little box and what kind of functionality does that bring? You know, what will customers get with it? >> So, obviously, it's, we didn't take old everything, >> Right. >> of course, so, you know, it does include Neutron for the networking and it does include Nova in the computes and so it has the core components that you need for OpenStack. And, why did we choose that? Because OpenStack really gave us that consistent platform across both out at the edge and also within the core, so we are building the hosted network services platform which we're using internally, as well, to host our, to support our network services and we're also supporting customers on this same platform. So, that gives us the ability to give a customer experience both out at the edge and within the core. So, of course, everybody wants to know the secret source. How did we cram that in? Containers, so we containerize OpenStack. One of the requirements is it had to be a single core, so it is a single core in the box because, of course, particularly in a small box, you want to leave as much space as possible for services that our customers want because the OpenStack is the infrastructure that supports it all. >> That's great, I mean, so, Beth, that was one of the highlights of the whole show, for me, right. I like when tech blows my mind a little bit and the idea of something that we might have run on a some embedded Linux source or embedded OS before, now, it's actually running a whole cloud platform, in a box, in my office, was amazing. As you're looking at the center of the network versus the edge, is that one, to you and to network ops, is that one big cloud, is that a cloud of clouds? What's kind of the architecture? >> Beth: Cloud of clouds. >> Yeah. >> Is it fog? (co-hosts laughing) >> It's, yeah, you could say it is a fog, because one of the things when you pull a network to the edge like that, Verizon lives, I mean, we live and breathe networks and the networks are WANs, Wide Area Networks, right, they're everywhere, so we live and breathe that every day. So, traditionally, as I mentioned in the keynote, is that cloud has been sort of the data center centric, right, and that changes the equation because, if you think about it, most data center centric clouds, the network ends at, there's some mystery thing that happens and the end, right? It just goes to that network router, you know, NNI, network-to-network net router and it just kind of disappears, right? Well, of course, we know what's on the other side, so what we've done is we've said, okay, we have functionality within that data center, but we've expanded that out to the edge and we understand that you can't just have everything sitting in the cloud and then rely on that edge to just work, so you need to move pieces of it out so it's not reliant on that inside data center. So, there's tools back there, but if that data center connection goes away, that function will still work out at the edge. >> That's great. You talked about both SDN and NFV, a big conversation at OpenStack for the last several years. >> Yeah. >> Can you talk a little bit about maybe the state of SDN and NFV and how you all are looking at that and are we there yet? What do we still, >> (laughs) Are we there yet? >> what places do you still see we need to go? >> So, when I worked with the marketing team, they were like, "Oh, we're going to have to use this NFV term. "We have to use the SDN," and when I talk to customers, inevitably, they're like, "What is the NFV stuff?" They have no idea, so, really, at the end of the day, I see NFV as a telco thing. Absolutely, we need it, but we have to translate what that means to customers because all that back-end stuff, as far as they're concerned, that's magic. That's the magic: that we deliver the services. Those packets just arrive, they do what they're supposed to do. So, I say, okay, network services is really what you're talking about, because they understand, "Oh, yeah, I need that security, I need that firewall, "I need that WAN Optimizer, I need that load balancer." That, they understand. >> Yeah. >> Well, Beth, I, with my telecom background, I think of, there's lots of hardware, there's lots of cabling, there's the challenges that you have with wireless and we're talking a lot about 5G, you're talking about software, though, and it's delivering >> Yeah. >> those services that the customer needs, so, right, is that what they ask for? Is it, I need these pieces and now I can do it via software as opposed to before, I had to, you know, we talked, it's the appliances to the software move? >> Right. >> What are the, your customers asking for and how are they embracing this? >> Well, so our customers are very excited. I can't think of a single customer that I have gone to that have said, "Why would I do that?" They're all saying, "No, this is really exciting," and so what they're doing is they're really rethinking the network because they're used to having stacks of boxes, so the appliance base, you know, that was really pioneered back, of course, Cisco sort of pioneered it back in the '90s but I remember talking to Infoblox back in the, oh, like the early 2000s when they came out with DHCP DNS appliance and I was like, "Wow, that's so cool." So, this is sort of the next generation, so why do you need to have six different boxes that do a single thing? Why don't we just make it a cloud in the box and put all those functions together and service chain them? That gives you a lot more flexibility. You're not stuck with that proprietary hardware and then worrying about, I mean, I can't tell you how many customers want to do this for tech refresh. They have end-of-life equipment that the vendor is saying, "Forget it, (laughs) this is 10-year-old equipment. "We're not supporting it anymore." >> Yeah, but what are the security implications, here, though? We've seen the surface area of where attacks can come from just seems to be growing exponentially. I think, I go to the edge, I've got way more devices, there's more vulnerabilities. Your last product, you said, was security. How does security fit into all of this? What are you hearing from your costumers? How do you partner with other people? >> So, security is absolutely paramount to our customers. As I mentioned in the talk, there was a, we did a survey of our customers. Security was absolutely the top priority, but security's a lot more sophisticated, as you said, than it used to be and the vectors for attack are much more sophisticated and so it's not enough to just have a firewall. That's, your attack is, you know, the sqiushy inside and the hard outside, forget it. That's just (laughs)-- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get it. >> That's just not there anymore. >> Indeed, the moats are gone. They're in the castle. >> Yeah. >> They're in the castle, right. So, for us, it's very appealing to our customers, that, the idea that they can put the security where they need it, so they can put it out at the edge and some of them so want it at the edge and we give them the choice of setting up a sort of a minimal basic firewall or a full-featured next-gen firewall. We also find customers kind of like the brand names, so we offer Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper and others will be coming, so that appeals to them. They tend to be a shop of one or the other. >> John: All on a software basis? >> All on a software basis. >> Giving them the virtual clients discount? >> Right, yeah, all virtual clients is right. And, you know, at the end of the day, our customers don't actually care about the hardware. For them, it's the service. >> I wanted to take it over to OpenStack itself for a little bit. You know, the great conversation here, this week, has been something about modularization, talking about the ecosystem, talking about containers, both the app layer up on top and the packaging layer down below, which is kind of really cool, as well. How are you seeing the OpenStack community engage with the ecosystem be available to different use cases like this? Right, slim it down, take what you need, leave the rest, different, for a while, the conversation was, there were so many projects and, about everything, and do you feel like OpenStack is going where we need it to go, now, in terms of, again, a usable partner and community to work with? >> I do believe that because, so, my product is really a portfolio, if you think about it, so it's a portfolio of services and I view our use of OpenStack in the same way. So, we're really taking that portfolio of OpenStack services and pulling, you know, putting together the package that we need to deliver the services. So, what's out at the edge, that package of OpenStack services at the edge, that's not the same set of services as what's within the core data center. There's some commonality, but we've chosen the ones that are important to us for the edge and chosen the ones that are important to us for the core. So, I think that the OpenStack community is really embracing this notion and we really welcome that, that thing. Now, what I'm finding is that the vendors that we're supporting, you know, that, in the ecosystem, at the application layer, are still struggling with, "Okay, do we containerize? "Do we support, what do, how do we support it?" I can't tell you how many vendors I've gone to and I said, "If you want to be in our portfolio," and obviously most of them do, you know, Verizon's a big company, "you have to be virtualized. "You have to be able to support, run under OpenStack," and they have to get past that, (laughs) that issue. >> Beth, I noticed in some of your social feeds, you've attended some of the Women at OpenStack event. >> Yes. >> I wonder if you have any comment on the events there and diversity in general in the community? >> So, one of the things I love about OpenStack is it's really, really gone out of its way in, within the open source community, in general, to really focus on the value of diversity and it really does track the number of women that, you know, there's a metric that says the percentage of women at every summit and it's going up and the Women of OpenStack community focus on mentoring, and it's not just women, because mentoring's very important, but it really allows, but women are, have sort of special challenges and minorities have special challenges, as well, and we really try to embrace that fact that you do need a leg up if you're not a 50-year-old white guy (laughs). >> All right, Beth Cohen, really appreciate you joining us. Congratulations on the keynote, the product and wish you the best of luck going forward. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston. For John and myself, thanks for watching The CUBE. (upbeat synthesizer music)

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost for the week, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Ildiko Vancsa, coming off the edge keynote presentation this morning. She is the ecosystem technical lead with the Edge Computing Group as part of the OpenStack Foundation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Coming into this show, edge is one of those things that it was actually pretty exciting to talk about because edge is not only super hot, but when I thought back to previous shows, this is the sixth year we've had theCUBE here and my fifth year doing it, it's like, wait, I've been talking to all the Telcos for years here. NFV was one of those use cases, and when you connect the dots, it's like oh, edge, of course. I said this conference is actually hipster when it comes to edge. We were totally covering it well before we called it that. So, explain to us your role in the foundation and what led to the formation of this track. >> Yeah, so I'm the ecosystem technical lead within the foundation, which is basically a role that belongs under the business development team. So, I'm basically building connections with our ecosystem members. I'm trying to help them succeed with OpenStack, both as software package and as a community. We are embracing open source, of course, so I'm also trying to advocate for involvement in open source because I think that's a key. Like, you know, picking up an open source software component and use it, that's a great start, but if you really want to be successful with it and you want to be able to successfully build it into your business model, then getting involved in the community, both enhancing the software and maintaining of the software, that's really key. So, my role is also onboarding companies as well to be active members of the community, and my focus is shifting toward edge computing. The history of edge computing in OpenStack basically started last May when Beth Cohen from Verizon described their use case, which is OpenStack in a tiny box in production cycle, wow. So that was also a little bit of an eye-opener for us as well, that yes, it's telecom. It's 5G, but this is the thing that's called edge, and maybe this is something that we should also look deeper into. So, we went to San Francisco last September, OpenDev, 200 people, architects, software developers trying to figure out what edge computing is. I think we had the question at every single session, someone asked that, okay, yeah so, what did you mean exactly when you said edge? Because from the nature of the architecture, like, you have the central cloud and then the sides on the different-- >> John: There are several edges depending on how far you want to go. >> Exactly. >> For you and OpenStack, what does edge mean, or all the above? >> With OpenStack, so after OpenDev when we realized that it's not really a well-defined term, we wrote up a white paper. It's at OpenStack the role/edge. It's a short one, really to just set the ground for what edge computing is. And what we came up with is, so don't imagine like a two-sentence definition for edge computing because I still strongly believe that doesn't exist, and anyone who claims it, that's not true. What we did with the white paper is basically we set characteristics and criteria that defines cloud edge computing per se, like what people are talking about when you're moving out the compute and then working closer to the edge. Like what that means from the bandwidth perspective, from how you will manage it, what that means for security, and all these sort of things. And you can basically characterize what edge means. So we rather described these layers and how far we go, and as far as like, you know, the very end edge device and like the IOT sensors, that's not a target of OpenStack. So, OpenStack itself is infrastructure as a service, so our Edge Computing Group is still staying on that layer. The Edge Computing Group itself is focusing on the angles, what edge brings onto the table, all these requirements, you know, collecting the use cases and trying to figure out what's missing, what we need to implement. >> If can repeat and maybe I'll get it right or wrong. The idea is at a cell tower or at a remote office or branch office or some closet somewhere, there is a full set of OpenStack running, maybe a minimal set of OpenStack, but it's live, it's updatable. You can update services on it. You can update the actual OpenStack itself, and it doesn't need the spoke hardware necessarily, but it's now updatable and part of a bigger multi-cloud infrastructure from some sort of service entity or enterprise. >> Yeah. >> Is that fair? >> I think that's fair. So, there's OpenStack itself that people know very well, a lot of projects. So when we talk about edge, obviously we don't want to say that, okay, pick the whole thing and install all the 60 projects because that's really not suitable for edge. So what, for example, the group is looking into, that which OpenStack components are essential for edge. And also the group is defining small edge, medium edge, what that means from hardware footprint perspectives, so just to figure out what the opportunities are there, what will fit, what will not fit. OpenStack itself is very modular by today, so you can pick up the services that you need. So what we discussed, for example, this week is Keystone, identity, you need it of course. So how much that fits into the edge scenarios. And I think the main conclusion of the forum session yesterday was that, yeah, Keystone supports Federation. We talked through the cases, and it seems like that it's kind of there. So, we now need a few people who will sit down, put together the environment, and start testing it because that's when it comes out that, you know, almost there, but there a few things to tweak. But basically the idea is what you described, pick up the component, put it there, and work with it. We also have another project called Cyborg, which is fairly new. That's for hardware acceleration, so it is providing a framework to plug in GPUs, FPJs, and these sort of, a bit more specialized hardware which will be really useful for edge use cases to OpenStack. So that's for example something that China Mobile and the OPNFV Edge Cloud Group is looking into to use, so I really hope that we will get there this year to test it in the OPNFV Pharos Labs in action. So we also have pretty great cross-community collaboration on trying to figure this whole thing out. >> Yeah, it often helps if we have examples to talk about to really explain this. Beth Cohen, we spoke with her last year and absolutely caught our attention. Got a lot of feedback from the community on it. Had Contron on earlier this week talking about, John was saying, here's some small device there with a little blade and is running pieces of OpenStack there to be able to run. Anything from the keynote or, boy, I think there's 40 sessions that you've got here. If you can, give us a couple of examples of some of the use cases that we're seeing to kind of bring this edge to reality. >> Example use cases is, we just heard this morning, for example, someone from the textile industry like how to detect issues with the fabric. So this is like one new manufacturing use case. I also heard another one, which is not checking the fabric itself, but basically the company who manufactures those machines that they are using to create the fabric, so they would like to have a central cloud and have it connected to the factories. So, being able to monitor how the machines are doing, how they can improve those machines, and also within the factory to monitor all the circumstances. Because for all the chemical processes, it's really important that the temperature and everything else is just, you know, clicks because otherwise all your fabrics will have to go to trash. So, that's manufacturing. A lot of telecom 5G, obviously that is really, really heavy because that's the part of the industry which is there today, so with 5G, all those strict requirements. This is really what we are mainly focusing on today. We are not specializing anything for telecom and in 5G use cases, but we want to make sure that all our components fit into that environment as well. In the white paper, for example, you also could see the retail use case. I'm not sure whether that will be exactly on stage this week, but that is also a great example on like Walmart with the lot of stores around, so how you manage those stores because they're also not wanting to do everything centrally. So, they would like to move the functionality out. What if the network connectivity is cut? They still have to be able to operate the store as nothing happened. So, there are a lot of segments of the industry who already have kind of really well-defined use cases. And what we see is that there's many overlapping between the requirements from the different segments that we're going to address. >> Are we seeing things like AI and ML coming up in these conversations also? >> Yes, like I think it was the manufacturing use case when I heard that they are planning to use that, and it's popping up. I think as far as our group is concerned, we are more looking into, I don't know, let's say lower-level requirements like how you maintain and operate the hundreds and thousands of edge sites, what happens with security, what happens with monitoring, what happens with all these sort of things. Like we have a new project rolling in under the foundation umbrella called Airship, which is basically deployment and lifecycle management, which is supposed to address one of the aspect that you were talking about on, okay, so how you manage this, how you upgrade this. And upgrade is, again, a really interesting question because I think I talked to someone yesterday who was like, yes, the Contron guys, they were saying that yeah, upgrade, it's really ambitious. So let say that maybe 18, 24 month or something like some kind of tech operator will decide to upgrade something out in the edge because it's out there, it's working, let's not touch this. So when we talk about upgrade, even that, I think, will depend on the bits of the industry that, what pace they will decide to take. >> Are there any particular surprises or learnings that you've had this year after talking with this community for a week now? You said, well, last year, I was very impressed last year when they got up on stage and talked about that. That kind of expanded my mind a little bit. You've been working with this now for a year, this whole track and forum sessions. Anything you're excited about taking to the future or learnings or surprises that, oh, this is really going to work or anything like that? Any parts of it that are really interesting? You talked about security upgrades. We've talked about a lot of the technical components, but it seems like it's working. >> I think at this point, at least on my end, I think I'm over the surprise phase. So what surprises me the most is how many groups there are out there who are trying to figure out what this whole edge thing is. And what we need to really focus on among the technical requirements is that how we are working together with all these groups just to make sure that the integration between the different things that we are all developing and working on is smooth. So like, we've been working together with the OPNFV community for a while now. It's a really fruitful relationship between us. Like seeing OpenStack being deployed in a full-stack environment and being tested, that's really priceless. And we are planning to do the same thing with edge as well, and we are also looking into ONAP, Aquino, Et-see-mac, so looking into the open source groups, looking into the standardization and really just trying to ensure that when we talk about open infrastructure, that that really is designed and developed in a way that integrates well with the other components. It's synchronized with the standardization activities because I think especially in case of edge, when we say interoperability, that's a level higher than what we call the interoperability on the telecom level I think. Like when you just imagine one operator network and applications from other providers popping up in that network, and components that just realizing the network popping up from different vendors. And this whole thing has to work together. So, I think OpenStack and open infrastructure has a really big advantage there compared to any proprietary solution because we have to address this, I think, really big challenge, and it's also a really important challenge. >> Ildiko, really appreciate you giving us all the updates here on the edge track, the keynote, definitely one of the areas that is capturing our attention and lots of people out there. So, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by The OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystems support. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost this week has been John Troyer. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, worldwide leader in live tech coverage. And this has been OpenStack Summit 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts. John, we came in with a lot of questions. One of my premises, coming into the event was that we needed to reset expectations, a little bit. I know I learned a lot this week. Still one of my favorite communities. A lot of really smart people. Really interesting things going on. Open source infrastructure is really the focus here. Start with you, big meta takeaways from the show so far. >> Big picture, my first summit, my first summit here. Didn't quite know what to expect. I love the community, a lot of activity. A lot of real world activity going on. People building clouds today. So that was very insightful and very, that's a great data point. As far as the ecosystem goes, a lot more talk about integrating with the rest of the open source ecosystem, about integrating with other public and private clouds. So I thought that there was also a lot of self awareness here about where OpenStack is on it's journey and how it might proceed into the future. So overall, I think, you know, a really practical, focused, and grounded week. >> Yeah, came in with the whole concept of big tent. I think which we said, there's a big hole poked in that. There's the core is doing well, there's a number of projects, I forget the user survey, whether you know, there's the kind of the six core pieces and then there's like 9 or 10 in the average configuration. So there's more than the core, there's interesting things going into it and last year I felt that OpenStack kind of understood where it fit into that hybrid cloud environment. As you pointed out this year, some of those upper layer things, I feel like I understand them a little more. So, of course, containers and Kubernetes, a big piece of the discussion this week. Containers definitely transforming the way we build our applications. It seems a given now, that containers will be a big part of the future and OpenStack's ready for it. We had yesterday, we had the people that did the demo in the keynote, but containers doing well. Kubernetes fits in pretty well, even though, I think it was Randy Bias that said, "Well, OpenStack needs Kubernetes." My paraphrase is Kubernetes doesn't need OpenStack. KubeCon is going to be in Austin at the end of the year and that show could be bigger than this show was here in Boston. Year over year, for the North American show, attendance is down a little bit, but still robust attendance, lots of different pieces. Containers, Kubernetes, you mentioned some of the other pieces, any other add-ons on that? >> Well now, I mean other than its worth saying that these are not either or, this is all and. If you look at the total addressable market, every place that containers and Kubernetes can play, that's every cloud in the world, right? It's up there at the application layer. If you look at where OpenStack belongs, it is in these private clouds that have special needs, that have, either from privacy, security or functionality latency, just data gravity, right. There's all these reasons why you might want to build out a public cloud and we see that with Telco. Telecomm is building out their own infrastructure, because they need it, because they run the network core. So that's not going away. As far as containers go, again the story was not either or, it's and. You can containerize the infrastructure. That's super useful. Sometimes being bare metal is useful. Separately, you can put containers on top, because that's increasingly becoming the application packaging and interface format. So, I didn't see a lot of ideology here, Stu, and that was refreshing to me. People were not saying there is one true way. This is a modular system that, at this point in it's life cycle, it has to become very pragmatic. >> John, I think that's a great point, because we knock on, and everybody knocks on, OpenStack's not simple and the reason is because IT is not simple. Everybody has different challenges, therefore, it's not a Lego brick, it's lots of ways we put it together. Had some really interesting deep dives with a customer, couple of users today. The Adobe advertising cloud, Paddy Power Betfair, both of those gave us real concrete examples of how and why they build things the way they do. How OpenStack and Kubernetes go together. How acquiring another company, or switching your storage vendors is made easier by OpenStack. So, we've talked to a number of practitioners, they like OpenStack, reminds me of VMware. People like being able to build it and tweak it. Very different scale for some of these environments, but people are building clouds. The Telecom's are doing some good things. All the Linux companies are super excited about the future, that it helps them kind of move up the stack and become more critical environments and how it all ties into this multi-hybrid cloud world. Digital transformation, many of these pieces, I need that modern infrastructure and the open infrastructure coming from OpenStack and related pieces pull it all together. >> Well, where is the innovation going to come from in this next generation of cloud? I thought our segment with Orran, talking about the Massachusetts open cloud, was great, because he's there as a computer science professor, somebody who's been intimately involved with virtualization, with IBM, with VMware, saying, "Okay, we need to build this next generation. "Where can we innovate? We have to own the stack "and OpenStack is a great way for us to innovate "with those different components." One of the challenges, because OpenStack as a set of technologies, is so modular, is where's the knowledge come from? Where's the knowledge transfer? Can you find an OpenStack expert? Do you have to grow them? So, I see that as one challenge going forward for the OpenStack community, is how do we grow the knowledge base? How do we make sure that people are trained up and able to architect and operate OpenStack based clouds? >> Yeah, John, how about the individuals themselves? We talked to Lisa-Marie Namphy about the Ambassadors Program. We talked to a number of our guests throughout the week about training everything, from Orran Krieger, talking about how his students are helping to build this, to engagement contribution. I mean it's nuance, when I look at the future of jobs. A lot of companies here are hiring. Which is always heartening to me. What's your take on that aspect? >> Well, it's still a very vibrant community. You look at these different camps, a lot of them are vendor affiliated these days. There are very few communities that are outside of a vendor and these open source foundations are one source of those. I think, look there's still 5 or 6,000 people here, right? This is not a small event and these people are active, hands on operators, for the most part. So-- >> Yeah and the thing I'd point out, there are lots of companies that have contributors here. The other category is still really big here. A point Lisa-Marie made, many of the people that have contributed here have switched jobs a number of times. NASA helped start it. They kind of left, they came back. Some of the big Telecom companies, they're not selling OpenStack, they're using it to help build their services. So, it's like wait, which are vendors, which are providers? I think we know everybody's becoming a software company. Wait John, TechReckoning, are you a software company yet? >> We use a lot of soft, we use a lot of cloud, mostly on SaaS side. >> At SiliconANGLE Media we actually have a part of our business that is software. We've got a full development team, you know open source plays into somewhat we do, but I guess what I'm saying is, the traditional demarcation between the vendor and the consumer in open source tends to be blurring. I don't remember in the keynote if they had, hey how many people have contributed to the code. That's something that we used to get, partially because we have splintered out this event a little as to, the goals, it's no longer the people building it. They've got lots of ways to do that and a lot of the drama's gone. We had for many years in OpenStack, it was who's going to own what distribution and who's driving what project and a lot of that's come out. We talked about the last couple of years, has it become boring in certain ways? But it's important, it's driving a lot of pieces and OpenStack should be here to stay for awhile. >> Yeah, it's part of the conversation. I love the term open infrastructure. We heard it once or twice. We'll see if that becomes a topic of conversation. Going back to Lisa-Marie Namphy's segment, I encourage people to check out your local OpenStack meet-up right? You'll find that other conversations are going on there, other than just OpenStack. This is an ecosystem, it interacts with the rest of the world. >> Yeah, and talk about that next generation, edge is really interesting, the conversation we had with Beth Cohen. Also talked to Lee Doyle from the analysts perspective. Lots of cool things happening with that next generation of technology. 5G's going to play into it. So, there's always the next next thing and OpenStack's doing a good job to, as a community, to be open, working with it and understanding that they don't need to be all things to all people, certain other pieces will pull in and we have that broad diverse ecosystem. >> Looks a, I'll go out and make a prediction, I think in five years, we're going to look back and we're going to say, actually, OpenStack driven plumbing is going to be driving a lot of the next generation to the internet. >> Yeah, I love that, actually I forget if it's two or three years ago, what I said was that, as Linux took a long time to kind of work its way into all the environments, OpenStack pieces will find its way there. Brian Stevens from Google said, "If it wasn't for open source, in general, "Linux specifically, we wouldn't have "any of the hyperscale guys today." All those companies leverage open source a bunch. We've heard whisperings that, not just the telecommunications, some very large global companies that are trying to figure out how OpenStack fit into it. Coming into the show, it was all the talk about, oh, Intel stopped its joint lab with Rackspace, HPE pulled its cloud out, there's some other hyperscale companies that are looking at OpenStack. It's reached a certain maturity and it will fit in a number of places. All right, well, hey John, we started the beginning of the week, it was cloudy and overcast, a little cool in Boston. The skies opened up, it's blue. I've loved having two weeks here in Boston. Really appreciate you joining me for the journey here. Here for the OpenStack Summit. >> Thanks for having me, it was fascinating. >> Thank you John. Want to thank our audience, and thank the whole team here in Boston, and the broad SiliconANGLE media team. This is our biggest week that we've ever had, as to how much content we're creating. So, thanks so much to everyone. Thanks for our community for watching. As anything, when they scale, let us know if there's things we need to fix or feedback that you have for us. For Stu Miniman, John Troyer, the whole team here in Boston and beyond, I want to thank you so much for watching theCUBE. Be sure to check out SiliconANGLE TV for all the upcoming events. Let us know where we should be at and feel free to reach to us with any comments, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. And if I'm sitting on this side of the table with the long hallways behind me, it means we're here for the wrap of the second day. John Troyer's here, day two of three days, theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit. John, I feel like you're building energy as the show goes on, kind of like the show itself. >> Yeah, yeah, getting my footing here. Again, my first summit. It was a good second day, Stu, I think we made it through. We had some fascinating stuff. >> Yeah, fascinating stuff. Before we jump into some of the analysis here, I do want to say you know, first and foremost, big thanks to the foundation. Foundations themselves tend to get, they get beat up some, they get loved some, without the OpenStack Foundation, we would not be here. Their support for a number of years, our fifth year here at the show, as well as the ecosystem here, really interesting and diverse and ever-changing ecosystem, and that fits into our sponsors too. So Red Hat's our headline sponsor here. We had Red Hat Summit last week and two weeks, lots of Red Haters, and now lots of Stackers here. Additional support brought to us by Cisco, by Netronome, and by Canonical. By the way, no secret, we try to be transparent as to how we make our money. If it's a sponsored segment, it lists "sponsored by" that guest here, and otherwise it is editorial. Day three actually has a lot of editorial, it means we have a lot of endusers on the program. We do have vendors, cool startups, interesting people, people like Brian Stevens from Google. When I can get access to them, love to have it here. So big shout out as always. Content, we put it out there, the community, try to have it. Back to the wrap. John, you know we've kind of looked at some of the pieces here, the maturity, you know where it fits in the hybrid and multi cloud world. What jumped out at you as you've been chewing on day two? >> Well, my favorite thing from today, and we talked about it a couple times just in passing it keep coming up, is OpenStack on the edge. So the concept of, that the economics works today, that you can have a device, a box, maybe it's in your closet somewhere, maybe it's bolted to a lamppost or something, but in the old days it would have run on some sort of proprietary chip, maybe an embedded Linux. You can put a whole OpenStack distribution on there, and when you do that, it becomes controllable, it becomes a service layer, you can upgrade it, you can launch more services from there, all from a central location. That kind of blew my mind. So that's my favorite thing from today. I finally got my arms around that I think. >> Okay, great, and we saw Beth Cohen from Verizon was in the day one keynote. We're actually going to have her on our program for the third day. And right, teasing out that edge, most of it, telecommunications is a big discussion point here. I understand why. Telcos spend a lot of money, they are at large scale, and that NFV use case has driven a lot of adoption. So Deutsche Telekom is a headline sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, did a big keynote this morning. AT&T's up on the main stage, Verizon's up on the main stage, you know Red Hat and Canonical all talk about their customers that are using it. You know, we just talked to Netronome about telecommunications. Everybody here, if you're doing OpenStack, you probably have a telco place because that's where the early money is and it tends to be, there's the network edge, then there's the IoT edge, and some of the devices there. So it was was one of the buzzy things going in and definitely is one of the big takeaways from the show so far. >> Well, Stu, I also think it's a major prove point for OpenStack, right. Bandwidth needs are not going down, that's pretty clear, with all the things you mentioned. Throughput is going to have to go up, services are going to have to be more powerful, and so all these different connected devices and qualities of service and streaming video to your car. So if OpenStack can build a back plan, a data plan for OpenStack that can do that, which it looks like they are doing, right, that's a huge prove point downstream from the needs of a telco, so I think that's super important for OpenStack that it's usable enough and robust enough to do that and that's one of the reasons I think it gets talked about so much. The nice thing is this year compared to my comparisons of previous years of OpenStack Summit, telco is not the only game in town, right. Enterprise also got a lot of play and there's a lot of use cases there too. >> And just to close out on that edge piece, really enjoyed the conversation we had with John and Kendall who had worked on the container space. Talking about the maturation of where Cinder had gone, how we went from virtualized environments to containerized environments. And even we teased out a little bit that edge use case. I can have a really small OpenStack deployment to put it at that edge. Maybe that's where some of the serverless stuff fits in. I know I've been, I tell my team, every time I get a good quote on serverless, let's make a gem out of that, put it out there, 'cause it's early days, but that is one of those deployments where I need at the edge environments, I need something lightweight, I need something that's going to be less expensive, can do some task processing, and both containers and potentially serverless can be interesting there. >> Yeah, I mean, even in our Canonical discussion with the product manager for their OpenStack distribution, right, containers are all over that, right, containers are just a way of packaging, there are some really interesting development pipelines that are now very popular and being talked about and built on in the container space. But containerization actually can come into play multiple points in the stack. Like you said, the Canonical distribution gets containerized and pushed out, it's a great way of compartmentalizing and upgrading, that's what the demo on stage today was about. Also, just with a couple of very short scripts, containerizing and pulling down components. So I think again, my second favorite thing after the edge today was just showing that actually containers and OpenStack mix pretty well. They're really not two separate things. >> Right, and I think containerization is one of those things that enables that multi cloud world. We talked in a number of segments today, everything from Kubernetes with Brian Stevens as to how that enables that. Reminds me at Red Hat Summit last week we talked a lot about OpenShift. OpenShift's that layer on top of OpenStack and sits at that application level layer to allow be to be able to span between public or private clouds and we need that kind of you know that to be able to enable some real multi or hybrid cloud environments. >> Yeah I mean, containers and in fact that Kubernetes layer may end up being the thing that drives more OpenStack adoption. >> Yeah, and the other thing that's been interesting, just hallway conversations, bumping into people we know, you know trying to walk around the show a little bit, as to people that are finally getting their arms around, okay, OpenStack from a technology standpoint has matured and you know they either need it to clean up what was their internal cloud or building something out, so real deployments. We talked about it yesterday in the close though. They're real customers doing real deployments. It's heartening to hear. >> Yeah I mean, one of those conversations, I ran into somebody at a hyperscale company, a friend of mine, and you know they are building out, internal OpenStack clouds to use for real stuff, right. >> But wait, hyperscale, come on, John, we can give away. Is this something we have on our phone or something we, I'll buy and use? >> One of those big folks. >> There's a large Chinese company that anybody in tech knows that's supposed to be doing a lot with OpenStack. We heard definitely Asia, very broad use of OpenStack. Been a theme of the whole show, right, is that outside the US where we tend to talk a lot about the public cloud, OpenStack's being used. An undertone I've heard is certain companies that start here in the United States, it's sometimes challenging for a foreign company to say I'm going to buy and use that, absolutely that is a headwind against a company like Amazon. Ties back to we had a keynote this morning with Edward Snowden and some of those things. What is the relationship between government and global companies that have a headquarters in the US and beyond. >> Yeah I think it's too soon to say where the pendulum, how the far the pendulum is going to swing. I'll be very interested in the commentary for next year to see have we moved away from more of the centralized services dominating the entire marketplace and workload into more distributed, more private, more customizable. For all those reasons, there's a lot of dynamics that might be pushing the pendulum in that direction. >> And one of the things I've liked hearing is infrastructure needs to be more agile, it needs to be more distributed, more modularized, especially as the applications are changing. So I feel like more than previous summits I've been at, we're at least talking about how those things fit together. With everything that's happening with the OpenStack Days, the Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Ceph, other open source projects, how those all fit together. It feels like a more robust, full position as opposed to , we were just building a software version of what we were doing in the data center before. >> My impression was the conversation at times had been a little more internally focused, right, it's a world unto its own. Here at this summit, they're definitely acknowledging there's an ecosystem, there's a landscape, it all has to interoperate. Usability's a part of that, and then interoperability and componentization is a part of that as well. >> The changing world of applications. We understand the whole reason we have infrastructure is to run those applications, so if we're not getting ready for that, what are we doing? >> I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I think the OpenStack community as a whole, one of their goals, you know, OpenStack needs to be as easy to run as a public cloud. The infrastructure needs to be boring. We heard the word boring a lot actually today. >> Yeah and what we say is, first of all, the public cloud is the bar that you were measured against. Whether it is easier or cheaper, your mileage may vary, because public cloud was supposed to be simple. They're adding like a thousand new features every year, and it seems to get more complicated over time. It's wonderful if we could architect everything and make it simple. Unfortunately, you know, that's why we have technology. I know every time I go home and have some interaction with a financial institution or a healthcare institution, boy, you wish we could make everything simpler, but the world's a complicated place and that's why we need really smart people like we've gotten to interview here at the show. So any final comments, John? >> No, I think that sums it up. Those are my favorite things for today. I'm looking forward to talking to a lot of customers tomorrow. >> Yeah, I'm really excited about that. John, appreciate your help here. So there's a big party here at the show. They're taking everyone to Fenway Park for the Stacker party. Last year it was an epic party in Austin. Boston's fun, Fenway's a great venue. Looks like the rain's going to hold off, which is good, but it'll be a little chillier than normal, but we will be back here with a third day of programming as John and I talked about. Got a lot of users on the program. Really great lineup, two days in the bag. Check out all the videos, go to SiliconANGLE.tv to check it all out. Big shout out to the rest of the team that's at the Dell EMC World and ServiceNOW shows, be able to check those out and all our upcoming shows. And thank you, everyone, for watching theCUBE. (technical beat)