>> Narrator: Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its Ecosystem partners. (soft music) >> Hi, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Medias coverage of theCUBE, here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. We've been here, this is now the third day of coverage, John. We've done a couple dozen interviews already. We've got one more day of coverage. We had some kind of perceptions coming in and I have some interesting differing viewpoints as to where we are for OpenStack the project, where this show itself is going. First of all John, give me your impressions overall. Vancouver, your first time here, city I fell in love with last time I came here, and let's get into the show itself, too. >> Sure, sure, I mean the show's a little bit smaller this year than it had been in past years. Some of that is because they pulled some of the technical stuff out last year, or a couple years ago. By being a little bit smaller, and being in a place like Vancouver, I get good energy off of the crowd. The folks we've talked to, the folks that have been going to sessions, have said they've been very good. The people here are practitioners. They are running OpenStack, or about to run OpenStack, or upgrading their OpenStack, or other adjacent technologies. They're real people doing real work. As we talk to folks and sponsors, the conversations have been productive. So, I'd say in general, this kind of a small venue and a beautiful city allows for a really productive community-oriented event, so that's been great. >> Alright, so John come on, on the analysis segment we're not allow to pull any punches. Attendance, absolutely is down. Three years ago when we were here it was around 5500. Mark Collier, on our opening segment, said there was about 2600. But two-year point, I've not talked to a single vendor or attendee here that was like, "Oh boy, nobody's here, "it's not goin' on." Yes, the Expo Hall is way smaller and people flowing through the Expo Hall isn't great all the time, but why is that? Because the people that are here, they're in sessions. They have 40 sessions about Edge Computing. Hot topic, we've talked a bunch about that. Interesting conversations. There is way more in Containers. Containers for more than three years, been a topic conversation. There's so many other sessions of people digging in. The line you've used a couple a time is the people here are people that have mortgages. In a good way, it means these are jobs, these are not them, "Oh, I heard about "this cool new thing, and I'm going to "go check out beautiful Vancouver." Now, yes, we've brought our spouses or significant others, and checking out the environment because yeah, this place is awesome, but there's good energy at the show. There's good technical conversation. Many of the people we've talked to, even if they're not the biggest OpenStack fans, they're like, "But our customers are using this in a lot of different ways." Let's talk about OpenStack. Where is it, where isn't it? What's your take from what you've heard from the customers and the vendors? >> Sure, I definitely think the conversation is warranted. As we came in, from outside the community there was a lot of conversation, even backchannel, like why are you going to OpenStack Summit? What's going on there, is it still alive? Which is kind of a perception of maybe it's an indication of where the marketing is on this project, or where it is on the hype cycle. In terms of where it is and where it isn't, it's built into everything. At this point OpenStack, the infrastructure management, open infrastructure management solution, seems to be mature. Seems to be inside every Telco, every cable company, every transportation company, every bank. People who need private resources and have the smarts and power to do that have leveraged OpenStack now. That seems stable. What was interesting here is, that that doesn't speak to the health overall, and the history of, or the future of the project itself, the foundation, the Summit, I think those are separate questions. You know, the infrastructure and projects seem good. Also here, like we've talked about, this show is not just about OpenStack now. It's about Containers, it's broadening the scope of these people informally known as infrastructure operators, to the application level as well. >> Yeah, if you want to hear a little bit more, some two great interviews we did yesterday. Sean Michael Kerner, who's a journalist. Been here for almost every single one of the OpenStack shows. He's at eWeek, had some really good discussion. He said private cloud, it doesn't exist. Now, he said what does he mean by that? There are companies that are building large scalable cloud with OpenStack but it's like if some of the big China Telecom, big China cloud companies. Oracle and IBM have lots of OpenStack, in what they do, and yes there are, as you mentioned, the telcos are a big used case. We had some Canonical customers talking about Edge as in a used case for a different type of scalability. Lots of nodes but not one massive infrastructure as a service piece. If I talk, kind of the typical enterprise, or definitely going the SNE piece of the market, this is not something that they go and use. They will use services that have OpenStack. It might be part of the ecosystem that they're playing, but people saying, "Oh, I had my VMware environment "and I want to go from virtualization "to private cloud" OpenStack is not usually the first choice, even though Red Hat has some customers that kind of fit into some of the larger sides of that, and we'll be talking to them more about that today. Randy Bias is the other one, take a look. Randy was one of the early, very central to a lot of stuff happening in the Foundation. He's in the networking space now, and he says even though he's not a cheerleader for OpenStack, he's like, "Why am I here? "That's where my customers are." >> Right, right. I mean, I do think it's interesting that public cloud is certainly mentioned. AWS, Google, et cetera, but it's not top of mind for a lot of these folks, and it's mentioned in very different ways depending on, kind of, the players. I think it's very different from last week at Red Hat Summit. Red Hat, with their story, and OpenShift on top of OpenStack, definitely talked public cloud for folks. Then they cross-cloud, hybrid-cloud. I think that was a much different conversation than I've been hearing this week. I think basically, kind of maybe, depends on the approach of the different players in the market, Stu. I know you've been talkin' to different folks about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like, Margaret Dawson at Red Hat helped us talk about how that hybrid-cloud works because here, I hate to say it's, some oh yeah, public cloud, that's too expensive. You're renting, it's always going to be more. It's like, well no, come on, let's understand. There's lot of applications that are there and customers, it's an and message for almost all of them. How does that fit together, I have some critiques as to how this goes together. You brought up another point though John, OpenStack Foundation is more than just OpenStack projects. So, Kata Containers, something that was announced last year, and we're talking about there's Edge, there's a new CI/CD tool, Zuul, which is now fully under the project. Yes, joke of the week, there is no OpenStack, there's only Zuul. There are actually, there's another open-source project named Zuul too, so boy, how many CI/CD tools are out there? We've got two different, unrelated, projects with the same name. John, you look at communities, you look at foundations, if this isn't the core knitting of OpenStack, what is their role vis-a-vis the cloud native and how do they compare to say, the big player in this space is Linux Foundation which includes CNCF. >> That's a good one. I mean, in some sense like all organic things, things are either growing or shrinking. Just growing or dying. On the other hand, in technology, nothing ever truly dies. I think the project seems mature and healthy and it's being used. The Foundation is global in scope and continues to run this. I do wonder about community identity and what it means to be an OpenStack member. It's very community-oriented, but what's at the nut of it here if we're really part of this cloud-native ecosystem. CNCF, you know, it's part of Linux Foundation, all these different foundations, but CNCF, on the other hand, is kind of a grab-bag of technology, so I'm not sure what it means to be a member of CNCF either. I think both of these foundations will continue to go forward with slightly different identities. I think for the community as a whole, the industry as a whole, they are talking and they better be talking, and it's good that they're talking now and working better together. >> Yeah, great discussion we had with Lisa-Marie Namphy who is an OpenStack Ambassador. She holds the meat up in Silicon Valley and when she positions it, it's about cloud-native and its about all these things. So like, Kubernetes is front and center whereas some of the OpenStack people are saying, "Oh no, no, we need to talk more about OpenStack." That's still the dynamic here was, "Oh, we go great together." Well, sometimes thou dost protest too much. Kubranetes doesn't need OpenStack, OpenStack absolutely must be able to play in this Container, cloud-native Kubranetes world. There's lots of other places we can learn about Kubranetes. It is an interesting dynamic that have been sorting out, but it is not a zero-sum game. There's absolutely lots, then we have, I actually was real impressed how many customers we got to speak with on the air this time. Nice with three days of programming, we had a little bit of flexibility, and not just people that were on the keynote stage. Not just people that have been coming for years, but a few of the interviews we had are relatively new. Not somebody that have been on since very early in the alphabet, now we're at queens. >> Right. >> Anything more from the customers or that Container, Kubranetes dynamic that you want to cover? >> Sure, well I mean just that, you know, Containers at least, Containers are everywhere here. So, I think that kind of question has been resolved in some sense. It was a little more contentious last year than this year. I'm actually more bullish on OpenStack as a utility project, after this week, than before. I think I can constantly look people in the eye and say that. The interesting thing for me though, coming from Silicon Valley, is you're so used to thinking about VCs and growth, and new startups, and where's the cutting edge that it's kind of hard to talk about this, maybe this open source business model where the customer basis is finite. It's not growing at 100% a year. Sometimes the press has a hard time covering that. Analysts have a hard time covering that. And if you wanted to give advice to somebody to get into OpenStack, I'm not sure who should if they're not in it already, there's definitely defined use cases, but I think maybe those people have already self-identified. >> Alright, so yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention is yeah. Big thank you to our sponsors to help get us here. The OpenStack Foundation, really supportive of us for years. Six years of us covering it. Our headline sponsor, Red Hat, had some great customers. Talked about this piece, and kind of we talk about it's practically Red Hat month on theCUBE for John with Red Hat Summit and OpenStack. Canonical, Contron, Nuage Networks, all helping us to be able to bring this content to you. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage in the past as well as where we'll be. Hit John Troyer, J. Troyer, on Twitter or myself, Stu, on Twitter if you ever have any questions, people we should be talking to, viewpoints, whether you agree or disagree with what we're talking about. Big thanks to all of our crew here. Thank you to the wonderful people of Vancouver for being so welcoming of this event and of all of us. Check out all the interviews. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat 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.