(cheerful music) >> Voiceover: Live, from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back here when we're here live with theCUBE coverage of Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, our next guest is Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking the Linux Foundation. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, nice to be here again. >> Always good to talk networking, as Stu and I always say networking is probably the most active audience in our community, because at the end of the day, everything rolls downhill to networking when the people complain. It's like "where the hell's my WiFi, "where's the patent latency," networking SDN was supposed to solve all that. Stu, we're still talking about networking. When are we going to fix the network? It's always in the network, but important. In all seriousness, a lot of action continues and innovation to networking. >> Absolutely. >> What's the update? >> Update is very exciting. So first of all, I can confidently say that open source networking, not just networking, but open source networking is now mainstream. And it's mainstream in the telcos, in the carriers, service providers, it's getting there in the enterprise. And Linux Foundation is really proud to host eight of the top 10 projects that are in open source networking. ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, Fido, you know, the list goes on. And we're really excited about each of these projects, so good momentum. >> We've been seeing and talking about it too, we all, joking aside, the intro there, but in all seriousness we've been saying, we get better the network, it's finally happening. Has it been a maturization of the network itself, has it been industry force and what have been the forces of innovations been? OpenStack has done some great work, they're not getting a lot of love these days with some people, but still we've seen a lot of production workflows at OpenStack, OpenStack's still there, rocking and rolling. New projects are onboarding, you see the telcos getting business models around digital. What's the drivers? Why is network mainstream now? >> I think it's a very simple answer to that, and that is before 5G and IoT hit the market, network better be automated. It's a very simple requirement. And the reason is very self-explanatory, right? You can't have an IoT device on the call on hold while you get your service up (laughs). So, it's IoT, right? And it is the same thing on 5G, a lot of new use cases around cars or around low latency apps. You need automation, and in order to have automation, a carrier or a solution provider goes through a simple journey. Am I virtualized? Yes or no? Am I using the building blocks of SDN and NFV? Yes or no? And the third, which is now reality, which is, am I using open source to do it? Yes, and I'm going to do it. And that's the driver right? I mean it's all- >> Automation, when you started throwing out a lot of TLAs, you talk about SDN and NFV, we've got a four-letter acronym that we need to talk about. The Open Network Automation Platform. Why don't you bring your audience up to speed, what that is, the news that you have this week. >> Absolutely, so ONAP was launched earlier in 2017. It's a combination of two open source projects, ECOMP and Open-O, and we wanted to bring the community together versus sort of fragmented, and because our end users are asking for a harmonized solution. So we brought it together. It was launched earlier this year as we talked about, but the most significant thing is it has received tremendous support from the member community. So at OSS today, we just announced that Vodafone has joined as a platinum member. They will be on our board, and as you know Vodafone is one of the top providers. So if you add up all the subscribers that are being influenced by ONAP, they come to 55%. So out of the 4.5 billion subscribers that exist, more than 55% will be influenced by ONAP and the work that happens. That includes China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, all of the China, Bell Canada, AT&T obviously who sort of was the founding member, Orange, Reliance Jio from India. So we've got, Comcast joined earlier in the quarter, so we've got cable companies, carriers, all joining. And to be very honest, I'll probably just give you the list of all the networking vendors that are participating here, and I've list Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Hua Wei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, VMware, ZTE, Juniper, you know, you name it. >> Arpit, I mean the long story short is-- >> Just cause they're involved does that mean they're actually working-- >> They're active. Active. >> we're not going to be critical on this. >> But come on, even Cisco's involved in the open source stuff, right? >> They've very active. >> We've had lots of guests on from Cisco, Lulu Tucker's been on many many times. We know the open source there, but it used to be, networking was very proprietary. Now, it wasn't SDNs going to totally change everything, it's lots of different pieces, lots of different projects. It kind of felt like the river slowly wearing down the mountain as to this transition from proprietary to open source. >> I think what happened is if you just look at four years back, it was proprietary. Not because people liked it, that was the only game in town. When the open source industry, especially in the networking, and this is a hundred year old industry, telecom right? When it came in in the desegregated manner, hardware and software separated, control plane separated from data plane, all of that happened, and what happened suddenly was each components started becoming mature. So they're production-ready components, and what ONAP and what Linux Foundation is intending to do this year is trying to bring all the components into a system solution. So that it's easy to deploy, and all you have to do is point, click a service, everything below it will all be automated and integrated. >> Well the telcos are under a lot of pressure. I mean this has been a decade run, over-the-top they've been struggling with that from years ago, decade ago or more. But now they're getting their act together. We're seeing some signs, even VMworld. Stu, Pat Gelsinger said 5G's the next big kahuna in networking the next 20 years, you can validate it. This is going to be a 20 year changeover, so as the Linux Foundation, which essentially is the organic growth engine for this community, what do you guys see in that 20 years? Cause I see 5G's going to create all these connection points. IoT is going to be massive. That's going to increase the surface area for potential attacks. We're seeing a networking paradigm that's moving from old guards Cisco, Juniper, and some of the names you mentioned. They got to make some changes. How are they adjusting? What's going on so the next 20 years we don't have more conflict and more identity politics. >> I'll tell you one thing, I come from a vendor community, right? So I really appreciate the work they're doing. Part of the reason you would have seen in the past a vendor dragging their feet is because of fragmentation in the community. You as a vendor do not know where to put your resources, people, and where you put your money. What we're doing at the Linux Foundation is starting to harmonize all that. And once you do that and you have enough of a scale and enough of a community, there is no shortage of people and developers that the vendors are contributing to. >> John: What's some of the proof points that you can share? >> Okay, so ONAP, from start to now, about 1100 Wiki members already. That means 1100 unique developers are joining the project. Over 50 members. We ran out of VMs, I mean it's like that has not happened in any project for over five years. We had to fire up people more. So you can see that... And this is not just, these are competitors, but if you step back and look at it, they're competitors from an end user perspective, but they're solving the common problem in which they don't get any money. They don't make any money. These are things that absolutely need to happen. The plumbing, the infrastructure, the orchestration, the control layer, the data plane layer, all of that need to just happen, it should just work. And let them differentiate on top. We are actively seeing almost everybody participating significantly. >> Stu, let's hear your thoughts on this. You guys are both, I view you guys both as experts and influencers in this networking ecosystem, so I got to ask you both a question. CNCF has gotten a lot of traction with funding, sponsorships are off the charts, you're seeing massive tractions, Stu, where you also see that KubeCon Cloud Native, but you have native clouds, I call them native clouds, in Amazon and then soon-to-be enterprises that want to run software-defined networking. So the question is do you see the same kind of support going for your group as CNCF's getting? Is it just fashionable at this point, CNCF? Why isn't the networking getting as much love at least from a sponsorship standpoint. >> Let's define love. So if you define love as the 2017 ONS, which is our largest networking summit, we grew that 10%, everything was off the charts. The feedback, the content-- >> John: The attendance growth or sponsorships? >> Attendance, sponsorships, CFPs were 5x oversubscribed. Call for papers, for submissions, 5x oversubscribed. So we had a hard time picking the best of the best. ONS 2018 is going to be here in LA, we've already started getting requests on, you know, so we're the same boat. >> So you feel good. >> We feel good. >> Not about this, like you're winning. >> No, but I tell you-- >> There'll be positive numbers we know from the hype scale horses, Stu, answer your question and then maybe you guys can comment. So is it a matter of that there's more buzz in positioning involved in the hype side of CNCF now, and there's just meat and potatoes being done in the networking world, Stu? Cause you and I both know, if no one has nothing to say, they've got to kind of market themselves. >> So John, think back to five years ago, how much hype and buzz there was around SDN. John, you and I interviewed like Martin Casado, he just bought for $1.4 billion, all these startups, lots of VC investment, so I think we're further down the maturity curve. Now networking's always-- >> John: People going to work, they're doing their job. >> It's real, it's in production-- >> It's funny-- >> It's not parb, I always say when you move from PowerPoint to production, real things happen. >> I always say, if there's going to be sizzle, I better see some steak on the grill, so what's happening is steak is cooking right now. >> And John, so one of the things we say, networking, no offense to all my friends in networking, networking is never sexy. >> Oh, come on Stu, networking is totally sexy. >> I always say it's cool again. >> Networking has never lost its edge. >> It absolutely is majorly important, but Arpit, take us in, you know, Kubernetes is hot, containers get a lot of buzz and everything. Networking, critical piece of making sure that this works, feels like, I think back to the virtualization days, it took us 10 years to kind of solve those things that that abstraction layer broke. It feels like networking is further ahead than it was, it's moving faster, we understand it's not something that's just kind of oh we'll let the networking guys get to it eventually. Networking and security, which often has that networking tie are front and center now. >> Very good point, and I think what you have to also sort of step back and look at is what are the problems that need to be solved from an end user perspective? So the hardest networking problems at the data plane control layers, check. Next big problem that remain to be solved was orchestration, data analytics, and things like that. Check, solve, with ONAP. Now the next problems that need to be solved are containerization of enterprise app, which is where Kubernetes and... and then how does containerization work with networking? That's all the C&I, the interfaces. I would say next year, you will start to see the interworking and the blend of these "hot projects" where they can all come together. >> Stu, you were there in 2010, I looked right in the camera and said to Dave Vellante, storage is not as sexy. And Dave called it snoreage, cause snoreage is boring. (Stu laughs) >> And at that time, the storage industry went on a run. And we well-documented that. Sexy is, networking is sexy. And I think that we-- >> I call it cool. >> And I just tweeted, 25g is a good indicator of a 20 year run, and networking is the big kahuna as Pat Gelsinger said in IoT, so I think, Stu, I think it's going to be very apparent, sexy. I just don't see a lot of amplifications, so you don't see a lot of people marketing the sizzle. I think, being done I would agree, but Stu, there's more buzz and hype on the CNCF side than networking. >> That's fair. I think it is always as you said, it's the initial phase of any project that gets a lot of clicks and a lot of interest, and people want to know about it. A lot of the buzz is around, just awareness. The classic marketing cycle, and I think we're past that. It was therefore ONAP in January, we're past that. >> Alright, so here's the question, final question. So the steak is coming off the grill in our metaphor here, what are people-- what is that product, what's happening, what is the big deliverable right now from a networking standpoint that people can bet on and know that they can cross the bridge into the future with it. >> You will see a visible difference, you as in an end user, an enterprise, or a residential consumer. You will see a significant difference in terms of how you get services. It's as simple as that. Why? Because it's all automated. Network on-demand, disaster recovery, video conference services. Why did over-the-top players, why were they so successful? If you need a Gmail ID, you go in, you get one. It's right there. Try getting a T1 line five years ago. That would be six weeks, six months. So with the automation in place, the models are converging. >> So provisionings are automatically happening-- >> Provisionings, service, and then the thing that you will not see but you will see in the services impact, is the closed loop automation that has all the analytics built in. Huge, huge. I mean, network is the richest source, and by the way, I'll come back next year and I'll tell you why we are cool again. Because all of a sudden, it's like oh my god look at that data and the analytics that the network is giving me. What can I do with it? You can do AI, you can do machine learning, you can do all these things. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, the eye of the storm is kind of happening now I think in networking, Stu and I always have debates about this, cause we see a lot of great action. Question is, let's see the proof points, you guys are doing some good work. Thanks for sharing, Arpit, really appreciate, General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation. It's theCUBE, more live coverage from Los Angeles, the Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, be back with more live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> 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

>> Host: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's TheCUBE covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are coming to the end of day two at Open Networking Summit. We just got here today, it's a great show. Everyone who's talking everything about software-defined networking is here. And along with Scott Raynovich we're joined by Dave Ward, one of the luminaries doing panels, doing keynotes. >> Here we are in TheCUBE. >> And here we are. Dave is the CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems. So Dave, great to see you as always. >> Great to see you guys. >> So what's the buzz of the show, you've been here for a couple of days, any surprises? >> No real big surprises to be honest, always there's some great announcements and great launches going on. But really what I'm finding surprising is that this is the sixth year of this conference, can you believe that? So year six from where we started, and I may be the first person to say this, have you ever had anybody in theCUBE today talking about openflow? >> Jeff: No. >> Remember those days? >> Now, nothing against open flow that's not my point, but think about how far we've gone and so. >> Scott: Actually, yeah, Martin was talking about it. >> Course he did. Course he did. He's not going to let it go. (laughter) But love you Martin. But really my point is, look how far we've come in six years. Six years ago we had a protocol, small community, one group working on this stuff, really working in standards, there was no open-source associated with that at that time, now look where we are. Basically the place to do work is now in open-source and come together as a community. So, the buzz for me really is holy shit, this thing is real! There's a lot of people investing a lot of money and time and really trying to work together to improve and build the ecosystem around networking, around network functions, what services are being delivered and building a business off networking again, so networking is back. It's cool again. >> Jeff: Right. Great. And then there's this whole new thing coming down the pike in the form of 5G, and IoT that's just opening up a new opportunity kind of redefine, what are these standards, and how is this going to help push things along? >> Well, it's kind of interesting and so I'm just ripping for a second. When you take a look at where we've come over the last several years and it was SDN controllers and configuring the network. Then it was virtualizing the network. There was a lot of talk yesterday and today about analytics and creating a reactive network. All of that has been built in the those six years and come together in different open-source communities to build those pieces. We've got SDN controllers, projects like OpenDaylight, projects like FD.io, projects like PNDA, P-N-D-A-.io. That's the SDN virtualized network and data analytics piece, but when you get to 5G and IoT, one thing I'll be talking about tomorrow in my keynote, is that there're big blocks missing in the industry. So, let's dial it back to historically, remember when the HVAC contractor logged on to the network and that malware on that laptop stole 70 million credit cards, remember that? >> Yes. >> Still haven't solved that problem yet. And so the reason why I'm bringing this up is what's missing, identity. So we had this notion that networks controlled by IT operators that are going to go in and config and provision that network. Well, we're now to the point where we need to link people and things to be able to drive what that intent is on the network, and whether its buzz words, which is real functionality by the way, of micro-segmentation. HVAC contractor goes into a micro-segment, can't get to the point of sale, can't steal the credit cards. Basic bread and butter stuff we want from the network. This is what SDN is supposed to deliver, virtualized services like firewalls and other sporadic security, we'll just hold that for a second. But that linking of who the person is, what device they're on, where they are on campus, where they are in the world, etc., etc., time of day, whatever the case may be, are now the variables that need to go into the top of this system, into a policy engine that then drives that reactive network. We've made a couple of great strides in six years, but to get to 5G, and in particular to get to IoT, we have to have another couple of major blocks come into the industry to make that work well. Hopefully it's open-source where that's going to go, and it's not just a standards body and not just open-source, cuz we still need things to be manufactured and interoperable and the rest of it. So hopefully these things come together as we've seen the maturing of those two big groups. >> I was going to say, it kind of begs the question, what is the interplay between standards bodies versa or together with open-source projects? Cuz before you didn't really have open-sources standards really set. Set the regs. Now you've got these open-source projects, which have a main channel, they might start forking, there's all kinds of places that they can go, and how do the two kind of work together? >> Well there's been a ton of effort, and coming out of the SDN open-source movement around model-driven networking, and although it sounds kind of geeky, the main way of representing those models is through representation called YANG. The interesting thing about YANG is that's been not only adopted in SDN, as the main object and way of representing the models being converted to network and equipment computes, computers etc. But the IETF has taken that up and really driven a service approach through the IETF which is I want to deliver a VPN service, I want to deliver load engineering on the network versus what we did with SNMP, or what the industry did, which was I'm going to fully distribute this out to all the protocols and all the functions and everybody's going to write a NIB etc., etc. and we know how that turned out. So the craze for model-driven networking, the standards bodies picking this up, IETF, MEF, which is metro ethernet forum, broadband forum, BBF. All these organizations have now taken on that mantra that came out of open-source SDN of model-driven networking and are working towards creating those models so that way we will have a standardized way to program the network. But what's next is the telemetry coming out. Those objects need to be standardized so that way whether it's a Cisco device or somebody else's device, it's actually sending out the same data that can be collected and can be interpreted properly. Does it mean that it's a NIB? Does it mean that it's only going to go over one particular transport? I don't think anybody in the industry really cares whether it's JSON, Google RPC, Protobuffs, Netconf, or any of these pieces, they're all perfectly fine, they have different semantics associated with them, but nonetheless those common objects and common data models have been what has been the key to keeping the industry working together, the common architectural philosophy, and then the standards bodies have thankfully picked that up over the last couple of years. >> Yeah we were talking here earlier, I mean you just threw out a bunch of alphabet soup there and I understand 80% of it, but it does raise the issue we were talking about earlier about these standards development organizations and the IETF, the TM Forum, the MEF. Now we have open-source, so we have the Linux Foundation. We have a lot of these different organizations and I think while you would know better than I as a CTO, people are becoming challenged by tracking and following all this stuff, do you think we need some sort of consolidation of these standards or at least some more unification, we just saw ECOMP and Open-O merge so there seems to be some consolidation. What will we see going forward? What's going to help you as the CTO? >> There's no doubt if there's consolidation, that would be easier to track and easier place to develop, but in reality, Scott, it's 50 shades of YANG. (laughter) >> And the reason why I say that is each and every standards body has done their own specific function, again whether it's Metro Ethernet or its broadband access or its mobility, each one of those standards bodies is redefining themselves to be SDN capable. There's no doubt. If there's a one stop shop, it would be the most optimal way to get something done the fastest, but that's not the way the world works. So actually I think we are going to see a continuous increase of more folks working on this, more foundations being build, etc., etc. Although, what we have witnessed over the last couple days in the last year, is that the communities, the open-source communities in particular, are coming together and trying to integrate the pieces together versus just islands of cool technology that there's a few geeks interested in, no. Thankfully the operators and some enterprises have come in and said I need this stuff to work and I need this stuff to work together and that discipline is actually fundamentally new and different than the way either standards bodies worked or open-source worked in the past. So I'd love to say that there'd be even more consolidation. There's frankly a bit of fatigue over, not saying it's wack-a-mole but you have to chase, you have to really figure out and track where all this stuff is going on in the industry to really keep abreast and understand how wide and how deep it goes. >> It's interesting this trend lately where people are just donating ... The project is just being absorbed into Linux Foundation. So now there's at least kind of a consistency across all these various projects, in terms of the way things are managed, the shows, the communication, and them helping standardize a process to help those projects be more successful in their distribution and adoption in the company. >> Linux Foundation has done the industry a huge service. They understand governance. They've gone through a zillion different experiences of how to build communities. What works well when there's competing factions that need to come together and work, on board marketing team, on board legal team, able to build foundations as necessary, or what's been experimented with over the last couple of years is, if you remember when we started to number these, you need to have a 503C, you need to have a foundation, there was frankly a high cost associated with these. Now, open-source is being contributed there's no foundation, and there's no cost. And so there's a whole continuum of things that the industry, the networking industry I should say, is learning about how to build communities and although this sounds cliche, you may launch a product, but you don't launch a community, you actually have to build it. And it's not all one company that's doing the donating or doing the working and that will produce, that'll create the longevity of that particular project. And that is what the Linux Foundation knows how to do well or at least catalyzed people to come together to do that well. >> Now you mentioned one of the big questions that always comes up with open-source is well how do we make money, right? Cause it's all free. It's like, you know ... >> Are we on Jerry Maguire? What's going on? (laughter) >> Jeff: Free like a puppy. (laughing) >> Still my favorite. >> Free like a puppy, yeah, you guys still got to change the newspaper. So you were on a panel today there was a big discussion about the commercialization and how does, I mean obviously Cisco has to stare at this big puppy in the room if you will, you know. What's going to happen to our licensing model with all this open-source, what came out of that discussion, what came out of the panel about how do you make money in this open-source world? >> So a couple of things, one thing that was discussed was not only how to make money, is which comes first, cost reduction, total cost of ownership, or new service revenue. And really the outcome there, and AT&T, Comcast, and Lightspeed Ventures was also in the panel with me. Needless to say it's a combination of both. If you're coming in with a project and the project is please spend this money so you can save this money, we know how to do that math. We can add up the rows and columns and can understand whether or not money will be saved over time. But the new service revenue really certainly in an enterprise space, is really what's being discussed. In particular, can I get these new services, I need these new security functions, I want to manage all my branches from the cloud or whatever the case might be. So new service revenue is depending on which use case, which technology, which layer. Both of those two balance out and they both are required in the algorithm. Now, can people make money off of it? And the answer is, needless to say, Lightspeed Ventures colleague said, "Hey man, if there's a community "and there's a technology, "you can list off a zillion cases of where that community "is turned into a true company that can provide value-add "and additional IP and move forward." Now, let's move this from just startups to big companies like Cisco or AT&T and Comcast and not only do we all use open-source in our projects, all those companies are contributing to open-source. And in Cisco's case, we're contributing to open-source for a couple of key reasons, one is there are gaps in the industry, which were limiting the industry. So let me give an example. We open-sourced a virtual switch router, which you might think, okay it's Cisco they're going to do something in networking, but the reason why we open-sourced it, and it's a piece that we actually use in our products, was there was not a virtual switch or router that had the scale, performance, or features that enabled the industry to utilize all the capabilities of the hardware underneath, whether it's computer or networking or security. And so the industry literally would have stalled with a limited feature set versus being able to utilize decades of networking knowledge and experience in things that are key and necessary, encapsulations, features, filters, quality of service etc., etc. There's a zillion of these pieces. And so there's a couple different ways, how can somebody make money off of this really is the fundamental question. We contribute into open-source communities and use that open-source to build products as well. And we can do this across video, we can do this in networking, and we do this in NFV, we do this in orchestration in these pieces and we also catalyze an ecosystem around these projects and then potentially around our portfolio as well. And so we continuously expand our ecosystem into startups that are using this technology, advancing the technology, enabling the industry to move faster, and trying to fundamentally create those business outcomes that our customers want. >> I just love that you just innately understand the value of an active community and that really comes through, so but unfortunately the janitors have rolled in, the vacuums are going, the garbage cans are rolling, so before they unplug all of our gear, I want to give you the last word Dave. What are some of your top priorities for 2017? >> So top priorities for 2017 really comes down to working towards filling the gaps I mentioned, identity and policy, but additionally number one, make sure that the automation orchestration policy around networking in a containerized stack is created. So we live through a long era of hypervisors and what it was like to work with open stack and what it was like in open-source and have to invent all this technology. We learned a ton. But it doesn't exist in a containerized world. So for 2017, fill the big gaps in the industry and work towards orchestrating and automating networking, compute, storage, and security in a containerized world. >> Pretty simple. I think that's the answer. I was going to say 42 is usually the answer, but I think that was it Dave. (laughter) >> I love 42. (laughing) >> Thanks Dave, so he's Dave Ward, Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching TheCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) >> You're also an entrepreneur, right? You know the business, you've been in the business.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's theCube. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Woman: Sure. Um, so, yeah, as you were saying, OpenDaylight really kind of kicked things off from a open source networking standpoint. I mean, there were certainly other open source controllers earlier, in sort of the market life cycle, but they kind of never really made their way out of the universities. OpenDaylight was the first that really had a lot of commercial participation and uptake, kind of in the real world, so to speak. Um, so with that, I think there was a lot of learning that happened, both on the vendor's side, with regard to open source, as well as on the user side. Um, and as the OpenDaylight platform matured and started coming to fruition, we started seeing a lot of other projects sort of both below at the platform layer as well as further up the stack. So at this point, and we've been talking about this quite a bit here at ONS, um, we've been talking a lot about the whole open networking stack that has sort of come to fruition now. You know, really low level stuff, DPDK was just announced today. Fido, which is sort of big data for networking. Then all the way up the stack to ONAP, which was just announced last month. ONAP is a bringing together of the ECOMP Project that was started by AT&T and then they brought it to The Linux Foundation and Open-O, which actually sort of germinated within The Linux Foundation with a lot of input from, um, a number of small vendors, as well as major carriers, particularly in Asia. So, um, bringing those things together at the orchestration layer, and so now we've got this sort of whole stack. Some of it, a lot of it is Linux Foundation projects, some of it is other projects with other open source foundations. All of which we work with very collaboratively across all those different projects. >> Man: Right, right. >> But at this point, we're really kind of looking at how do we enable people to consume this a little bit more easily from the user side? And then also from the developer side. There are a lot of developers who are involved in multiple different projects. Which of course means that they're spread very thin across all those projects. And we're looking at how do we make it a more feasible and scalable activity for them? >> Right. >> So for example, you know, OpenDaylight is upstream of a lot of other projects. There are a lot of other projects that have a lot of dependencies on OpenDaylight. So how do we streamline the release train in such a way that, you know, everybody gets what they need at the time that they need it, so they can do their releases on a timely basis and so forth and so on. And that just, you know, that makes things a lot easier from a developer standpoint. That also sort of naturally increases the, improves the integration points between those projects which is, of course, better for users. >> Man: Right. >> Um, so those are a lot of the things that we have in motion sort of across the Linux Foundation, um, and I think that the other thing that we've really seen over the last year come to fruition is a lot of the early adopters of OpenDaylight in particular have now spent enough time working with the open source community, either through their vendors or increasingly directly themselves, that they kind of get this open source thing, and they understand kind of what the processes are and why we do things they way they do. >> Right. >> And so they're willing to take a much more active role. AT&T is a prime example of that. They were working on ECOMP themselves internally, and they, very quickly, came to the realization that in order to scale it as quickly as they needed to, I mean, they were putting tens of thousands of their developers through specialized boot camps, right? >> Man: Right, right. >> The networking people to become networking developers. But at the same point, you just can't push people through the system that fast enough, nor can you hire enough people that fast enough. And so that's why this has decided to bring it to the open source community. >> Man: It seems like there's kind of an acceleration of carving out some piece of what was proprietary and putting it out to continue the development in an open source world. >> Any "why", you kind of answered the question just now in terms of there's not enough people. But more interestingly, you talked about some open source stuff just never gets going. What are some of the real secrets that make an open source project run? >> Yeah. >> Versus those that don't, or you know, die on the vine. >> Yeah. Um, there are a lot of different components, of course, like with anything. Some of it is technical, right? Do you have the right architecture? Is it one that can scale? Is it extensible? Are the right kinds of people involved in the project? Is the project being informed by the right kinds of people? So if you go and build something that nobody needs, either because you don't have the right people involved, or because you're not open to that feedback, it's going to die on the vine. So, you know, a successful project really has to have a strong community around it. And it's a-- >> Jeff: Chicken and egg. >> Chicken and egg thing, right? How do you get a strong community? Well, you have the right processes in place, but you also make sure that you have the right people involved so that they can build the right kind of thing. And that they have the skills to do it effectively. >> Right. And then the other interesting trend we're seeing is, The Linux Foundation is becoming kind of the hub where you put these things, um, to grow, and as you said, really to cross-pollinate with the other open source projects that have all these interdependencies. >> And that seems to be an accelerating trend as well, as least from the outside looking in. >> Lisa: Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And I think we learned a lot with, with OpenDaylight and also with OpenStack. You know, when OpenStack started, and OpenStack of course is even older than OpenDaylight, but when OpenStack started, I think there was all kinds of euphoria in the industry because open source was relatively new to infrastructure, and infrastructure people, it was like, "Oh, I can build everything "that I ever wanted to build now!" Um, and so there was this sort of irrational exuberance about feature proliferation. In some ways, kind of at the expense of platform stability initially. And at a certain point, the users, again, started getting involved and said, "That's great. We need the thing to actually work. "At scale, in real world environments. "Please focus on that." And you know, that's the real beauty and strength of open source, is when you have users who care, and see the possibility of a project, they can be actively involved and actively influence where the focus of the project is going to be. And that's how you get to something that's going to be useful to people quickly. >> Thank you. >> Well, it'd be great to hear a little bit more about how you-- on these, I'm always kind of mystified as an analyst or a journalist or whatever, when you see these things. The press release comes out, "ONAP is the new thing", right? There's a new thing every week. How do you ensure the success? How do you get the momentum behind it? I imagine there's a lot of stuff that's been happening behind the scenes for ONAP. >> Lisa: Yep. We try not to keep it too behind the scenes. It has always been part of open source culture and what's proven to be a best practice is openness and transparency of not just the code itself but the processes around it. >> Scott: Mhm. >> Um, if people feel like they understand what's going on, that things aren't being hidden from them, that they can have a voice. >> Scott: Right. >> They're much more actively willing to participate. So that's really kind of the key to building any kind of community. >> And how do you work with a big carrier, like, I mean, the fascinating part about this for me is for our viewers who don't know what ONAP and ONOS and ODL are, it's basically all this carrier software that's becoming open source and they're just putting it out there, saying, "It's no longer our family jewels. "Everybody can use it." I mean, that's a big leap for an AT&T, you know? Tell us how you work with AT&T or Verizon or some of these big, gigantic organizations. Like, they just hand you a thumb drive? (laughter) How do you get the intellectual property? How's that process start? >> In the case of AT&T, they reached out to The Linux Foundation and said, "We want and need to do this. "Help us do it. We don't know how this works. "Help us, teach us." But it's very much a, you know, a big part of the role of The Linux Foundation in all of this project proliferation and so forth is teaching people how to do open source effectively. Because, again, it's not just about throwing coders at a problem, 'cause you can do that inside your own organization as well. It's understanding how to do that in a collaborative manner, how to carve off what parts to open source, 'cause AT&T's ECOMP platform, not all of it has been open source. Some portion of it, the stuff that's really important and proprietary and is considered the crown jewels, that has stayed internal, but they've shared a reasonable, fairly large percentage of the base platform with the open source community. And learning to draw that line is an art. And figuring out what is commodity and really could and should be shared with the rest of the world so we're not all reinventing the same wheel. >> Scott: Right. >> But rather than having ten developers here doing that and ten developers here and duh duh duh dah, we can put 30 developers, all working together, to get the same thing more quickly. That shifted mindset can take a little bit of time, a bit of education, and that's kind of part of what The Linux Foundation brings to that process of onboarding new open source projects. >> Jeff: Right. And then on the other end, I always think of Randy Bias. He's one of our favorite guests, Especially with OpenStack, and he knows a couple OpenStack Silicon Valleys ago, where he was somewhat critical on the other end, saying we also have to kind of reign things in, and you have all this risks of stuff going all over the place, and how do you kind of have some organization at the top end because of successful growth can drive a bunch of different agendas and things can get forked. It's not a simple thing to manage. >> No, and we've tried different models and different approaches within different projects and we've learned a lot from that. OpenDaylight was very much a, you know, you guys figure it out, hands-off kind of model. Other open source projects have been very top-down, from their governant structure to everything else. Others, like Open-O are kind of in-between where they did specifically set up an architecture committee that was composed of the leading members of the project because, again, Open-O in particular is touching the business layer of these carriers. So they really need that architecture to be meeting their specifications. >> Right, right. >> Sort of a lower layer, so it's a little bit less critical. There are lots of different models and sort of a gradation of top-down versus bottom-up and, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. (chuckling) There are pluses and minuses to all of them. I think that we've been sort of learning as we go through all of these different projects what works. And different--sometimes it's worth shifting the model and starting out one way and shifting as you go along as the project matures, too. >> Jeff: But the net-net, which I think, you said at the beginning, is that big companies are now really learning how to operate effectively in this world, in this open source paradigm. It's matured way, way, way beyond what, we used to always joke, years ago, is a free puppy, you know? (laughing) >> You know, I mean, I think Tokus understand now that it is, yes, it's a free puppy. You still have to do lots of work. I think that understanding is sort of starting to trickle into the enterprise. I still have, every time I do a briefing, people will ask me to tell them about my product, and I say, "I don't have a product. I can't sell you anything." I help bring together a bunch of building blocks that you and your vendors can put together. But I don't have a product. And that, you know, that's a major mind shift for, especially, enterprise IT, where they're used to buying things off the shelf. >> Right. >> So larger enterprises, um, are starting again. They tend to take their cues from the carriers as things get proven out in the carrier world. And so we're starting to see that the same level of understanding and also, drivers in large, especially very distributed types of organizations, where they have 50, a hundred, hundreds of different sites around the world that they need to have a centralized few of in some fashion. And the only way they can get there is with SDN and they have a very strong preference, very clear preference for open source. >> Scott: How big is The Linux Foundation now? >> Lisa: By what metric? >> Uh, people, I guess. >> Lisa: Oh, people. Um... We're a few hundred, no more. But it's not just--we're not the ones doing all the work, right? We organize things. We help things happen. We help teach people. We provide the infrastructure. >> It seems to be growing very fast, like new projects are being added and merged. >> Lisa: But again, it's vendors and it's users. >> Very grassroots. >> Yeah. We help provide the ground, the legal framework, and the technical test facilities and things like that, and kind of the organizational guide rails. But we're here to help, we're not the ones doing the work. >> Right, right. Alright, Lisa, so I'll give you the last word before we sign off here. As you look forward to 2017, what are some of your top priorities for this next year? >> Lisa: Yeah, so, several things. First order is really enabling our users to really be successful with the projects that they already have in hand. In many cases, they're well through the phase of proof of concept and all the way onto production, and we just want to make sure that they're continuing to get everything they want out of the project and supporting them and supporting their vendors. And really building out the commercial ecosystem around it, so that they have a strong base of support. So that's one thing. Certainly on the OpenDaylight side, with some of the newer projects, it's really about figuring out what are the best practices that we can implement for this project, for this project, and for this project in order to make sure that they're successful. And a lot of that, again, is that whole harmonization effort that we have going on. >> Right, right. Alright, Lisa Caywood. She knows all about bringing open source to the enterprise, and thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick, he's Scott Raynovich. You're watching theCube from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. We'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)