>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. (techno music) >> And we're back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program two of the keynote speakers this morning, worked on some of the container activity, Kendall Nelson, who's a Upstream Developer Advocate with the OpenStack Foundation. >> Yep. >> And John Griffith, who's a Principal Engineer from NetApp, excuse me, through the SolidFire acquisition. Thank you so much both for joining. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. Thank you. >> John Griffith: Thanks for havin' us. >> Stu Miniman: So you see-- >> Yeah. >> When we have any slip-ups when we're live, we just run through it. >> Run through it. >> Kendall, you ever heard of something like that happening? >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. That might've happened this morning a little bit. (laughs) >> So, you know, let's start with the keynote this morning. I tell ya, we're pretty impressed with the demos. Sometimes the demo gods don't always live up to expectations. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> But maybe share with our audience just a little bit about kind of the goals, what you were looking to accomplish. >> Yeah. Sure. So basically what we set out to do was once the ironic nodes were spun up, we wanted to set up a standalone cinder service and use Docker Compose to do that so that we could do an example of creating a volume and then attaching it to a local instance and kind of showing the multiple backend capabilities of Cinder, so... >> Yeah, so the idea was to show how easy it is to deploy Cinder. Right? So and then plug that into that Kubernetes deployment using a flex volume plugin and-- >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> Voila. >> It was funny. I saw some comments on Twitter that were like, "Well, maybe we're showing Management that it's not, you know, a wizard that you just click, click, click-- >> John Griffith: Right. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> "And everything's done." There is some complexity here. You do want to have some people that know what they're doing 'cause things can break. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> I love that the container stuff was called ironic. The bare metal was ironic because-- >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Right. When you think OpenStack at first, it was like, "Oh. This is virtualized infrastructure." And therefore when containers first came out, it was like, "Wait. It's shifting. It's going away from virtualization." John, you've been on Cinder. You helped start Cinder. >> Right. >> So maybe you could give us a little bit about historical view as to where that came from and where it's goin'. Yeah. >> Yeah. It's kind of interesting, 'cause it... You're absolutely right. There was a point where, in the beginning, where virtualization was everything. Right? Ironic actually, I think it really started more of a means to an end to figure out a better way to deploy OpenStack. And then what happened was, as people started to realize, "Oh, hey. Wait." You know, "This whole bare metal thing and running these cloud services on bare metal and bare metal clouds, this is a really cool thing. There's a lot of merit here." So then it kind of grew and took on its own thing after that. So it's pretty cool. There's a lot of options, a lot of choices, a lot of different ways to run a cloud now, so... >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> You want to comment on that Kendall, or... >> Oh, no. Just there are definitely tons of ways you can run a cloud and open infrastructure is really interesting and growing. >> That has been one thing that we've noticed here at the show. So my first summit, so it was really interesting to me as an outsider, right, trying to perceive the shape of OpenStack. Right? Here the message has actually been very clear. We're no longer having to have a one winner... You know, one-size-fits-all kind of cloud world. Like we had that fight a couple of years ago. It's clear there's going to be multiple clouds, multiple places, multiple form factors, and it was very nice people... An acknowledgement of the ecosystem, that there's a whole open source ecosystem of containers and of other open source projects that have grown up all around OpenStack, so... But I want to talk a little bit about the... And the fact that containers and Kubernetes and that app layer is actually... Doesn't concern itself with the infrastructure so much so actually is a great fit for sitting on top of or... And adjacent to OpenStack. Can you all talk a little bit about the perception here that you see with the end users and cloud builders that are here at the show and how are they starting to use containers. Do they understand the way these two things fit together? >> Yeah. I think that we had a lot of talks submitted that were focused on containers, and I was just standing outside the room trying to get into a Women of OpenStack event, and the number of people that came pouring out that were interested in the container stack was amazing. And I definitely think people are getting more into that and using it with OpenStack is a growing direction in the community. There are couple new projects that are growing that are containers-focused, like... One just came into the projects, OpenStack Helm. And that's a AT&T effort to use... I think it's Kubernetes with OpenStack. So yeah, tons. >> So yeah, it's interesting. I think the last couple of years there's been a huge uptick in the interest of containers, and not just in containers of course, but actually bringing those together with OpenStack and actually running containers on OpenStack as the infrastructure. 'Cause to your point, what everybody wants to see, basically, is commoditized, automated and generic infrastructure. Right? And OpenStack does a really good job of that. And as people start to kind of realize that OpenStack isn't as hard and scary as it used to be... You know, 'cause for a few years there it was pretty difficult and scary. It's gotten a lot better. So deployment, maintaining, stuff like that, it's not so bad, so it's actually a really good solution to build containers on. >> Well, in fact, I mean, OpenStack has that history, right? So you've been solving a lot of problems. Right now the container world, both on the docker side and Kubernetes as well, you're dealing with storage drivers-- >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> Networking overlays-- >> Right. >> Multi-tenancy security, all those things that previous generations of technology have had to solve. And in fact, I mean, you know, right now, I'd say storage and storage interfaces actually are one of the interesting challenges that docker and Kubernetes and all that level of containers and container orchestration and spacing... I mean, it seems like... Has OpenStack already solved, in some way, it's already solved some of these problems with things like Cinder? >> Abso... Yeah. >> John Troyer: And possibly is there an application to containers directly? >> Absolutely. I mean, I think the thing about all of this... And there's a number of us from the OpenStack community on the Cinder side as well as the networking side, too-- >> Yeah. >> Because that's another one of those problem spaces. That are actually taking active roles and participating in the Kubernetes communities and the docker communities to try and kind of help with solving the problems over on that side, right? And moving forward. The fact is is storage is, it's kind of boring, but it's hard. Everybody thinks-- >> John Troyer: It's not boring. >> Yeah. >> It's really awesomely hard. Yeah. >> Everybody thinks it's, "Oh, I'll just do my own." It's actually a hard thing to get right, and you learn a lot over the last seven years of OpenStack. >> Yeah. >> We've learned a lot in production, and I think there's a lot to be learned from what we've done and how things could be going forward with other projects and new technologies to kind of learn from those lessons and make 'em better, so... >> Yeah. >> In terms of multicloud, hybrid cloud world that we're seeing, right? What do you see as the role of OpenStack in that kind of a multicloud deployments now? >> OpenStack can be used in a lot of different ways. It can be on top of containers or in containers. You can orchestrate containers with OpenStack. That's like the... Depending on the use case, you can plug and play a lot of different parts of it. On all the projects, we're trying to move to standalone sort of services, so that you can use them more easily with other technologies. >> Well, and part of your demo this morning, you were pulling out of a containerized repo somehow. So is that kind of a path forward for the mainline OpenStack core? >> So personally, I think it would be a pretty cool way to go forward, right? It would make things a lot easier, a lot simpler. And kind of to your point about hybrid cloud, the thing that's interesting is people have been talking about hybrid cloud for a long time. What's most interesting these days though is containers and things like Kubernetes and stuff, they're actually making hybrid cloud something that's really feasible and possible, right? Because now, if I'm running on a cloud provider, whether it's OpenStack, Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, it doesn't matter anymore, right? Because all of that stuff in my app is encapsulated in the container. So hybrid cloud might actually become a reality, right? The one thing that's missing still (John Troyer laughs) is data, right? (Kendall Nelson laughs) Data gravity and that whole thing. So if we can figure that out, we've actually got somethin', I think. >> Interesting comment. You know, hybrid cloud a reality. I mean, we know the public cloud here, it's real. >> Yeah. >> With the Kubernetes piece, doesn't that kind of pull together some... Really enable some of that hybrid strategy for OpenStack, which I felt like two or three years ago it was like, "No, no, no. Don't do public cloud. >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> "It's expensive and (laughter) hard or something. "And yeah, infrastructure's easy and free, right?" (laughter) Wait, no. I think I missed that somewhere. (laughter) But yeah, it feels like you're right at the space that enables some of those hybrid and multicloud capabilities. >> Well, and the thing that's interesting is if you look at things like Swarm and Kubernetes and stuff like that, right? One of the first things that they all build are cloud providers, whether OpenStack, AWS, they're all in there, right? So for Swarm, it's pretty awesome. I did a demo about a year ago of using Amazon and using OpenStack, right? And running the exact same workloads the exact same way with the exact same tools, all from Docker machine and Swarm. It was fantastic, and now you can do that with Kubernetes. I mean, now that's just... There's nothing impressive. It's just normal, right? (Kendall Nelson laughs) That's what you do. (laughs) >> I love the demos this morning because they actually were, they were CLI. They were command-line driven, right? >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> I felt at some conferences, you see kind of wizards and GUIs and things like that, but here they-- >> Yeah. >> They blew up the terminal and you were typing. It looked like you were actually typing. >> Kendall Nelson: Oh, yeah. (laughter) >> John Griffith: She was. >> And I actually like the other demo that went on this morning too, where they... The interop demo, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> John Troyer: They spun up 15 different OpenStack clouds-- >> Yeah. >> From different providers on the fly, right there, and then hooked up a CockroachDB, a huge cluster with all of them, right? >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Can you maybe talk... I just described it, but can you maybe talk a little bit about... That seemed actually super cool and surprising that that would happen that... You could script all that that it could real-time on stage. >> Yeah. I don't know if you, like, noticed, but after our little flub-up (laughs) some of the people during the interop challenge, they would raise their hand like, "Oh, yeah. I'm ready." And then there were some people that didn't raise their hands. Like, I'm sure things went wrong (John Troyer laughs) and with other people, too. So it was kind of interesting to see that it's really happening. There are people succeeding and not quite gettin' there and it definitely is all on the fly, for sure. >> Well, we talked yesterday to CTO Red Hat, and he was talking same thing. No, it's simpler, but you're still making a complicated distributed computing system. >> Kendall Nelson: Oh, definitely. >> Right? There are a lot of... This is not a... There are a lot of moving parts here. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's funny, 'cause I've been around for a while, right? So I remember what it was like to actually build these things on your own. (laughs) Right? And this is way better, (laughter) so-- >> So it gets your seal of approval? We have reached a point of-- >> Yeah. >> Of usability and maintainability? >> Yeah, and it's just going to keep gettin' better, right? You know, like the interop challenge, the thing that's awesome there is, so they use Ansible, and they talk to 20 different clouds and-- >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> And it works. I mean, it's awesome. It's great. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> So I guess I'm hearing containers didn't kill OpenStack, as a matter of fact, it might enable the next generation-- >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Of what's going on, so-- >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> How about serverless? When do we get to see that in here? I actually was lookin' real quick. There's a Functions as a Service session that somebody's doing, but any commentary as to where that fits into OpenStack? >> Go ahead. (laughs) >> So I'm kind of mixed on the serverless stuff, especially in a... In a public cloud, I get it, 'cause then I just call it somebody else's server, right? >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> In a private context, it's something that I haven't really quite wrapped my head around yet. I think it's going to happen. I mean, there's no doubt about it. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> I just don't know exactly what that looks like for me. I'm more interested right now in figuring out how to do awesome storage in things like Kubernetes and stuff like that, and then once we get past that, then I'll start thinking about serverless. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause where I guess I see is... At like an IoT edge use case where I'm leveraging a container architecture that's serverless driven, that's where-- >> Yeah. >> It kind of fits, and sometimes that seems to be an extension of the public cloud, rather than... To the edge of the public cloud rather than the data center driven-- >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> But yeah. >> Well, that's kind of interesting, actually, because in that context, I do have some experience with some folks that are deploying that model now, and what they're doing is they're doing a mini OpenStack deployment on the edge-- >> Stu Miniman: Yep. >> And using Cinder and Instance and everything else, and then pushing, and as soon as they push that out to the public, they destroy what they had, and they start over, right? And so it's really... It's actually really interesting. And the economics, depending on the scale and everything else, you start adding it up, it's phenomenal, so... >> Well, you two are both plugged into the user community, the hands-on community. What's the mood of the community this year? Like I said, my first year, everybody seems engaged. I've just run in randomly to people that are spinning up their first clouds right now in 2017. So it seems like there's a lot of people here for the first time excited to get started. What do you think the mood of the user community is like? >> I think it's pretty good. I actually... So at the beginning of the week, I helped to run the OpenStack Upstream Institute, which is teaching people how to contribute to the Upstream Community. And there were a fair amount of users there. There are normally a lot of operators and then just a set of devs, and it seemed like there were a lot more operators and users looking that weren't originally interested in contributing Upstream that are now looking into those things. And at our... We had a presence at DockerCon, actually. We had a booth there, and there were a ton of users that were coming and talking to us, and like, "How can I use OpenStack with containers?" So it's, like, getting more interest with every day and growing rapidly, so... >> That's great. >> Yeah. >> All right. Well, want to thank both of you for joining us. I think this went flawless on the interview. (laughter) And yeah, thanks so much. >> Yeah. >> All these things happen... Live is forgiving, as we say on theCUBE and absolutely going forward. So thanks so much for joining us. >> John Griffith: Thank you. John and I will be back with more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit in Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (funky techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Washington DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of John Furrier. We are excited to welcome to the program, General Keith Alexander former NSA Director, the first Commander to lead the US Cyber Command, Four-star General with a 40 year career. Thank you so much for coming theCUBE, we are honored, we are honored to have you. >> It is an honor to be here. Thank you. >> So let's talk about cyber threats. Let's start there and have you just give us your observations, your thoughts on what are the most pressing cyber threats that keep you up at night? >> Well, so, when you think about threats, you think about Nation States, so you can go to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. And then you think about criminal threats, well all the things like ransomware. Some of the Nation State actors are also criminals at night so they can use Nation State tools. And my concern about all the evolution of cyber-threats, is that the attacks are getting more destructive, the malware has more legs with worms and the impact on our commercial sector and our nation, increasingly bigger. So you have all those from cyber. And then I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property, right. That's our future. So you look out on this floor here, think about all the technical talent. Now imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us, and beating us. That's kind of what Huawei did, taking CISCO code to make Huawei, and now they're racing down that road. So we have a couple of big issues here to solve, protect our future, that intellectual property, stop the theft of money and other ideas, and protect our nation. So when you think about cyber, that's what I think about going to. Often times I'll talk about the Nation State threat. The most prevalent threats is this criminal threat and the most, I think, right now, important for us strategically is the theft of intellectual property. >> So why don't we just have a digital force to counter all this? Why doesn't, you know, we take the same approach we did when we, you know, we celebrated the 75th anniversary D-day, okay, World War II, okay, that was just recently in the news. That's a physical war, okay. We have a digital war happening whether you call it or not. I think it is, personally my opinion. I think it is. You're seeing the misinformation campaigns, financial institutions leaving England, like it's nobody's business. I mean it crippled the entire UK, that like a big hack. Who knows? But its happening digitally. Where's the forces? Is that Cyber Command? What do you do? >> So that's Cyber Command. You bring out an important issue. And protecting the nation, the reason we set up Cyber Command not just to get me promoted, but that was a good outcome. (laughing) But it was actually how do we defend the country? How do we defend ourselves in cyber? So you need a force to do it. So you're right, you need a force. That force is Cyber Command. There's an issue though. Cyber Command cannot see today, attacks on our country. So they're left to try to go after the offense, but all the offense has to do is hit over here. They're looking at these sets of targets. They don't see the attacks. So they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony. They don't see these devastating attacks. They don't see the thefts. So the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible, make it so our nation can defend itself from cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. That should help us protect companies in sectors and help us share that information. It has to be at speed. So we talk about sharing, but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control, a letter, that a plane is located overhead. You get it in the mail seven days later, you think, well-- >> Too late. >> That's too late. >> Or fighting blindfolded. >> That's right. >> I mean-- >> So you can't do either. And so what it gets you to, is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyber space. This does a whole host of things and you were good to bring out, it's also fake news. It's also deception. It's all these other things that are going on. We have to make that visible. >> How do you do that, though? >> What do you do? I do that. (laughing) So the way you do it, I think, is start at the beginning. What's happening to the network? So, on building a defensible framework, you've got to be able to see the attacks. Not what you expect, but all the attacks. So that's anomaly detection. So that's one of the things we have to do. And then you have to share that at network speed. And then you have to have a machine-learning expert system AI to help you go at the speeds the attacker's going to go at. On fake-news, this is a big problem. >> Yeah. >> You know. This has, been throughout time. Somebody pointed out about, you know, George Washington, right, seven fake letters, written to say, "Oh no, I think the King's good." He never wrote that. And the reason that countries do it, like Russia, in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It is interesting, MIT has done some studies, so I've heard, on this. And that people are 70% more like to re-Tweet, re-Tweet fake news than they are the facts. So. >> Because it's more sensational, because it's-- >> That's food. It's good for you, in a way. But it's tasty. >> Look at this. It's kind of something that you want to talk about. "Can you believe what these guys are doing? "That's outrageous, retweet." >> Not true. >> Not true. Oh, yeah, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. >> Right, right. >> And so, you get people going, and you think, You know, it's like going into a bar and you know, you go to him, "He thinks you're ugly." and you go to me, and you go, "He thinks you're ugly." (laughs) And so we get going and you started it and we didn't even talk. >> Right, right. >> And so that's what Russia does. >> At scale too. >> At scale. >> At the scale point. >> So part of the solution to that is understanding where information is coming from, being able to see the see the environment like you do the physical environment at speed. I think step one, if I were to pick out the logical sequence of what'll happen, we'll get to a defensible architecture over the next year or two. We're already starting to see that with other sectors, so I think we can get there. As soon as you do that, now you're into, how do I know that this news is real. It's kind of like a block-chain for facts. How do we now do that in this way. We've got to figure that out. >> We're doing our part there. But I want to get back to this topic of infrastructure, because digital, okay, there's roads, there's digital roads, there's packets moving round. You mentioned Huawei ripping off CISCO, which takes their R and D and puts it in their pockets. They have to get that. But we let fake news and other things, you've got payload, content or payload, and then you've got infrastructure distribution. Right, so, we're getting at here as that there are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure, that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored, or reset, because you've had email that's been around for awhile. But these are new kinds of infrastructure, but the payload, malware, fake news, whatever it is. There's an interaction between payload and infrastructure. Your thoughts and reaction to that as a Commander, thinking about how to combat all this? >> I, my gut reaction, is that you're going to have to change, we will have to change, how we think about that. It's not any more roads and avenues in. It's all the environment. You know, it's like this whole thing. Now the whole world is opened up. It's like the Matrix. You open it up and there it is. It's everything. So what we have to do is think about is if it's everything, how do we now operate in a world where you have both truths and fiction? That's the harder problem. So that's where I say, if we solve the first problem, we're so far along in establishing perhaps the level so it raises us up to a level where we're now securing it, where we can begin to see now the ideas for the pedigree of information I think will come out. If you think about the amount of unique information created every year, there are digital videos that claim it's doubling every year or more. If that's true, that half of, 75% of it is fiction, we've got a big road to go. And you know there is a lot of fiction out there, so we've got to fix it. And the unfortunate part is both sides of that, both the fiction and the finding the fiction, has consequences because somebody says that "A wasn't true, "That person, you know, they're saying, he was a rapist, "he was a robber, he was a drugger," and then they find out it was all fake, but he still has that stigma. And then the person over here says, "See, they accused me of that. "They're out to get me in other areas. "They can exclaim what they want." >> But sometimes the person saying that is also a person who has a lot of power in our government, who is saying that it's fake news, when it's not fake news, or, you know what, I-- >> So that's part of the issue. >> It's a very different climate >> Some of it is fake. Some of it's not. And that's what makes it so difficult for the public. So you could say, "That piece was fake, "maybe not the other six." But the reality is, and I think this is where the media can really help. This is where you can help. How do we set up the facts? And I think that's the hardest part. >> It's the truth. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a data problem. And you know, we've talked about this off camera in the past. Data is critical for the systems to work. The visibility of the data. Having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets a lot of the consequences. There's real consequences to this one. Theft, IP, freedom, lives. My son was video-gaming the other day and I could hear his friends all talking, "What's your ping start word? "What's your ping time? "I got lag, I'm dead." And this is a video game. Military, lagging, is not a game. People are losing their lives, potentially if they don't have the right tactical edge, access to technology. I know this is near and dear to your heart. I want to get your reaction. The Department of Defense is deploying strategies to make our military in the field, which represents 85% infantry, I believe, some statistic around that number, is relying on equipment. Technology can help, you know, that. Your thoughts on, the same direction. >> Going to the Cloud. Their effort to go to the Cloud is a great step forward, because it addresses just what you're saying. You know, everybody used to have their own data centers. But a data center has a fixed amount of computational capability. Once you reach it, you have to get another data center, or you just live with what you've got. In the Cloud if the problem's bigger, elasticity. Just add more corridors. And you can do things now that we could never do before. Perhaps even more importantly, you can make the Clouds global. And you can see around the world. Now you're talking about encrypted data. You're talking about ensuring that you have a level of encryption that you need, accesses and stuff. For mobile forces, that's the future. You don't carry a data center around with an infantry battalion. So you want that elasticity and you need the connectivity and you need the training to go with it. And the training gets you to what we were just talking about. When somebody serves up something wrong, and this happened to me in combat, in Desert Storm. We were launched on, everybody was getting ready to launch on something, and I said, "This doesn't sound right." And I told the Division Commander, "I don't agree. "I think this is crazy. "The Iraqis are not attacking us down this line. "I think it's old news. "I think somebody's taken an old report that we had "and re-read it and said oh my God, they're coming." And when we found out that was a JSTARS, remember how the JSTARS MTI thing would off of a wire, would look like a convoy. And that's what it was. So you have to have both. >> So you were on the cusp of an attack, deploying troops. >> That's right. >> On fake information, or misinformation, not accurate-- >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old, fake, it's all not relevant. >> Well what happens is somebody interprets that to be true. So it gets back to you, how do you interpret the information? So there's training. It's a healthy dose of skepticism, you know. There are aliens in this room. Well, maybe not. (laughing) >> As far as we know. >> That's what everybody. >> But what a fascinating anecdote that you just told, about being in Desert Storm and having this report come and you saying, "Guys, this doesn't sound right." I mean, how often do you harken back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat, versus what you are doing today in terms of thinking about these threats? >> A lot. Because in the military, when you have troops in danger your first thought is how can I do more, how can I do better, what can I do to get them the intelligence they need? And you can innovate, and pressure is great innovator. (crunching sound) And it was amazing. And our Division Commander, General Griffith, was all into that. He said, "I trust you. "Do whatever you want." And we, it was amazing. So, I think that's a good thing. Note that when you go back and look at military campaigns, there's always this thing, the victor writes the history. (laughing) So you know, hopefully, the victor will write the truthful history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes history is re-written to be more like what they would like it to be. So, this fake news isn't new. This is something where I think journalists, historians, and others, can come together and say, "You know, that don't make sense. "Let's get the facts." >> But there's so much pressure on journalists today in this 24-hour news cycle, where you're not only expected to write the story, but you're expected to be Tweeting about it, or do a podcast about it later, to get that first draft of history right. >> So it may be part of that is as the reporter is saying it, step back and say, "Here's what we've been told." You know, we used to call those a certain type of sandwich, not a good-- (laughing) If memory serves it's a sandwich. One of these sandwiches. You're getting fed that, you're thinking, "You know, this doesn't make sense. "This time and day that this would occur." "So while we've heard this report. "It's sensational. "We need to go with the facts." And that's one of the areas that I think we really got to work. >> Journalism's changing too. I can tell you, from we've talked, data drives us. We've no advertising. Completely different model. In-depth interviews. The truth is out there. The key is how do you get the truth in context to real-time information for those right opportunities. Well, I want to get before we go, and thanks for coming on, and spending the time, General, I really appreciate it. Your company that you've formed, IronNet, okay, you're applying a lot of your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and cutting-edge tech. Tell us about your company. >> So one of the things that you, we brought up, and discussed here. When I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations that I discussed with both Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta, we can't see attacks on our country. And that's the commercial sector needs to help go fix that. The government can't fix that. So my thought was now that I'm in the commercial sector, I'll help fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government. What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system that creates events, anomalies, an expert system with machine-learning and AI, that helps you understand what's going on and the ability to correlate and then give that to the government, so they can see that picture, so they have a chance of defending our country. So step one is doing that. Now, truth and lending, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. (laughing) You know, I had this great saying, "Nothing is too hard "for those of us who don't have to do it." "How hard can this be?" Those were two of my favorite sayings. Now that I have to do it, I can say that it's hard, but it's doable. We can do this. And it's going to take some time. We are getting traction. The energy sector has been great to work with in this area. I think within a year, what we deploy with the companies, and what we push up to the Cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with government will change the way we think about cyber security. I think it's a disruptor. And we have to do that because that's the way they're going to attack us, with AI. We have to have a fast system to defend. >> I know you got to go, tight schedule here, but I want to get one quick question in. I know you're not a policy, you know, wonk, as they say, or expert. Well, you probably are an expert on policy, but if we can get a re-do on reshaping policy to enable these hard problems to be solved by entrepreneurs like yourself expertise that are coming into the space, quickly, with ideas to solve these big problems, whether it's fake news or understanding attacks. What do the policy makers need to do? Is it get out of the way? Do they rip up everything? Do they reshape it? What's your vision on this? What's your opinion? >> I think and I think the acting Secretary of Defense is taking this on and others. We've got to have a way of quickly going, this technology changes every two years or better. Our acquisition cycle is in many years. Continue to streamline the acquisition process. Break through that. Trust that the military and civilian leaders will do the right thing. Hold 'em accountable. You know, making the mistake, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, says a great thing, "Go quickly to failure so we can get "to success." And we in the military say, "If you fail, you're a dummy." No, no, try it. If it doesn't work, go on to success. So don't crush somebody because they failed, because they're going to succeed at some point. Try and try again. Persevere. The, so, I think a couple of things, ensure we fix the acquisition process. Streamline it. And allow Commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this. >> All right. All right, I'm thinking Rosie the Riveter. We can do this. (laughing) >> We can do it. Just did it. >> General Alexander, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome inside the VM Village at VMworld 2018 where we have a nice, big set. Double set of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my co-host John Troyer and wait, Keith Townsend? >> Did you mess up the intro? >> Oh my gosh. (Keith chuckling) Luckily, the great thing about VMworld is it's got a great community. Remember a couple of years ago, had a couple of my staff that weren't going to be here and I'm like oh my gosh, what do we do? So I reached out to community members. John Troyer, Keith Townsend. I said hey, guys, how'd you like to do some CUBE stuff? Keith did a whole bunch of CUBE with us for a couple of years and something happened. You decided to go and take a real job? >> Evidently, you can't live off borrowed time for too long. It catches up with you. But VMware, obviously, world-class organization. I've been on the other side interview folks on here so I've gotten a good window in to the org over the past couple of years, thanks to theCUBE. >> Yeah, well, Keith, look, first of all, thank you for all the time you did. We call you the once and future guest host of theCUBE. (both laughing) So we have not seen the end of Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. You're now a solutions architect, though, at VMware. If people want, go read Keith's blog. Great resource to the community as to looking at jobs. Keith didn't apply to VMware once or twice, it was one of those you keep trying and eventually you found a pretty sweet job. >> Yeah. >> Maybe give us a little insight as to what brought you, what excited you to come join VMware? You've know the community, been a vExpert. Been a watcher and a partner and a customer of VMware. What's it like being inside, wearing that logo? >> I've said on theCUBE, a couple of times, VMware moves at the speed of the CIO. You can take that one of two different ways. You can say VMware is really slow organization, or they go right where the CIO needs them to go. The thing the intrigued me about VMware all the time is that no company is better positioned to walk through digital transformation than VMware. As seen by the announcements this morning. VMware is struggling through, we're struggling through to find our way through what it is that the right combination of partnerships, technologies, people, process to help companies transition to this new digital age and that is an exciting thing to be a part of. >> Definitely interesting times. I'm sure there's a number of companies that would say hi, Microsoft, Amazon, and the like, that we think we're pretty well positioned to lead companies to where you need to go. But definitely interesting stuff in the keynote. That maturation of cloud and networking. Put your CTO Advisor hat on there. How're they doing? >> This is where I got, I tweeted it out earlier that man, I got to be careful, because some of the stuff that I want to tweet I'm like, oh, I can't say that as a VMware employee. But I can say definitely, I was surprised at the RDS announcement and people love the VMware ESXi on ARM. Two amazing announcements, but what really excited me was the RDS announcement. On theCUBE, I've pushed Chris Wolf, I've pushed Lee Caswell, all of these GMs, these BU GMs, about when is the innovation going to come out of VMware again? Let's not just get V1 updates. Why should somebody upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to 6.7? Give us a compelling reason. I think this morning we heard some really compelling stuff. RDS on vSphere is, I can't overstate how disruptive of an innovation that is. >> That could be really interesting. I like what you said in the beginning about the digital transformation. I think we also heard this morning the word digital foundation a lot, which is, again, one of my goals here for this show, Stu and Keith, is to pin down what does VMware do? What does it do? And it's not quite fair, because it has quite a wide portfolio but it seems to me, Keith, that it feels like the early days when I was there. You had to work with a whole set of OEMs in the hypervisor and some of the same things are happening with a whole bunch of clouds and working as a neutral Switzerland or partners with all them. But I was actually wanting to pivot over a little bit over to you as a communicator and as a member of the community. You were a customer. You worked for a large pharmaceutical company and ran a lot of billion dollars worth of stuff. You chose to become a communicator and an explainer and to be part of the learning process and buying process as an independent. Now back on the vendor side. Is there anything in that journey you've learned about 2018 about how people learn and how IT people figure this stuff. How do I even know where to go or what to buy or even what to consider? Any insights into that? >> So John, that's a really great question. I went on a run this morning, the vFit Run. We do it every year at VMworld and I was with VMUG CEO, Brad Tompkins. And we actually talked about this. vSphere admins want all the vSphere content that they can consume. In reality, they need to transition from just being focused on vSphere, vSphere, vSphere, and VXLAN and NSX to this broader picture. Pat on stage this morning talked through PKS, which is Kubernetes, he talked a little bit of serverless. I mean, from a CEO of a software company, that was a lot to consume just on the stage this morning. So you can be a deer in the headlights and think, what should I focus on? I think the thing to focus on, one of my peers gave a talk, well two of my peers, Craig Fletcher, who brought me into VMware, and Joseph Griffith, gave a talk today on culture. And this is about culture. The culture to learn and grow. You don't necessarily have to learn a specific technology, but you should most definitely have the attitude that if the CXO comes to me and asks me about X business process, I need to know a high level answer to that and how do I get there? Simple, simple steps is learn your business processes. I'll throw just one out there. Order to cash. Every organization has some process from when they either request money, they place an order, and how they eventually get paid. If you learn that process, the technology bits I think fall in place. >> Yeah it's an interesting point. I've talked to some of the users here, and they were a little bit overwhelmed this morning. I don't think there's anybody at this show, that if you put them in front of the CEO of their company, and said, okay tell me everything VMware's doing. (Keith laughing) Nobody can explain that. Nobody inside VMware nobody out. There's too much. Part of the answer I get all the time, is how do I keep up? Look, you're not going to keep up on everything. You need to have, I think the role you're in now Keith, is part of helping customers understand what are the things they need to understand, what are the steps they can be taking in the areas they need to learn and the things they can lean on you and your partners to get there. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah I did a podcast with Brian Gracely maybe about a year, a year and half ago and we talked about this very topic. At the highest level, you just need, from a CIO perspective, CIO, CTO, and if you don't have a CTO, that's probably step one. But from a CIO perspective, you need someone who can just think about big picture, how the moving parts work. And then you need people to go deep and different areas. I talked to a financial services senior VP and he was talking through how he needed today a Pivotal guy But tomorrow that Pivotal guy would not need to be a Pivotal guy but a Kubernetes guy specifically. And how that guy would morph into something else so he's structured in his organization. So that he can, hey today, this guy or gal knows this technology stack but more important, they know systems and they can adjust and learn the technology that they need to learn to be effective. Because even as an analyst, near the end of the CTO Advisor as a full time opportunity, I thought about focusing all on VMware, because the company's that big now. Pat on stage said one of the things they learned from AWS, is how to add features every quarter. Stu, if I told you five years ago VMware would add a feature every quarter, the culture just isn't there, until now. >> Yeah, so, Keith, that's a really interesting point. That pace of change, because most people when you talk about vSphere upgrades, it was oh wow. It came out every year, every year and a half or so like that >> That's too fast >> I'm usually a couple generations behind. Every quarter there's no way I'm going to do that. We still have a bit of an impedance mismatch. When I go use the cloud, some of the base things happen under line. But other things I still need to choose or there's automation that will help me. How do we help CIOs, IT businesses to get to this more fluid, dynamic, upgradeable environment compared to the oh wait I need to consciously think about when do I upgrade, when do I move, how do I make those changes? >> So we have to get out of this mindset that IT is in this constant ops mode. Whether it's vSphere and the announcements that were made today or any other platform. We add no value by engineering upgrades. Putting time into designing and testing the upgrade from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 6.7 update 1 really doesn't add value at the end of the day. VMware made critical announcements about the path to having VMware manage that. VMware cloud on AWS is a great example but the technologies are out there where we're no longer consuming our OSes. There's Linux distributions, there's Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows desktop ever and we'll get those updates directly from Microsoft. So we need to get out of the mindset that we add value as executives to managing upgrades and move our organizations where we're consuming these things as the black boxes they should be. >> Alright, so Keith, last question. What's surprised you so much, so far inside of VMware? >> You know what? I'm going to give an honest, raw answer to that, Stu. I'm not used to competing against my friends. (Stu laughing) It's one of those things, you know what, you got to make money, you got to win deals but both me and you have made a lot of friends, and John, we've made a lot of friends in this community. And you run into situations where you're pitting your technology against someone you just had dinner with last night or the week before at the last conference. And you've known for years and they're actually your friend. And keeping that competitive nature but at the same time maintaining your friendship, that's been surprisingly interesting. >> Alright, well hey, Keith, pleasure to catch up with you, as always, you're always welcome on our program in one of these seats. And yeah, absolutely, what I love about this community is that I see lots of people that are friends that are fierce competitors but they're grabbing out, hanging out at parties, taking selfies together, doing stuff like that. So, community, definitely key themes. Keith, thank you for being our community guest for today. Day one of three days live wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas, VMworld 2018. For John Troyer, the CTO Advisor Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST (lively music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here at theCube. We're here at NAB 2017 again with 100,000 of our friends. It's a crazy, busy conference. I think it's got three halls, two levels on each hall, more stuff than you could ever take in in four days, but we're going to do our best to give you a little bit of the inside, and we're going to go down a completely different path here with our next guest. We're really excited to have Linda Tadic on, she's the founder and CEO of Digital Bedrock. Linda, welcome. >> Thank you Jeff, happy to be here. >> Jeff: Absolutely. So for those that aren't familiar with your company, give us a little bit of an overview. >> Well what we do at Digital Bedrock is we provide the managed digital preservation services that are required to keep digital content alive. [Jeff] Okay, so managed digital preservation. [Linda] Yes. >> Okay, so what does that mean? >> Managed, meaning we do the work for you. You just have to give us the files and we take care of it, so you don't have to license software, you don't have to train people, you don't have purchase all the infrastructure, no big CAPEX, we just do the work for you with our staff and infrastructure. >> Jeff: Okay. >> Digital, meaning its all digital content. Any format, any kind of content, we don't care. And then preservation. And so what that means is keeping the content alive so it can be used in a hundred years. And that's not just storing it, because that means you have to know everything about how that file was created so that you can monitor obsolescence, because digital files will become obsolete over time. >> So it's a really different kind of spin because we're here in the HGST booth, and a lot of talk about storage or storage people all around us. But when you talk about archiving and preservation, how do you delineate that from just, it's a backup copy, I know I have a backup copy on a server someplace? >> Yeah, so the preservation part of it is it has to live somewhere. I mean the bits have to live on something, and so it can be spinning disk, it can be solid state, it can be tape, and so storing it is the easy part actually, but then the hard part is the managing it. So you want to make sure those bits are okay, that the bits are healthy, so you will be doing fixity checks over time, according to a schedule, and then you want to also make sure that the file formats themselves, so everybody's concerned about migrating the data onto other storage media in the future 'cause you just have to do that, end of life, you have to move things along, but it's those formats that can become obsolete over time, which means let's say you have a format, a specific format, which requires a software to render it, which requires an operating system for it to run, which requires a chip or a piece of hardware or a file system to run. So what you have to do is you have to monitor all those vulnerabilities in order to keep that format alive. So you have to either migrate it or you can emulate it, or use another software, or you can do nothing and just keep the bits alive until you can do something with it. >> So you'll do those things, so you'll, if there's a new file format that comes out next year to NAB that's the new preferred, the format, you'll take some of those assets you have in your protection, and go ahead and recreate them in whatever feels like a viable format going forward? >> Actually we don't do that. We don't do the transcoding work. What we do is we monitor it. We have a separate database that's tapped into our support database. It's called the Digital Object Obsolescence Database, or the DUDE is what we call it >> That's a good thing. >> So in the DUDE it's monitoring all those, what version of a software can be used to be able to render a file. So if something in our database suddenly is flagged as being, uh -oh, this is not, it's endangered now, because one of those vulnerability factors has now been deprecated, we'll notify the client and we'll say you have all these files you've given us to preserve that are now endangered. But we can't just do the media transcoding because you know that those digital objects also then have perhaps these underlying files that feed up into that object. If you change one of those subsidiary files, you can't then render that final object. And so you have to be very careful not to just suddenly flip something and change it. So we tell the client here's the files and here's all the relations between all the files, and here's what you can do to migrate it or to keep it alive. But we won't do that work for them because they probably can either do it themselves, they have to choose first of all what they want to do, or they might have a preferred vendor themselves who will do that work for them. >> Jeff: And the other piece you talk about a lot, in doing some research before we sat down, is the metadata, and how important the metadata is. There's a lot of conversation about metadata, especially in media entertainment because there's the asset itself that you need all this other information, so I wonder if you can give us kind of the 101 on metadata and why it's so important and maybe not necessarily just the 101, but something a little bit more advanced that people don't think about when they think about metada. >> Right. I would say that most of the folks here at the event, at NAB, they're thinking about metadata in two ways. One is the description, which is describing the content, so what is the nature of this content, what is it about, what's in it, do you want to search for a particular scene or a particular clip, and that's based on the content. They also may be thinking about technical metadata but technical metadata in the sense of interoperability with machines. And so you want to know that the software can work with this or with this system or whatever, and that's why this camera can then work with a certain system, and that's all because of the technical metadata behind the scenes. What they're not thinking about is the metadata that is required to keep that content alive. And that's all those obsolescence factors, and in order to monitor all that obsolescence as we do in the DUDE, is where you need to be able to validate a particular format. And you know immediately, yeah, this was shot with this camera, and it's a certain kind of raw format, it's this version of it, which can only be used in this particular system. >> A lot of complex variables that are moving very very quickly. >> A lot of metadata, yeah. >> I mean in the typical bit of technical metadata we extract off a file, we'll get over 400 bits of metadata and that's not even the descriptive metadata. >> 400 bits, 400 different classifications >> 400 different elements of metadata. And we just pull it off the file. >> Jeff: Wow. >> And if that's not complicated enough, we were talking a little bit before we turned the cameras on about virtual reality and a whole different way of really describing that experience. Probably experience is a better word than asset because there is no asset until you engage with what the software is feeding into your experience. >> It's kind of virtual metadata when you kind of think about it because it's like, so there's a code that creates the software for the virtual reality to all work, it's all required, but the actual experience that is what the human, the person who's using the software and how they're interacting with it, and so that metadata about your experience in the content is in your head. Unless you're recording it as you're going, your experience, and so then there's an output of it, but otherwise it's all in your head, in your experience. >> It's fascinating. The other piece we've heard a number of times here is, especially now with all the different content distribution methods, there's many many flavors of the same file. So are you keeping track of all the different variants as well? >> Yeah. And so in fact in the research for the DUDE, 'cause it's humans who are doing the research to add the data to the DUDE, they'll say okay, great, this one software works with all these different operating systems except for this one package that went out, so it's somewhere in the middle, so we can't even say this range from here to here, and we'll work with it, oh no, but there's always an exception in between. So it's very complicated. >> So it's complicated and expensive in a lot of versions, and storage is getting cheaper every day, but it's not free >> right >> and managing is not free, and so it begs a value question, and I'm sure you can bring up all kinds of sad tales of phenomenal assets that were lost in the past. But how are people thinking about the value of these assets so that they feel comfortable making the investment in this preservation and archiving. >> Yeah. Two different mindsets I think that people have to just start adjusting to. One is they're just creating so much data they need to start doing appraisal and retention policies on them. You can't save everything, you shouldn't have to save everything. So that means you should really in reality set those policies at the point of when you're shooting, when you're creating it, so that it's automated, so that it's not at the end of a huge project when you have a petabyte of data there. That's not the time to choose what you want to keep. You need to set that policy in advance and try to automate it. >> So are there best practices? What are some of the best practices? Or are there some reference points that people should kind of start from I guess? >> I think the bottom line that they should be thinking about is let's say that in a hundred years, so thinking about Paramount. Paramount just had it's 100-year anniversary. And they were able to go back to their original nitrates and digitization and they're showing films that were made a hundred years ago. So what about the content being created now? What if in a hundred years you want to be able to have your own one-hundred-year retrospective? What would you need in order to be able to render the file that you're creating now in order to show it then? So what elements do you need to keep in case you need to restore it or recreate it? So that's one thing you have to think about. >> That feels like it could be a complete rabbit hole though. >> It could be. >> So that's why you have to think about the bottom line, the hundred years. Now of course in a hundred years who knows, 'cause of all of this artificial intelligence and all of this automated capture, then there could be systems that will just recreate it for you. So you might, you know, I'll be out of business, as I call it, the virtual Linda. I'll be out of a gig in a hundred years. >> So this is a fascinating area. How did you get involved in this area? I started out as a creator, so I was a composer and a filmmaker way back when, but then I got into the archival community, the archival field. So I've been working in audiovisual, film video, auto and then digital. Really starting in 2000 all my work's been in digital format and doing that preservation because all of this content is important to me and whether it's your own personal home videos or images, of your kids when they were born, it's all digital or whatever, to a studio product a station, government documents, it doesn't really matter. If that content is important to you, it should be preserved, because it documents your personal history, it documents our cultural history, it documents governments who are going forward for evidence, for law enforcement, all of that if it has to be preserved you have to really focus on that and how to keep it alive. And it's all important, and that's why I got into it. >> And as you spoke, you're involved in some really interesting cultural heritage preservation, which is a completely different kind of value chain than a movie or my home video of the kids. I wonder if you can kind of talk us through that use case that you described earlier, 'cause this is a very different way to think about virtual reality, preservation, and digital assets. >> Yeah. So I also do some consulting work, and I'm working with this organization in Dunhuong, China, which is on the Western part of China, so that's out in the Gobi Desert, far out. So what this organization is in charge of are these caves that were created by Buddhist monks starting in three sixty four A.D. going up to around eleven hundred A.D. Hundreds of caves out in the desert, carved out of sandstone and the monks would then paint murals, and beautiful, incredible murals showing Buddhist culture, history, and the culture of the time. You can see how people lived, how they farmed, 'cause they have that representation on the murals. So the Dunhuong Academy, they came to me and they said they're doing digital capture of the caves, high-res capture of the murals, and they said Linda, these caves are fifteen-hundred years old. We know they will not be around in fifteen-hundred years, so these digital assets must be around in fifteen-hundred years, 'cause those will be the only representations of these caves that are there. So I'm helping them build a digital repository to keep those digital images alive. Because if they are, they consider them to be the embodiment of the caves. So I've seen some great examples of virtual reality implementations in the cultural heritage environment, again thinking about some of these critical places around us, in the world and the environment. They won't be around in fifteen-hundred years, either because humans have destroyed them, through the environment, or just natural deterioration and destruction. So what virtual reality can do is go out and capture those environments, capture those sites, so that we can experience them, or people can experience them when those sites are no longer around. If the humans are still around in fifteen-hundred years. >> Fascinating. And what a great application of virtual reality. >> Yes, absolutely. It's my favorite. And entertainment is fun, to pretend you're somewhere, but it's not just to go to a different site, go to a different place. >> I want to shift gears just a little bit. As you've done all this archiving and you look at these old movies, 'cause we're here at NAB and it's all about media entertainment, I'm curious if you have any kind of historical perspective of how the storytelling has changed over time. Is there a consistent thread that you see or just reflection as you've spent so much time with this historical archive footage, that you could share with the audience, that maybe will get them to go look at the ... that aren't opening this weekend at your local cineplex. >> Okay, so think about film. So film in the early days was basically just a representation of theater. Because that was the moving art form of the time. And so it was really static, just one camera standing there and people would act in front of the camera. And then of course that changed what with D.W. Griffith and others to mold the intercutting into the show and then things happening at the same time in different locations, that was really radical in 1912, 1913, just over a hundred years ago. And then you go into the golden age of cinema in the '30s and the spectacle, and so it's more, and so now we're in the age of virtual reality where instead of we're being told a story, it's more like we are part of the story and going through that. And we'll see how if people still want to go back and return to "tell me a story," just like when we were little kids we all wanted "tell me a story daddy and mommy," kind of thing so when we're in the theater maybe we want to be told that and just be engrossed in somebody else's story and relax our brains instead of feeling like gosh I just want to rest and relax, do I have to interact with this thing? >> Right. Do I have to work? I'd rather have somebody who's really good at it, like Quentin Tarantino, tell me his interpretation of this story. >> So I'm really curious to see, it's still new with virtual reality and augmented reality to see how it's going to really expand. And people ... it might just be a fad, I know people who don't want to hear that, but it has all these other great uses as a cultural heritage or in gaming and that kind of thing it's totally fun, but for narrative, sometimes you just want a story. >> Well Linda, you're doing great work, so we have to let you get back to the booth so that more people can take advantage and keep track, and I think the word that you used a number of times, keep these things alive for future consumption, not just in cold storage in a vault someplace. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Alright, well thanks again Linda for stopping by. >> Thank you. Thanks so much Jeff. >> Alright. Linda Tadic. I'm Jeff Frick. We're at NAB 2017, you're watching theCube, and we'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (lively music)