>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host for the week, John Troyer. We've been talking this week about how OpenStack, there's real clouds, there's real deployments. I'm happy to welcome to the program two people that have done this with Adobe Advertising Cloud. We have Joseph Sandoval, who is the engineering manager at Adobe Advertising Cloud, and Nicolas Brousse, who is director of operations engineering. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for letting us join. >> Thank you. >> Nicolas, I'm sorry Joseph, we actually had you on the program at the Silicon Valley OpenStack Days a little while ago. Refresh our audience, though, a little bit, your background, how OpenStack fits in with your role, and what you do. >> Sure. Now, I've been in, a long time, in the OpenStack community, at that time when I was at the Silicon Valley event, I was with Lithium Technologies, so we also were an OpenStack user, but we were also kind of going through some transformation, I think, I would say we kind of really pushed the Kubernetes button for the community at that time. So I think I kind of got a little rep about being kind of like an agitator in this community to try to make the product really, you know, work for people who are actually consuming it. >> Right, so not only have you deployed OpenStack, you've done it at two different jobs now already. >> Joseph: Yes. >> People think we're still so early there, but we're already seeing that progression. Alright, Joseph, a little bit of background, yourself, what brought you to the current role in interaction with OpenStack? >> Yeah, so it's Nicolas. >> I'm sorry, yeah Nicolas, sorry, yeah. >> It's okay. >> I come from this startup company called TubeMogul that got acquired by Adobe last year, and one of our challenges as a startup was to be able to scale our cloud infrastructure and our infrastructure in general. We were a newer user of a public cloud at that time, but over the years we faced multiple challenges, not only as a cost challenge, where it gets like easily out of control with public clouds, but also technical challenge. We were in like an IP goals environment with very lean team operation. So we had to figure out a way where we can scale some of our technology and some of our platforms. And so my first technical prime was to have a reasonable cost control. And so we started to look at different cloud solutions. At the time it was like Eucalyptus, CloudStack, Open Nebula, and we tried many of these to get control, to get some time to figure out what was the solution. And we moved quickly to OpenStack and started to implement and get like some known, couple of here a journey to implement that and scale a little faster too. >> Stu, I want to point out something. In that story, at least what I took away from it, usually when you have a problem state of a lean team and you're trying to hyper growth >> Stu: In scaling. >> In scaling, the answer is public cloud. Oh, we'll just go to the public cloud, that'll solve all that problem. You chose a different way and chose a different architecture. >> Nicholas: Correct. >> Anything that brought you to that decision? >> Yeah, so there was a few factors. First one was like, well cost growth on public clouds was growing faster than the revenue in some ways, so that doesn't line up. You need to have a story that makes more sense. And the second one was really like technical. We had some very specific challenge where we're in the real-time bidding advertising, so we have a huge amount of traffic. We do want to try billions, HTTP request on the platform. All of those need to be answered in a few milliseconds, so the proximity of our partner, you can always see that as a smaller stock exchange for advertising. So we need to be close to our partner so all this auction process is happening very quickly. And we have to store huge amount of data. Any of the solution you will find on the public cloud will end up having like 50 minutes ago that's 50 milliseconds that doesn't necessarily fit our use case. >> Yeah, just maybe you can bring us inside the architecture a little bit. >> Joseph: Sure. >> Talk about, look, public cloud isn't simple, obviously costs people, you know, we understand that and there's the debate as to where those pieces fit. But you know, OpenStack, speak a little bit to how it is to put that together. Simplicity is not usually what we hear when we talk, but what worked, what didn't work, what did you have to kind of customize to kind of get things working? >> You know, I think the one thing is just coming through like, you know, two different implementations is that, yeah there is complexity. And what I really got out of this was that you know, you really just have to consume the things that you need, so we've been very lean about the APIs that we consume, what services that we think are meaningful to our business. Instead of taking really all as a service type parts of this framework, we really narrowed it down to what matched our business requirements. I think as well as kind of like how you're consuming, and I think if you noticed the keynote on Monday, all of a sudden we're seeing this new pivot of like, let us manage your cloud. And it still kind of speaks to some of the challenges that you know, the end users of OpenStack have. And I think the part that's really important for anyone that's really going on this journey is that, you know, it's how you decide to consume it, like can you start really running it within like a CICD model so that you're really getting into that dev-ops aspect of it. Even within Amazon, I think in my journey, that's one thing that I think a lot of people miss is that when they try to lift and shift, like they want to race to the public cloud, you're going to still be challenged because you haven't really fundamentally changed how you're consuming the cloud product. You're not making yourself cloud native. And I think in my journey, I've made those same mistakes. I've learned from it enough. I'm actually really realizing that it's almost bigger than OpenStack. It's almost like how as business you operate and how your teams fundamentally build their tools and how they kind of like make open source a true strategy. >> I'd love to hear about the applications that you're using in this environment. We hear it in some of the keynotes on some of the users, you know, rapid move from where they started to adding applications. You mentioned cloud native. What are the class of applications, what percentage of your business runs on that? >> Sure, yeah so the code name we've given our platform is CloudMogul. And really it comprises bare metal, primarily OpenStack, and yet we still also use Amazon, so we have all different frameworks in there, depending on the type of, you know, workload that's there. As far as like OpenStack specifically, we really just consume the court. It's compute, storage, and network. Storage is probably a little bit secondary for us, the way we have designed our platform. Network is the really key thing. And as Nicholas mentioned earlier, I mean, that's the thing that in Amazon, you'll see great choices for compute, great choices for memory, but if you try to find an affordable network, you know, intensive instance, and that's what you know, we have decided why we're doing the data center. So we really have stuck really with just the core OpenStack services. Currently our developers are looking at now rolling out Kubernetes, and they're kind of doing it in a more, you know, dev POC. And as well as we're trying to balance out like the broader Adobe strategies, like they want to move to multi-cloud, they want to use Azure. So there's quite a bit that we're trying to consume, but with the lean team, we have to really be judicious about what we decide to roll in. >> Nicholas, can you comment maybe on the applications you mentioned some of the costs. The keynote, cost compliance capabilities, does that resonate with you, and how do you choose between the public and >> I think it's more like to get back to this lean operation, it would drive like some of our info on it, like we're a technology company in some way. I mean, we are building software, we are building certain solutions. You know, our goal is to develop like an advertising solution and trend solutions at several customer. So we're on a tier to be like a storage solution for OpenStack or compute solution for OpenStack or public cloud. So we really had to focus on what is selling or best use case or solve one problem, as that's where we had like to really look at cutting the fat in some way on OpenStack and really just looking at what is going to be the best use case for us. So we liberate OpenStack for most of our bidding system and manage all those calculating for the VMs, but we also integrate that very easily with like a flat network designed with open maker, so we are about to really like get the best of both worlds, between like Permital, OpenStack, and virtualization, and know we are also like implementing like reverting on the, be able to offload some of the workload back to Amazon in Ozone, we are starting to look at Ozone like a cloud provider but for trying to revert like what's the best and consider like all the terms we have. >> Can you give us a little insight to that cloud bursting is a term that, you know, gets attention because data's tough to move, you know, where the application lives, is that you know, container, Kubernetes stuff that you're doing, expand that a little for us. >> So it's definitely challenging. It's not something that, and then we got a very quick iteration and we have been able to liberate it easily first because we are like a very simple design on the way we were managing our kernel environment on OpenStack prime mount. So it was to very easily integrate, have a direct connect to a VPC on Amazon and just offload some of the compute of these onto this VPC. So a challenge we had to learn is we are trying to understand we're in the workload and that was in iteration, when we did move back to in house, understanding like the network traffic you are getting and understanding like the back and forth between your backend and your frontend. That's something you don't really see or understand easily on public cloud. When you move back in house, then you start to see the bottlenecks and you start to learn about what is really your workload, and we are to do this again, like with cloud bursting, okay, what kind of back and forth are going between our compute services and all the backend service that it needs to access. And latency being very critical for us, we had to really measure that. >> Yeah, you never know til you try it, right? >> Exactly. >> You crawl, walk, run. Hey Joseph, you talked about CICD and rate of change. I'm kind of curious how you're seeing the rate of change of your infrastructure stack, so OpenStack, versus you said you're now kind of experimenting with Kubernetes containers in the talk. A lot of talk about containers here at the show. For me, it's becoming a little more clear where in the architectural pie, layer cake, that that, pie, layer cake, that that fits in. Can you talk about rate of change? Are you looking at, does your infrastructure need to change at the same rate as the application on top of it, or how are you all looking at it? >> You know, in just beginning this journey, the one thing that I've really took away and that was one guy on my team when I was at Lithium, where he would always talk about like really meeting your developers where they're at. And yes, there's so much change, and you have to really kind of balance it. And you know, some of these companies we've been with, we've had some software stacks that are almost a decade old. They're just not made with cloud nativeness in mind. And that's where, you know, I've always been a really like let's move forward, and that was one of the early individuals saying, you know, I was at OpenStack Prague and we were doing, you know, Kubernetes under the control plane. In hindsight I was like, well, it was a little kind of premature. It was almost a little reckless. But I think that the thing that I'm trying to do now is really just try to leverage like where our product's at. Can I help evolve the platform so that, are we 12-factored, can we get there? You know, we have big data kind of workloads. How do we like start taking frameworks that allow us so that you know, we can be in this multi-cloud world. So I think there is a challenge, you know, you're hearing all these new great things that are happening. You know, you're coming to these summits, and you're getting all this hype. But then you really got to walk away. And I just kind of do that sniff test, testing something out to see like, is it really ready? And especially with where we're at in enterprise, you know, we really have to map to security compliance. And I think those are some of the gates that we're challenged with, as well as like, is the workload that we're bringing in, have we adapted it enough so that we can really kind of push what we're doing. Cause I'd love to see us get to the point where we have the frameworks of containers and Kubernetes. But not everything for us can get there. You know, so like on the edge, we're doing billions of requests per second. Bare metal is the key thing for us. And we're running HA proxy on the edge. So the key thing for us is like, run it as code, let's count how much can we do to get this so that we can fully automate this and make it repeatable. And I think that's kind of the core ethos for the team. >> You talked about coming to different summits over the years, kind of the sniff test. What's the mood of the attendees here at OpenStack summit here in Boston this year in 2017 and is it different from previous years? >> You know, I think we seen kind of some interesting ebb and flows. I think when I was in Barcelona, it was definitely different. I was kind of like surprised, it just felt like it was a little bit less energy. Austin I thought was tremendous, it was a great event. And I kind of feel like, I think there's a little bit more pragmatism that set in, which I think is really healthy and a sign of maturity that you know, people are really kind of understanding instead of getting caught up in that, the cloud hype, you know, public versus private and all these things. I think now we're starting to see a more mature audience. I think OpenStack foundation and the community has also kind of adapted as well. I know they try to be everything for everybody under the cloud in a data center. And I think now we're actually seeing a more healthy approach, so for me I think there's still a lot of energy there. Maybe it's getting a little boring, which to me in my world, that's a good thing. >> Nicholas, I'm curious, do you either at this show or at other events, how are you working with your peers in the industry to understand that kind of hybrid multi-cloud model and sort that out, you know, resources you go to, conversations you have, you know, how do you create that learning? >> So, first it's I come from the culture that's from the startup to Mogul that got a prior where we're ready for costs on the customer and the end goal of what we are trying to build. And we are not necessarily driven by the technology itself, we really try to devise technology to solve a problem. We have a lot of geek on our team, and that's what drives some of our discussion. But we're really more trying to look at how we drive the product for our world. And that's really like most of the discussion, even with our product, like we started a year ago to use the Fastly file pen to sort some specific problem where we can't have like a global footprint as much as the city and provider. And they were able to address like some of a specific use case, where they can do like a synchronous looking for us. And that was something like a specific business case for us, and every time we go like to an event or technology, we are trying to see like what are we trying to solve? And that's what drives most of our discussions. >> Joseph, sounds like you've given feedback and been on some of the leading edge of some of the activities. Is there anything you look at where you're hoping for a little bit more maturity, either OpenStack in general or the vendor community out there, you know, what are you hoping to see, you know, as we mature this even further? >> Sure, I mean I would say one thing about, you know, the OpenStack community. And I know this was always kind of one of my early beefs about it. It felt so vendor-centric, and very vendor-influenced that it just didn't really for me feel like the actual consumers, the individuals who really are using these platforms are really being heard. So I think they need to still kind of really force it, really listen to that feedback from the community, what's working, what's not working. As far as what I'd love to see, is you know, I think there's been a little bit more of like a correction I guess in a sense of like all the kind of like services that were out there, these side projects. I think there was a lot of messaging about like let's all work together, which I think is kind of, I just kind of wince a little bit. But I'm like, it's good, I'm glad that they've kind of come to this recognition. I'd love to see more and more of that. But I also want to make sure that the OpenStack community, like stay distinct. I'm not sure if I 100% think like, leveraging off the Kubernetes community, like yes, work together, let's make these things, you know, coexist and stuff. But I do hear some things where like, hey, we should just make this service be the backend for Kubernetes. I'm like, hmm. I don't think you've really looked at the framework of some of these APIs and how they're going to integrate in that environment. And I actually would like to see them develop, you know, distinctly, but you know, find some really friendly integration points so that me as a consumer, I can like easily use these as we evolve and our platform evolves, I can easily kind of start roadmapping these into our platform. >> Alright, Nicholas and Justin, really appreciate you giving us the update, and we'd love to get that real practitioner viewpoint. John and I will be back with more coverage here from OpenStack 2017 in Boston. You're watching The Cube. (upbeat techno music)