>> Narrator: From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hi, and we're back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is SilconANGLES production of the Cube, here at DockerCon 2017, Austin, Texas. Happy to have on the program Kiran Kamity, who was CEO of ContainerX which was acquired by Cisco. And you're currently the senior director and head of container products at Cisco. And also joining us is Brad Wong, who is the director of product management at Docker. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Brad: Thanks for having us. [Kiran] Thank you, Stu. >> So Kiran, talk a little bit about ContainerX, you know, bring us back to, why containers, you know why you help start a company with containers, and when to be acquired by a big company like Cisco. >> Yeah, it was actually late 2014 is when Pradeep and I, my co-founder from ContainerX, we started brainstorming about, you know, what do we do in the space and the fact that the space was growing, and my previous company called RingCube, which has sold to Citrix, where we had actually built a container between 2006 and 2010. So we wanted to build a management platform for containers, and it was in a way there was little bit of an overlap with Docker Datacenter, but we were focusing on mostly tendency aspects of it. Bringing in concepts like viamordi rs into containers et cetera. And we were acquired by Cisco about eight months ago now, and the transition in the last eight months has been fantastic. >> Great, and Brad, you're first time on the cube, so give us your background, what brought you to Docker? >> Yeah, so actually before Docker I was at actually, a veteran of Cisco, interestingly enough. Many different ventures in Cisco, most recently I was actually part of the Insieme Networks team, focusing on the software defined networking, and Application Centric Infrastructure. Obviously I saw a pretty trend in the infrastructure space, that the future of infrastructure is being led by applications and developers. With that I actually got to start digging around with Docker quite a lot, found some good interest, and we started talking, and essentially that's how I ended up at Docker, to look at our partner ecosystem, how we can evolve that. Two years ago now, actually. >> I think two years ago Docker networking was a big discussion point. Cisco's been a partner there, but bring us up to speed if you would, both of you, on where you're engaging, on the engineering side, customer side, and the breadth and depth of what you're doing. >> You're right, two years ago, networking was in quite a different place. We kicked it off with acquiring a company back then called SocketPlane, which helped us really define-- >> Yeah and we know actually, ---- and ----, two alums, actually I know those guys, from the idea to starting the company, to doing acquisition was pretty quick for you and for them. >> Right, and we felt that we really needed to bring on board a good solid networking DNA into the company. We did that, and they helped us define what a successful model would be for networking which is why they came up with things like the container networking model, and live network, which then actually opened the door for our partners to then start creating extensions to that, and be able to ride on top of that to offer more advanced networking technologies like Contiv for example. >> Contiv was actually an open source project that was started within Cisco, even before the container was acquisitioned. Right after the acquisition happened, that team got blended into our team and we realized that there were some really crown jewels in Contiv that we wanted to productize. We've been working with Docker for the last six months now trying to productize that, and we went from alpha to beta to g a. Now Contiv is g a today, and it was announced in a blog post today, and it's actually 100% open-source networking product that Cisco TAC and Cisco advanced services have offered commercial support and services support. It's actually a unique moment, because this is the fist 100% open-source project that Cisco TAC has actually offered commercial support for, so it's a pretty interesting milestone I think. >> I think also with that, we also have it available on Docker store as well. It's actually the first Docker networking plug-in that it's been certified as well. We're pretty also happy to have that on there as well. >> Yeah. >> Anything else for the relationship we want to go in beyond those pieces? >> We also saw that there was a lot of other great synergies between the two companies as well. The first thing we wanted to do was to look at how we can also make it a lot better experience for joint customers to get Docker up and running, Docker Enterprise Edition up and running on infrastructure, specifically on Cisco infrastructure, so Cisco UCS. So we also kicked off a series of activities to test and validate and document how Docker Enterprise Edition can run on Cisco UCS, Nexus platforms, et cetera. We went ahead with that and a couple months later we brought out, jointly, to our Cisco validated designs for Docker Enterprise Edition. One on Cisco UCS infrastructure alone, and the other one jointly with NetApp as well, with the FlexPod Solution. So we're also very very happy with that as well. >> Great. Our community I'm sure knows the CVD's from what they are out there. UCS was originally designed to be the infrastructure for virtualized environments. Can you walk me through, what other significant differences there or anything kind of changing to move to containers versus what UCS for virtualized environment. >> The goal with that, UCS is esentially considered a premium kind of infrastructure server infrastructure for our customers. Not only can they run virtual environments today, but our goal is as containers become mainstreamed, containers evolved to being a first-class citizen alongside VM. We have to provide our customers with a solution that they need. And a turnkey solution from a Cisco standpoint is to take something like a Docker stack, or other stacks that our customer stopped, such as Kubernetes or other stacks as well, and offer them turnkey kind of experience. So with Docker Data Center what we have done is the CVD that we've announced so far has Docker Data Center, and the recipe provides an easy way for customers to get started with USC on Docker Data Center so that they get that turnkey experience. And with the MTA program that was announced, today at the key note. So that allows Cisco and Docker to work even more closely together to have not just the products, but also provide services to ensure that customers can completely sort of get started very very easily with support from advanced services and things like that. >> Great, I'm wondering if you have any customer examples that you can talk through. If you can't talk about a specific, logo, maybe you can talk about. Or if there are key verticals that you see that you're engaging first, or what can you share? >> We've been working joint customer evals, actually a couple of them. Once again I don't think we can point out the names yet. We haven't fully disclosed, or cleared it with their Prs Definitely into financials. Especially the online financials, a significant company that we've been working with jointly that has actually adopted both Contiv, and is actually seeing quite a lot of value in being able to take Docker, and also leverage the networking stack that Contiv provides. And be able to not just orchestrate networking policies for containers, but the other thing that they want to do is to have those same policies be able to run on cloud infrastructure, like EWS for example. So they obviously see that Docker is a great platform to be enable their affordability between on premises and also public cloud. But at the same time be able to leverage these kind of tools that makes that transition, and makes that move a lot easier so they don't have to re-think their security networking policies all over again. That's been actually a pretty used case I thought of the joint work that we did together with Contiv. >> Some of the customers that we've been talking to in fact we have one customer that I don't think I'm supposed say the name just yet, but we've drollled it out, has drolled out Contiv with the Docker on time. In five production data centers already. And these are the kind of customers that actually take to advanced networking capabilites that Contiv offers so that they can comprehensive L2 networking, L3 networking. Their monitoring pools that they currently use will be able to address the containers, because the L2, the L3 networking capabilities allows each container to have an IP address that is externally addressable, so that the current monitoring tools that you use for VMs et cetera can completely stay relevant, and be applicable in the container world. If you have an ACI fabric that continues to work with containers. So those are some of the reasons why these customers seem to like it. >> Kiran, you're relatively new into Cisco, and you were a software company. Many people they still think of Cisco as a networking company. I've heard people derogatory it's like, "Oh they made hardware define networking when they rolled out some of this stuff." Tell us about, you talk about an open source project that you guys are doing. I've talked to Lou Tucker a number of times. I know some of the software things you guys are doing. Give us your viewpoint as to your new employer, and how they might be different than people think of as the Cisco that we've known for decades. >> Cisco is, has of course it has, you know, several billion dollars of revenue coming in from hardware and infrastructure. And networking and security have been the bread and the butter for the company for many many years now But as the world moves to Cloud-Native becoming a first class citizen, the goal is really to provide complete solutions to our customers. And if you think of complete solutions, those solutions include things like networking, thing like security. Including analytics, and complete management platforms. At the same time, at the end of the day, the customers want to come to peace with the fact that this is a multi-cloud world Customers have data centers on premises, or on hosted private cloud environments. They have workloads that are running on public clouds. So with products like cloud center, our goal is to make sure that whatever they, the applications that they have, can be orchestrated across these multiple clouds. We want to make sure that the pain points the customers have around deploying whole solutions include easy set-up of products on infrastructure that they have, and that includes partnerships like UCS, or running on ACI or Nexus. We want to make sure that we give that turnkey experience to these customers. We want to make sure that those workloads can be moved across and run across these different clouds. That's where products like cloud center come in. We want to make sure that these customers have top grade analytics, which is completely software. That's were the app dynamics acquisition comes in. And we want to make sure that we provide that turnkey experience with support in terms of services. With our massive services organization, partners, et cetera. We view this as our job is to provide our customers what they need in terms of the end solution that they're looking for. And so it's not just hardware, it's just a part of it. Software, services, et cetera, complimented. >> Alright, Brad last question that I have for you in the keynote yesterday, I couldn't count how many times the word ecosystem was used. I think it was loud and clear that everybody there I think it was like, you know, Docker will not be successful unless it's partners are successful, kind of vice versa. When you look at kind of the product development piece of things, how does that resonate with you and the job that you're doing? >> We basically are seeing Docker become more of a, more and more of a platform as evidenced by yesterdays keynote. Every platform, the only way that platform's going to be successful is if we can do great, we have great options for our partners, like Cisco, to be able to integrate with us on multiple different levels, not just on one place. The networking plug-in is just one example. Many many other places as well Yesterday we announced two new open source initiatives. Lennox kit and also the movi project. You can imagine that there's probably lots of great places where partners like Cisco can actually play in there, not just only in the service fees, but maybe also in things like IOT as well, which is also a fast-emerging place for us to be. And all the way up until day two type of monitoring, type of environment as well where we think there's a lot of great places where once again, options like app dynamics, tetration analytics can fit in quite nicely with how do you take applications that have been migrated or modernized into containers, and start really tracking those using a common tool set. So we think that's really really good opportunities for our ecosystem partners to really innovate in those spaces, and to differentiate as well. >> Kiran, I want to give you the final word, take-aways that you want the users here, and those out watching the show to know about, you know, Cisco, and the Docker environment. >> I want to let everybody know that Cisco is not just hardware. Our goal is to provide turnkey complete solutions and experiences to our customers. And as they walk through this journey of embracing Cloud-Native workloads, and containerized workload there's various parts of the problem, that include all the way from hardware, to running analytics, to networking, to security, and services help, and Cisco as a company is here to offer that help, and make sure that the customers can walk away with turnkey solutions and experiences. >> Kiran and Brad, thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day two, DockerCon 2017, you're watching theCube.