>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost here John Troyer. And we're at the OpenStack Summit 2018, here in Vancouver. One of the key topics we've been discussing, actually for a few years but under new branding, and it's really matured a bit is Edge Computing. So, we're really happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Arturo Suarez, who's a program director with Canonical. We also have first time Kontron employee on, Eric Sarault, who's a product manager of software and services with, I believe Montreal based, is the headquarters. >> That's correct. >> Stu: So, thank you for allowing all of us to come up to Canada and have some fun. >> It's a pleasure. >> But we were all working during Victoria Day, right? >> Yeah. >> All right. Arturo, we know Canonical. So, we're going to talk about where you fit in. But, Eric, let's start with Kontron. I've got a little bit of background with them. I worked in really kind of the TelCo space back in the 90s. But for people that don't know Kontron maybe give us some background. So, basically, the entity here today is representing the communications business unit. So, what we do on that front is mostly TelCo's service providers. We also have strong customer base in the media vertical. But right now the OpenStack, what we're focusing on, is really on the Edge, mixed messages as well. So, we're really getting about delivering the true story about Edge because everybody has their own version of Edge. Everybody has their own little precisions about it. But down the road, it's making sure that we align everyone towards the same messaging so that we deliver a unified solution so that everybody understands what it is. >> Yeah. So, my filter on this has been Edge depends who you are. If you're a telecommunications vendor, when we've talked about the Cohen, it's the Edge of where they sit. If I'm an enterprise, it's the Edge is more like the IOT devices and sometimes there's an aggregation box in between. So, there's somewhere between two and four Edges out there. It's like cloud. We spent a bunch of years discussing it and then we just put the term to the side and go things. When you're talking Edge at Kontron, what does that mean? You actually have devices. >> We do. >> So, who's your customer? What does the Edge look like? >> So, we do have customers on that front. Right now we're working with some big names out there. Basically delivering solutions for 12 inch depth racks at the bottom of radio towers or near cell sites. And ultimately working our way up closer to what would look like, what I like to call a "closet" data center, if you will. Where we also have a platform with multiple systems that's able to be hosted in the environment. So, that's really about not only having one piece of the equation but really being able to get closer to the data center. >> All right. And Arturo, help bring us in because we know Canonical's a software company. What's the Edge mean to your customers and where does Canonical fit? >> So, Canonical, we take pride of being an ubiquitous platform, right? So, it doesn't matter where the Edge, or what the Edge is, right? There is an Ubuntu platform. There is an Ubuntu operating system for every single domain of compute, going from the very end of the Edge. That device that sits on your house or that drone that is flying around. And you need to do some application businesses, or to post on application businesses with, all the way to the core rank. Our OpenStack story starts at the core. But it's interesting as it goes farther from that core, how the density, it's an important factor in how you do things, so. We are able, with Kontron, to provide an operating system and tooling to tackle several of those compute domains that are part of the cloud where real estate is really expensive, right. >> Eric, so you all are a systems developer? Is that a fair two-word phrase? It's hardware and software? >> Basically, we do our original design. >> Okay. I know where I am. >> Manufacturing. >> So, I'm two steps away from hardware. So, I think of those as all systems. But you build things? >> Eric: Correct. >> And you work with software. I think for folks that have been a little more abstract, you tend to think, "Well, in those towers, there must be some bespoke chips and some other stuff but nothing very sophisticated." At this point we're running, or that your customers are running, full OpenStack installations on your system hardware. >> Eric: Correct. >> That's in there and it's rugged and it's upgradable. Can you talk a little bit about the business impact, of that sort of thing, as you go out and work with your customers? >> Certainly. So, one of the challenges that we saw there was really that, from a hardware perspective, people didn't really think about making sure that, once the box is shipped, how do you get the software on it, right. Typically, it's a push and forget approach. And this is where we saw a big gap, that it doesn't make any sense for folks to figure that on their own. A lot of those people out there are actually application developers. They don't have the networking background. They don't have a hardware engineering background. And the last thing they want to be doing is spending weeks, if not months, figuring out how to deploy OpenStack, or Kubernetes, or other solutions out there. So, that's where we leverage Canonical's tools, including MAAS and Juju, to really deploy that easily, at scale, and automated. Along with packaging some documentation, some proper steps on how to deploy the environment quickly in a few hours instead of just sitting there scratching your head and trying to figure it out, right. Because that's the last thing they want. The minute they have the box in their hand they already want to consume the resources and get up and running, so. That's really the mission we want to tackle that you're not going to see from most hardware vendors out there. >> Yeah, it's interesting. We often talk about scale, and our term, it's a very different scale when you talk about how fast it's deployed. We're not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of cores for one environment. It's way more distributed. >> Yeah. It's a different type of scale. It's still a scale but the building block is different, right. So, we take the orders of magnitude more of points of presence than there are data centers, right. At that scale, and the farther you go again from the core, the larger the scale it is. But the building block is different. And the ability to play, the price of the compute is different. It goes much higher, right? So, going back again, that ability to condense in OpenStack, the ability to deliver a Kubernetes within that little space, is pretty unique, right? And while we're still figuring out what technology goes on the Edge, we still need to account for, as Eric said, the economics of that Edge play a big, big part of that gain, right. So, there is a scale, it's in the thousands of points of presence, in the hundreds of thousands of points of presence, or different buildings where you can put an Edge cloud, or the use-case are still being defined, but it's scaled on a different building block. >> Well, Arturo, just to clarify for myself, sometimes when you're looking at an OpenStack component diagram, there's a lot of components and I don't know how many nodes I'm going to have to run. And they're all talking to each other. But at the Edge, even though there's powerful hardware there, there's an overhead consideration, right? >> Yes. Absolutely and that's going to be there. And OpenStack might evolve but might not evolve. But this is something we are tackling today, right. That's why I love the fact that Kontron has also a Kubernetes cluster, right. That multi-technology, the real multi-cloud is a multi-technology approach to the Edge, right. There are all the things that we can put in the Edge and the access is set. It's not defined. We need to know exactly how much room you have, how you make the most out of each of your cores or each of the gigs of RAM out there. So, OpenStack obviously is heavy for some parts of the Edge. Kontron, with our help, has pushed that to the minimum Openstack viable that allows you not to roll a track when you need to do something on that location, right. As that is as effective as it can get today. >> Eric, can you help put this in a framework of cloud, in general. When I think of Edge, a lot of it data's going to need to go back to data centers or a public cloud, multiple public cloud providers. How do your customers deal with that? Are you using Kubernetes to help them span between public cloud and the Edge? >> So, it's a mix of both. Right now we're doing some work to see how you can utilize idle processing time, along with Kubernetes scheduling and orchestration capabilities. But also OpenStack really caters to the more traditional SDNN of the use-case out there to run your traditional applications. So, that's two things that we get out of the platform. But it's also understanding how much data do you want to go back to the data center and making sure that most of the processing is as close as possible. That goes along with 5G, of course. You literally don't have the time to go back to the data centers. So, it's really about putting those capabilities, whether it's FPGAs, GPUs, and those platform, and really enabling that as close as possible to the Edge, or the end user, should I say. >> Eric, I know you're in the carrier space. Can you talk a little, maybe Kontron in general? And maybe how you, in your career as you go the next decades looking at imbed-able technology everywhere, and what do you all see as the vision of where we're headed? >> Oh, wow. That's a hell of a question. >> That's a big question to throw on you. >> I think it's very interesting to see where things are going. There's a lot of consolidation. And you have all these opensource project that needs to work together. The fact that OpenStack is embracing the reality that Kubernetes is going to be there to drive workloads. And they're not stepping on each others' throat, not even near. So, this is where the collaboration, between what we're seeing from the OpenStack Foundation along with the projects from the Linux Foundation, this is really, really interesting to see this moving forward. Other projects upcoming, like ONAP and Akraino, it's going to be very interesting for the next 24 months, to see what it's going to shape into. >> One of the near things, you mentioned 5G and we've been watching, what's available, how that roll-out's going to go into the various pieces. Is this ecosystem ready for that? Going to take advantage of it? And how soon until it is real for customers? >> The hardware is ready. That's for sure. It's really going to be about making sure if you have a split environment that's based on X86, or a split with ARM, it's going to be about making sure that these environments can interact with each other. The service chaining is probably the most complicated aspect there is to what people want to be doing there. And there's a bit of a tie, rope-pulling, from one side to another still but it's finally starting to put in to play. So, I think that the fact that Akraino, which is going to bring a version of OpenStack within the Linux Foundation, this is going to be really unlocking the capabilities that are out there to deploy the solution. And tying along with that, with hardware that has a single purpose, that's able to cater all the use-cases, and not just think about one vertical. "And then this box does this and this other box does another use-case." I think that's the pitfall that a lot of vendors fallen into. Instead of just, "Okay, for a second think outside the box. How many applications could you fit in this footprint?" And there probably going to be big data and multiple use-cases, that are nowhere near each other. So, don't try to do this very specific platform and just make sure that you're able to cater pretty much everyone. It's probably going to do the job, right, so. >> There's over 40 sessions on Edge Computing here. Why don't we just give both of you the opportunity to give us a closing remarks on the importance of Edge, what you're seeing here at the show, and final takeaways. >> From our side, from the Canonical side again, the Edge is whatever is not core. That really has different domains of compute. There is an Ubuntu for each of one of those domains. As Eric mentioned, this is important because you have a common platform, not only in the hardware perspective or the orchestrating technologies and their needs, which are evolving fast. And we have the ability, because how we are built, to accommodate or to build on all of those technologies. And be able to allow developers to choose what they want to do or how they want to do it. Try and try again, in different types of technologies and finally get to that interesting thing, right. There is that application layer that still needs to be developed to make the best use out of the existing technologies. So, it's going to be interesting to see how applications and the technologies evolve together. And we are in a great position as a common platform to all of those compute domains on all of those technologies from the economical perspective. >> On our side, what we see, it's really about making sure it's a density play. At the Edge, and the closer you go to these more wild environments, it's not data centers with 30 kilowatts per rack. You don't have the luxury of putting in, what I like to call whiteboards, 36 inch servers or open-compute systems. So, we really want to make sure that we're able to cater to that. We do have the products for it along with the technologies that Canonical are bringing in on that front. We're able to easily roll-out multiple types of application for those different use-cases. And, ultimately, it's all going to be about density, power efficiency, and making sure that your time to production with the environment is as short as possible. Because the minute they'll want access to that platform, you need to be ready to roll it out. Otherwise, you're going to be lagging behind. >> Eric and Arturo, thanks so much for coming on the program and giving us all the updates on Edge Computing here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (exciting music)

>> Announcer: Live, fro-- >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. We're here for three days of live wall-to-wall coverage at the OpenStack Foundation's show they have it twice a year John, pleasure to be with you again, you and I were together at the OpenStack show in Boston, a year ago, little bit further trip for me. But views like this, I'm not complaining. >> It's a great time to be in Vancouver, little bit overcast but the convention center's beautiful and the people seem pretty excited as well. >> Yeah so if you see behind us, the keynote let out. So John, we got to get into the first question of course for some reason the last month people are always Hey Stu where are you, what're you doing and when I walk through the various shows I'm doing when it comes to this one they're like, why are you going to the OpenStack show? You know, what's going on there, hasn't that been replaced by everything else? >> I got the same thing, there seems to be kind of a almost an antireligious thing here in the industry maybe more emotional perhaps at other projects. Although frankly look, we're going to take the temperature of the community, we're going to take the temperature of the projects, the customers, we got a lot of customers here, that's really the key here is that our people actually using this, being productive, functional, and is there enough of a vendor and a community ecosystem to make this go forward. >> Absolutely, so three years ago, when we were actually here in Vancouver, the container sessions were overflowing, people sitting in the aisles. You know containers, containers, containers, docker, docker, docker, you know, we went through a year or two of that. Then Kubernetes, really a wave that has taken over, this piece of the infrastructure stack, the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon shows, in general, I think have surpassed this size, but as we know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is always additive, and a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is, we have complexity, we need to deal with interoperability, everybody has a lot of things and that's the, choose your word, hybrid, multi-cloud world that you have, and that's really the state of opensource, it's not a thing, it's there's lots of things you take all the pieces you need and you figure out how to put 'em together, either buy them from a platform, you have some integrator that helps, so somebody that puts it all together, and that's where, you know, we live here, which is, by they way, I thought they might rename the show in the open, and they didn't, but there's a lot of pieces to discuss. >> Definitely an open infrastructure movement, we'll probably talk about that, look I loved the message this morning that the cloud is not consolidating, in fact it's getting more complicated, and so that was a practical message here, it's a little bit of a church of opensource as well, so the open message was very well received and, these are the people that are working on it, of course, but yeah, the fact that, like last year I thought in Boston, there was a lot of, almost confusion around containers, and where containers and Kubernetes fit in the whole ecosystem, I think, now in this year in 2018 it's a lot more clear and OpenStack as a project, or as a set of projects, which traditionally was, the hit on it was very insular and inward facing, has at least, is trying to become outward facing, and again that's something we'll be looking at this week, and how well will they integrate with other opensource projects. >> I mean John, you and I are both big supporters of the opensource movements, love the community at shows like this, but not exclusively, it's, you know, Amazon participating a little bit, using a lot of opensource, they take opensource and make it as a service, you were at Red Hat Summit last week, obviously huge discussion there about everything opensource, everything, so a lot going on there, let me just set for, first of all the foundation itself in this show, the thing that I liked, coming into it, one of the things we're going to poke at is, if I go up to the highest level, OpenStack is not the only thing here, they have a few tracks they have an Edge computer track, they have a container track, and there's a co-resident OpenDev Show happening a couple floors above us and, even from what the OpenStack Foundation manages, yes it OpenStack's the main piece of it, and all those underlying projects but, they had Katacontainers, which is, you know, high level project, and the new one is Zuul, talking about CI/CD, so there are things that, will work with OpenStack but not exclusively for OpenStack, might not even come from OpenStack, so those are things that we're seeing, you know, for example, I was at the Veeam show last week, and there was a software company N2WS that Veeam had bought, and that solution only worked on Amazon to start and, you know, I was at the Nutanix show the week before, and there's lots of things that start in the Amazon environment and then make their way to the on-premises world so, we know it's a complex world, you know, I agree with you, the cloud is not getting simpler, remember when cloud was: Swipe the credit card and it's super easy, the line I've used a lot of times is, it is actually more complicated to buy, quote, a server equivalent, in the public could, than it is if I go to the website and have something that's shipped to my data center. >> It's, yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's where we've ended up. You know, we'll see, with Zuul, it'll be very interesting, one of the hits again on OpenStack has been reinvention of the wheel, like, can you inter-operate with other projects rather than doing it your self, it sounds like there's some actually, some very interesting aspects to it, as a CI/CD system, and certainly it uses stuff like Ansible so it's, it's built using opensource components, but, other opensource components, but you know, what does this give us advantage for infrastructure people, and allowing infrastructure to go live in a CI/CD way, software on hardware, rather than, the ones that've been built from the dev side, the app side. I'm assuming there's good reasons, or they wouldn't've done it, but you know, we'll see, there's still a lot of projects inside the opensource umbrella. >> Yeah, and, you know, last year we talked about it, once again, we'll talk about it here, the ecosystem has shifted. There are some of the big traditional infrastructure companies, but what they're talking about has changed a lot, you know. Remember a few years ago, it was you know, HP, thousand people, billion dollar investment, you know, IBM has been part of OpenStack since the very beginning days, but it changes, even a company like Rackspace, who helped put together this environment, the press release that went was: oh, we took all the learnings that we did from OpenStack, and this is our new Kubernetes service that we have, something that I saw, actually Randy Bias, who I'll have on the show this week, was on, the first time we did this show five years ago, can't believe it's the sixth year we're doing the show, Randy is always an interesting conversation to poke some of the sacred cows, and, I'll use that analogy, of course, because he is the one that Pets vs Cattle analogy, and he said, you know, we're spending a lot of time talking about it's not, as you hear, some game, between OpenStack and Kubernetes, containers are great, isn't that wonderful. If we're talking about that so much, maybe we should just like, go do that stuff, and not worry about this, so it'll be fun to talk to him, the Open Dev Show is being, mainly, sponsored by Mirantis who, last time I was here in Vancouver was the OpenStack company, and now, like, I saw them a year ago, and they were, the Kubernetes company, and making those changes, so we'll have Boris on, and get to find out these companies, there's not a lot of ECs here, the press and analysts that are here, most of us have been here for a lot of time so, this ecosystem has changed a lot, but, while attendance is down a little bit, from what I've heard, from previous years, there's still some good energy, people are learning a lot. >> So Stu, I did want to point out, that something I noticed on the stage, that I didn't see, was a lot of infrastructure, right? OpenStack, clearly an infrastructure stack, I think we've teased that out over the past couple years, but I didn't see a lot of talk about storage subsystems, networking, management, like all the kind of, hard, infrastructure plumbing, that actually, everybody here does, as well as a few names, so that was interesting, but at the end of the day, I mean, you got to appeal to the whole crowd here. >> Yeah, well one of the things, we spent a number of years making that stuff work, back when it was, you know, we're talkin' about gettin' Cinder, and then all the storage companies lined up with their various, do we support it, is it fully integrated, and then even further, does it actually work really well? So, same stuff that went through, for about a decade, in virtualization, we went through this in OpenStack, we actually said a couple years ago, some of the basic infrastructure stuff has gotten boring, so we don't need to talk about it anymore. Ironic, it's actually the non-virtualized environments, that's the project that they have here, we have a lot of people who are talking bare metal, who are talking containers, so that has shifted, an interesting one in the keynote is that you had the top level sponsors getting up there, Intel bringing around a lot of their ecosystem partners, talking about Edge, talking about the telecommunications, Red Hat, giving a recap of what they did last week at their summit, they've got a nice cadence, the last couple of years, they've done Red Hat Summit, and OpenStack Summit, back-to-back so that they can get that flow of information through, and then Mark Shuttleworth, who we'll have on a little bit later today, he came out puchin', you know, he started with some motherhood in Apple Pi about how Ubuntu is everywhere but then it was like, and we're going to be so much cheaper, and we're so much easier than the VMwares and Red Hats of the world, and there was a little push back from the community, that maybe that wasn't the right platform to do it. >> Yeah, I think the room got kind of cold, I mean, that's kind of a church in there, right, and everyone is an opensource believer and, this kind of invisible hand of capitalism (laughs) reached in and wrote on the wall and, you know, having written and left. But at the end of the day, right, somebody's got to pay for babies new shoes. I think that it was also very interesting seeing, at Red Hat Summit, which I covered on theCUBE, Red Hat's argument was fairly philosophical, and from first principles. Containers are Linux, therefore Red Hat, and that was logically laid out. Mark's, actually I loved Mark's, most of his speech, which was very practical, this, you know, Ubuntu's going to make both OpenStack and containers simpler, faster, quicker, and cheaper, so it was clearly benefits, and then, for the folks that don't know, then he put up a couple a crazy Eddy slides like, limited time offer, if you're here at the show, here's a deal that we've put together for ya, so that was a little bit unusual for a keynote. >> Yeah, and there are a lot of users here, and some of them'll hear that and they'll say: yeah, you know, I've used Red Hat there but, you can save me money that's awesome, let me find out some more about it. Alright, so, we've got three days of coverage here John, and we get to cover this really kind of broad ecosystem that we have here. You talked about what we don't discuss anymore, like the major lease was Queens, and it used to be, that was where I would study up and be like oh okay, we've got Hudson, and then we got, it was the letters of the alphabet, what's the next one going to be and what are the major features it's reached a certain maturity level that we're not talking the release anymore, it's more like the discussions we have in cloud, which is sometimes, here's some of the major things, and oh yeah, it just kind of wraps itself in. Deployments still, probably aren't nearly as easy as we'd like, Shuttleworth said two guys in under two weeks, that's awesome, but there's solutions we can put, stand up much faster than that now, two weeks is way better than some of the historical things we've done, but it changes quite a bit. So, telecommunications still a hot topic, Edge is something, you know what I think back, it was like, oh, all those NFE conversations we've had here, it's not just the SDN changes that are happening, but this is the Edge discussion for the Telcos, and something people were getting their arms around, so. >> It's pretty interesting to think of the cloud out on telephone poles, and in branch offices, in data centers, in closets basically or under desks almost. >> No self-driving cars on the keynote stage though? >> No, nothing that flashy this year. >> No, definitely not too flashy so, the foundation itself, it's interesting, we've heard rumors that maybe the show will change name, the foundation will not change names. So I want to give you last things, what're you looking for this week, what were you hearing from the community leading up to the show that you want to validate or poke at? >> Well, I'm going to look at real deployments, I'd like to see how standard we are, if we are, if an OpenStack deployment is standardized enough that the pool of talent is growing, and that if I hire people from outside my company who work with OpenStack, I know that they can work with my OpenStack, I think that's key for the continuation of this ecosystem. I want to look at the general energy and how people are deploying it, whether it does become really invisible and boring, but still important. Or do you end up running OpenShift on bare metal, which I, as an infrastructure person, I just can't see that the app platform should have to worry about all this infrastructure stuff, 'cause it's complicated, and so, I'll just be looking for the healthy productions and production deployments and see how that goes. >> Yeah, and I love, one of the things that they started many years ago was they have a super-user category, where they give an award, and I'm excited, we have actually have the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is one of our guests on today, they won the 2018 super-user group, it's always awesome when you see, not only it's like, okay, CERN's here, and they're doing some really cool things looking for the Higgs boson, and all those kind of things but, you know, companies that are using technology to help them attack the battle against cancer, so, you know, you can't beat things like that. We've got the person from the keynote, Melvin, who was up on stage talking about the open lab, you know, community, ecosystem, definitely something that resonates, I know, one of the reasons I pulled you into this show in the last year is you're got a strong background there. >> Super impressed by all the community activity, this still feels like a real community, lots of pictures of people, lots of real, exhortations from stage to like, we who have been here for years know each other, please come meet us, so that's a real sign of also, a healthy community dynamic. >> Alright, so John first of all, I want to say, Happy Victoria Day, 'cause we are here in Vancouver, and we've got a lot going on here, it's a beautiful venue, hope you all join us for all of the coverage here, and I have to give a big shout out to the companies that allowed this to happen, we are independent media, but we can't survive without the funding of our sponsors so, first of all the OpenStack Foundation, helps get us here, and gives us this lovely location overlooking outside, but if it wasn't for the likes of our headline sponsor Red Hat as well as Canonical, Kontron, and Nuage Networks, we would not be able to bring you this content so, be sure to checkout thecube.net for all the coverage, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. 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