>> From the Regency Center in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Serverlessconf San Francisco 2018 brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Serverlessconf 2018 here in San Francisco at the Regency ballroom. I'm happy to welcome back to the program Simon Wardley, who's a researcher with the Leading Edge Forum, I spoke with you last year at Serverless in New York City, and thanks for joining me again here in San Francisco. >> Absolute pleasure, nice to be back. >> Alright, so many things have changed, Simon, we talked off camera and we're not going into it, your wardrobe stays consistent >> Always. >> But, you know, technology tends to change pretty fast these days. >> Mhmm. >> You do a lot of predictions and I'm curious starting out when you think about timelines and predictions, how do you deal with the pace of change, and put things out, I have my CTOs, like well, if I put a 10 year forecast down there, I can be off on some of the twists and curves, and kind of hit closer to the mark. Give us some of your thoughts as to how you look out and think about things when we know it's changing really fast. >> Okay, okay, so there are a number of different comments in there, one about how do you do predictions, one about the speed of change, okay? So I'm going to start off with the fact that one of the things I use is maps. And maps are based on a couple of characteristics. Any map needs an anchor, in the case of the maps of business that I do, that's the user, and often the business, and often regulators. You also need movement and position in a map. So position's relative to the anchor, so a geographical map, if you've got a compass then this piece is north, south, east or west of that. In the sort of maps that I do, it's the value chain which gives you position relative to the user or the business at the top. Movement, in a geographical map you have consistency of movement, so if I go, I don't know, north from England I end up in Scotland, so you have the same thing with a business map, but that evolution is described, sorry, that movement is described by evolution. So what you have is the genesis of novel and new activities custom-build examples, products and rental services, commodity and utility services, and that's driven by supply and demand competition. Now, that evolution axis, in order to create it, you have to abolish time. So one of the problems when you look at a map is there is no easy use of time in a map. You can have a general direction and then you have to use weak signals to get an idea of when something is likely to happen. So for example if I take nuts and bolts, they took 2,000 years to go from genesis to commodity, electricity was 1,400 years from genesis to commodity, utility, computing 80 years. So, there are weak signals that you can use to identify roughly when something is going to transition, particularly between stages like product to a commodity. Product-product substitution very unpredictable, genesis of novel acts, you can usually say when stuff might appear, but not what is going to appear because in that space it's actually what we call the uncharted, the unexplored space. So, one of the problems is time is an extremely difficult thing to predict without the use of weak signals. The second thing is the pace of change. Because what happens is components evolve, and when we see them shift from product to more commodity and utility, we often see a big change in the value chains that that impacts. And you can get multiple components evolving, and they overlap, and so we feel that the pace is very very fast, despite the fact that it actually takes about 30 to 50 years to go from genesis to the point of industrialization, becoming a commodity, and then about 10 to 15 years for that to actually happen. So if you look at something like machine learning, we can start with it back in the '70s, 3D printing 1968, the Battelle Institute, all of this stuff, virtual reality back in the 1960s as well. So the problem is, one, time's very difficult. The only way to effectively manage time is to use weak signals, it's probability. The second thing is the pace of change is confusing because what we're seeing is overlapping points of industrialization like for example cloud, and what's going here with Serverless. That doesn't actually imply that things are rapidly changing because you've actually got this overlapping pattern. Does that make sense? >> Yes, it does actually. >> Perfect. >> Because you think, we have in hindsight we always think that things happen a lot faster but-- >> Yeah. >> it's funny, infrastructure space when I talk to some of the people that I came up with, they were like oh yeah, come on, we did this in mainframe decades ago. and now we're trying again, we're trying again. Things like-- >> Containers, for example, you've got LXE before that, and we had Solaris Zones before that, so it's all sort of like, interconnected together. >> Okay, so tie this into Serverless for us. >> Okay. >> You were a rather big proponent of Platform as a Service, is this a continuation of us trying to get that abstraction of the application or is it something else? What is the map we are on, and, you know, help us connect things like PaaS and Serverless and that space. >> So back in 2005, the company I ran, we mapped out our value chain, and we realized that compute was shifting from product to utility. Now that had a number of impacts. A, that shift from product to utility tends to be exponential, people have inertia due to past practice, you see a co-evolution of practice, around the changing characteristic. It's normally to do with something called MTTR, mean time to recovery changes. And so you see rapid efficiency, rapid speed of development, being able to build new sources, new areas of value. So that happened with infrastructure, and we also knew it was going to happen with platform, which is why we built something called Zymkey, which was a code execution environment, totally stateless, event-driven, utility billing, and billing to the function, and that was basically a shift of the code execution platform from a product, lamp.net stack, to a much more utility form. Now we were way too early, way too early, because the educational barriers to get people into this idea of building with functions, functional program, much more declarative environment, was really different, I mean when Amazon launched EC2 in 2006, that was a big enough shock for everybody else, and now of course, now we're in 2014, Lambda represents that shift, and the timing's much much better. Now the impact of the shift is not only efficiency and speed of development of new things, and being able to explore new sources of value, but also a change of practice, and in the past, change of practice created DevOps, this is likely to create a new type of practice. For us, we've also got inertia to change because of pre-existing systems and governance and ways of working, sunk capital, physical capital, social capital. So it's all perfectly normal. So in terms of being able to predict and far-predict these types of future, well for me, actually, Lambda's my past, because that's where we were. It's just the timing was wrong, and so when it came out, it was like for me, it was like, this is really powerful stuff and the timing is much, and we're seeing it here, it's now really starting to grow. >> Alright, you've poked a little bit at some of the container discussions going on in the industry, you know, I look at the ecosystem here, and of course AWS is the big player, but there's lots of other Serverless out there. There's discussion of Multicloud. >> Yeah. >> How does things like Kubernetes, and there was this new term canative, or cane-native project, that was just announced, and we're all, don't expect that you've dug in too deeply, but, if you look at containers and Kubernetes, and Serverless, do these combine, intersect, fight? How do you see this playing out? >> So when I look at the map, you know, you've got the code execution layer, the framework which has now become more of a utility, and that's what we call platform. The problem is, is people will application to containers, and therefore describe their environments as application-container platforms, and the platform term became really messy, basically meant everything, okay. But if we break it down into code execution, this is what we call frameworks, this is becoming utility, this is where things like Lambda is, underneath that, are all these components like operating systems, and containers, and container management, Kubernetes type systems. So if you now look at the value chain, the focus is on building applications, and those applications need functions, and then lower down the stack are all these other components. And that will tend to become less visible over time. It's a bit like your toaster. I mean, your toaster contains nuts and bolts and all sorts of things, do you care? Have you ever noticed? Have you ever broken one open and had a look? >> Only if something's not working right. >> (laughs) Only if something, maybe, a lot of people these days wouldn't even go that far, they'd just go and buy themselves a new toaster. The point is, what happens is, as layers industrialize, the lower-order systems become much less visible. So, containers, I'm a big fan of containers. I know Solomon and the stuff in Docker, and I take the view that they are an important but invisible subsystem, and the same with container management and things like containers. The focus has got to be on the code execution. Now when you talk about canative, I've go to say I was really excited with Google Next last week, with their announcements like functions going GA, I thought that was really good. >> We've been hoping that it would have happened last year. >> Yeah exactly, I wanted this before, but I'm really pleased they've got functions coming out GA. There was some really interesting stuff around SDO, and there was the GRPC stuff which is, sort of, I think a hidden gem. In terms of the canative stuff, really interesting stuff there in terms of demos, not something I've played with, I'm sort of waiting for them to come out with canative as a service, rather than, you know, having to build your own. I think there was a lot of good and interesting stuff. The only criticism I would have was the emphasis wasn't so much on basically, serverless code execution building, it was too much focused on the lower end systems, but the announcements are good. Have I played with canative? No, I've just gone along and seen it. >> So Simon, the last question I have for you is, we spoke a year ago today, what are you excited about that's matured? What are you still looking for in this space, to really make the kind of vision you've been seeing for a while become reality, and allow serverless to dominate? >> So, when you get a shift from, say, product to utility, you get this co-evolution of practice, this practice is always novel and new. It starts to emerge, and gets better over time. The area that I think we're going to see that practice is the combining of finance and development, and so when you're running your application, and your application consists of many different functions, it's being able to look at the capital flow through your application, because that gives you hints on things like what should I refactor? Refactoring's never really had financial value. By exposing the cost per function and looking at capital flow, it's suddenly does. So, what I'm really interested in is the new management practices, the new tooling around observing capital flow, monitoring, managing capital flow, refactoring around that space and building new business models. And so there's a couple of companies here with a couple of interesting tools, it's not quite there yet, but it's emerging. >> Well, Simon Wardley, really appreciate you. >> Oh, it's a delight! >> Mapping out the space a little bit, to understand where things have been going. >> Absolute pleasure! >> And thank you so much, for watching as always, theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by: Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. And we're live here in Austin, Texas. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Cloud Native conference and KubeCon for Kubernetes Conference. This is for the Linux Foundation. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon ANGLE Media. My co, Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Dustin Kirkland Vice-President of product. The Ubuntu, Canonical, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So you're the product guy. You get the keys to the kingdom, as they would say in the product circles. Man, what a best time to be-- >> Dustin: They always say that. I don't think I've heard that one. >> Well, the product guys are, well all the action's happening on the product side. >> Dustin: We're right in the middle of it. >> Cause you got to have a road map. You got to have a 20 mile steer on the next horizon while you go up into the pasture and deliver value, but you always got to be watching for it always making decision on what to do, when to ship product, not you got the Cloud things are happening at a very accelerated rate. And then you got to bring it out to the customers. >> That's right. >> You're livin' on both sides of the world You got to look inside, you got to look outside. >> All three. There's the marketing angle too. which is what we're doing here right now. So there's engineering sales and this is the marketing. >> Alright so where are we with this? Because now you guys have always been on the front lines of open source. Great track record. Everyone knows the history there. What are the new things? What's the big aha moment that this event, largest they've had ever. They're not even three years old. Why is this happening? >> I love seeing these events in my hometown Austin, Texas. So I hope we keep coming back. The aha moment is how application development is fundamentally changing. Cloud Native is the title of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and CloudNativeConference here. What does Cloud Native mean? It's a different form of writing applications. Just before we were talking about systems programing right? That's not exactly Cloud Native. Cloud Native programming is writing to API's that are Cloud exposed API's, integrating with software as a service. Creating applications that have no intelligence, whatsoever, about what's underneath them, Right? But taking advantage of that and all the ways that you would want and expect in a modern application. Fault tolerance, automatic updates, hyper security. Just security, security, security. That is the aha moment. The way applications are being developed is fundamentally changing. >> Interesting perspective we had on earlier. Lew Tucker from Cisco, (mumbles) in the (mumbles) History Museum, CTO at Cisco, and we have Kelsey Hightower co-chair for this conference and also very active in the community. Yet, in the perspective, and I'll over simplify and generalize it, but basically was: Hey, that's been going on for 30 years, it's just different now. Tell us the old way and new way. Because the old way, you kind of describing it you're going to build your own stuff, full stack, building all parts of the stack and do a lot of stuff that you didn't want to do. And now you have more, especially time on your hands if DevOps and infrastructure as code starts to happen. But doesn't mean that networking goes away, doesn't mean storage goes away, that some new lines are forming. Describe that dynamic of what's new and the new way what changes from the old way? >> Virtualization has brought about a different way of thinking about resources. Be those compute resources, chopping CPU's up into virtual CPU's, that's KVM ware. You mentioned network and storage. Now we virtualized both of those into software defined storage and software defined networking, right? We have things like OpenStack that brings that all together from an infrastructure perspective. and we now have Kubernetes that brings that to fare from an application perspective. Kubernetes helps you think about applications in a different way. I said that paradigm has changed. It's Kubernetes that helps implement that paradigm. So that developers can write an application to a container orchestrator like Kubernetes and take advantage of many of the advances we've made below that layer in the operating system and in the Cloud itself. So from that perspective the game has changed and the way you write your application is not the same as a the monolithic app we might have written on an IBM or a traditional system. >> Dustin, you say monolithic app versus oh my gosh the multi layered cake that we have today. We were talking about the keynote this morning where CNCF went from four projects to 14 projects, you got Kubernetes, You got things like DSDU on top. Help up tease that a little bit. What are the ones that, where's canonical engaged? What are you hearing from customers? What are they excited about? What are they still looking for? >> In a somewhat self-serving way, I'll use this opportunity to explain exactly what we do in helping build that layered cake. It starts with the OS. We provide a great operating system, Ubuntu that every developer would certainly know and understand and appreciate. That's the kernel, that's the systemd, that's the hyperviser, that's all the storage and drivers that makes an operating system work well on hardware. Lot's of hardware, IBM, Dell HP, Intel, all the rest. As well as in virtual machines, the public Clouds, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, VM ware and others. So, we take care of that operating system perspective. Within the CNCF and within in the Kubernetes ecosystem, It really starts with the Kubernetes distribution. So we provide a Kubernetes distribution, we call it Canonicals Distribution of Kubernetes, CDK. Which is open source Kubernetes with security patches applied. That's it. No special sauce, no extra proprietary extensions. It is open source Kubernetes. The reference platform for open source Kubernetes 100% conformed. Now, once you have Kubernetes as you say, "What are you hearing from customers?" We hear a lot of customers who want a Kubernetes. Once they have a Kubernetes, the next question is: "Now what do I do with it?" If they have applications that their developers have been writing to Google's Kubernetes Engine GKE, or Amazon's Kubernetes Engine, the new one announced last week at re:Invent, AKS. Or Microsoft's Kubernetes Engine, Microsoft-- >> Microsoft's AKS, Amazons EKS. A lot of TLA's out there, always. >> Thank you for the TLA dissection. If you've written the applications already having your own Kubernetes is great, because then your applications simply port and run on that. And we help customers get there. However, if you haven't written your first application, that's where actually, most of the industry is today. They want a Kubernetes, but they're not sure why. So, to that end, we're helping bring some of the interesting workloads that exists, open source workloads and putting those on top of Canonical Kubernetes. Yesterday, we press released a new product from Canonical, launched in conjunction with our partners at Rancher Labs, Which is the Cloud Native platform. The Cloud Native platform is Ubuntu plus Kubernetes plus Rancher. That combination, we've heard from customers and from users of Ubuntu inside and out. Everyone's interested in a developer work flow that includes open-source Ubuntu, open-source Kubernetes and open-source Rancher, Which really accelerates the velocity of development. And that end solution provides exactly that and it helps populate, that Kubernetes with really interesting workloads. >> Dustin, so we know Sheng, Shannon and the team, they know a thing or two about building stacks with open source. We've talked with you many times, OpenStack. Give us a little bit of compare and contrast, what we've been doing with OpenStack with Canonical, very heavily involved, doing great there versus the Cloud Native stacking. >> If you know Shannon and Sheng, I think you can understand and appreciate why Mark, myself and the rest of the Canonical team are really excited about this partnership. We really see eye-to-eye on open source principles First. Deliver great open source experiences first. And then taking that to market with a product that revolves around support. Ultimately, developer option up front is what's important, and some of those developer applications will make its way into production in a mission critical sense. Which open up support opportunities for both of us. And we certainly see eye-to-eye from that perspective. What we bring to bare is Ubuntu ecosystem of developers. The Ubuntu OpenStack infrastructure is a service where we've seen many of the world's largest organizations deploying their OpenStacks. Doing so on Ubuntu and with Ubuntu OpenStacks. With the launch of Kubernetes and Canonical Kubernetes, many of those same organizations are running their own Kubernetes along side OpenStack. Or, in some cases, on top of OpenStack. In a very few cases, instead of Openstack, in very special cases, often at the Edge or in certain tiny Cloud or micro Cloud scenarios. In all of these we see Rancher as a really, really good partner in helping to accelerate that developer work flow. Enabling developers to write code, commit code to GitHub repository, with full GitHub integration. Authenticate against an active directory with full RBAC controls. Everything that you would need in an enterprise to bring that application to bare from concept, to development, to test into production, and then the life cycle, once it gains its own life in production. >> What about the impact of customers? So, I'm an IT guy or I'm an architect and man, all this new stuff's comin' at me. I love my open source, I'm happy with space. I don't want to touch it, don't want to break it, but I want to innovate. This whole world can be a little bit noisy and new to them. How do you have that conversation with that potential customer or customer where you say, Look, we can get there. Use your app team here's what you want to shape up to be, here's service meshes and plugable, Whoa plugable (mumbles)! So, again, how do you simplify that when you have conversations? What's the narrative? What's the conversation like? >> Usually our introduction into the organization of a Fortune 500 company is by the developers inside of that company who already know Ubuntu. Who already have some experience with Kubernetes or have some experience with Rancher or any of those other-- >> So it's a bottoms up? >> Yeah, it's bottoms up. Absolutely, absolutely. The developer network around Ubuntu is far bigger than the organization that is Canonical. So that helps us with the intro. Once we're in there, and the developers write those first few apps, we do get the introductions to their IT director who then wants that comfy blanket. Customer support, maybe 24 by seven-- >> What's the experience like? Is it like going to the airport, go through TSA, and you got to take your shoes off, take your belt off. What kind of inspection, what is kind of is the culture because they want to move fast, but they got to be sure. There's always been the challenge when you have the internal advocate saying, "Look, if we want to go this way "this is going to be more the reality for companies." Developers are now major influencers. Not just some, here's the product we made a decision and they ship it to 'em, it's shifted. >> If there's one thing that I've learned in this sort of product management assignment, I'm a engineer by trade, but as a product manager now for almost five years, is that you really have to look at the different verticals and some verticals move at vastly different paces than other verticals. When we are in the tele close phase, We're in RFI's, requests for a quote or a request for information that may last months, nine months. And then go through entering into a procurement process that may last another nine months. And we're talking about 18 months in an industry here that is spinning up, we're talking about how fast this goes, which is vastly different than the work we do in Silicon Valley, right? With some of the largest dot-coms in the world that are built on Ubuntu, maybe an AWS or else where. Their adoption curve is significantly different and the procurement angle is really different. What they're looking to buy often on the US West Coast is not so much support, but they're looking to guide your roadmap. We offer for customers of that size and scale a different set of products something we call feature sponsorships, where those customers are less interested in 24 by seven telephone support and far more interested in sponsoring certain features into Ubuntu itself and helping drive the Ubuntu roadmap. We offer both of those a products and different verticals buy in different ways. We talked to media and entertainment, and the conversation's completely different. Oil and gas, conversation's completely different. >> So what are you doing here? What's the big effort at CloudNativeCon? >> So we've got a great booth and we're talking about Ubuntu as a pretty universal platform for almost anything you're doing in the Cloud. Whether that's on frame infrastructure as a service, OpenStack. People can coo coo OpenStack and point OpenStack versus Kubernetes against one another. We cannot see it more differently-- >> Well no I think it's more that it's got clarity on where the community's lines are because apps guys are moving off OpenStack that's natural. It's really found the home, OpenStack very relevant huge production flow, I talk to Johnathon Bryce about this all the time. There's no co cooing OpenStack. It's not like it's hurting. Just to clarify OpenStack is not going anywhere its just that there's been some comments about OpenStack refugees going to (mumbles), but they're going there anyway! Do you agree? >> Yeah I agree, and that choice is there on Ubuntu. So infrastructure is a service, OpenStack's a fantastic platform, platforms as a service or Cloud Native through Cloud Native development Kubernetes is an excellent platform. We see those running side by side. Two racks a systems or a single rack. Half of those machines are OpenStack, Half of those are Kubernetes and the same IT department manages both. We see IT departments that are all in OpenStack. Their entire data center is OpenStack. And we see Kubernetes as one workload inside of that Openstack. >> How do you see Kubernetes impact on containers? A lot of people are coo cooing containers. But they're not going anywhere either. >> It's fundamental. >> The ecosystem's changing, certainly the roles of each part (mumbles) is exploding. How do you talk about that? What's your opinion on how containers are evolving? >> Containers are evolving, but they've been around for a very long time as well. Kubernetes has helped make containers consumable. And doctored to an extent, before that the work we've done around Linux containers LXE LEXT as well. All of those technologies are fundamental to it and it take tight integration with the OS. >> Dustin, so I'm curious. One of the big challenges I have the U face is the proliferation of deployments for customers. It's not just data center or even Cloud. Edge is now a very big piece of it. How do you think that containers helps enable the little bit of that Cloud Native goes there, but what kind of stresses does that put on your product organization? >> Containers are adding fuel to the fire on both the Edge and the back end Cloud. What's exciting to me about the Edge is that every Edge device, every connected device is connected to something. What's it connected to, a Cloud somewhere. And that can be an OpenStack Cloud or a Kubernetes Cloud, that can be a public Cloud, that could be a private implementation of that Cloud. But every connected device, whether its a car or a plane or a train or a printer or a drone it's connected to something, it's connected to a bunch of services. We see containers being deployed on Ubuntu on those Edge devices, as the packaging format, as the application format, as the multi-tendency layer that keeps one application from DOSing or attacking or being protected from another application on that Edge device. We also see containers running the micro services in the Cloud on Ubuntu there as well. The Edge to me, is extremely interesting in how it ties back to the Cloud and to be transparent here, Canonical strategy and Canonical's play is actually quiet strong here with Ubuntu providing quite a bit of consistency across those two layers. So developers working on those applications on those devices, are often sitting right next to the developers working on those applications in the Cloud and both of them are seeing Ubuntu helping them go faster. >> Bottom line, where do you see the industry going and how do you guys fit into the next three years, what's your prediction? >> I'm going to go right back to what I was saying right there. That the connection between the Edge and the Cloud is our angle right there, and there is nothing that's stopping that right now. >> We were just talking with Joe Beda and our view is if it's a shoot and computing world, everything's an Edge. >> Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. >> (mumbles) is an Edge. A light in a house is an Edge with a processor in it. >> So I think the data centers are getting smarter. You wanted a prediction for next year: The data center is getting smarter. We're seeing autonomous data centers. We see data centers using metals as a service mask to automatically provision those systems and manage those systems in a way that hardware look like a Cloud. >> AI and IOT, certainly two topics that are really hot trends that are very relevant as changing storage and networking those industries have to transform. Amazon's tele (mumbles), everything like LAN and serverless, you're starting to see the infrastructure as code take shape. >> And that's what sits on top of Kubernetes. That's what's driving Kubernetes adoption are those AI machine learning artificial intelligence workloads. A lot of media and transcoding workloads are taking advantage of Kubernetes everyday. >> Bottom line, that's software. Good software, smart software. Dustin, Thanks so much for coming theCube. We really appreciate it. Congratulations. Continued developer success. Good to have a great ecosystem. You guys have been successful for a very long time. As the world continues to be democratized with software as it gets smarter more pervasive and Cloud computing, grid computing, Unigrid. Whatever it's called it is all done by software and the Cloud. Thanks for coming on. It's theCube live coverage from Austin, Texas, here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, We'll be back with more after this short break. (lively music)