>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, It's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, to theCUBE coverage here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn. And happy to welcome back to the program Mark Shuttleworth who os the CEO of Canonical. Of course, the orange shirts of Ubuntu, are seen all throughout the show. Mark, thank you so much for joining us, great so see you. >> Great to see you. >> All right, so for years, actually, we've had these conversations at the OpenStack Summit. It's interesting that, every time you mention it around this show you get snark online, as like, it is dead, Kubernetes killed it and it's like wait, no, no, you know we're talking about, a couple of open-source projects. I've been talking to people, especially in the telco space, that's like, oh yeah, well no, we just run OpenStack underneath and Kubernetes on top and put all things together. Give us a little bit of your broad view of some of these big trends, and open-source monoliths and microservices and all these pieces, all kind of fly together. >> Yeah, I think if your in the Reddit SubChannels, then you know it can feel a bit like turf war, and gangster-type, free software riffing, right. But the reality is, OpenStack solves business problems for people. They want large scale, virtualized infrastructure, that's cheaper than VMware. We are deploying OpenStacks in enterprise environments at double the scale and double the speed, in other words, like twice as many every month, as we were a year ago. I think people have gotten comfortable with the idea that Kubernetes is an application operations construct. I think we will see virtualization blur into the Kubernetes lives, but mainly for security reasons. So I want deeper isolation of applications that come from third-party vendors, for example. And I'm willing to trade performance for isolation, in circumstances where I am bringing in third-party code into my private infrastructure. After we see a couple of significant security compromises, I mean, we saw the GitHub compromise. If you shave that Yak, it gets to a very uncomfortable place of, what are we actually running as root all over our data centers with Docker and Docker Hub. So, people are going to want that kind of isolation of containers, the Kata Containers work is going to bring that. But that's very different to the proposition of, essentially, give me large scale, machine virtualization which OpenStack addresses. OpenStack hasn't done itself any favors, don't need to go into that here. But nonetheless, as far as we're concerned, it's straight forward to deliver large scale, low cost, enterprise virtualization infrastructure for telco's or IT use cases. >> Let's get into this ecosystem here. I want to say the Cloud Native ecosystem, and I say that specifically because there are some that look at this and they say, oh, there's dozens of projects now, Kubernetes is a platform against platform. Somebody even mentioned the word big tent once. We've seen some projects merging, we've seen some various pieces. >> I saw making a bigger tent on the keynote and I was like, not my favorite choice of words. >> I seem to remember a certain article that you wrote poking a whole in the big tent thing. What's the same, what's different? What's your take on this? Is it an ecosystem? Is it Kubernetes and friends, as Corey has liked to say here? What's your take? >> Look, I think we're still trying to figure out what are the appropriate labels to attach to this kind of forum, it is a forum, right. There is a tremendous amount of value attached to being here, to the ideas that are getting bounced about. But I wouldn't call it a simple community in the sort of, traditional open-source sense. The reality is there's very serious money behind every, sort of project that's been framed as a community project. This is a new kind of consortium. And that brings with it certain, delicate, political posturing and so on. But, nonetheless, it's a valuable place to be. It's definitely staking out important concepts and operational platforms, ideas, regimes, whatever you want to call it. This is going to be a fun week. >> I started off my career in the Linux world as a grumpy Unix administrator because there really wasn't any other kind. Then I started dipping my toes into the Linux world and something struck me, almost immediately, about Ubuntu. Was how welcoming everyone was in the community. There was no such thing as a stupid question. I asked the kind of questions you would expect from someone working on a computer, wearing a suit. People were very eager to embrace newcomers into that. It was one of the absolute best things that I saw coming out of Canonical, in addition to the software itself. I love that you're here as a part of this. What is the larger picture? What do you see in the Cloud Native ecosystem that's resonating with what Canonical's doing? >> So, the big thing that we do is, essentially, try to figure out where, what's possible with open-source that's hard to do. And then make it really straight forward so that more people can do the important stuff easily. That doesn't stop people from doing all the crazy stuff at the periphery that you can do with Ubuntu. It's generally easier with Ubuntu than any other platform. But we try to make the really most important things really easy for everybody. That's the first thing. The second thing is, we're a little non-judgemental about the fact that there are different perspectives on the same stuff. In the Ubuntu ecosystem, we make a point of saying that GNOME guys, and the KDE guys, and the LXQt, and the MATE guys. The Ubuntu ecosystem is where they actually meet to hash out how they can do stuff in a way that means users get a real choice between those. There's a very similar role for us to play in an environment like this. It's kind of acronym soup out there. Like 50 new projects every KubeCon. They're all interesting, they're all important, there's a lot of overlap between them. There's work for us to do in figuring out which ones are going to be really more important in the tent. We did that very effectively with OpenStack. The people who rode the OpenStack wave with us haven't had to abandon their OpenStacks. Because the stuff that we really chose to make central and easy, turned out to be the stuff that was the important poles in the tent. And we'll do exactly the same stuff here with Kubernetes. So, to put that into context, it's been real fun to be on the booth. We had, just tons, of people coming up and saying thank you for Microk8s. Microk8s is a single package of Kubernetes, that works in lots Linux distributions. It gives you, in about a minute, it gives you a standard Kubernetes environment, that's pure upstream. That, for a developer, just let's you get productive immediately. Figure out these new development application operations, constructs. You can use it on an airplane, you can use it on a train. Of course, it's compatible with all of the public clouds so that's the second thing that we're doing. We work with Amazon, with the EKS team, I spoke at their event on Monday. We work with Azure, the AKS team, we work with Google, we work with Oracle, we work with IBM. Essentially making sure that all of them offer Ubuntu worker nodes for their Kubernetes, SaaS offerings. That means that the developer who's doing stuff on their workstation with Microk8s can take those containers straight to any other public clouds. So, we're not trying to force people to use a particular solution, we're saying, in all of those environments, there are going to be choices people have. We want to make that as easy as possible for them. We want to avoid unnecessary friction in that process. That kind of underlining culture is coming through in this forum, as well. >> We've had many conversations about how you've always tried to make the job of that developer really easy. One of the things we always look at on this show is how much of it is the infrastructure people, or the platform underneath and the developer, and how much are they coming together. Anything different about this ecosystem? >> Very much so, yeah. >> Or your customers here that you can share? >> Kubernetes is an application construct. You can think of it as a next generation message bus. It's how components of an application find each other, communicate with each other, essentially, coordinate with each other. That makes it very tightly woven in to the developer experience. By contrast, you can be sitting writing a Java application inside a bank and not know or care whether it's going to be running on a physical machine, a virtual machine or an OpenStack cloud. You just don't know, you don't care. It's too far away from the application. Kubernetes is right there. I think that's one of the really interesting things is that it's bringing those infrastructure brains together with the application, app dev brains, in a very interesting way. It's going to be challenging. I wouldn't underestimate it, there are a lot of people, sort of, wondering around here, feeling a little confused, but that's okay. Do you know what I mean, the stuff shakes out. >> So, something that's been a recurring theme here has been the idea of going in a multi-cloud direction. Where people are talking about wanting to build workloads that they can seamlessly deploy across different providers. People talk about that, periodically, as a strategic goal but I'm not seeing people do it very often in the real world. You're in a much better position than a lot of us, to see that. Is that something you're seeing people moving towards as an adoption? >> Well, yes. Because we work with all of the major public clouds to optimize Ubuntu there, in a way that I don't think any other Linux does. You get an optimized Amazon Ubuntu on Amazon. You get an optimized Azure Ubuntu on Azure, and so on. >> Going very deep in the Amazon ecosystem. Most of my customers are using Ubuntu far ahead of anything else out there. >> That's right. >> And it's the right answer for what they're doing. >> That's right. It gives them, essentially, the best of what Amazon's offering, it still gives them the ability to feel like if they want to go somewhere else, they can. And that actually works well for Amazon. In the early days, I think there was a little tension between us and the cloud guys, because they were saying, look, if people use Ubuntu then they can go somewhere else. Yes, but in a sense, that makes them more likely to be more relaxed about starting wherever they choose to start. We don't advise enterprises as to which cloud to use. We advise them to engage with those clouds and figure out their differences, they are different. Amazon's really good at some things that are different, to what Microsoft is good at. Oracle is really good at some things which are different too. And what we're starting to see is the level of maturity in the enterprise governance process. They know they want to work with multiple clouds. They initially thought that was a straight kind of commodity exchange, competition thing. They now realize that it's a bit richer than that. That there are actually business reasons to have deeper relationships with particular clouds, based on what those clouds are prioritizing, and what they are prioritizing. So, we're not going to say you should use this cloud, you should use that cloud. Obviously, we can draw a distinction between the clouds where we're deeply engaged and the clouds where, you know, where you just don't have the benefit of that. But, more importantly we can say, you know, here are the set of practices that you can adopt internally that will give you comfort that your getting the best out of those clouds, the ones that you've chosen. And you have the portability that you really need. The key turns out be, enabling your developers, to use multiple clouds and challenging the developers to do different phases of the development life cycle on different clouds. Develop on your private cloud or your work station, use Microk8s, for example. Do tests on one cloud. Do staging and production on a different cloud. Now you already know that that whole, seamless ecosystem works. If you want to go use a high value, proprietary function, effectively on a cloud, that's a business decision and it's not a bad business decision. There's some spectacular capabilities from Amazon that are unique to Amazon. Or from Microsoft that are unique, or from Oracle that are unique to Oracle. They're spectacular. Those are business decisions to use them. There's other stuff that effectively you can give yourself optionality on. I wouldn't be black and white about that, put yourself in a position to make smart choices. And our best customers are getting are getting there. PayPal, they're operating on Ubuntu in a very sophisticated way, across multiple public clouds and private infrastructure. >> All right, so Mark we're five years into Kubernetes now. We've seen adoption grow, people feel there's a certain level of maturity here. There's always that concern that we've reached that peak and we're about to fall off the cliff. What do we need to worry about? What does the ecosystem need to do to make sure we continue along the stability and security that customers are looking for. >> There will be an over shoot regardless. I don't think there's any sort of leadership or governance approach that could avoid that. It's a little bit like, if your stock is going crazy. On the one hand, you're kind of happy. On the other hand, if you feel it's over valued it's a difficult sort of thing to say. You need to say, guys, you know what I mean, we're humans too. We've got our challenges to work through. And no one likes volatility, but too a certain extent, there's always speculation and over shoot, and over-enthusiasm, and hype. Kubernetes will over shoot. There's a bunch of emperors walking around here that, frankly, have no clothes. My job, our job, is very calmly, to sort through the wheat from the chaff. Make sure that it's possible for people to experiment with everything. But, that the stuff that we think has legs, effectively, is nicely integrated for people, that they have that for the long term, they won't regret things. We have a good track record of doing that. We've done it in the Linux desktop. We did it in OpenStack, we're doing it in public cloud. We've done it here in the Cloud Native world. I'd say things like AI are going in the same direction. Again, tons of complexity, tons of new options. Helping people effectively navigate through that is what we do very well. >> Yeah, one of the questions that I started to see as well, as we look at the way that these technologies continue to evolve, has been that, for better or worse, when developers are writing applications now and even infrastructure people are working with a lot of the things they care about. What operating system, let alone what distribution they're using, is increasingly slipping beneath the waves. People don't think about that as a primary area of focus anymore. And as, I guess, of the foundational Linux vendors in this space, how are you seeing that evolving? And how does Canonical remain relevant in a world where suddenly, people in a serverless future, I just throw some code over somewhere else and it runs is the limit of where most companies get involved. >> Yes, of course, we can point to the servers. And on the servers, we can point to the operating systems and inside the containers, we can point to the operating systems and underneath the serverless code, we can point to the language runtimes. So, the reality is that those things matter less and less to the developer. >> Yes. >> They still matter to the institution. So, I'm super comfortable with the language that says, the OS doesn't matter. What it means is that that whole tangle is getting professionalized and abstracted. But to be confident in the abstractions, someone needs to do a lot of work. I know how much work we do with Google, with Amazon, with Microsoft, with Oracle, with IBM, to make sure that nobody else has to feel like the OS matters. That that stuff essentially just works. You can extend that out to what we do with VMware, what we do, essentially, on bare-metal, what we do on developer workstations, what we do with the Windows crowd, effectively, and Windows subsystem for Linux, so that developers really can just build on Windows subsystem for Linux, Ubuntu, effectively, and ship that container straight to Amazon EKS and have it just work. There are a ton of little lies that have to line up. Containers are all kind of a fiction. The fiction breaks if those pieces don't line up. So, being Ubuntu, effectively and being being able to be consistent in all of those places, is a ton of work to enable it not to matter for anybody upstairs. That's allowing developers to go faster. It's allowing them to be more productive. It's allowing them to be more heroic. And it's allowing the people who do worry about the middleware to have far fewer nights scratching their heads as to, why didn't this version of this library tie up to that driver with that kernel. All of those things are still there. When you drop that container onto Amazon, we've got to connect the GPGPU in the hardware, through the hypervisor, to the guest OS, up into the container. And there's code getting injected all the way up. It's only the fact that we can typically have Ubuntu everywhere there that, essentially, allows those pieces to line up without some spectacular fireworks. It satisfies me when people say they don't have to worry about that. >> It's a victory condition. >> Mark, I want to give you the final word. What should we be looking for, from Canonical, through the rest of the year? >> So, for us, this has been a big year in terms of visibility in the enterprise. In terms of penetration, Ubuntu's everywhere in the Fortune 500, everywhere in the Global 2000. What's changed this year, is the CIO suddenly is seeing Ubuntu on their desk. For two reasons, one is IBM Red Hat. The CIO suddenly wants to know, okay, what does this mean? What else are we running? Where else can we get 24/7 SLAs? Where else can we get long term commitments to Linux and so on? And the fact is Ubuntu's already in the building so that's one, sort of, easy connect. The other thing is, there's really interesting, new workloads that Ubuntu leads in the enterprise. Obviously the container story, the multi-cloud story, edge. It's not just telcos. Every retailer, every logistics company, anybody that has physical distribution is now trying to say, well how can I automate compute in my physical world, effectively. So, edge is super interesting and IoT beyond that. People transforming businesses through taking a Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu and putting a snap on it is really, really cool. Which of those is going to drive the biggest headlines or the scariest headlines, I can't tell you. We're just trying to take care of security, performance and operations across all of them. >> All right, well, Mark Shuttleworth, always a pleasure to catch up, thank you so much for the updates. >> Great to see you. >> All right, for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)