(ambient Music) >> Announcer: 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, this is theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for the week is John Troyer, happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alumni, we have Margaret Dawson and John Alessio. Margaret is the vice-president of Portfolio Product Marketing and John is the vice-president of Global Services. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Alright so, John has gotten the week and a half now of the red hat greatness of being at summit last week, I unfortunately missed Summit, first time in five years I hadn't been at the show, did watch some of the interviews, caught up on it, and of course we talked to a lot of your team but, Margaret, let's start with you >> Margaret: Okay. >> One of the things we were looking at was, really, it's not just a maturation of OpenStack, but it's beyond where we were, how it fits into the greater picture, something we've been observing is when you think about open sourced projects, it's not one massive stack that you just deploy, it's you take what you need, it kind of gets embedded all over the place, and help us frame for us where we are today. >> Wow, that's a big question. So I think there's a couple things, I mean, in talking to customers, I think there's a couple trends that are happening. One is one you've probably talked about a lot and we probably covered at the Red Hat Summit which is just this overall digital transformation, digital leadership, whatever you want to call it, digital disruption tends to be a thing, and open sources definitely playing, really, the critical role of that, right, you will not be able to innovate and disrupt or even manage a disruption if you're not able to get to those technologies and innovations quickly and be able to adapt to it and have it work with other things. So the need for openness, for open APIs, for open technologies, inner-operability allows us to move faster and have that innovation and agility that every enterprise and organization needs world wide. And tied to that is kind of this overall hybrid cloud, so it's not just, OpenStack is a part of a much bigger kind of solution or goal that enterprises have in order to win and transform and be a digital leader. >> Margaret, I love that. Digital transformation, absolutely something we hear time and again from customers. >> Margaret: Yup. >> John, I've got a confession to make. I'm an infrastructure person and sometimes we're always like, why, come on, we spend all our time talking about how all the widgets and doo-dads and things-- >> Margaret: Blinky lights. >> Blinky lights, up on stage we have the-- >> He missed the blinking lights >> He did miss the blinking light. >> They had a similar stack up on stage yesterday. >> Oh, that's right. >> Same fans you could hear in the back of the room. But the whole goal of infrastructure always, of course, is to run the application, the whole reason for applications is to run and transform and do-- >> John: Serve the business >> Yeah, so that's where I'm going with this is we're talking more about not only that foundational layer of OpenStack but everything that goes with it and on it so maybe you could talk about the services-- >> Sure. So I think, Stu, that's exactly what we're seeing. So if you think about the last year and what we're seeing with services and projects here on OpenStack, I think the first thing to talk about is the fact that it's been growing quite a bit, in fact, from a 2017 versus 2018 perspective, our number of OpenStack projects have increased 36% year on year globally. So we're seeing a lot of demand, but we're seeing the projects be a lot more comprehensive. So these are OpenStack projects, but they're OpenStack with Open Shift, with Cloud Form, with Suff, as an example, and this combination is, really, a very very powerful combination. In fact, it's been so powerful that we started to see some common patterns of customers building a hybrid cloud solution, using OpenStack as their kind of private cloud infrastructure, but then using Open Shift as their way to kind of deploy applications in containers in that hybrid way, that we created a whole solution, which we announced two weeks ago, when John was at our Red Hat Summit, called Containers on Cloud. And that's taking all of our best practices around combining these products together in a very comprehensive, programmatic approach to deploying those solutions together. >> And I think it's really important, I mean, as you know, I think you and I met when we were both in networking, so coming from that infrastructure background but we really all need to talk about the workload down, starting with the application, starting with the business goal, and then how the infrastructure is almost becoming a services-based abstraction layer where you just need it to be always there. >> John: Yup. >> And whether it's public cloud or private cloud or traditional infrastructure, what developers in the business want is that agility and flexibility and containers provide that. There's other kind of architectural fabrics that allow that consistency and that's when it gets really exciting. >> One thing that's really interesting to me this week at OpenStack, as we've drilled into different customers, and talking to different people, even at lunch, is one, it's real. Everyone I've talked to, stuff in deployment, it went quickly, it's rock solid, it's powering, as we know, actually a lot of that is technical infrastructure that's powering a lot of the world's infrastructure at this point. >> That's right. >> The other thing that was interesting to me is some folks I talked to were saying, "Well, actually we have enough knowledge "that we're actually doing a lot of it ourselves, "we're going upstream." However, so that's great, and that's right for some people, but what I'm kind of been interested in both just coming from Red Hat Summit is both the portfolio, the breadth of the stack, and then all the different offerings that Red Hat, you know, it's not Rel anymore, it's not just Linux anymore, there's everything that's been built up and around and on top for orchestration and management, and then also the training, the services, the support, and that sort of thing, and I was wondering, that's kind of a two-part question, but maybe you all could tackle that. What does Red Hat bring to the table then? >> So, let me just start with, again, just to kind of position what we do as global services, our number one priority is customer success with Red Hat technology, that's the first and foremost thing we do and second is really around building expertise in the ecosystem so our customers have choice and where to go to get that expertise. So, if you start to look at kind of what's been going on as it relates to OpenStack, and, again, many customers are using Upstream bits, but many customers are using Red Hat bits, we see that and we look at the number of people who are getting trained around our technology. So over the last three years, we've trained, through our fee-based programs, 55,000 people on our OpenStack portfolio and in fact from 2017 to 2018 that was up 50% year on year and so the momentum is super super strong. So, that's the first point. The second is it's not just our customers. So part of my remit is, yes, to run consulting and, yes, to drive customer enablement and training, but it's also to build an ecosystem through our business partners. Our business partners use a program we call OPEN, Online Partner Enablement Network, which actually will just be celebrating five years just like OpenStack will, we'll be celebrating five years for OPEN. And our business partner accreditations on OpenStack specifically are up 49% year on year. So we're seeing the momentum in our regional systems integrators, our global systems integrators, our partners at large, building their solutions and capabilities around OpenStack, which I think is fantastic. >> No and it helps a lot with the verticalization of that, right, 'cause every industry has slightly different things they need. The thing I that would add to that, in terms of do-it-yourself community versus a dis-ter that's supported from someone like Red Hat, is it really comes down to core competency. And so even though OpenStack has become vastly simplified from a day one, day two, ongoing management, it is still a complex project. I mean that's the power of it, it can be highly customizable, right, it is an incredibly powerful infrastructure capability and so for most people their core competency is not that, and they need that support at least initially to get it going. What we have done is a couple things. I've actually talked to customers a lot about doing that training earlier and it's for a couple reasons, one is so that they actually have the people in house that have that competency but, two, you're giving infrastructure folks a chance to be part of that future cool stuff, right? I mean, OpenStack's written in Python and there's other languages that are newer and sexier, I guess, but it's still kind of moving them towards that future and for a lot of guys that have been in the data center and the ops world for a long time, they're looking out there at developers and going, I'm not the cool kid anymore, right? So OpenStack actually is a little bit of a window, not just to help companies go through that digital transformation, but actually help your ops personnel get a taste of that future and be part of that transformation instead of being stuck in just mainframe land or whatever, so training them early in the process is a really powerful way to do a lot of things. You know, skillset, retention, as well as then you can manage more of that yourself. >> And then all the way up to Stack, right? I mean, we're talking about containers, and then there's containers but then there's container data storage, container data networking. I mean, you've got the rest of the pieces in that, in Open Shift, in the rest. >> Absolutely. >> That is correct. >> And I think, John, you were at Red Hat Summit, we had a number of different innovation award winners. So I think one good example of kind of this kind of transformation from a digital transformation perspective, but also kind of leveraging a lot of what our Stack has to offer is Cafe Pacific. And so we talked about Cafe, they were one of our innovation award winners and what their challenge really was is how do they create a new modern infrastructure that gave them more flexibility so they could be more responsive to their customers. >> Yeah. >> In the airline industry. And so what they were really looking for was really, truly a hybrid cloud solution. They wanted to be able to have some things run in their infrastructure, have some things run in the public cloud, and we worked with them over the last, little over a year now, Red Hat consulting, Red Hat training, the Red Hat engineering team, in really building a solution that leverage OpenStack, yes, but also a number of other capabilities in the Red Hat portfolio, Open Shift, so they can deploy these applications, containerized applications now both to the public cloud as well as to the private cloud, but also automation through Ansible, which we're hearing a lot about Ansible and products like Ansible here at the conference-- >> Well the Open Stock and Ansible communities are starting to really work well together, just like Kubernetes, you've got a lot of this collaboration happening at the project level not to mention when we actually productize it and take it to customers. >> Yeah, so it's been super super powerful and I think it's a good one where it really hit on what Margaret was saying, which was giving the guys in infrastructure an opportunity to be a part of this huge transformation that Cafe went through, 'cause they were a very very key part of it. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're seeing that also with the open innovation labs. So this is something, which is really an innovation incubation process, it's agile, scrum, whatever, and in those we're not just talking to the developers, we're actually combining developers, functional lines of business leaders, infrastructure, architects, who all come together in a very typical six week kind of agile methodology and what comes out of that, I don't know, I've seen it a couple times, it's magical is all I can say, but having those different perspectives and having those different people work together to innovate is so powerful and they all feel like they're moving that forward and you come out with pilots, and we've seen things where they come out with two apps at the end of six weeks or eight weeks, it's just incredible when they're all focused on that and you start to understand those different perspectives and to me that's open source culture, right? It's awesome. >> And, Margaret, I'd love to hear your perspective also on that hybrid cloud discussion because so many people look at OpenStack and be like, oh, that's private cloud. >> Margaret: Right. >> And, of course, every customer we talk to, they have a cloud strategy. And they're doing lots of SaaS, they've got public cloud, multiple, Red Hat, I know you play across all of them, big announcement with Microsoft last week, last year was Amazon big partnerships with, so is Kubernetes the story, or is Kubernetes a piece of the story, how do all these play together for customers? >> I think Kubernetes is one and so, especially when you look at the broader architectural level, OpenStack becomes obviously the private cloud and enables them to start to do things that are more cloud-native even in their own data center, or if it's hosted or management or more traditional infrastructure, but it really has to be fluid. And a lot of customers initially were saying that their strategy was cloud first, and they would say, "Oh, we're going to put "everything in the public cloud." And then you actually start going through the workloads, you start going through the cost, you start going through the data privacy, or whatever the criteria capabilities are, and that's just not practical, frankly. And so this hybrid reality with private cloud, traditional, and public is going to be the reality for a very very long time, if not forever. There's always going to be things that you want to have better control of. And so Kubernetes at the orchestration layer becomes really critical to be able to have that agility across all those environments, but you have other fabrics like that in your architecture too, we talked about Ansible, it allows you to have common automation and do those play books that you can use across all those different infrastructure, KVM, what's your virtualization fabric, and can KVM take you from traditional virtualization all through public cloud? The answer is yes. So we're going to see increasingly these kind of layers of the overall architecture that allows you to have that flexibility, that management that's still the consistency, which is what you need to keep your policies the same, your access controls, you security, your compliance, and your sanity, whereas before it was kind of Ad Hoc. People would be like, oh, we're just going to put this here, go to public cloud. We're going to do this here, and now people are finding standardizing on things like even Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that's my OS layer, and that allows me to easily do Linux containers in a secure way, et cetera, et cetera. So, doing hybrid cloud means both the agility but you got to have some consistency in order to have the security and control that you need. So it's a little bit different than what we were talking about a few years ago, even. >> And I think one of the things that we've learned in the services world is that we started this idea about 18 months ago, we called these journey adoption programs, which were really the fact that some of these transformations are big, they're not about a single project that's going to last four to six weeks, it's a journey that the customer's going to go on and so when we talk about hybrid cloud, we've actually created this adoption program which can really start with the customer in this whole discovery phase, really, what are you trying to accomplish from a business perspective then take them into a design phase, take them into a deployment phase, take them into an enablement phase, and then take them into a sustainment phase. And there's a number of different services that we'll do across consulting, training, even within Marco Bill Peters Organization, which is our customer experience and engagement organization, around what role a technical account manager can play and really help our customer in the operational phases. And so we've learned this from some of the very large deployments, like Verizon, where we've seen some very-- >> And it's cyclical, right? You can do that many times. >> We do. In fact, you absolutely do. And so we've created now a program, specifically, around hybrid clouded option to try and de-mistify it. >> Yeah. >> Because it is complex. >> Well, and the reality is, there's somewhere around 30% of organizations still do not actually have a clear cloud strategy. And we see that in our own research, our own experiences, but industry analysts come up with the exact same number. >> And Margaret, by the way, the other 70%, the ink still pretty-- >> Yeah. >> Still wet! (laughing) >> Yes, it is. I'll tell you, I love saying cloud first to people because they kind of giggle. It's like, yeah, that's our strategy but we know we don't really know what that means. >> Which cloud? >> Exactly. >> Exactly. >> All the clouds. >> Exactly. >> Alright, well Margaret and John, want to give you a final word, key takeaways you want to have or anything new to the show that you want to point out? >> I would just say we are still in early days. I think sometimes we forget that we, both in the open source communities, in the industry for a long time, tend to be 10 years ahead of where most people are and so when you hear jokes about, oh, is OpenStack still viable or is everything doing this, it's like right now we only have a very small percentage of actual enterprise workloads in the cloud and so we need to just now get to the point where we're all getting mature in this and really start to help our customers and our partners and our communities take this to the next level and work on inter-operability, and ease of use, and management. We're so mature now in technology, now let's put the polish on it, so that the consumption and the utilization can really go to the next level. >> Yeah, and I'll play off what Margaret said. I think it's very very key. When I look at where we've had the biggest success, as defined by, in that discovery phase, the customer lays out for us, here's what our business objectives were, did we achieve those business objectives, it's all about figuring out how we can create the solution and integrate into their environment today. So Margaret said I think very very well which is we have to integrate into these other solutions and every one of these big customer deployments has some Red Hat software, but it also has some other software that we're integrating into because customers have investments. So it's not about rip and replace, it's about integrate, it's about leverage, it's about time to market, and that's what most of the customers I've talked to, they're very worried about time to value, and so that's what we're trying to focus in, I think as a whole company, around Red Hat. >> Margaret: Agree. >> Absolutely. Summed it up very well. John Alessio, Margaret Dawson, thanks so much for joining us again. >> Thanks again. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, watch more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> 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's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018, here in Vancouver. Three days wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, Radhesh Balakrishnan, who is the general manager of OpenStack with Red Hat. Radhesh, great to see you. It's been a week since John talked to you, and always good to have you on at the show. >> Great to be on. Good to be here talking about OpenStack at OpenStack Summit. >> Yeah so, look, OpenStack is in the title of your job. I believe, did we have a birthday cake and a party celebrating a certain milestone? >> That is indeed true; so it's the fifth anniversary of that fact that we've had a product, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, on the market. And so, we've been doing a little bit of a look back at how far we have come in the last five years as well as looking ahead at, you know, how does the next three to five years shape as well. >> Yeah, Radhesh, I'm going to date myself and when I think back to, gosh it was 18 years ago, I was working with Linux, and there were kernels all over the place and things like that. And then, I worked for an enterprise storage company and was like, ugh, like keeping up with Chrome.org was a pain in the neck. There came out this thing called Red Hat Advanced Server that was like, oh wait, we can glom onto this, we can support this with our customers, and that eventually turned into RHEL, which, of course, kind of becomes the main standard for how to do Linux. I feel like we have a lot of similarities. >> Radhesh: Absolutely, absolutely. >> In how we did. RHOSP, I believe, is the acronym, so. >> That's exactly right, and we like to have long names. >> Which are very descriptive, but Red Hat OpenStack Platform, fundamentally, to your point brings the same valid proposition that RHEL brought to Linux, to OpenStack, with the twist that, it's not just curated OpenStack, but it's a co-engineered solution of Linux and Cavium and OpenStack. And along the way we learned that, look, it's not just OpenStack and the infrastructure solution. It's done in conjunction with the software-defined storage solution or it's done in conjunction with software-defined networking. Or, fast-forward all the way now, it's being done in conjunction with cloud-native applications running on top of it, right? But regardless, in five years we've been able to grow to address these different demands being placed at infrastructure level, and at the same time evolved to address new-use cases as well; Telco is an example of that. >> Radhesh, let's spend a couple of minutes, though, on the OpenStack Platform itself from Red Hat. Some of the things, guys, that you were bringing to market, I know we talked about, here at the show, fast-forward upgrades, for instance were, they were just introducing, and maybe some other things in the Queens release that you all are bringing forward and have engineered. >> Yeah, thanks for that question, very topical, in the sense that yesterday we launched OSP 13, which is the latest and greatest version based on Queens release. If you look at the innovation packed in that it fundamentally falls in three buckets. One is the bread part that you talked about, whereby, anybody who is standing on OSP 10, which was the prior, long-release lifecycle product, over to 13, how do you kind of get over there in a graceful manner is the first area that we have addressed. The second area is around security, because how do you make sure that OpenStack-based clouds are secure by default, from the day you roll out all the way to until you retire it, right? I don't know if there's going to be a retirement, but that's the intent of all the security enablements that we have in the product as well. And the third one, how do we make sure that containers in OpenStack can come together in a nice manner. >> Yeah, the container piece is something else that, so a lot of effort, here at the show. They announced Kata containers, which, trying to give the security of a VM, lightweight VM. How does Red Hat look at Kata containers? I know Red Hat, you know Linux's containers, you know, very strong position, fill us in on that. >> Yeah, to maybe pull back a little bit and then look at the larger picture of there is the notion of infrastructure or the open infrastructure that you need and OpenStack is a good starting point for that. And then, you overlay on top of that an application deployment management configuration, lifecycle management solution that's the container platform called OpenShift, right. These are the two centers of gravity for the stack. Now, aspects such as Kata containers or Hubbard, which is for again, similar concept of addressing how do you use virtualization in addition to containers to bring some of the value around security et cetera, right? So we are continuing to engage in all these upstream projects, but we'll be careful and methodical in bringing those technologies into our products as we go along. >> Okay, how about Edge is the other kind of major topic that we're having here, I know I've interviewed some Red Hat customers looking at NFV solutions, so some of the big telcos you know specifically that use various pieces. What do you hear from your customers and help us kind of draw that line between the NFV to the Edge. Yeah, so Edge has become the center is kind of the new joke in the sense that, from an NFV perspective, customers have already effectively addressed the CORD errors and the challenges, now it's about how do you scale that and deploy that on a massive scale, right? That's a good problem to have. Now the goodness of virtualization can be brought all the way down to the radio Edge so that a programmable network becomes the reality that a telco or a carrier can get into. So in that context, Edge becomes a series of use cases. You know, it's not just one destination. Another way to say it is there is Edge an objective and there is Edge as a noun. Edge as the objective is a set of technologies that are enabling Edge, Edge networking, right. Edge management, for example, and then Edge as a destination where you have a series of Edge locations starting from CORD error center going all the way to radio. Now, the technology answers for all these are just being figured out right now. So you can say, you know, put crudely, KBM, OpenStack, containers, and Ansible will be all good elements that will come into the picture when it comes to a solution for all these footprints. >> Nice. Radhesh, maybe let's switch over to talk about the summit here, and the people here, filled with people being productive with OpenStack, right? Either looking at it, upgrading it, inheriting it. We talked to people in a bunch of different scenarios Red Hat, huge installed base, and you are good at helping and supporting, and uplifting, and upskilling a set of operators who started with Linux and now have to be responsible for an entire cloud infrastructure. Plus, now, at this conference, we've been talking about containers, we've been talking about open dev, right. That's again broadening the scope of what an operator might have to deal with. How does Red Hat look at that? How are you and your team helping upskill and enhance the role of the operator? >> Yeah, so I think it comes down to, how do we make sure that we are understanding the journey that the operator himself or herself is taking from a career perspective, right, the skill set of evolving from Linux and core automation-related skills to going to being able to understand what does it mean to live with cloud implementation on a day-to-day basis. What does it mean to live with network function virtualization as the way in which new services are going to be deployed. So, our course curriculum has evolved to be able to address all these needs today. That's one dimension, the other dimension is how do we make sure that the product itself is so easy that the journey is getting to a point where the infrastructure is invisible, and the focus is on the application platform on top. So I think we have multiple areas of focus to get to the point where it's so relevant that it's invisible, if that paradox makes sense. That's what we're trying to make happen with OpenStack. >> Radhesh, Red Hat has a very large presence at the show here; we were noting in the keynote the underlying infrastructure didn't get a lot of discussion because it is more mature, and therefore, we can talk about everything like VGPUs and containers, and everything like that. But Red Hat has a lot in the portfolio that helps in some of those underlying pieces. So maybe you can give us some of the highlights there. >> Absolutely, so we aren't looking at OpenStack as the be-all end-all destination for customers, but rather an essential ingredient in the journey to a hybrid cloud. So when you have that lens it becomes natural to you that a portfolio of our offerings, which are either first-party or in conjunction with our partners --we have over 400 partners with whom we have joint solutions as well -- so you naturally take a holistic view and then say, "How do you optimize the experience of ceph plus OpenStack for example." So we were talking about Edge recently, right, in the context of Edge we realize that there is a particular use-case for hyperconverged infrastructure whereby you need to collocate, compute, and store it in a way that the footprint is so small and easy to manage plus you want to have one life-cycle both for OpenStack and ceph right, so to address that we announced, right at hypercloud infrastructure for cloud, as an offering that is co-engineered between ceph team, or our storage team, and the OpenStack team. Right, that's just an example of how, by bringing the rest of the portfolio, we're able to address needs being expressed by our customers today. Or you look forward in terms of use-case, one thing that we are hearing from all our large customers, such as the Amadeus's of the world is, make the experience of OpenShift on OpenStack, easy to deploy and manage, as well as reduce the penalty of running containers on VMs. Because we understand the benefits of security and all of that, but we want to be able to get that without having any penalty of using a virtual infrastructure so that's why we're heavily focused on OpenShift, on OpenStack, as the form-factor for delivering that while continuing to work on things such as Kata containers as well as, you know, Kuryrs, as technology is evolving to make communities much richer as well as the infrastructure management at OpenStack level richer. >> You brought up an interesting point, we spoke a little bit yesterday with John Allessio and Margaret Dawson, about really that kind of multi-cloud world out there, because pieces like Kubernetes and Ansible, aren't just in the data center with this one stack, it's spanning across multiple environments and when we talk to customers, they do cloud, and cloud is multiple things in multiple places and changing all the time. So I'd love to get your viewpoint on what you hear from customers, how Red Hat's helping them across all those environments. >> Absolutely, so the key differentiation we see in being able to provide to our customers is that unlike some of the other providers out there, they're where they are stitching you with a particular private cloud, with the particular public cloud, and then saying, "Hey, this is sort of the equivalent of the AOL walled gardens, if you will, right, that's being created for a particular private and public cloud. What we're saying is fundamentally three things. First is, the foundation of Linux skills from RHEL that you have is going to be what you can build on to innovate for today and tomorrow, that's number one. Secondly, you can invest in infrastructure that is 100% open using OpenStack so that you can use commodity hardware, bring in multiple use-cases which are bleeding it, such as data lags, big data, Apache Spark, or going all the way to cloud-native application, development on top of OpenStack. And then last but not least, when you are embarking on a multi-cloud journey it is important that you're not tied to innovation speed of one particular public cloud provider, or even a private cloud provider, for that matter, so being able to get to a container platform, which is OpenShift, that can run pretty much everywhere, either on PREM or on a public cloud, and give you that single pane of consistency for your application, which is where business and IT alignment is the focus right now, then I think you've got the best of all the worlds. You know, freedom from vendor-lock in, and a future-proof infrastructure and application platform that can take you to where you need to go, right. So pretty excited to be able to deliver on that consistently as of today, as well as in the coming years. >> All right, we just want to give you the final word, for people out there that ... you know, often they get their opinion based on when they first heard of something. OpenStack's been around for a number of years, five years now, with your platform. Give us the takeaway for 2018 here from OpenStack Summit as to how they should be thinking about OpenStack, in that larger picture. >> The key takeaway is that OpenStack is rock-solid, that you can bring into your environment, not just to power your virtual machine infrastructure, but also baremetal infrastructure on which you can bring in containers as well. So if you're thinking about an infrastructure fabric, either to power your telco network or to power your private cloud in its entirety OpenStack is the only place that you need to be looking at and our OpenStack platform from end to end delivers that value proposition. Now the second aspect to think about is, OpenStack is a step in the journey of a hybrid future destination that you can get to. Red Hat not only has the set of surround products and technologies to round-up the solution, but also have the largest partner ecosystem to offer you choice. So what's your excuse from getting to a hybrid cloud today if not tomorrow? >> Well, Radhesh Balakrishnan, thank you for all the updates appreciate catching up with you once again. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Minimam, getting near the end of three days wall-to-wall coverage here in Vancouver, thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its Ecosystem partners. (soft music) >> Hi, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Medias coverage of theCUBE, here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. We've been here, this is now the third day of coverage, John. We've done a couple dozen interviews already. We've got one more day of coverage. We had some kind of perceptions coming in and I have some interesting differing viewpoints as to where we are for OpenStack the project, where this show itself is going. First of all John, give me your impressions overall. Vancouver, your first time here, city I fell in love with last time I came here, and let's get into the show itself, too. >> Sure, sure, I mean the show's a little bit smaller this year than it had been in past years. Some of that is because they pulled some of the technical stuff out last year, or a couple years ago. By being a little bit smaller, and being in a place like Vancouver, I get good energy off of the crowd. The folks we've talked to, the folks that have been going to sessions, have said they've been very good. The people here are practitioners. They are running OpenStack, or about to run OpenStack, or upgrading their OpenStack, or other adjacent technologies. They're real people doing real work. As we talk to folks and sponsors, the conversations have been productive. So, I'd say in general, this kind of a small venue and a beautiful city allows for a really productive community-oriented event, so that's been great. >> Alright, so John come on, on the analysis segment we're not allow to pull any punches. Attendance, absolutely is down. Three years ago when we were here it was around 5500. Mark Collier, on our opening segment, said there was about 2600. But two-year point, I've not talked to a single vendor or attendee here that was like, "Oh boy, nobody's here, "it's not goin' on." Yes, the Expo Hall is way smaller and people flowing through the Expo Hall isn't great all the time, but why is that? Because the people that are here, they're in sessions. They have 40 sessions about Edge Computing. Hot topic, we've talked a bunch about that. Interesting conversations. There is way more in Containers. Containers for more than three years, been a topic conversation. There's so many other sessions of people digging in. The line you've used a couple a time is the people here are people that have mortgages. In a good way, it means these are jobs, these are not them, "Oh, I heard about "this cool new thing, and I'm going to "go check out beautiful Vancouver." Now, yes, we've brought our spouses or significant others, and checking out the environment because yeah, this place is awesome, but there's good energy at the show. There's good technical conversation. Many of the people we've talked to, even if they're not the biggest OpenStack fans, they're like, "But our customers are using this in a lot of different ways." Let's talk about OpenStack. Where is it, where isn't it? What's your take from what you've heard from the customers and the vendors? >> Sure, I definitely think the conversation is warranted. As we came in, from outside the community there was a lot of conversation, even backchannel, like why are you going to OpenStack Summit? What's going on there, is it still alive? Which is kind of a perception of maybe it's an indication of where the marketing is on this project, or where it is on the hype cycle. In terms of where it is and where it isn't, it's built into everything. At this point OpenStack, the infrastructure management, open infrastructure management solution, seems to be mature. Seems to be inside every Telco, every cable company, every transportation company, every bank. People who need private resources and have the smarts and power to do that have leveraged OpenStack now. That seems stable. What was interesting here is, that that doesn't speak to the health overall, and the history of, or the future of the project itself, the foundation, the Summit, I think those are separate questions. You know, the infrastructure and projects seem good. Also here, like we've talked about, this show is not just about OpenStack now. It's about Containers, it's broadening the scope of these people informally known as infrastructure operators, to the application level as well. >> Yeah, if you want to hear a little bit more, some two great interviews we did yesterday. Sean Michael Kerner, who's a journalist. Been here for almost every single one of the OpenStack shows. He's at eWeek, had some really good discussion. He said private cloud, it doesn't exist. Now, he said what does he mean by that? There are companies that are building large scalable cloud with OpenStack but it's like if some of the big China Telecom, big China cloud companies. Oracle and IBM have lots of OpenStack, in what they do, and yes there are, as you mentioned, the telcos are a big used case. We had some Canonical customers talking about Edge as in a used case for a different type of scalability. Lots of nodes but not one massive infrastructure as a service piece. If I talk, kind of the typical enterprise, or definitely going the SNE piece of the market, this is not something that they go and use. They will use services that have OpenStack. It might be part of the ecosystem that they're playing, but people saying, "Oh, I had my VMware environment "and I want to go from virtualization "to private cloud" OpenStack is not usually the first choice, even though Red Hat has some customers that kind of fit into some of the larger sides of that, and we'll be talking to them more about that today. Randy Bias is the other one, take a look. Randy was one of the early, very central to a lot of stuff happening in the Foundation. He's in the networking space now, and he says even though he's not a cheerleader for OpenStack, he's like, "Why am I here? "That's where my customers are." >> Right, right. I mean, I do think it's interesting that public cloud is certainly mentioned. AWS, Google, et cetera, but it's not top of mind for a lot of these folks, and it's mentioned in very different ways depending on, kind of, the players. I think it's very different from last week at Red Hat Summit. Red Hat, with their story, and OpenShift on top of OpenStack, definitely talked public cloud for folks. Then they cross-cloud, hybrid-cloud. I think that was a much different conversation than I've been hearing this week. I think basically, kind of maybe, depends on the approach of the different players in the market, Stu. I know you've been talkin' to different folks about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like, Margaret Dawson at Red Hat helped us talk about how that hybrid-cloud works because here, I hate to say it's, some oh yeah, public cloud, that's too expensive. You're renting, it's always going to be more. It's like, well no, come on, let's understand. There's lot of applications that are there and customers, it's an and message for almost all of them. How does that fit together, I have some critiques as to how this goes together. You brought up another point though John, OpenStack Foundation is more than just OpenStack projects. So, Kata Containers, something that was announced last year, and we're talking about there's Edge, there's a new CI/CD tool, Zuul, which is now fully under the project. Yes, joke of the week, there is no OpenStack, there's only Zuul. There are actually, there's another open-source project named Zuul too, so boy, how many CI/CD tools are out there? We've got two different, unrelated, projects with the same name. John, you look at communities, you look at foundations, if this isn't the core knitting of OpenStack, what is their role vis-a-vis the cloud native and how do they compare to say, the big player in this space is Linux Foundation which includes CNCF. >> That's a good one. I mean, in some sense like all organic things, things are either growing or shrinking. Just growing or dying. On the other hand, in technology, nothing ever truly dies. I think the project seems mature and healthy and it's being used. The Foundation is global in scope and continues to run this. I do wonder about community identity and what it means to be an OpenStack member. It's very community-oriented, but what's at the nut of it here if we're really part of this cloud-native ecosystem. CNCF, you know, it's part of Linux Foundation, all these different foundations, but CNCF, on the other hand, is kind of a grab-bag of technology, so I'm not sure what it means to be a member of CNCF either. I think both of these foundations will continue to go forward with slightly different identities. I think for the community as a whole, the industry as a whole, they are talking and they better be talking, and it's good that they're talking now and working better together. >> Yeah, great discussion we had with Lisa-Marie Namphy who is an OpenStack Ambassador. She holds the meat up in Silicon Valley and when she positions it, it's about cloud-native and its about all these things. So like, Kubernetes is front and center whereas some of the OpenStack people are saying, "Oh no, no, we need to talk more about OpenStack." That's still the dynamic here was, "Oh, we go great together." Well, sometimes thou dost protest too much. Kubranetes doesn't need OpenStack, OpenStack absolutely must be able to play in this Container, cloud-native Kubranetes world. There's lots of other places we can learn about Kubranetes. It is an interesting dynamic that have been sorting out, but it is not a zero-sum game. There's absolutely lots, then we have, I actually was real impressed how many customers we got to speak with on the air this time. Nice with three days of programming, we had a little bit of flexibility, and not just people that were on the keynote stage. Not just people that have been coming for years, but a few of the interviews we had are relatively new. Not somebody that have been on since very early in the alphabet, now we're at queens. >> Right. >> Anything more from the customers or that Container, Kubranetes dynamic that you want to cover? >> Sure, well I mean just that, you know, Containers at least, Containers are everywhere here. So, I think that kind of question has been resolved in some sense. It was a little more contentious last year than this year. I'm actually more bullish on OpenStack as a utility project, after this week, than before. I think I can constantly look people in the eye and say that. The interesting thing for me though, coming from Silicon Valley, is you're so used to thinking about VCs and growth, and new startups, and where's the cutting edge that it's kind of hard to talk about this, maybe this open source business model where the customer basis is finite. It's not growing at 100% a year. Sometimes the press has a hard time covering that. Analysts have a hard time covering that. And if you wanted to give advice to somebody to get into OpenStack, I'm not sure who should if they're not in it already, there's definitely defined use cases, but I think maybe those people have already self-identified. >> Alright, so yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention is yeah. Big thank you to our sponsors to help get us here. The OpenStack Foundation, really supportive of us for years. Six years of us covering it. Our headline sponsor, Red Hat, had some great customers. Talked about this piece, and kind of we talk about it's practically Red Hat month on theCUBE for John with Red Hat Summit and OpenStack. Canonical, Contron, Nuage Networks, all helping us to be able to bring this content to you. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage in the past as well as where we'll be. Hit John Troyer, J. Troyer, on Twitter or myself, Stu, on Twitter if you ever have any questions, people we should be talking to, viewpoints, whether you agree or disagree with what we're talking about. Big thanks to all of our crew here. Thank you to the wonderful people of Vancouver for being so welcoming of this event and of all of us. Check out all the interviews. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)