>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, its theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018, in Vancouver. My co-host John Troyer is here, happy to welcome back to the program, Mark Baker who's a Product Manager with Canonical. Mark, how's the show treating you so far? >> Show's been going very well. So, we've seen people coming to us on the show floor, coming to the sessions. We're seeing really interesting building, scalable production Clouds, and so and coupling that with all the container technologies and a lot of other complimentary technology by machine-learning. So, a lot of the discussion is, can we build Cloud? But also, much more about the workloads and the kind of integration with, parallel if you like, or adjoining technologies. >> Great, want to talk about the customers really, Mark. So as you said, you've been to a few of these shows, we've been to a few of these also and, the makeup of the attendees has changed a bit, one of the things I heard, it is 2X the number of Cloud architects, with their title, compared just to last year, little bit of a broadening into the scope, what do you hear from customers, what brings them here, what's exciting them, in this environment? >> So, I mean yes certainly Cloud architects, and at Canonical we regularly talk to Cloud architects, because architecture with the Cloud is something that evolves, it's not something that's pinned. As workloads evolve, and new technologies come along you need to be able to evolve that architecture, and therefore people that understand that are important. I think it's also noticeable, I'm sat here wearing my blazer, is there's noticeable seeing quite a few people round the show, wearing blazers. So, you go back a couple years ago, or even a year or so ago, it was very much a sort of developer centric type of event. We're seeing more business conversations now, and even discussing things such as money, and economics, which weren't necessarily conversations that we were going too heavily in a couple of years ago. >> There's still a bunch of the hoodies set here, lots of cool T-shirts and, yeah, ironic facial hair and the like, so, maybe from your standpoint at Canonical, talk a little bit about those constituencies of who to sell with. We've got the operators, you've got the developers, you've got the C suite, I'm sure the answer is yes, but who you find yourself maybe, help walk us through some of those roles that you're talking to, some of the biggest concerns they're having and how you're helping them. >> So in most enterprises that we go and talk to we're typically talking to, initially operations, because they know that they need to be able to ride services to, Cloud services, and container services, to their customers internally, or within the business, and they're looking at okay how can we operate this, how can we secure it, how can we scale it, in smart ways, they're looking for our help and assistance doing that. Very soon after that we'll need to go and talk to developers, or engage line of business developers, primarily because we need to, this represents change to them, moving into a Cloud or, moving their applications to containers represents change, and we want to get them onboarded into this environment and to start to begin that change as quickly as possible. The Cloud, to succeed, it needs to have many running workloads on it, and so engaging with the developers, to take advantage of the capabilities the platform can provide is really important. We'd love to be able to go and talk to at that sea level, and we are starting to have more of those conversations, but I think the type of infrastructure, the OpenStack and container technologies provides, it's the initial interest is very much coming from those operators, from the architects, and from the developers. >> Well lets talk about operators for a minute, I mean, once upon a time there was a tribe of people called sisbits, they were kind of surly, and they took care of things like Linux, right, and now, out of that Linux framework, there's a huge set of technologies, that have grown all based on Linux, on all that Canonical works with, and there's a new set of skills required. Can you talk a little bit about what the new operator needs to know, and how you can help train people and Canonical help train people that you're assistant men working with Linux, what different things do I need to care about now in the Cloud management world, Cloud operator world? >> Yeah sure so, you're right, it used to be relatively simple, and you would run a VM or you'd run an application on top of bare metal and, there'd be certain things you'd need to be able to tweak to scale it and up the performance, but, we're running an, as we say, more agile infrastructure, so whether it's Cloud or containers or combinations of both, there are very many different variables, and how an application's able to take advantage of the storage or the capabilities that a platform provides, there's many different nobs and dials that you can turn. We tend to be advising right now, people on bringing in services such as CICD, Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment, so that they can start to adopt some of these newer ways of working. Operators now need to, they need to be much more aware of okay, what the workload characteristics are, and how that might behave on a hyper vise, or how it might behave within a containerized environment. I just came out of a conversation with a customer for example, who was asking detailed questions about storage performance, right? They have applications that require certain levels of storage performance and different types of storage that we can bring to bare, in conjunction with an OpenStack, which is going to be the appropriate one, and how do they segment them and so, it's definitely become more complex, but I think, through collaboration events like this, we're actually getting much better at being able to provide them with the information and the choices they need to make. >> Mark, speak to us a little bit about the community. OpenStack started heavy users in the community, contributed the community, how do you see that dynamic playing out today? >> Well there's still lots of contribution coming into OpenStack, and that's good to see. We are starting to see, as OpenStack has matured, as the market place has matured, some of the focus no longer being purely on contributing code, but now sharing experiences around operations, and that's starting to move into this area of people use this phrase, "Infrastructure as code", to be able to access infrastructure programmatically. I think we're seeing collaboration now in the OpenStack community and adjacent communities around collaborating on the operations, especially when those operations themselves are encapsulated in code. So, very simple thing, sounds simple, not necessarily easy to do but, being able to upgrade, update and place, how you would sort of suspend the system whilst you perform some maintenance and evacuating the workloads and bring them back in and those kinds of very common tasks for Cloud operators. We saw, even just a few years ago, how operators would each have their own way of doing it, their own preferred methods, and this was generally not so efficient so, collaborating on those and sharing best practices is one of the really interesting things to see within this community today. >> John: Sure, sure, I mean you, I think the evolution goes, everybody then starts to write scripts, which you all write scripts in your own way, and eventually you have to come up with a framework. And you all have developed a couple different frameworks in terms of installation and upgrades and things like that. >> Absolutely, and one of the things that once the customer start to understand that we've developed a framework around operations, those operations are encapsulated within code, and it means that if we have a customer, dodgy telecom, for example one of our customers that is understandably very security conscious, 'cause they run the telco network, has best practices around the security of their Cloud, and we're able, when they start to make recommendations or updates to that, we're able to take those and share them with a broad audience, and get that sort of collaborative spirit around what's the best way to be able to do this. >> So, you mentioned security there, any other kind of key pinpoints, what are you hearing out in the market place, is GDPR something that a lot of your customers are beaten on you and, what's the Canonical decision there? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, GDPR has been a real catalyst for people to look at areas for security that they probably meant to get round to at some point but never had, so. >> Some people said it's the Y2K of this generation >> Yes, exactly, definitely a forcing function. And so one of the areas we've seen a lot of activity around and solely we've committed resources to it within the last couple of months has been around encryption of data at rest. So, obviously in the Cloud, you're going to have a lot of data that's there with the relevant workloads, and some of that regulations in GDPR regulation is about what happens if somebody removes a disk from the server, does that mean that they have access to the data? As we start looking at things such as Edge Cloud, so very many Clouds close to the customer or close to the edge, which don't necessarily have the same data center infrastructure around them, how do we secure the data there, right? So, encryption of data, but doing it in a way that doesn't require to manually typed passwords in to be able to access them all of the time, is not a simple problem and, we've spent quite a few resources, working out how do we address that, how can we do it in a way that's going to allow it to be dealt with economically, and scalably. >> There's been a lot of talk about open infrastructure in general here at the show, and OpenStack obviously is designed to manage infrastructure, but we've already talked about containers here, with you in this segment, there's a lot of container news, Kubernetes news, OpenDev Summit going on at the same time, so how do you as a Product Manager, you can't just be worried about one part of the stack, how do you and your team worry about that integration and that unified platform and bring together these interactions will all these different OpenSource projects? >> Oh yes, for sure, and that's, it certainly is one of the things Canonical has been cognoscente on and focusing on, or working on for quite a long time is a Linux distribution at it's heart is really the integration of very many different components, from a kernel, and libraries, and pilots and all the various other pieces that go with that. So, understanding how these components plug together, whether it's OpenStack, with containers, and open V switch for the networking, and set for storage for example, that's very much part of what we've been doing. We're learning with customers as we go, very much, that how they want to plug these things together with Kubernetes, Kubernetes running alongside OpenStack, Kubernetes running on top of OpenStack, OpenStack even running on Kubernetes, some of them are looking at, so understanding how they, people want to be able to plug technologies together, and we'd standardized very much on sort of reference architectures of combination of OpenStack plus Kubernetes as a really simple example, but then as part of our QA process, testing process, all this reference architectures that we build with hardware partners and other partners too, is ensuring that we're able to deliver that as a stand-alone product as required, but also as effectively solutions together, that are fully integrated, fully supportable and they're going to deliver the capability that the customer needs. >> First of all, the OpenStack on top of Kubernetes, really? Is that something you'd recommend to customers or? Or is it a specific use case for that? >> It's not something that we recommend today. So, there's been certainly a lot of discussion in the OpenStack community around the control plane, and what's the best way to deliver the control plane. Canonical made a very strategic or specific choice several years ago that actually, containerizing the services is the right way to do this, so we containerized basically all of the control plane services apart from Neutron Gateway which would be a little tricky to do that but, so we containerized all of those services, and it gives us flexibility when we want to perform updates and migrate services between different systems, for example. How do you manage those containerized services though? There's lots of diversity of opinion. Some people want to be able to do that with Kubernetes, and that's great, then we certainly track those efforts and work with those people, if they're using a (mumbles) or some of our technologies, but I think, it's still yet to be decided, what's the best way to be able to do that. >> So you must, you have an interest in Java as a Product Manager, you always want to productize in general, standardize as much as possible, in the needs communities you have the diversity of opinions, oh I'll take this piece, I'll get rid of the core, I'll do something over here, I'll flip it upside down, how do you balance that, giving customers choice, but making sure you can deliver solid offerings that you can support? >> And so, that's very much it. It's a choice and we can say, look, we can deliver a robust, high performing Cloud, with these reference architectures, we've learned that through experience with customers, and working with our partners. We understand that customers all believe they're special and they all have their own special requirements, often with good valid reason, so, but we'll always try and start from a base, and then say let's start to iterate through that, adding in additional capabilities or, maybe tweaking something for your particular use case if you do that, and see how it impacts the Cloud. Because, for us to be successful, us, the OpenStack community to be successful, we need to ensure that those Clouds can live and breathe and evolve over time, and if they're making too many or too heavy customization of that Cloud, then it can start to impact their ability to do that. So, it's, we'll offer that choice. >> Speaking a little bit on the line of standardized services, I'm really intrigued by managed OpenStack, from Canonical. Can you talk a little about what customers it's right for, and when it comes into the conversation and then where in the lifecycle, 'cause I guess then it can also eventually go as as the control container back over to the customers when they don't, when they're finished with managed. >> Absolutely, so we started providing what we call boot stack, as fully managed OpenStack service, primarily to address the skills gap within the OpenStack community. So, we saw a lot of companies interested in deploying OpenStack, a lot of enterprises looking for OpenStack, but they couldn't find the talent, or the people with the experience of deploying a managing OverStack. Just, there weren't the people around, right? Hiring was hard. So, and that was becoming a blocker for us to be able to deliver Clouds to those customers, so we started to offer a managed service, we had a lot of the reference architectures and best practices pretty well nailed down, but it was a facilitator for them to get up and running with the Cloud and there's a point where they, that they became comfortable operating it, managing themselves, hand control back. We've seen, that is a very popular model, and that period where they're having us manage it, can be six months or 12 months or 18 months, but the customers know that they have the reassurance that they can take it back, control and house, they can operate it themselves, and they can manage their own environment, they become self sufficient, but they're not doing that from day one. We're holding their hand, and taking them along that path. So, that's been a very popular offer. >> Mark Baker, really appreciate you giving us an update on really the broad spectrum of customer use cases and all the updates from Canonical. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit 2018, in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)