>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>>Overnight 2020 forced us to get digital video, right? For the first 90 days, it was pretty awkward to say the least, but as people became more comfortable with home setups and lighting and just the weirdness of being locked down and shut in the frequency, the quality, and I think the watch ability of virtual conversations improved quite dramatically welcome to the cube. My name is Dave Vellante. And with me to talk about what we learned and can take away from producing video content during the isolation economy is event expert conference facilitator and MC extraordinary Sam Allen, Sam, come inside the cube. Welcome. >>Thank you so much for having me really lovely to be here with you. >>Pleasure. So I gotta ask you, you know, am I right? Do we actually have more watchable video online or now, or are we all sort of zoom fatigued out? >>I think if people watch the cube, I think you've got some incredible content online. You guys are the pros. I think we are still in this change format right now. Uh, we've got people who are doing it well, who started really early, tried failed, pick themselves back up, try it again, and are producing some really good pieces of content looking outside of perhaps the norm to create some great visual, some great conferences and events. I think on the whole, sadly, I think we still have a way to go, which is great for the likes of us in terms of helping those professionals become more professional and just trying to differentiate between what's just a zoom meeting. And actually what's an experience for communications for our audiences. >>I want to get into some of the best practice and maybe some of the do's and don'ts, but, but let's roll back a little bit. Tell us about yourself and how you got into this business. >>I'd love to say I've been a virtual event designer and MC moderator for years, but as we know, the world has turned itself on its head in the past 14, 15 months. Prior to that, I've been in the event and conference industry for about 20 years. Most recently, traveling the world, uh, onstage presenting moderating, hosting conferences, across various different industries from pharmaceuticals to finance, through to industry associations, telecoms, et cetera. Um, my world fell apart just about February 23rd, 2020, as many people did. I was excitingly booked to work with a lot of clients through Nova, uh, through to November, 2020. That didn't happen. And we have a couple of choices as an entrepreneur, uh, pick ourselves up or stay down on the ground. So I chose that first option. I studied online event design. I was a meeting and event designer already, but there are big nuances. When we work in the world of online, I've picked myself up, started studying online event design. I was fortunate. My clients trusted me. So we managed to pivot, uh, several of their events early on during the pandemic into the world of virtual. We've had some incredible feedback from our participants and we have gone from strength to strength. I now work with several other associate MCs experienced in this digital field, working with new and existing clients in terms of designing a better experience for those who are watching us on our screens. Now >>That's awesome. I love the reinvention story. I, Sam, I didn't know. You could take a class in this stuff. So tell me about that. And what was that like? >>I think one of the things when, you know, when we are in, and I'm sure many of our viewers today have said in the wonderful conference theaters and we'll be back in those rooms soon, uh, everything is done with experienced a V and technical and event producers and venue people. Whereas in the online world, I'm here, uh, in sunny London on my own, making sure that I have the right sound, the right connectivity, the rights, uh, visuals, all of these things are things that we just didn't have to do. And we have to do that for every single content contributors. So studying an online event design course back at the very beginning of lockdown really helped me understand the checklist that we need to have for our clients, the things that we need to assume. And most importantly, the things that can go wrong so that we can pick up on those as quickly as we can and try and create these seamless and engaging experiences for our audiences. So I would say to anyone, who's sort of looking into this and really don't know where to start. It's probably good to go and have a look at an online event design course. >>Thank you for that. So, so tell me what, what were some of the things as you look back on 2020, and you think about the work that you did with your clients and maybe even observing some, some of your non-clients, what were the, some of the, some of the mistakes that people made and we can get into some of the best practice. >>Well, as all good people who are being interviewed say, well, you're going to have to wait for my book to be published later on in the year with all the things that have gone wrong and all the ways we've rectified it. But I think one of the major things that we've we've had is obviously this world of distraction, we've all seen it with the cat lawyer. We've seen it with the kids coming in and we've humanized. I think the world of events, which I think is a really positive experience for us all, we are all humans and events are about bringing humans together, human connection. So I think there's a positive side to that, but equally by the same token, we we've seen people, maybe not really getting under the skin of, you know, what's the difference between a zoom meeting and an event experience in terms of what people have been wearing. >>Um, I've had an awkward conversation when we've taken a zoom background away from a speaker and you don't want to know what was hanging on the door. We also had a situation where we lost, um, we've, we've lost speakers and we've had to jump in due to connectivity issues that, you know, we've tested them, but then they've ended up broadcasting from somewhere else. So I think some of that seamless technology, and I would say to anyone, uh, to try and not suffer those challenges, I would say, test, test, rehearse, test, and rehearse again, and make sure you've got that team of people around you. I think a lot of people think that it's very easy to do this, Dave, as I know you and your team will know it is not a, you wouldn't just because I happen to like flying. You wouldn't want me to fly your aircraft. And I think there's the same analogy in terms of running your online event, um, and digital communication experiences. >>Oh, you think, I mean, I w I think we found it that running virtual events is, is harder because there's, first of all, there's so much unknown. You can't really call a late, late stage audible. I mean, things are locked in when you're doing a simulive. I presume you found the same thing and your clients have, have learned a lot in that regard. >>I think it's, um, a lot more work. I think there's a lot more work pre event. Pre-conference pre-meeting that, um, people are still trying to get their, their minds around when we hosted an event in person where you'll get there the day or two before during set-up, we then have a very, very long two, three, four days, depending on how long that event is, where we've got our speakers of the same room, they've all flown in. We know that they've arrived. We know they've checked into the hotel. What we don't have are any of those variables in this world. So we need to make sure that we're working with all of those content providers. And if like me, you work in the association world where you can have up to 90 or a hundred different speakers over a course of a Congress, we've got to fit in the time to make sure that we've tech checked. >>We've worked with panels so that we can make sure that they're dynamic and we've got people looking as well as sounding good. So I think one of those things is that is exceptionally, uh, huge amounts of pre-planning that people need to factor in. I think the second thing is people need to not underestimate how exhausting it is when you don't have the vibe of a live audience. Uh, especially as they'd be considerate of your keynote speakers, especially if they're not professionals, they haven't been doing this. They're not comfortable with a green light. It is tiring, um, trying to visualize 1,004 and a half thousand 25 people, one person in the same room as you would be quite nice. And we haven't had that for the past 12 months. So I think we've learned a lot from that. And we've got some good tips and tricks now that we can, we can use, but, um, I'm pretty sure a lot of our content providers and speakers are looking forward to seeing people back in a really, yeah, fantastic. Well, >>That brings me to my next question. Let's make this the last one, just as we begin to get a little bit more comfortable with, with virtual now we're getting vaccinated. People are, there's huge up demand for face to face. So now we have this new thing of hybrid, uh, which is going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. What are you seeing? What's your expectation for that sort of new abnormal? >>That's an incredibly good question. And we have to start with the new C word is the H word, which is hybrid. I think we have a lot of people getting worried about what hybrid looks like, but I think if, if you think with a design thinking mind, when you're looking at event planning, the virtual or the in-person audience adjust another stakeholder. So if you're spending that time to plan out your meeting or event, the way you should be, then you can factor those people in. I am excited about this world. I think it becomes so much more inclusive for organizations moving forward. And DNI is something that has often been forgotten in the world of conferences and events. And I think the hybrid role gives us all the opportunity to, to have that choice. I think people especially event organizers because it's their job believe that everybody wants to be in a room and not everybody does and not everybody can. And now this is a really, really exciting opportunity to do things differently, to do things, to become more inclusive. And of course, to be more sustainable. >>Sam, you're really an inspiration. I mean, a lot of people out there have to reinvent themselves. You've, you've done it. You retrained you, you started a new type of business that drew on your existing passion, but it's really fantastic to have you on. Thanks for sharing your expertise best of luck in the future. It's great having you. >>Thanks, Dave. >>All right. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>live from Stanford University. It's the queue covering Stanford women in Data Science 2020. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're live at Stanford University, covering the fifth annual Woods Women in Data Science conference. Joining us today is Tilapia Williams, who's the associate professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and host of Nova Wonders at PBS to leave a welcome to the Cappy to be here. Thanks for having me. So you have a lot of rules. So let's first tell us about being an associate professor at Harvey Mudd. >>Yeah, I've been at Harvey Mudd now for 11 years, so it's been really a lot of fun in the math department, but I'm a statistician by training, so I teach a lot of courses and statistics and data science and things like that. >>Very cool. And you're also a host of API s show called Novo Wonders. >>Yeah, that came about a couple of years ago. Folks at PBS reached out they had seen my Ted talk, and they said, Hey, it looks like you could be fund host of this science documentary shows So, Nova Wonders, is a six episode Siri's. It kind of takes viewers on a journey of what the cutting edge questions and science are. Um, so I got to host the show with a couple other co host and really think about like, you know, what are what are the animals saying? And so we've got some really fun episodes to do. What's the universe made of? Was one of them what's living inside of us. That was definitely a gross win. Todo figure out all the different micro organisms that live inside our body. So, yeah, it's been funded in hopes that show as well. >>And you talk about data science and AI and all that stuff on >>Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, one of the episodes. Can we build a Brain was dealt with a lot of data, big data and artificial intelligence, and you know, how good can we get? How good can computers get and really sort of compared to what we see in the movies? We're a long way away from that, but it seems like you know we're getting better every year, building technology that is truly intelligent, >>and you gave a talk today about mining for your own personal data. So give us some highlights from your talk. Yeah, >>so that talks sort of stemmed out of the Ted talk that I gave on owning your body's data. And it's really challenging people to think about how they can use data that they collect about their bodies to help make better health decisions on DSO ways that you can use, like your temperature data or your heart rate. Dina. Or what is data say over time? What does it say about your body's health and really challenging the audience to get excited about looking at that data? We have so many devices that collect data automatically for us, and often we don't pause on enough to actually look at that historical data. And so that was what the talk was about today, like, here's what you can find when you actually sit down and look at that data. >>What's the most important data you think people should be collecting about themselves? >>Well, definitely not. Your weight is. I don't >>want to know what that >>is. Um, it depends, you know, I think for women who are in the fertile years of life taking your daily waking temperature can tell you when your body's fertile. When you're ovulating, it can. So that information could give women during that time period really critical information. But in general, I think it's just a matter of being aware of of how your body is changing. So for some people, maybe it's your blood pressure or your blood sugar. You have high blood pressure or high blood sugar. Those things become really critical to keep an eye on. And, um, and I really encourage people whatever data they take, too, the active in the understanding of an interpretation of the data. It's not like if you take this data, you'll be healthy radio. You live to 100. It's really a matter of challenging people to own the data that they have and get excited about understanding the data that they are taking. So >>absolutely put putting people in charge of their >>own bodies. That's >>right. >>And actually speaking about that in your Ted talk, you mentioned how you were. Your doctor told you to have a C section and you looked at the data and he said, No, I'm gonna have this baby naturally. So tell us more about that. >>Yes, you should always listen to your medical pressures. But in this case, I will say that it was It was definitely more of a dialogue. And so I wasn't just sort of trying to lean on the fact that, like, I have a PhD in statistics and I know data, he was really kind of objectively with the on call doctor at the time, looking at the data >>and talking about it. >>And this doctor was this is his first time seeing me. And so I think it would have been different had my personal midwife or my doctor been telling me that. But this person would have only looked at this one chart and was it was making a decision without thinking about my historical data. And so I tried to bring that to the conversation and say, like, let me tell you more about you know, my body and this is pregnancy number three like, here's how my body works. And I think this person in particular just wasn't really hearing any of that. It was like, Here's my advice. We just need to do this. I'm like, >>Oh, >>you know, and so is gently as possible. I tried to really share that data. Um, and then it got to the point where it was sort of like either you're gonna do what I say or you're gonna have to sign a waiver. And we were like, Well, to sign the waiver that cost quite a buzz in the hospital that day. But we came back and had a very successful labor and delivery. And so, yeah, >>I think >>that at the time, >>But, >>you know, with that caveat that you should listen to what, your doctors >>Yeah. I mean, there's really interesting, like, what's the boundary between, Like what the numbers tell you and what professional >>tells me Because I don't have an MD. Right. And so, you know, I'm cautious not to overstep that, but I felt like in that case, the doctor wasn't really even considering the data that I was bringing. Um, I was we were actually induced with our first son, but again, that was more of a conversation, more of a dialogue. Here's what's happening here is what we're concerned about and the data to really back it up. And so I felt like in that case, like Yeah, I'm happy to go with your suggestion, but I could number three. It was just like, No, this isn't really >>great. Um, so you also wrote a book called Power In Numbers. The Rebel Women of Mathematics. So what inspired you to write this book? And what do you hope readers take away from it? >>A couple different things. I remember when I saw the movie hidden figures. And, um, I spent three summers at NASA working at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And so I had this very fun connection toe, you know, having worked at NASA. And, um, when this movie came out and I'm sitting there watching it and I'm, like ball in just crying, like I didn't know that there were black women who worked at NASA like, before me, you know, um and so it felt it felt it was just so transformative for me to see these stories just sort of unfold. And I thought, like, Well, why didn't I learn about these women growing up? Like imagine, Had I known about Katherine Johnsons of the world? Maybe that would have really inspired Not just me, but, you know, thinking of all the women of color who aren't in mathematics or who don't see themselves working at at NASA. And so for me, the book was really a way to leave that legacy to the generation that's coming up and say, like, there have been women who've done mathematics, um, and statistics and data science for years, and they're women who are doing it now. So a lot of the about 1/3 of the book are women who were still here and, like, active in the field and doing great things. And so I really wanted to highlight sort of where we've been, where we've been, but also where we're going and the amazing women that are doing work in it. And it's very visual. So some things like, Oh my gosh, >>women in math >>It is really like a very picturesque book of showing this beautiful images of the women and their mathematics and their work. And yes, I'm really proud of it. >>That's awesome. And even though there is like greater diversity now in the tech industry, there's still very few African American women, especially who are part of this industry. So what advice would you give to those women who who feel like they don't belong. >>Yeah, well, a they really do belong. Um, and I think it's also incumbent of people in the industry to sort of recognize ways that they could be advocate for women, and especially for women of color, because often it takes someone who's already at the table to invite other people to the table. And I can't just walk up like move over, get out the way I'm here now. But really being thoughtful about who's not representative, how do we get those voices here? And so I think the onus is often mawr on. People who occupy those spaces are ready to think about how they can be more intentional in bringing diversity in other spaces >>and going back to your talk a little bit. Um uh, how how should people use their data? >>Yeah, so I mean, I think, um, the ways that we've used our data, um, have been to change our lifestyle practices. And so, for example, when I first got a Fitbit, um, it wasn't really that I was like, Oh, I have a goal. It was just like I want something to keep track of my steps And then I look at him and I feel like, Oh, gosh, I didn't even do anything today. And so I think having sort of even that baseline data gave me a place to say, Okay, let me see if I hit 10 stuff, you know, 10,000 >>steps in a day or >>and so, in some ways, having the data allows you to set goals. Some people come in knowing, like, I've got this goal. I want to hit it. But for me, it was just sort of like, um and so I think that's also how I've started to use additional data. So when I take my heart rate data or my pulse, I'm really trying to see if I can get lower than how it was before. So the push is really like, how is my exercise and my diet changing so that I can bring my resting heart rate down? And so having the data gives me a gold up, restore it, and it also gives me that historical information to see like, Oh, this is how far I've come. Like I can't stop there, you know, >>that's a great social impact. >>That's right. Yeah, absolutely. >>and, um, Do you think that so in terms of, like, a security and privacy point of view, like if you're recording all your personal data on these devices, how do you navigate that? >>Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, because you are giving up that data privacy. Um, I usually make sure that the data that I'm allowing access to this sort of data that I wouldn't care if it got published on the cover of you know, the New York Times. Maybe I wouldn't want everyone to see what my weight is, but, um, and so in some ways, while it is my personal data, there's something that's a bit abstract from it. Like it could be anyone's data as opposed to, say, my DNA. Like I'm not going to do a DNA test. You know, I don't want my data to be mapped it out there for the world. Um, but I think that that's increasingly become a concern because people are giving access to of their information to different companies. It's not clear how companies would use that information, so if they're using my data to build a product will make a product better. You know we don't see any world from that way. We don't have the benefit of it, but they have access to our data. And so I think in terms of data, privacy and data ethics, there's a huge conversation to have around that. We're only kind >>of at the beginning of understanding what that is. Yeah, >>well, thank you so much for being on the Cube. Really having you here. Thank you. Thanks. So I'm Sonia to Gary. Thanks so much for watching the cube and stay tuned for more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>From New York city. It's the cube covering. Welcome to the new edge brought to you by systems. >>Okay, we'll come back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in downtown Manhattan at the top of Goldman Sachs, like 43 stories above the Hudson. It was a really beautiful view a couple hours ago, but the cloud has moved in and that's only appropriate cause it's cloud is a big theme of why we're here today. We're here for the Penn Zando event. It's called welcome to the new edge. They just come out of stealth mode after two and a half years, almost three years, raised a ton of money, got a really rockstar team and we're excited to have the CEO with us today to tell us a little bit about more what's going on. And that's prem Jane and again, the CEO of Penn Sandow prem. Great to see you. Nice to see you too. So everything we did running up to this event before we could get any of the news, we, we, we tried to figure out what was going on and all it kept coming up was NPLS, NPLS, NPLS, which I thought was a technology, which it is, but it's really about the team. Tell us a little bit about the team in which you guys have built prior and, and why you're such a, a well functioning and kind of forward thinking group of people. >>So I think the team is working together. Mario Luca, myself and Sony were working together since 1983 except for Sony. Sony joined us after the first company, which has crescendo, got acquired by Cisco in 1993 and since then four of us are working together. Uh, we have done many, uh, spinnings inside the Cisco and demo was the first one. Then we did, uh, uh, Nova systems, which was the second, then we did recently in CMA. Uh, and then after we left we thought we are going to retire, but we talked about it and we says, you know, there is still transitions happening in the industry and maybe we have few more years to go back to the, you know, industry and, and do something which is very challenging and, and uh, impacting. I think everything which we have done in the past is to create a impact in the industry and make that transition which is occurring very successful, >>which is really hard to do. And, and John Chambers who, who's on the board and spoke earlier today, you know, kind of talked about these 10 year cycles of significant change in our industry and you know, Clayton Christianson innovator's dilemma, it's really easy when you are successful at one of those to kind of sit on your laurels. In fact, it's really, really hard to kill yourself and go on to the next thing you guys have done this time and time and time again. Is there a unique chemistry in the way you guys look forward or you just, you just get bored with what you built and you want to build something new. I mean, what is some of the magic, because even John said, as soon as he heard that you were the team behind it, he was like, sign me up. I don't know what they're building but I don't really care cause I know these people can deliver. >>I think it's very good the, whenever you look at any startup, the most important thing which comes up as the team and you're seeing a lot of startup fails because the team didn't work together or they got their egos into this one. Since we are working for so long, they compliment each other. That's the one thing which is very important. Mario, Luca, myself, they come from engineering backgrounds. Sony comes from marketing, sales, uh, type of background and we all lady in terms of the brain, if you think about is the Mario behind the scene, Luca is really the execution machine and I'm, you can think like as a heart, okay. Putting this thing together. Uh, as a team, we work very complimentary with each other. It does not mean that we agree on everything, right? We disagree. We argue. We basically challenge each other. But one thing good about this particular team is that once we come to a conclusion, we just focus and execute. And team is also known to work with customers all the time. I mean, even when we started Penn Sando, we talked to many customers in the very beginning. They shape up our ideas, they shape up the directions, which is we are going and what transitions are occurring in the industries and all that. That's another thing which is we take customer very seriously in our thought process of building a product. >>So when you were thinking around sitting around the table, deciding whether you guys wanted to do it again, what were the challenges that you saw? What was the kind of the feedback loop that came in that, that started this? The, uh, the gym of the idea >>thing is also is that, uh, we had, we had developed so many different products as you saw today in the launch, eight or nine, uh, billion dollar product line and stuff like that. So we all have a very good system experience what is really needed, what transitions are occurring and stuff like that. When we started this one, we were not really sure what we wanted to do it, but in the last one when we did the, uh, NCMA, we realize that the enterprise thing, which we deliver the ACI solution for the enterprise, the realize that these services was the most complex way of incorporating into that particular architectures. So right from the beginning of interview realized that the, this particular thing is nobody has touched it, nobody thought about it out of the box thinking that how can you make it into a distributed fashion, which has also realized that cloud is going, everything distributed. >>They got away from the centralized appliances. So as the enterprise is now thinking of doing it cloud-like architectures and stuff like that. And the third thing which was really triggered us also, there was a company which is a new Poona which got acquired by Amazon in 2016 and we were looking at it what kinds of things they are doing and we said we can do much better architecturally and next generation, uh, architecture, which can really enable all the other cloud vendors. Some of them are our partners to make sure they can leverage that particular technologies and build the next generation cloud. And that's where this idea of new edge came in because we also saw that the new applications like IOT is five G's and artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics or drones, you just name it intelligent devices, which is going to get connected. What is the best place to process them is at the edge or also at the backend with the application where the server is running these and that is another edge compute edge, right? >>In that particular sense. So our idea was to develop a product so that it can cover wide segment of the market, enterprise cloud providers, service borders, but focus very narrowly delivering these services into existing architectures. Also people who are building, building the next generation architectures. Right, so it's the distributed services platform or the distributed services architecture. So at its core for people that didn't make it today, what is it? It's basically is a distributed service platforms. The foundation of that is really our custom processor, which is we have designed is highly programmable. It's software defined so that all the protocols, which is typically people hardwired in our case is programmable. It's all programs which is we are writing the language which you selected as before and before extensions. The software stack is the major differentiated thing which is running on the top of this particular processor, which is we have designed in such a way that is hardware agnostics. >>The the, the capabilities which we have built is easily integrated into the existing environment. So if people already have cloud and they want to leverage our technologies, they can really deploy it in the enterprise. We are basically replacing lot of appliances, simplifying the architectures, making sure they can enable the service as they grow model, which is really amazing because right now they had to say firewall goes here, load balancer goes here, these a VPN devices goes there. In our case it's very simple. You put in every server of our technologies and our software stack and our Venice, which is our policy manager, which is sitting outside and it's based upon Kubernete X a architectures is basically a microservices, which is we are running and managing the life cycle of this particular product family and also providing the visibility and uh, uh, accountability in terms of exactly what is going on in that particular network. >>And it's all driven by intent-based architecture, which is policy driven, right? So software defined sitting on software defined Silicon. So you get the benefits of the Silicon, but it's also programmable Silicon, but it's still, you're sitting, you've got a software stack on top of that that manages that cloud and then the form factors as small as a Nick. Yes. So he can stick it in the HP HP server. Yeah. It specifically goes into any PCI slot in any server, uh, in the industry. Yes. It's amazing. Well, first incarnation, but, but, but, but, but that's a really simple implementation, right? Just to get radiation and easy to deploy. Right. And you guys are, you're yourself where involved in security that's involved in managing the storage. It's simple low power, which I thought was a pretty interesting attribute that you defined early on. Clearly thinking about edge and these distributed, uh, things all over the place. >>They're metal programmable. And then the other thing that was talked about a lot today was the observability. Yes. Um, why observability why was that so important? What were you hearing from customers that were really leading you down that path? Yeah, it's important. Uh, you know, surprisingly enough, uh, the visibility is one of the biggest challenge. Most of the data center faces today. A lot of people tried to do multiple different things, but they're never able to do it, uh, in, in the way we are doing it. One is that we don't run anything on the host. Some people have done it right on the train running the agent on the host. Some people have tried to run virtual machines on the those particular environment. In our case there's nothing which is running on the host site. It runs on our card and having end to end that visibility we can provide latency, very accurate latency to the, to the applications which is very important for these customers. >>Also, what is really going on there is the problem in the network. Isolation is another big thing. When something get lost they don't know where it got lost. We can provide that thing. Another important thing that you're doing, which is not being done in the industries. Everything which is we are doing is flow based means if I'm talking to you, there is a flow being set up between you and me and we are monitoring every flow and one of the advantages of our processor is we have four to eight gigabytes of memory, so we can keep these States, have these flows inside, and that gives a tremendous advantage for us to do lots of things, which as you can imagine going forward, we will be delivering it such as, for example, behavior of these flows and things from this point of view, once you understand the behavior of the flow, you can also provide lot of security features because if I'm not talking to you and suddenly I start talking to you and I know that there's something went wrong, right, right. >>And they should be able to look at the behavior analysis and should be able to tell exactly what's going on. You mean we want a real time snapshot of what's really happening instead of a instead of a sample of something that happened a little. No, absolutely. You're absolutely connected. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's terrific. So you put together to accompany and you immediately went out and talked to a whole bunch of customers. I was amazed at the number of customers and partners that you had here at the launch. Um, was that for validation? Were you testing hypotheses or, or were there some things that the customers were telling you about that maybe you weren't aware of or maybe didn't get the right priority? I think it's all of the above. What you mentioned our, it's in our DNA by the way. You know, we don't design products, we don't design things without talking to customers. >>Validation is very important that we are on the right track because you may try to solve the customer problem, which is not today's problem. Maybe future's problem. Our idea was that then you can develop the product it was set on the shelf. We don't want to do that. We wanted to make sure that, that this is the hard problem customer is facing today. At the same time looking at it, what futuristic in their architecture is understanding the customers, how, what are they doing today, how they're deploying it. The use cases are understanding those very well and making sure that we are designing. Because when we design a seeker, when your designer processor, you know, you cannot design for one year, it has to be a longterm, right? And you need to make sure that we understand the current problems, we understand the future problems and design that in pretty much your spark and you've been in this space forever. >>You're at Cisco before. And so just love to get your take on exponential growth. You know, such an interesting concept that people have a really hard time grasping exponential growth and we're seeing it clearly with data and data flows and ultimately everything's got to go through the network. I mean, when you, when you think back with a little bit of perspective at the incredible increase in the data flow and the amount of data is being stored and the distribution of these, um, applications now out to the edge and store and compute and take action at the edge, you know, what do you think about, how do you, how do you kind of stay on top of that as somebody who kind of sees the feature relatively effectively, how do you try to stay on top of exponential curves? As you know, very valuable data is very important for anybody in any business. >>Whether it's financial, whether it's healthcare, whether it's, and it's becoming even more and more important because of machine learning, artificial intelligence, which is coming in to really process this particular data and predict certain things which is going to happen, right? We wanted to be close to the data and the closest place to be data is where the application is running. That's one place clears closest to the data at the edge is where data is coming in from the IOT devices, from the 5g devices, from the, you know, you know all kinds of appliances which is being classified under IOT devices. We wanted to be, make sure that we are close to the data, doesn't matter where you deploy and we want to be agnostic. Actually our technologies and architectures designed that this boundary is between North, South, East, West is going to go away in future cloud. >>A lot of things which is being done in the backend will be become at the edge like we talked about before. So we are really a journey which is just starting in this particular detectors and you're going to see a lot more innovations coming from us continuously in this particular directions. And again, based upon the feedback which you're going to get from cloud customers with enterprise customers, but they were partners and other system ecosystem partners, which is going to give us a lot of feedback. Great. Well again, thanks for uh, for having us out and congratulations to uh, to you and the team. It must be really fun to pull the covers off. absolutely. It is very historical day for us. This is something we were waiting for two years and nine months to see this particular date, to have our customers come on the stage and talk about our technologies and why they think it's very important. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk to you. Thank you. Alright, thanks prem. Thanks. He's prem. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube where it depends. Sandow launch at the top of Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in Downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine: A Better World, A Global Education Conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington, at the AWS, I think it's called the Meeting Space. There's a lot of AWS buildings around here. It's AWS Imagine: Education, first year of the conference, about 900 registered folks, 22 countries represented. Really excited, this thing is going to grow. We've seen it before with AWS. We saw it with Summit: Reinvent. AWS Public Sector. We're excited to be here for the very first time and our next guest is Dr. Scott Ralls. He is the President of Northern Virginia Community College. Scott, great to see you. >> Thank you, it's good to be here Jeff, appreciate it. >> A lot of mentions of NOVA, and that's you guys. >> That's us, yeah. >> That's not the PBS programming. You guys are kind of out front on some of these initiatives, with 3sa and AWS Public Sector. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the Veterans' Apprenticeship Program, which has been in place for a little while. >> Just a little bit about NOVA, we're a community college just right outside of the Virginia suburbs of D.C. We're the, I'd say, the biggest college that nobody's heard of outside of our region. We have about 100,000 students. >> 100,000? >> 100,000. >> And how many campuses? >> Six campuses. >> For us, our niche is information technology. It's where the internet runs through our region, and so that cloud computing, we have the highest concentration of cloud computing cyber degrees. That's why the AWS partnership is so key for us, because it's about the opportunity for our students. And for AWS, it's about filling those jobs. Also, we have a lot of employers in our region that hire based on AWS credentials. AWS is the backbone for them. That's why for us as a community college, being jobs-focused, filling that gap, that's why it's key for us. >> That's Tyson's corner, right? That's where AOL started-- >> That's right, that's right, that's right. >> and there's a whole history. >> You've got all the cyber right around there. One writer has said that we're the bullseye of the internet. It's a unique place, but it's a unique opportunity for our students. >> Right, and the smart money's on the AWS second headquarter being in that neighborhood, but we don't-- >> Knock on wood. >> Knock on wood. We would love to see that. >> I'm just curious then if you've been educating people to get jobs in this IT sector, how you've seen that evolve over time? Because it used to be there were a lot of sys admin jobs or a lot of jobs that now automation and cloud is taking away. On the other hand, there's a lot of new jobs that the technology's enabling, like happens every time. How are you seeing the landscape change? >> I really think that's the way it has been. 30 years ago, when I was breaking into this workforce and world, that same conversation was going on. Automation was going to take all the jobs. There's been all kinds of new opportunities that emerge and that's the same thing we see, and certainly in Northern Virginia we see that so, for us, as a community college, we're doing it two ways. You asked about the apprenticeship program, that was our first entree with AWS so we are one of their primary training providers, education providers for apprenticeship. Those are the veterans and others that are hired by AWS, they come to our college for the education component, the certifications, the IT skills. The second part for us is the new cloud degree which we introduced in February, which is a two-year, first cloud degree in the country that will help other students who are not those coming through apprenticeship to also break into this important area. >> This is an associate's degree like all the other degrees you guys offer >> That's right. as a two-year program. I'd be just curious, what are some of the curricula? What are some of the core classes that they take that are part of that degree? >> One of the things that we've been doing, we use a lot of data analytics on the workforce side that others do not so part of it's our engagement, talking with the AWS leaders about what's needed. Part of it's also watching what AW, what credentials, what skills AWS is hiring for and then others who use the AWS platform, so you will see certain types of credentials that are built in, security plus, Linux plus, AWS Solutions Architect built in. Also even programming language, it's like Python because of its importance in that regard. We kind of use that as the, using that intelligence, if you will, to be able to build out what the degree should look like. Because we're paying attention to how AWS hires and how the IT users of AWS, how they're hiring and what the skills are that they're looking for. >> How hard is it to get that through at the school, to actually have an associate degree based on cloud? Were they receptive of the idea, did everybody see it coming, was it a hard push? >> We did it within one year, we did it within one year. >> Did it in one year? >> Within one year. >> Everything in the cloud happens fast. >> We moved fast on this. It is built off of our IT degree, so it's a specialization of that degree, so it was really, I think what made it move faster for us was two things. One is AWS has a great program called AWS Educate, which essentially provides a lot of the curriculum content. It's the kind of things if you were starting a degree, you would have to go out and create on your own. Having that rich content. Other partners, like Columbus State, who is also, Santa Monica, others that are working on cloud degrees and we can partner with each other. Then having the apprenticeship as sort of a North Star to tack on with respect to how companies are hiring and what skills are needed. That allowed us to move fast. >> Beyond Educate and the actual materials and curriculum materials, what does partnering with AWS do for you guys? What has that enabled you to do as part of this program that you couldn't do or it'd be a whole lot harder? >> Not everybody looks at community colleges. Being partnered with AWS, who they are, is key for us, it's important for us. I think it's also they recognize how important it is for them. Not everybody recognizes that. One thing that's unique for us as a community college, we have a lot of students who come to us who already have four-year degrees to get that skills part. It's almost like a graduate school. The apprentices are that way. Most of the apprentices already have four-year degrees in computer science, and we're providing that finishing piece. I think AWS sees in us how to broaden the, to scale, to fill that talent gap. I really think the only way you're going to diversify the talent gap and scale the talent gap is through institutions like ours. >> It's really an interesting statement on the role of community colleges in this whole refactoring of education. One, as you said, a lot of people have four-year degrees, so this concept of ongoing education, continue to get new skills as the opportunities dictate. Have that very specific knowledge and these certifications that are not Intro Philosophy or English Lit 205. These are very specific things that people can apply to their job today. >> The curriculum changes so fast, so we have to be willing to change, our instructors have to be willing to get that new thing. The history curriculum doesn't change that quickly, but the IT curriculum and particularly as it relates to cloud and cyber and other areas. If we're not doing that, then we're out of the ballgame, and when we're out of the ballgame that means our students are out of the ballgame, and that's what it's all about. >> When you come to an event like this, what are you hoping to get out of an event like this? Flew across the country, unfortunately through all the terrible smoke and stuff we have on the west coast. What are some of the things you hope to gain here with some of the other educators? >> One thing that always happens at AWS events is the connections that you make. Part of it is you do hear people, like we heard this morning, that you wouldn't have the opportunity to hear before, on machine learning and other areas. A lot of it's about the connections, so actually tomorrow morning a lot of the community colleges and others who are creating cloud programs will be working together tomorrow. AWS does a great job of maximizing our time, so we're part of the program, but we're also breaking off to really partner and that allows us all to move quicker. When we can build off of each other and then have the resources like AWS makes available to us. >> Sounds like you're moving pretty quick-- >> We're trying, we're trying. >> To get all that done and to get it done in a year. >> We have to keep up with where they're going. >> It's not what academic institutions are generally known for, speed and change. >> We're not your average academic institution. >> There ya go, alright. He's Dr. Scott Ralls,-- >> Thank you, 'preciate it. thanks for taking a few minutes with ya. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS public sector, Imagine, in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching, catch ya next time. (electronic tones)

(electronic music) >> Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. It's like re:Invent but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Quah, who's the head of education, nonprofits, and healthcare in Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. >> You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here, and people use the word GovCloud, and Teresa and I always kind of jokingly say, "No, it's bigger than GovCloud. It's global public sector." You bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Public sector, okay. Outside of China, which is a different division with Amazon, you got the whole world. So Teresa and the team are looking not just at the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How's that working? Give us an update. >> I think one of the key differences that we see is that the US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We had great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia, they're beginning to pick up their pace. And it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Teresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education, as well as some of the that they're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot, but really education has been a real growth area, from interest with cloud. Because old IT (laughs) okay, you look at that, okay, there's never had a lot of IT guys. (Vincent laughs) But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. >> Right. >> Talk about the AWS Educate program. >> So the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS, it comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as Cloud Credits, where individual student members, or the educator's members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now, this is really game-changing for students and for the institution. And it's game-changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises and now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine, if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services, and bringing out to the market. So now, innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. >> I love that, Vincent. I think back, most of my career, when you talked about education, you talked about research and universities. So it was a certain top-tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples, or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right. So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. >> What's NOVA again? >> The Northern Virginia Community College. >> In the keynote yesterday, not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. >> Northern Virginia, got it, sorry. >> So, there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills and graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, more about Internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and re-skilling. Educate sits so nicely to this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is, in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. It was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location, with probably close to 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups, and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV, that they can actually submit to companies. And on the fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event, and we got the students to actually connect with the companies, and the companies to the students, so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days, that they can apply to jobs that these company are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working. Connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. >> Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. You have a unique perspective in your job. What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia, Pacific, and Japan? >> Sure. There'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is, we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level. But then, last re:Invent is now being extended to 14 years and above. So now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. One very specific example that I can share with you. There is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Unions Congress LearningHub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content, and they develop two courses. Fundamentals in Cloud Computing and Fundamentals in IoT. They bring this pilot courses for the Fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. They were so excited about what they have learned. How to program, actually, I have with me, an Internet of Things button. Now they can actually come up with an idea, program an activity on this button, so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old. They have the domain expertise, now they need is just an idea and a platform. >> It's also entrepreneurial too. >> Absolutely. >> They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age, and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. >> Correct. >> Or, someone who's retraining, to get a new job. >> Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big. But actually, innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. >> All right. So Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? >> What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually, they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or if you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these courses that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it. And help them have a much better sense of idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure. And we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. >> Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. How many people are out there's a growing, you're hiring. What are some of the priorities you guys have. They have a big event in Singapore, I know that. We've been watching it, thinking about bringing theCUBE there. Give us some idea of the growth around the AWS people. What's the head count look like, give us some estimations. John, you know I can't really talk too much about head count, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS head count very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous, and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. We are a customer-obsessed company, and so we want to be there with the customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have. And help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler. We empower the customer to make. >> You have events out there too, right? You have the re:Invent, Summit? >> We have the AWS Summit, and this coming October we have the Public Sector Summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. >> Right. >> And there's an education event coming domestically, too. >> And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. >> Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vincent. Really appreciate it. We're here live in Washington, DC. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got Dave Vellante here as well, coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic 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 to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. And happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Mark Collier, who's the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me back. >> Thank you for having us back and thank you again for doing the show in Vancouver, so-- >> Oh man, such an amazing place. Like this convention center, I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center because it's like a work of art, you know? >> And it's my second time here for this show, and I think kudos to your team because you have good enough content that people aren't just wandering around, taking pictures of the mountains. My wife is off seizing the whale watching right now, but everybody else here, they're engaged. And that's what you want in the community. >> Yeah, definitely. I guess you have to make sure you don't lose their attention to the whales and the sea planes, but so far everyone seems to be gettin' down to business. >> You know, I think it would be fair to say that there's some transitions going on in the marketplace in general, and at this show I notice when I got the invitation, it's like the OpenStack slash open infrastructure summit. Got a big track on edge computing, got another one on containers, been talking about containers for a few years at this show, which really interesting to talk about. And I mean, the edge stuff, we were talking about it as NFV and the telcos and all that stuff in the past. What is the OpenStack Summit these days, Mark? >> Yeah, I mean I think that it's evolving to reflect what people are doing with open source when it comes to infrastructure. And so we call it open infrastructure, but basically it's just a world of possibilities have been opened up by, of course, OpenStack, but also many, many other components, some of which came before like Linux and things like that, and some of which started after, like Kubernetes, and there's many other examples, TensorFlow for AI machine learning. So there's kind of this like embarrassment of riches these days if yo want to automate your infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. You can do so many more things with it, and OpenStack solves a very specific, very important layer which is that kind of traditional infrastructure as a service layer, compute storage and networking. But once you automate that, it's proven, it's reliable, you could run millions of cores with it like some of our users are doing. You want to do more and that means layering other things on top or sort of connecting them in different ways. So just trying to help users get something more out of the technology is really what we're about and OpenStack becomes like an enabler rather than kind of like the whole conversation. Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry, sometimes we just don't have the right expectations going into these environments. You know, when I think back 15 years ago as to what we thought Linux was going to do. Oh it's going to crush Microsoft. It's like, well, Microsoft is still doing quite well and Linux has done phenomenal. We wouldn't have companies like, Google if it wasn't for the likes of Linux. In an open source you've got a lot of tools out there. So while there are the CERNs and Walmarts of the world that take a full OpenStack distribution and put out tons of cores, I've run into software companies where when I dig into their IP, oh what do ya know, there's a project from OpenStack in there that enables what they're doing. So I've seen at a lot of shows they're like, there's companies that are like, yes, I want it, and then there's like, oh no, there's this piece of it I want, there's that piece what I want. And that's kind of the wonder of OpenStack that I can do all of those things. >> Yeah exactly. I think we've talked before about sort of calling it composable open infrastructure, and making, OpenStack's always been architecturally designed from, in terms of the goals around it, to be pluggable so from the beginning you could plug multiple hypervisors kind of underneath and you could plug different backends for storage and networking, so that sort of concept of being something, integration engine that plugs things in is part of the OpenStack kind of philosophy, but now you see that the OpenStack services themselves are sort of, you can think of them as microservices, and like if you just need block storage you can use sender. And that may make sense for some specific environments, and are you running OpenStack? Well, you are, but it gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of are you running all of it or part of it? And the reality is the things are not as simple as a binary yes or no. It's just that the options are much greater now. >> Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion in the community over the last few years, the core versus the big tent, and now of course with all this interoperability, conversations with both OpenStack participating in other communities and other communities here today, this week. I mean, what's the current state of that conversation about what is OpenStack and how does it interrelate? I think you kind of touched on it with this composable idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think that basically it's kind of like OpenStack is as OpenStack does, you know? So what are people doing with it and that tells you kind of what it is and what people are doing with it. There are a lot of different patterns. There's no like one specific deployment pattern that everyone uses, but probably by and large, by far the most common pattern is OpenStack plus Kubernetes. And so when you talk about the interop piece, this is a really good example where OpenStack has evolved to become a better, kind of better citizen, I guess, of open infrastructure by having more reliable APIs, kind of being a target that tools that build on top can rely on and not sort of have to worry about the snowflakes of different clouds and there's still more work to be done in that area, but we talked about OpenLab, which is an initiative, this morning, that puts together OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other pieces like Terraform and things like that, and does constant end-to-end testing on it, and that's really how you make sure that you know kind of what combinations work well together, and sometimes you just find bugs, and it turns out a couple of changes need to be made upstream in Kubernetes or in OpenStack or in gophercloud or in Terraform, and just if you don't know, then the user kind of with the some assembly required model, finds out and they're like, I don't know, it doesn't work, it's broken. Well, is it OpenStack's fault or Kubernetes's fault, and they don't, they just want it to work. >> So you're saying >> Identified upstream we can fix it. >> You're saying OpenStack has become more of a stable layer of the (mumbles). >> Yes exactly, yes. It has become a much more stable layer. >> Which means there wasn't a whole lot of flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually. >> A lot of the talk-- >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think it's just really proven in that way, and you know, one of the things that was highlighted was like the virtual GPUs, right? So, if OpenStack is designed to be pluggable, what do people want to have as an option now in terms of compute storage and networking, on the compute side is they want GPUs, because that gives an AI machine learning much faster, if they're bit coin miners, like I'm sure you all are in your basement, they're going to want GPUs. And what was really interesting is that the PTL, like the technical leader of the Nova Project, got up and talked about virtual GPUs. I was back in the green room and like three of the other keynote speakers were like, oh man, we are so excited about this VGPU support. Like, our customers are asking for it, the guy, Mohammad from Vexos, is the CEO of Vexos, he said, our customers are demanding this queens release, which is the latest OpenStack, and we were kind of surprised, they just really want this queens release. So we asked them why and they're like well they want VGPU. So that's kind of an example of an evolution in OpenStack itself, but it's an extension, enabler for things like GPUs, and that's kind of an exciting area as well. >> You know, it's interesting because in previous years it was the major release was one of the main things we talked about. Queens, as you mentioned, other than the VGPUs and that little discussions, spent a lot more time outside, talked to a lot of the users. You talked about the new tracks that were there. And something I heard a lot this year that I hadn't heard for a few years was, get involved, we're looking to build. And I was trying to think of a sports analogy, and maybe it was like, okay, we're actually building more of a league here and we're looking to recruit as opposed to or is it rebuilding what exactly OpenStack 2.0 is in the future? >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. You're absolutely right, and I can imagine or can remember sort of talking to some of the speakers as they were working on their content, and I don't think I totally picked up that that was a big trend, but you're absolutely right, that was a major call to action from so many different people. I think it's because when we think about what we are as a community, I talked about how we're a community of people who build and operate open infrastructure, and it's really about solving problems, and if you're as open to community collaboration and you want to solve problems, you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems. And sometimes maybe that feels awkward. It's like the tech 101 is get up and say you solved all the problems and you should buy it today. It's online or downloaded or whatever. And I think we just realized that the magic of our community is solving problems. There's always going to be more problems to solve, now you're putting more pieces together, which means the pieces themselves have to evolve and the testing and integration has to evolve. Like it's just a new set of challenges and sort of saying, here's what we're trying to solve, it's not done, help us, actually is more, I think, true to kind of what the community is all about. >> I'm wondering, do we know how many people are at the show this year? >> I don't have the exact count. I think it's around 2600, something like that. >> Yeah, so fair to say it might be a little bit less than last year's North America show? >> Yeah, it is a little bit less. >> And what are you hearing from the user? What are the main things they come for? That you got the new tracks, you've got the open dev conference co-located. What kind of key themes can you get from the users? >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we found is that we have twice as many cloud architects this year than a year ago. So I think there's always this period of time where conference attendance is driven by curiosity. Like, I've heard about this thing, what is it, or it's the cool factor, hype curves and all that stuff, I want to learn about it. At this point people know what OpenStack is. We've got tons of ways you can learn about it. There's local meetups, there's OpenStack Days all over the world, there's content, videos online. It's just not like a mystery anymore. Like the mystery draws in kind of the people that are just poking around to learn. Now we're at that point of, okay I know what it is, I know what it's for, I want to architect a solution around it, so seeing twice as many cloud architects I think is an interesting data point to think about how we're shifting more towards, people are not asking if it's proven, they're like it's been proven for whatever, two, three years, however, the perception is, but the technology is just very, very solid. It's running infrastructure all over the world, the largest banks and so on and so, I think that's kind of how things are shifting to what else can we do and put on top of it, now that it's a solid foundation. >> I wonder, sometimes there's that buzz as to what's going on out there. There was a certain large analyst firm that wrote a report a couple months ago that wasn't all that favorable about OpenStack. There's others that watching on Twitter during the keynote, and they're like, they're spending all their time talking about containers, why isn't this just part of the Cloud Native Con, KubCon show? What's the foundation's feedback on, what are you hearing kind of, what's your core deliverables? And why this show should continue in the future? >> Sure, I mean I think that what we're hearing generally from users and seeing in our data as well as from analysts like 451 and IDC, those are a couple of different reports coming out, like right now or just came out, that Jonathan mentioned this morning, I think is adoption just continues to grow, and so you know, I think people are not looking at just one technology stack. And maybe they never were, but I think there was this kind of temptation to just think of it, is it containers versus VMs or is it Kubernetes versus OpenStack? And it's like, no one who really runs infrastructure thinks like that because they might have thought it until they tried it, they realized these things go together. So I think the future of this conference is just becoming more and more centered around what are the use cases? What are the technical challenges we're trying to solve? And to the extent we're getting patterns and tools that are emerging like the lamp stack of the cloud, so to speak. How can people adopt them? So you think about cloud as taking all kinds of new forms, edge computing, those are the kinds of things that I think will become a bigger part of the conference in the future. I do like the open infrastructure angle on this. I mean, as infrastructure folks, right, you know that that storage compute network doesn't manage itself, doesn't configure itself. >> Mark: Totally. >> Doesn't provision itself. And so a lot of the app layer things should rely on this lower layer. And I thought last year in Boston there was this kind of curious OpenStack or containers conversation, which seemed odd at the time, and that's clarified, I think, at a number of levels from a number of camps and vendors. >> Yeah I agree, I think we have done our best from our point of view, from the foundation, myself, and the others that are involved in our community to try to dispell those myths or tamper down that kind of sense of a rivalry, but it takes time and I do feel like there is kind of a sea change now. There are just so many people running in production with various container tools, predominantly Kubernetes and in OpenStack that I think that that sort of myth that they're, that one's replacing the other, it's hard for that cognitive dissonance to last forever when you're given like the hundredth example of like somebody running in production at scale. Like they must be doing it for a reason, and then people start to go, well why is that? >> And I did like the comment you did make about cloud is not consolidating and simplifying, right? Even at the Dell Technologies World show, Michael Dell got up and talked about the distributed core, which is a little bit of an oxymoron, but the fact is compute and compute is everywhere, right? And it's not only, it's on the edge, it's on telephone poles, it's in little boxes in our, you know, going to be on our walls, in our walls, right? And this open infrastructure idea can play everywhere. It's not just about an on-prem data center anymore. >> Yeah and I think that's a big part of why we started to say open infrastructure instead of cloud, just because, I mean, you know, I guess we spent 10 years arguing over the definition of cloud, now we can argue over open infrastructure. But to me it's a little more descriptive and a little less kind of, I don't know, a little less baggage than the term cloud. >> Yeah, definitely differentiates it as to where you sit in the marketplace. And one thing I definitely want to give the foundation great kudos on, the diversity of this show is excellent. Not just that there was a welcome happy hour and there's a lunch, but look at all the PTLs, the project leads that are there, a lot of diversity, up on stage. It's just evident. >> Mark: Thank you. >> And it's just something kind of built into the community, so great job there. >> Thank you, I'm very proud of the fact that we had just so many excellent keynote speakers this morning, and you know, that's always something that we strive for, but I feel like we got closer to the goal than ever in terms of just getting broad representation up on the stage. And some amazing leaders. >> It's always nice from our standpoint because we always say give us your keynote speakers and give us some of the main people making things happen, and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity, from gender, from geography. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> From various backgrounds, so that's good. All right, want to give you the final word. Take aways that you want people after the show or maybe some things that people might not know if they didn't make it here for the show. >> I mean, I think, you know, the number one take away is it's all about the people, and we want to make it about the headlines or the technology, and even the technology is about the people, but certainly the operators are not, like I said, logos don't operate clouds or infrastructure, people do, so getting to meet the people, seeing what they're doing, like the Adobe I mentioned, they're marketing cloud. They have 100,000 cores of compute with four people operating it. So if you've got the right four people and the right playbook, you can do that, too. But you got to meet those people and find out how they're doing it, get their recipe, get their playbook, and they're happy to share it, and then you can run at that kind of scale, too, without a big team and you can change the way you operate. >> Yeah, I know I said in my last question, but the last thing, I know there's been a big emphasis to not just do the two big shows a year, but the OpenStack days and other events globally, give people, how do they get involved and where can they come to find out more? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked because, there are so many ways to get involved and of course it's online, it's IRC, it's mailing lists 24/7, but there's no substitute when it's about the people for meeting in person. So we have the two summits a year. We're also having an event which is called the PTG, which is really for the developers and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well where we're having it in Denver, but the summits are the big shows twice a year, but the OpenStack days are really important. Those are annual, typically one to two day events, in 15 plus countries around the world. One in particular that is going to be really exciting this year is in Beijing. You know, we've had that for the last couple of years. Huge event, but of course, others throughout Europe and Asia. Tokyo is always an awesome OpenStack day, and then there are quite a few in Europe as well. So that's another way you can get involved. Not necessarily have to fly around the world, but if you do have to fly around the world, being in Vancouver is not a bad spot, so. >> Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know there's a lot of OpenStack happening in China. >> Yes there is. >> So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation for allowing theCUBE to cover this. >> Sure. >> And thanks so much for joining us. >> Mark: Thank you. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music) (shutter clicks)

>> Announcer: Live, from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live in Austin, Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder, of SilconANGLE Media, analyst here with SilconANGLE Media, next guest, Justin Garrison, co-author of the Cloud Native Infrastructure book. How about us wrap up day one with two days of live coverage, Justin, welcome to The Cube. >> Justin: Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Stu, day one wrap-up, guys what are you seeing? Justin, what's your perspective? >> There are a ton of announcements today, it was kind of crazy. It's amazing being part of the CNCF community and everything, and everything happens in the open, but then there's so much other stuff in the ecosystem that just happens and gets announced. >> I mean, real accelerated growth, if you look at KubeCon, this is the second year doing the event, last year's kind of an inaugural event, the first year before that was just an idea, side break out kind of thing going on, just forming, and then just took off. Obviously containers with DockerCon, and Container Ecosystem, kina floating that boat up. Kubernetes, I mean those tracks are huge, the agenda looks like, it's like a university of geeks here, I mean, this has been ramped up pretty fast. What's your take on that? >> I mean, I was at KubeCon last year, and about a thousand people was a great little environment, and a lot of stuff that was still emerging, and being discovered, and now it's everyone is in the middle of it, and trying to learn as fast as they can to pick up these projects, and see how to actually make this stuff production-ready, and how to actually use it. And not just in the environments that they used to be, they're rewriting all of their environments, it's no longer a here's how I run my app the old way, and a VM statically, it's I you know, we're beyond running containers, and they realize that's not the end goal anymore. >> Justin, when we were talking to you before the segment here, and you're like oh, I've been working on Kubeternes for like two years more and everything, and it's funny in the career. It's like oh, well two years, in some ways it's a long time, in CloudNative time it's a long time, in career wise, it's a rather short time, give us a little bit about what you've been seeing, you know, what's interesting, you mentioned there's a whole lot of announcements, I mean, obviously new projects spinning up, new, new releases, so you know, if you could give us a little bit of a historical view. >> Yeah, I mean from last year, it was really hard to get a cluster. It was something that was really, like you had to know what you were doing to make Kubernetes run, and make it highly available and production-ready. And now, club dividers give you a button, you click it, how big do you want it, how much do you want to auto-scale it, and it's all about the application, and bringing business value to whoever's running it to say, like, my application runs here, and now there's more involved with Istio and these network proxies that give you more resiliency in the claw providers, because people don't run their own infrastructures much anymore, it's all in a cloud, and they don't care about the underlying infrastructure, they care about their apps. >> Yeah, so you tell them about CloudNative infrastructure, so one of the things we're teasing out here is, you know, Kubernetes, all this CloudNative stuff will make it easy to be able to do the application, but you know, infrastructure, it matters. I love Dan Cone's line in the Keynote this morning is you know, it's exciting times for boring infrastructure, so you know, talk about that layer, what's important about infrastructure, and bring us in a little bit, you know, why you wrote the book with Kris Nova, and you know, how that fit. >> Really wanted to write it to help people not make a lot of mistakes to help them kind of level up and get a head start in building the infrastructure in the cloud, cause it's not something that they own anymore, it's not this server that they rack, and they take care of it for years. It's something that comes and goes, it's quick, you know, you have to design for failure and resiliency, and that layer of infrastructure isn't important because you don't run it anymore, but it is important to build a platform on top of that that your applications are still resilient. There's no more scheduled down-times in the cloud, like websites aren't gone, you know, Sundays at midnight. >> Yeah, don't you have to be pretty brave, cause you don't own it anymore, but if something goes wrong, you know, you're the one whose job's on the line. >> You own the failure. >> Justin, talk about the feedback that you might have for the industry. Stu and I were looking at the growth, we certainly love the excitement, but they're still running as fast as they can, they're pedaling as fast as they can, they're trying to introduce all these services. You see some good news here, some new releases coming out, some key services for monitoring, tracing, and whatnot, but what do they need to do better, in your opinion as a practitioner, someone who's out in the trenches, what's the critical analysis, in a good way, constructive criticism, what needs to happen? >> Right, moving forward, I mean there was this, you know, since configuration management, everyone said infrastructure is code, and really we need to level up to be, Kris actually coined this to me in the book, was infrastructure is software. Where it is a piece of software that's running that you declare that has a two-way relationship. It's not get repository that statically defines things, it's a declarative thing that mutates the infrastructure and talks back to the user so that things can auto-scale, and have same defaults and you don't have to do every last little piece of it, but the declarative nature and policy-based roles in all the infrastructure you're building, and everything around your application, and with your application need to be defined and controlled by software and not people anymore. >> But what needs to happen to make that, obviously STN, software-defined data center, we've seen a lot of that go on at the network level's door right now, are they there, what's the progress meter on that? How would you peg the progress of the evolution, making that happen, cause that's really what people want, I mean at the end of the day, that's what Lambda is for Amazon, that's what serverless is, that's what virtual Cubelets are for. >> Yeah, and it's funny, cause you can run Lambda in a very non-CloudNative way, I mean you can have, you know, individual deploying code to Lambda, and not checked in to get anywhere, you can do all those things, you can go against the CloudNative model very easily, and so it's interesting just seeing that evolution as well, of people actually adopting how Netflix has been doing it for a long time. >> Yeah, we should call it SoftwareNative. (laughter) I mean, but this is kind of what we're getting at, I mean, people on the buyer side are looking and saying oh, I get it, I see the new wave coming, I want to get out there, I want to ride this, and they want to kind of vet out whose pretender, who's the player, how should businesses evaluate the pretenders and the players in your mind? >> Moving to the cloud should be, you know, and easy sell. Like people building data centers anymore, you have to have immense scale to really care about those things, and really get any sort of benefit. If you can beat Amazon and Google and Microsoft at the pricing game, then you're still not ahead because you still have all the people managed. They have so many thousands of people that are doing this stuff that you can't keep up. And so, I mean, just adopting one of those clouds, and not worrying about the vendor lock-in. But yes, Kubernetes brings a lot that you can move from cloud to cloud, but really it's about moving to a cloud provider that provides what your application needs, and at the rate of innovation that you need, and if you can match those two things, if you can stay innovation-matched, I mean Amazon is probably going to pull ahead of you, because they're doing this as their job. >> If I hear you correctly, what I'm hearing is that look for people that are players, that are constantly introducing more innovative services? >> If that's what you need, if that's what you need. If you do not need a high rate of innovation, if you have a lot of policy, or a lot of rules and regulations around your industry, then you probably will get lost in Amazon, and they'll move ahead, they'll move too far for you. And so, you need to find what matches for your industry, and your application. >> Justin, 4,000 people here, over 4,000 people here, for those that didn't come, what are they missing, what's exciting you the most, you know, is it the hallway track, is it, you know, some of the special interest groups, you know, what are you excited that you've seen so far, and are looking forward to seeing? >> Really missing out, I just love the community. I mean, every talk is recorded, if you really care, like, go watch them on YouTube, they're great, like every one of these things is fantastic, but engaging with people, meeting face to face, cause a lot of people are online. Like I mean, on Twitter, or on social networks, like thousands of people here, aren't, and you get to meet those people and find out what their struggles are and what they're working on, and then learn from them, either you know, where they're headed, or where they were before. >> I mean, you can meet the people who write the code, and they're going to give you the straight scoop, or tell you they don't know it, it's real authentic. >> Yeah, any things that you're hearing, kind of what's the buzz, what's the pain point, you know, that you're hearing from the community so far? >> A lot of people still aren't in cloud, they're still doing it themselves, standing up a cluster on pram, you know, has struggles, Kubernetes cluster that is. I mean, you can't really adopt some of these patterns, until you have an API that declares all of your infrastructure, and that's still hard for people. And OpenStack was going to bring some of that stuff, and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't, but really it's about people and processes, and getting those things right, and being able to change the culture of your environment, and for your applications, that's what's important for the business, and that's where you can learn from people face-to-face and actually talk to them, and not just read a blog post about it, and just hear a one-way tell me what you did, I need feedback, and I need this feedback from whoever's doing it to say, well, why did you do that, and that's really important in the community to learn. >> Well, one of the preferential I was looking for, it's one thing to say, you know, some of these CloudNative companies, like, you see in Netflix, you see in Lyft, you know these are companies where, you know, digital is their business. What about, you know, more traditional businesses, you know, are they able to make that change, is it too challenging for them, you know, what are you seeing? >> The people and the culture's the hardest thing to change, it always is. And if they can change the people, the Keynote today, Netflix was talking about the tools influence your culture, and if you can influence your culture positively, and do that intentionally to actually change the people, then absolutely, they totally can pivot and make that change, but again, do they need to? I mean, if there's other government restrictions, or something else that like, they could move too fast and cause other problems for their industry. >> What's a practitioner dream scenario right now out there that you see, cause you made a good point, sometimes you might want to have more services, sometimes you might want to pull back so it kind of depends on the perspective, but generally speaking, CloudNative Kubernetes, offers an opportunity, what's the nirvana, what's the ideal use case for practitioners these days, what's the key things that need to be rolled out or on the table should be taken advantage of? >> You mean as far as technology goes, or? >> Whether it's technology, whether it's mindset, culture, people, personnel, package, ops. >> I mean, if we can change the people mindset of how they do things, how they deploy applications, and how they manage those applications, the technology would fall into place, I believe, because the people would drive towards this way of working, and then they would build those tools just naturally. A lot of times, like with Kubernetes, Google was in that mindset, and so they did that, they had that culture, and now they're trying to share that with everyone else, and then everyone else has to learn from the tool, rather than the people building. >> Did you see the Netflix talk on the Keynote was culture and tech, and I think that's a real good point, because if you think about your other point, if you got a lot of compliance issues, you might not want to go fast, you really want to move fast, or you like a, you know, fast dot com or web services company, you might want to compete on value and services. Know your culture and hire right. >> Know what your benefit is of your application, and what environment it plays in, and then you can, from there, figure out. >> Well that's been a struggle for the DevOps world is they're taking a square and trying to put it in a round hole, you know what I'm saying? >> Everyone want to move fast, but should everyone move fast, I don't know. It depends. >> Yeah, alright Justin, well thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Biggest surprise in this whole Kubernetes movement for you, just in terms of shock factor, or blew you away, did you fall out of your chair, share some color, personal perspective. >> The community is just humongous now. I mean, joining it a couple years ago, it was pretty small, and things were really difficult, and now I play with, you know, clusters in Amazon and Google and Microsoft and just one quick button, I play with it for a few hours and I throw it away, and I got a bill for like four cents, I was like that was amazing, like this would take so long, you know, a couple years ago, and the growth of the community around that, just to be able to say like this is easy now, let's level up what we're doing and working on, and figuring out where the benefit is. >> When we were talking earlier in The Cube, and we've been saying for a couple months, this is going to bring back more time for the developers, to bring craftsmanship back to the development process, bringing artistry and artisan kind of, real software development, not like UX stuff, but like really solution-driven. >> Focus on the business application, where's the application in the business struggle and don't worry about the infrastructure. >> Justin Garrison, co-author of the Cloud Native Infrastructure book, it's on the web, check it out, thanks for coming on The Cube, thanks for sharing your perspective. Day one wrap- up here in Austin Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, see you tomorrow for day two coverage. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Host: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's The Cube! Covering Big Data New York City 2017, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media, and its Ecosystem sponsors. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live, The Cube in New York City for Big Data NYC, this is our fifth year, doing our own event, not with O'Reilly or Cloud Era at Strata Data, which as Hadoop World, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, now called Strata Data, probably called Strata AI next year, we're The Cube every year, bringing you all the great data, and what's going on. Entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders, we interview them and bring that to you. I'm John Furrier with our next guest, Greg Sands, who's the managing director and founder of Costa Nova ventures in Palo Alto, started out as an entrepreneur himself, then single shingle out there, now he's a big VC firm on a third fund. >> On the third fund. >> Third fund. How much in that fund? >> 175 million dollar fund. >> So now you're a big firm now, congratulations, and really great to see your success. >> Thanks very much. I mean, we're still very much an early stage boutique focused on companies that change the way the world does business, but it is the case that we have a bigger team and a bigger fund, to go do the same thing. >> Well you've been great to work with, I've been following you, we've known each other for a while, watched you left Sir Hill and start Costanova, but what's interesting is that, I can kind of joke and kid you, the VC inside joke about being a big firm, because I know you want to be small, and like to be small, help entrepreneurs, that's your thing. But it's really not a big firm, it's a few partners, but a lot of people helping companies, that's your ethos, that's what you're all about at your firm. Take a minute to just share with the folks the kinds of things you do and how you get involved in companies, you're hands on, you roll up your sleeves. You get out of the way at the right time, you help when you can, share your ethos. >> Yeah, absolutely so the way we think of it is, combining the craft of old school venture capital, with a modern operating team, and so since most founder these days are product-oriented, our job is to think like product people, not think like investors. So we think like product people, we do product level analysis, we do customer discovery, we do, we go ride along on sales calls when we're making investment decisions. And then we do the things that great venture capitalists have done for years, and so for example, at Alatian, who I know has been on the show today, we were able to incubate them in our office for a year, I had many conversations with Sathien after he'd sold the first two or three customers. Okay, who's the next person we hire? Who isn't a founder? Who's going to go out and sell? What does that person look like? Do you go straight to a VP? Or do you hire an individual contributor? Do you hire someone for domain, or do you hire someone for talent? And that's the thing that we love doing. Now we've actually built out an operating team so marketing partner, Martino Alcenco, and Jim Wilson as a sales partner, to really help turn that into a program, so that they can, we can take these founders who find product market fit, and say, how do we help you build the right sales process and marketing process, sales team and marketing team, for your company, your customer, your product? >> Well it's interesting since you mention old school venture capital, I'll get into some of the dynamics that are going on in Silicon valley, but it's important to bring that forward, because now with cloud you can get to critical mass on the fly wheel, on economics, you can see the visibility faster now. >> Greg: Absolutely. >> So the game of the old school venture capitalist is all the same, how do you get to cruising altitude, whatever metaphor you want to use, the key was getting there, and sometimes it took a couple of rounds, but now you can get these companies with five million, maybe $10 million funding, they can have unit economics visibility, scales insight, then the scale game comes in, so that seems to be the secret trick right now in venture is, don't overspend, keep the valuation in range and allows you to look for multiple exits potentially, or growth. Talk about that dynamic, because this is like, I call it the hour glass. You get through the hour glass, everyone's down here, but if you can sneak through and get the visibility on the economics, then you grow quickly. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's exactly right an I haven't heard the hour glass metaphor before but I like it. You want to basically get through the narrows of product market fit and the beginnings of scalable sales and marketing. You don't need to know all the answers, but you can do that in a capital-efficient way, building really solid foundations for future explosive growth, look, everybody loves fast growth and big markets, and being grown into. But the number of people who basically don't build those foundations and then say, go big or go home! And they take a ton of money, and they go spend all the money, doing things that just fundamentally don't work, and they blow themselves up. >> Well this is the hourglass problem. You have, once you get through that unique economics, then you have true scale, and value will increase. Everybody wins there so it's about getting through that, and you can get through it fast with good mentoring, but here's the challenge that entrepreneurs fall into the trap. I call it the, I think I made it trap. And what happens is they think they're on the other side of the hourglass, but they still haven't even gone through the straight and narrow yet, and they don't know it. And what they do is they over fund and implode. That seems to be a major trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into, while I got a 50 million pre on my B round, or some monster valuation, and they get way too much cash, and they're behaving as if they're scaling, and they haven't even nailed it yet. >> Well, I think that's right. So there's certainly, there are stages of product market fit, and so I think people hit that first stage, and they say, oh I've got it. And they try to explode out of the gates. And we, in fact I know one good example of somebody saying, hey, by the way, we're doing great in field sales, and our investors want us to go really fast, so we are going to go inside and we, my job was to hire 50 inside people, without ever having tried it. And so we always preach crawl, walk, run, right? Hire a couple, see how it works. Right, in a new channel. Or a new category, or an adjacent space, and I think that it's helpful to have an investor who has seen the whole picture to say, yeah, I know it looks like light at the end of the tunnel, but see how it's a relatively small dot? You still got to go a little farther, and then the other thing I say is, look, don't build your company to feed your venture capitalist ego. Right? People do these big rounds of big valuations, and the big dog investors say, go, go, go! But, you're the CEO. Your job is analyze the data. >> John: You can find during the day (laughs). >> And say, you know, given what we know, how fast should we go? Which investments should we make? And you've got to own that. And I think sometimes our job is just to be the pulling guard and clear space for the CEO to make good decisions. >> So you know I'm a big fan, so my bias is pretty much out there, love what you guys are doing. Tim Carr is a Pivot North doing the same thing. Really adding value, getting down and dirty, but the question that entrepreneurs always ask me and talk privately, not about you, but in general, I don't want the VC to get in the way. I want them, I don't want them to preach to me, I don't want too many know-it-alls on my board, I want added value, but again, I don't want the preaching, I don't want them to get in the way, 'cause that's the fear. I'm not saying the same about VCs in general, but that's kind of the mentality of an entrepreneur. I want someone who's going to help me, be in the boat with me, but not be in my way. How do you address that concern to the founders who think, not think like that, but might have a fear. >> Well, by the way, I think it's a legitimate fear, and I think it actually is uncorrelated with added value, right? I think the idea that the board has certain responsibilities, and management has certain responsibilities, is incredibly important. And I think, I can speak for myself in saying, I'm quite conscious of not crossing that line, I think you talk. >> John: You got to build a return, that's the thing. >> But ultimately I would say to an entrepreneur, I'd just say, hey look, call references. And by the way, here are 30 names and phone numbers, and call any one of them, because I think that people who are, so a venture capital know-it-all, in the board room, telling CEOs what to do, destroys value. It's sand in the gears, and it's bad for the company. >> Absolutely, I agree 100% >> And some of my, when I talk about being a pulling guard for the CEO, that's what I'm talking about, which is blocking people who are destructive. >> And rolling the block for a touchdown, kind of use the metaphor. Adding value, that's the key, and that's why I wanted to get that out there because most guys don't get that nuance, and entrepreneurs, especially the younger ones. So it's good and important. Okay, let's talk about culture, obviously in Silicon Valley, I get, reading this morning in the Wymo guy, and they're writing it, that's the Silicon Valley, that's not crazy, there's a lot of great people in Silicon Valley, you're one of them. The culture's certainly an innovative culture, there's been some things in the press, inclusion and diversity, obviously is super important. This whole brogrammer thing that's been kind of kicked around. How are you dealing with all that? Because, you know, this is a cultural shift, but I think it's being made out more than it really is, but there's still our core issues, your thoughts on the whole inclusion and diversity, and this whole brogrammer blowback thing. >> Yeah, well so I think, so first of all, really important issues, glad we're talking about them, and we all need to get better. And to me the question for us has been, what role do we play? And because I would say it is a relatively small subset of the tech industry, and the venture capital industry. At the same time the behavior of that has become public is appalling. It's appalling and totally unacceptable, and so the question is, okay, how can we be a part of the stand-up part of the ecosystem, and some of which is calling things out when we see them. Though frankly we work with and hang out with people and we don't see them that often, and then part of which is, how do we find a couple of ways to contribute meaningfully? So for example this summer we ran what we called the Costanova Access Fellowship, intentionally, trying to provide first opportunity and venture capital for people who traditionally haven't had as much access. We created an event in the spring called, Seat at the Table, really, particularly around women in the tech industry, and it went so well that we're running it in New York on October 19th, so if you're a woman in tech in New York, we'd love to see you then. And we're just trying to figure-- >> You're doing it in an authentic way though, you're not really doing it from a promotional standpoint. It's legit. >> Yeah, we're just trying to do, you know, pick off a couple of things that we can do, so that we can be on the side of the good guys. >> So I guess what you're saying is just have high integrity, and be part of the solution not part of the problem. >> That's right, and by the way, both of these initiatives were ones that were kicked off in late 2016, so it's not a reaction to things like binary capital, and the problems at uper, both of which are appalling. >> Self-awareness is critical. Let's get back to the nuts and bolts of the real reason why I wanted you to come on, one was to find out how much money you have to spend for the entrepreneurs that are watching. Give us the update on the last fund, so you got a new fund that you just closed, the new fund, fund three. You have your other funds that are still out there, and some funds reserved, which, what's the number amount, how much are you writing checks for? Give the whole thesis. >> Absoluteley. So we're an early stage investor, so we lead series A and seed financing companies that change the way the world does business, so up and down the stack, a business-facing software, data-driven applications. Machine-learning and AI driven applications. >> John: But the filter is changing the way the world works? >> The way, yes, but in particularly the way the world does business. You can think of it as a business-facing software stack. We're not social media investors, it's not what we know, it's not what we're good at. And it includes security and management, and the data stack and-- >> Joe: Enterprise and emerging tech. >> That's right. And the-- >> And every crazy idea in between. >> That's right. (laughs) Absolutely, and so we're participate in or leave seed financings as most typically are half a million to maybe one and a quarter, and we'll lead series A financing, small ones might be two or two and a half million dollars at the outer edge is probably a six million dollar check. We were just opening up in the next couple of days, a thousand square feet of incubation space at world headquarters at Palo Alto. >> John: Nice. >> So Alation, Acme Ticketing and Zen IQ are companies that we invested in. >> Joe: What location is this going to be at? >> That's, near the Fills in downtown Palo Alto, 164 staff, and those three companies are ones where we effectively invested at formation and incubated it for a year, we love doing that. >> At the hangout at Philsmore and get the data. And so you got some funds, what else do you have going on? 175 million? >> So one was a $100 million fund, and then fund two was $135 million fund, and the last investment of fund two which we announced about three weeks ago was called Roadster, so it's ecommerce enablement for the modern dealerships. So Omnichannel and Mobile First infrastructure for auto-dealers. We have already closed, and had the first board meeting for the first new investment of fund three, which isn't yet announced, but in the land of computer vision and deep learning, so a couple of the subjects that we care deeply about, and spend a lot of time thinking about. >> And the average check size for the A round again, seed and A, what do you know about the? The lowest and highest? >> The average for the seed is half a million to one and a quarter, and probably average for a series A is four or five. >> And you'll lead As. >> And we will lead As. >> Okay great. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now that gets you excited? It doesn't have to be a portfolio company, but the research you're doing, thing, tires you're kicking, in subjects, or domains? >> You know, so honestly, one of the great benefits of the venture capital business is that I get up and my neurons are firing right away every day. And I do think that for example, one of the things that we love is is all of the adulant infrastructure and so we've got our friends at Victor Ops that are in the middle of that space, and the thinking about how the modern programmer works, how everybody-- >> Joe: Is security on your radar? >> Security is very much on our radar, in fact, someone who you should have on your show is Asheesh Guptar, and Casey Ella, so she's just joined Bug Crowd as the CEO and Casey moves over to CTO, and the word Bug Bounty was just entered into the Oxford Dictionary for the first time last week, so that to me is the ultimate in category creation. So security and dev ops tools are among the things that we really like. >> And bounties will become the norm as more and more decentralized apps hit the scene. Are you doing anything on decentralized applications? I'm not saying Blockchain in particular, but Blockchain like apps, distributing computing you're well versed on. >> That's right, well we-- >> Blockchain will have an impact in your area. >> Blockchain will have an impact, we just spent an hour talking about it in the context our off site in Decosona Lodge in Pascadero, it felt like it was important that we go there. And digging into it. I think actually the edge computing is actually more actionable for us right now, given the things that we're, given the things that we're interested in, and we're doing and they, it is just fascinating how compute centralizes and then decentralizes, centralizes and then decentralizes again, and I do think that there are a set of things that are fascinating about what your process at the edge, and what you send back to the core. >> As Pet Gelson here said in the QU, if you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood, a lot of big waves coming in, you've seen a lot of waves, you were part of one that changed the world, Netscape browser, or the business plan for that first project manager, congratulations. Now you're at a whole nother generation. You ready? (laughs) >> Absolutely, I'm totally ready, I'm ready to go. >> Greg Sands here in The Cube in New York City, part of Big Data NYC, more live coverage with The Cube after this short break, thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost this week, John Troyer. Hi and welcome to the program, a first time guest, Professor at Boston University, and lead of the Massachusetts Open Cloud, Orran Krieger. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Ah, my pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, so, we're here in Boston, the center of culture, the revolution, a lot of universities. Tell us a little about you, just click on yourself, your role at BU, and then we'll get into the MOC stuff in a little bit too. >> Sure, I mean, I sort of came back from industry after 15 years in industry, to this incredible opportunity we had, to create this entity. I mean, there's no other place like this, if you take the universities in this city, it's equivalent to all the universities on the Pacific West Coast. Right, the concentration of high-tech is unbelievable here. >> I want to remind you, my wife was actually involved when Partners Healthcare first got launched here in Boston, was an early technology and collaboration here in Boston. Sounds similar, what you are, what you're doing with some of the universities in Cloud. Maybe you talk, you came from the vendor side. Just real quick, your background, you worked at a company that John and I know quite well. Maybe just give a quick background? >> Sure. I left academia, I don't know how many years ago. Ended up going to IBM research, and was there for about 10 years. And then I joined this little start-up called VMWare. And started up and then worked as sort of one of the lead architects for vCloud Director and the whole vCloud Initiative. >> Alright, great. Let's speak today, you also have, you're the lead in Massachusetts Open Cloud. We actually had a couple of guests on from Red Hat that talked a little bit about it. But tell us about the project, the scope of it, how many people involved, how many users you reach with this. >> Sure. The future is in the Cloud. I mean, you look at sort of the fact that users can use what they need, when they need it. Producers can get massive economies of scale. You know, the future of computing is in the cloud. And when I was on the industry side, what really concerned me, what was going on, is that these clouds were really closed. You couldn't see what was going on inside them. Innovation was sort of gated by this single provider, that operated and controlled each of these clouds. So, the question that I was struggling with back then, is how can we create a cloud that's open? That multiple technology companies can participate. And certainly when I came back to academia, a cloud where I could do innovation in. Where not just me, but many many different researchers. You look at how much research has fundamentally impacted our field. It's dramatic. Even in just sort of the very area we're talking about. From what Mendall and team did with VMWare, and then Zen coming out of Cambridge. I mean, Ceph coming out of, just like technology after technologies come out of academia. But now clouds are these closed boxes you can't get into. So we had this incredible opportunity. There'd be this data center, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Data Center, MGHPCC. 15 megawatts. That's more than half the size of one of Google's 16 data centers. That had been built, right next to Hydro Dam, one third the power costs of what it is in Boston. By five big institutions: MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, UMass. And we thought, wow, couldn't we create a cloud there? Couldn't we create a cloud with some 157,000 potential students as well as the broader ecosystem? So we started discussing that idea. All the universities kind of signed up behind it. The model of the cloud is not to create another single provider cloud. It's not going to be my cloud. The idea is to have many vendors participate. Stand up different services, and create an open cloud, where there's not just multiple tenants but there's also multiple landlords with the cloud. >> Great. Could you talk to us a little about how do some of those pieces get chosen? How does OpenStack fit into it? And if you can talk about some of the underlining pieces it'd be good to understand how you sort that out too. >> Sure. So in doing that we, it's actually been sort of this cool, you know you have to kind of build different levels simultaneously. When we started the project, you know our first thing was, oh you know we'll be able to just stand up a cloud. It wasn't that easy. OpenStack is actually a complicated learning curve to get up. Now it's matured tremendously. We've been in production for about ten months, with no significant failures. I'm almost thinking that we need to kind of bring it down for a couple hours. Just so the people start realizing this is not intended to be a place where you run it like you would a production data center facility. That we don't guarantee it as so, 'cause people are starting to assume we do. (laughing) But, we started off and we sort of solved OpenStack, got it up and running. Took us a while to get it to the production layer. Started hosting courses, and users, and stuff like that. And some tastes that with sort of two other tracks. One is I'm developing some of the base technologies to enable a cloud to be multi-vendor. So mix-and-match fetterations serve our core of that. Which is this new capability that we've, after like five iterations on the right way to do this to allow multiple different clouds with their own keystone, mix different administrators say from MIT or Harvard, or from companies that might want to participate and set up a service. So, to have a capability of fettering between those things. Allowing you, for example, to use storage from one and compute from another. We started off with OpenStack because OpenStack already had the right architecture. It was designed as a series of different services. Each one which could be scaled independently. Each one that had it's own well defined API. And it seemed natural, jeez, we should be able to compose them together. Have, you know, one stand up, Nova compute. Another one stand up, Swift storage. Another one stand up, Cinder Storage. Turned out not to be that easy. There was assumptions that all these services were stood up by the same administrative entity. After three iterations of trying to figure out with the community how to make it, we finally have a capability of doing that now. That we're putting into production in the MOC itself. >> You talked about the different projects inside OpenStack, that's been one of the discussions here this week at the Summit. Different projects, the core, which are important and also the whole ecosystem of other cloud native and open source projects that have grown-up around OpenStack over the last six or seven years. Any commentary on how, which kind of projects you're finding are the most useful and the UC as kind of the core of OpenStack going on? And also, which projects from other ecosystems do you think are natural fits into working on an OpenStack base platform? >> Sure. So in our environment, we serve all the core services you think of, obviously Nova and Cinder and Swift. We're using Ceph in most of our environments. Sahara, Heat. We've actually expanded beyond in a couple of different dimensions. I guess that, one thing is we've been using extensively Ceph, that's been very valuable for us. And we've also been modifying it actually, substantially. It's actually kind of exciting cause we have graduate students that are making changes that are now going upstream in the Ceph community as a result of their experiences in doing things within our environment. But, there's other projects that sort of tied in sort of two different levels. One is we're working very closely with Red Hat, today around OpenShift. And we're making the first deployment of that available in the very near future. And the other thing is very important for our environment, we have I think three different talks related to this to have data sets in the cloud. To have data sets shared between communities of people. Data sets that are discoverable. Data sets where you can actually, that are citable. So we've been working very closely with Harvard and the OpenSource dataverse community and we've together created the cloud dataverse. Which is now actually in the MOC. So researchers from all these institutions can actually publish their data sets. As well as researchers from around the world. So there's over 15,000 data sets today in the Harvard dataverse for example. >> Curious if you can give us any commentary on how open source fits into education these days? Talk about the pipeline and the next generation of workers. Do your students get, you talked about upstream contributions, how do they get involved? How early are they getting involved? >> Well, actually, that's sort of a bit of a passion of mine. So multiple different levels, I guess. One of them I think is this is a great way for a student to sort of get exposed to a broad community of people to interact with. I think it's, rather than going in to serve one company, and getting locked down doing one thing, I think it's just enormously valuable. There's sort of two different dimensions I guess, educationally and from a research prospective. And both of them were very tied to open source. So from an education perspective, we have a course, for example, one of my frustrations of having come back from industry was students had done a lot of great, learned how to program, often as individuals they really didn't learn how to do agile, they didn't learn how to work with teams of people, so we have a large course that's served by multiple institutions today that's sort of tied to the MOC where we actually have industry mentors, we teach them agile methods, we teach them a lot of the sort of fundamentals of cloud, but we also have industry mentors come in and mentor teams of five students to create a product. There's actually three different lightning talks by different students that have taken this course, that are here in the OpenStack forum today. So it's kind of exciting to see. We've had several hundred students that have learned that and at least, in my experience, learning how to deal with open source communities, mentorship is a great way of doing that. First year we started teaching this course we had sort of struggled finding mentors, now we're about twice as many mentors applying to mentor teams as we can accommodate in it. So that's been kind of exciting. >> That's great. That's super important and learning right and not just learning how to program but how to operate as a engineer and a team. >> So in the MOC itself, a lot of it's stood up by students. We have like 20 to 30 students. We have a very small core development in our operations team and most of it is actually students doing all the real work. It's been amazing how much they can accomplish in that environment. >> You mentioned OpenShift. So another conversation that's been somewhat confusing in the broader industry is the talking about containers versus VMs and virtualization and OpenStack. Here this week, I thought it's been a fairly clear message that there's some you can be containerizing the stack itself and then there's also a role for containers on top. Obviously been involved in virtualization for a long time, how are you seeing the evolution of both containerization as a technology, but also container based platforms versus kind of the infrastructure and provisioning of the cloud part? >> I mean, there's three levels that all have its role. There's actually people that want to control all the way down to the operating system and want to do, customize things who want to use SRLV and want to use accelerators that haven't. So there's people that actually want hardware as a service and we provide a capability for doing that that's got its limitations today. There's people that want to use virtual machines and there's people that actually want to use containers. And the ability to orchestrate setting up a complex multitiered environment on that and doing fine-grain sharing in a containerized environment is huge. I think that actually all three are going to have a continued role going forward. And certainly containerized approach is an awesome way to deploy a cloud environment and scale the cloud environment even the IAS environment. So we're certainly doing that. >> Love the idea of the collaboration you have both intermittently with all the universities. Are you getting reached out by outside of Massachusetts? How do you interact with the broader community and share ideas back and forth? >> So of course there is multiple streams of that one of them is our industry partners are very broad. Second, we've participated in sort of the OpenStack Summits and all those kind of things. The other thing is that the model that we are doing, I think has a lot of excitement and interest from very many different segments. I don't think people want to see the public cloud be dominated, or could see always be dominated by a very small number of vendors. So the idea of actually creating an open mall of cloud. Lots of other academic institutions have talked with us both about setting up sister organizations, fettering between clouds and replicating the model. We're still at an early stage. This model still has to be proven out. We're excited that we have users that are using us now to get their work done. Rather than just courses and things like that. But it's still at a very early stage So I think as we scale up we'll start looking at replicating that model more broadly. >> Is there any public information about what you're doing? And I'm curious, will this tie into like mooc delivery, things like that? >> Oh, absolutely yeah. It's all on our webpage info.massopencloud.org. So everything is done in the open, I guess. So all the projects, they're all, everything is on the websites and you can discover all about it. And we welcome participation from a broad community. And are excited about that. >> Orran Krieger. Really appreciate you sharing with our community everything there. Congratulations. Local, we'd love to stop by some time to check out even more. John and I will be back with lots more coverage here from openStack Summit 2017, Boston, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. (energetic music) >> Bryan, good to see you again. >> Bryan: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. I said, "Good to see you again." We thought we had you on before, but maybe not. But anyway-- >> Bryan: I have lots of Rackers. >> We feel like Rackspace is one of ours, with theCUBE alone. Red Hat Summit, obviously a big show for the industry. Big show for Rackspace. But your focus is on OpenStack, you're the general manager of the OpenStack business. You guys started OpenStack, I mean, you and some others. But it was really the seed and the vision of Rackspace. So bring us up to date as to where you are now. >> Yeah, I see your point. It kind of goes back to 2010, where Rackspace and NASA essentially co-invented OpenStack and opened it up as a community project, and made it open source. Again, the intent was, how do you help leverage the innovation of a community to help build cloud infrastructure? At that time, it was really focused on public and private cloud. Rackspace over the years, certainly, our public cloud was built on OpenStack and we continue to do a lot of that focus in upstream innovation and contributing in, how do you make this platform scale very massively? Over the last several years, where we've seen great adoption of OpenStack specifically, though, is in private cloud solutions. We have built a practice over the last several years building, deploying, and operating private clouds for customers in our data centers, in their data centers, third party data centers. And that's where we've seen a lot of growth in that. >> Bryan, I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. I know you and I are going to be back here in Boston down the road at the Hynes for OpenStack Summit next week. But when you hear the general discussion, OpenStack has changed a lot in the last few years. So there are people that throw stones and are like, "Oh, well, it's done, it's over." Sounds like you've got a good, robust business. Tell us where are people using it, how are they using it, what is it replacing, or helping them grow their business? >> OpenStack itself, if you think of this arc of an open source project in the rapid innovation, how quickly it's matured, over the last couple years OpenStack itself has really become a solid platform. Infrastructure as a service. In fact, I think I heard a comment as of the Barcelona summit where an analyst or media or somebody said, "OpenStack is now boring." Because a lot of the drama or rapid change has really come out of it, many of the core projects have very much matured. You do hear, "Is OpenStack dead? "Are people going straight to containers on bare metal? "Is this the end of the space?" In practice, we are seeing it is still, how am I consuming or building cloud-native apps? I'm consuming cloud services, and certainly in a private cloud context I'm looking for that power and agility that I see from a public cloud, but delivered in a private cloud form factor. We're still seeing huge adoption for OpenStack in that use case. >> Well, there's a lot of misconceptions about OpenStack over the years, and part of it is it was just sort of put out there and said, "Okay, let's see what happens." But I remember when it went public, John Furrier, other co-host of theCUBE, called it a Hail Mary against Amazon. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> Okay, well, in a way, people needed some kind of alternative. And it's really emerged as the only, correct me if I'm wrong, really the only open platform to build private clouds on. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> And when you say you hear, "Oh, is OpenStack it?", you hear that from a lot of the legacy enterprise companies who are sort of doing their own proprietary private cloud. To your point, it's become a platform with momentum. Further thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think to your point that those that are really saying it's dead and they're doing their own proprietary cloud, that's really just virtualization at scale. They're not really consuming cloud services in the same framework that OpenStack delivers it. It is still a vibrant and growing platform. We're seeing it as the platform of choice for not just, how do I move virtualized workloads, but even for containers and other orchestrated solutions on top of that as well. It really is this underpinning technology that people are consuming for private and hybrid types of scenarios. >> Red Hat would argue, I wonder if you could weigh in on this, that in order for you to build a true hybrid cloud, we use the term true private cloud, we can extend that to true hybrid cloud, you've got to have a sort of modern infrastructure that's open on-prem. Or else you're going to be just force-fitting square pegs in round holes. >> I think there's a lot of validity to that. Especially when you think about the concept of portability or leveraging moving applications between different platforms. If I have a truly siloed infrastructure, I don't have that capability. Whereas if you look at leveraging these open platforms of OpenStack and the tooling that I could use on top of that, cloud forms and ether services, and certainly as I move into paths and containers, I now have much more portability on where I can deploy and operate these different technologies. >> Bryan, congratulations. You guys are an Innovation Award winner. Can you talk a little bit about the solutions and what you guys are working closely with Red Hat to give to your customers? >> It's really exciting. We were awarded one of their Innovator of the Year awards for cloud infrastructure. The way this came about is, Rackspace and Red Hat have a mutual customer that really came to us where they were looking for a private cloud delivered as a service. They're looking for the operational expertise that Rackspace brings in operating these technologies at scale, but were looking for a fully certified Red Hat stack. At that time, we didn't have an offering around the Red Hat OpenStack platform. We obviously have a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, and support a number of Red Hat technologies across our businesses, but in the OpenStack space we had not productized or brought to market a main service around the Red Hat OSP Platform. And so we partnered very closely with them to bring this solution to market. But it's not as simple as just saying, "Voilà, now we have our Red Hat offering." Our focus is really to bring the operators' perspective to it. So we spent eighteen months in total, if you think about from when we really kicked off this effort with them, deploying and operating and scaling and testing, and going through all the stages of patching, and upgrading and running different workload profiles and really, scalability testing. And feeding back a lot of innovation into the Red Hat team. It led to a number of enhancements that have come in later releases of RHEL OSP, which allowed us to really get to a platform that we could stand behind, provide as a main service and deliver a four nines availability SLA around it. This is the offering that we brought together. We're being recognized for some of those innovations that we fed back into it. We consume their Distributed Continuous Integration environment, so through the DCI platform we execute over 1500 tests on a daily basis, which allows us to deliver the latest release of RHEL OSP to our customers within two weeks of a given major release. We made a number of networking plainly-needed enhancements in how can we break out the bouncing from the control plane? Things that allow us to deploy and operate these solutions at a much larger scale. >> Maybe if you could speak to one of the challenges we've heard for OpenStack for years is, it's kind of complicated, and how do we do this? And I have to think, the Red Hat service and support model partnered with the fanatical support from Rackspace should be able to address some of those concerns for customers. >> That's honestly where I think we've found the most success with customers is, OpenStack itself is a very powerful tool. But it is complex. It's not something that you're just going to download and run on a VM in your laptop to gain experience with it. >> Stu: Built by rocket scientists! What do you expect? >> Literally, quite literally! So the complexity does continue to be a barrier to adoption for many enterprises. That's where our focus of being the operators and delivering it as a service has been so key for many customers. And then, given that fully compliant or certified stack from Red Hat, the software assurance that comes with that has been a great fit to a lot of customers who really grow. >> You mentioned platform as a service. Stu, earlier, you made the comment of The Platform Formerly Known As PaaS. There's a lot of discussion about PaaS, well, it's really not here anymore. Can you guys, at least start with Bryan, maybe Stu, you can chime in, what's happening with PaaS? Is it getting subsumed? I often say infrastructure's a service plus, or a SaaS minus. What's happening with PaaS? 'Cause when you talk to companies like Oracle, it's like, "Oh, our PaaS business is rockin'!" So what's really happening out there? >> I'm sure you have thoughts on this, too. I believe that PaaS is still a very strong plane. That's where many organizations, now they're embracing cloud and cloud-native development, are looking to move up the step and leverage more fabric-like services. Things that a PaaS can provide them, that integrated development environment. How do I make it easy to consume different data services? Removing the coarse-grained building blocks that I would otherwise have to orchestrate or manage myself. So we do see a lot of adoption for that. It's kind of that progression, as I'm moving up, I'm moving into cloud-native designs and architectures. Now I'm looking to really empower and enable my developers to consume these fabric services. Moving up the stack. >> Comment I'll make on it is, if you look at what's happening with the container space, you heard about what Red Hat talked, is how they take that piece. I want to be able to take my application, have how I built that and have some flexibility as to where that lives. And that was one of the core values of what PaaS was going to offer because, if I want to do Red Hat as the AMP with OpenShift, I want to do it on-premises, I want to do it in AWS, I want to do it with Google, I have that flexibility. Maybe we're just not calling it PaaS anymore. >> Yeah, I think that's good. I think if you look at the move to containerization, there are still those other components or services that I need to consume. How am I solving for identity and networking and storage and all these other components that go into it? This is where some of the PaaS frameworks can help that. >> Just one piece. Rackspace has a really interesting portfolio of services. You're partnering with all the big cloud guys. You've got private cloud. What do your customers think when you say hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, how does that fit in to where they are today and where they're making their strategy for cloud going forward? >> Again, Rackspace does represent a very large portfolio. We are the managed cloud company. I obviously am very focused on our private cloud and OpenStack, but we have as practices, we help enable customers to either migrate to, deploy or operate on Amazon web services. Certainly, the Azure platform, and recently we announced Google Compute, providing support for that. We have customers that are coming to us looking for help in architecting or moving to these. But the reality is almost all customers, and they touched on that during the keynote here, we live in a multi-vendor strategy or multi-cloud strategy. Certain clouds, either geographically or feature-set-wise are better suited for certain applications or workloads. Many of our customers are living in that hybrid cloud world, where I'm leveraging multiple different platforms depending on workload placement or other rules to that. Where Rackspace has really stepped it is providing that cloud expertise and helping them leverage that, providing tooling to help them deploy and operate in these different environments. In some cases where it's portability, move the same application around, but oftentimes it's really workload placement and how do I more effectively use it. >> We were talking in our open about the bromide from Marc Andreessen in Software's Eating The World, and the implication, tying that into Benioff's statement that there'll be more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. You're seeing some big SaaS tech companies like Workday and Salesforce, and Infor's always been there, moving to the Amazon cloud. And others who are maybe saying, "Well, I'm not sure I want to move to the Amazon Cloud." So my specific question is, relative to SaaS takeup on things like OpenStack, what are you seeing there? >> Ironically, certainly in private cloud, that's probably one of our biggest areas of growth is companies that are launching SaaS platforms for all the same reasons that they would be using an AWS to back that, right? They have the agility and rapid growth and elasticity that they can build into it, but they're running their platform, and depending on HR, you mentioned Workday, we have another great example. Ultimate software. They run their platform. Again, it's HR management and other services they want to run in a private cloud context, but deploying that framework where they can leverage cloud-native deployment. OpenStack has been a great fit for that, and helped them grow and scale. >> What's next for you guys in your world of OpenStack? Can you give us a little road map, and what we should expect going forward? >> For us, very specifically, if you focus on the IaaS layer, we continue to be very focused on operational efficiencies. How are we helping customers get the right unit economics out of a private cloud? Getting to greater densities, higher performance, more optimal usage of their cloud as we bring more visibility to actual capacity planning and capacity management, and make sure they're really leveraging or growing their cloud as they can. And then certainly from a feature set where we continue to move up and adopt these other services. I know we touched on earlier on the PaaS. This is an area where we're starting to get a lot of customer demand saying, "Can you help us in this area? "Are there things that you could be doing?" Going straight to native Kubernetes or looking at the different PaaS frameworks like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry. These are areas that we're starting to work more and more to potentially bring services to help customers really leverage these platforms. >> Paul Cormier was talking about how, you know, early days of the Cloud everybody thought everything was going to Amazon and so forth. But everything is going to the Cloud. Whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud, I know somebody told me the other day they're running an application in VMS. Okay, so some stuff never dies. But generally, the world will be cloud. Maybe we'll stop using the words like cloud and digital. Look at a camera! It's not a digital camera. Your thoughts on that? You buy that? >> No, I think you're spot-on. There's a long tale, there's still a lot of AS/400 out there. Although with OpenPOWER, maybe you could make the argument it's coming to OpenStack anyway. It is. If you think about any greenfield development, it's all being done in cloud-native ways. If you look at folks coming out of school and new application development, nobody's developing in the context of bare metal or legacy client/server apps that are built in that framework. I think even as enterprises continue to replatform services, they're moving into that cloud way. So they can take the long-term benefits of agility and cost-savings they're looking for. So we'll become ubiquitous. You're right, at some point, we're going to stop calling it cloud. It's just the way you're consuming infrastructure. >> Final question I have for you. A piece that I hadn't heard enough about when it comes to OpenStack is that kind of application modernization and replatforming. How does OpenStack fit into that discussion with your customers? I'm worried we talked in the keynote this morning about, it's like, oh, okay. We're going to do new stuff, but we might move the old stuff. We're not just moving the old stuff and leaving it, right? >> You're absolutely right. If you think of enterprises that are adopting or going all-in on OpenStack, they have, if you go back to the pets vs. cattle analogy everybody knows, they have lots of pets that they need to care for. We've looked at it and we've actually worked very hard with many customers on, how do I leverage things like Ceph to back Nova, and help bring things like live migration and other services that help OpenStack still cater to those pets and not force them in a full cloud-native model. How can I still deliver some amount of resiliency and failover in the infrastructure so the app doesn't have to be aware of it, and that way they can have one environment to run both new cloud development, but also still care for those legacy apps. >> Excellent. Bryan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you guys. >> Enjoy the rest of the show. >> Bryan: Thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Be right back. (energetic music)