(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's theCube. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Woman: Sure. Um, so, yeah, as you were saying, OpenDaylight really kind of kicked things off from a open source networking standpoint. I mean, there were certainly other open source controllers earlier, in sort of the market life cycle, but they kind of never really made their way out of the universities. OpenDaylight was the first that really had a lot of commercial participation and uptake, kind of in the real world, so to speak. Um, so with that, I think there was a lot of learning that happened, both on the vendor's side, with regard to open source, as well as on the user side. Um, and as the OpenDaylight platform matured and started coming to fruition, we started seeing a lot of other projects sort of both below at the platform layer as well as further up the stack. So at this point, and we've been talking about this quite a bit here at ONS, um, we've been talking a lot about the whole open networking stack that has sort of come to fruition now. You know, really low level stuff, DPDK was just announced today. Fido, which is sort of big data for networking. Then all the way up the stack to ONAP, which was just announced last month. ONAP is a bringing together of the ECOMP Project that was started by AT&T and then they brought it to The Linux Foundation and Open-O, which actually sort of germinated within The Linux Foundation with a lot of input from, um, a number of small vendors, as well as major carriers, particularly in Asia. So, um, bringing those things together at the orchestration layer, and so now we've got this sort of whole stack. Some of it, a lot of it is Linux Foundation projects, some of it is other projects with other open source foundations. All of which we work with very collaboratively across all those different projects. >> Man: Right, right. >> But at this point, we're really kind of looking at how do we enable people to consume this a little bit more easily from the user side? And then also from the developer side. There are a lot of developers who are involved in multiple different projects. Which of course means that they're spread very thin across all those projects. And we're looking at how do we make it a more feasible and scalable activity for them? >> Right. >> So for example, you know, OpenDaylight is upstream of a lot of other projects. There are a lot of other projects that have a lot of dependencies on OpenDaylight. So how do we streamline the release train in such a way that, you know, everybody gets what they need at the time that they need it, so they can do their releases on a timely basis and so forth and so on. And that just, you know, that makes things a lot easier from a developer standpoint. That also sort of naturally increases the, improves the integration points between those projects which is, of course, better for users. >> Man: Right. >> Um, so those are a lot of the things that we have in motion sort of across the Linux Foundation, um, and I think that the other thing that we've really seen over the last year come to fruition is a lot of the early adopters of OpenDaylight in particular have now spent enough time working with the open source community, either through their vendors or increasingly directly themselves, that they kind of get this open source thing, and they understand kind of what the processes are and why we do things they way they do. >> Right. >> And so they're willing to take a much more active role. AT&T is a prime example of that. They were working on ECOMP themselves internally, and they, very quickly, came to the realization that in order to scale it as quickly as they needed to, I mean, they were putting tens of thousands of their developers through specialized boot camps, right? >> Man: Right, right. >> The networking people to become networking developers. But at the same point, you just can't push people through the system that fast enough, nor can you hire enough people that fast enough. And so that's why this has decided to bring it to the open source community. >> Man: It seems like there's kind of an acceleration of carving out some piece of what was proprietary and putting it out to continue the development in an open source world. >> Any "why", you kind of answered the question just now in terms of there's not enough people. But more interestingly, you talked about some open source stuff just never gets going. What are some of the real secrets that make an open source project run? >> Yeah. >> Versus those that don't, or you know, die on the vine. >> Yeah. Um, there are a lot of different components, of course, like with anything. Some of it is technical, right? Do you have the right architecture? Is it one that can scale? Is it extensible? Are the right kinds of people involved in the project? Is the project being informed by the right kinds of people? So if you go and build something that nobody needs, either because you don't have the right people involved, or because you're not open to that feedback, it's going to die on the vine. So, you know, a successful project really has to have a strong community around it. And it's a-- >> Jeff: Chicken and egg. >> Chicken and egg thing, right? How do you get a strong community? Well, you have the right processes in place, but you also make sure that you have the right people involved so that they can build the right kind of thing. And that they have the skills to do it effectively. >> Right. And then the other interesting trend we're seeing is, The Linux Foundation is becoming kind of the hub where you put these things, um, to grow, and as you said, really to cross-pollinate with the other open source projects that have all these interdependencies. >> And that seems to be an accelerating trend as well, as least from the outside looking in. >> Lisa: Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And I think we learned a lot with, with OpenDaylight and also with OpenStack. You know, when OpenStack started, and OpenStack of course is even older than OpenDaylight, but when OpenStack started, I think there was all kinds of euphoria in the industry because open source was relatively new to infrastructure, and infrastructure people, it was like, "Oh, I can build everything "that I ever wanted to build now!" Um, and so there was this sort of irrational exuberance about feature proliferation. In some ways, kind of at the expense of platform stability initially. And at a certain point, the users, again, started getting involved and said, "That's great. We need the thing to actually work. "At scale, in real world environments. "Please focus on that." And you know, that's the real beauty and strength of open source, is when you have users who care, and see the possibility of a project, they can be actively involved and actively influence where the focus of the project is going to be. And that's how you get to something that's going to be useful to people quickly. >> Thank you. >> Well, it'd be great to hear a little bit more about how you-- on these, I'm always kind of mystified as an analyst or a journalist or whatever, when you see these things. The press release comes out, "ONAP is the new thing", right? There's a new thing every week. How do you ensure the success? How do you get the momentum behind it? I imagine there's a lot of stuff that's been happening behind the scenes for ONAP. >> Lisa: Yep. We try not to keep it too behind the scenes. It has always been part of open source culture and what's proven to be a best practice is openness and transparency of not just the code itself but the processes around it. >> Scott: Mhm. >> Um, if people feel like they understand what's going on, that things aren't being hidden from them, that they can have a voice. >> Scott: Right. >> They're much more actively willing to participate. So that's really kind of the key to building any kind of community. >> And how do you work with a big carrier, like, I mean, the fascinating part about this for me is for our viewers who don't know what ONAP and ONOS and ODL are, it's basically all this carrier software that's becoming open source and they're just putting it out there, saying, "It's no longer our family jewels. "Everybody can use it." I mean, that's a big leap for an AT&T, you know? Tell us how you work with AT&T or Verizon or some of these big, gigantic organizations. Like, they just hand you a thumb drive? (laughter) How do you get the intellectual property? How's that process start? >> In the case of AT&T, they reached out to The Linux Foundation and said, "We want and need to do this. "Help us do it. We don't know how this works. "Help us, teach us." But it's very much a, you know, a big part of the role of The Linux Foundation in all of this project proliferation and so forth is teaching people how to do open source effectively. Because, again, it's not just about throwing coders at a problem, 'cause you can do that inside your own organization as well. It's understanding how to do that in a collaborative manner, how to carve off what parts to open source, 'cause AT&T's ECOMP platform, not all of it has been open source. Some portion of it, the stuff that's really important and proprietary and is considered the crown jewels, that has stayed internal, but they've shared a reasonable, fairly large percentage of the base platform with the open source community. And learning to draw that line is an art. And figuring out what is commodity and really could and should be shared with the rest of the world so we're not all reinventing the same wheel. >> Scott: Right. >> But rather than having ten developers here doing that and ten developers here and duh duh duh dah, we can put 30 developers, all working together, to get the same thing more quickly. That shifted mindset can take a little bit of time, a bit of education, and that's kind of part of what The Linux Foundation brings to that process of onboarding new open source projects. >> Jeff: Right. And then on the other end, I always think of Randy Bias. He's one of our favorite guests, Especially with OpenStack, and he knows a couple OpenStack Silicon Valleys ago, where he was somewhat critical on the other end, saying we also have to kind of reign things in, and you have all this risks of stuff going all over the place, and how do you kind of have some organization at the top end because of successful growth can drive a bunch of different agendas and things can get forked. It's not a simple thing to manage. >> No, and we've tried different models and different approaches within different projects and we've learned a lot from that. OpenDaylight was very much a, you know, you guys figure it out, hands-off kind of model. Other open source projects have been very top-down, from their governant structure to everything else. Others, like Open-O are kind of in-between where they did specifically set up an architecture committee that was composed of the leading members of the project because, again, Open-O in particular is touching the business layer of these carriers. So they really need that architecture to be meeting their specifications. >> Right, right. >> Sort of a lower layer, so it's a little bit less critical. There are lots of different models and sort of a gradation of top-down versus bottom-up and, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. (chuckling) There are pluses and minuses to all of them. I think that we've been sort of learning as we go through all of these different projects what works. And different--sometimes it's worth shifting the model and starting out one way and shifting as you go along as the project matures, too. >> Jeff: But the net-net, which I think, you said at the beginning, is that big companies are now really learning how to operate effectively in this world, in this open source paradigm. It's matured way, way, way beyond what, we used to always joke, years ago, is a free puppy, you know? (laughing) >> You know, I mean, I think Tokus understand now that it is, yes, it's a free puppy. You still have to do lots of work. I think that understanding is sort of starting to trickle into the enterprise. I still have, every time I do a briefing, people will ask me to tell them about my product, and I say, "I don't have a product. I can't sell you anything." I help bring together a bunch of building blocks that you and your vendors can put together. But I don't have a product. And that, you know, that's a major mind shift for, especially, enterprise IT, where they're used to buying things off the shelf. >> Right. >> So larger enterprises, um, are starting again. They tend to take their cues from the carriers as things get proven out in the carrier world. And so we're starting to see that the same level of understanding and also, drivers in large, especially very distributed types of organizations, where they have 50, a hundred, hundreds of different sites around the world that they need to have a centralized few of in some fashion. And the only way they can get there is with SDN and they have a very strong preference, very clear preference for open source. >> Scott: How big is The Linux Foundation now? >> Lisa: By what metric? >> Uh, people, I guess. >> Lisa: Oh, people. Um... We're a few hundred, no more. But it's not just--we're not the ones doing all the work, right? We organize things. We help things happen. We help teach people. We provide the infrastructure. >> It seems to be growing very fast, like new projects are being added and merged. >> Lisa: But again, it's vendors and it's users. >> Very grassroots. >> Yeah. We help provide the ground, the legal framework, and the technical test facilities and things like that, and kind of the organizational guide rails. But we're here to help, we're not the ones doing the work. >> Right, right. Alright, Lisa, so I'll give you the last word before we sign off here. As you look forward to 2017, what are some of your top priorities for this next year? >> Lisa: Yeah, so, several things. First order is really enabling our users to really be successful with the projects that they already have in hand. In many cases, they're well through the phase of proof of concept and all the way onto production, and we just want to make sure that they're continuing to get everything they want out of the project and supporting them and supporting their vendors. And really building out the commercial ecosystem around it, so that they have a strong base of support. So that's one thing. Certainly on the OpenDaylight side, with some of the newer projects, it's really about figuring out what are the best practices that we can implement for this project, for this project, and for this project in order to make sure that they're successful. And a lot of that, again, is that whole harmonization effort that we have going on. >> Right, right. Alright, Lisa Caywood. She knows all about bringing open source to the enterprise, and thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick, he's Scott Raynovich. You're watching theCube from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. We'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)