(quiet jazz) >> Announcer: Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE covering Open Source Summit North America 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, live in Los Angeles to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit in North America, I'm John Furrier. My cohost, Steve Miniman. Our next guest is Jono Bacon, who is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting in the community. A great talk here-- >> Jono: Thank you. >> at Open Source Summit. Great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. >> Congratulation on all your recent success, on the personal and business side. Congratulations, great to see you. So, bottom line, Open Source Summit is kind of powered by the Linux Foundation, but pretty significant accomplishment and State of the Union, if you will, calling an Open Source Summit, big tent event. What's your view on this? How do you explain to folks watching? Is this a new event, is it a combination of multiple events, certainly a great, great big tent, >> Jono: Yeah. >> cross pollination. Whatever you want to call it. But what is this event about? Share your opinion. >> I think it's interesting, and I don't work for the Linux Foundation, but I've worked very closely with them for a number of years. And I think what we've been seeing is that in the earlier days of open source, there was, you know, the Linux foundation have played a fairly key role in certain specific areas. And in recent years, they've become a real center of gravity around open source in a variety of different areas, from automotive to cloud and beyond. And obviously there's a ton of events that are happening all over the world. And the open source thing I think is interesting because it's really an umbrella event that's got four other events that are part of it. So the event that I was running, which we launched this time around, was the Open Community Conference, which is kind of like one thread of this broader event. So one of the things I like about it is is different events from my experience draw different types of audiences. The Linux Foundation events have traditionally brought a lot of professionals who work in the industry. In a similar way, that happens at OSCON as well. But I like that the events kind of become a little bit more organized and diversified into those four areas. And I think what happens then is you get a greater bandwidth of content and discussions that go with that. >> I think it's an interesting point of these other streams, if you will, kind of going into the big tent event. It's got an ecosystem vibe to it, cause you don't want to lose the specialty of the topics and interest at the events that matter for the audiences on a content basis and face-to-face communications. But it's interesting that they're taking this approach because, when you look at it, the scale that's coming, in open source generally, categorically, if you put all of the code together, it's exponentially growing. >> Jono: Oh, yeah. >> So, there's a flood coming, there's a big open source flood of code coming. So, I think it's time to think architecturally about the dams and the rivers and the flows. To your point, this is a super important point in history. >> Oh, it's without question. And one of the things that's interesting to me is in my work as a consultant, when I help companies to build communities, it's broken into a few different layers. For example, so one is a technology layer, like which of the lego bricks that you're going to choose to put together, and how do you click them together in different ways? And that's where I think the LF has become a real center of gravity around what those projects are and how to integrate. But the other thing that we're starting to see more and more of is the formalization of the software development lifecycle, which is, it's not nearly just writing code anymore. It's about automated testing and continuous delivery and deployment, and all these different pieces. So I think we're seeing a formalization of the Lego bricks, but also the instructions for how you click them together. And that's really important if we're going to broaden out this bubble. Because this is a bubble that we're in right now. This is full of invariably tech companies talking about technology. But when we get into the bigger enterprises, when we get into non-tech into the-- >> John: Blocking and tackling, the realities are there. >> And there is so much nuance wrapped up in open source that it's alien to the people outside of this world, that we need to build that better interface for that. >> And that's just putting some hardening around either software or process that there's some comfort and reliability to the users. >> I'll give you one example. Like one company that I was working with, who were a large hardware company, fairly unfamiliar with open source. And one of the first questions they asked me was, "What does success look like? We know what all these options are, we see all the things that people are talking about, but we don't know how to determine what success is." And I think even just that, it seems like an obvious thing to the people in this room, but it's not obvious to a lot of people who are new to consumer technology this way. >> They want to see a finish line or some KPI that's says, we're done! >> Jono: Exactly! >> Shipped! >> And also because this is technology that's built by a broad diverse community of people, you then, a lot of these organizations then say, "So, what is my expected social responsibility here?" So, like how do I participate in this world that I'm broadly unfamiliar with? To me it's like a hip hop guy who's trying to join a metal band. You know? (John laughs) It works differently. >> It's completely different genres of developers and also environments. So, what's your advice to customers? Because they have to navigate because the mainstream adoption of Linux, obviously, and now new projects as they graduate or come to fruition will be deployed. So there is an ops, the DevOps certainly is a movement we're seeing, we can agree on. But now I got to put it into production. I'm a bank or I'm an enterprise. Hey, I got some guys that are monitoring. We're not that active, but we're happy to use it, be a user. How do you talk to that customer? >> Jono: Right. >> The way which I try to approach it is is to break it into a few different areas. The first thing is to first of all make sure that everybody's got the same sense of what the problem is that you want to solve. One of the things that was most transformative to me when I started consulting was it's amazing how many people think they're solving the same problem, but they're actually on a completely different grade of the same problem. So to me, what I like to do, is I like to define what I call a set of key themes which are these are the big rocks that we want to target in a time frame, six months or a year, or whatever it might be. Particularly with, when you're either doing community strategy or development, or you're doing a level of open source, it's fundamentally cross-functional. It involves marketing, engineering, product, there are executive stakeholder requirements, and then there's the people on the ground who are delivering those, so getting those themes in place I think is critical. But then to me what's important next, is to break a broader strategy down into smaller, consumable pieces. I think one of the things where a lot of companies get stuck is they're aware of these different Lego bricks that are available to them. They're aware of some optimizations in terms of workflow, but it's such a huge thing to bring into an organization that invariable is already got a very, very, stodgy or very specific culture that they've got to somewhat unseat. So to me, you need that combination of permissive, top-down approach, which is invariably your exec saying we see value in this, but then you need to break the strategy and the execution down into smaller manageable pieces that a team can wrap their head around. >> We talked to the Cisco guy, Ed, and he was, we were talking about DevNet, a huge developer community for Cisco. DevNet Create was kind of their cloud-native group that they've put together, great little skunk works, worked out great. But those are two languages. It's two worlds. The semantics of what they're saying is the same thing, but the translation is needed. This seems to be a common thread within the DevOps community now that the rubber hits the road, and people see the obvious benefits of what is true private cloud or cloud native. So, how do you go ahead? You provide like a dictionary, and say, "Hey, here's the translation. Okay, he really means that." I mean, are you being more herding the cats, being a translator, or is the client further along than that in your mind? >> It varies, it does vary from company to company. And a chunk of this, at least from my experience, is there is a significant translation layer. One of the things I talked about in my keynote on Monday was I see collaboration ... When I do community strategy, but fundamentally, it really is organizational design. It's just outside of a company in some cases, and sometimes inside of a company. In an organization, you'll have a set of stakeholders making decisions, and then the people who've got to execute on those decisions. And there is often a massive translation layer between them. I run a conference called the Community Leadership Summit each year at OSCON, and every year a couple hundred community managers come along, and I hear the same story from a lot of them, which is, I joined this company, I started building out, I started doing my work and my manager wasn't happy. And to me it's because the execs are defining value that they want to see, but it's not getting translated into tatics, and invariably a lot of the folks who are coming into it-- >> John: Where their ROI calculations are-- >> Yeah, a lot of that's-- >> They're not seeing a real answer. They don't know what success looks like. >> And they come in, and they don't necessarily have the strategic background to internalize that requirement into a place that they can move it forward. So, you get this kind of, this impedance mismatch. So, a big chunk of what I tend to do is to really try to understand what those requirements are and to work across the organization to try and-- >> John: You're doing architecture? Like what would be organizational behavior architecture in the wild, but also an arbiter to the managers. It's looking good, it's like you're trying to the score of the game. You're keeping-- >> Jono: And some days as well, as I'm sure anyone who's watching this, will have seen this with the companies they work with, this isn't rocket science. You know, what someone says they want, this is going to sound incredibly patronizing, it's not meant to, but when someone says what they want, invariably what they actually want is not that thing. So for example, I was working with a company a couple of months ago and they were saying, "We just want growth. We absolutely want to grow as quickly as we can." And when I dug into it with their CEO, what they really wanted was brand recognition and acceptance. And those are two very different challenges that you got to approach there. >> John: Stu, get a word in, I'm sorry if I've taken all of it. >> Yeah, John's passionate about community if you can't tell. The question I have for you is, building a community takes time, and things are changing faster than ever. How do you help people manage that pace of change versus I want results? It seems strategy is something that is for today, and we're changing often. So, how do you manage that give and take of growing yet breaking? >> It's a great question. And again, I think it varies. To me, there's some fundamental pieces that are involved in the way that I, and I take one approach and other people will take different approaches, I'm certainly not the only person who's doing this. The approach that I like to take is is we first of all need to treat communities as a journey. I think a lot of people think we have a product or a service, let's get people interested, and it's seen as a series of individual interactions with individual people. Whereas the way I like to look at it is when that person discovers your product, your service, your framework, whatever it may be, there's a journey from how they learn about it, how they go up an on-ramp to get something done, how you get people making their first contribution or how they derive their first piece of value, and then how you incentivize and reward them to keep them moving along the journey. So to me I look at it as this zoomed-out birds-eye view of this journey that I want to craft. And then I like to break that down into small bite-sized pieces that form the strategy. But the other thing is, and this varies depending on the company, is to what level of transparency and openness you need to communicate with different people. So, for example, one of the first things I do with inner source when people bring in open source principles inside a company is to make sure we have weekly reports going out and we're updating the stakeholders, more specifically, on a regular cadence. Because in that kind of environment where there's an existing enterprise, we all see these like digital transformation consultants come in-- >> Oh god, it's a total gravy train. They make the bookings and the billings. Reminds me of the old ERP deployments. Write a big fat check, and it'd be like, all these consultants come in and make all the cash. >> I think a lot of people look around thinking, alright, Lunchbox, you'll be here for a year. You'll be gone then, all right, and we'll go on to the next thing now our CEO cares about. So to me it's like-- >> John: Well, the consulting is being disrupted. It's interesting, you're a contrarian in your world because you have a consulting firm, but the old model things used to be the next gig is get that next consulting gig, so you worked not to actually put yourself out of a job, which is where the client wants to get. And that's where Agile and cloud has come in. It's interesting is, this is where the work product is. You know what success is in that model. You can come in and say, look, we did our work, everything. You've got a community that's vibrant. You got operational, they operationalized your value. >> Jono: Yep. >> You don't need me anymore, unless you want me. So, it's one of those kinds of conversations. Your thoughts? >> I agree. And it's interesting you mentioned Agile. One of the things that I've noticed as well, and I'm sure lots of not just consultants but people notice this as well is there are, I think there are broadly two types of people in the world. I think there's people who take a very kind of organic and somewhat animated approach to how they do things. And then there's some people who really need a roadmap. They need to follow a plan. I think a lot of people who are building organizational design or building communities default to we need to create a process and a workflow so people can follow that and we can have a sense of order. I don't think most people naturally want to work like that. I think there's a reason why people don't stick with to-do lists. It's because people like to have a more organic way of working. And a good example of this, in my mind, is Agile. Some people will take Agile to the nth degree with story points and epics and a lot of that kind of stuff-- >> You serve the process, the process doesn't serve the objective. I mean, it's the classic effectiveness model. But, I mean, that's the whole point. I mean, you could foreclose opportunities if you're too structured. But yet you got to have some boundaries, let the ball bounce around. So, you kind of want both. What is the ideal in your mind? >> In my mind, the approach that I'm a big fan is an approach called munsing, which was a story of, I forget his name, there's a story of a guy back in like the 50s. And he basically owned a TV factory. And what he'd do is he'd go up to like an engineer who's building one of these big, bulky old TVs, and he'd basically pull out components until it stopped working. And then he'd put that last component in so it would be the minimum level of components for it to work. Ended up saving the company a ton of money. I like to take the same approach process. What's the minimum level that you need that gives people the creativity to be successful in a predictable way? So, like with Agile, these epics and stories and things like that, I think a lot of that stuff is just there to deal with crappy product managers, like people who aren't very good at manning your project. No process is going to deal with someone who's not good at organizing. >> You need to bring to me the right level of the human ingredient and the process is what keeps people ticking over-- >> The other thing too that I find in that area is people kind of redefine, or they maybe mischaracterize what outcome is. Everyone's outcome driven. Love that word. (Jono laughs) It's all about the outcome. In this case, the TV's got to work with a less amount of moving parts. >> Jono: Right. >> That's the outcome. And so, outcomes can be bastardized if you will, could be really mangled in its definition. How do you work with clients on trying to really temper and set the expectations on what the outcome is? Cause the manager still wants to know what the outcome is going to be. So, do you reverse engineer from there? How do you tackle that? >> Jono: It's interesting. A big chunk of it for me is just being realistic. There is no minimum amount of work that needs to be put in to achieve any kind of community. I think you can build a tiny community with one person. However, depending on the requirements and the goals, there's just certain things you have to do. And there's certain time and resources that are required. And also just expectations. Like one of the expectations that some people wrestle with I think is, if you're building a community they're either inside your organization or outside, it's only going to succeed if a broader set of people participate. You know, we see this trend where you hire a community manager and that person lives in a forum or a slack channel to build out the community. Doesn't work. >> John: Yeah. >> Because the people in that community want access to other people. >> This value creation mindset in communities. Value has to be a group dynamic. This individual contributions, I get that. But the group dynamic is critical. Not just a message board moderator. I mean, that's basically what you're saying. >> Jono: Exactly. >> That's a message board. >> Nobody wants to deal with >> John: That's a tool. >> the interface of the thing you care about. And that's the community manager. So, a chunk of this then is a different mindset in how people operate. One of my clients is a company called HackerOne. I wrapped up work with them a little while ago, and their CEO is this guy called Mårten Mickos who-- >> John: Yeah, Mårten's great CUBE alumni. >> Phenomenal. For me, he's one of the people I most respect in our industry. >> John: He's a great strategic thinker, understands community, knows tech. Great guy >> Jono: Amazing. >> One of the things that he said when he joined HackerOne was I want everybody in this company to know a hacker. Everybody's got to know our audience. Everybody's got to understand the needs, the desires, the insecurities, the worries, the dynamics, otherwise we can't build a community. It's not just hiring a person to interface to that. That's one of the trickiest things because, again, it takes time. >> John: It's alignment to the audience. >> Right >> John: This is classic. >> Ingratiating in and actually being cool. Aligning with them >> Right. And if it's done well it's really rewarding because I think people who ordinarily wouldn't see the fruits of their labor. >> Well, Jono, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up the segment here on what's exciting you about potential new things that are coming around the corner. Obviously, we see the promise of blockchain which could have a great big application for communities. We're doing some things with it now that we're testing in our community around trying to create these new value networks. Certainly, there's new tooling coming out. Things like theCUBE and content and communities. New things are coming. The growth is going to be here which is going to create great new opportunities. >> Jono: Yeah. >> What are you excited about as you want to navigate the community landscape? Because the thesis is more people are coming in, more rivers of distinct audiences are going to want specialty but yet the broad market ... What are you excited about the community opportunity? From compensation to interaction to culture. What's your thoughts? >> There's a few things I'll subdivide it into things that relate to my bread and butter which is communities and things just more broadly in technology. The one thing I'm really excited about communities is I feel like the value proposition has become well understood, is not just in open source but outside with Proctor & Gamble, H&R Block, Harley Davidson, all these examples. Where people see the value in doing this work and doing it well. And that's great because I think we're improving the state-of-the-art of how we do this. One of the reasons why I got into this was I want my career to leave a fingerprint on structured, predictable ways in which we can do this as opposed to seeming magic science that a lot of people seem to think community is. >> John: Or a series of one-offs that are not understood or can't be operationalized or leveraged in any way. >> Jono: Yeah, exactly. From a technology perspective, there's a bunch of things. I'm really excited about crowdsource security, things like HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Synack, things like that. I think there's a lot of excitement in my mind around bringing open source into financial services. I think that's an industry that's ripe to be disrupted which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever say. Ripe to be disrupted. (John laughs) And then I'm also really excited about the work that's going on obviously in A.I., but the intersection of A.I. with kind of like voice control. Obviously, things such as Google Home and Alexa, but also things like Mycroft. I think blockchain is interesting. It's kind of less interesting to me. It's not really something I've really been following very closely, but I think it is. I think it's pretty neat. But then also just the formalization of the end-to-end software development lifecycle and how we're seeing, you know, GitHub was transformative in technology for a lot of companies. And now we're seeing GitHub as one piece, and you've got continuous delivery and continuous deployment. And also, we manage ideas, the project manager, all that kind of stuff. >> I think there's a lot of transformative ideas coming. And I think it's super exciting. Congratulations on all the great work you're doing. >> Jono: Thank you. Appreciate it. >> I just think that the self-governing community model that's now becoming mainstream people are starting to figure out how to balance that with the command and control top down and hierarchy job definition specifics, and balancing that. I think the self-governing open source model certainly prove that. And communities as a working example of what you can operationalize. >> It's exciting. >> And crowdsourcing just takes it to the consumer level. >> Right. >> Okay, it's working there too. Okay, great job. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> John: Jono Bacon, >> John: Bacon Consulting. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Silicon Angle Media's theCUBE, worldwide leader in live, enterprise tech coverage here at DockerCon 2017, Austin, Texas. Happy to have on the program, a guest that's been on before. Mazda Marvasti, he's the CEO of appLariat, and he's brought along a managed service provider of his, also a customer of his, Thomas Chamtie, who is the founder of KMicro Technologies. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you sir. >> Alright, so you're both from Orange County, come down here to Austin, I have some local friends of mine they're like, God all these tech conferences are coming down here. I'm like, this seems to be where open source kind of gathers. There's the OSCON coming in a couple weeks, I'll be back later this year for Cube-con, come there. First time for both of you. Just quick, how's the show been for you so far? >> It's been really well received in terms of our product announcement and our company, and not just open source, enterprise. Enterprise applications are all over the place. For us, doing a launch at DockerCon was very appropriate because our company is all about taking your existing applications, new applications and taking them through the journey of not just into the cloud, but into the container era, running on a modern container environment. So it's been well received so far. >> Mazda, it takes some really interesting stuff this week and even the last few months when I've been hearing the cloud space. We've been talking about micro services and cloud-native and everything like that. But customers have, you talk of the enterprise, they've got hundreds if not thousands of existing applications. Therefore, what about them? Ben Golub got on stage, said, "it's not a bimodal world, we need to give them platform, to be able to move forward." That ties into the vision of your company right? >> Oh absolutely. The real problems and the real opportunities are with the existing applications. How do you get those applications same kinds of capabilities that you're trying to give brand new applications being done with microservices. That's why Thomas with KMicro, they're a managed service provider that they're working with customers along the same journey. >> Thomas, before we get into the solution with appLariat, just give us the thumbnail, your background and your company. >> Basically, KMicro as a company is a three year old company, we do managed services for mid to large sized customers. I, myself have been doing IT for about 20 years. Not the fresh guy on the block. But we were introduced to appLariat, when we were looking to do a little project for a client of ours. They had a specific legacy application that they needed to modernize. We're looking for a solution for them that would help them modernize the application, at the same time stay up to date with the latest technologies. Docker seemed, in addition to containerizing, all their application was the solution, was the way to go for them. That's when we were introduced to appLariat and worked together on that project and we've been working with them since then. We love working with these guys, their solution seems to solve a huge issue for a lot of our clients and we look forward to actually doing that again and again for more clients. >> I mean, the challenge here is how does KMicro repeatably do that across customers? So you have consistency which is the same thing when you look at an enterprise. Yeah, I can hand craft an application so that it's containerized and I can deploy it. But how do I get repeatability and consistency across different teams across my applications? That's the scale issue, that you can't use muscle memory to move your applications into the cloud. >> Mazda you're totally right. I've watched the app modernization environment and when you go say, oh what's the killer app, what's the number one thing, it's custom. And that's not scalable, that's not repeatable. Maybe unpack for us a little bit about what you guys bring, that journey along there and how you fit in that spectrum. >> Again, the key is, not to be reliant upon software artists to sit there and script away per application, how does this thing get containerized? What you want to bring is automation and uniformity across these applications. So that you have the same type of consistency for the applications. Then not only that, but when you deploy it, how does the orchestrator manage those deployed containers? Because if you're not going to run it in on an orchestrator, it becomes really difficult to manage it. We use Kubernetes from the backend to actually orchestrate these containers but then you have to have a policy layer that manages that entire infrastructure. Kubernetes is great at knowing that to do, it just doesn't know when to do it. So we provide that when capability. Again, that's a solution that a managed service provider can essentially say okay, now I can repeatably do this across my customers and manage the environments in a similar manner. Versus having to do one-offs. That's what we're trying to get away from. >> Thomas, could you maybe, if it's possible, walk us through a little bit that project with the customer. How long it took, how many people were involved. Where some of the heavy lifting is there. Anything that you've done this, to say oh okay, here's what we've learned for the next time. >> So one of the clients is a GPS tracking company. And they have the DevOps team that were struggling maintaining their code. They have code all over the place. Mazda was more involved on this project than I might have been, so he'll chime in on that. But what we walked out at the end with this client, is that they had a platform that their DevOp could go to and test their code against without having to spend tremendous amount of time or effort into putting all the pieces together. The application will actually do all of that for you from A to Z. They didn't have to worry about storage or processing or memory or any of that stuff. It was just there for them to use. In a second, or a few seconds, they could just conduct an environment, test their code against it, and all was said, when they're done with it, it just shuts down. And it scales up as well, so if they needed to do some testing against an application or a code, they would do the test and then shut down the environment and they're ready to go. And move on. >> Right, the primary use case was that I'm spending way too much money on AWS for DevTest. Because developers would go spin up the VMs and use it to develop and do some unit testing and then the VMs will just live there. So ongoing, continuous basis. Once we put the AWS under a Kubernetes cluster, we're then able to manage the cluster size based on usage and availability, etc. Not only that but then the IT side of the house is able to govern that environment for the developers. The developers don't care to go provision machines or use iAds or anything like that. They just want to deploy their applications, be able to test it and go back and modify code. That's all they care about while IT cares about where does that code go, who looks at it, how does it get tested, what is the cost infrastructure for that. By using our product to manage that AWS cluster, they were able to save 50% on their AWS costs by just managing that DevTest environment. Now we're moving it into production. Those are the kinds of use cases that really you find containerization can bring. You talk about bringing new capabilities to the apps, but it also really goes to cost savings as well. And that was something that-- >> 50% probably conservative even, I would think. We had one of the keynotes case studies this morning, I think it was Visa, was like, 90% of my environment is being utilized less than 10%. >> Mazda: Underutilized, right. >> We know that, heck, I think back, we had server sprawl, we had vm sprawl, now we have cloud sprawl. Is it the whole API economy that allows your software to be able to plug into this, manage some of these environments? How much of it is just cloud, how much is it containers allowing us to do some of this-- >> So every layer we talk about is another layer of abstraction. Cloud is an abstraction, container is an abstraction. Orchestration is an abstraction. Every time you bring these abstractions, you're introducing inefficiency into the system. It brings efficiency in terms of how you develop, how much more secure your application is, how easily you can bring your applications up and down. It brings inefficiencies in terms of these things living on. In terms of sprawl along the cloud boundaries that your applications are running. We bring the efficiency in terms of policies. That says who gets to have what where? And when does it die? Because nothing should live forever. Unless it's your production app, it should not live forever. And when should it die? Expiring those applications and then reclaiming the environment to a smaller size so that your costs are lower or giving the resource to someone else who may need to use it. >> Mazda, Dockers made a real emphasis this week about the ecosystem. Can you talk about partnering with them, how easy it is to work with them, what you're seeing over the last year or so? >> Yeah, we're primarily using the open source Docker containerization mechanism. Because that's really prevalent in the marketplace. We found the same thing in terms of using Kubernetes. Customers are looking for having a degree of control. Close source at a level where your application is running at this point is becoming really difficult. For customers to be able to manage that ability to be able to say okay, I don't have control over this part of my environment, that doesn't make any sense to me. The open source community is really come along in terms of moving the enterprises into their direction. What we're doing is that we're leveraging those open source elements so at the end of the day, we are not in the interconnect between the customer and their applications. They can always go back to those open source tools to manage the applications however they want. We're providing the orchestration layer that sits on top of those open source tools, really unifying them and bringing them together. >> Thomas, what is this whole containerization, your partnership with appLariat mean to your business? How do you expect it to change what you guys are doing? >> There's a couple of things. One of them is modernizing the applications that we talked about a minute ago. But another thing that we wanted to bring on the table and use their solution for was disaster recovery. No one had thought of real time disaster recovery without the efforts of going through a whole bunch of configuration and maintaining, a whole bunch of things. Just to have disaster recovery for a company, no matter what cloud you're in, no matter what infrastructure you use, it doesn't matter. That's when appLariat, we think, is a really good platform that we're going to build on to actually provide what we call real time disaster recovery services for our clients. I think that'll take us, that'll be pretty good for our clients and it's going to help us grow our business as well. >> Yeah, that's another one of those areas where you see a lot of managed service providers providing disaster recovery services but what that means is that they'll provide you a location in the cloud for you to have your application and then services along the lines of people. In bringing those applications to run over there. Then when there is a disaster, have to go through a lot of manual effort to get that site up and running. So what we're talking about, is that if you have your applications already containerized, you can snap shot it anywhere. Once it's snap shotted, it can come up and go down very quickly. Having that ability in terms of being able to provide disaster recovery services on a containerized application is a whole new set of capabilities that now I think it's viable for our organizations. >> Let alone the cost savings as well. Like you were talking about. The cost savings are huge. I only need to speed up the environment when needed. It doesn't have to sit idle, sitting there, costing us money or costing the client money. >> Do you see passing that savings onto your customers? >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's one of the areas that was untapped in the past and with doctoring, containerizing applications technologies, this is the next thing. This is the future of doing disaster recovery. We see it that way. And then we look for-- >> Mazda, oh sorry. >> Yeah, no worries. >> Mazda, want to give you the final word. When people leave DockerCon 2017, what do you want them to know about appLariat and the solutions you're providing. >> What I want them to know is that you don't need to become a scripting ninja to be able to containerize our applications and bring cloud native capabilities to your existing applications. You don't need to become a scripting magician. You can take your existing applications through a very easy process, get them containerized, deploy it on Kubernetes without having to know anything about the underlying infrastructure that it actually takes for those platforms to run. On an ongoing basis, as newer technologies comes along, we'll be the abstraction layer in front of the application for those customers so that they don't need to bother. Do I need to make a bet on something? Do I need to learn new technologies, do I need to upgrade my people? Keep doing what you're doing, your existing CICD process stays as is, your existing developer work levels and skillset remains as is. Everything else should be abstracted and taken away from you. >> Mazda and Thomas, thank you so much for joining us, we'll be back with lots more programming, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker, and support from its ecosystem partners. (bright electronic music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Jim Kobielus for two days of theCUBE's live coverage, DockerCon 2017, here in Austin, Texas. We are the worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage, happy to welcome to the program, a first-time guest on theCUBE, happens to also be a local here in the Austin area, so Dustin Kirkland, the Ubuntu Product and Strategy, with Canonical, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. >> All right, so Dustin, give us a good thumbnail, what's your role, and how excited are you to be at another local show. All the open source shows seem to be here in Austin. I mean, we love doing it. >> I'm super glad. >> Dustin: We love sharing Austin. Glad for people to come and visit. Just make sure you go home at the end of it. (chuckles) >> Jim: Keep Austin weird and keep it open. >> That's right, that's right. Yeah, it's great to be local, it's great to have the Docker community back in Austin. It was, a lot of these people were here for OpenStack. We'll be back for CubeCon later this year. OSCON in between. >> All right, and tell us a little bit about your role. >> Yes, so I lead Product and Strategy at Ubuntu. We make an operating system that runs in the cloud, on public clouds, private clouds, bare-metal, physical servers, down to desktops and embedded devices. >> Okay, so, I have a serious question for you. Every time we see the surveys of OpenStack, the surveys in the public cloud, Canonical's always there. I mean, everybody's using your stuff. >> Dustin: Good! >> But where are people paying money for it? What's kind of from the business standpoint, maybe you can give us the quick update on that. >> People pay money when it's mission-critical. When Ubuntu and OpenStack and soon, Kubernetes, certainly more and more, Docker, when that's part of the mission-critical infrastructure, they pay for that. They pay the support and the services, they pay for consulting, for design, for leads, for architecture. They pay for access to the product roadmap, and so we do have some really brand-name customers who pay us good money for that. >> Okay, it's our third year doing theCUBE at this show, and every year, it seems we come in with one of the same questions, which is like, all right, is this ready for production, is anybody using it? We backed you to knock down the doors of everybody here, and give us more customers to talk to, so, what do you see, what's your answer to that? >> Yeah, I mean, it strikes me as really odd when people are still asking, "Are containers ready "for production?" Containers have been part of our DNA in Ubuntu for almost 10 years now. Shipping an OS that boots into a container that's able to run LXD containers, Docker containers, and run those at tremendous scale. We'd run containers underneath as the control plane of every OpenStack cloud we've ever deployed, every Kubernetes cloud we've ever deployed, every Hadoop cloud we've ever deployed. So containers are part of our production system. >> So do you guys have a marketing term? You guys are the hipster Linux container company. You were doing it before it was cool. >> I guess so, I mean it's, I guess, it's like asking, and I wonder, you think cellphones are mainstream yet? It's like, yeah, it is now, but you're probably one of the first in your family to have a cellphone, right? It's, we're kind of at that juncture, where we've been doing for a long time, and it's good to see others finally taking advantage as well. >> In the keynote this morning, we talked, we saw a lot about the maturation of Docker. They really started out working with the developer, they've really grown, working with the business, working with the enterprise. Talk to us about your customers as it fits into the container space in general, Docker, specifically. What are you guys seeing? >> As an operating system that delivers the latest and greatest open source software across multiple architectures, public and private clouds, Docker fits into that very well, in fact. It sits alongside LXD at giving that machine container, replace your VM's experience, but also the new way of writing applications. Solomon talked about applications, and if you're going to develop an application, Docker is a great application development platform. So when applications are being developed, (mumbles) or microservices, from scratch, Docker is a fantastic approach, and we see more developers using Ubuntu desktops and Ubuntu in the cloud, as that development platform. As that matures, then we get into a situation where it becomes mission-critical, and then we have really interesting commercial discussions around how do we really help that platform succeed? >> All right, we just Microsoft on the program. >> Dustin: John, right? >> Yeah, John was on, talks about, (mumbles) Microsoft is talking about being open, Microsoft's talking about choice. They actually talked, John mentioned, your company and your operating system. When we get to cloud solutions, Canonical's supported everywhere. How do you guys differentiate? How do you make sure that they're choosing your product as opposed to something else? >> So Ubuntu itself, always latest and greatest. It's fresh, you're never more than six months away from the next latest and greatest everything across the board. You're never more than two years away from an LTS, a long-term support release. That's really the key differentiator for Ubuntu is its freshment, its velocity, and that maps very well to the container world, where things are revving very, very quickly. >> All right, security was a big focus this morning also. What's your viewpoint as to where security lives, how that works with all of your environment, and what you guys do for that-- >> I've been a security nerd for most of my career. In fact, it's one of those jobs you leave but you always kind of get sucked back into because you care about it, honestly. Ubuntu as a platform, security, we take very seriously. Encryption anywhere, we can use encryption, updates, latest and greatest updates, kernel patches, Livepatch for the kernel. (coughs) Livepatch for the kernel is particularly interesting from a security perspective because it enables us to address security vulnerabilities without rebooting systems, and that's really important in a containerized environment, where you're not just running one or two machines, you're running potentially thousands of machines or containers or applications, and being able to update one single kernel with a Livepatch, without rebooting any of them, that's what security people are excited about when we talk Ubuntu kernel and security. >> (mumbles) Ubuntu being deployed into Internet of things, or to what extent is your roadmap going in that direction 'cause we're seeing a lot of new development going into the Internet of things, to deploy artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms and data, down to the edge, and so-- >> Yeah, it's beautiful, I mean, that edge-to-cloud story is something that we've got a very clear view on. We produce an OS, an Ubuntu OS called Ubuntu Core, is a read-only operating system custom-tailored for IoT devices. That's the OS, it's the same Ubuntu but rolled and managed and updated in a different way. Applications fit onto that device in the form of snaps, or Docker containers, frankly. They're a little bit different in the way that they're implemented, but we have a new packaging system that's well-adapted, well-tuned-- >> A snap is more, something different from a container, how? >> It is, it's a form of a container. It's less than a container, but it uses some of the same container primitives. It's, frankly, it's an archive and a set of security profiles that wrap that tarball, essentially, and the way it's executed in a very secure manner, so it's wrapped with AppArmor profiles, it only has access to certain parts of the system, it contains its own dependencies, but they're contained in such a way that they're protected from the rest of the system. A lot of that sounds like Docker, and it is similar to Docker, but Docker provides a little bit more of that machine experience. Docker will include a file system, it'll draw an IP address sometimes, or defroute traffic, whereas a snap actually runs directly on the underlying OS. It's more tightly linked to that OS. In terms of linking back to the machine learning, that happens in the cloud. Inevitably, IoT drives more cloud adoption because those little IoT devices, they've got so little processing power and storage by design, that information needs to go somewhere, and it goes to the cloud, where something like a TensorFlow, running in a Docker Swarm, or a Kubernetes, or some combination of those two, are really crunching the interesting problems. >> First, Google recently made a big to-do about federating more of the machine learning algorithms all the way to the edge device, so, the world is going in that direction but I hear you. That's, they're very constrained-- >> Dustin: We hear a lot about the edge. >> To run the algorithms that pull power on the edge device, but it's coming. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Great. >> Stu: All right, so Dustin, I heard Kubernetes and Swarm, you guys, agnostic to that, support all of it. >> Dustin: We are. >> What do you guys code on, what do you hear from customers? >> Yeah, so we're very proud of our position here. I'm here at DockerCon, supporting Docker. Docker Inc. is a close commercial partner of Canonical. We, Canonical is authorized to resell Docker Enterprise Edition, Docker services, Docker support. We've got mutual customers who buy that directly from Canonical, and we support Docker and Swarm and Datacenter on top of Ubuntu, and that's a great story that brings us from the developers who are running Docker on Ubuntu on their Macs and Windows machines. John, I'm sure, was talking about Windows and Docker. But when they put that into production, we've got the wherewithal to support that. We offer Kubernetes as another platform. I've spoken with some really bright, just last night, with a really bright cloud architect from a major Internet service provider, and their role is they set up Docker Swarms for their internal customers, and Kubernetes Clusters for their internal customers, and Cloud Foundries, and OpenStacks, all inside of this big telco Internet cable giant, and it makes sense, and they can do all of that, and do all of that on top of Ubuntu, because it's the platform that can offer whatever they need for their customers. >> All right, one of the other announcements in the keynote this morning was LinuxKit, so, I got a little bit of a preview before the show, and I don't feel that it was Docker trying to punch at the providers of Linux, and it didn't seem to come off that way in the keynote, but for those that hear at a glance, oh, wait, LinuxKit developed with a bunch of, you know, seems like mostly hardware companies plus Microsoft and Docker. What do you guys see, how do you look at that? >> It's genuinely fun for an open source engineer to put together a Linux distribution. It's like the thing you want to do, and customize it and tailor it, and the beauty of open source is you can absolutely do that, and so, what I saw from LinuxKit, I too got a little preview, it seems it comes out of the part of Docker that also works on unikernels, Alpine, to an extent, and they've built a container-optimized, or Docker-optimized OS from Docker, so if you want Docker all the way down, it sounds like LinuxKit is a solution that they're working on, still working on. I'll say that Ubuntu, containers are in our DNA, we built a kernel and we built a security system around containers for quite some time, and we continue to optimize that, and we work directly with Microsoft, Google, Amazon to ensure that the Ubuntu that's running in those public clouds is ready to run Docker and other container systems out of the box, and very consistently, in a way that looks exactly like the Ubuntu that's running as the bash shell on the Windows desktop, as the Ubuntu desktop itself, as the server that you might run in any one of the public clouds. It's a very consistent experience. We do tune that and tailor that, but it's in ways that ensures portability. >> All right, so Dustin, you talked about kind of the history and how long people have been using it. Production should not be a question. It's just where, what, how you're doing this. What things do you still see us needing to mature, or what excites you about this going forward? >> Yeah. The management, honestly, and that comes back to security. Ensuring that running those containers at scale, you're doing that in a secure manner. Minimal is part of it. We hear that quite a bit, that, "I want a minimal image, I want a minimal host." That is an important part of it. It's, we have to be a little bit careful that we don't go so minimal that we end up creating a bunch of snowflakes, special unicorns where every container image is a little bit different, every host is a little bit different, because it's more minimal than the previous one. That actually creates more security problems, so I think thinking that problem through is, it's one of the most important problems that I think through, or I'm working on right now, and I think others are interested in working on as well. >> All right, Dustin, you've been way too pleasant through all of this interview, so before we end up, as an Austin local here, I have to ask you the divisive question. Your favorite barbecue place. (Dustin groans) >> You know-- >> Jim: Your favorite bar band, too. Keep going. >> Okay, yeah, I mean, you can't go wrong with the award-wining Franklin's barbecue or the gas station Rudy's, we love those. My favorite's a little hole in the wall out close to where I live. It's a trailer that's been serving barbecue out of that trailer since 1997. It's called Bee Caves barbecue. Those guys, they put together some fantastic barbecue five days a week. They sell it until they're out, and then they close up the shop and they go fishing, and it's, you got to get there early, and when they're done, they're done, so I-- >> Yeah, is there a connection between people that make barbecue and people that put together Linux distributions? It sounds like a lot of the same thing. >> Maybe so, maybe so, yeah. I've got a smoker out back. I like to smoke meat as much as I can. >> Absolutely, all right, well, Dustin, really appreciate you joining us. Welcome to the >> Stu, thank you, Jim. >> Stu: CUBE alumni list now, and we'll be back with more coverage here from DockerCon 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (bright electronic music) >> I remember--

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker, and support from its ecosystem partners. (bright electronic music) >> Welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of DockerCon 2017. This is theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for the next two days is Jim Kobielus, and happy to have as our first guest on the program, is Brian Gracely. A year ago, actually, Brian had a beard, and he was one of the hosts on theCUBE. He's now with Red Hat. Brian, welcome back to the program. >> Stu, great to be on this side of the table again. Good to see you guys. >> And Brian, you were at the first CUBE event back in 2010. We've had you on at least once or twice every year. You did a few more when you were on our team, but happy to have you back as a guest. Why don't you bring our audience up to speed? What brought you to Red Hat and what's your role there, and what brings you to DockerCon? >> Yeah, so, been at Red Hat about a year, a little less than a year now, worked on the OpenShift team, so focused on Kubernetes containers, integrated Linux. It was a great opportunity to be in open source, which I've been working on for a year. It was at home, it was in Raleigh, and it's a great team. It's a team that's growing. The Kubernetes space is growing, so, the vendor side of the world drew me back into Red Hat, so it's been good. >> Yeah, open source, big component about what we're talking here at this show. I heard open source mentioned a ton. It was developers, it was contributors. What's your take, did you get a chance to see some of the keynote? Solomon got out there, thanked the 3300-plus contributor. When he put up the name of the companies, I think it was 41% of the contributors for all of this are independent, but then, Red Hat's in the top six companies there. What's your take on that and the ecosystem in general? >> Yeah, I thought it was, I thought the keynote was good. Obviously, the show's doing well, so it's great to see the container space doing really well. We've been part of the Docker ecosystem since sort of day one. We like to say that we're probably the biggest distributor of what used to be Docker is now Moby, within Rail. But yeah, I think we see that, we obviously believe in the open source movement. We're seeing more and more customers, our customers who want to contribute, who want to make it the de facto buying decision as to what they use, so, yeah, it's great to see not only huge open source support, but then seeing it become, to blossom into very viable, commercial offerings around the market. >> Yeah, so, Brian, your team actually wrote a blog leading up to the show that says, "Containers or Linux." After listening to the keynote, with LinuxKit announced, it felt like, oh well, Linux is containers. It seems like, reminds me back, Sun is, the network is the computer, the computer is the network. It's all kind of looking at it. What's your take as to kind of the relationship of containers with Linux, of course Windows fits in the mix, too, but the operating system and the containers. >> Well, I think, the reason we really put that out was if you go back a little bit historically, not to bore people, containers aren't a Docker thing. Containers are a Linux thing. They were created by Google, Red Hat made a huge contribution sort of secondarily around namespaces, Google did cgroups, IBM did LXC, so it's been a core Linux feature for over a decade now. Docker did a great job of making it easier to use, but at the end of the day, even if you look at, like, what LinuxKit and some of these other things are, they're not about sort of Linux versus Windows, it's, they are all Linux, and it's how do I represent Linux in ways of doing that? So we really kind of want to just reinforce this idea that there are things that you expect out of your operating system, containers being one of them, but if you look at every other project that's being built around this space, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's management tools that are be, they're all being built on Linux. That's the foundation of this, and it's kind of just a reinforcement to people that, remember where your tools come from, what that thing is that drives security for you, things in that space. >> Brian, you wrote a lot about kind of cloud-native and that journey kind of, rewriting applications, containers, for the fits into that a lot. What have you seen changing kind of last 12 to 18 months? Couple of shows I've been to lately, it feels like we're talking about lift-and-shift more than we are about building new applications. What's the application space look like, and I know Jim's going to want to jump in here. He covers the cloud-native stuff. >> So I think there's a couple of big things that, and I wrote about it for a while, and it's, how much has changed in the last two years have been really interesting. So, I think originally, when you went and looked at platforms, whether it was OpenShift or Cloud Foundry or Heroku or whatever, lots of sort of what we used to call opinionated systems. You dictated what developers did, right? And then, we had-- >> Jim: Opinionated systems? >> Very opinionated platforms, right? The opinion of us, the creators, was going to get forced on you, the developer, right? >> Stu: It made a lot of the decisions for you, so. (Jim laughs) >> And again, the idea was make it easier for you. You don't have to think about those things, but you're going to get them in the way that we want them, and what ended up happening was Docker would kind of became a standard way, a standard container format. We ended up having these open source schedulers like Mesos and Kubernetes and other things, and that allowed the platforms to be a little more, what I was calling composable, so, because developers may not want to use the languages that you force on them, they may not want to use them in those ways. So I think what we've seen is this sort of blurring between what used to be heavily opinionated to becoming more composable, modular, and there's always this trade-off between how much do developers want to care, how much do they not? So that's one big trend that we've seen, is this start of back and forth of what that is. The other one we saw was-- >> In terms of compatibility, (mumbles) quickly, do you see any trend in this space, containers, toward visual composition of applications? What I'm seeing in today, and I've seen generally in this space, is mostly coding, command line interfaces, any visual composition tools you guys provide or any partners of yours for-- >> Brian: Yeah, there's-- >> For building containerized applications? >> And so I think there's sort of two pieces there. It's a great question because ultimately, if the coding piece is hard, you only reach a small segment of those developers, right? You want to, it's like when websites came out, they were all hand-coded in HTML and stuff, and then you had things like Dreamweaver and these other visual tools, and then it exploded. We've seen that. To be successful in this, you've got to have tools in the desktop that make it easier for the developers. Red Hat does something that we call the Container Developer Kit, which is really, write your application, a lot of the stuff in the background gets hidden. Docker has Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows. We see some other tools. So that piece is important. The other piece that, to come back to your question about it, is it lift-and-shift? We probably see 75, 80% of the customers we work with who say, "Look, I know I've got to do cloud-native. "I've got digital transformation "and all these sort of things, "but I've got a lot of portfolio "that I'd like to modernize. "Can I do that with containers?" And I think what we've seen is, for the early days, it was containers are only for new. They only work for microservices, they're only for new, and what we're seeing, and this again goes back to the sort of, containers are Linux, is customers say, "I have an application that ran perfectly fine in Linux. "Why wouldn't it run really well in there?" And we've got customers nowadays, and this sort of blows people's minds, like, we've got customers who will pick up things like WebSphere, put them into a container, run them, modernize them somewhat, but, because the platform will give them automation, it gives them high availability, it gives them scalability, and they go, it works, and they get cost-effectiveness. So we're seeing a lot of that because you can address a lot of your portfolio. >> Oh, Brian, it's the typical maturation that we've seen. The use cases that put on stage, keep planes in the air, power the largest infrastructure, monitor fire alarms, websites, it's like, oh, this is same thing we saw in virtualization in every kind of way that's like, oh, containers run applications. (chuckles) >> Right. >> Right? >> Jim: Have you seen a big push by your customers or in the ecosystem to containerize more of the deep learning and artificial intelligence toolkits, like TensorFlow or Theano? Is that, with your customers, is that a big priority rate now or going forward? >> Yeah, so, I think the big data space was always an area that was kind of on the fence if it made sense to, in container, do you need an abstraction layer, do you want to be closer to it? We're starting to see more and more, so for example, Google with TensorFlow. Google, huge proponent of containers and Kubernetes. They're doing a lot of work to make that happen. We've been doing a lot of work with the Spark community to make Spark work really well in containers, and it becomes an issue of can you manage the resources? The container schedulers do that great, and then, can you manage getting access to the data, and we're seeing more and more storage become container-native and people understanding how that works, so yeah, the breadth of what you can do around containers has gotten very, very large. >> Yeah, any difference in how your customers look at it, whether they're doing on-premises or public cloud, or do things like Docker and Kubernetes make that not matter as much? >> I think what they, so, I joke all the time, none of our customers have a container problem. None of them have a, none of them wake up in the morning and say, "That's my problem," right? What they're saying more and more is, "I know I want to, I'd like to start getting away "from maybe owning data centers, "or by destiny, being data centers. "I need to leverage public clouds, multiple, plural," and they're sort of saying, "Look, I get the benefit of what they do, "but there's still operational differences, "what Azure does, what AWS does. "I would like some level of consistency," and so that's where the OpenShift conversation really comes into play. The operational model I can build with OpenShift as a platform is the same thing I can run on top of Azure, on top of AWS, on top of Google, and we're seeing more and more of our deals, our customers who say, "That's what it's going to look like. "Help us make that work," and today, they do it on a basic level. Somebody like Volvo, for example, some in their data center, some in AWS, and then, more and more, they go, "Go contribute upstream in Kubernetes, "and federate this stuff." Make it look more consistent, make it look more operationally consistent, and that's coming in the next version of Kubernetes, and so forth, so, that shift is happening, but what they want is sort of this consistency. The Kubernetes part, the Docker part, they're sort of details under the covers, but it does provide them a level of portability that's really important. >> All right, Brian, want to give you the final word. Red Hat has got Red Hat Summit coming up, OpenStack and Jim Whitehurst is going to be given, I think, the day one keynote there. Talk a little bit of Red Hat's presence here at the show, what we can expect to see in this space from Red Hat throughout the year. >> Yeah, so I think, from us here, and what you'll see at Red Hat Summit, like, containers are front and center. Obviously, it's an extension of Linux, but it's, we're becoming a company that's more about how to do applications faster, how to modernize applications, how to do them across multiple clouds, and it's this whole idea that those things that used to be really hard, you do them in software now, and the community is helping to fix those, so big presence here. Again, we've got a ton of customers who use Docker as a packaging format, run their containers, open, at Red Hat Summit, we're going to have 25-plus production OpenShift customers that you want to talk about running governments, running airplanes, running, like, they're going to talk about that stuff, so that part, we're really excited about. It's fun, it's fun at this point. They don't, our customers don't want to talk about containers. They want to talk about this digital transformation stuff, and that is making the technology industry fun again. >> All right, so that was my last question for Brian Gracely with Red Hat. My last question for Brian Gracely of the Cloudcast is, I haven't heard Serverless mentioned yet this week. What's wrong? >> I know, that's a good, it's a good question. The Serverless stuff's taking off two weeks from now, probably, at the same, no, down the street. Serverlessconf is happening. >> Stu: Is that part of OSCON then, or? >> No, it's its own event now. >> It's own event. >> Serverless complement to their own event. They'll probably get five, 600 people. We're seeing it as another way of looking at applications. It's functions, containerize them, write your own code, and you'll see us, you'll see what we're doing around OpenShift begin to incorporate that, sort of functions as a server, Serverless stuff, very, very soon, and around Boston timeframe. >> All right, well, Brian, always great to talk to you, and glad I can bring it to the audience, so Brian Gracely with Red Hat. We'll be back with lots more coverage here, DockerCon 2017. You're watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (funky techno music) >> Welcome back to our live coverage here of Google Next 2017, an event that last year was focused only on Google Cloud. They've actually expanded a bit, they're talking about G Suite, talking about some of the devices, and they bring in a really broad and diverse community, so when I talk to the Google people, it's not one show, it's a handful of shows. I went to the analyst event. My guest for this segment is Chris Wahl, who came in through the community event. So, excited to get that angle. Chris, thanks so much for doing the drive with me from San Francisco down to Palo Alto. For those of us not in the area, it's a 45 minute drive, it's not too bad. It's a beautiful, sunny day. It's great to catch up with you and thanks for coming. >> Always glad to be on, love being a CUBE Alumni, so, I think it's my third time. >> Wow, a three-time Alumni. It's like if you've been a host of Saturday Night Live for like seven times, you know you get the special jacket. - Automatically. >> Things like that. You're getting up there. Three times. It's like, you're not quite in Pak Elsinger area, but you have passed, you've been on more than Andy Jassey now. >> Wow, cool. >> I think that that's pretty impressive. >> Bucket list, accomplished. >> Exactly, so, what brings you to the Google event and tell us a little bit about the community event. >> Yeah, to be honest, I thought it was a spam email at first. I just got an invite saying, hey, we have this Google event going on, and I'm not really plugged in to the Google Universe too much. So I said, cool, I'm interested, I'll take a look. Got invited out by Sarah Novotny to a community focus day. >> Host: Sarah's awesome. Also a CUBE Alum, of course. >> Yeah, Alum, and ran OSCON I think, as a boarder or some kind of management facility for quite a while. So yeah, the Google Cloud Next is this week but on Tuesday. They actually had a bunch of influencers, evangelists, community members, out to spend time with all sorts of Google-y Google-ers, talking around what their vision is around kind of bridging the gap to the enterprise, what their thought around Kubernetes, and just really the community in general were. Which was kind of cool because it was all fresh and clean and new for me. So, it was really great to taste the Kool-Aid, and see how delicious it could be. >> Yeah, so I'm curious what your take is. I remember I did a panel at Interop a couple of years ago, and it was like, basically, hyper-scale, you're-not-Google, so what do you need to do, how do you do it, do you just use Google stuff, can you code like Google, can you act like Google, or are you just an enterprise and you're forced to live in the past. >> I think over the last couple of years, the idea of the Sight Reliability Engineers come out and been more focused on the enterprise and kind of dovetailed into the Dev-Op story. So, it was really interesting to hear, not only trying to talk to the enterprise, but also how they're trying to get the enterprise to kind of stop being the traditional enterprise that it's been. Which I think entirely, it's something that we practitioners have always been trying to do. No one wants to be on-call all the time and fixing these flaming disasters and things like that. But at the same time, you have to recognize that moving that much intrinsic culture poison from one side to the next is hard. They're admitting that too, it's like, we wold love for you guys to be more Google-y, and to use the tools that we have here, but we're not sure you even know what the tools are or how to use them, or what kind of documentation is necessary, or what meet-ups we can go to find my people, you know, the practitioners. >> I want to channel our friends, the Geek Whisperers, and alright Chris, so how did you transition out of being a VMware guy to someone that does cool and interesting things now, because VMware is no longer the coolness. >> That's been the vibe, yeah. It's something I personally have been trying to, I don't think in any technology you want to be that technology specific. VMware, love it, have been doing it for 12 something years, but you don't just want to be pigeon-holed in that kind of silo. Which is actually why I wanted to come out and talk with the folks at Google around what they're doing to build a community. I think it was Sam something-or-other-- >> Host: Sam Ramji. >> Sam Ramji actually came up and said, you know, as long as we're going to exist as a company, we're going to have this community day. It's the first one they've done, and they plan to do it basically infinitely forever, because they realized they had the analysts, and things like that out there, they had all the engineers and developers, but what were they missing? The folk in the trenches that are trying to adopt and use this sort of technology. I like that aspect of it. There weren't any huge, mind-shattering results that were out there, except for I think, me personally, I like that Google kind of admitted that yeah, they hadn't been doing the best job around interfacing with the community and getting IT practitioners and operation-centric folks into the fold, welcoming into the bosom of Google, and that they were trying to work on that. And it's like, okay, awesome. Let's have a conversation, which the other half of the day was an un-conference, where we literally broke up into groups, that we decided ourselves as like a democracy of Google decision-making. We formed eight different groups. Some focused on containers, I actually sat in in a two hour session where we just kind of riffed on abstraction layers and where we should we start working. Is it at the container level, is it at the hypervisor level, is it at the virtual machine level? And it was neat because everyone had a completely different idea and background around that. I felt like I was an alien in that conversation for a lot of it 'cause they're working on solving problems that are totally alien to my world. So I liked all that. >> It's an interesting crowd when the server-less stuff got talked about in the keynote today-- >> Yes! >> There was a big clap and I loved Brian Stevens. He's like, functions are just fragments of code, and they get applause, you know, he's kind of like-- (Chris laughs) >> It's like either remark, I got applause for that. >> Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. But you know, that's the kind of people that come to this show, right? So, you checked out a thing called, what was it, Code Labs or something like that? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, yeah, there was, I had some notes there that I'd written down. Certification in Code Labs, specifically. So Code Labs was interesting 'cause it's a place that you can, you have to book it in advance, like a day in advance, and from about 11 to seven each day, they just have Google-y Google-ers, you know, very Google-y people out there that say alright, here's all our various APIs, such as the new one where you can query a video and say I'm looking for, I think in the keynote, they had "find me baseball" in this video, and it actually shows you in the timeline where baseball occurs. There's also things to do image tagging and things like that. And, I don't know, it might be difficult to grasp that API interaction at first. And so you can sit down, and they'll show you how to write code in the languages of your choice. Obviously Go is very prominent. I'm a PowerShell developer, so it's like, alright, how would you write that in Curl, and that's maybe our bridge to one another, since I don't know Go and they don't know PowerShell, or the person I was working with. So that was cool, to hear how they approach those things, because I've typically done it as an Ops person. I'm typically looking at it from the perspective of I'm trying to automate some task and feed it into an orchestration engine. And I'm not super deep on APIs in general, I like them, but ... That was cool, I liked that you're basically getting to meet with really, really awesome engineers and SREs to pick their brain and their vast decades of experience on writing code. To work with APIs and things that are Google-centric. So that was awesome. >> So it sounds like you didn't feel like this was a marketing show, right, - [Chris] No! >> that they bring in the engineers, the technical people, I mean it's not far being from San Franscisco from the Google-Plex, the Mothership is nearby. >> Thats's a good point because a lot of these shows have just become a sales pitch in a wolf's clothing or a conference clothing, and this was ... I've never met so many really, really talented engineers all concentrated in one spot. I mean, you've got the rock stars that I think everybody knows, like Sarah, and Kelsey, that are very available and personable, but you also have a whole army of people that have a huge amount of passion around writing code and understand what your problems are and wanting to talk to you. I felt like a person, which I've been a Google customer since, I guess, Google came out, you know, Google apps and things like that. This is really the first time I really started putting faces to the technical practitioners that work there, and they're really interested and excited with what my mundane kind of problems. So, that's kind of cool. >> Yeah, I found they're definitely, they're listening, they're talking, it's really good, because right, we at our firm, we've used Google for a while and it's like, oh wait I have a challenge. Who do I call, who do I email? Nope, you should just watch the YouTube video and use it. C'mon, aren't you smart enough to use these things right? You know, was kind of how we all felt for a while. Interesting. Kinder, gentler Google than we've knew in the past? >> They had the Google leaders circle and the various groups that you could join online, but it was just, you can't fake that kind of raw passion, and I sat down with some of the SREs at the community day, and it was really just, talk to me about what you do, and why, and what tools you use, and what can we do to be better? More specifically, the Dev Rel, the developer relations folks were just awesome. And they're like, is our title threatening? What meet-up should we go to? What can we do to make your life better? And I just kind of, at first, said a few comments and realized, no, this is real. They want to know my day one and day two operations, so that they can find the right tools, or if there isn't one, build one. And I don't know, that's great. I've never seen that at a conference before. So I'm hooked. I definitely plan to go again. >> Alright, so anything you didn't see that you were hoping to see, follow-up that you want to have, other cool stuff going on that you want to share? >> I almost want to do like a plea to Google that throughout the community today and at the conference, there's been a lot of commentary and some, kind of some references to, oh we don't want to tell you how to do things, we don't want to tell you how to build architecture in a certain way. Please do tell me how to do those things. At least give me a reference architecture, or some example environments, because I feel like a lot of it is just, here's some cool things you can do, kind of in isolation. Or here are some things with Kubernetes that kind of exist outside of reality. I'm looking for, alright, I don't have any of that stuff, how do I onboard into that? Here's a white paper, and that kind of jazz. >> Yeah, and we saw, you know, I hate to always bring up AWS, but AWS went from here's this giant toolbox with all these things to right, here's some services, here are some tracks, here are some, not wizards, but you know, templates you can follow for certain things. Here are people that are probably similar to you and, boy, with Google with their AI and ML and all their things that they can do to help us sort out all the TLAs that they've got to. (Chris laughs) You know, they should be able to help going forward because, yeah, Google should be able to personalize all that to be able to work a little bit better for us as opposed to us having to just kind of figure it out a little bit. I know you played with the Google Cloud a little bit yourself-- - Yeah. >> And it wasn't as simple as you were hoping, right? >> It was hard. (both laugh) I mean-- >> Host: C'mon, if you can't figure it out, you know-- >> I don't feel like I'm the sharpest tool in the shed, but I was like, I'm kind of the representative layman ops person, and it felt very convoluted, complex, the documentation was fragmented. I'm like, just give me the wizard so that I can start fishing for myself. I just do that first hit for free, and then I'll take care of it beyond that. So, that would be my one ask to Google as a whole, but otherwise I think the tooling and the people, and the culture are all there, it's just build a few more things and I think we've got some interesting entanglements at the enterprise level once that's done. >> Okay, want to give me the final word, what's going on with you other than, your hometown, your new hometown of Austin, Texas. South By coming, so I know there's a lot of music and fun going on but, what's happening in your world, what's happening with Rubrik? >> Oh yeah, I'll mention South By, definitely will be there, I will not be available online or anything. I'm going to be going into sequester mode and just listen to music with my co-host actually. If you listen to the Datanauts podcast, with Ethan Banks, he's going to come by. So, we'll be at the show I guess if you want to hang out with us, hit us up. Otherwise, Rubrik's been awesome. It's definitely a rocket ship ride and it was actually dove-tailed into quite a few conversations I had while at Google Next. Because movement of data into and around clouds is non-trivial, so that's where the Cloud Data Management world that we're in, kind of fits into that equation, and why I personally wanted to go to this show, but also professionally I thought that there'd be some inroads there to discuss with the other practitioners. >> Absolutely, the whole infrastructure side and how that plays in the public cloud, how it plays with Sass, there's a lot of those discussions going on. Congrats, you guys have been growing some good buzz. You guys have been hiring, too, so check Chris out for all that. We'll be back, lots more coverage here of the Google Cloud Next 2017, you're watching theCUBE. (funky techno music)