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