>> 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. >> The sun has come out, but we're still talking about a lot of the cloud here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program the 2018 Super User Award winner, George Mihaiescu, who's the senior cloud architect with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research or OICR. First of all, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you so much for joining us. So cancer research, obviously is, one of the things we talk about is how can technology really help us at a global standpoint, help people. So, tell us a little about the organization first, before we get into the tech of it? >> So OICR is the largest cancer research institution in Canada, and is funded by government of Ontario. Located in Toronto, we support about 1,700 researchers, trainees and clinician staff. It's focused entirely on cancer research, it's located in a hub of cancer research in downtown Toronto, with Princess Margaret Hospital, Sick Kids Hospital, Mount Sinai, very, very powerful research centers, and OICR basically interconnects all these research centers and tries to bring together and to advance cancer research in the province, in Canada and globally. >> That's fantastic George. So with that, sketch out for us a little bit your role, kind of the purview that you have, the scope of what you cover. >> So I was hired four years ago by OICR to build and design cloud environment, based on a research grant that was awarded to a number of principal investigators in Canada to build this cloud computing infrastructure that can be used by cancer researchers to do large-scale analysis. What happens with cancer, because the variety of limitations happening in cancer patients, researchers found that they cannot just analyze a few samples and draw a conclusion, because the conclusion wouldn't be actually valid. So they needed to do large-scale research, and the ICGC, which is International Cancer Genome Consortium, an organization that's made of 17 countries that are donating, collecting and analyzing data from cancer patients, okay, they decided to put together all this data and to align it uniformly using the same algorithm and then analyze it using the same workflows, in order to actually draw conclusion that's valid across multiple data sets. They are focusing on the 50 most common types of cancer that affect most people in this world, and for each type of cancer, at least two countries provide and collect data. So for brain cancer, let's say we have data sets from two countries, for melanoma, for skin, and this basically gives you better confidence that the conclusion you draw is valid, and then the more pieces of the puzzle you throw on the table, the easier to see the big picture that's this cancer. >> You know George, I mean, I'm a former academic, and you know, the more data you get right, the more infrastructure you're going to have to have. I'm just reading off the announcement, 2,600 cores, 18 terabytes of RAM, 7.3 petabytes of storage, right, that's a lot of data, and it's a lot of... accessed by a lot of different researchers. When you came in, was the decision to use OpenStack already made, or did you make that decision, and how was the cloud architected in that way? >> The decision was basically made to use open source. We wanted basically to spend the money on capacity, on hardware, on research and not on licensing and support. >> John: Good use of everybody's tax dollars. >> Exactly, so you cannot do that if you have to spend money for paying licensing, then you probably have only half of the capacity that you could. So that means less large analysis, and longer it takes, and more costly. So Ceph for storing the data sets and OpenStack for infrastructure as a service offering was a no-brainer. My specialty was in OpenStack and Ceph, I started OpenStack seven years ago, so I was hired to design and build, and I had a chance to actually do alignment, and invitation calling for some of the data sets, so I was able to monitor the kind of stress that this workflows put on the system, so when I design it, I knew what is important, and what to focus on. So it's a cloud environment, it's customized for cancer research. We have very good ratio of RAM per CPU, we have very large local discs for the VM, for the virtual machines to be able to download very large data sets. We built it so if one compute node fails, you only impact a few workflows running there, you don't impact single small points of failures. Another tuning that we applied to the system too. >> George, can walk us through a little bit of the stack? What do you use, do you build your own OpenStack, or do you get it from someone? >> So basically, we use community hardware, we just high-density chassis, currently from Super Micro, Ubuntu for the operating system, no licensing there, OpenStack from the VM packages. We focus more on stability, scalability and support costs, internal support costs, because it's just myself and I have a colleague Gerard Baker, who's a cloud engineer, and you have to support all this environment, so we try to focus on the features that are most useful to our users, as well as less strain on our time and support resources. >> I mean that's, let's talk about the scalability right? You said the team is you and a colleague. >> George: Yes. >> But mostly, right. And you know, in the olden days, right, you would be taking care of maybe a handful of machines, and maybe some disk arrays in the lab. Now you're basically servicing an entire infrastructure for all of Canada, right? At how many universities? >> Well basically, it's global, so we have 40 research projects from four continents. So we have from Australia, from Israel, from China, from Europe, US, Canada. So approved cancer researchers that can access the data open up an account with us, and they get a quota, and they start their virtual machines, they download the data sets from the extra API of Ceph to their VMS, and they do analysis and we charge them for the time used, and because the use, everything is open source, and we don't pay any licensing fees, we are able to, and we don't run for profit, we charge them just what it costs us to be able to replenish the hardware when it fails. >> Nice, nice. And these are actually the very large machines, right? Because you have to have huge, thick data sets, you've got big data sets you have to compare all at once. >> Yeah, an average bandwidth of a file that has the normal DNA of the patient, and they need also the tumor DNA from the biopsy, an average whole genome sequence is about 150 gigabytes. So they need at least 300 gigabytes, and depending on the analysis, if they find mutations, then the output is usually five, 10 gigabytes, so much smaller. For other workflows, you have to actually align the data, so you input 150 gigabytes and the output is 150 or a bit more with metadata. And so nevertheless, you need very large storage for the virtual machines, and these are virtual machines that run very hard, in terms of you cannot do CPU over subscription, you cannot do memory over subscription, when you have a workflow that runs for four days, hundred percent CPU. So is different than other web scale environments, where you have website was running at 10%, or you can do 10 to one subscription, and then you go much cheaper or different solutions. Here you have to only provide what you have physically. >> John: That's great. >> George, you've said you participated in the OpenStack community for about seven years now. >> George: Yes. >> What kind of, do you actually contribute code, what pieces are you active in the community? >> Yeah, so I'm not a developer. My background is in networking, system administration and security, but I was involved in OpenStack since the beginning, before it was a foundation. I went to the first OpenStack public conference in Boston seven years ago, at the International Intercontinental Hotel and over time I was involved in discussions from the RAC channel, mailing list support, reporting backs. Even recently we had very interesting packet affected as well. The cloud package that is supposed to resize the disk of the VM as it boots, it was not using more than two terabytes because it was a bug, okay. So we reported this, and Scott Moffat, who's the maintainer of the cloud utils package, worked on the bug, and two days later, we had a fix, and they built a package, it's in the latest cloud Ubuntu image, and that happen, everybody else is going to use the same virtual Ubuntu package, so somebody who now has larger than two terabytes VMs, when they boot, they'll be able to resize and use the entire disk. And that's just an example of how with open source we can achieve things that would take much longer in commercial distribution, where even if you pay, doesn't necessarily mean that the response... >> Sure. Also George, any lessons learned? You've been with us a long time, right, and like Ceph. One thing we noticed today in the keynote, is actually a lot of the storage networking and compute wasn't really talked, those projects were maybe down focused a bit, as they talked about all the connectivity to everything else. So, I mean any lessons, so you... My point is, the infrastructure is stable of OpenStack, but any lessons learned along the journey? >> I think the lessons are that you can definitely build very affordable and useful and scalable infrastructure, but you have to get your expectations right. We only use from the open standard project that we consider are stable enough, so we can support them confidently without spending, like if a project adds 5% value to your offering, but eats 80% of your time debugging and trying to get it working, and doesn't have packages and missing documentation and so on, that's maybe not a good fit for your environment if you don't have the manpower to. And if it's not absolutely needed. Another very important lesson is that you have to really stay up to date, like go to the conferences, read the emails from the mailing list, be active in the community, because the OpenStack meetups in Toronto for 2018, we present there, we talk to other members. In these seven years I read tens of thousands of emails, so I learn from other users experiences, I try to help where I can. You have to be involved with the developers, I know the Ceph core developers, Sage and other people. So, you can't do this just by staying on the side and looking, you have to be involved. >> Good, George what are you looking for next from this community? You talked about the stability, are there pieces that you're hoping reach that maturity threshold for yourselves, or new functionalities that you're looking for down the road? >> I think what we want to provide to our researchers, 'cause they don't run web scale applications, so their needs are a little bit different. We want to add Magnum to our environment, to allow them deploy Kubernetes cluster easily. We want to add Octavia to expose the services, even though they don't run many web services, but you have to find a way to expose them when they run them. Maybe, Trove, database as a service, we'll see if we can deploy it safely and if it's stable enough. Anything that OpenStack comes up with, we basically look, is it useful, is it stable, can you do it, and we try it. >> George, last thing. Your group is the Super User of the Year. Can you just walk us through that journey, what led to the nomination, what does it mean to your team to win? >> I think we are a bit surprised, because we are a very small team, and our scale is not as big as T-Mobile or the other members, but I think it shows that again, for a big company to be able to deploy OpenStack at scale and make it work, it's maybe not very surprising 'cause yes, they have the resources, they have a lot of manpower and a lot of... But for a small institution or organization, or small company to be able to do it, without involving a vendor, without involving extra costs, I think that's the thing that was appreciated by the community and by the OpenStack Foundation, and yeah, we are pretty excited to have won it. >> All right, George, let me give you the final word, as somebody that's been involved with the community for a while. What would you say to people if they're, you know, still maybe looking from the outside or played with it a little bit. What tips would you give? >> I think we are living proof that it can be done, and if you wait until things are perfect, then they will never be, okay. Even Google has services in beta, Amazon has services in beta. You have to install OpenStack, it's much more performant and stable than when I started with OpenStack, where there was just a few projects, but definitely they will get help from the community, and the documentation's much better. Just go and do it, you won't regret it. >> George, as we know, software will eventually work, hardware will eventually fail. >> Absolutely. >> So, George Mihaiescu, congratulations to OICR on the Super User of the Year award, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we're getting towards the end of day one of three days of wall to wall coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live, fro-- >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. We're here for three days of live wall-to-wall coverage at the OpenStack Foundation's show they have it twice a year John, pleasure to be with you again, you and I were together at the OpenStack show in Boston, a year ago, little bit further trip for me. But views like this, I'm not complaining. >> It's a great time to be in Vancouver, little bit overcast but the convention center's beautiful and the people seem pretty excited as well. >> Yeah so if you see behind us, the keynote let out. So John, we got to get into the first question of course for some reason the last month people are always Hey Stu where are you, what're you doing and when I walk through the various shows I'm doing when it comes to this one they're like, why are you going to the OpenStack show? You know, what's going on there, hasn't that been replaced by everything else? >> I got the same thing, there seems to be kind of a almost an antireligious thing here in the industry maybe more emotional perhaps at other projects. Although frankly look, we're going to take the temperature of the community, we're going to take the temperature of the projects, the customers, we got a lot of customers here, that's really the key here is that our people actually using this, being productive, functional, and is there enough of a vendor and a community ecosystem to make this go forward. >> Absolutely, so three years ago, when we were actually here in Vancouver, the container sessions were overflowing, people sitting in the aisles. You know containers, containers, containers, docker, docker, docker, you know, we went through a year or two of that. Then Kubernetes, really a wave that has taken over, this piece of the infrastructure stack, the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon shows, in general, I think have surpassed this size, but as we know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is always additive, and a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is, we have complexity, we need to deal with interoperability, everybody has a lot of things and that's the, choose your word, hybrid, multi-cloud world that you have, and that's really the state of opensource, it's not a thing, it's there's lots of things you take all the pieces you need and you figure out how to put 'em together, either buy them from a platform, you have some integrator that helps, so somebody that puts it all together, and that's where, you know, we live here, which is, by they way, I thought they might rename the show in the open, and they didn't, but there's a lot of pieces to discuss. >> Definitely an open infrastructure movement, we'll probably talk about that, look I loved the message this morning that the cloud is not consolidating, in fact it's getting more complicated, and so that was a practical message here, it's a little bit of a church of opensource as well, so the open message was very well received and, these are the people that are working on it, of course, but yeah, the fact that, like last year I thought in Boston, there was a lot of, almost confusion around containers, and where containers and Kubernetes fit in the whole ecosystem, I think, now in this year in 2018 it's a lot more clear and OpenStack as a project, or as a set of projects, which traditionally was, the hit on it was very insular and inward facing, has at least, is trying to become outward facing, and again that's something we'll be looking at this week, and how well will they integrate with other opensource projects. >> I mean John, you and I are both big supporters of the opensource movements, love the community at shows like this, but not exclusively, it's, you know, Amazon participating a little bit, using a lot of opensource, they take opensource and make it as a service, you were at Red Hat Summit last week, obviously huge discussion there about everything opensource, everything, so a lot going on there, let me just set for, first of all the foundation itself in this show, the thing that I liked, coming into it, one of the things we're going to poke at is, if I go up to the highest level, OpenStack is not the only thing here, they have a few tracks they have an Edge computer track, they have a container track, and there's a co-resident OpenDev Show happening a couple floors above us and, even from what the OpenStack Foundation manages, yes it OpenStack's the main piece of it, and all those underlying projects but, they had Katacontainers, which is, you know, high level project, and the new one is Zuul, talking about CI/CD, so there are things that, will work with OpenStack but not exclusively for OpenStack, might not even come from OpenStack, so those are things that we're seeing, you know, for example, I was at the Veeam show last week, and there was a software company N2WS that Veeam had bought, and that solution only worked on Amazon to start and, you know, I was at the Nutanix show the week before, and there's lots of things that start in the Amazon environment and then make their way to the on-premises world so, we know it's a complex world, you know, I agree with you, the cloud is not getting simpler, remember when cloud was: Swipe the credit card and it's super easy, the line I've used a lot of times is, it is actually more complicated to buy, quote, a server equivalent, in the public could, than it is if I go to the website and have something that's shipped to my data center. >> It's, yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's where we've ended up. You know, we'll see, with Zuul, it'll be very interesting, one of the hits again on OpenStack has been reinvention of the wheel, like, can you inter-operate with other projects rather than doing it your self, it sounds like there's some actually, some very interesting aspects to it, as a CI/CD system, and certainly it uses stuff like Ansible so it's, it's built using opensource components, but, other opensource components, but you know, what does this give us advantage for infrastructure people, and allowing infrastructure to go live in a CI/CD way, software on hardware, rather than, the ones that've been built from the dev side, the app side. I'm assuming there's good reasons, or they wouldn't've done it, but you know, we'll see, there's still a lot of projects inside the opensource umbrella. >> Yeah, and, you know, last year we talked about it, once again, we'll talk about it here, the ecosystem has shifted. There are some of the big traditional infrastructure companies, but what they're talking about has changed a lot, you know. Remember a few years ago, it was you know, HP, thousand people, billion dollar investment, you know, IBM has been part of OpenStack since the very beginning days, but it changes, even a company like Rackspace, who helped put together this environment, the press release that went was: oh, we took all the learnings that we did from OpenStack, and this is our new Kubernetes service that we have, something that I saw, actually Randy Bias, who I'll have on the show this week, was on, the first time we did this show five years ago, can't believe it's the sixth year we're doing the show, Randy is always an interesting conversation to poke some of the sacred cows, and, I'll use that analogy, of course, because he is the one that Pets vs Cattle analogy, and he said, you know, we're spending a lot of time talking about it's not, as you hear, some game, between OpenStack and Kubernetes, containers are great, isn't that wonderful. If we're talking about that so much, maybe we should just like, go do that stuff, and not worry about this, so it'll be fun to talk to him, the Open Dev Show is being, mainly, sponsored by Mirantis who, last time I was here in Vancouver was the OpenStack company, and now, like, I saw them a year ago, and they were, the Kubernetes company, and making those changes, so we'll have Boris on, and get to find out these companies, there's not a lot of ECs here, the press and analysts that are here, most of us have been here for a lot of time so, this ecosystem has changed a lot, but, while attendance is down a little bit, from what I've heard, from previous years, there's still some good energy, people are learning a lot. >> So Stu, I did want to point out, that something I noticed on the stage, that I didn't see, was a lot of infrastructure, right? OpenStack, clearly an infrastructure stack, I think we've teased that out over the past couple years, but I didn't see a lot of talk about storage subsystems, networking, management, like all the kind of, hard, infrastructure plumbing, that actually, everybody here does, as well as a few names, so that was interesting, but at the end of the day, I mean, you got to appeal to the whole crowd here. >> Yeah, well one of the things, we spent a number of years making that stuff work, back when it was, you know, we're talkin' about gettin' Cinder, and then all the storage companies lined up with their various, do we support it, is it fully integrated, and then even further, does it actually work really well? So, same stuff that went through, for about a decade, in virtualization, we went through this in OpenStack, we actually said a couple years ago, some of the basic infrastructure stuff has gotten boring, so we don't need to talk about it anymore. Ironic, it's actually the non-virtualized environments, that's the project that they have here, we have a lot of people who are talking bare metal, who are talking containers, so that has shifted, an interesting one in the keynote is that you had the top level sponsors getting up there, Intel bringing around a lot of their ecosystem partners, talking about Edge, talking about the telecommunications, Red Hat, giving a recap of what they did last week at their summit, they've got a nice cadence, the last couple of years, they've done Red Hat Summit, and OpenStack Summit, back-to-back so that they can get that flow of information through, and then Mark Shuttleworth, who we'll have on a little bit later today, he came out puchin', you know, he started with some motherhood in Apple Pi about how Ubuntu is everywhere but then it was like, and we're going to be so much cheaper, and we're so much easier than the VMwares and Red Hats of the world, and there was a little push back from the community, that maybe that wasn't the right platform to do it. >> Yeah, I think the room got kind of cold, I mean, that's kind of a church in there, right, and everyone is an opensource believer and, this kind of invisible hand of capitalism (laughs) reached in and wrote on the wall and, you know, having written and left. But at the end of the day, right, somebody's got to pay for babies new shoes. I think that it was also very interesting seeing, at Red Hat Summit, which I covered on theCUBE, Red Hat's argument was fairly philosophical, and from first principles. Containers are Linux, therefore Red Hat, and that was logically laid out. Mark's, actually I loved Mark's, most of his speech, which was very practical, this, you know, Ubuntu's going to make both OpenStack and containers simpler, faster, quicker, and cheaper, so it was clearly benefits, and then, for the folks that don't know, then he put up a couple a crazy Eddy slides like, limited time offer, if you're here at the show, here's a deal that we've put together for ya, so that was a little bit unusual for a keynote. >> Yeah, and there are a lot of users here, and some of them'll hear that and they'll say: yeah, you know, I've used Red Hat there but, you can save me money that's awesome, let me find out some more about it. Alright, so, we've got three days of coverage here John, and we get to cover this really kind of broad ecosystem that we have here. You talked about what we don't discuss anymore, like the major lease was Queens, and it used to be, that was where I would study up and be like oh okay, we've got Hudson, and then we got, it was the letters of the alphabet, what's the next one going to be and what are the major features it's reached a certain maturity level that we're not talking the release anymore, it's more like the discussions we have in cloud, which is sometimes, here's some of the major things, and oh yeah, it just kind of wraps itself in. Deployments still, probably aren't nearly as easy as we'd like, Shuttleworth said two guys in under two weeks, that's awesome, but there's solutions we can put, stand up much faster than that now, two weeks is way better than some of the historical things we've done, but it changes quite a bit. So, telecommunications still a hot topic, Edge is something, you know what I think back, it was like, oh, all those NFE conversations we've had here, it's not just the SDN changes that are happening, but this is the Edge discussion for the Telcos, and something people were getting their arms around, so. >> It's pretty interesting to think of the cloud out on telephone poles, and in branch offices, in data centers, in closets basically or under desks almost. >> No self-driving cars on the keynote stage though? >> No, nothing that flashy this year. >> No, definitely not too flashy so, the foundation itself, it's interesting, we've heard rumors that maybe the show will change name, the foundation will not change names. So I want to give you last things, what're you looking for this week, what were you hearing from the community leading up to the show that you want to validate or poke at? >> Well, I'm going to look at real deployments, I'd like to see how standard we are, if we are, if an OpenStack deployment is standardized enough that the pool of talent is growing, and that if I hire people from outside my company who work with OpenStack, I know that they can work with my OpenStack, I think that's key for the continuation of this ecosystem. I want to look at the general energy and how people are deploying it, whether it does become really invisible and boring, but still important. Or do you end up running OpenShift on bare metal, which I, as an infrastructure person, I just can't see that the app platform should have to worry about all this infrastructure stuff, 'cause it's complicated, and so, I'll just be looking for the healthy productions and production deployments and see how that goes. >> Yeah, and I love, one of the things that they started many years ago was they have a super-user category, where they give an award, and I'm excited, we have actually have the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is one of our guests on today, they won the 2018 super-user group, it's always awesome when you see, not only it's like, okay, CERN's here, and they're doing some really cool things looking for the Higgs boson, and all those kind of things but, you know, companies that are using technology to help them attack the battle against cancer, so, you know, you can't beat things like that. We've got the person from the keynote, Melvin, who was up on stage talking about the open lab, you know, community, ecosystem, definitely something that resonates, I know, one of the reasons I pulled you into this show in the last year is you're got a strong background there. >> Super impressed by all the community activity, this still feels like a real community, lots of pictures of people, lots of real, exhortations from stage to like, we who have been here for years know each other, please come meet us, so that's a real sign of also, a healthy community dynamic. >> Alright, so John first of all, I want to say, Happy Victoria Day, 'cause we are here in Vancouver, and we've got a lot going on here, it's a beautiful venue, hope you all join us for all of the coverage here, and I have to give a big shout out to the companies that allowed this to happen, we are independent media, but we can't survive without the funding of our sponsors so, first of all the OpenStack Foundation, helps get us here, and gives us this lovely location overlooking outside, but if it wasn't for the likes of our headline sponsor Red Hat as well as Canonical, Kontron, and Nuage Networks, we would not be able to bring you this content so, be sure to checkout thecube.net for all the coverage, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. 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