>> (Narrator) Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer and you're watching The Cube, worldwide leader in tech coverage, and this is OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest Melvin Hillsman, who's the governance board member of OpenLab, which we got to hear about in the keynote on Monday. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Melvin, we were given, start us off with a little bit about your background, what brought you to the OpenStack community, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, yeah, so my background is in Linux system administration and my getting involved in OpenStack was more or less seeing the writing on the wall as it relates to virtualization and wanting to get an early start in understanding how things would pan out over the course of some years. So I probably started OpenStack maybe three or four so years ago. I was probably later to the party than I wanted to be, but through that process, started working at Rackspace first and that's how I really got more involved into OpenStack in particular. >> Yeah, you made a comment, though. The writing on the wall for virtualization. Explained that for a sec. >> So for me, I was at a shared hosting company and we weren't virtualizin' anything. We were using traditional servers, dedicated servers, installing hundreds of customers on those servers. And so, at one point, what we started doing was we would take a dedicated server, we would create a virtual machine on it, but we would use most of the resources of that dedicated server, and so what allowed that shared hosting was to tear stuff down and recreate it, but it was very manual process and so, of course, the infrastructure service and orchestration around that OpenStack was becoming the de facto standard and way of doing it, and so I didn't want to try to learn manually, or fix something up internally, I wanted to go where OpenStack was being highly developed a lot and people working on it in their day to day jobs, which is why I went to Rackspace. >> Okay, one of the things we look at, this is a community here, so it takes people from lots of different backgrounds, and some of them do it on their spare time, some of them are paid by larger companies to participate, so to tell us about OpenLab, itself, and how your company participates there. >> Sure, so I started, well I'm at Huawei now, but I was at Rackspace and that's kind of how I got more involved in the community and there I started working on testing things above the OpenStack ecosystem, so things that people want to build on top of OpenStack and during that process Huawei reached out to me and was like hey you know you're doing a great job here, and I was like yeah I would love to come and explore more of how we can increase this activity in the community at large. And so Oakland Lab was essentially born out of that, which the OpenStack community, they deliver the OpenStack API's, and they kind of stop there, you know. Everything above that is, you do that on your own, more or less, and so also, as a chair of the user committee, again, just being more concerned about the people who are using stuff, OpenLab was able, was available to facilitate me having access to hardware and access to people who are using things outside OverStack in use cases, et cetera, where we want to test out more integrated tools working with OpenStack and different versions of OpenStack. And so that's essentially what OpenLab is-- >> So in OpenLab, projects come together and it's basically, it's an Interop, boy, in the networking world, they've had the Interop plug and plug fest for a long time, but, in essence, projects come together and you integrate them and start, you invite them in and they integrate and start to test them. Starting with, I mean, I see, for this release, Terraform and Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so a lot of people want to to use Kubernetes, right? And as an OpenStack operator you essentially, you don't really want to go and learn all the bits of Kubernetes, necessarily, and so, but you want to use Kubernetes and you want to work seamlessly with OpenStack and you want to use the API's that you're used to using with OpenStack and so we work very heavily on the external cloud provider for OpenStack, enabling Cinder V3 for containers that you're spinning up in Kubernetes, so that they have seamless integration, you don't have to try to attach your volumes, they are automatically attached. You don't have to figure out what your load balancing is going to to look like. You use Octavia, which is load balancing service for OpenStack, very tightly integrated and things, you know, as you spin things up, they work as you as you would expect and so then all the other legacy applications and all the things you're used to doing with OpenStack, you bring on Kubernetes and you essentially do things the way you've been doing them before, with just an additional layer. >> Yeah, now I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the providers and the users, you know how do they get engaged, to and give us a little flavor around those. >> Yeah, so you get engaged, you go to OpenLabtesting.org and there's two options. One, is you can test out your applications and tools, by clicking get started, you fill that out. And what's great about open lab is that we actually reach out and we talk with you, we consult with you, per se, because we have a lot of variation in hardware that's available to us and so we want to figure out the right hardware that you need in order to do the tests that you want, so that we can get the output as it relates to that integration that will, of course, educate and inform the community at large of whether or not it's working and been validated. And, again, so as a person who wants to support OpenLab or for a provider, for example, who wants to support OpenLab, you click on the support OpenLab link, you fill out a form and you tell us you know, do you want to provide more infrastructure, do you want to talk with us about how clouds are being architected, integrations are being architected, things that you're seeing in the open source use cases that may not be getting the testing that they need and you're willing to work with engineers from other companies around that, so individual testers and then companies who may bring a number of testers together around a particular use case. >> Now, you're starting to publish some of the results of Interop testing and things like that. How is open lab, how does it produce its results, is it eventually going to be producing white papers and things like that or dashboards or what's your vision there? >> Yeah, so we produce a very archaic dashboard right now, but we're working with the CNCF to, if you go to CNCF.CI, and they have a very nice dashboard that kind of shows you a number of projects and whether or not they work together. And so it's open source, so what we want to do is work with that team to figure out how do we change the logos and the git repos, to how to driving those red and green, success or failure icons that are there, but they're relevant to the test that we're doing in OpenLab, so yeah. So we definitely want to have a dashboard that's very easy to decipher what tests are failing in or passing. >> Looking forward, what kinds of projects are you most interested in getting involved? >> Right now, very much Kubernetes, of course. We're really focusing on multi architecture, again, as a result of our work with Kubernetes and driving full conformance and multi architecture. That's kind of the wheelhouse at this time. We're open for folks to give us a lot of different use cases, like we were starting to look at some edge stuff, how can we participate there, we're starting looking at FPGA's and GPU's, so a lot different, we don't have a full integration in a lot of different areas, just yet, but we are having those conversations. >> So, actually, I spent a bunch of years, when I worked on the vendor side, living in an Interrupt lab, and the most valuable things were not figuring out what worked, but what broke, so what kind of things, you know, as you're working through this, what learnings back do you share with the community, both the providers and users? Big stumbling blocks that you can help people, give a red flag, or say you know, avoid these type of things. >> Yeah, exactly what you just said. You know, what's good is some of our stuff is geographically dispersed, so we can start to talk about if, what's the latency look like? You may, within that few square miles that you're operating and doing things, it works great, but when I'm sending something across the water how, is your product still moving quickly, is the latency too bad that we can't, I can't create a container over here because it takes too long, so one example of looking at something fail as it relates to that is we're talking with Octavia folks to see, if I spin up a lot of containers am I going to therefore create a lot of load balancers and if I create a lot of load balancers I'm creating a lot of VM's, or am I creating a lot of containers or are things breaking apart, so we need to dig a little bit further to understand what is and is not working with the integrations we're currently working on and then again we're exploring GPV, GPUs just landed more or less, that was a part of the keynote as well, and so now we're talking about, well, let's do some of that testing. The software, the code, is there but is it usable? And so that's one area we want to start playing around with. >> Okay, one of the other things in the keynote's got mentioned was Zul, the CIDT tool, how's that fitting into the OpenLab? >> Yeah, we use Zul as our gating, so what's great about Zul is that you can interac6t with projects from different SCM's, so we have some projects that live in github, some that utilize Garrote, some that utilize gitlab, and Zul has applicability where it can talk to different, it can talk across these different SCM's, and if you have a patch that depends on a patch in another another pod, so a patch on one project in one SCM can depend on a patch in another project, in a different SCM, and so what's great about Zul is that you can say, hey I'm depending on th6at, so before this patch lands, check to make sure this stuff works over there, so if it succeeds there and it's a dependency then you basically confirm that succeeds there and then now I can run the test here, and it passes here as well, so you know that you can use both of those projects together again, in an integration. Does it makes sense? Hopefully I'm making it very clear, the power there with the cross SCM integration. >> Yeah, Melvin, you've had a busy week, here, at the show. Any, you know, interesting things you learned this week or something that you heard from a customer that you thought, oh boy we got to, you know, get this into our lab or a road map or, you know-- >> The ARM story, the multi architecture is, I feel like that's really taking off. We've had discussions with quite a few folks around that, so yeah, that for me, that's the next thing that I think we're really going to concentrate a little bit harder on is, again, figuring out if there are some problems, because mostly it's been just x86, but we need to start exploring what's breaking as we add more to multi architecture. >> Melvin, no shortage of new things to test and play with, and every customer always brings some unique spins on things, so appreciate you giving us the update on OpenLab, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're Welcome. Thanks for having me. >> From John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. And happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Mark Collier, who's the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me back. >> Thank you for having us back and thank you again for doing the show in Vancouver, so-- >> Oh man, such an amazing place. Like this convention center, I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center because it's like a work of art, you know? >> And it's my second time here for this show, and I think kudos to your team because you have good enough content that people aren't just wandering around, taking pictures of the mountains. My wife is off seizing the whale watching right now, but everybody else here, they're engaged. And that's what you want in the community. >> Yeah, definitely. I guess you have to make sure you don't lose their attention to the whales and the sea planes, but so far everyone seems to be gettin' down to business. >> You know, I think it would be fair to say that there's some transitions going on in the marketplace in general, and at this show I notice when I got the invitation, it's like the OpenStack slash open infrastructure summit. Got a big track on edge computing, got another one on containers, been talking about containers for a few years at this show, which really interesting to talk about. And I mean, the edge stuff, we were talking about it as NFV and the telcos and all that stuff in the past. What is the OpenStack Summit these days, Mark? >> Yeah, I mean I think that it's evolving to reflect what people are doing with open source when it comes to infrastructure. And so we call it open infrastructure, but basically it's just a world of possibilities have been opened up by, of course, OpenStack, but also many, many other components, some of which came before like Linux and things like that, and some of which started after, like Kubernetes, and there's many other examples, TensorFlow for AI machine learning. So there's kind of this like embarrassment of riches these days if yo want to automate your infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. You can do so many more things with it, and OpenStack solves a very specific, very important layer which is that kind of traditional infrastructure as a service layer, compute storage and networking. But once you automate that, it's proven, it's reliable, you could run millions of cores with it like some of our users are doing. You want to do more and that means layering other things on top or sort of connecting them in different ways. So just trying to help users get something more out of the technology is really what we're about and OpenStack becomes like an enabler rather than kind of like the whole conversation. Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry, sometimes we just don't have the right expectations going into these environments. You know, when I think back 15 years ago as to what we thought Linux was going to do. Oh it's going to crush Microsoft. It's like, well, Microsoft is still doing quite well and Linux has done phenomenal. We wouldn't have companies like, Google if it wasn't for the likes of Linux. In an open source you've got a lot of tools out there. So while there are the CERNs and Walmarts of the world that take a full OpenStack distribution and put out tons of cores, I've run into software companies where when I dig into their IP, oh what do ya know, there's a project from OpenStack in there that enables what they're doing. So I've seen at a lot of shows they're like, there's companies that are like, yes, I want it, and then there's like, oh no, there's this piece of it I want, there's that piece what I want. And that's kind of the wonder of OpenStack that I can do all of those things. >> Yeah exactly. I think we've talked before about sort of calling it composable open infrastructure, and making, OpenStack's always been architecturally designed from, in terms of the goals around it, to be pluggable so from the beginning you could plug multiple hypervisors kind of underneath and you could plug different backends for storage and networking, so that sort of concept of being something, integration engine that plugs things in is part of the OpenStack kind of philosophy, but now you see that the OpenStack services themselves are sort of, you can think of them as microservices, and like if you just need block storage you can use sender. And that may make sense for some specific environments, and are you running OpenStack? Well, you are, but it gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of are you running all of it or part of it? And the reality is the things are not as simple as a binary yes or no. It's just that the options are much greater now. >> Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion in the community over the last few years, the core versus the big tent, and now of course with all this interoperability, conversations with both OpenStack participating in other communities and other communities here today, this week. I mean, what's the current state of that conversation about what is OpenStack and how does it interrelate? I think you kind of touched on it with this composable idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think that basically it's kind of like OpenStack is as OpenStack does, you know? So what are people doing with it and that tells you kind of what it is and what people are doing with it. There are a lot of different patterns. There's no like one specific deployment pattern that everyone uses, but probably by and large, by far the most common pattern is OpenStack plus Kubernetes. And so when you talk about the interop piece, this is a really good example where OpenStack has evolved to become a better, kind of better citizen, I guess, of open infrastructure by having more reliable APIs, kind of being a target that tools that build on top can rely on and not sort of have to worry about the snowflakes of different clouds and there's still more work to be done in that area, but we talked about OpenLab, which is an initiative, this morning, that puts together OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other pieces like Terraform and things like that, and does constant end-to-end testing on it, and that's really how you make sure that you know kind of what combinations work well together, and sometimes you just find bugs, and it turns out a couple of changes need to be made upstream in Kubernetes or in OpenStack or in gophercloud or in Terraform, and just if you don't know, then the user kind of with the some assembly required model, finds out and they're like, I don't know, it doesn't work, it's broken. Well, is it OpenStack's fault or Kubernetes's fault, and they don't, they just want it to work. >> So you're saying >> Identified upstream we can fix it. >> You're saying OpenStack has become more of a stable layer of the (mumbles). >> Yes exactly, yes. It has become a much more stable layer. >> Which means there wasn't a whole lot of flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually. >> A lot of the talk-- >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think it's just really proven in that way, and you know, one of the things that was highlighted was like the virtual GPUs, right? So, if OpenStack is designed to be pluggable, what do people want to have as an option now in terms of compute storage and networking, on the compute side is they want GPUs, because that gives an AI machine learning much faster, if they're bit coin miners, like I'm sure you all are in your basement, they're going to want GPUs. And what was really interesting is that the PTL, like the technical leader of the Nova Project, got up and talked about virtual GPUs. I was back in the green room and like three of the other keynote speakers were like, oh man, we are so excited about this VGPU support. Like, our customers are asking for it, the guy, Mohammad from Vexos, is the CEO of Vexos, he said, our customers are demanding this queens release, which is the latest OpenStack, and we were kind of surprised, they just really want this queens release. So we asked them why and they're like well they want VGPU. So that's kind of an example of an evolution in OpenStack itself, but it's an extension, enabler for things like GPUs, and that's kind of an exciting area as well. >> You know, it's interesting because in previous years it was the major release was one of the main things we talked about. Queens, as you mentioned, other than the VGPUs and that little discussions, spent a lot more time outside, talked to a lot of the users. You talked about the new tracks that were there. And something I heard a lot this year that I hadn't heard for a few years was, get involved, we're looking to build. And I was trying to think of a sports analogy, and maybe it was like, okay, we're actually building more of a league here and we're looking to recruit as opposed to or is it rebuilding what exactly OpenStack 2.0 is in the future? >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. You're absolutely right, and I can imagine or can remember sort of talking to some of the speakers as they were working on their content, and I don't think I totally picked up that that was a big trend, but you're absolutely right, that was a major call to action from so many different people. I think it's because when we think about what we are as a community, I talked about how we're a community of people who build and operate open infrastructure, and it's really about solving problems, and if you're as open to community collaboration and you want to solve problems, you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems. And sometimes maybe that feels awkward. It's like the tech 101 is get up and say you solved all the problems and you should buy it today. It's online or downloaded or whatever. And I think we just realized that the magic of our community is solving problems. There's always going to be more problems to solve, now you're putting more pieces together, which means the pieces themselves have to evolve and the testing and integration has to evolve. Like it's just a new set of challenges and sort of saying, here's what we're trying to solve, it's not done, help us, actually is more, I think, true to kind of what the community is all about. >> I'm wondering, do we know how many people are at the show this year? >> I don't have the exact count. I think it's around 2600, something like that. >> Yeah, so fair to say it might be a little bit less than last year's North America show? >> Yeah, it is a little bit less. >> And what are you hearing from the user? What are the main things they come for? That you got the new tracks, you've got the open dev conference co-located. What kind of key themes can you get from the users? >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we found is that we have twice as many cloud architects this year than a year ago. So I think there's always this period of time where conference attendance is driven by curiosity. Like, I've heard about this thing, what is it, or it's the cool factor, hype curves and all that stuff, I want to learn about it. At this point people know what OpenStack is. We've got tons of ways you can learn about it. There's local meetups, there's OpenStack Days all over the world, there's content, videos online. It's just not like a mystery anymore. Like the mystery draws in kind of the people that are just poking around to learn. Now we're at that point of, okay I know what it is, I know what it's for, I want to architect a solution around it, so seeing twice as many cloud architects I think is an interesting data point to think about how we're shifting more towards, people are not asking if it's proven, they're like it's been proven for whatever, two, three years, however, the perception is, but the technology is just very, very solid. It's running infrastructure all over the world, the largest banks and so on and so, I think that's kind of how things are shifting to what else can we do and put on top of it, now that it's a solid foundation. >> I wonder, sometimes there's that buzz as to what's going on out there. There was a certain large analyst firm that wrote a report a couple months ago that wasn't all that favorable about OpenStack. There's others that watching on Twitter during the keynote, and they're like, they're spending all their time talking about containers, why isn't this just part of the Cloud Native Con, KubCon show? What's the foundation's feedback on, what are you hearing kind of, what's your core deliverables? And why this show should continue in the future? >> Sure, I mean I think that what we're hearing generally from users and seeing in our data as well as from analysts like 451 and IDC, those are a couple of different reports coming out, like right now or just came out, that Jonathan mentioned this morning, I think is adoption just continues to grow, and so you know, I think people are not looking at just one technology stack. And maybe they never were, but I think there was this kind of temptation to just think of it, is it containers versus VMs or is it Kubernetes versus OpenStack? And it's like, no one who really runs infrastructure thinks like that because they might have thought it until they tried it, they realized these things go together. So I think the future of this conference is just becoming more and more centered around what are the use cases? What are the technical challenges we're trying to solve? And to the extent we're getting patterns and tools that are emerging like the lamp stack of the cloud, so to speak. How can people adopt them? So you think about cloud as taking all kinds of new forms, edge computing, those are the kinds of things that I think will become a bigger part of the conference in the future. I do like the open infrastructure angle on this. I mean, as infrastructure folks, right, you know that that storage compute network doesn't manage itself, doesn't configure itself. >> Mark: Totally. >> Doesn't provision itself. And so a lot of the app layer things should rely on this lower layer. And I thought last year in Boston there was this kind of curious OpenStack or containers conversation, which seemed odd at the time, and that's clarified, I think, at a number of levels from a number of camps and vendors. >> Yeah I agree, I think we have done our best from our point of view, from the foundation, myself, and the others that are involved in our community to try to dispell those myths or tamper down that kind of sense of a rivalry, but it takes time and I do feel like there is kind of a sea change now. There are just so many people running in production with various container tools, predominantly Kubernetes and in OpenStack that I think that that sort of myth that they're, that one's replacing the other, it's hard for that cognitive dissonance to last forever when you're given like the hundredth example of like somebody running in production at scale. Like they must be doing it for a reason, and then people start to go, well why is that? >> And I did like the comment you did make about cloud is not consolidating and simplifying, right? Even at the Dell Technologies World show, Michael Dell got up and talked about the distributed core, which is a little bit of an oxymoron, but the fact is compute and compute is everywhere, right? And it's not only, it's on the edge, it's on telephone poles, it's in little boxes in our, you know, going to be on our walls, in our walls, right? And this open infrastructure idea can play everywhere. It's not just about an on-prem data center anymore. >> Yeah and I think that's a big part of why we started to say open infrastructure instead of cloud, just because, I mean, you know, I guess we spent 10 years arguing over the definition of cloud, now we can argue over open infrastructure. But to me it's a little more descriptive and a little less kind of, I don't know, a little less baggage than the term cloud. >> Yeah, definitely differentiates it as to where you sit in the marketplace. And one thing I definitely want to give the foundation great kudos on, the diversity of this show is excellent. Not just that there was a welcome happy hour and there's a lunch, but look at all the PTLs, the project leads that are there, a lot of diversity, up on stage. It's just evident. >> Mark: Thank you. >> And it's just something kind of built into the community, so great job there. >> Thank you, I'm very proud of the fact that we had just so many excellent keynote speakers this morning, and you know, that's always something that we strive for, but I feel like we got closer to the goal than ever in terms of just getting broad representation up on the stage. And some amazing leaders. >> It's always nice from our standpoint because we always say give us your keynote speakers and give us some of the main people making things happen, and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity, from gender, from geography. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> From various backgrounds, so that's good. All right, want to give you the final word. Take aways that you want people after the show or maybe some things that people might not know if they didn't make it here for the show. >> I mean, I think, you know, the number one take away is it's all about the people, and we want to make it about the headlines or the technology, and even the technology is about the people, but certainly the operators are not, like I said, logos don't operate clouds or infrastructure, people do, so getting to meet the people, seeing what they're doing, like the Adobe I mentioned, they're marketing cloud. They have 100,000 cores of compute with four people operating it. So if you've got the right four people and the right playbook, you can do that, too. But you got to meet those people and find out how they're doing it, get their recipe, get their playbook, and they're happy to share it, and then you can run at that kind of scale, too, without a big team and you can change the way you operate. >> Yeah, I know I said in my last question, but the last thing, I know there's been a big emphasis to not just do the two big shows a year, but the OpenStack days and other events globally, give people, how do they get involved and where can they come to find out more? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked because, there are so many ways to get involved and of course it's online, it's IRC, it's mailing lists 24/7, but there's no substitute when it's about the people for meeting in person. So we have the two summits a year. We're also having an event which is called the PTG, which is really for the developers and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well where we're having it in Denver, but the summits are the big shows twice a year, but the OpenStack days are really important. Those are annual, typically one to two day events, in 15 plus countries around the world. One in particular that is going to be really exciting this year is in Beijing. You know, we've had that for the last couple of years. Huge event, but of course, others throughout Europe and Asia. Tokyo is always an awesome OpenStack day, and then there are quite a few in Europe as well. So that's another way you can get involved. Not necessarily have to fly around the world, but if you do have to fly around the world, being in Vancouver is not a bad spot, so. >> Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know there's a lot of OpenStack happening in China. >> Yes there is. >> So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation for allowing theCUBE to cover this. >> Sure. >> And thanks so much for joining us. >> Mark: Thank you. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music) (shutter clicks)