(upbeat 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 back to The Cube's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome back a company we've spoken to a few times at events, Paddy Power Betfair. First time guest coming to us from across the pond, Dave Buckley who is the automation engineer with Paddy Power Betfair, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so first of all, you've been to a couple summits and we've talked to Paddy Power about OpenStack. Before we get into your specific implementation, tell us about your experience here this week and any compare, contrast to previous years. >> Yeah so I'm very lucky, I got to come to the previous two summits in North America. I guess what I've enjoyed this week, it's kind of a slight tilt towards, it's away from being purely OpenStack, kind of towards this open infrastructure kind of thing, 'cause like I said, especially last year in Boston, Q and NEs was becoming a big thing. Yeah, and kind of, the OpenStack Foundation becoming kind of more, not that it wasn't before, but more community-based and being part of the ecosystem. So, yeah, I think it's been quite interesting seeing that. >> Not to put words in your mouth but, it was even, the last year or two, it's more aware of some of the complimentary things and adding pieces. You know, we had, one of the interviews we did this week was person who's the SIC lead for the Kubernetes stuff, that sits under another Foundation, things like that. Yeah, exactly. It's been quite interesting this week, I guess, sort the Kata Container project, which wasn't something I'd been aware of before Monday morning basically. I remember we were sitting in the keynotes, and they were like, you can have this container-like thing which has all the speed of a container, but it's as secure as a BM. And you're thinking, how, how is that even possible? So I've really enjoyed, I got to go to one of the sessions yesterday, one of the technical introductions on that. >> Yeah, I always love, there's certain things where, okay, this is what I'm going to do with my schedule, and turns into, this got announced, or I didn't know about this, and you knew, blow up my schedule, let me change everything else. Yeah, exactly, I think you always, you can't, you have to be flexible, right? Adaptable, and as the week goes on you just go to what you think is interesting. >> John: So Dave, you and your company have been working with OpenStack for quite a while. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And you obviously run a system that needs to be stable. Right, needs to, you take care of betting and people's money. >> Dave: Exactly. >> So that needs to be solid. But I understand you recently went though an upgrade and have some experiences talking about that? Can you talk a little bit about where you are with your OpenStack implementation and that sort of migration? >> Sure. So, I guess it's about three years ago, it was Betfair at the time, so this was before the merger of the two companies. So Betfair started using OpenStack, and I think it was actually the last time the summit was here, in Vancouver. So a couple of my colleagues who were kind of the technical leads at the time. Steve Armstrong and Steve Perera, they flew out here, to kind of get a feel for OpenStack, what it was, talk to people who'd had experiences with it. I actually think that conference back then was very informative of what the platform today now looks like. So some of the conversations they had there with people like New Age Networks and Arista, which we used for the switching, but conversations they had there kind of ended up being now what we're using in production. I guess over the past couple of years, so the big thing that happened obviously was this merger between Paddy Power and Betfair, following that they had an exercise which they called the single customer platform, which is annoyingly, for a sys-admin guy, kind of like me, they, it's always been abbreviated to SCP, but you have to ignore that. So that was to kind of consolidate and integrate the Paddy Power and Betfair co-bases and put it on a single platform, which was our OpenStack and Nuage platform. So that kind of completed in January this year, so that's live, so basically the Paddy Power sports book has an entirely new website, all running on OpenStack. A lot quicker and more efficient then the previous version. So that's been a real success. And as part of that, I should say that stability is really vital, so kind of in our business. If the site is down we don't make any money, and if it happens during a big sporting event you have a big problem. >> Do you have a metric around that? What a minute or an hour of down time would be? >> So I guess it always depends, so the nature of our traffic is very spikey. So obviously when you have a big, it's on a Saturday in Europe, the football, soccer, maybe I should say, is like a very big deal. >> We have a global audience, football's okay. >> I'll stick with football then. >> We were all watching the royal wedding. >> I don't want to talk about that. The football, if you, we just get peak traffic on that day. And, even within the year, there's a thing called the Grand National, which is a big event in the UK, big horse racing, I guess like the Kentucky Derby. It's kind of when we get our maximum traffic in the year. Yeah, you always need to be prepared for that. So one of the things as you mentioned, we kind of look into upgrade OpenStack from Kilo to Newton. So we've been on Kilo from the start. We're using Red Hat's distribution of OpenStack, so what Red Hat offer is this, they have like every three releases I think it is? They have this long release life-cycle. So that's kind of the reason we're going to Newton, cause we have kind of the, then the support will go to 2021. [Stu] - But if I remember, it's Red Hat the OpenStack Platform 10. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And 13 is going to be queened as their next one that's going to be released. >> Exactly, so I think they just announced that this week, right? So I think at some point in the next year or two we'd be going to queens. >> How do you determine when you make that jump and anything around the upgrade process, you know, good and bad that you could share. >> Dave: Yeah, so I guess going from, we were overdue an upgrade in this case, Kilos, you know, pretty old now. What we're lucky that we can do is because we have Nuage, it's like an external SDM provider, so the entire data plane is controlled by Nuage, and you can kind of plug as many OpenStacks as you like really into Nuage, and you offload all the networking to Nuage. So what's that's allowed us to do is basically we'd have had a lot of trouble if we'd had to do an in place upgrade, so I've actually been to one of the groups this week, quite a lot of people were talking about upgrades and just like all the nightmares it's caused. I know it's getting better as like the releases come out, but what we were able to do is kind of building new, an entirely new OpenStack cloud on the side of, so we've kind of turned it kind of an immutable OpenStack, so your OSB 7 cloud is there, we built this new OSB 10. But they're both circ into the same networking, so the same Nuage SDN. And the way our developers deploy their applications, I guess you want to see this in more detail, we've done presentations at these summits in the past, but kind of in short, every deployment we do immutable deployments as well, so for every deployment we'll create a new subnet within Nuage, and kind of do rolling update of your VMs that are on that new subnet into like a VIP which is kind of where the constant is, so all the traffic's come in to that VIP then you just flip things in and out below it when you do a deployment, so what that basically means is from a developers point of view, when they're migrating from OSB 7 to OSB 10 they'll essentially spin up new networks and new VMs in OSB 10 and that deployment pipeline will kind of just seamlessly, everything else will stay the same because the networking doesn't change. So we don't have to have any downtime on the data plane or the control plane. Which is really beneficial for us 'cause the way, I guess this is I'll just describe the way developers do deployments like we rely heavily on the OpenStack API being available. You pay a cost in that you, so you need extra hardware to do that I guess, but yeah we found it is something that's worked for us. >> John: Anything else with the networking and specifically that you all are running, the load balancing or resiliency that you need to have for your apps? >> Dave: Yeah so one of the things was, so it's kind of another problem there were trying to solve with this whole project, this new OpenStack platform is that historically Betfair, as it was at the time, had always run out of a single data-center. But we had another site, but it was mainly kind of a development environments right in there. So the company thought why don't we just have, we should just have both DCs for resiliency, try and run things in like an active-active configuration. Which is fine for external customer facing applications where we've had an external load balance server that can point traffic between the two DCs. But then the question is what do you do with internal apps? So this is what led us to use Avi Networks, which is kind of a cloud native load balancing technology, so we've been using to provide like GSLB internal laps, so basically we'll load balance traffic between the two data-centers so it gets deployed within your OpenStack environment, has a really neat integration with Nuage, the Nuage SDN layer, and will resolve you to whichever data-center is appropriate at that time. So if you have a full data-center outtage, you should be able to go "Okay, point stuff over there". >> John: So it makes you and the networking team or the IT team into the heroes not the villains, you're usually the people saying "No" or "We can't do that". >> I guess so, I guess so yeah you're probably right. It's cool technology though. I guess that we're very lucky and that we're given the opportunity by the people at the company to experiment with new things, so even though we're about stability but we're also about trying to push things forward in terms of what technology to use. >> Stu: Dave I'm curious how kind of the hybrid or multi-cloud type of environments fit into what you're doing today, give us the update there. >> Dave: Yeah so that's something very in our radar at the moment I guess it's, yeah it's what everybody's doing, looking to how you can have this hybrid cloud model. So I think, going back three years again, at that time, being like an online betting company, it's a highly regulated business and only at that point it was really possible to kind of put some of this stuff into the public cloud, it seems like things have come a long way, so it's something we're looking at at the moment, we're evaluating different solutions, different vendors like the Googles, AWSs, and seeing or even like some OpenStack public clouds and seeing maybe how could we migrate some workloads out into the public cloud, how do we want to that, to give us more resiliency, and also as I was saying about our spiky traffic, it just makes a lot of sense to be able to say burst out into whichever public cloud vendor on a Saturday when the football's on to deal with that peak load. So it's something we're very much looking at at the moment. But yeah no formal decisions as of yet. Unless they've done something while I've been away. >> John: With containers here at the show, lots of different threads right? Containers, Edge, the OpenDev track, things like that. Anything else, we've talked about Kata, anything else that came up that was interesting here that you just watch Kubernetes and container track as well? >> Dave: So I guess in terms of containers it's, sitting in the Keynotes on Monday you would, if you weren't watching if you were just listening, you probably wouldn't know you were at an OpenStack Summit right since there's as much Kubernetes container stuff as there is OpenStack. It's interesting so we've kind of been doing... Again, similar to the public cloud conversation, it's something that's very relevant to us at the moment, we've done kind of a few proof-of-concept ideas, evaluating different solutions, so we have like running a Cube cluster ourself, obviously we have a strong relationship with Red Hat that we've kind of explored to using OpenShift maybe, and then come the networking layer you can integrate with Nuage which would be really cool for us so it'll allow us to do kind of the all the networking, access control mechanisms as we do for our virtual machines. And again this is also something in the whole public cloud conversation is well if wanted to containers in the public cloud as well like you have all the different offerings, would we want to run our own, in like an AWS or something? Or maybe go to someone like Google where you have that supported self-service model I suppose. But yeah at the moment it's kind of at those stages so I think Steve did a presentation on the Kubernetes stuff like a PCO we done at the last Summit. But yeah still at the moment still want to make some firm decisions about which direction we're going to go but a lot of the developers a very keen for this and obviously for guys like us we all know the value of it so I think at the moment because we had that focus on stability we should now have a period of time where we're able to kind of look at all this stuff a bit more, hopefully get some container solutions into production which would be awesome. >> Stu: Dave Buckley we really appreciate you giving us the update, love to be able to do some of those longitudinal case studies as to where you've been where you're going, what you're thinking about. Be sure to check out thecube.net, you can actually search for Patty Power Betfair, see some of those previous interviews from Dave's peers. Loads more interviews there as well as all the shows we're going to be at in the future where hope you come by and say "Hi". For John Troyer I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> (electro-dance music) >> (soft piano)

[Music] from San Francisco it's the covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat everyone welcome back is the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco Red Hat summit 2018 I'm Sean furry co-host of the cube with my coasts analyst this week John Troyer who's the co-founder of tech reckoning advisory and Community Development firm our next guess is red hash Balakrishnan is the general manager of OpenStack for Red Hat welcome to the cube good to see you ready to be here so OpenStack is very hot obviously with the with the with the trends we've been covering from day one been phenomenal to watch that grow and change but with kubernetes you seeing cloud native to robust communities you got application developers and you got under the hood infrastructure so congratulations and you know what's what's the impact of that what is how is OpenStack impacted by the cloud native trend and what is Red Hat doing they're the best epidermis ation of that is openshift on OpenStack if you had caught the keynotes earlier today there was a demo that we did whereby they were spawning open shifts on bare metal using OpenStack and then you run open shift on power that's what we kind of see as the normed implementation for customers looking to get - I want an open infrastructure on Prem which is OpenStack and then eventually want to get to a multi cloud application platform on top of it that makes up the hybrid cloud right so it's a essential ingredient to the hybrid cloud that customers that are trying to get to and open shifts role in this is what I'm assuming we are asked about openshift ownerships will be multi cloud from a application platform perspective right so OpenStack is all about the infrastructure so as long as you're worrying about info or deployment management lifecycle that's going to be openstax remet once you're thinking about applications themselves the packaging of it the delivery of it and the lifecycle of it then you're in openshift land so how do you bring both these things together in a way that is easier simpler and long-standing is the opportunity and the challenge in front of us so the good news is customers are already taking us there and there's a lot of production workflow is happening on OpenStack but I got to ask the question that someone might ask who hasn't been paying attention in a year or so it was thick hey OpenStack good remember that was what's new with OpenStack what would you say that person if they asked you that question about what's new with OpenStack the answer would be something along the lines of boring is the new normal right we have taken the excitement out of OpenStack you know the conversations are on containers so OpenStack has now become the open infrastructure that customers can bring in with confidence right so that's kind of the boring Linux story but you know what that's what we thrive on right our job as reddit is to make sure that we take away the complexities involved in open source innovation and make it easy for production deployment right so that's what we're doing with OpenStack too and I'm glad that in five years we've been able to get here I definitely I think along with boring gos clarity right last year the cube was that OpenStack summit will be there again in two weeks so with you and I enjoy seeing you again for it the last year there was a lot of you know containers versus there was some confusion like where people got sorted out in their head oh this is the infrastructure layer and then this is the a play I think now people have gotten it sorted out in their head open open shipped on OpenStack very clear message so a meaning of the community in two weeks in any comments on the growth of the open OpenStack community the end users that are there the the depth of experience it seemed like last year was great everywhere for OpenStack on the edge it ended you know set top devices and pull top devices all the way to OpenStack in in private data centers and and for various security or logistical reasons where is OpenStack today yeah I think that he phrased would be workload optimization so OpenStack has now evolved to become optimized for various workloads so NFV was a workload that people were talking about now people are in when customers are in production across the globe you know beat Verizon or the some of the largest telcos that we have in any and a pack as well the fact that you can actually transform the network using OpenStack has become real today now the conversation is going from core of the data center to the edge which is radio networks so the fact that you can have a unified fabric which can transcend from data center all the way to a radio and that can be OpenStack is a you know great testament to the fact that a community has rallied around OpenStack and you know delivering on features that customers are demanding pouring is the new normal of that is boring implies reliable no-drama clean you know working if you had to kind of put a priority in a list of the top things just that it are still being worked on I see the job is never done with infrastructure always evolving about DevOps certainly shows that with programmability what are the key areas still on the table for OpenStack that are that are key discussion points where there's still innovation to be done and built upon I think the first one is it's like going from a car to a self-driving car how can we get that infrastructure to autonomously manage itself we were talking about network earlier even in that context how do you get to a implementation of OpenStack that can self manage itself so there's a huge opportunity to make sure that the tooling gets richer to be able to not just deploy manage but fine-tune the infrastructure itself as we go along so clearly you know you can call it AI machine learning implementation you on OpenStack to make sure that the benefit is occurring to the administrator that's an opportunity area the second thing is the containers and OpenStack that we taught touched upon earlier OpenShift on OpenStack in many ways is going to be the cookie cutter that we're gonna see everywhere there's going to be private cloud if you've got a private cloud it's gotta be an open shift or on OpenStack and if it's not I would like to know why right it's a it becomes a de-facto standard you start to have and they enablement skills training for a few folks as you talk to the IT consumer right the the IT admins out there you know what's the message in terms of upskilling and managing say an OpenStack installation and and what does Red Hat doing to help them come along yeah so those who are comfortable with Braille Linux skills are able to graduate easily over to OpenStack as well so we've been nationally focused on making sure that we are training the loyal Linux installed based customers and with the addition of the fact that now the learnings offerings that we have are not product specific but more at the level of the individual can get a subscription for all the products that reddit has you could get learning access to learning so that does help make sure that people are able to graduate or evolve from being able to manage Linux to manage a cloud and the and face the brave new world of hybrid cloud that's happening in front of our eyes but let's talk about the customer conversations you're having as the general manager of the stack red hat what what are the what's the nature of the conversations are they talking about high availability performance or is it more under the hood about open shift and containers or they range across the board depending upon the use cases whose they do range but the higher or the bit is that applications is where the focuses well closes where the focus is so the infrastructure in many ways needs to get out of the way to make sure that the applications can be moving from the speed of thought to execution right so that's where the customer conversations are going so which is kind of ties back to the boring is the new normal as well so if we can make sure that OpenStack is boring enough that all the energy is focused on developing applications that are needed for the enterprise then I think the job is done self-driving OpenStack it means when applications are just running and that self-healing concepts you were talking about automation is happening exactly that's the opportunity in front of us so you know it's by N's code by code we will get there I think I love the demo this morning which showed that off right bare metal stacks sitting there on stage from different vendors right actually you're the you know OpenStack is the infrastructure layer so it's it's out there with servers from Dell and HP II and others right and then booting up and then the demo with the with Amadeus showing you know OpenStack and public clouds with openshift all on top also showed how it fit into this whole multi cloud stack is it is it challenging to to be the layer with with the hardware hardware heterogeneous enough at this point that OpenStack can handle it are there any issues they're working with different OEMs and if you look at the history of red add that's what we've done right so the rel became rel because of the fact that we were able to abstract multi various innovation that was happening at the so being able to bring that for OpenStack is like we've got you know that's the right to swipe the you know employee card if you will right so I think the game is going back to what you were only talking about the game is evolving to now that you have the infrastructure which abstracts the compute storage networking etc how do you make sure that the capacity that you've created it's applied to where the need is most right for example if you're a telco and if you're enabling Phi G IOT you want to make sure that the capacity is closest to where the customer fool is right so being able to react to customer needs or you know the customers customers needs around where the capacity has to be for infrastructure is the programmability part that we've you know we can enable right so that's a fascinating place to get into I know you are technology users yourself right so clearly you can relate to the fact that if you can make available just enough technology for the right use case then I think we have a winner at hand yeah and taking as you said taking the complexity out of it also means automating away some of those administrative roles and moving to the operational piece of it which developers want to just run their code on it kind of makes things go a little faster and and so ok so I get that and I but I got to ask the question that's more Redhead specific that you could weigh in on this because this is a real legacy question around red hats business model you guys have been very strong with rel the the the record speaks for itself in terms of warranty and and serviceability you guys give like I mean how many years is it now like a zillion years that support for rel OpenStack is boring is Red Hat bringing that level of support now how many years because if I use it I'm gonna need to have support what's the Red Hat current model on support in terms of versioning xand the things that you guys do with customers thank you for bringing that up what have you been consciously doing is to make sure that we have lifecycle that is meeting two different customers segments that we are talking about one is customers who want to be with the latest and the greatest closer to the trunk so every six months there is an openstack released they want to be close enough they want to be consuming it but it's gotta be production ready in their environment the second set of customers are the ones who are saying hey look the infrastructure part needs to stay there cemented well and then every maybe a couple of years I'll take a real look at you know bringing in the new code to light up additional functionality or on storage or network etc so when you look at both the camps then the need is to have a dual life cycle so what we have done is with OpenStack platform 10 which is two years ago we have a up to five year lifecycle release so obvious that platform 10 was extensible up to five years and then every two releases from there 11 and 12 are for just one year alone and then we come back to again a major release which is OSP 13 which will be another five years I know it can be and they get the full Red Hat support that they're used to that's right so there are years that you're able to either stay at 10 or you could be the one who's going from 10 to 11 to 12 to 13 there are some customers were saying staying at 10 and then I won't go over to 13 and how do you do that we'll be a industry first and that's what we have been addressing from an engineering perspective is differentiated - I think that's a good selling point guy that's always a great thing about Red Hat you guys have good support give the customers confidence or not you guys aren't new to the enterprise and these kinds of customers so right - what are you doing here at the show red hat summit 2018 what's on your agenda what some of the hallway conversations you're hearing customer briefings obviously some of the keynote highlights were pretty impressive what going on for you it's a Volvo OpenShift on OpenStack that's where the current and the future is and it's not something that you have to wait for the reality is that when you're thinking about containers you might be starting very small but the reality is that you're going to have a reasonably sized farm that needs to power all the innovation that's going to happen in your organization so given that you need to have an infrastructure management solution thought through and implemented on day one itself so that's what OpenStack does so when you can roll out OpenStack and then on top of it bring in openshift then you not only have to you're not only taking care of today's needs but also as you scale and back to the point we were talking about moving the capacity where is needed you have a elastic infrastructure that can go where the workload is demanding the most attention so here's another question that might come up from when I asked you and you probably got this but I'll just bring it up anyway I'm a customer of OpenStack or someone kicking the tires learning about deploying up a stack I say ritesh what is all this cloud native stuff I see kubernetes out there what does that mean for me visa V OpenStack and all the efforts going on around kubernetes and above and the application pieces of the stack right let's say if you looked at the rear view mirror five years ago when we looked at cloud native as a contract the tendency was that hey look I need to be developing net new applications that's the only scenario where cloud native would be thought thought off now fast forward five years now what has happened is that cloud native and DevOps culture has become the default if you are a developer if you're not sort of in that ploughed native and DevOps then you are working on yesterday's problem in many ways so if digital transformation is urging organizations to drive - as cloud native applications then cloud native applications require an infrastructure that's fungible inelastic and that's how openshift on OpenStack again coming back to the point of that's the future that customers can build on today and moving forward so summarize I would say what I heard you saying periphery if I'm wrong open ship is a nice bridge layer or an up bridge layer but a connection point if you bet on open ship you're gonna have best of both worlds that that's a good summary and you gotta be you know betting on open first of all is the first order a bet that you should be making once you've bet on open then the question is you gotta bet on an infrastructure choice that's OpenStack and you gotta bet on an application platform choice that's open shift once you've got both of these I think then the question is what are you going to do with your spare time okay count all the cash you're making from all the savings but also choice is key you get all this choice and flexibility is a big upside I would imagine British thanks for coming on sharing your insight on the queue appreciate it thanks for letting us know what's going on and best of luck see you in Vancouver thank you for having okay so the cube live coverage here in San Francisco for Red Hat summit 2018 John four with John Troy you're more coverage after this short break