>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. (techno music) >> And we're back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program two of the keynote speakers this morning, worked on some of the container activity, Kendall Nelson, who's a Upstream Developer Advocate with the OpenStack Foundation. >> Yep. >> And John Griffith, who's a Principal Engineer from NetApp, excuse me, through the SolidFire acquisition. Thank you so much both for joining. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. Thank you. >> John Griffith: Thanks for havin' us. >> Stu Miniman: So you see-- >> Yeah. >> When we have any slip-ups when we're live, we just run through it. >> Run through it. >> Kendall, you ever heard of something like that happening? >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. That might've happened this morning a little bit. (laughs) >> So, you know, let's start with the keynote this morning. I tell ya, we're pretty impressed with the demos. Sometimes the demo gods don't always live up to expectations. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> But maybe share with our audience just a little bit about kind of the goals, what you were looking to accomplish. >> Yeah. Sure. So basically what we set out to do was once the ironic nodes were spun up, we wanted to set up a standalone cinder service and use Docker Compose to do that so that we could do an example of creating a volume and then attaching it to a local instance and kind of showing the multiple backend capabilities of Cinder, so... >> Yeah, so the idea was to show how easy it is to deploy Cinder. Right? So and then plug that into that Kubernetes deployment using a flex volume plugin and-- >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> Voila. >> It was funny. I saw some comments on Twitter that were like, "Well, maybe we're showing Management that it's not, you know, a wizard that you just click, click, click-- >> John Griffith: Right. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> "And everything's done." There is some complexity here. You do want to have some people that know what they're doing 'cause things can break. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> I love that the container stuff was called ironic. The bare metal was ironic because-- >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Right. When you think OpenStack at first, it was like, "Oh. This is virtualized infrastructure." And therefore when containers first came out, it was like, "Wait. It's shifting. It's going away from virtualization." John, you've been on Cinder. You helped start Cinder. >> Right. >> So maybe you could give us a little bit about historical view as to where that came from and where it's goin'. Yeah. >> Yeah. It's kind of interesting, 'cause it... You're absolutely right. There was a point where, in the beginning, where virtualization was everything. Right? Ironic actually, I think it really started more of a means to an end to figure out a better way to deploy OpenStack. And then what happened was, as people started to realize, "Oh, hey. Wait." You know, "This whole bare metal thing and running these cloud services on bare metal and bare metal clouds, this is a really cool thing. There's a lot of merit here." So then it kind of grew and took on its own thing after that. So it's pretty cool. There's a lot of options, a lot of choices, a lot of different ways to run a cloud now, so... >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> You want to comment on that Kendall, or... >> Oh, no. Just there are definitely tons of ways you can run a cloud and open infrastructure is really interesting and growing. >> That has been one thing that we've noticed here at the show. So my first summit, so it was really interesting to me as an outsider, right, trying to perceive the shape of OpenStack. Right? Here the message has actually been very clear. We're no longer having to have a one winner... You know, one-size-fits-all kind of cloud world. Like we had that fight a couple of years ago. It's clear there's going to be multiple clouds, multiple places, multiple form factors, and it was very nice people... An acknowledgement of the ecosystem, that there's a whole open source ecosystem of containers and of other open source projects that have grown up all around OpenStack, so... But I want to talk a little bit about the... And the fact that containers and Kubernetes and that app layer is actually... Doesn't concern itself with the infrastructure so much so actually is a great fit for sitting on top of or... And adjacent to OpenStack. Can you all talk a little bit about the perception here that you see with the end users and cloud builders that are here at the show and how are they starting to use containers. Do they understand the way these two things fit together? >> Yeah. I think that we had a lot of talks submitted that were focused on containers, and I was just standing outside the room trying to get into a Women of OpenStack event, and the number of people that came pouring out that were interested in the container stack was amazing. And I definitely think people are getting more into that and using it with OpenStack is a growing direction in the community. There are couple new projects that are growing that are containers-focused, like... One just came into the projects, OpenStack Helm. And that's a AT&T effort to use... I think it's Kubernetes with OpenStack. So yeah, tons. >> So yeah, it's interesting. I think the last couple of years there's been a huge uptick in the interest of containers, and not just in containers of course, but actually bringing those together with OpenStack and actually running containers on OpenStack as the infrastructure. 'Cause to your point, what everybody wants to see, basically, is commoditized, automated and generic infrastructure. Right? And OpenStack does a really good job of that. And as people start to kind of realize that OpenStack isn't as hard and scary as it used to be... You know, 'cause for a few years there it was pretty difficult and scary. It's gotten a lot better. So deployment, maintaining, stuff like that, it's not so bad, so it's actually a really good solution to build containers on. >> Well, in fact, I mean, OpenStack has that history, right? So you've been solving a lot of problems. Right now the container world, both on the docker side and Kubernetes as well, you're dealing with storage drivers-- >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> Networking overlays-- >> Right. >> Multi-tenancy security, all those things that previous generations of technology have had to solve. And in fact, I mean, you know, right now, I'd say storage and storage interfaces actually are one of the interesting challenges that docker and Kubernetes and all that level of containers and container orchestration and spacing... I mean, it seems like... Has OpenStack already solved, in some way, it's already solved some of these problems with things like Cinder? >> Abso... Yeah. >> John Troyer: And possibly is there an application to containers directly? >> Absolutely. I mean, I think the thing about all of this... And there's a number of us from the OpenStack community on the Cinder side as well as the networking side, too-- >> Yeah. >> Because that's another one of those problem spaces. That are actually taking active roles and participating in the Kubernetes communities and the docker communities to try and kind of help with solving the problems over on that side, right? And moving forward. The fact is is storage is, it's kind of boring, but it's hard. Everybody thinks-- >> John Troyer: It's not boring. >> Yeah. >> It's really awesomely hard. Yeah. >> Everybody thinks it's, "Oh, I'll just do my own." It's actually a hard thing to get right, and you learn a lot over the last seven years of OpenStack. >> Yeah. >> We've learned a lot in production, and I think there's a lot to be learned from what we've done and how things could be going forward with other projects and new technologies to kind of learn from those lessons and make 'em better, so... >> Yeah. >> In terms of multicloud, hybrid cloud world that we're seeing, right? What do you see as the role of OpenStack in that kind of a multicloud deployments now? >> OpenStack can be used in a lot of different ways. It can be on top of containers or in containers. You can orchestrate containers with OpenStack. That's like the... Depending on the use case, you can plug and play a lot of different parts of it. On all the projects, we're trying to move to standalone sort of services, so that you can use them more easily with other technologies. >> Well, and part of your demo this morning, you were pulling out of a containerized repo somehow. So is that kind of a path forward for the mainline OpenStack core? >> So personally, I think it would be a pretty cool way to go forward, right? It would make things a lot easier, a lot simpler. And kind of to your point about hybrid cloud, the thing that's interesting is people have been talking about hybrid cloud for a long time. What's most interesting these days though is containers and things like Kubernetes and stuff, they're actually making hybrid cloud something that's really feasible and possible, right? Because now, if I'm running on a cloud provider, whether it's OpenStack, Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, it doesn't matter anymore, right? Because all of that stuff in my app is encapsulated in the container. So hybrid cloud might actually become a reality, right? The one thing that's missing still (John Troyer laughs) is data, right? (Kendall Nelson laughs) Data gravity and that whole thing. So if we can figure that out, we've actually got somethin', I think. >> Interesting comment. You know, hybrid cloud a reality. I mean, we know the public cloud here, it's real. >> Yeah. >> With the Kubernetes piece, doesn't that kind of pull together some... Really enable some of that hybrid strategy for OpenStack, which I felt like two or three years ago it was like, "No, no, no. Don't do public cloud. >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> "It's expensive and (laughter) hard or something. "And yeah, infrastructure's easy and free, right?" (laughter) Wait, no. I think I missed that somewhere. (laughter) But yeah, it feels like you're right at the space that enables some of those hybrid and multicloud capabilities. >> Well, and the thing that's interesting is if you look at things like Swarm and Kubernetes and stuff like that, right? One of the first things that they all build are cloud providers, whether OpenStack, AWS, they're all in there, right? So for Swarm, it's pretty awesome. I did a demo about a year ago of using Amazon and using OpenStack, right? And running the exact same workloads the exact same way with the exact same tools, all from Docker machine and Swarm. It was fantastic, and now you can do that with Kubernetes. I mean, now that's just... There's nothing impressive. It's just normal, right? (Kendall Nelson laughs) That's what you do. (laughs) >> I love the demos this morning because they actually were, they were CLI. They were command-line driven, right? >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> I felt at some conferences, you see kind of wizards and GUIs and things like that, but here they-- >> Yeah. >> They blew up the terminal and you were typing. It looked like you were actually typing. >> Kendall Nelson: Oh, yeah. (laughter) >> John Griffith: She was. >> And I actually like the other demo that went on this morning too, where they... The interop demo, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> John Troyer: They spun up 15 different OpenStack clouds-- >> Yeah. >> From different providers on the fly, right there, and then hooked up a CockroachDB, a huge cluster with all of them, right? >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Can you maybe talk... I just described it, but can you maybe talk a little bit about... That seemed actually super cool and surprising that that would happen that... You could script all that that it could real-time on stage. >> Yeah. I don't know if you, like, noticed, but after our little flub-up (laughs) some of the people during the interop challenge, they would raise their hand like, "Oh, yeah. I'm ready." And then there were some people that didn't raise their hands. Like, I'm sure things went wrong (John Troyer laughs) and with other people, too. So it was kind of interesting to see that it's really happening. There are people succeeding and not quite gettin' there and it definitely is all on the fly, for sure. >> Well, we talked yesterday to CTO Red Hat, and he was talking same thing. No, it's simpler, but you're still making a complicated distributed computing system. >> Kendall Nelson: Oh, definitely. >> Right? There are a lot of... This is not a... There are a lot of moving parts here. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's funny, 'cause I've been around for a while, right? So I remember what it was like to actually build these things on your own. (laughs) Right? And this is way better, (laughter) so-- >> So it gets your seal of approval? We have reached a point of-- >> Yeah. >> Of usability and maintainability? >> Yeah, and it's just going to keep gettin' better, right? You know, like the interop challenge, the thing that's awesome there is, so they use Ansible, and they talk to 20 different clouds and-- >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> And it works. I mean, it's awesome. It's great. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> So I guess I'm hearing containers didn't kill OpenStack, as a matter of fact, it might enable the next generation-- >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> Of what's going on, so-- >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> How about serverless? When do we get to see that in here? I actually was lookin' real quick. There's a Functions as a Service session that somebody's doing, but any commentary as to where that fits into OpenStack? >> Go ahead. (laughs) >> So I'm kind of mixed on the serverless stuff, especially in a... In a public cloud, I get it, 'cause then I just call it somebody else's server, right? >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> In a private context, it's something that I haven't really quite wrapped my head around yet. I think it's going to happen. I mean, there's no doubt about it. >> Kendall Nelson: Yeah. >> I just don't know exactly what that looks like for me. I'm more interested right now in figuring out how to do awesome storage in things like Kubernetes and stuff like that, and then once we get past that, then I'll start thinking about serverless. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause where I guess I see is... At like an IoT edge use case where I'm leveraging a container architecture that's serverless driven, that's where-- >> Yeah. >> It kind of fits, and sometimes that seems to be an extension of the public cloud, rather than... To the edge of the public cloud rather than the data center driven-- >> John Griffith: Yeah. >> But yeah. >> Well, that's kind of interesting, actually, because in that context, I do have some experience with some folks that are deploying that model now, and what they're doing is they're doing a mini OpenStack deployment on the edge-- >> Stu Miniman: Yep. >> And using Cinder and Instance and everything else, and then pushing, and as soon as they push that out to the public, they destroy what they had, and they start over, right? And so it's really... It's actually really interesting. And the economics, depending on the scale and everything else, you start adding it up, it's phenomenal, so... >> Well, you two are both plugged into the user community, the hands-on community. What's the mood of the community this year? Like I said, my first year, everybody seems engaged. I've just run in randomly to people that are spinning up their first clouds right now in 2017. So it seems like there's a lot of people here for the first time excited to get started. What do you think the mood of the user community is like? >> I think it's pretty good. I actually... So at the beginning of the week, I helped to run the OpenStack Upstream Institute, which is teaching people how to contribute to the Upstream Community. And there were a fair amount of users there. There are normally a lot of operators and then just a set of devs, and it seemed like there were a lot more operators and users looking that weren't originally interested in contributing Upstream that are now looking into those things. And at our... We had a presence at DockerCon, actually. We had a booth there, and there were a ton of users that were coming and talking to us, and like, "How can I use OpenStack with containers?" So it's, like, getting more interest with every day and growing rapidly, so... >> That's great. >> Yeah. >> All right. Well, want to thank both of you for joining us. I think this went flawless on the interview. (laughter) And yeah, thanks so much. >> Yeah. >> All these things happen... Live is forgiving, as we say on theCUBE and absolutely going forward. So thanks so much for joining us. >> John Griffith: Thank you. John and I will be back with more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit in Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (funky techno music)