>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost this week, John Troyer. Hi and welcome to the program, a first time guest, Professor at Boston University, and lead of the Massachusetts Open Cloud, Orran Krieger. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Ah, my pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, so, we're here in Boston, the center of culture, the revolution, a lot of universities. Tell us a little about you, just click on yourself, your role at BU, and then we'll get into the MOC stuff in a little bit too. >> Sure, I mean, I sort of came back from industry after 15 years in industry, to this incredible opportunity we had, to create this entity. I mean, there's no other place like this, if you take the universities in this city, it's equivalent to all the universities on the Pacific West Coast. Right, the concentration of high-tech is unbelievable here. >> I want to remind you, my wife was actually involved when Partners Healthcare first got launched here in Boston, was an early technology and collaboration here in Boston. Sounds similar, what you are, what you're doing with some of the universities in Cloud. Maybe you talk, you came from the vendor side. Just real quick, your background, you worked at a company that John and I know quite well. Maybe just give a quick background? >> Sure. I left academia, I don't know how many years ago. Ended up going to IBM research, and was there for about 10 years. And then I joined this little start-up called VMWare. And started up and then worked as sort of one of the lead architects for vCloud Director and the whole vCloud Initiative. >> Alright, great. Let's speak today, you also have, you're the lead in Massachusetts Open Cloud. We actually had a couple of guests on from Red Hat that talked a little bit about it. But tell us about the project, the scope of it, how many people involved, how many users you reach with this. >> Sure. The future is in the Cloud. I mean, you look at sort of the fact that users can use what they need, when they need it. Producers can get massive economies of scale. You know, the future of computing is in the cloud. And when I was on the industry side, what really concerned me, what was going on, is that these clouds were really closed. You couldn't see what was going on inside them. Innovation was sort of gated by this single provider, that operated and controlled each of these clouds. So, the question that I was struggling with back then, is how can we create a cloud that's open? That multiple technology companies can participate. And certainly when I came back to academia, a cloud where I could do innovation in. Where not just me, but many many different researchers. You look at how much research has fundamentally impacted our field. It's dramatic. Even in just sort of the very area we're talking about. From what Mendall and team did with VMWare, and then Zen coming out of Cambridge. I mean, Ceph coming out of, just like technology after technologies come out of academia. But now clouds are these closed boxes you can't get into. So we had this incredible opportunity. There'd be this data center, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Data Center, MGHPCC. 15 megawatts. That's more than half the size of one of Google's 16 data centers. That had been built, right next to Hydro Dam, one third the power costs of what it is in Boston. By five big institutions: MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, UMass. And we thought, wow, couldn't we create a cloud there? Couldn't we create a cloud with some 157,000 potential students as well as the broader ecosystem? So we started discussing that idea. All the universities kind of signed up behind it. The model of the cloud is not to create another single provider cloud. It's not going to be my cloud. The idea is to have many vendors participate. Stand up different services, and create an open cloud, where there's not just multiple tenants but there's also multiple landlords with the cloud. >> Great. Could you talk to us a little about how do some of those pieces get chosen? How does OpenStack fit into it? And if you can talk about some of the underlining pieces it'd be good to understand how you sort that out too. >> Sure. So in doing that we, it's actually been sort of this cool, you know you have to kind of build different levels simultaneously. When we started the project, you know our first thing was, oh you know we'll be able to just stand up a cloud. It wasn't that easy. OpenStack is actually a complicated learning curve to get up. Now it's matured tremendously. We've been in production for about ten months, with no significant failures. I'm almost thinking that we need to kind of bring it down for a couple hours. Just so the people start realizing this is not intended to be a place where you run it like you would a production data center facility. That we don't guarantee it as so, 'cause people are starting to assume we do. (laughing) But, we started off and we sort of solved OpenStack, got it up and running. Took us a while to get it to the production layer. Started hosting courses, and users, and stuff like that. And some tastes that with sort of two other tracks. One is I'm developing some of the base technologies to enable a cloud to be multi-vendor. So mix-and-match fetterations serve our core of that. Which is this new capability that we've, after like five iterations on the right way to do this to allow multiple different clouds with their own keystone, mix different administrators say from MIT or Harvard, or from companies that might want to participate and set up a service. So, to have a capability of fettering between those things. Allowing you, for example, to use storage from one and compute from another. We started off with OpenStack because OpenStack already had the right architecture. It was designed as a series of different services. Each one which could be scaled independently. Each one that had it's own well defined API. And it seemed natural, jeez, we should be able to compose them together. Have, you know, one stand up, Nova compute. Another one stand up, Swift storage. Another one stand up, Cinder Storage. Turned out not to be that easy. There was assumptions that all these services were stood up by the same administrative entity. After three iterations of trying to figure out with the community how to make it, we finally have a capability of doing that now. That we're putting into production in the MOC itself. >> You talked about the different projects inside OpenStack, that's been one of the discussions here this week at the Summit. Different projects, the core, which are important and also the whole ecosystem of other cloud native and open source projects that have grown-up around OpenStack over the last six or seven years. Any commentary on how, which kind of projects you're finding are the most useful and the UC as kind of the core of OpenStack going on? And also, which projects from other ecosystems do you think are natural fits into working on an OpenStack base platform? >> Sure. So in our environment, we serve all the core services you think of, obviously Nova and Cinder and Swift. We're using Ceph in most of our environments. Sahara, Heat. We've actually expanded beyond in a couple of different dimensions. I guess that, one thing is we've been using extensively Ceph, that's been very valuable for us. And we've also been modifying it actually, substantially. It's actually kind of exciting cause we have graduate students that are making changes that are now going upstream in the Ceph community as a result of their experiences in doing things within our environment. But, there's other projects that sort of tied in sort of two different levels. One is we're working very closely with Red Hat, today around OpenShift. And we're making the first deployment of that available in the very near future. And the other thing is very important for our environment, we have I think three different talks related to this to have data sets in the cloud. To have data sets shared between communities of people. Data sets that are discoverable. Data sets where you can actually, that are citable. So we've been working very closely with Harvard and the OpenSource dataverse community and we've together created the cloud dataverse. Which is now actually in the MOC. So researchers from all these institutions can actually publish their data sets. As well as researchers from around the world. So there's over 15,000 data sets today in the Harvard dataverse for example. >> Curious if you can give us any commentary on how open source fits into education these days? Talk about the pipeline and the next generation of workers. Do your students get, you talked about upstream contributions, how do they get involved? How early are they getting involved? >> Well, actually, that's sort of a bit of a passion of mine. So multiple different levels, I guess. One of them I think is this is a great way for a student to sort of get exposed to a broad community of people to interact with. I think it's, rather than going in to serve one company, and getting locked down doing one thing, I think it's just enormously valuable. There's sort of two different dimensions I guess, educationally and from a research prospective. And both of them were very tied to open source. So from an education perspective, we have a course, for example, one of my frustrations of having come back from industry was students had done a lot of great, learned how to program, often as individuals they really didn't learn how to do agile, they didn't learn how to work with teams of people, so we have a large course that's served by multiple institutions today that's sort of tied to the MOC where we actually have industry mentors, we teach them agile methods, we teach them a lot of the sort of fundamentals of cloud, but we also have industry mentors come in and mentor teams of five students to create a product. There's actually three different lightning talks by different students that have taken this course, that are here in the OpenStack forum today. So it's kind of exciting to see. We've had several hundred students that have learned that and at least, in my experience, learning how to deal with open source communities, mentorship is a great way of doing that. First year we started teaching this course we had sort of struggled finding mentors, now we're about twice as many mentors applying to mentor teams as we can accommodate in it. So that's been kind of exciting. >> That's great. That's super important and learning right and not just learning how to program but how to operate as a engineer and a team. >> So in the MOC itself, a lot of it's stood up by students. We have like 20 to 30 students. We have a very small core development in our operations team and most of it is actually students doing all the real work. It's been amazing how much they can accomplish in that environment. >> You mentioned OpenShift. So another conversation that's been somewhat confusing in the broader industry is the talking about containers versus VMs and virtualization and OpenStack. Here this week, I thought it's been a fairly clear message that there's some you can be containerizing the stack itself and then there's also a role for containers on top. Obviously been involved in virtualization for a long time, how are you seeing the evolution of both containerization as a technology, but also container based platforms versus kind of the infrastructure and provisioning of the cloud part? >> I mean, there's three levels that all have its role. There's actually people that want to control all the way down to the operating system and want to do, customize things who want to use SRLV and want to use accelerators that haven't. So there's people that actually want hardware as a service and we provide a capability for doing that that's got its limitations today. There's people that want to use virtual machines and there's people that actually want to use containers. And the ability to orchestrate setting up a complex multitiered environment on that and doing fine-grain sharing in a containerized environment is huge. I think that actually all three are going to have a continued role going forward. And certainly containerized approach is an awesome way to deploy a cloud environment and scale the cloud environment even the IAS environment. So we're certainly doing that. >> Love the idea of the collaboration you have both intermittently with all the universities. Are you getting reached out by outside of Massachusetts? How do you interact with the broader community and share ideas back and forth? >> So of course there is multiple streams of that one of them is our industry partners are very broad. Second, we've participated in sort of the OpenStack Summits and all those kind of things. The other thing is that the model that we are doing, I think has a lot of excitement and interest from very many different segments. I don't think people want to see the public cloud be dominated, or could see always be dominated by a very small number of vendors. So the idea of actually creating an open mall of cloud. Lots of other academic institutions have talked with us both about setting up sister organizations, fettering between clouds and replicating the model. We're still at an early stage. This model still has to be proven out. We're excited that we have users that are using us now to get their work done. Rather than just courses and things like that. But it's still at a very early stage So I think as we scale up we'll start looking at replicating that model more broadly. >> Is there any public information about what you're doing? And I'm curious, will this tie into like mooc delivery, things like that? >> Oh, absolutely yeah. It's all on our webpage info.massopencloud.org. So everything is done in the open, I guess. So all the projects, they're all, everything is on the websites and you can discover all about it. And we welcome participation from a broad community. And are excited about that. >> Orran Krieger. Really appreciate you sharing with our community everything there. Congratulations. Local, we'd love to stop by some time to check out even more. John and I will be back with lots more coverage here from openStack Summit 2017, Boston, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by The OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystems support. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost this week has been John Troyer. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, worldwide leader in live tech coverage. And this has been OpenStack Summit 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts. John, we came in with a lot of questions. One of my premises, coming into the event was that we needed to reset expectations, a little bit. I know I learned a lot this week. Still one of my favorite communities. A lot of really smart people. Really interesting things going on. Open source infrastructure is really the focus here. Start with you, big meta takeaways from the show so far. >> Big picture, my first summit, my first summit here. Didn't quite know what to expect. I love the community, a lot of activity. A lot of real world activity going on. People building clouds today. So that was very insightful and very, that's a great data point. As far as the ecosystem goes, a lot more talk about integrating with the rest of the open source ecosystem, about integrating with other public and private clouds. So I thought that there was also a lot of self awareness here about where OpenStack is on it's journey and how it might proceed into the future. So overall, I think, you know, a really practical, focused, and grounded week. >> Yeah, came in with the whole concept of big tent. I think which we said, there's a big hole poked in that. There's the core is doing well, there's a number of projects, I forget the user survey, whether you know, there's the kind of the six core pieces and then there's like 9 or 10 in the average configuration. So there's more than the core, there's interesting things going into it and last year I felt that OpenStack kind of understood where it fit into that hybrid cloud environment. As you pointed out this year, some of those upper layer things, I feel like I understand them a little more. So, of course, containers and Kubernetes, a big piece of the discussion this week. Containers definitely transforming the way we build our applications. It seems a given now, that containers will be a big part of the future and OpenStack's ready for it. We had yesterday, we had the people that did the demo in the keynote, but containers doing well. Kubernetes fits in pretty well, even though, I think it was Randy Bias that said, "Well, OpenStack needs Kubernetes." My paraphrase is Kubernetes doesn't need OpenStack. KubeCon is going to be in Austin at the end of the year and that show could be bigger than this show was here in Boston. Year over year, for the North American show, attendance is down a little bit, but still robust attendance, lots of different pieces. Containers, Kubernetes, you mentioned some of the other pieces, any other add-ons on that? >> Well now, I mean other than its worth saying that these are not either or, this is all and. If you look at the total addressable market, every place that containers and Kubernetes can play, that's every cloud in the world, right? It's up there at the application layer. If you look at where OpenStack belongs, it is in these private clouds that have special needs, that have, either from privacy, security or functionality latency, just data gravity, right. There's all these reasons why you might want to build out a public cloud and we see that with Telco. Telecomm is building out their own infrastructure, because they need it, because they run the network core. So that's not going away. As far as containers go, again the story was not either or, it's and. You can containerize the infrastructure. That's super useful. Sometimes being bare metal is useful. Separately, you can put containers on top, because that's increasingly becoming the application packaging and interface format. So, I didn't see a lot of ideology here, Stu, and that was refreshing to me. People were not saying there is one true way. This is a modular system that, at this point in it's life cycle, it has to become very pragmatic. >> John, I think that's a great point, because we knock on, and everybody knocks on, OpenStack's not simple and the reason is because IT is not simple. Everybody has different challenges, therefore, it's not a Lego brick, it's lots of ways we put it together. Had some really interesting deep dives with a customer, couple of users today. The Adobe advertising cloud, Paddy Power Betfair, both of those gave us real concrete examples of how and why they build things the way they do. How OpenStack and Kubernetes go together. How acquiring another company, or switching your storage vendors is made easier by OpenStack. So, we've talked to a number of practitioners, they like OpenStack, reminds me of VMware. People like being able to build it and tweak it. Very different scale for some of these environments, but people are building clouds. The Telecom's are doing some good things. All the Linux companies are super excited about the future, that it helps them kind of move up the stack and become more critical environments and how it all ties into this multi-hybrid cloud world. Digital transformation, many of these pieces, I need that modern infrastructure and the open infrastructure coming from OpenStack and related pieces pull it all together. >> Well, where is the innovation going to come from in this next generation of cloud? I thought our segment with Orran, talking about the Massachusetts open cloud, was great, because he's there as a computer science professor, somebody who's been intimately involved with virtualization, with IBM, with VMware, saying, "Okay, we need to build this next generation. "Where can we innovate? We have to own the stack "and OpenStack is a great way for us to innovate "with those different components." One of the challenges, because OpenStack as a set of technologies, is so modular, is where's the knowledge come from? Where's the knowledge transfer? Can you find an OpenStack expert? Do you have to grow them? So, I see that as one challenge going forward for the OpenStack community, is how do we grow the knowledge base? How do we make sure that people are trained up and able to architect and operate OpenStack based clouds? >> Yeah, John, how about the individuals themselves? We talked to Lisa-Marie Namphy about the Ambassadors Program. We talked to a number of our guests throughout the week about training everything, from Orran Krieger, talking about how his students are helping to build this, to engagement contribution. I mean it's nuance, when I look at the future of jobs. A lot of companies here are hiring. Which is always heartening to me. What's your take on that aspect? >> Well, it's still a very vibrant community. You look at these different camps, a lot of them are vendor affiliated these days. There are very few communities that are outside of a vendor and these open source foundations are one source of those. I think, look there's still 5 or 6,000 people here, right? This is not a small event and these people are active, hands on operators, for the most part. So-- >> Yeah and the thing I'd point out, there are lots of companies that have contributors here. The other category is still really big here. A point Lisa-Marie made, many of the people that have contributed here have switched jobs a number of times. NASA helped start it. They kind of left, they came back. Some of the big Telecom companies, they're not selling OpenStack, they're using it to help build their services. So, it's like wait, which are vendors, which are providers? I think we know everybody's becoming a software company. Wait John, TechReckoning, are you a software company yet? >> We use a lot of soft, we use a lot of cloud, mostly on SaaS side. >> At SiliconANGLE Media we actually have a part of our business that is software. We've got a full development team, you know open source plays into somewhat we do, but I guess what I'm saying is, the traditional demarcation between the vendor and the consumer in open source tends to be blurring. I don't remember in the keynote if they had, hey how many people have contributed to the code. That's something that we used to get, partially because we have splintered out this event a little as to, the goals, it's no longer the people building it. They've got lots of ways to do that and a lot of the drama's gone. We had for many years in OpenStack, it was who's going to own what distribution and who's driving what project and a lot of that's come out. We talked about the last couple of years, has it become boring in certain ways? But it's important, it's driving a lot of pieces and OpenStack should be here to stay for awhile. >> Yeah, it's part of the conversation. I love the term open infrastructure. We heard it once or twice. We'll see if that becomes a topic of conversation. Going back to Lisa-Marie Namphy's segment, I encourage people to check out your local OpenStack meet-up right? You'll find that other conversations are going on there, other than just OpenStack. This is an ecosystem, it interacts with the rest of the world. >> Yeah, and talk about that next generation, edge is really interesting, the conversation we had with Beth Cohen. Also talked to Lee Doyle from the analysts perspective. Lots of cool things happening with that next generation of technology. 5G's going to play into it. So, there's always the next next thing and OpenStack's doing a good job to, as a community, to be open, working with it and understanding that they don't need to be all things to all people, certain other pieces will pull in and we have that broad diverse ecosystem. >> Looks a, I'll go out and make a prediction, I think in five years, we're going to look back and we're going to say, actually, OpenStack driven plumbing is going to be driving a lot of the next generation to the internet. >> Yeah, I love that, actually I forget if it's two or three years ago, what I said was that, as Linux took a long time to kind of work its way into all the environments, OpenStack pieces will find its way there. Brian Stevens from Google said, "If it wasn't for open source, in general, "Linux specifically, we wouldn't have "any of the hyperscale guys today." All those companies leverage open source a bunch. We've heard whisperings that, not just the telecommunications, some very large global companies that are trying to figure out how OpenStack fit into it. Coming into the show, it was all the talk about, oh, Intel stopped its joint lab with Rackspace, HPE pulled its cloud out, there's some other hyperscale companies that are looking at OpenStack. It's reached a certain maturity and it will fit in a number of places. All right, well, hey John, we started the beginning of the week, it was cloudy and overcast, a little cool in Boston. The skies opened up, it's blue. I've loved having two weeks here in Boston. Really appreciate you joining me for the journey here. Here for the OpenStack Summit. >> Thanks for having me, it was fascinating. >> Thank you John. Want to thank our audience, and thank the whole team here in Boston, and the broad SiliconANGLE media team. This is our biggest week that we've ever had, as to how much content we're creating. So, thanks so much to everyone. Thanks for our community for watching. As anything, when they scale, let us know if there's things we need to fix or feedback that you have for us. For Stu Miniman, John Troyer, the whole team here in Boston and beyond, I want to thank you so much for watching theCUBE. Be sure to check out SiliconANGLE TV for all the upcoming events. Let us know where we should be at and feel free to reach to us with any comments, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (light techno music)