>> 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)