>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. (energetic music) >> Bryan, good to see you again. >> Bryan: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. I said, "Good to see you again." We thought we had you on before, but maybe not. But anyway-- >> Bryan: I have lots of Rackers. >> We feel like Rackspace is one of ours, with theCUBE alone. Red Hat Summit, obviously a big show for the industry. Big show for Rackspace. But your focus is on OpenStack, you're the general manager of the OpenStack business. You guys started OpenStack, I mean, you and some others. But it was really the seed and the vision of Rackspace. So bring us up to date as to where you are now. >> Yeah, I see your point. It kind of goes back to 2010, where Rackspace and NASA essentially co-invented OpenStack and opened it up as a community project, and made it open source. Again, the intent was, how do you help leverage the innovation of a community to help build cloud infrastructure? At that time, it was really focused on public and private cloud. Rackspace over the years, certainly, our public cloud was built on OpenStack and we continue to do a lot of that focus in upstream innovation and contributing in, how do you make this platform scale very massively? Over the last several years, where we've seen great adoption of OpenStack specifically, though, is in private cloud solutions. We have built a practice over the last several years building, deploying, and operating private clouds for customers in our data centers, in their data centers, third party data centers. And that's where we've seen a lot of growth in that. >> Bryan, I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. I know you and I are going to be back here in Boston down the road at the Hynes for OpenStack Summit next week. But when you hear the general discussion, OpenStack has changed a lot in the last few years. So there are people that throw stones and are like, "Oh, well, it's done, it's over." Sounds like you've got a good, robust business. Tell us where are people using it, how are they using it, what is it replacing, or helping them grow their business? >> OpenStack itself, if you think of this arc of an open source project in the rapid innovation, how quickly it's matured, over the last couple years OpenStack itself has really become a solid platform. Infrastructure as a service. In fact, I think I heard a comment as of the Barcelona summit where an analyst or media or somebody said, "OpenStack is now boring." Because a lot of the drama or rapid change has really come out of it, many of the core projects have very much matured. You do hear, "Is OpenStack dead? "Are people going straight to containers on bare metal? "Is this the end of the space?" In practice, we are seeing it is still, how am I consuming or building cloud-native apps? I'm consuming cloud services, and certainly in a private cloud context I'm looking for that power and agility that I see from a public cloud, but delivered in a private cloud form factor. We're still seeing huge adoption for OpenStack in that use case. >> Well, there's a lot of misconceptions about OpenStack over the years, and part of it is it was just sort of put out there and said, "Okay, let's see what happens." But I remember when it went public, John Furrier, other co-host of theCUBE, called it a Hail Mary against Amazon. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> Okay, well, in a way, people needed some kind of alternative. And it's really emerged as the only, correct me if I'm wrong, really the only open platform to build private clouds on. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> And when you say you hear, "Oh, is OpenStack it?", you hear that from a lot of the legacy enterprise companies who are sort of doing their own proprietary private cloud. To your point, it's become a platform with momentum. Further thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think to your point that those that are really saying it's dead and they're doing their own proprietary cloud, that's really just virtualization at scale. They're not really consuming cloud services in the same framework that OpenStack delivers it. It is still a vibrant and growing platform. We're seeing it as the platform of choice for not just, how do I move virtualized workloads, but even for containers and other orchestrated solutions on top of that as well. It really is this underpinning technology that people are consuming for private and hybrid types of scenarios. >> Red Hat would argue, I wonder if you could weigh in on this, that in order for you to build a true hybrid cloud, we use the term true private cloud, we can extend that to true hybrid cloud, you've got to have a sort of modern infrastructure that's open on-prem. Or else you're going to be just force-fitting square pegs in round holes. >> I think there's a lot of validity to that. Especially when you think about the concept of portability or leveraging moving applications between different platforms. If I have a truly siloed infrastructure, I don't have that capability. Whereas if you look at leveraging these open platforms of OpenStack and the tooling that I could use on top of that, cloud forms and ether services, and certainly as I move into paths and containers, I now have much more portability on where I can deploy and operate these different technologies. >> Bryan, congratulations. You guys are an Innovation Award winner. Can you talk a little bit about the solutions and what you guys are working closely with Red Hat to give to your customers? >> It's really exciting. We were awarded one of their Innovator of the Year awards for cloud infrastructure. The way this came about is, Rackspace and Red Hat have a mutual customer that really came to us where they were looking for a private cloud delivered as a service. They're looking for the operational expertise that Rackspace brings in operating these technologies at scale, but were looking for a fully certified Red Hat stack. At that time, we didn't have an offering around the Red Hat OpenStack platform. We obviously have a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, and support a number of Red Hat technologies across our businesses, but in the OpenStack space we had not productized or brought to market a main service around the Red Hat OSP Platform. And so we partnered very closely with them to bring this solution to market. But it's not as simple as just saying, "Voilà, now we have our Red Hat offering." Our focus is really to bring the operators' perspective to it. So we spent eighteen months in total, if you think about from when we really kicked off this effort with them, deploying and operating and scaling and testing, and going through all the stages of patching, and upgrading and running different workload profiles and really, scalability testing. And feeding back a lot of innovation into the Red Hat team. It led to a number of enhancements that have come in later releases of RHEL OSP, which allowed us to really get to a platform that we could stand behind, provide as a main service and deliver a four nines availability SLA around it. This is the offering that we brought together. We're being recognized for some of those innovations that we fed back into it. We consume their Distributed Continuous Integration environment, so through the DCI platform we execute over 1500 tests on a daily basis, which allows us to deliver the latest release of RHEL OSP to our customers within two weeks of a given major release. We made a number of networking plainly-needed enhancements in how can we break out the bouncing from the control plane? Things that allow us to deploy and operate these solutions at a much larger scale. >> Maybe if you could speak to one of the challenges we've heard for OpenStack for years is, it's kind of complicated, and how do we do this? And I have to think, the Red Hat service and support model partnered with the fanatical support from Rackspace should be able to address some of those concerns for customers. >> That's honestly where I think we've found the most success with customers is, OpenStack itself is a very powerful tool. But it is complex. It's not something that you're just going to download and run on a VM in your laptop to gain experience with it. >> Stu: Built by rocket scientists! What do you expect? >> Literally, quite literally! So the complexity does continue to be a barrier to adoption for many enterprises. That's where our focus of being the operators and delivering it as a service has been so key for many customers. And then, given that fully compliant or certified stack from Red Hat, the software assurance that comes with that has been a great fit to a lot of customers who really grow. >> You mentioned platform as a service. Stu, earlier, you made the comment of The Platform Formerly Known As PaaS. There's a lot of discussion about PaaS, well, it's really not here anymore. Can you guys, at least start with Bryan, maybe Stu, you can chime in, what's happening with PaaS? Is it getting subsumed? I often say infrastructure's a service plus, or a SaaS minus. What's happening with PaaS? 'Cause when you talk to companies like Oracle, it's like, "Oh, our PaaS business is rockin'!" So what's really happening out there? >> I'm sure you have thoughts on this, too. I believe that PaaS is still a very strong plane. That's where many organizations, now they're embracing cloud and cloud-native development, are looking to move up the step and leverage more fabric-like services. Things that a PaaS can provide them, that integrated development environment. How do I make it easy to consume different data services? Removing the coarse-grained building blocks that I would otherwise have to orchestrate or manage myself. So we do see a lot of adoption for that. It's kind of that progression, as I'm moving up, I'm moving into cloud-native designs and architectures. Now I'm looking to really empower and enable my developers to consume these fabric services. Moving up the stack. >> Comment I'll make on it is, if you look at what's happening with the container space, you heard about what Red Hat talked, is how they take that piece. I want to be able to take my application, have how I built that and have some flexibility as to where that lives. And that was one of the core values of what PaaS was going to offer because, if I want to do Red Hat as the AMP with OpenShift, I want to do it on-premises, I want to do it in AWS, I want to do it with Google, I have that flexibility. Maybe we're just not calling it PaaS anymore. >> Yeah, I think that's good. I think if you look at the move to containerization, there are still those other components or services that I need to consume. How am I solving for identity and networking and storage and all these other components that go into it? This is where some of the PaaS frameworks can help that. >> Just one piece. Rackspace has a really interesting portfolio of services. You're partnering with all the big cloud guys. You've got private cloud. What do your customers think when you say hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, how does that fit in to where they are today and where they're making their strategy for cloud going forward? >> Again, Rackspace does represent a very large portfolio. We are the managed cloud company. I obviously am very focused on our private cloud and OpenStack, but we have as practices, we help enable customers to either migrate to, deploy or operate on Amazon web services. Certainly, the Azure platform, and recently we announced Google Compute, providing support for that. We have customers that are coming to us looking for help in architecting or moving to these. But the reality is almost all customers, and they touched on that during the keynote here, we live in a multi-vendor strategy or multi-cloud strategy. Certain clouds, either geographically or feature-set-wise are better suited for certain applications or workloads. Many of our customers are living in that hybrid cloud world, where I'm leveraging multiple different platforms depending on workload placement or other rules to that. Where Rackspace has really stepped it is providing that cloud expertise and helping them leverage that, providing tooling to help them deploy and operate in these different environments. In some cases where it's portability, move the same application around, but oftentimes it's really workload placement and how do I more effectively use it. >> We were talking in our open about the bromide from Marc Andreessen in Software's Eating The World, and the implication, tying that into Benioff's statement that there'll be more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. You're seeing some big SaaS tech companies like Workday and Salesforce, and Infor's always been there, moving to the Amazon cloud. And others who are maybe saying, "Well, I'm not sure I want to move to the Amazon Cloud." So my specific question is, relative to SaaS takeup on things like OpenStack, what are you seeing there? >> Ironically, certainly in private cloud, that's probably one of our biggest areas of growth is companies that are launching SaaS platforms for all the same reasons that they would be using an AWS to back that, right? They have the agility and rapid growth and elasticity that they can build into it, but they're running their platform, and depending on HR, you mentioned Workday, we have another great example. Ultimate software. They run their platform. Again, it's HR management and other services they want to run in a private cloud context, but deploying that framework where they can leverage cloud-native deployment. OpenStack has been a great fit for that, and helped them grow and scale. >> What's next for you guys in your world of OpenStack? Can you give us a little road map, and what we should expect going forward? >> For us, very specifically, if you focus on the IaaS layer, we continue to be very focused on operational efficiencies. How are we helping customers get the right unit economics out of a private cloud? Getting to greater densities, higher performance, more optimal usage of their cloud as we bring more visibility to actual capacity planning and capacity management, and make sure they're really leveraging or growing their cloud as they can. And then certainly from a feature set where we continue to move up and adopt these other services. I know we touched on earlier on the PaaS. This is an area where we're starting to get a lot of customer demand saying, "Can you help us in this area? "Are there things that you could be doing?" Going straight to native Kubernetes or looking at the different PaaS frameworks like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry. These are areas that we're starting to work more and more to potentially bring services to help customers really leverage these platforms. >> Paul Cormier was talking about how, you know, early days of the Cloud everybody thought everything was going to Amazon and so forth. But everything is going to the Cloud. Whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud, I know somebody told me the other day they're running an application in VMS. Okay, so some stuff never dies. But generally, the world will be cloud. Maybe we'll stop using the words like cloud and digital. Look at a camera! It's not a digital camera. Your thoughts on that? You buy that? >> No, I think you're spot-on. There's a long tale, there's still a lot of AS/400 out there. Although with OpenPOWER, maybe you could make the argument it's coming to OpenStack anyway. It is. If you think about any greenfield development, it's all being done in cloud-native ways. If you look at folks coming out of school and new application development, nobody's developing in the context of bare metal or legacy client/server apps that are built in that framework. I think even as enterprises continue to replatform services, they're moving into that cloud way. So they can take the long-term benefits of agility and cost-savings they're looking for. So we'll become ubiquitous. You're right, at some point, we're going to stop calling it cloud. It's just the way you're consuming infrastructure. >> Final question I have for you. A piece that I hadn't heard enough about when it comes to OpenStack is that kind of application modernization and replatforming. How does OpenStack fit into that discussion with your customers? I'm worried we talked in the keynote this morning about, it's like, oh, okay. We're going to do new stuff, but we might move the old stuff. We're not just moving the old stuff and leaving it, right? >> You're absolutely right. If you think of enterprises that are adopting or going all-in on OpenStack, they have, if you go back to the pets vs. cattle analogy everybody knows, they have lots of pets that they need to care for. We've looked at it and we've actually worked very hard with many customers on, how do I leverage things like Ceph to back Nova, and help bring things like live migration and other services that help OpenStack still cater to those pets and not force them in a full cloud-native model. How can I still deliver some amount of resiliency and failover in the infrastructure so the app doesn't have to be aware of it, and that way they can have one environment to run both new cloud development, but also still care for those legacy apps. >> Excellent. Bryan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you guys. >> Enjoy the rest of the show. >> Bryan: Thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Be right back. (energetic music)