>> Announcer: Live, from Vancouver, Canada it's the CUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the Open Stack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer and you're watching the CUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program long time friend of the CUBE back from the earliest days, Randy Bias, Vice President with Juniper, Randy, great to see you. >> Absolutely, great to be back with you guys. >> All right, so Randy, we've been talking about, you know, community, and everything's going good and attendance might be down a little bit but how we fit in with containers and kubernetes, and everything, so we expect you to tear everything up for us and tell us the reality of what's happening in this community. >> I'll do my best (laughing). >> All right, so before we get to the kubernetic stuff, you're working on, we used to call it OpenContrail? Which you were involved in before Juniper acquired it, went through a rebranding recently, Tungsten, which I was looking up, came from the word heavy stone, give us the update from the networking side. >> Yeah, so the short history is that there was a company called Contrail, and they created a software defined networking controller, it was acquired by Juniper in 2012, 2013, and then that was open sourced, so Juniper for a long time was running with sort of two editions, Contrail which was the commercial offering, and OpenContrail which was the open source, and then shortly after I joined Juniper, identified that, you know, we really needed to go back to the drawing board on the way that we had organized the community, and transition it from being Juniper-led to community led, and so over the past year, I spearheaded that effort, and then that culminated in us announcing at the end of March at ONS that, you know, OpenContrail was now Tungsten Fabric. We renamed it, we moved it into the Linux foundation, under its governance, and now Juniper is one of many people of the community that have a seat at the table for the management, both from a business and technical perspective, and we're moving forward with a new reinvigorated community. >> Yeah, so networking sits at really the intersection of this multi-cloud world that we're living in. There's so many players trying to be there, you know Cisco, really moving to become more of a software company, when I interviewed their number two guy at their show, he's like, when you think of Cisco in the future, we're not even going to be a networking company, we'll be a software company. VMware, of course, pushed heavy through, then the Nicira acquisition, where does Tungsten fit, kind of compare and contrast for us, where it fits among some of these other offerings out there in the marketplace. >> Yeah, I mean, I think most enterprise vendors are in a similar transition from being a hardware to software companies. We're no different than any of the rest. I think we have a pretty significant advantage in that we have a lot of growth in the cloud sector, so a lot of the large public clouds are our customers and we're selling a tremendous amount of hardwaring to them, so I think we've got a lot longer runway. But, you know, we just recently hired CTO, Bikash Koley, out of Google, and we're starting to see some additional folks out of Google, like my new boss, Morgan, and what that's bringing with it is a very much a software first type perspective. So Bikash and Morgan really built everything for the Google network from the topper rack all the way out to the win and it's almost all software-based, disaggregated, hardware, software, opensource software running on top of white boxes, and so that kind of perspective is now really deep, start beginning to become embedded in Juniper. And at the head of that is Tungsten. So we see Tungsten Fabric as being sort of a tool that we use to create, you know, a global ubiquitous network fabric, that anybody can use anywhere, without talking to Juniper at all, without knowing that Juniper's part of Tungsten, and then as they grow up and they get to a point where they need multi-cloud, they need federation, or they need kind of day two enterprise operations, you know, we have a commercial version and a commercial distribution that they can use. >> Randy, we talked a little bit about OpenContrail and last year, at OpenStack Summit and moving it to a more of a community based governance model, and now that's happened with the Linux Foundation, can you talk a little bit about the role of opensource governance, and corporate governance, and then foundations, and just going forward, you know, what's an effective model for 2018 going forward, for a foundation-led project and maybe in the context of Tungsten Fabric, and how is that looking? >> Yeah, so again, OpenContrail's now Tungsten Fabrics, might be new for some of the viewers, lot of people still coming to terms with that. And so one of the things that we noticed is that, and when many people go and they say, hey, we want opensource first, the AT&T's of this world, part of what they're saying, one of the aspects of being opensource versus we want to be one of many around the table, we want to have a seat at the table, we want to have the option to contribute code back, and we want to feel like it's a group effort. And so that was a big factor, right? It was an opensource project, but it was largely the governance was carried by Juniper, all the testing infrastructure was Juniper, you know, all of the people who made architectural decisions were Juniper, all of the lead contributors were Juniper, and so, going to Linux Foundation was critical to us having a legal framework, for the trademarks, the code, the licenses, the contributor license agreements, are all owned and operated by the Linux Foundation and not by Juniper, so we basically have a trusted third party who can mediate all those things and create a structure, a governance small structure where Juniper has one seat at the table, and all the other community members do as well. So it was really key to getting, to moving to that model to increase people's interest in the project and to really go the next level. There just wasn't any way to do it without doing this. >> All right, so, Randy, let's talk about OpenStack. You were watching the keynote yesterday, you were, you know, in the Twitter stream, >> Randy: I don't usually watch keynotes, man. >> Stu: But you know this community, so-- >> I do know this community (laughing). >> Give us kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly from your standpoint as to, you know, where we've gone, you know, what's doing well, and what you're frustrated as heck that we still haven't fixed yet. >> Well, I mean, it's great that we have so much inroads amongst the carriers, it's great that, you know, that there's a segment that OpenStack has been able to land in. I mean, at some points when I was feeling particularly pessimistic on some days, I was like, oh man, this thing's never going to go anywhere, so that's great. On the other hand, you know, the promise that we had of sort of being the Linux operating center, operating system of the data center, and you know, really gaining inroads into private cloud and enterprise, that just hasn't materialized and I don't see a path to that. A lot of that has to do with history, I'm not sure how much of that I want to go into here, but I see those as being bright lights. I see the Ocata containers effort and sort of having this alternative structure that's more or less like the umbrella structure that I lobbied for while I was on the board. So for several years on the board, I said we need to really look more like the Apache Software Foundation, we need to look less like the Linux Operating System in terms of how we think about things. Not this big integrated monolithic release, you need more competition between projects and that just wasn't really embraced. And I think that that, in a way, that was one of several things that really kind of limited our ability to capture the market that we really wanted, which is the enterprise market. >> Yeah, well, I know, and one of those sticking points there that I've talked to you many times over the years about is how do I actually deploy this? You know, getting a base configuration and scaling this out, simplicity is tough, getting to those environments, you know, getting it up in two weeks, is good for some environments, but maybe not for others. >> Yeah, I mean I think there's sort of a spectrum, right? At one end of the spectrum, you say hey, I'm going to have a very opinionated approach like kubernetes does, and we're going to limit what we say we can do, you know, we're not all things to all people. And I think that opinionated approach, like the Linux operating system worked very, very well. And then other end of the spectrum is we've got no opinion like the Apache Software Foundation, and then it's up to vendors to go and cherry pick the pieces they want and turn that into some kind of commercial offering, whether it's Hortonworks, or Thi-dare or Du-per or whatever it is, the problem is that OpenStack wound up in the middle where it had the sort of integrated monolithic release cycle which it still does, which started to be all things to all people, and it was never as great as it could be, so it's like we got to support Hyper-V, we got to support VMware, and as the laundry list of all things we have to support grew longer, it became more and more difficult to have a compelling, easy to use, easy to scale offering that any enterprise could consume. >> Randy, a lot of talk this week about edge computing, with several different definitions, right? But it does strike me that, you know, there's a certain set of apps, that you write 'em and that they live fine in a big public cloud, and a big data center somewhere. But there's a lot of hardware that's going to be living out in the world, whether that's at the base of a radio tower, or in a wall, or in my shoe, that is going to be running hardware, and is going to be running something, and sometimes that something can be OpenStack, and we're seeing some examples of it, many examples of that already. Is that an area of growth for OpenStack? Is that an interesting part of how this fabric is going to expand? >> Well, I probably have a contrarian view here. So, I spent a bunch of time at Juniper, one of the things I worked on for a while was edge computing and we're still trying to decide what we want to do there and you know, kind of to the first point you made is everybody's edge is different, right? Is it on the mobile phone, is it back in the data center, the difference is that the real estate gets more expensive as you move out, right? And it's in terms of latency, and it's in terms of bandwidth and it's also in terms of cost of storage and compute. There's a move closer to the mobile device that becomes progressively more expensive, and so that's why a lot of people sort of look and say hey, wouldn't it be nice if we can get you out the closer lower latency and bandwidth and so on but as we looked at it, a lot of the different use cases it became really interesting in that, it wasn't clear if there was that much value between 5 milliseconds and 20 milliseconds, right? I mean, that's pretty, either one's pretty close, sure there's a lot of difference between 20 and a 100, but maybe not so much between 5 and 20. And so we kind of came to the conclusion that at least for right now, probably, the bulk of use cases are fine with 20 milliseconds, and what that means is that regional systems like AWS's Lambda at the Edge, they're in metro, those are probably good for most cases. I don't know that you need to be on the tower, I don't know that you need to be in the central office, so I think edge computing is still nascent, we don't know exactly what all those use cases are, but I think you might be able to service most of them from regional data centers, and then the question really becomes what does that stack need to be and if you have a regional data center that's got plenty of power, plenty of space, then it might be that OpenStack is a good solution, but if you're trying to scale down onto the tower, I got to have some doubts about whether OpenStack can really scale down that far. >> Randy, analytics is something we've been seeing, the networking people used for many years, at this show, starting to hear a lot of discussion about AI and ML, would love your view point as to what you're seeing in that space. >> You know I have some friends who started off in AI in very early days and he had a very pessimistic view. He said, you know this stuff comes and goes, but I'm actually very positive and optimistic about it because the way I look at this is there's a renaissance happening which is that, you know, now ML is really available to masses and you're seeing people do really interesting things like, we have a product called AppFormix, and what they do is they take ML and they apply it to operations and I love this because as an operations guy, you know, I used to have these problems in production where something would go out and the first thing I'd do, is I'm trying to do correlation and then root cause analysis, like, what was the actual failure? Like I can see the symptom on this end and now I have to get all the way back to what caused it, and the reality is that machine learning, AI techniques and protocols can do all the heavy lifting for operators very, very quickly and basically surface a problem for somebody to do the final analysis on. And so I do think that ML and AI apply to very specific vertical problems, it is just a place where we're going to see a tremendous amount of revolution in the next couple years. >> All right, and that hits right at really that intersection between kind of the developers and the operators there-- >> Absolutely. >> What are you seeing from an organizational standpoint, companies you're talking to these days, how are they doing adopting that change, dealing with that, you know, often schism or are they bringing those groups together? >> Well, I think you remember that like in the early days, I used bring my deck along and I would talk about assembly line IT versus the robotics spectrum all of IT and I would sort of make that sort of analogy to sort of the car manufacturing process, and I think what machine learning is really going to do is take us to that next level past that right? So we had the assembly line where we have all the specialists, we had the robotics factory where we had people who know how to build a robots and software, and it's really sort of like, just churning out with a lot of people on the line, and I think the next level after that is, you know, completely fully automated applications driving themselves, you know, self-driving applications, and I think that's when things get really interesting, and maybe we start to remove the traditional operator out of the equation and it really becomes about empowering developers with tools that are comfortable and that leverage all the cloud era and stuff that we built. >> All right, so Randy, you're credited with the pets versus cattle analogy, what's the latest, you were talking about some of the previous slide decks, what's Randy Bias looking on down the road? >> I mean, the stuff just comes to me, man. I can't like predict, but the thing I've been talking about a lot lately is services of platform, I think we might've talked about that last time, which is just this notion that if we look at where Amazon's invested and what's interesting, it's certainly not at the infrastructure layer and it's really not at the PAS layer, it's that thick layer in between with like database as a service and NoSQL as a service, and messaging service, and DNS and so on, where you can kind of cherry pick those things as you're assembling your own PAS for your application, and I still think that's the area that is under-discussed, and the reason is is the people back into basically doing that, building kind of the service as a platform system, but they're not like going into it, kind of like eyes wide open. >> Yeah, so just following up on that last piece, one of the criticisms I have this week is when you talk about multi-cloud, most of the people talk about, oh well people are clawing things back to their data centers. Juniper plays across the board, strong partnership with Amazon, yet you're here, what are you hearing from customers, you know, what do you see as kind of the balance there and, you know, the public cloud's role in the world? >> I mean, they're still winning, right? I don't think there's any doubt, I haven't seen a decline back here talking about, but we are starting to enter into the era of, okay, this stuff is out there, and it's running, but I need to find my governance model, I need to understand who's using what, I need to understand what it's costing me, and that's the sign of the maturation process. And so I think that, you know, we saw in the early days of cloud, people jumping the gun, creating compliance services, and you know, SAS products that would basically measure how much you're spending and think that it's time for that stuff to come back in vogue again, because the tool needs to be there for people to manage these extended supply chain of IT vendors which include the public cloud. And I think that the idea that would claw them back as opposed to like just see that as holistic part of what we're trying to accomplish doesn't make any sense. >> Well learned. Well, Randy Bias, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> John. >> John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of two days of three days of live coverage. Thanks for staying with the CUBE. (bubbly electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional Ecosystem as support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer. This is Silken Angle Media's production of the Cube at OpenStack Summit. We're the world wide leader in tech coverage, live tech coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program someone we've had on so many times we can't keep track. He is the creator of the term Pets versus Cattle, he is one of the OG of The Cloud Group, Randy, you know, wrote about everything before most of it was done. So good to see you, thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Randy, coming into this show we felt that it was a bit of resetting expectations, people not understanding, you know, where infrastructure's going, a whole hybrid multi-cloud world, so, I mean you've told us all how it's going to go, so where are we today, what have people been getting wrong, what's your take coming into this week and what you've seen? >> Well, I've said it before, which is that the public clouds have done more than just deliver compute storage and networking on demand. What they've really done is they've built these massive development organizations. They're very sophisticated, that are, you know, that really come from that Webscale background and move at a velocity that's really different than anything we've seen before, and I think the hope in the early days of OpenStack was that we would achieve a similar kind of velocity and momentum, but I think the reality is is that it just hasn't really materialized; that while there are a lot of projects and there are a lot of contributors the coordination between them is very poor, and you know it's just not the, like architectural oversight that we really needed isn't there. I, a couple years ago at the Openstack Silicon Valley gave a presentation called The Lie of the Benevolent Dictator, and I chartered a course for how we could actually have more of a technical architecture oversight, and just that really fell on deaf ears. And so we continue to do the same thing and expect different results and I just, that's a little disappointing for me. >> Yeah. So what is your view of hybrid cloud? You know, no disagreement, you look at what the public cloud companies, especially the big three, the development that they can do, Amazon, a thousand new features a year, Google, what they can do with data, Microsoft has a whole lot of applications and communities around them. We're mostly talking about private cloud here, it was a term that you fought against for many years, we've had great debates on it, so how does that hybrid play out? Cause customers, they're keeping on premises. Edge fits into a lot of this too, so it's, there's not one winner, it's not a zero sum game, but how does that hybrid cloud work? >> Yeah so, I didn't fight against private cloud, I qualified it. I said if it's going to be a private cloud it's got to be built and look and smell the way that the public cloud was. Alright? If it's just VM ware with VM's on demand, that's not a private cloud. That was my position. And then in terms of hybrid cloud, you know, I don't think we're there yet. I've presented on this at many different OpenStacks, you can see it in the past, and I sort of laid out what needs to happen and that didn't happen. But I think there's hope, and I think the hope comes in the form of Kubernetes, and to a certain degree, Helm. And the reason that Kubernetes with Helm is very powerful is that Kubernetes gives us a computive traction, so that you don't care if you're on the public cloud, or you know OpenStack or Vmware or whatever, and then what Helm gives us is our charts, so ways to deploy services, not just software, and so what we could think about doing in the future is building hybrid cloud based off of Kubernetes and Helm. >> Yeah, so Randy since last time we talked you've got a new role, you're now with Juniper. Juniper had done a Contrail acquisition. You know, quite a few years back you wrote a good blueprint on one of the Juniper forums about the OpenContrail communities. So tell us a little bit about your role, your goals, in that community. >> So OpenContrail has been a primarily Juniper initiative, and we're going to press the reset button on the OpenContrail community. I'm going to do it tonight and call for people to sort of get involved in doing that reset, and when I say reset I mean, wipe the operating system, reload it from scratch, and do it really as a community, not just as a Juniper run initiative, and so people inside Juniper are very excited about this, and what we're trying to do is that we believe that the path forward for OpenContrail is ubiquitous adoption. So rather then playing for just the pieces that we have, which we've done a great job of, we want to take the world's best SDN controller and we want to make sure everybody uses it, because we think aggregate that's good for not only the entire community but also Juniper. >> So, love the idea of kind of rebooting the community in the open, right, because you have to be transparent about these sort of things. >> Randy: Yeah, that's right. >> What are the community segments that you would like to see join you here in the OpenContrail? What kind of users, what kind of companies would you like to see come in to the tent? >> Well anybody's welcome, but we want to start with all of our key stakeholders that exist today, so first one, and arguably one of the most important is our competitors, right so we're hoping to have Mirantis at the table, maybe Ericcson, Huawei, anybody. Cisco, hey come join the party. Second is that we have done really well in Sass and in gaming, and we'd like to see all of those companies come to the table as well, Workday, Symantech, and so on. The third segment is enterprises, we've done well in financial services, we think that that's a really important segment because they're leading edge of enterprises typically, and the fourth is the carrier's obviously incredibly important for Juniper, folks like AT&T, Direction Telecom, all those companies we'd love to see come to the table. And then that's really the primary focus, and then anybody else who wants to show up, anybody who wants to develop in Contrail in the future we'd love to have there. >> Well with open source communities, right, there's always a balance of the contributors and developers versus operators, and we can use the word contributors in a lot of roles. Some open source communities, much more developer focused, >> Randy: That's right. >> Others more operator focused, where do you see this OpenContrail community starting out? >> So where it's been historically is more of our end users and operators. >> I think that's interesting and an interesting twist because I think sometimes open source communities get stuck with just the people who can contribute code, and I'm from an operator community myself, >> Randy: Right. >> So I think that's really interesting. >> We still want all those people but I think what has happened is that when people have come in and they wanted to be more sort of on the developer side, the community hasn't been friendly to them. >> John: Okay. >> Randy: And so we want, that's a key thing that we want to change. You know when we were talking, to certain carriers they came and they said look, it's great you're going to do this, we want to be a part of it, and one of the things we'd like to contribute is more advanced testing around VMFs. And I just look at that and I'm just like that's what we need, right? Juniper is not, can't carry all the water on having, you know, sophisticated test suites for VMFs and more advanced networking use cases, but the carriers are deep into this and we'd love to have them come and bring that. So not just developers, but also QA, people who want to increase the code quality, the architectural quality, and the aggregate value of OpenContrail. >> Okay, Randy can you help place OpenContrail where it fits in this kind of networking spectrum, especially, there's open source things, we've talked about about VPP a couple times on theCube here. The joke for many years was SDN still does nothing, NFV solutions have grown, have been huge use case, is really where the early money for big deployments have been for OpenStack. Where does OpenContrail fit, where does it kind of compare and contrast against some of the other options out there. >> I'm going to answer that slightly differently. I've been skeptical about SDN overlays for a long time, and now I am helping with one of the world's best SDN overlays, and what's changed for me is that in the last year I've seen key customers of Contrail's, of Juniper's actually do something very interesting, right. You've got an SDN overlay, it's complex, it's hard to void, you got to wonder, why should I do this? Well I thought the same thing about virtualization, right, until I figured out, sort of what was the killer app. And what we've seen is a company, one of our customers, and several others, but one in particular I can talk about publicly, Riot Games, take containers and OpenContrail and marry them so that you have an abstraction around compute, and an abstraction around networking, so that their developers can write to that, and they don't care whether that's running on top of public cloud, private cloud, or in some partner's data center globally. And in fact they're going to talk about that today at OpenContrail days at 3:30, and are going to present a lot more details, and that's amazing to me because by abstracting a way and disintermediating the public clouds, you actually have more power, right. You can build your own framework. And if you're using Kubernetes as a baseline you can do a lot more on top of that computing network abstraction. >> You talked about OpenContrail days, again my first summit, I've actually been impressed by the foundation, acknowledging there's a huge landscape of open source and other technologies around there, OpenStack itself doesn't invent everything. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of attitude of bringing, I mean we talk about Kubernetes and that sort of thing, but all the other CNCF projects, monitoring, even components like SCD, right, we're talking about here at this conference. So, can you talk a little bit about how OpenStack can interact with the rest of the open source and cloud native at-large community? >> That's sort of a tough question John. >> John: Okay. >> I mean the reason I say that is like the origins of OpenStack are very much NIH and there has been a very disturbing tendency to sort of re-invent the wheel. A great example is Keystone, still to this day I don't know why Keystone exists and why we created a whole new authentic standard when there were dozens and dozens of battle-tested, battle-hardened protocols and bits of code that existed prior. It's great that we're getting a little bit better at that but I still sense that the origins of the community and some of the technical leadership have resistance to organizing and working with outside components and playing nice. So, it's better but it's not great, it's not where it should be. Really OpenStack needs to be broken down into a lot of different projects that can compete with each other and all run in parallel without having to be so tightly wound together. It's still disappointing to me that we aren't doing that today. >> Randy, wonder if you could give us a little bit of a personal reflection, you've been involved in cloud many years, we've talked about some of the state of it, where do you think enterprises are when they think about their IT, how IT relates to business, some of the big challenges they're facing, and kind of this rapid pace of change that's happening in our industry right now >> Yeah well the pressures just increase. The need to pick up speed and to move faster and to have a greater velocity, that's not going away, that seems to be like an incredible macro-trend that's just going to keep driving people towards the next event. But what I see is that the tension between the infra-structure IT teams and the line of business hasn't really started to get resolved. You see a lot of enterprises back into using DevOps as a way to try to fix the culture change problems but it's just not happening fast enough. I have a lot of concerns that basically private cloud or private infra-structure for enterprises will just not materialize in the way it needs to for the next generation. And that the line of business will continue to just keep moving to public cloud. All the while all the money that's being reinvested in the public cloud is increasing their capabilities in terms feature sets and security capabilities and so on. I just, I don't see the materialization of private cloud happening very well at this point in time and I don't see any trendlines that tell me it's going to change. >> Yeah, what recommendations do you give today to the OpenStack foundation? I know that you haven't been shy in the past about giving guidance as to the direction, what do you think needs to happen to be able to help customers along that journey that they need? >> I don't give any guidance to the OpenStack Foundation anymore, I'm not on the Board of Directors, and frankly I gave a lot of advice in the past that fell on deaf ears and people were unwilling to make the changes that were necessary I think to create success. And even though I was eventually proven right, there doesn't seem to be an appetite for change. I would say that the hard partition between the Board of Directors and the technical committee that was created at the outset with the founding of the Foundation has let to a big problem which is that there's simply business concerns that are technical concerns and there are technical concerns which are business concerns and the actual structure of the Foundation does not allow that to occur because that hard partition between them. So if people on Board of Directors can't actually tell the TC that they'd like to see certain technical changes because they're business concerns and Technical Committee can't tell the Board of Directors they'd like to see business changes made because they're technical concerns around them. And I think that's, it's fundamentally broken until the bylaws are fixed. >> So Randy beyond what we've talked about already what's exciting you these days, you look at like the serverless trend, is that something that you find intriguing or maybe contrary view on it, what's exciting you these days? >> Serverless is really interesting. In fact I'd like to see serverless at the edge. I think it would be fascinating if Amazon webservices could sell a serverless capability that was actually running in the mobile carriers edge. So like on the mobile towers or in essential offices. But you could do distributive computation for IOT literally at the very edge of the network, that would be incredibly powerful. So I am very interested in serverless in that regard. With Kubernetes, I think that this is the future, I think I've seen most of the other initiatives start to fail at this point. Docker Incorporated just hasn't made the progress they need to, hopefully a change in leadership will fix that. But it does mean that more and more people are gravitating towards Kubernetes and that's a thing because whereas OpenStack is historically got no opinion, Kubernetes is a much more prescriptive model and I think that actually leads to faster innovation, a greater pace of change and combined with Helm charts, I think that we're going to see an ecosystem develop around Kubernetes that actually could be a counterweight to the public clouds and really be sort of cloud agnostic. Private, public, at the edge, who cares? >> Randy Bias, always appreciated your very opinionated viewpoints on everything that are happening here. Pleasure to catch up with you as always. John and I will be back will lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston, thanks for watching the Cube.

(lively music) >> Hello, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We are here in our Palo Alto Studio to have a conversation around cloud computing, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, the changes going on in the IT industry and for businesses across the globe as impacted by cloud computing, data, AI. All that's coming together, and a lot of people are trying to figure out how to architect their solution to scale globally but also take care of their businesses, not just cutting costs for information technologies, but delivering services that scale and benefit the businesses and ultimately their customers, the end users. I'm here with a very special guest, Donnie Berkholz, who's the VP of IT services delivery at CWT, Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Also the program chair of the Open Source summit, part of the Linux Foundation, formerly an analyst, a great friend of theCUBE. Donnie, great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. >> Well, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. >> So we've been having a lot of conversations around, obviously, cloud. We've been there, watching it, from day one. I know you have been covering it as an analyst. Part of that cloud ought to go back to 2007, '08 time frame roughly speaking, you know, even before that with Amazon. Just the massive growth certainly got everyone's attention. IBM once called Amazon irrelevant. Now going full cloud with buying Red Hat for billions and billions of dollars at a 63% premium. Open Source has grown significantly, and now cloud absolutely is the architectural linchpin for companies trying to change how they do business, gather more efficiencies, all built on the ethos of DevOps. That is now kind of going mainstream. So I want to get your thoughts and talk about this across a variety of touchpoints. One is what people are doing in your delivering services, IT services for CWT, and also trying to get positioned for the future. And then Open Source. You're on the Open Source program chair. Open Source driving all these benefits, now with IBM buying Red Hat, you've seen the commercialization of Open Source at a whole nother level which is causing a lot of conversation. So tell us what you're doing and what CWT is about and your role at the company. >> Absolutely, thank you. So CWT, we're in the middle of this journey we call CWT 3.0, which is really one about how do we take the old school green screens that you've seen when you've got travel agents or airline agents booking travel and bring people into the picture and blend together people with technology. So I joined about a year and a half ago to really help push things forward from the perspective of DevOps, because what we came to realize here was we can't deliver quickly and iterate quickly without the underlying platforms that give us the kind of agility that we need without the connections across a lot of our different product groups that led us, again, to iterate on the right things from the perspective of our customers. So I joined a year and a half ago. We've made a lot of strides since then in modernizing many of our technology platforms. The way I think about it here, it's a large enterprise. We've got hundreds of different applications. We've got many, many different product teams, and everything is on a spectrum. We've got some teams that are on the bleeding edge. Not even the leading edge, but I'd say the bleeding edge, trying out the very latest things that come out, experimenting with brand new Open Source tools, with brand new cloud offerings to see, can we incorporate that as quickly as possible so we can innovate faster than our competitors? Whether those are the traditional competitors or some of the new software companies coming into things from that angle. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got teams who are taking a much more conservative approach, and saying, "Let's wait and see what sticks "before we pick it up." And the fortunate thing, I think, about a company at the scale we are, is that we can have some of those groups really innovating and pushing the needle, and then other groups who can wait and see which parts stick before we start adopting those at scale. >> And so you've got to manage the production kind of stability versus kind of kicking the tires for the new functionality. So I've got to ask you first. Set up the architecture there. Are you guys on premise with cloud hybrid? Are you in the cloud-native? Do you have multiple clouds? Could you just give a sense of how you're deploying specifically with cloud? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think just like anything else, it's a spectrum of all we see here. There's a lot of different products. Some of them have been built cloud-native. They're using those serverless functions as service technologies from scratch. Brought in some leaders from Amazon to lead some of that drive here. They brought in a lot of good thinking, a lot of good culture, a lot of new perspective to the technologies we're adopting as a company that's not traditionally been a software company. But that is more and more so every day. So we've got some of that going on as completely cloud-native. We've got some going on that's more, I would say, hybrid cloud, where we're spanning between a public cloud environment back to our data centers, and then we've got some that are different applications across multiple different public clouds, because we're not in any one place right now. We're putting things in the best place to do the job. So that's very much the approach that we take, and it's one that, you know, back when I was in my analyst's world, as one of my colleagues called it, the best execution venue. What's the best place? What's the right place to do the right kind of task? We incorporate what are the best technologies we can adopt to help us differentiate more quickly, and where does the data live? What's the data gravity look like? Because we can't be shipping data back and forth. We can't have tons of transactions going back and forth all the time between different public clouds or between a public cloud and one of our data centers. So how do we best account for that when we're architecting what our applications should look like, whether they're brand new ones or whether they're ones we're in the middle of modernizing. >> Great, thanks for sharing, that's great, so yeah, I totally see that same thing. People put, you know, where the best cloud for the app, and if you're Microsoft Shop, you use Azure. If you want to kick the tires on Amazon, there's good roles for that, so we're seeing a lot of those multiple clouds. But while I've got you on the line here, I know you've been an analyst. I want you to just help me define something real quick because there's always kind of confusion between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Certainly the multi-cloud, we're getting a lot of hype on that. We're seeing with Kubernetes, with stateful applications versus stateless. You're seeing some conversations there. Certainly on Open Source, that's top of the agenda. Donnie, explain for folks watching the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, because there's some nuances there, and some people have different definitions. How do you guys look at that? Cause you have multiple clouds, but some aren't necessarily running a workload across clouds yet because of latency issues, so define what hybrid means to you guys and what multi-cloud means to you. >> All right, yeah, I think for us, hybrid cloud would be something where it's about integrating an on-prem workload off a more traditional workload with something in a public cloud environment. It's really, hybrid cloud to me is not two different public clouds working together or even the same application in two different public clouds. That's something a little bit different, and that's where you start to get, I think, into a lot of the questions of what is multi-cloud? We've seen that go through a lot of different transitions over the past decade or so. We've seen a lot of different, you know, vendors, going out there thinking they could sell multi-cloud management that, you know, panned out at different levels of success. I think for at least a decade, we've been talking about ideas like can we do cloud bursting? Has that ever really worked in practice? And I think it's almost as rare as a unicorn. You know, on-prem for the cost efficiencies and then we burst the cloud for the workload. Well, you know, to this day, I've never seen anything that gives you 100% functionality and 100% performance comparability between an on-prem workload and public cloud workload. There always seems to be some kind of difference, and this is a conversation that, I think, Randy Bias has actually been a great proponent of it's not just about the API compatibility. It's not just, you know, can I run Azure in their data centers or in mine? It's about what is the performance difference look like? What does the availability difference look like? Can I support that software in my data center as well as the engineers at Microsoft or at Amazon or at Google or wherever else they're supporting it today? Can I keep it up and running as well? Can I keep it performing as well? Can I find problems as quickly? And that's where it comes to the question of how do we focus on our differentiators and let the experts focus on theirs. >> That's a great point about Randy Bias. Love that great API debate. I was looking at some of that footage we had years ago. But this brings up a good point that I want to get your reaction to, because, you know, a lot of vendors going out there, saying, "Oh, our cloud's this. "We've got all this stuff going on," and there's a lot of hype and a lot of posturing and positioning. The great thing about cloud is that you really can't fake it until you make it. It's got to be working, right? So when you get into the kind of buying into the cloud. You say, "Okay, great, we're going to do some cloud," and maybe you get some cloud architects together. They say, "Okay, here's what it means to us. "In each environment, we'll have to, you know, "understand what that means and then go do it." The reality kind of kicks in, and this is what I'd like to get your reaction to. What is the realities when you say, "Okay, "I want to go to cloud," either for pushing the envelope and/or moving solid workloads that are in production into the cloud. What is the impact on the network, network security, and application performance? Because at the end of the day, those are going to be impacted. Those three areas come up a lot in conversations when all of the glam and all the bloom is off the rose, those are the things that are impacted. What's your thoughts on how practitioners should prepare for those three areas? The network impact, network security impact, and application performance? >> Yeah, I think preparation is exactly the right word there of how do we get the people we have up to speed? And how do we get more and more out of that kind of project mindset and into much more of the product mindset and whether that product is customer-facing or whether that product is some kind of infrastructure or platform product? That's the kind of thinking we're trying to have going into it of how do we get our people, who, you know, may run a Ci Cd pipeline, may run an on-prem container platform, may even be responsible for virtualization, may be responsible for on-prem networks or firewalls or security. How do we get them up to speed and turn them into real software engineers? That's a multi-year journey. That's not something that happens overnight. You can't bring in a team of consultants to fix that problem for you and say, "Oh, well, we came in and implemented it, "and now it's yours, and we walk out the door." It's no longer that, you know, build and operate mindset that you could take a little bit more with on-prem. Because everything is defined as code. And if you don't know how to deal with code, you're going to be in a real rough spot the next time you have to make a change to that stuff that that team of consultants came in and implemented for you. So I think it's turned into a much more long-term approach, which is very, very healthy for technology and for technology companies as a whole of how do we think about this long-term and in a sustainable way, think about scaling up our people. What do those training paths look like? What do those career paths look like? So we can decide, you know, how many people do we want certified? What kind of certifications should they have or equivalent skill sets? I remember hearing not too long ago that I think it was Capital One had over 10,000 people who were AWS certified, which is an enormously large number to think about, but that's the kind of transitions that we've been making as we become more and more cloud-native and cloud by default, is getting the right people. The people we have today trained up in these new kinds of skill sets instead of assuming that's something we can have some team fly in from magic land and implement and then fly away again afterwards. >> That's great, Don, thanks for sharing that insight. I also want to get your thoughts on the Open Source summit, but before we get there, I've got to ask you a question around some of the trends we've been seeing. Early on at DevOps we saw this together of the folks doing the hard work in the early pioneering days, where you saw the developers really getting closer to the front lines. They were becoming part of the business conversation. In the old world of IT, "Okay, here's our strategy. "Consolidate this, load some virtual machines," you know, "Get all this stuff up and running." The business decisions would then trickle down to the tech folks, then with the DevOps revolution, that's now cloud computing and all things, you know, IoT and everything else happening where the developers and the engineering side of it and the applications are on the front lines. They're in more of the business conversations, so I have to ask you. When you're at CWT, what are some of the business drivers and conversations that you guys are having with executive management around choices? Are they business drivers? Do you see an order of preference around agility? The transformation value for either customers or employees, compliance and security, are the top ones that people talk about generally. Of those business drivers, which ones do you guys see the most that are part of iterating through the architecture and ultimately the environment that you deploy? >> Yeah, I think as part of what I mentioned earlier, that we're on this journey we call CWT 3.0, and what's really new about that is bringing in speed and agility into the conversation of if we have something that we imagine as a five year transformation, how do we get to market quickly with new products so that we can start really executing and seeing the outcomes of it? So we've always had the expectations around availability, around security, around all these other factors. Those aren't going away. Instead, we're adding a new one, so we've got new conversations and a new balance to reach at an executive level of we now need a degree of speed that was not the expectation, let's say, a decade ago. It may not even have been the expectation in our industry five years ago, but is today. And so we're now incorporating speed into that balance of maybe we'll decide to very intentionally say, "We're not going to go over quite as many nine's today "so that we can be iterating more quickly on our software." Or, "We're going to invest more "in better release management approaches and tools," right? Like Canary releases, like, you know, Green-Blue releases, all these sorts of new techniques, feature flags, that sort of thing so that we can better deal with speed and better account for the risk and spread it to the smallest surface area possible. >> And you were probably doing those things also to understand the impact and look at kind of what's that's coming in that you're instrumenting in infrastructure because you don't want to have to put it out there and pray and hope that it works. Right, I mean? The old way. >> The product teams that are building it are really great and really quick at understanding about what the user experience looks like. And whether that's their Real User monitoring tools or through, you know, other tools and tricks that we may incorporate to understand what our users are doing on our tools in real time, that's the important part of this, is to shorten the iteration cycle and to understand what things look like in production. You've got to expose that back to the software engineers, to the business analysts, to the product managers who are building it or deciding what should be built in the first place. >> All right, so now that you're on the buyer's side, you've actually got people knocking on your door. "Hey, Donnie, buy my cloud. "Do this, you know, I've got all these solutions. "I've got all these tools. "I've got a toolshed full of," you know, the fool with the tool, as they say. You don't want to be that person, right? So ultimately you've got to pick an environment that's going to scale. When you look at the cloud, how do you evaluate the different clouds? You mentioned gravity or data gravity earlier. All kinds of new criteria is up there now in terms of cloud selection. You mentioned best cloud for the job. I get that. Is there certain things that you look for? Is there a list? Is there criteria on cloud selection that goes through your desk? >> Yeah, I think something that's been really healthy for me coming into the enterprise side from the analyst perspective is you get a couple of new criteria that start to rise up real quickly. You start thinking about things like what's that vendor relationship going to look like? How is the sales force? Are they willing to work with you? Are they willing to adapt to your needs? And then you can adapt back with them so you can build a really strong, healthy relationship with some of your strategic vendors, and to me, a public cloud vendor is absolutely a strategic vendor. That's one where you have to really care a lot and invest in that relationship and make sure things go well when you're sailing together, going in the same direction. And so to me, that's a little bit of a newer factor because it was easy to sit back and come in as the strategic advisor role and say, "Oh, you should go with this cloud. "You should go with that cloud "because of reasons X, Y, or Z," but that doesn't really account for a lot of things that happen behind the scenes, right? What's your sourcing and human department doing? How do they like to work with around contract, right? Will you negotiate a good MSA? All these sorts of things where you don't think about that when you're only thinking about technology and business value. You also have to think about the other, just the day to day, what does it look like? What's the blocking and tackling working with some of those strategic vendors? So you've got that to incorporate in addition to the other criteria around do they have great managed services? You know, self-service managed services that will work for your needs? For example, what do they have around data bases? What do they have around stream processing? What do they have around serverless platforms, right? Whatever it might be that suits the kinds of needs you have. Like for example, you might think about what does our business look like, and it's a graph, right? It's travelers, it's airports, it's planes, it's hotels. It's a bunch of different graphs all intersecting, and so we might imagine looking for a cloud provider that's really well-suited to processing those sorts of workloads. >> In the old days, the networking guys used to run the keys to the kingdom. Hey, you know, I'm going to rack and stack servers. I'm going to do all this stuff, but I've got to go talk to the networking guys, make sure all the routes are provisional and all that's locked down, mainly because that was a perimeter environment then. With cloud now, what's the impact of the networking? What's the role of the network? As we see DevOps notion of infrastructure as code, you've got to compute networking stores as three main pillars of all environments. Compute, check. Stores getting better. Networking, can you imagine Randy Bias? This was a big pet peeve for him. What's the role that cloud does? What's the role of the network with your cloud strategy? >> Yeah, I think something that I've seen following DevOps for the past decade or so has been that, you know, it really started as the ops doing development moved more into the developers and the ops working together and in many cases sharing roles in different ways, then incorporated, you know, QA, and incorporated product, to some extent. Most recently it's really been focused on security and how do we have that whole DevSecOps, SecDevOps thing going on. Something that's been trailing behind a little bit was network, absolutely. I had some very close friends about 10 years ago, maybe, who were getting into that, and they were the only people they knew and they only people they'd ever even heard of thinking beyond the level of using some kind of an expect script to automate your network interaction. But now I think networking as code is really starting to pick up. I mean, you look at what people are doing in public cloud environments. You look at what Open Source projects like Ansible are doing or on the new focus on network functionality. They're not alone in that. Many others are investing in that same kind of area. It's finally really starting to get up. Like for example, we have an internal DevOps Day that we run twice a year, and at the most recent one, guess who one of our speakers was? It was a network engineer talking about the kinds of automation they'd been starting to build against our network environments, not just in public cloud, but also on-premise. And so we're really investing in bringing them into our broader DevOps community, even though Net may not be in the name today. I don't think the name can ever extend to include all possible roles. But it is absolutely a big transition that more and more companies, I think, are going to see rolling along, and one that we've seen happening in public cloud externally for many, many years now. It's been inevitable that the network's going to get engaged in that automation piece. And the network teams are going to be more and more thinking about how do we focus our time in automation and on defining policy, and how do we enable the product teams to work in a self-service way, right? We set up the governance, but governance now means they can move at speed. It doesn't mean wait seven to 30 days for us to verify all of the port openings, match our requirements, and so on and so forth. That's defined up front. >> Yeah, and that's awesome, and I think that's the last leg of the stool in my opinion, and I think you nailed it. Making it operationally automation enabled, and then actually automating it. So, okay, before we get to the Open Source, one final question for you. You know, as you look at plan for the technologies around containers and microservices, what sounds a lot like networking constructs, provisioning, services. The role of stateless applications become a big part of that. As you look at those technologies, what are some of the things you're looking for and evaluating containers and microservices? And what role will that play in your environment and your job? >> I think something that we spend a lot of time focusing on is what is the day two experience going to look like? What is it going to be like? Not just to roll it out initially, but to, you know, operate on an ongoing basis, to make upgrades, to monitor it, to understand what's happening when things are going wrong, to understand, you know, the security stance we're at, right? How well are we locked down? Is everything up-to-date? How do we know that and verify it on a continuous basis instead of the, you know, older school approach of hey, we kind of do a ECI survey or an audit, you know, once a year, and that's the day we're in compliance, and then after that, we're not. Which I was just reading some stories the other day about companies saying, "Hey, there's a large percentage "of the time that you're out of compliance, "but you make sure to fix it just in time "for your quarterly surveys or scans or what have you." And so that's what we spend a lot of our time focusing on is not just the ease of installation, but the ease of ongoing operability and getting really good visibility into the security, into the health, of the underlying platforms that we're running. And in some cases, that may push us to, let's say, a cloud managed service. In some cases, we may say, "Well, that doesn't quite suit our needs." We might have some unique requirements, although I spend a lot of my time personally saying, "In most cases, we are not a snowflake, right?" We should be a snowflake where we differentiate as a company. We should not be a snowflake at the level of our monitoring tools. There's nothing unique we should really be doing in that area. So how can we make sure that we use, whether it's trusted vendors, trusted cloud providers, or trusted Open Source projects with a large and healthy community behind them to run that stuff instead of build it ourselves, 'cause that's not our forte. >> I love that. That's a great conversation I'd love to have with you another time around competitive advantage around IT which is coming back in vogue again. It hasn't been that way in awhile because of all the consolidation and outsourcing. You're seeing people really, really ramp up and say, "Wait a minute, we outsourced our core competency and IT," and now with cloud, there's a competitive advantage, so how do you balance the intellectual property that you need to build for the business and then also use the scale and agility with Open Source? So I want to move to that Open Source conversation. I think this is a good transition. Developers at the end of the day still have to build the apps and services they're going to run on these environments to add value. So Open Source has become, I won't say a professional circuit for developers. It really is become the place for developers because that's where now corporations and projects have been successful, and it's going to a whole nother level. Talk about how Open Source is changing, and specifically around it becoming a common vehicle for one, employees of companies to participate in as part of their job, and two, how it's going to a whole nother level with all this code that's flying around. You can't, you know, go dig without finding out that, you know, new TensorFlow library's been donated for Google, big code bases are being rolled in there, and still the same old success formula for Open Source is continuing to work. You're on the program chair for Open Source summit, which is part of the Linux foundation, which has been very, very successful in this modern era. How has that changed? What's going on in Open Source? And how does that help people who are trying to stand up architecture and build businesses? >> I think Open Source has gone through a lot of transitions over the past decade or so. All right, so it started, and in many ways it was driven by the end users. And now it's come back full circle so that it's again driven more and more by the end users in a way that there was a middle term there where Open Source was really heavily dominated by vendors, and it's started to come back around, and you see a lot of the web companies in particular, right? You're sort of Googles and Amazons and LinkedIns and Facebooks and Twitters, they're open sourcing tools on an almost daily basis, it feels like. I just saw another announcement yesterday, maybe the day before, about a whole set of kernel tools that I think it was Facebook had open sourced. And so you're seeing that pace just going so quickly, and you think back to the days of, for example, the Apache web server, right? Where did that come about from? It didn't come from a software vendor. It came from a coalition of end users all working together to develop the software that they needed because they felt like there's a big gap there and there's an opportunity to cooperate. So it's been really pleasing for me to see that kind of come back around full circle of now, you can hardly turn around and see a company that doesn't have some sort of Open Source program office or something along those lines where they start to develop a much more healthy approach to it. All right, the early 2000's, it was really heavy on that fear and uncertainty and doubt around Open Source. In particular by some vendors, but also a lot of uncertainty because it wasn't that common, or maybe it wasn't that visible inside of these Fortune 500 global 2000 companies. It may have been common, right? What we used to say back when I worked at RedMonk was you turned around, and you asked the database admins, you know, "Are you running MySQL? "Or are you running Postgres?" You asked the infrastructure engineers, "Are you running Linux here?" and you'll get a yes, nine times out of ten, but the CIO was the last to know. Well now, it's started to flip back around because the CIO's are seeing the business value and adopting Open Source and having a really healthy approach to it, and they're trying to kind of normalize the approach to it as a consequence to that, saying, "Look, it's awesome "that we're adopting Open Source. "We have to use this "so that we can get a competitive advantage "because every thousand lines of code we can adopt "is a thousand lines of code we don't have to write, "and we can focus on our own products instead." And then starting to balance that new model of it used to be, you know, is it buy versus built? And then Sass came around, and it's buy versus build versus rent. And now there's Open Source, and it's buy versus build versus rent versus adopt. So every one of these just shifts conversation a little bit of how do you make the right choice at the right time at the right level of the stack? >> Yeah, that's a great observation, and it's awesome insight. It feels like dumping a little bit, a lot of dumping going on in Open Source, and you worry that the flood of vendor-contributed code is the new tactic, but if you look at all the major inflection points from the web, you know, through bitcoin, which is now 10 years old this year, it all started out as organic community projects or conversations on a message board. So there's still a revolution, and I think you're right. Their script is flipping around. I love that comment about the CIO's were last to know about Open Source. I think now that might be flipping around to the CIO's will be last to know about some proprietary advantage that might come out. So it's interesting to see the trend where you're starting to see smart people look at using Open Source but really identifying how they can use their engineering and their intellectual capital to build something proprietary within Open Source for IT advantage. Are you seeing that same trend? Is that on the radar at all? Is that just more of a fantasy on my part? >> I think it's always on the radar, and I think especially with Open Source projects that might be just a little bit below the surface of where a company's line of business is, that's where it will happen the most often. And so, you know, if you were building an analytics product, and you decided to build it on top of, you know, maybe there's the ELK Stack or the Elastic Stack, or maybe there's Graylog. There's a bunch of tools in that space, right? Maybe, you know, Solar, that sort of thing. And you're building an analytics tool or some kind of graph tool or whatever it might be, yeah, you might be inclined to say, "Well, the functionality's not quite there. "Maybe we need to build a new plugin. "Maybe we need to enhance a little bit." And I think this is the same conversation that a lot of the Linux kernel embedded group went through some number of years ago, which is, it's long term a higher burden to maintain a lot of those forks in-house and keep updating them forever than it is to bring some of that functionality back upstream. That's a good, healthy dialogue that hopefully will be happening more and more inside a lot of these companies that are taking Open Source and enhancing it for their own purposes, is taking the right level of those enhancements, deciding what that right level is, and contributing those back upstream and building a really healthy upstream participation regardless of whether you're a software vendor or an adopter of that software that uses it as a really critical part of their product stack. >> Awesome, Donnie, thanks for spending the time chatting with me today. Great to see you, great to connect over our remote here in our studio in Palo Alto. A final question for you. Are you having fun, these days? And what are you most excited about because, again, you've seen. You've been on multiple sides of the table. You've seen what the vendors have. You actually had the realities of doing your job to build value for Carlson Wagonlit Travel, CWT. What are you excited about right now? What's hot for you? What's jazzing you these days? >> Yeah, I think what's hot for me is, you know, to me there's nothing or very little that's revolutionary in technology. A lot of it is evolutionary, right? So you can't say nothing's new. There's always something a little bit different. And so the serverless is another example of something that it's a little bit different. It's a little bit new. It's similar to some previous takes, but you got new angles, specifically around the financials and around, you know, how do you pay? How is it priced? How do you get really almost closer to the metal, right? Get the things you need to happen closer to the way you're paying for them or the way they're running. That's remains a really exciting area for me. I've been going to Serverlessconf for probably since the first or second one now. I haven't been to the most recent one, but you know, there's so much value left in there to be tapped that I'm not yet really on to say, "What's next? What's next?" I've helped myself move out of that analyst world of getting excited about what's next, and for me it's now, "What's ready now?" Where can I leverage some value today or tomorrow or next week? And not think about what's coming down the pipe. So for me, that's, "Well, what went GA?" Right? What can I pick up? What can I scale inside our company so that we can drive the kinds of change we're looking for? So, you know, you asked me what am I the most excited about right now, and it's being here a year and a half and seeing the culture change that I've been driving since day one start to come back. Seeing teams that have never built automation in their lives independently go and learn it and build some automation and save themselves 80 hours a month. That's one example that just came out of our group a couple months back. That's what's valuable for me. That's what I love to see happen. >> Automation's addicting. It's almost an addictive flywheel. We automate something. Oh, that's awesome. I can move on to something else, something better. That was grunt work. Why do I want to do that again? Donnie, thanks so much, and again, thanks for the insight. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing with theCUBE here in our studio. Donnie Berkholz is the VP of IT source of CWT, a great guest. I'm John Furrier here inside theCUBE studio in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Narrator: Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its Ecosystem partners. (soft music) >> Hi, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Medias coverage of theCUBE, here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. We've been here, this is now the third day of coverage, John. We've done a couple dozen interviews already. We've got one more day of coverage. We had some kind of perceptions coming in and I have some interesting differing viewpoints as to where we are for OpenStack the project, where this show itself is going. First of all John, give me your impressions overall. Vancouver, your first time here, city I fell in love with last time I came here, and let's get into the show itself, too. >> Sure, sure, I mean the show's a little bit smaller this year than it had been in past years. Some of that is because they pulled some of the technical stuff out last year, or a couple years ago. By being a little bit smaller, and being in a place like Vancouver, I get good energy off of the crowd. The folks we've talked to, the folks that have been going to sessions, have said they've been very good. The people here are practitioners. They are running OpenStack, or about to run OpenStack, or upgrading their OpenStack, or other adjacent technologies. They're real people doing real work. As we talk to folks and sponsors, the conversations have been productive. So, I'd say in general, this kind of a small venue and a beautiful city allows for a really productive community-oriented event, so that's been great. >> Alright, so John come on, on the analysis segment we're not allow to pull any punches. Attendance, absolutely is down. Three years ago when we were here it was around 5500. Mark Collier, on our opening segment, said there was about 2600. But two-year point, I've not talked to a single vendor or attendee here that was like, "Oh boy, nobody's here, "it's not goin' on." Yes, the Expo Hall is way smaller and people flowing through the Expo Hall isn't great all the time, but why is that? Because the people that are here, they're in sessions. They have 40 sessions about Edge Computing. Hot topic, we've talked a bunch about that. Interesting conversations. There is way more in Containers. Containers for more than three years, been a topic conversation. There's so many other sessions of people digging in. The line you've used a couple a time is the people here are people that have mortgages. In a good way, it means these are jobs, these are not them, "Oh, I heard about "this cool new thing, and I'm going to "go check out beautiful Vancouver." Now, yes, we've brought our spouses or significant others, and checking out the environment because yeah, this place is awesome, but there's good energy at the show. There's good technical conversation. Many of the people we've talked to, even if they're not the biggest OpenStack fans, they're like, "But our customers are using this in a lot of different ways." Let's talk about OpenStack. Where is it, where isn't it? What's your take from what you've heard from the customers and the vendors? >> Sure, I definitely think the conversation is warranted. As we came in, from outside the community there was a lot of conversation, even backchannel, like why are you going to OpenStack Summit? What's going on there, is it still alive? Which is kind of a perception of maybe it's an indication of where the marketing is on this project, or where it is on the hype cycle. In terms of where it is and where it isn't, it's built into everything. At this point OpenStack, the infrastructure management, open infrastructure management solution, seems to be mature. Seems to be inside every Telco, every cable company, every transportation company, every bank. People who need private resources and have the smarts and power to do that have leveraged OpenStack now. That seems stable. What was interesting here is, that that doesn't speak to the health overall, and the history of, or the future of the project itself, the foundation, the Summit, I think those are separate questions. You know, the infrastructure and projects seem good. Also here, like we've talked about, this show is not just about OpenStack now. It's about Containers, it's broadening the scope of these people informally known as infrastructure operators, to the application level as well. >> Yeah, if you want to hear a little bit more, some two great interviews we did yesterday. Sean Michael Kerner, who's a journalist. Been here for almost every single one of the OpenStack shows. He's at eWeek, had some really good discussion. He said private cloud, it doesn't exist. Now, he said what does he mean by that? There are companies that are building large scalable cloud with OpenStack but it's like if some of the big China Telecom, big China cloud companies. Oracle and IBM have lots of OpenStack, in what they do, and yes there are, as you mentioned, the telcos are a big used case. We had some Canonical customers talking about Edge as in a used case for a different type of scalability. Lots of nodes but not one massive infrastructure as a service piece. If I talk, kind of the typical enterprise, or definitely going the SNE piece of the market, this is not something that they go and use. They will use services that have OpenStack. It might be part of the ecosystem that they're playing, but people saying, "Oh, I had my VMware environment "and I want to go from virtualization "to private cloud" OpenStack is not usually the first choice, even though Red Hat has some customers that kind of fit into some of the larger sides of that, and we'll be talking to them more about that today. Randy Bias is the other one, take a look. Randy was one of the early, very central to a lot of stuff happening in the Foundation. He's in the networking space now, and he says even though he's not a cheerleader for OpenStack, he's like, "Why am I here? "That's where my customers are." >> Right, right. I mean, I do think it's interesting that public cloud is certainly mentioned. AWS, Google, et cetera, but it's not top of mind for a lot of these folks, and it's mentioned in very different ways depending on, kind of, the players. I think it's very different from last week at Red Hat Summit. Red Hat, with their story, and OpenShift on top of OpenStack, definitely talked public cloud for folks. Then they cross-cloud, hybrid-cloud. I think that was a much different conversation than I've been hearing this week. I think basically, kind of maybe, depends on the approach of the different players in the market, Stu. I know you've been talkin' to different folks about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like, Margaret Dawson at Red Hat helped us talk about how that hybrid-cloud works because here, I hate to say it's, some oh yeah, public cloud, that's too expensive. You're renting, it's always going to be more. It's like, well no, come on, let's understand. There's lot of applications that are there and customers, it's an and message for almost all of them. How does that fit together, I have some critiques as to how this goes together. You brought up another point though John, OpenStack Foundation is more than just OpenStack projects. So, Kata Containers, something that was announced last year, and we're talking about there's Edge, there's a new CI/CD tool, Zuul, which is now fully under the project. Yes, joke of the week, there is no OpenStack, there's only Zuul. There are actually, there's another open-source project named Zuul too, so boy, how many CI/CD tools are out there? We've got two different, unrelated, projects with the same name. John, you look at communities, you look at foundations, if this isn't the core knitting of OpenStack, what is their role vis-a-vis the cloud native and how do they compare to say, the big player in this space is Linux Foundation which includes CNCF. >> That's a good one. I mean, in some sense like all organic things, things are either growing or shrinking. Just growing or dying. On the other hand, in technology, nothing ever truly dies. I think the project seems mature and healthy and it's being used. The Foundation is global in scope and continues to run this. I do wonder about community identity and what it means to be an OpenStack member. It's very community-oriented, but what's at the nut of it here if we're really part of this cloud-native ecosystem. CNCF, you know, it's part of Linux Foundation, all these different foundations, but CNCF, on the other hand, is kind of a grab-bag of technology, so I'm not sure what it means to be a member of CNCF either. I think both of these foundations will continue to go forward with slightly different identities. I think for the community as a whole, the industry as a whole, they are talking and they better be talking, and it's good that they're talking now and working better together. >> Yeah, great discussion we had with Lisa-Marie Namphy who is an OpenStack Ambassador. She holds the meat up in Silicon Valley and when she positions it, it's about cloud-native and its about all these things. So like, Kubernetes is front and center whereas some of the OpenStack people are saying, "Oh no, no, we need to talk more about OpenStack." That's still the dynamic here was, "Oh, we go great together." Well, sometimes thou dost protest too much. Kubranetes doesn't need OpenStack, OpenStack absolutely must be able to play in this Container, cloud-native Kubranetes world. There's lots of other places we can learn about Kubranetes. It is an interesting dynamic that have been sorting out, but it is not a zero-sum game. There's absolutely lots, then we have, I actually was real impressed how many customers we got to speak with on the air this time. Nice with three days of programming, we had a little bit of flexibility, and not just people that were on the keynote stage. Not just people that have been coming for years, but a few of the interviews we had are relatively new. Not somebody that have been on since very early in the alphabet, now we're at queens. >> Right. >> Anything more from the customers or that Container, Kubranetes dynamic that you want to cover? >> Sure, well I mean just that, you know, Containers at least, Containers are everywhere here. So, I think that kind of question has been resolved in some sense. It was a little more contentious last year than this year. I'm actually more bullish on OpenStack as a utility project, after this week, than before. I think I can constantly look people in the eye and say that. The interesting thing for me though, coming from Silicon Valley, is you're so used to thinking about VCs and growth, and new startups, and where's the cutting edge that it's kind of hard to talk about this, maybe this open source business model where the customer basis is finite. It's not growing at 100% a year. Sometimes the press has a hard time covering that. Analysts have a hard time covering that. And if you wanted to give advice to somebody to get into OpenStack, I'm not sure who should if they're not in it already, there's definitely defined use cases, but I think maybe those people have already self-identified. >> Alright, so yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention is yeah. Big thank you to our sponsors to help get us here. The OpenStack Foundation, really supportive of us for years. Six years of us covering it. Our headline sponsor, Red Hat, had some great customers. Talked about this piece, and kind of we talk about it's practically Red Hat month on theCUBE for John with Red Hat Summit and OpenStack. Canonical, Contron, Nuage Networks, all helping us to be able to bring this content to you. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage in the past as well as where we'll be. Hit John Troyer, J. Troyer, on Twitter or myself, Stu, on Twitter if you ever have any questions, people we should be talking to, viewpoints, whether you agree or disagree with what we're talking about. Big thanks to all of our crew here. Thank you to the wonderful people of Vancouver for being so welcoming of this event and of all of us. Check out all the interviews. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, fro-- >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. We're here for three days of live wall-to-wall coverage at the OpenStack Foundation's show they have it twice a year John, pleasure to be with you again, you and I were together at the OpenStack show in Boston, a year ago, little bit further trip for me. But views like this, I'm not complaining. >> It's a great time to be in Vancouver, little bit overcast but the convention center's beautiful and the people seem pretty excited as well. >> Yeah so if you see behind us, the keynote let out. So John, we got to get into the first question of course for some reason the last month people are always Hey Stu where are you, what're you doing and when I walk through the various shows I'm doing when it comes to this one they're like, why are you going to the OpenStack show? You know, what's going on there, hasn't that been replaced by everything else? >> I got the same thing, there seems to be kind of a almost an antireligious thing here in the industry maybe more emotional perhaps at other projects. Although frankly look, we're going to take the temperature of the community, we're going to take the temperature of the projects, the customers, we got a lot of customers here, that's really the key here is that our people actually using this, being productive, functional, and is there enough of a vendor and a community ecosystem to make this go forward. >> Absolutely, so three years ago, when we were actually here in Vancouver, the container sessions were overflowing, people sitting in the aisles. You know containers, containers, containers, docker, docker, docker, you know, we went through a year or two of that. Then Kubernetes, really a wave that has taken over, this piece of the infrastructure stack, the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon shows, in general, I think have surpassed this size, but as we know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is always additive, and a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is, we have complexity, we need to deal with interoperability, everybody has a lot of things and that's the, choose your word, hybrid, multi-cloud world that you have, and that's really the state of opensource, it's not a thing, it's there's lots of things you take all the pieces you need and you figure out how to put 'em together, either buy them from a platform, you have some integrator that helps, so somebody that puts it all together, and that's where, you know, we live here, which is, by they way, I thought they might rename the show in the open, and they didn't, but there's a lot of pieces to discuss. >> Definitely an open infrastructure movement, we'll probably talk about that, look I loved the message this morning that the cloud is not consolidating, in fact it's getting more complicated, and so that was a practical message here, it's a little bit of a church of opensource as well, so the open message was very well received and, these are the people that are working on it, of course, but yeah, the fact that, like last year I thought in Boston, there was a lot of, almost confusion around containers, and where containers and Kubernetes fit in the whole ecosystem, I think, now in this year in 2018 it's a lot more clear and OpenStack as a project, or as a set of projects, which traditionally was, the hit on it was very insular and inward facing, has at least, is trying to become outward facing, and again that's something we'll be looking at this week, and how well will they integrate with other opensource projects. >> I mean John, you and I are both big supporters of the opensource movements, love the community at shows like this, but not exclusively, it's, you know, Amazon participating a little bit, using a lot of opensource, they take opensource and make it as a service, you were at Red Hat Summit last week, obviously huge discussion there about everything opensource, everything, so a lot going on there, let me just set for, first of all the foundation itself in this show, the thing that I liked, coming into it, one of the things we're going to poke at is, if I go up to the highest level, OpenStack is not the only thing here, they have a few tracks they have an Edge computer track, they have a container track, and there's a co-resident OpenDev Show happening a couple floors above us and, even from what the OpenStack Foundation manages, yes it OpenStack's the main piece of it, and all those underlying projects but, they had Katacontainers, which is, you know, high level project, and the new one is Zuul, talking about CI/CD, so there are things that, will work with OpenStack but not exclusively for OpenStack, might not even come from OpenStack, so those are things that we're seeing, you know, for example, I was at the Veeam show last week, and there was a software company N2WS that Veeam had bought, and that solution only worked on Amazon to start and, you know, I was at the Nutanix show the week before, and there's lots of things that start in the Amazon environment and then make their way to the on-premises world so, we know it's a complex world, you know, I agree with you, the cloud is not getting simpler, remember when cloud was: Swipe the credit card and it's super easy, the line I've used a lot of times is, it is actually more complicated to buy, quote, a server equivalent, in the public could, than it is if I go to the website and have something that's shipped to my data center. >> It's, yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's where we've ended up. You know, we'll see, with Zuul, it'll be very interesting, one of the hits again on OpenStack has been reinvention of the wheel, like, can you inter-operate with other projects rather than doing it your self, it sounds like there's some actually, some very interesting aspects to it, as a CI/CD system, and certainly it uses stuff like Ansible so it's, it's built using opensource components, but, other opensource components, but you know, what does this give us advantage for infrastructure people, and allowing infrastructure to go live in a CI/CD way, software on hardware, rather than, the ones that've been built from the dev side, the app side. I'm assuming there's good reasons, or they wouldn't've done it, but you know, we'll see, there's still a lot of projects inside the opensource umbrella. >> Yeah, and, you know, last year we talked about it, once again, we'll talk about it here, the ecosystem has shifted. There are some of the big traditional infrastructure companies, but what they're talking about has changed a lot, you know. Remember a few years ago, it was you know, HP, thousand people, billion dollar investment, you know, IBM has been part of OpenStack since the very beginning days, but it changes, even a company like Rackspace, who helped put together this environment, the press release that went was: oh, we took all the learnings that we did from OpenStack, and this is our new Kubernetes service that we have, something that I saw, actually Randy Bias, who I'll have on the show this week, was on, the first time we did this show five years ago, can't believe it's the sixth year we're doing the show, Randy is always an interesting conversation to poke some of the sacred cows, and, I'll use that analogy, of course, because he is the one that Pets vs Cattle analogy, and he said, you know, we're spending a lot of time talking about it's not, as you hear, some game, between OpenStack and Kubernetes, containers are great, isn't that wonderful. If we're talking about that so much, maybe we should just like, go do that stuff, and not worry about this, so it'll be fun to talk to him, the Open Dev Show is being, mainly, sponsored by Mirantis who, last time I was here in Vancouver was the OpenStack company, and now, like, I saw them a year ago, and they were, the Kubernetes company, and making those changes, so we'll have Boris on, and get to find out these companies, there's not a lot of ECs here, the press and analysts that are here, most of us have been here for a lot of time so, this ecosystem has changed a lot, but, while attendance is down a little bit, from what I've heard, from previous years, there's still some good energy, people are learning a lot. >> So Stu, I did want to point out, that something I noticed on the stage, that I didn't see, was a lot of infrastructure, right? OpenStack, clearly an infrastructure stack, I think we've teased that out over the past couple years, but I didn't see a lot of talk about storage subsystems, networking, management, like all the kind of, hard, infrastructure plumbing, that actually, everybody here does, as well as a few names, so that was interesting, but at the end of the day, I mean, you got to appeal to the whole crowd here. >> Yeah, well one of the things, we spent a number of years making that stuff work, back when it was, you know, we're talkin' about gettin' Cinder, and then all the storage companies lined up with their various, do we support it, is it fully integrated, and then even further, does it actually work really well? So, same stuff that went through, for about a decade, in virtualization, we went through this in OpenStack, we actually said a couple years ago, some of the basic infrastructure stuff has gotten boring, so we don't need to talk about it anymore. Ironic, it's actually the non-virtualized environments, that's the project that they have here, we have a lot of people who are talking bare metal, who are talking containers, so that has shifted, an interesting one in the keynote is that you had the top level sponsors getting up there, Intel bringing around a lot of their ecosystem partners, talking about Edge, talking about the telecommunications, Red Hat, giving a recap of what they did last week at their summit, they've got a nice cadence, the last couple of years, they've done Red Hat Summit, and OpenStack Summit, back-to-back so that they can get that flow of information through, and then Mark Shuttleworth, who we'll have on a little bit later today, he came out puchin', you know, he started with some motherhood in Apple Pi about how Ubuntu is everywhere but then it was like, and we're going to be so much cheaper, and we're so much easier than the VMwares and Red Hats of the world, and there was a little push back from the community, that maybe that wasn't the right platform to do it. >> Yeah, I think the room got kind of cold, I mean, that's kind of a church in there, right, and everyone is an opensource believer and, this kind of invisible hand of capitalism (laughs) reached in and wrote on the wall and, you know, having written and left. But at the end of the day, right, somebody's got to pay for babies new shoes. I think that it was also very interesting seeing, at Red Hat Summit, which I covered on theCUBE, Red Hat's argument was fairly philosophical, and from first principles. Containers are Linux, therefore Red Hat, and that was logically laid out. Mark's, actually I loved Mark's, most of his speech, which was very practical, this, you know, Ubuntu's going to make both OpenStack and containers simpler, faster, quicker, and cheaper, so it was clearly benefits, and then, for the folks that don't know, then he put up a couple a crazy Eddy slides like, limited time offer, if you're here at the show, here's a deal that we've put together for ya, so that was a little bit unusual for a keynote. >> Yeah, and there are a lot of users here, and some of them'll hear that and they'll say: yeah, you know, I've used Red Hat there but, you can save me money that's awesome, let me find out some more about it. Alright, so, we've got three days of coverage here John, and we get to cover this really kind of broad ecosystem that we have here. You talked about what we don't discuss anymore, like the major lease was Queens, and it used to be, that was where I would study up and be like oh okay, we've got Hudson, and then we got, it was the letters of the alphabet, what's the next one going to be and what are the major features it's reached a certain maturity level that we're not talking the release anymore, it's more like the discussions we have in cloud, which is sometimes, here's some of the major things, and oh yeah, it just kind of wraps itself in. Deployments still, probably aren't nearly as easy as we'd like, Shuttleworth said two guys in under two weeks, that's awesome, but there's solutions we can put, stand up much faster than that now, two weeks is way better than some of the historical things we've done, but it changes quite a bit. So, telecommunications still a hot topic, Edge is something, you know what I think back, it was like, oh, all those NFE conversations we've had here, it's not just the SDN changes that are happening, but this is the Edge discussion for the Telcos, and something people were getting their arms around, so. >> It's pretty interesting to think of the cloud out on telephone poles, and in branch offices, in data centers, in closets basically or under desks almost. >> No self-driving cars on the keynote stage though? >> No, nothing that flashy this year. >> No, definitely not too flashy so, the foundation itself, it's interesting, we've heard rumors that maybe the show will change name, the foundation will not change names. So I want to give you last things, what're you looking for this week, what were you hearing from the community leading up to the show that you want to validate or poke at? >> Well, I'm going to look at real deployments, I'd like to see how standard we are, if we are, if an OpenStack deployment is standardized enough that the pool of talent is growing, and that if I hire people from outside my company who work with OpenStack, I know that they can work with my OpenStack, I think that's key for the continuation of this ecosystem. I want to look at the general energy and how people are deploying it, whether it does become really invisible and boring, but still important. Or do you end up running OpenShift on bare metal, which I, as an infrastructure person, I just can't see that the app platform should have to worry about all this infrastructure stuff, 'cause it's complicated, and so, I'll just be looking for the healthy productions and production deployments and see how that goes. >> Yeah, and I love, one of the things that they started many years ago was they have a super-user category, where they give an award, and I'm excited, we have actually have the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is one of our guests on today, they won the 2018 super-user group, it's always awesome when you see, not only it's like, okay, CERN's here, and they're doing some really cool things looking for the Higgs boson, and all those kind of things but, you know, companies that are using technology to help them attack the battle against cancer, so, you know, you can't beat things like that. We've got the person from the keynote, Melvin, who was up on stage talking about the open lab, you know, community, ecosystem, definitely something that resonates, I know, one of the reasons I pulled you into this show in the last year is you're got a strong background there. >> Super impressed by all the community activity, this still feels like a real community, lots of pictures of people, lots of real, exhortations from stage to like, we who have been here for years know each other, please come meet us, so that's a real sign of also, a healthy community dynamic. >> Alright, so John first of all, I want to say, Happy Victoria Day, 'cause we are here in Vancouver, and we've got a lot going on here, it's a beautiful venue, hope you all join us for all of the coverage here, and I have to give a big shout out to the companies that allowed this to happen, we are independent media, but we can't survive without the funding of our sponsors so, first of all the OpenStack Foundation, helps get us here, and gives us this lovely location overlooking outside, but if it wasn't for the likes of our headline sponsor Red Hat as well as Canonical, Kontron, and Nuage Networks, we would not be able to bring you this content so, be sure to checkout thecube.net for all the coverage, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. 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>> 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)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's theCube. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Woman: Sure. Um, so, yeah, as you were saying, OpenDaylight really kind of kicked things off from a open source networking standpoint. I mean, there were certainly other open source controllers earlier, in sort of the market life cycle, but they kind of never really made their way out of the universities. OpenDaylight was the first that really had a lot of commercial participation and uptake, kind of in the real world, so to speak. Um, so with that, I think there was a lot of learning that happened, both on the vendor's side, with regard to open source, as well as on the user side. Um, and as the OpenDaylight platform matured and started coming to fruition, we started seeing a lot of other projects sort of both below at the platform layer as well as further up the stack. So at this point, and we've been talking about this quite a bit here at ONS, um, we've been talking a lot about the whole open networking stack that has sort of come to fruition now. You know, really low level stuff, DPDK was just announced today. Fido, which is sort of big data for networking. Then all the way up the stack to ONAP, which was just announced last month. ONAP is a bringing together of the ECOMP Project that was started by AT&T and then they brought it to The Linux Foundation and Open-O, which actually sort of germinated within The Linux Foundation with a lot of input from, um, a number of small vendors, as well as major carriers, particularly in Asia. So, um, bringing those things together at the orchestration layer, and so now we've got this sort of whole stack. Some of it, a lot of it is Linux Foundation projects, some of it is other projects with other open source foundations. All of which we work with very collaboratively across all those different projects. >> Man: Right, right. >> But at this point, we're really kind of looking at how do we enable people to consume this a little bit more easily from the user side? And then also from the developer side. There are a lot of developers who are involved in multiple different projects. Which of course means that they're spread very thin across all those projects. And we're looking at how do we make it a more feasible and scalable activity for them? >> Right. >> So for example, you know, OpenDaylight is upstream of a lot of other projects. There are a lot of other projects that have a lot of dependencies on OpenDaylight. So how do we streamline the release train in such a way that, you know, everybody gets what they need at the time that they need it, so they can do their releases on a timely basis and so forth and so on. And that just, you know, that makes things a lot easier from a developer standpoint. That also sort of naturally increases the, improves the integration points between those projects which is, of course, better for users. >> Man: Right. >> Um, so those are a lot of the things that we have in motion sort of across the Linux Foundation, um, and I think that the other thing that we've really seen over the last year come to fruition is a lot of the early adopters of OpenDaylight in particular have now spent enough time working with the open source community, either through their vendors or increasingly directly themselves, that they kind of get this open source thing, and they understand kind of what the processes are and why we do things they way they do. >> Right. >> And so they're willing to take a much more active role. AT&T is a prime example of that. They were working on ECOMP themselves internally, and they, very quickly, came to the realization that in order to scale it as quickly as they needed to, I mean, they were putting tens of thousands of their developers through specialized boot camps, right? >> Man: Right, right. >> The networking people to become networking developers. But at the same point, you just can't push people through the system that fast enough, nor can you hire enough people that fast enough. And so that's why this has decided to bring it to the open source community. >> Man: It seems like there's kind of an acceleration of carving out some piece of what was proprietary and putting it out to continue the development in an open source world. >> Any "why", you kind of answered the question just now in terms of there's not enough people. But more interestingly, you talked about some open source stuff just never gets going. What are some of the real secrets that make an open source project run? >> Yeah. >> Versus those that don't, or you know, die on the vine. >> Yeah. Um, there are a lot of different components, of course, like with anything. Some of it is technical, right? Do you have the right architecture? Is it one that can scale? Is it extensible? Are the right kinds of people involved in the project? Is the project being informed by the right kinds of people? So if you go and build something that nobody needs, either because you don't have the right people involved, or because you're not open to that feedback, it's going to die on the vine. So, you know, a successful project really has to have a strong community around it. And it's a-- >> Jeff: Chicken and egg. >> Chicken and egg thing, right? How do you get a strong community? Well, you have the right processes in place, but you also make sure that you have the right people involved so that they can build the right kind of thing. And that they have the skills to do it effectively. >> Right. And then the other interesting trend we're seeing is, The Linux Foundation is becoming kind of the hub where you put these things, um, to grow, and as you said, really to cross-pollinate with the other open source projects that have all these interdependencies. >> And that seems to be an accelerating trend as well, as least from the outside looking in. >> Lisa: Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And I think we learned a lot with, with OpenDaylight and also with OpenStack. You know, when OpenStack started, and OpenStack of course is even older than OpenDaylight, but when OpenStack started, I think there was all kinds of euphoria in the industry because open source was relatively new to infrastructure, and infrastructure people, it was like, "Oh, I can build everything "that I ever wanted to build now!" Um, and so there was this sort of irrational exuberance about feature proliferation. In some ways, kind of at the expense of platform stability initially. And at a certain point, the users, again, started getting involved and said, "That's great. We need the thing to actually work. "At scale, in real world environments. "Please focus on that." And you know, that's the real beauty and strength of open source, is when you have users who care, and see the possibility of a project, they can be actively involved and actively influence where the focus of the project is going to be. And that's how you get to something that's going to be useful to people quickly. >> Thank you. >> Well, it'd be great to hear a little bit more about how you-- on these, I'm always kind of mystified as an analyst or a journalist or whatever, when you see these things. The press release comes out, "ONAP is the new thing", right? There's a new thing every week. How do you ensure the success? How do you get the momentum behind it? I imagine there's a lot of stuff that's been happening behind the scenes for ONAP. >> Lisa: Yep. We try not to keep it too behind the scenes. It has always been part of open source culture and what's proven to be a best practice is openness and transparency of not just the code itself but the processes around it. >> Scott: Mhm. >> Um, if people feel like they understand what's going on, that things aren't being hidden from them, that they can have a voice. >> Scott: Right. >> They're much more actively willing to participate. So that's really kind of the key to building any kind of community. >> And how do you work with a big carrier, like, I mean, the fascinating part about this for me is for our viewers who don't know what ONAP and ONOS and ODL are, it's basically all this carrier software that's becoming open source and they're just putting it out there, saying, "It's no longer our family jewels. "Everybody can use it." I mean, that's a big leap for an AT&T, you know? Tell us how you work with AT&T or Verizon or some of these big, gigantic organizations. Like, they just hand you a thumb drive? (laughter) How do you get the intellectual property? How's that process start? >> In the case of AT&T, they reached out to The Linux Foundation and said, "We want and need to do this. "Help us do it. We don't know how this works. "Help us, teach us." But it's very much a, you know, a big part of the role of The Linux Foundation in all of this project proliferation and so forth is teaching people how to do open source effectively. Because, again, it's not just about throwing coders at a problem, 'cause you can do that inside your own organization as well. It's understanding how to do that in a collaborative manner, how to carve off what parts to open source, 'cause AT&T's ECOMP platform, not all of it has been open source. Some portion of it, the stuff that's really important and proprietary and is considered the crown jewels, that has stayed internal, but they've shared a reasonable, fairly large percentage of the base platform with the open source community. And learning to draw that line is an art. And figuring out what is commodity and really could and should be shared with the rest of the world so we're not all reinventing the same wheel. >> Scott: Right. >> But rather than having ten developers here doing that and ten developers here and duh duh duh dah, we can put 30 developers, all working together, to get the same thing more quickly. That shifted mindset can take a little bit of time, a bit of education, and that's kind of part of what The Linux Foundation brings to that process of onboarding new open source projects. >> Jeff: Right. And then on the other end, I always think of Randy Bias. He's one of our favorite guests, Especially with OpenStack, and he knows a couple OpenStack Silicon Valleys ago, where he was somewhat critical on the other end, saying we also have to kind of reign things in, and you have all this risks of stuff going all over the place, and how do you kind of have some organization at the top end because of successful growth can drive a bunch of different agendas and things can get forked. It's not a simple thing to manage. >> No, and we've tried different models and different approaches within different projects and we've learned a lot from that. OpenDaylight was very much a, you know, you guys figure it out, hands-off kind of model. Other open source projects have been very top-down, from their governant structure to everything else. Others, like Open-O are kind of in-between where they did specifically set up an architecture committee that was composed of the leading members of the project because, again, Open-O in particular is touching the business layer of these carriers. So they really need that architecture to be meeting their specifications. >> Right, right. >> Sort of a lower layer, so it's a little bit less critical. There are lots of different models and sort of a gradation of top-down versus bottom-up and, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. (chuckling) There are pluses and minuses to all of them. I think that we've been sort of learning as we go through all of these different projects what works. And different--sometimes it's worth shifting the model and starting out one way and shifting as you go along as the project matures, too. >> Jeff: But the net-net, which I think, you said at the beginning, is that big companies are now really learning how to operate effectively in this world, in this open source paradigm. It's matured way, way, way beyond what, we used to always joke, years ago, is a free puppy, you know? (laughing) >> You know, I mean, I think Tokus understand now that it is, yes, it's a free puppy. You still have to do lots of work. I think that understanding is sort of starting to trickle into the enterprise. I still have, every time I do a briefing, people will ask me to tell them about my product, and I say, "I don't have a product. I can't sell you anything." I help bring together a bunch of building blocks that you and your vendors can put together. But I don't have a product. And that, you know, that's a major mind shift for, especially, enterprise IT, where they're used to buying things off the shelf. >> Right. >> So larger enterprises, um, are starting again. They tend to take their cues from the carriers as things get proven out in the carrier world. And so we're starting to see that the same level of understanding and also, drivers in large, especially very distributed types of organizations, where they have 50, a hundred, hundreds of different sites around the world that they need to have a centralized few of in some fashion. And the only way they can get there is with SDN and they have a very strong preference, very clear preference for open source. >> Scott: How big is The Linux Foundation now? >> Lisa: By what metric? >> Uh, people, I guess. >> Lisa: Oh, people. Um... We're a few hundred, no more. But it's not just--we're not the ones doing all the work, right? We organize things. We help things happen. We help teach people. We provide the infrastructure. >> It seems to be growing very fast, like new projects are being added and merged. >> Lisa: But again, it's vendors and it's users. >> Very grassroots. >> Yeah. We help provide the ground, the legal framework, and the technical test facilities and things like that, and kind of the organizational guide rails. But we're here to help, we're not the ones doing the work. >> Right, right. Alright, Lisa, so I'll give you the last word before we sign off here. As you look forward to 2017, what are some of your top priorities for this next year? >> Lisa: Yeah, so, several things. First order is really enabling our users to really be successful with the projects that they already have in hand. In many cases, they're well through the phase of proof of concept and all the way onto production, and we just want to make sure that they're continuing to get everything they want out of the project and supporting them and supporting their vendors. And really building out the commercial ecosystem around it, so that they have a strong base of support. So that's one thing. Certainly on the OpenDaylight side, with some of the newer projects, it's really about figuring out what are the best practices that we can implement for this project, for this project, and for this project in order to make sure that they're successful. And a lot of that, again, is that whole harmonization effort that we have going on. >> Right, right. Alright, Lisa Caywood. She knows all about bringing open source to the enterprise, and thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick, he's Scott Raynovich. You're watching theCube from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. We'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)