>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center at Node Summit 2017. We've been coming to Node Summit off and on for a number of years. And it's pretty amazing, the growth of this application for development. It really seems to take off. There's about 800 or 900 people here. It's kind of the limits of the facility here at Mission Bay. But we're really excited to be here. And it's not surprising to have me see Intel is here in full force. Our first guest is Monica Ene-Pietrosanu. And she is the Director of Software Engineering for Intel, welcome. >> Thank you, hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's definitely exciting to be here. Node is this dynamic community that grows in one year, like others can. So it's always exciting to be part one of these events. And present about the work we are doing for Node. >> So you're on a panel later on Taking Benchmarking to the Next Level. So what is that all about? >> That is part of the work we are doing for Node. And I want to mention here the word stewardship. Intel is a long time contributor in the open source communities. And has assumed a performance leadership in many of these communities. We are doing the same for Node. We are driving, we are trying to be a steward for the performance in OJS. And what this means, is we are watching to make sure that every check in that happens, doesn't impact performance. We are also optimizing Nodes, so it give the best of the hardware, Node runs best on the newest hardware that we have. And also, we are developing, right now new measures, new benchmarks which better reflect the reality of the data center use cases. The way your Node is getting used in the Cloud. The way Node is getting used in the data center. There are very few ways to measure that today. And with this fast development of the ecosystem, my team has also taken this role of working with the industry partners and coming up with realistic measures for the performance. >> Right, so these new benchmarks that you're defining around the capabilities of Node. Or are you using old benchmarks? Or how are you kind of addressing that challenge? >> We started by running what was available. And most of the benchmarks were quite, let's say, isolated. They were focused on single Node, one operation, not realistic in terms of what the measurements were being done for the data center. Especially, in the data center everything is evolving. So nothing is just running with one single computer. Everything is impacted by network latencies. We have a significant number of servers out there. We have multiple software components interacting. So it's way more complex. And then you have containers coming into the picture. And everything makes it harder and harder to evaluate from the performance perspective. And I think Node is doing a pretty good job from the performance perspective. But who's watching that it stays the same? I think performance is one of those things that you value when you don't have it, right? Otherwise you just take it as granted, like it's there. So, my team at Intel is focused on top tier scripting languages. We are part of this larger software organization called Software and Services Group. And we are, right now, optimizing and writing the performance for Python, No-gs, PHP HHVM, and for some of the top tier languages used in the data centers. So Node is actually our interesting story in terms of evolution. Because we've seen, also, an extraordinary growth. We've seen, it's probably the one who's doubled for the past three years. The community has doubled. Everything has doubled for Node, right? Even, the number of commits, it depends on which statuses you look-- >> They're all up and to the right, very steep. >> Yeah, so then it's a very fast progress which we need to keep pace with. And one thing that is important for us is to make sure that we expose the best of our hardware to the software. With Node that is taking an interesting approach. Because Node is one of, what we called CPU front end bounce. It's having a large footprint. It's one of the largest footprint applications that we've seen. And for this we want to make sure that the newest CPUs we bring to market are able to handle it. >> I was just going to say, they have Trevor Livingston on it from HomeAway. Kicked off things today. We're talking about the growth. He said a year ago, they had one Node JS project. And this is a big site that competes with, like, Air B&B. That's now owned by Expedia. Now they say, he said, they had, "15 projects in production. "22 almost in production, and 75 other internal projects." In one year, from one. So that shows pretty amazing growth and the power of the application. And from Intel's point of view, you guys are all in on cloud. You're all in on data centers. You've all seen all the adds. So you guys are really, aggressively taking on the optimization, for the unique challenges and special environment that is Cloud. Which is computing everywhere, computing nowhere. But at the end of the day, it's got to sit on somebody's servers. And there's got to be a CPU in the background. So you look at all these different languages. Why do you think Node has gone so crazy? >> I think there are several reasons. And my background is a C++ developer, coming and security. So coming into the Node space, one thing amazed me. Like, only 2% of the code is yours, when you write an application. So that is like-- >> Jeff: 2%? >> So where is the other 98% coming from? Or it's already pre developed. It's an ecosystem, you just pull in those libraries. So that's what brings, in addition to the security risks you have. It brings a fantastic time to market. So it enables you as the developer to launch an application in a matter of days, instead of months or a year. So time to market is an unbeatable proposition. And I think that's what drives this space. When you need to launch new applications faster and faster, and upgrade. For us, that's also an interesting challenge. Because we have, our super road maps are not days, right? Are years? So what we want to make sure is that we feed back into the CPU road map the developments we are seeing into this space. I have on my team, I have several principal engineers who are working with the CPU architects to make sure that we are continuously providing this information back. One thing I wanted to mention is, as you probably know, since you've been talking to other Intel people, we've been launching recently, the latest generation server, Skylake. And on this latest generation Nodes. So all the Node workloads we've been optimizing and measuring. So one point five x performance improvement, from the prior generation. So this is a fantastic boost. And this doesn't happen only from hardware. It happens from a combination of hardware and software. And we are continuing to work now with the CPU architects to make sure that the future generation also keeps space with the developments. >> It's interesting, kind of the three horsemen of computing, if you will, right? There's compute, there's store, and there's IO. And now we're working, and it's interesting that Ryan Dahl, it's funny, they brought up Ryan Dahl. We interviewed him back at the Node JS, I think back in 2011? Still one of our most popular segments on theCUBE. We do thousands of interviews a year. He's still one of the most popular. But to really rethink the IO problem, in this asynchronous form, seems to be just another real breakthrough that opens up all types of capacity in compute and store. When you don't have to sit and wait. So that must be another thing that you guys have addressed from coming from the hardware and the software perspective? >> You are right on spot, because I think Node, comparing to other scripting languages brings more into the picture, the whole platform. So it's not only a CPU. It's also a networking. It's also related to storage. Also, it makes the entire platform to shine if it's optimized to the right capability. And we've been investing a lot into this. We have all our work is made available is open source. All our contributions are up-streamed back into the mainstream. We also started an effort to work with the industry in developing these new workloads. So last year at Node Interactive, we launched one new workload, benchmark, for Node. Which we called Node DC. With his first use case, which is an employee information system, simulating what a large data center distributed application will be doing. This year, now at Node Summit, we will be presenting the updated version of that, one point zero, this time. It was version zero point nine, last time. Where we added support for containers. We included several capabilities to be able to run, in a configural manner, in as many configurations as needed. And we are also contributing this back. We submitted it to the Node Foundation. So it becomes an official benchmark for the Node Foundation. Which means, every night, after the build system runs, this will be run as part of the regressions. To make sure that the performance doesn't degrade. So that's part of our work. And that's also continuing an effort we started with what we call the languages performance portal. If you go to languagesperformance.intel.com we have an entire lab behind that portal, in which every night we build this top tier scripting languages. Including Python, including Node, including PHP, and we run performance regressions on the latest Intel architecture. So we are contributing the results back into the open source community, to make sure that the community is aware if any regression happens. And we have a team of engineers who jumps on those regression center root causes and analyzes it. So to figure it out. >> So Monica, but we're almost out of time. But before I let you go, we talked before we got started, I love Kim Stevenson, I've interviewed her a bunch of times. And one of the conversations that we had was about Moore's Law. And that Moore's Law's really an attitude. And it's kind of a way to do things more than hitting the physical limitations on chips, which I think is a silly conversation. You're in a constantly, the role of constantly optimizing. And making things better, faster, cheaper. As you sit back and look at, kind of, what you've done to date, and looking forward, do you see any slowdown in this ability to continue to tweak, optimize, tweak, optimize? And just get more and more performance out of some of these new technologies? >> I wouldn't see slow down. At least from where I sit on the software side. I'm seeing only acceleration. So, the hardware brings a 30%, 40% improvement. We add, on top of that, the software optimizations. Which bring 10%, 20% improvements as well. So that continuously is going on. And I am not seeing it improving. I'm seeing it becoming more, there is a need for customization. So that's where when we design the workloads, we need to make them customizable. Because there are different use cases across the data center customers. So they are used differently. And we want to make sure that we reflect the reality. That's how they're in the world. And that's how our customers, our partners can also leverage them, to measure something that's meaningful for them. So in terms of speed, now, we want to make sure that we fully utilize our CPU. And we grow to more and more cores and increase frequency. We also grow to more capabilities. And our focus is also to make the entire platform to shine. And when we talk about platform we talk about networking. We talk about non volatile memory. We talk about storage as well as CPU. >> So Gordon's safe. You're safe, Gordon Moore. Your law's still solid. Monica, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and good luck on your panel later this afternoon. >> Thank you very much for having me here. It was pleasure. >> Absolutely, all right, Jeff Frick checking in from Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(switch clicking) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick, here with theCUBE. We're at the Mission Bay Conference Center in downtown San Francisco at Node Summit 2017. TheCUBE's been coming here for a number of years. In fact, Ryan Dahl's one of our most popular interviews in the history of the show, talking about Node. And, the community's growing, the performance is going up and there's a lot of good energy here, so we're excited to be here and there's a lot of big companies that maybe you would or wouldn't expect to be involved. And, we're excited to have Gaurav Seth. He is the Product Manager for Several Things JavaScript. I think that's the first time we've ever had that title on. He's from Microsoft. Thanks for stopping by. >> Yeah, hey, Jeff, nice to be here. Thanks for having me over. >> Absolutely, >> Yes. >> so let's just jump right into it. What is Microsoft doing here in such a big way? >> So, one of the things that Microsoft is, like, I think we really are, now, committed and, you know, we have the mantra that we are trying to follow which is any app, any developer, any platform. You know, Node actually is a great growing community and we've been getting soaked more and more and trying to help the community and build the community and play along and contribute and that's the reason that brings us here, like, it's great to see the energy, the passion with people around here. It's great to get those connections going, have those conversations, hear from the customers as to what they really need, hear from developers about their needs and then having, you know, a close set of collaboration with the Core community members to see how we can even evolve the project further. >> Right, right, and specifically on Azure, which is interesting. You know, it's been interesting to watch Microsoft really go full bore into cloud, via Azure. >> Right. >> I just talked to somebody the other day, I was talking about 365 being >> Uh huh. >> such a game-changer in terms of cloud implementation, as a big company. There was a report that came out about, you know, the path at 20 billion, >> Right. >> so, clearly, Microsoft is not only all-in, but really successfully >> Right. >> executing on that strategy >> Yeah, I mean-- >> and you're a big piece of that. >> Yes, I mean, I think one of the big, big, big pieces, really, is as the developer paradigms are changing, as the app paradigms are changing, you know, how do you really help make developers this transition to a cloud-native world? >> Right, right. >> How do you make sure that the app platforms, the underlying infrastructure, the cloud, the tools that developer use, how do you combine all of them and make sure that you're making it a much easier experience for developers to move on >> Right. >> from their existing paradigms to these new cloud-native paradigms? You know, one of the things we've been doing on the Azure side of the house and when, especially when we look at Node.js as a platform, we've been working on making sure that Node.js has a great story across all the different compute models that we support on Azure, starting from, like, hey, if you you want to do server list of functions, if you want to do BasS, if you want to go the container way, if you want to just use WEAMS, and, in fact, we just announced the Azure container instances, today, >> Right. >> so it's, one of the work, some of the work we are doing is really focused on making sure that the developer experiences as you migrate your workloads from old traditional, monolithic apps are also getting ready to move to this cloud native era. >> Right, so it's an interesting point of view from Microsoft 'cause some people, again, people in-the-know already know, but a lot of people maybe don't know, kind of, Microsoft's heritage in open source. We think, you know, that I used to buy my Office CD, >> Right. >> and my Outlook CD >> Right. >> you know, it's different, especially as you guys go more heavily into cloud, >> Right. >> you need to be more open to the various tools of the developer community. >> That's absolutely true and one of the focus areas for us, really, has been, you know, as we think through the cloud-native transition, what are the big pieces, the main open source tools, the frameworks that are available and how do we provide great experiences for those on Azure? >> Right, right. >> Right, because, at times, people come with the notion that, hey, Azure probably might just be good for dot NET or might just be good for Windows, but, you know, the actual fact, today, is really that Azure has great supporting story for Linux, Azure has great story for a lot of these open source tools and we are continuing to grow our story in that perspective. >> Right. >> So, we really want to make sure that open source developers who come and work on our platform are successful. >> And then, specifically for Node, and you're actually on the Board, so you've got >> Right. >> a leadership position, >> Yep. >> when you look at Node.js within the ecosystem of opensource projects and the growth that we keep hearing about in the sessions, >> Yep. >> you know, how are you, and you specifically and Microsoft generally, kind of helping to guide the growth of this community and the development of this community as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger? >> Right, I think that's a great question. I think from my perspective, and also Microsoft's perspective, there are a bunch of things we are actually doing to engage with the community, so I'll kind of list out three or four things that we are doing. I think the first and foremost is, you know, we are a participant in the Node.js Foundation. >> Right. >> You know, that's where like, hey, we kind of look at the administrative stuff. We are a sponsor of, you know, at the needed levels, et cetera, so that's just the initial monetary support, but then it gets to really being a part of the Node Core Committee, like, as we work on some of the Core pieces, as we evolve Node, how can we actually bring more perspectives, more value, into the actual project? So, that's, you know, we have many set of engineers who are, right now, working across different working groups with Node and helping evolve Node. You know, you might have heard about the NAPI effort. We are working with the Diagnostics Working Group, we are working with the Benchmarking Working Group and, you know, bringing the thing. The third thing that we did, a while back, was we also did this integration of bringing Chakra which is the JavaScript Runtime from Microsoft that powers Microsoft Edge. We made Node work with Chakra because we wanted to bring the power of Node to this new platform called Windows IoT >> Right, right. >> and, you know, the existing Node could not get there because some of the platform limitations. So, those are like some of the few examples that we've, and how we've been actually communicating and contributing. And then, I think the biggest and the foremost for me, really, are the two pillars, like when I think about Microsoft's contribution, it's really, like, you know, the big story or the big pivot for us is, we kind of go create developer tools and help make developer live's easier by giving them the right set of tools to achieve what they want to achieve in less time, be more productive >> Right, right. >> and the second thing is, really, like the cloud platforms, as things are moving. I think across both of those areas, our focus really had been to make sure that Node as a language, Node as a platform has great first-class experiences that we can help define. >> Right. Well, you guys are so fortunate. You have such a huge install base of developers, >> Right. >> but, again, traditionally, it wasn't necessarily cloud application developers and that's been changing >> Yep. >> over time >> Yep. >> and there's such a fierce competition for that guy, >> Yep. >> or gal, who wakes up >> Yep. >> in the morning or not, maybe, the morning, at 10:00, >> Yep. >> has a cup of coffee >> Yep. >> and has to figure out what they're going to develop today >> Right. >> and there's so many options >> Right. >> and it's a fierce competition, >> Right. >> so you need to have an easy solution, you need to have a nice environment, you need to have everything that they want, so they're coding on your stuff and not on somebody else's. >> That's true, I mean I, you know, somehow, I kind of instead of calling it competition, I have started using this term coopetition because between a lot of the companies and vendors that we talk about, right, it's more about, for all of us, it's working together to grow the community. >> Right. >> It's working together to grow the pie. You know, with open source, it's not really one over the other. It's like the more players you have and the more players who engage with great ideas, I think better things come out of that, so it's all about that coopetition, >> rather than competition, >> Right. >> I would say. >> Well, certainly, around and open source project, here, >> Yes, exactly. >> and we see a lot of big names, >> Exactly. >> but I can tell you, I've been to a lot of big shows where they are desperately trying to attract >> Right, right, yes. >> the developer ecosystem. "Come develop on our platforms." >> Yes, yes. >> So, you're in a fortunate spot, you started, >> Yes, I mean that-- >> not from zero, but, but open source is different >> Yes. >> and it's an important ethos because it is much more community >> Exactly, exactly. >> and people look at the name, they don't necessarily look at the title >> Exactly. >> or even the company >> Yep, exactly. >> that people work for. >> Exactly, and I think having more players involved also means, like, it's going to be great for the developer ecosystem, right, because everybody's going to keep pushing for making it better and better, >> Right. >> so, you know, as we grow from a smaller stage to, like, hey, there's actually a lot of enterprised option of these use case scenarios that people are coming up with, et cetera, it's always great to have more parties involved and more people involved. >> Gaurav, thank you very much >> Yeah. >> and, again, congratulations on your work here in Node. Keep this community strong. >> Sure. >> It looks like you guys are well on your way. >> Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. >> All right. >> Thanks for your time, take care, yeah. >> Guarav Seth, he's a Project Lead at Microsoft. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Node Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. (upbeat synthpop music)