>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Coop con and cloud, native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners >>Welcome back. This is the Cube coverage of Cube Con Cloud, native con, the European show for 2020. I'm your host to Minuteman. And when we talk about the container world, we talk about what's happening in cloud. Native storage has been one of those sticking points. One of those things that you know has been challenging, that we've been looking to mature and really happy to welcome back to the program two of our cube alumni to give us the update on the state of storage for the container world. Both of them are oh, founders and CEOs. First of all, we have Xiang Yang from Rancher Labs, of course, was recently acquired by Sue Save it and the intention to acquire on and also joining us from early the relay. Who is with port works? Shang Amerli. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. So early. I actually I'm going to start with you just cause you know we've seen, you know, a couple of waves of companies working on storage. In this environment, we know storage is difficult. Um, And when we change how we're building things, there's architectural things that can happen. Eso maybe if you could just give us a snapshot, you know, Port works, you know, was created to help unpack this. You know, straight on here in 2020 you know, where you see things in the overall kind of computer storage landscape? >>Absolutely. Still, before I kind of jump into port works. I just want to take a minute to publicly congratulate the the whole rancher team, and and Shang and Shannon And will China have known those folks for a while there? They're kind of true entrepreneurs. They represent the serial entrepreneur spirit that that so many folks know in the valley, and so, you know, great outcome for them. We're very happy for them and ah, big congrats and shout out to the whole team. What works is is a little over five years old, and we've been kind of right from the inception of the company recognized that to put containers in production, you're gonna have to solve, not just the orchestration problem. But the issue of storage and data orchestration and so in a natural kubernetes orchestrates containers and what works orchestrates storage and data. And more specifically, by doing that, what we enable is enterprises to be able to take APS that are containerized into production at scale and and have high availability. Disaster recovery, backup all of the things that for decades I t has had to do and has done to support application, reliability and availability. But essentially we're doing it for purpose with the purpose build solution for containerized workloads. >>Alright, shaming. Of course, storage is a piece of the overall puzzle that that ranchers trying to help with. Maybe if you could just refresh our audience on Longhorn, which your organization has its open source. It's now being managed by the CN. CF is my understanding. So help us bring Longhorn into the discussion >>thanks to. So I'm really glad to be here. We've I think rancher and port work started about the same time, and we started with a slightly different focus. More is exactly right to get containers going, you really need both so that the computer angle orchestrating containers as well as orchestrating the storage and the data. So rancher started with, ah, it's slightly stronger focus on orchestrating containers themselves, but pretty quickly, we realized, as adoption of containers grow, we really need it to be able to handle ah, storage feather. And like any new technology, you know, uh, Kubernetes and containers created some interesting new requirements and opportunities, and at the time, really, they weren't. Ah, a lot of good technologies available, you know, technologies like rook and SEF at the time was very, very premature, I think, Ah, the You know, we actually early on try to incorporate ah, the cluster technology. And it was just it was just not easy. And And at the time I think port Works was, ah, very busy developing. Ah, what turned out to be there flagship product, which we end up, end up, uh, partnering very, very closely. But but early on, we really had no choice but to start developing our own storage technology. So Long horn. As a piece of container storage technology, it's actually almost as oh, there's rancher itself. When about funding engineers, we hired he he ended up, you know, working on it and Then over the years, you know the focus shift that I think the original version was written in C plus plus, and over the years it's now being completely re written in Golan. It was originally written more for Docker workload. Now, of course, everything is kubernetes centric. And last year we you know, we we decided to donate the Longhorn Open Source project to CN CF. And now it's a CN CF sandbox project, and the adoption is just growing really quickly. And just earlier this year, we we finally ah decided to we're ready to offer a commercial support for it. So So that's that's where rancher is. And with longhorn and container storage technology. >>Yeah, it has been really interesting to watch in this ecosystem. A couple of years ago, one of the Q con shows I was talking to people coming out of the Believe It was the Sigs, the special interest group for storage, and it was just like, Wow, it was heated. Words were, you know, back and forth. There's not a lot of agreement there. Anybody that knows the storage industry knows that you know standards in various ways of doing things often are contentious and there's there's differences of opinion. Look at the storage industry. You know, there's a reason why there's so many different solutions out there. So maybe it love to hear from early. From your standpoint, things are coming to get a little bit more. There are still a number of options out there. So you know, why is this kind of coop petition? I actually good for the industry? >>Yeah, I think this is a classic example of Coop petition. Right? Let's let's start with the cooperation part right? The first part of time the you know, the early days of CN, CF, and even sort of the Google Communities team, I think, was really very focused on compute and and subsequent years. In the last 34 years, there's been a greater attention to making the whole stack works, because that's what it's going to take to take a the enterprise class production and put it in, you know, enterprise class application and put it in production. So extensions like C and I for networking and CS I container storage interface. We're kind of put together by a working group and and ah ah you know both both in the CN CF, but also within the kubernetes Google community. That's you talked about six storage as an example. And, you know, as always happens, right? Like it It looks a little bit in the early days. Like like a polo game, right where folks are really? Ah, you know, seemingly, uh, you know, working with each other on on top of the pool. But underneath they're kicking each other furiously. But that was a long time back, and we've graduated from then into really cooperating. And I think it's something we should all be proud of. Where now the CS I interface is really a A really very, very strong and complete solution tow, allowing communities to orchestrate storage and data. So it's really strengthened both communities and the kubernetes ecosystem. Now the competition part. Let's kind of spend. I want to spend a couple of minutes on that too, right? Um, you know, one of the classic things that people sometimes confuse is the difference between an overlay and an interface. CSC is wonderful because it defines how the two layers off essentially kind of old style storage. You know, whether it's a san or ah cloud, elastic storage bucket or all of those interact with community. So the the definition of that interface kind of lay down some rules and parameters for how that interaction should happen. However, you still always need an overlay like Port Works that that actually drives that interface and enables Kubernetes to actually manage that storage. And that's where the competition is. And, you know, she mentioned stuff and bluster and rook and kind of derivatives of those. And I think those have been around really venerable and and really excellent products for born in a different era for a different time open stack, object storage and all of that not really meant for kind of primary workloads. And they've been they've been trying to be adapted for, for for us, for this kind of workload. Port Works is really a built from right from the inception to be designed for communities and for kubernetes workloads at enterprise scale. And so I think, you know, as I as I look at the landscape, we welcome the fact that there are so many more people acknowledging that there is a vital need for data orchestration on kubernetes right, that that's why everybody and their brother now has a CS I interface. However, I think there's a big difference between having an interface. This is actually having the software that provides the functionality for H. A, D R. And and for backup, as as the kind of life cycle matures and doing it not just at scale, but in a way that allows kind of really significant removal or reduction off the storage admin role and replaces it with self service that is fully automated within communities. Yeah, if I >>can, you know, add something that that I completely agree. I mean, over the Longhorns been around for a long time. Like I said, I'm really happy that over the years it hasn't really impacted our wonderful collaborative partnership with what works. I mean, Poll works has always been one of our premier partners. We have a lot of, ah, common customers in this fight. I know these guys rave about what works. I don't think they'll ever get out for works. Ah, home or not? Uh huh. Exactly. Like Morissette, you know, in the in the storage space, there's interface, which a lot of different implementations can plugging, and that's kind of how rancher works. So we always tell people Rancher works with three types of storage implementations. One is let we call legacy storage. You know, your netapp, your DMC, your pure storage and those are really solid. But they were not suddenly not designed to work with containers to start with, but it doesn't matter. They've all written CS I interfaces that would enable containers to take advantage of. The second type is some of the cloud a block storage or file storage services like EBS, GFS, Google Cloud storage and support for these storage back and the CS I drivers practically come with kubernetes itself, so those are very well supported. But there's still a huge amount of opportunities for the third type of you know, we call container Native Storage. So that is where Port Works and the Longhorn and other solutions like open EBS storage OS. All these guys fitting is a very vibrant ecosystem of innovation going on there. So those solutions are able to create basically reliable storage from scratch. You know, when you from from just local disks and they're actually also able to add a lot of value on top of whatever traditional or cloud based, persistent storage you already have. So so the whole system, the whole ecosystem, is developing very quickly. A lot of these solutions work with each other, and I think to me it's really less of a competition or even Coop petition. It's really more off raising the bar for for the capabilities so that we can accelerate the amount of workload that's been moved onto this wonderful kubernetes platform in the end of the benefit. Everyone, >>Well, I appreciate you both laying out some of the options, you know, showing just a quick follow up on that. I think back if you want. 15 years ago was often okay. I'm using my GMC for my block. I'm using my netapp for the file. I'm wondering in the cloud native space, if we expect that you might have multiple different data engine types in there you mentioned you know, I might want port works for my high performance. You said open EBS, very popular in the last CN CF survey might be another one there. So is do we think some of it is just kind of repeating itself that storage is not monolithic and in a micro service architecture. You know, different environments need different storage requirements. >>Yeah, I mean quick. I love to hear more is view as well, especially about you know, about how the ecosystem is developing. But from my perspective, just just the range of capabilities that's now we expect out of storage vendors or data management vendors is just increased tremendously. You know, in the old days, if you can store blocks to object store file, that's it. Right. So now it's this is just table stakes. Then then what comes after that? There will be 345 additional layers of requirements come all the way from backup, restore the our search indexing analytics. So I really think all of this potentially off or in the in the bucket of the storage ecosystem, and I just can't wait to see how this stuff will play out. I think we're still very, very early stages, and and there, you know what? What, what what containers did is they made fundamentally the workload portable, but the data itself still holds a lot of gravity. And then just so much work to do to leverage the fundamental work load portability. Marry that with some form of universal data management or data portability. I think that would really, uh, at least the industry to the next level. Marie? >>Yeah. Shanghai Bean couldn't. Couldn't have said it better. Right? Let me let me let me kind of give you Ah, sample. Right. We're at about 160 plus customers now, you know, adding several by the month. Um, just with just with rancher alone, right, we are. We have common customers in all common video expedient Roche March X, Western Asset Management. You know, charter communications. So we're in production with a number off rancher customers. What are these customers want? And why are they kind of looking at a a a Port works class of solution to use, You know, Xiang's example of the multiple types, right? Many times, people can get started with something in the early days, which has a CS I interface with maybe say, $10 or 8 to 10 nodes with a solution that allows them to at least kind of verify that they can run the stack up and down with, say, you know, a a rancher type orchestrator, workloads that are containerized on and a network plug in and a storage plugging. But really, once they start to get beyond 20 notes or so, then there are problems that are very, very unique to containers and kubernetes that pop up that you don't see in a in a non containerized environment, right? Some. What are some of these things, right? Simple examples are how can you actually run 10 to hundreds of containers on a server, with each one of those containers belonging to a different application and having different requirements? How do you actually scale? Not to 16 nodes, which is sort of make typically, maybe Max of what a San might go to. But hundreds and thousands of notes, like many of our customers, are doing like T Mobile Comcast. They're running this thing at 600 thousands of notes or scale is one issue. Here is a critical critical difference that that something that's designed for Kubernetes does right. We are providing all off the storage functions that Shang just described at container granted, granularity versus machine granularity. One way to think about this is the old Data center was in machine based construct. Construct everything you know. VM Ware is the leader, sort of in that all of the way. You think of storage as villains. You think of compute and CPUs, everything. Sub sub nets, right? All off. Traditional infrastructure is very, very machine centric. What kubernetes and containers do is move it into becoming an app defined control plane, right? One of the things were super excited about is the fact that Kubernetes is really not just a container orchestrator, but actually a orchestrator for infrastructure in an app defined way. And by doing that, they have turned, uh, you know, control off the infrastructure via communities over to a kubernetes segment. The same person who uses rancher uses port works at NVIDIA, for example to manage storage as they use it, to manage the compute and to manage containers. And and that's marvellous, because now what has happened is this thing is now fully automated at scale and and actually can run without the intervention off a storage admin. No more trouble tickets, right? No more requests to say, Hey, give me another 20 terabytes. All of that happens automatically with the solution like port works. And in fact, if you think about it in the world of real time services that we're all headed towards right Services like uber now are expected in enterprises machine learning. Ai all of these things analytics that that change talk about are things that you expect to run in a fully automated way across vast amounts of data that are distributed sometimes in the edge. And you can't do that unless you're fully automated and and not really the storage admin intervention. And that's kind of the solution that we provide. >>Alright, well, we're just about out of time. If I could just last piece is, you know, early and saying to talk about where we are with long for and what we should expect to see through the rest of this year and get some early for you to you know, what differentiates port works from Just, you know, the open source version. So And maybe if we start with just kind of long or in general and then really from from your standpoint, >>yeah, so it's so so the go along one is really to lower the bar for folks to run state for workloads on on kubernetes we want you know, the the Longhorn is 100% open source and it's owned by CN cf now. So we in terms of features and functionalities is obviously a small subset of what a true enterprise grade solution like Port Works or, um, CEO on that that could provide. So there's just, you know, the storage role. Ah, future settle. The roadmap is very rich. I don't think it's not really Ranchers go Oh, our Longhorns goal to, you know, to try to turn itself into a into a plug in replacement for these enterprise, great storage or data management solutions. But But they're you know, there's some critical critical feature gaps that we need address. And that's what the team is gonna be focusing on, perhaps for the rest of the year. >>Yeah, uh, still, I would I would kind of, you know, echo what Chang said, right? I think folks make it started with solutions, like longer or even a plug in connector plug in with one of their existing storage vendors, whether it's pure netapp or or EMC from our viewpoint, that's wonderful, because that allows them to kind of graduate to where they're considering storage and data as part of the stack. They really should that's the way they're going to succeed by by looking at it as a whole and really with, You know, it's a great way to get started on a proof of concept architecture where your focus initially is very much on the orchestration and the container ization part. But But, as Xiang pointed out, you know what what rancher did, what I entered it for Kubernetes was build a simple, elegant, robust solution that kind of democratized communities. We're doing the same thing for communities storage right? What Port works does is have a solution that is simple, elegant, fully automated, scalable and robust. But more importantly, it's a complete data platform, right? We we go where all these solutions start, but don't kind of venture forward. We are a full, complete lifecycle management for data across that whole life cycle. So there's many many customers now are buying port works and then adding deal right up front, and then a few months later they might come back and I'd backup from ports. So two shanks point right because of the uniqueness of the kubernetes workload, because it is an app defined control plane, not machine to find what is happening is it's disrupting, Just like just like virtualization day. VM exist today because because they focused on a VM version off. You know, the their backup solution. So the same thing is happening. Kubernetes workloads are district causing disruption of the D r and backup and storage market with solutions like sports. >>Wonderful. Merlin Chang. Thank you so much for the updates. Absolutely. The promise of containers A Z you were saying? Really, is that that Atomic unit getting closer to the application really requires storage to be a full and useful solution. So great to see the progress that's being made. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Welcome, Shannon. We look forward to ah, working with you as you reach for the stars. Congratulations again. We look >>forward to the containing partnership morally and thank you. Still for the opportunity here. >>Absolutely great talking to both of you And stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube Cube Con cloud, native con 2020 Europe. I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special CUBE Conversation, we always love talking to startups around the industry, understanding how they're creating innovation, doing new things out there, and oftentimes one of the exits for those companies is they do get acquired, and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Sheng Liang, he is the cofounder and CEO of Rancher, today there was an announcement for a definitive acquisition of SUSE, who our audience will know well, we were at SUSECON, so Sheng, first of all, thank you for joining us, and congratulations to you and the team on joining SUSE here in the near future. >> Thank you, Stu, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so Sheng, why don't you give our audience a little bit of context, so I've known Rancher since the very early days, I knew Rancher before most people had heard the word Kubernetes, it was about containerization, it was about helping customers, there was that cattles versus pets, so that Rancher analogy was, hey, we're going to be your rancher and help you deal with that sprawl and all of those pieces out there, where you don't want to know them by name and the like, so help us understand how what was announced today is meeting along the journey that you set out for with Rancher. >> Absolutely, so SUSE is the largest independent opensource software company in the world, and they're a leader in enterprise Linux. Today they announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher, so we started Rancher about six years ago, as Stu said, to really build the next generation enterprise compute platform. And in the beginning, we thought we're going to just base our technology based on Docker containers, but pretty soon Kubernetes was just clearly becoming an industry standard, so Rancher actually became the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, so really with the combination of Rancher and SUSE going forward, we're going to be able to supply the enterprise container platform of choice for lots and lots of customers out there. >> Yeah, just for our audience that might not be as familiar with Rancher, why don't you give us your position in where we are with the Kubernetes landscape, I've talked about many times on theCUBE, a few years ago it was all about "Hey, are we going to have some distribution war?" Rancher has an option in that space, but today it's multicloud, Rancher works with all of the cloud Kubernetes versions, so what is it that Rancher does uniquely, and of course as you mentioned, opensource is a key piece of what you're doing. >> Exactly, Stu, thanks for the question. So this is really a good lead-up into describing what Rancher does, and some of the industry dynamics, and the great opportunity we see with SUSE. So many of you, I'm sure, have heard about Kubernetes, Kubernetes is this container orchestration platform that basically works everywhere, and you can deploy all kinds of applications, and run these applications through Kubernetes, it doesn't really matter, fundamentally, what infrastructure you use anymore, so the great thing about Kubernetes is whether you deploy your apps on AWS or on Azure, or on on-premise bare metal, or vSphere clusters, or out there in IoT gateways and 5G base stations and surveillance cameras, literally everywhere, Kubernetes will run, so it's, in our world I like to think about Kubernetes as the standard for compute. If you kind of make the analogy, what's the standard of networking, that's TCPIP, so networking used to be very different, decades ago, there used to be different kinds of networking and at best you had a local area network for a small number of computers to talk to each other, but today with TCPIP as a standard, we have internet, we have Cisco, we have Google, we have Amazon, so I really think as successful as cloud computing has been, and how much impact it has had to actually push digital transformation and app modernization forward, a lot of organizations are kind of stuck between their desire to take advantage of a cloud provider, one specific cloud provider, all the bells and whistles, versus any cloud provider, not a single cloud provider can actually supply infrastructure for everything that a large enterprise would need. You may be in a country, you may be in some remote locations, you may be in your own private data center, so the market really really demands a standard form of compute infrastructure, and that turned out to be Kubernetes, that is the true, Kubernetes started as a way Google internally ran their containers, but what it really hit the stride was a couple years ago, people started realizing for once, compute could be standardized, and that's where Rancher came in, Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform. We help organizations tie together all of their Kubernetes clusters, regardless where they are, and you can see this is a very natural evolution of organizations who embark on this Kubernetes journey, and by definition Rancher has to be open, because who, this is such a strategic piece of software, who would want their single point of control for all compute to be actually closed and proprietary? Rancher is 100% opensource, and not only that, Rancher works with everyone, it really doesn't matter who implements Kubernetes for you, I mean Rancher could implement Kubernetes for you, we have a Kubernetes distro as well, we actually have, we're particularly well-known for Kubernetes distro design for resource constrained deployments on the edge, called K3S, some of you might have heard about it, but really, we don't care, I mean we work with upstream Kubernetes distro, any CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distro, or one of many many other popular cloud hosted Kubernetes services like EKS, GKE, AKS, and with Rancher, enterprise can start to treat all of these Kubernetes clusters as fungible resources, as catalysts, so that is basically our vision, and they can focus on modernizing their application, running their application reliably, and that's really what Rancher's about. >> Okay, so Sheng, being acquired by SUSE, I'd love to hear a little bit, what does this mean for the product, what does it mean for your customers, what does it mean for you personally? According to Crunchbase, you'd raised 95 million dollars, as you said, over the six years. It's reported by CNBC, that the acquisition's in the ballpark of 600 to 700 million, so that would be about a 6X increment over what was invested, not sure if you can comment on the finances, and would love to hear what this means going forward for Rancher and its ecosystem. >> Yeah, actually, I know there's tons of rumors going around, but the acquisition price, SUSE's decided not to disclose the acquisition price, so I'm not going to comment on that. Rancher's been a very cash-efficient business, there's been no shortage of funding, but even amounts to 95 million dollars that we raised, we really haven't spent majority of it, we probably spent just about a third of the money we raised, in fact our last run to fundraise was just three, four month ago, it was a 40 million dollar series D, and we didn't even need that, I mean we could've just continued with the series C money that we raised a couple years ago, which we barely started spending either. So the great thing about Rancher's business is because we're such a product-driven company, with opensource software, you develop a unique product that actually solves a real problem, and then there's just no barrier to adoption, so this stuff just spreads organically, people download and install, and then they put it in mission-critical production. Then they seek us out for commercial subscription, and the main value they're getting out of commercial subscription is really the confidence that they can actually rely on the software to power their mission-critical workload, so once they really start using Rancher, they recognize that Rancher as an organization provide, so this business model's worked out really well for us. Vast majority of our deals are based on inbound leads, and that's why we've been so efficient, and that's I think one of the things that really attracted SUSE as well. It's just, these days you don't just want a business that you have to do heavy weight, heavy duty, old fashioned enterprise (indistinct), because that's really expensive, and when so much of that value is building through some kind of a bundling or locking, sooner or later customers know better, right? They want to get away. So we really wanted to provide a opensource, and open, more important than opensource is actually open, lot of people don't realize there are actually lots of opensource software even in the market that are not really quite open, that might seem like a contradiction, but you can have opensource software which you eventually package it in a way, you don't even make the source code available easily, you don't make it easy to rebuild the stuff, so Rancher is truly open and opensource, people just download opensource software, run it in the day they need it, our Enterprise subscription we will support, the day they don't need it, they will actually continue to run the same piece of software, and we'd be happy to continue to provide them with patches and security fixes, so as an organization we really have to provide that continuous value, and it worked out really well, because, this is such a important piece of software. SUSE has this model that I saw on their website, and it really appeals to us, it's called the power of many, so SUSE, turns out they not only completely understand and buy into our commitment to open and opensource, but they're completely open in terms of supporting the whole ecosystem, the software stack, that not only they produce, but their partners produce, in many cases even their competitors produce, so that kind of mentality really resonated with us. >> Yeah, so Sheng, you wrote in the article announcing the acquisition that when the deal closes, you'll be running engineering and innovation inside of SUSE, if I remember right, Thomas Di Giacomo has a similar title to that right now in SUSE, course Melissa Di Donato is the CEO of SUSE. Of course the comparison that everyone will have is you are now the OpenShift to SUSE. You're no stranger to OpenShift, Rancher competes against RedHat OpenShift out on the market. I wonder if you could share a little bit, what do you see in your customer base for people out there that says "Hey, how should I think of Rancher "compared to what RedHat's been doing with OpenShift?" >> Yeah, I mean I think RedHat did a lot of good things for opensource, for Linux, for Kubernetes, and for the community, OpenShift being primarily a Kubernetes distro and on top of that, RedHat built a number of enhanced capabilities, but at the end of the day, we don't believe OpenShift by itself actually solves the kind of problem we're seeing with customers today, and that's why as much investment has gone into OpenShift, we just see no slowdown, in fact an acceleration of demand of Rancher, so we don't, Rancher always thrived by being different, and the nice thing about SUSE being a independent company, as opposed to a part of a much larger organization like RedHat, is where we're going to be as an organization 100% focused on bringing the best experience to customers, and solve customers' business problems, as they transform their legacy application suite into cloud-native infrastructure. So I think the opportunity is so large, and there's going to be enough market there for multiple players, but we measure our success by how many people, how much adoption we're actually getting out of our software, and I said in the beginning, Rancher is the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, and out of that, what real value we're delivering to our customers, and I think we solve those problems, we'll be able to build a fantastic business with SUSE. >> Excellent. Sheng, I'm wondering if we could just look back a little bit, you're no stranger to acquisitions, remember back when Cloud.com was acquired by Citrix, back when we had the stack wars between CloudStack and OpenStack and the like, I'm curious what lessons you learned having gone through that, that you took away, and prepared you for what you're doing here, and how you might do things a little bit differently, with the SUSE acquisition. >> Yeah, my experience with Cloud.com acquired by Citrix was very good, in fact, and a lot of times, you really got to figure out a way to adapt to actually make sure that Rancher as a standalone business, or back then, Cloud.com was a standalone business, how are they actually fitting to the acquirer's business as a whole? So when Cloud.com was acquired, it was pretty clear, as attractive as the CloudStack business was, really the bigger prize for Citrix was to actually modernize and cloudify their desktop business, which absolutely was like a two billion dollar business, growing to three billion dollars back then, I think it's even bigger now, with now everyone working remote. So we at Citrix, we not only continued to grow the CloudStack business, but more importantly, one of the things I'm the most proud of is we really played up a crucial role in modernizing and cloudifying the Citrix mainline business. So this time around, I think the alignment between what Rancher does and what SUSE does is even more apparent, obviously, until the deal actually closes, we're not really allowed to actually plan or execute on some of the integration synergies, but at a higher level, I don't see any difficulty for SUSE to be able to effectively market, and service their global base of customers, using the Rancher technology, so it's just the synergy between Kubernetes and Linux is just so much stronger, and in some sense, I think I've used this term before, Kubernetes is almost like the new Linux, so it just seems like a very natural place for SUSE to evolve into anyway, so I'm very very bullish about the potential synergy with the acquisition, I just can't wait to roll up my hands and get going as soon as the deal closes. >> All right, well Sheng, thank you so much for joining us, absolutely from our standpoint, we look at it, it's a natural fit of what Rancher does into SUSE, as you stated. The opensource vision, the community, and customer-focused absolutely align, so best of luck with the integration, looking forward to seeing you when you have your new role and hearing more about Rancher's journey, now part of SUSE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's always great talking to you. >> All right, and be sure, we'll definitely catch up with Rancher's team at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon European show, which is of course virtual, as well as many other events down the road. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by RedHat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for three days of coverage is John Troyer. We're here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon in San Diego, over 12,000 in attendance and happy to welcome back a CUBE alumni and veteran of generations of the stacks that we've seen come together and change over the time, Sheng Liang, who is the co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs. Thanks so much, great to see you. >> Shang: Thank you Stuart, is very glad to be here. >> All right, so you know Kubernetes, flash to the pan nobody's all that excited about it. I mean, we've seen all these things come and go over the years, Sheng. No but seriously, the excitement is palpable. Every year, you know, so many more people, so many more projects, so much more going on. Help set the stage for you, as to what you see and the importance today of kind of CloudNative in general and you know, this ecosystem specifically. >> Yeah you're so right though, Stuart. Community as a whole and Kubernetes has really come a long way. In the early days, Kubernetes was a uh, you know, somewhat of a technical community, lot of Linux people. But not a whole lot of end users. Not a whole lot of Enterprise customers. I walk in today and just the kind of people I've met, I've probably talked to fifty people already who are just really at the beginning of the show and uh there's a very very large number Enterprise customers. And this does feel like Kubernetes has crossed the chasm and headed in to the mainstream Enterprise market. >> Yeah it's interesting you know I've talked to you know plenty of the people here probably if you brought up things like OpenStack and CloudStack they wouldn't even know what we were talking about. The wave of containerization really seemed to spread far and wide. At Rancher you've done some surveys, give us some of the insight. What are you seeing? You've talked to plenty of customers. Give us where we are with the maturity. >> Definitely, definitely. Enterprise Kubernetes adoption is ready for prime time. You know the So what we're really seeing is some of the early challenges a few years ago a lot of people were having problems with just installing Kubernetes. They were literally just making sure to get people educated about container as a concept. Those have been overcome. Now, uh, we're really facing next generation of growth. And people solve these days solve problems like how do I get my new applications onboarding to Kubernetes. How do I really integrate Kubernetes into my multicloud and hybrid-Cloud strategy? And as Enterprise's need to perform computing in places beyond just the data centers and the cloud, we're also seeing tremendous amount of interest in running Kubernetes on the Edge. So those are some of the major findings of our survey. >> John: That's great. So Sheng I'd love for you to kind of elaborate or elaborate for us where Rancher fits into this. Right. Rancher is, you've been around, you've a mature stack of technology and also some new announcements today so I'd kind of love for you to kind of tell us how you fit in to that landscape you just described. >> Absolutely. This is very exciting and very very fast changing industry. So one of the things that Rancher is able to play very well is we're really able to take work with the community, take the latest and greatest open source technology and actually develop open source products on top this and make that technology useful and consumable for Enterprise at large. So the way we see it, to make Kubernetes work we really need to solve problems at three levels. At the lowest level, the industry need at lot of compliant and compatible certified Kubernetes distros and services. So that's table stakes now. Rancher is a leader in providing CNCF certified Kubernetes distro. We actually provide two of them. One of them is called RKE - Rancher Kubernetes Engine. Something we've been doing it for years. It's really one of the easiest to use and most widely deployed Kubernetes distributions. But we don't force our customers to only use our Kubernetes distribution. Rancher customers can use whatever CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution or Kubernetes services they want. So a lot of our customers use RKE(Rancher Kubernetes Engine) but they also use, when they go to the cloud, they use cloud hosted Kubernetes Services like GKE and EKS. There are really a lot of advantages in using those because cloud providers will help you run these Kubernetes clusters for free. And in many cases they even throw in the infrastructure it takes to run the Kubernetes masters and etcd databases for free. If you're in the cloud, there's really no reason not to be using these Kubernetes services. Now there's one area that Rancher ended up innovating at the Kubernetes distros, despite having these data center focus and cloud focus Kubernetes distros and services. And that is one of our, one of the two big announcements today. And that's called K3S. K3S is a great open source project. It's probably one of the most exciting open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem today. And what we did with K3S is we took Kubernetes that's been proven in data center and cloud and we brought it everywhere. So with K3S you can run Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi. You can run Kubernetes in a surveillance camera. You can run Kubernetes in an ATM machine. You know, we have customers trying to run now Kubernetes in a uh, factory floor. So it really helps us realize our vision of Kubernetes as a new Linux and you run it everywhere. >> Well that's great 'cause you talk about that simplicity that we need and if you start talking about Edge deployment, I don't have the people, I don't have the skillset, and a lot times I don't have the gear, uh, to run that. So you know, help connect the dots as to you know, what led Rancher to do the K3S piece of it and you know, what did we take out? Or what's the differences between K8S and the K3S? >> That's a great question, you know. Even the name "K3S" is actually somewhat a wordplay on K8S You know we kind of cut half of 8 away and you're left with 3. It really happened with some of our early traction we sawing some customers. I remember, in retrospect it wasn't really that long ago. It was like middle of last year, we saw a blog coming out of Chick-fil-A and a group of technical enthusiasts were experimenting with actually running uh, Kubernetes in very, in like Intel Nook servers. You know, they were talking about potentially running three of those servers in every one of their stores and at the time they were using RKE and Rancher Kubernetes Engine to do that. And they run into a lot of issues. I mean to be honest if you think about running Kubernetes in the cloud in the database center, uh these servers have a lot of resources and you also have a dedicated operations teams. You have an SRE to manage them, right? But when you really bring it out into branch offices and Edge computing locations, now all of the sudden, number one, these uh, the software now has to take a lot less resource but also you don't really have SREs monitoring them every day anymore. And you, since these, Kubernetes distro really has to be zero touch and it has to run just like a, you know like a embedded window or Linux server. And that's what K3S was able to accomplish, we were able to really take away lot of the baggage that came with having all the drivers that were necessary to run Kubernetes in the cloud and we were also able to dramatically simplify what it takes to actually start Kubernetes and operate it. >> So unsolicited, I was doing an event right before this one and I asked some people what they looking forward to here at KubeCon. And independently, two different people said, "The thing I'm most excited about is K3S." And I think it's because it's the right slice through Kubernetes. I can run it in my lab. I can run it on my laptop. I can on a stack of Raspberry Pis or Nooks, but I could also run it in production if I, you know I can scale it up >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: And in fact they both got a twinkle in their eye and said well what if this is the future of Kubernetes, like you could take this and you could run it, you know? They were very excited about it. >> Absolutely! I mean, you know, I really think, you know, as a company we survive by, and thrive by delivering the kind of innovation that pushes the market forward right? I mean, we, otherwise people are not going to look at Rancher and say you guys are the originators of Kubernetes technology. So we're very happy to be able to come up with technologies like K3S that effectively greatly broadened the addressable market for everyone. Imagine you were a security vendor and before like all you really got to do is solving security problems. Or if you were a monitoring vendor you were able to solve monitoring problems for a data center and in the cloud. Now with K3S you end up getting to solve the same problems on the Edge and in branch offices. So that's why so many people are so excited about it. >> All right so Sheng you said K3S is one of the announcements this week, what's the rest of the news? >> Yeah so K3S, RKE, and all the GKE, AKS, EKS, they're really the fundamental layer of Kubernetes everywhere. Then on top of that one of the biggest piece of innovation that Rancher labs created is the idea of multi-cluster management. A few years ago it was pretty much of a revolutionary concept. Now it's widely understood. Of course an organization is not going to have just one cluster, they're going to have many clusters. So Rancher is the industry leader for doing multi-cluster management. And these clusters could span clouds, could span data centers, now all the way out to branch offices and the Edge. So we're exhibiting Rancher on the show floor. Everyone, most people I've met here, they know Rancher because of that flash of product. Now our second announcement though is yet another level above Rancher, so what we've seen is in order to really Kubernetes to achieve the next level of adoption in the Enterprise we're seeing you know some of the development teams and especially the less skilled dev ops teams, they're kind of struggling with the learning curve of Kubernetes and also some of the associated technologies around service mesh around Knative, around, you know, CICD, so we created a project called Rio, as in Rio de Janeiro the city. And the nice thing about Rio is it packaged together all these Cloud Native technologies and then we created very easy to use, very simple to understand user experience for developers and dev ops teams. So they no longer have to start with the training course on Kubernetes, on Istio, on Knative, on Tekton, just to get productive. They can pretty much get productive on day one. So that Rio project has hit a very important milestone today, we shipped the beta release for it and we're exhibiting it at the booth as well. >> Well that's great. You know, the beta release of Rio, pulling together a lot of these projects. Can you talk about some folks that, early adopters that have been using them or some folks that have been working with the project? >> Sheng: Yeah absolutely. So I talk about some of the early adoption we're seeing for both K3S and Rio. Uh, what we see the, first of all just the market reception of K3S, as you said, has been tremendous. Couple of even mentioned to you guys today in your earlier interviews. And it is primarily coming from customers who want to run Kubernetes in places you probably haven't quite anticipated before, so I kind of give you two examples. One is actually appliance manufacture. So if you think they used to ship appliances, then you can imagine these appliances come with Linux and they would image their appliance with an OS image with their applications. But what's happening is these applications are becoming so sophisticated they're now talking about running the entire data analytics stack and AI software. So it actually takes Kubernetes not necessarily, because it's one server in a situation of appliance. Kubernetes is not really managing a cluster, but it's managing all the application components and microservices. So they ended up bundling up K3S into their appliance. This is one example. Another example is actually an ISV, that's a very interesting use case as well. So uh, they ship a micro service based application software stack and again their software involves a lot of different complicated components. And they decided to replatform their software on Kubernetes. We've all heard a lot of that! But in their case they have to also ship, they don't just run the software themselves, they have to ship the software to the end users. And most of their end users are not familiar with Kubernetes yet, right? And they don't really want to say, to install our software you go provision the Kubernetes cluster and then you operate it from now on. So what they did is they took K3S and bundled into their application as if it were an application server, almost like a modern day WebLogic and WebSphere, then they shipped the whole thing to their customers. So I thought both of these use cases are really interesting. It really elevates the reach of Kubernetes from just being almost like a cloud platform in the old days to now being an application server. And then I'll also quickly talk about Rio. A lot of interest inside Rio is around really dev ops teams who've had, I mean, we did a survey early on and we found out that a lot of our customers they deploy Kubernetes in services. But they end up building a custom experience on top of their Kubernetes deployment, just so that most of their internal users wouldn't have to take a course on Kubernetes to start using it. So they can just tell that this thing that, this is where my source code is and then every thing from that point on will be automated. So now with Rio they wouldn't have to do that anymore. Effectively Rio is the direct source to URL type of, one step process. And they are able to adopt Rio for that purpose. >> So Sheng, I want to go back to when we started this conversation. You said, you know, the ecosystem growing. That not only, you know, so many vendors here, 129 end users, members of the CNCF. The theme we've been talking about is to really, you know, it's ready for production and people are all embracing it. But to get the vast majority of people, simplicity really needs to come front and center, I think. K3S really punctuates that. What else do we need to do as an ecosystem, you know, Rancher is looking to take a leadership position and help drive this, but what else do you want to see from your peers, the community, overall to help drive this to the promise that it could deliver. >> We really see the adoption of Kubernetes is probably going to wing at three, I mean. We see most organizations go through this three step journey. The first step is you got to install and operate Kubernetes. You know, day one, day two. And I think we've got it down. With K3S it becomes so easy. With GKE it becomes one API call or one simple UI interaction. And CNCS has really stepped up and created a great, you know, compliance certification program, right? So we're not seeing the kind of fragmentation that we saw with some of the other technologies. This is fantastic. Then the second step we see is, which a lot of our customers are going through now, is now you have all the Kubernetes clusters coming from different clouds, different infrastructure, potentially on the Edge. You have a management problem. Now you all of the sudden because we made Kubernetes clusters so easy to obtain you can potentially have a sprawl. If you are not careful you might leave them misconfigured. That could expose a security issue. So really it takes Rancher, it takes our ecosystem partners, like Twistlock, like Aqua. CICD partners, like CloudBees, GitLab. Just everyone really needs to come together, make that, solve that management problem. So not only, uh, you build this Kubernetes infrastructure but then you actually going to get a lot of users and they can use the cluster securely and reliably. Then I think the third step, which I think a lot of work still remain is we really want to focus on growing the footprint of workload, of enterprise workload, in the enterprise. So there the work is honestly just getting started. Anywhere from uh, if you walk into any enterprise you know what percentage of their total workload is running on Kubernetes today? I mean outside of Google and Uber, that percentage is probably very small, right? They're probably in the minority, maybe even in single digit percentage. So, we really need to do a lot of work. You know, we need to uh, Rancher created this project called LongHorn and we also work with a lot of our ecosystem partners in persistence storage area like Portworx, StorageOS, OpenEBS. Lot of us really need to come together and solve this problem of running persistent workload. I mean there was also a lot of talk about it at the keynote this morning, I was very encouraged to hear that. That could easily double, triple the amount of workload that could bring, that could be onboarded into Kubernetes and even experiences like Rio, you know? Make it further simpler, more accessible. That is really in the DNA of Rancher. Rancher wouldn't be surviving and thriving without our insight into how to make our technology consumable and widely adopted. So a lot of work we're doing is really to drive the adoption of Kubernetes in the enterprise beyond, you know, the current state and into something I really don't see in the future, Kubernetes wouldn't be as actually widely used as say AWS or vSphere. That would be my bar for success. Hopefully in a few years we can be talking about that. >> All right, that is a high bar Sheng. We look forward to more conversations with you going forward. Congratulations on the announcement. Great buzz on K3S, and yeah, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego, you're watching theCUBE. [Upbeat music]

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by: Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. And we're live here in Austin, Texas. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Cloud Native conference and KubeCon for Kubernetes Conference. This is for the Linux Foundation. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon ANGLE Media. My co, Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Dustin Kirkland Vice-President of product. The Ubuntu, Canonical, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So you're the product guy. You get the keys to the kingdom, as they would say in the product circles. Man, what a best time to be-- >> Dustin: They always say that. I don't think I've heard that one. >> Well, the product guys are, well all the action's happening on the product side. >> Dustin: We're right in the middle of it. >> Cause you got to have a road map. You got to have a 20 mile steer on the next horizon while you go up into the pasture and deliver value, but you always got to be watching for it always making decision on what to do, when to ship product, not you got the Cloud things are happening at a very accelerated rate. And then you got to bring it out to the customers. >> That's right. >> You're livin' on both sides of the world You got to look inside, you got to look outside. >> All three. There's the marketing angle too. which is what we're doing here right now. So there's engineering sales and this is the marketing. >> Alright so where are we with this? Because now you guys have always been on the front lines of open source. Great track record. Everyone knows the history there. What are the new things? What's the big aha moment that this event, largest they've had ever. They're not even three years old. Why is this happening? >> I love seeing these events in my hometown Austin, Texas. So I hope we keep coming back. The aha moment is how application development is fundamentally changing. Cloud Native is the title of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and CloudNativeConference here. What does Cloud Native mean? It's a different form of writing applications. Just before we were talking about systems programing right? That's not exactly Cloud Native. Cloud Native programming is writing to API's that are Cloud exposed API's, integrating with software as a service. Creating applications that have no intelligence, whatsoever, about what's underneath them, Right? But taking advantage of that and all the ways that you would want and expect in a modern application. Fault tolerance, automatic updates, hyper security. Just security, security, security. That is the aha moment. The way applications are being developed is fundamentally changing. >> Interesting perspective we had on earlier. Lew Tucker from Cisco, (mumbles) in the (mumbles) History Museum, CTO at Cisco, and we have Kelsey Hightower co-chair for this conference and also very active in the community. Yet, in the perspective, and I'll over simplify and generalize it, but basically was: Hey, that's been going on for 30 years, it's just different now. Tell us the old way and new way. Because the old way, you kind of describing it you're going to build your own stuff, full stack, building all parts of the stack and do a lot of stuff that you didn't want to do. And now you have more, especially time on your hands if DevOps and infrastructure as code starts to happen. But doesn't mean that networking goes away, doesn't mean storage goes away, that some new lines are forming. Describe that dynamic of what's new and the new way what changes from the old way? >> Virtualization has brought about a different way of thinking about resources. Be those compute resources, chopping CPU's up into virtual CPU's, that's KVM ware. You mentioned network and storage. Now we virtualized both of those into software defined storage and software defined networking, right? We have things like OpenStack that brings that all together from an infrastructure perspective. and we now have Kubernetes that brings that to fare from an application perspective. Kubernetes helps you think about applications in a different way. I said that paradigm has changed. It's Kubernetes that helps implement that paradigm. So that developers can write an application to a container orchestrator like Kubernetes and take advantage of many of the advances we've made below that layer in the operating system and in the Cloud itself. So from that perspective the game has changed and the way you write your application is not the same as a the monolithic app we might have written on an IBM or a traditional system. >> Dustin, you say monolithic app versus oh my gosh the multi layered cake that we have today. We were talking about the keynote this morning where CNCF went from four projects to 14 projects, you got Kubernetes, You got things like DSDU on top. Help up tease that a little bit. What are the ones that, where's canonical engaged? What are you hearing from customers? What are they excited about? What are they still looking for? >> In a somewhat self-serving way, I'll use this opportunity to explain exactly what we do in helping build that layered cake. It starts with the OS. We provide a great operating system, Ubuntu that every developer would certainly know and understand and appreciate. That's the kernel, that's the systemd, that's the hyperviser, that's all the storage and drivers that makes an operating system work well on hardware. Lot's of hardware, IBM, Dell HP, Intel, all the rest. As well as in virtual machines, the public Clouds, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, VM ware and others. So, we take care of that operating system perspective. Within the CNCF and within in the Kubernetes ecosystem, It really starts with the Kubernetes distribution. So we provide a Kubernetes distribution, we call it Canonicals Distribution of Kubernetes, CDK. Which is open source Kubernetes with security patches applied. That's it. No special sauce, no extra proprietary extensions. It is open source Kubernetes. The reference platform for open source Kubernetes 100% conformed. Now, once you have Kubernetes as you say, "What are you hearing from customers?" We hear a lot of customers who want a Kubernetes. Once they have a Kubernetes, the next question is: "Now what do I do with it?" If they have applications that their developers have been writing to Google's Kubernetes Engine GKE, or Amazon's Kubernetes Engine, the new one announced last week at re:Invent, AKS. Or Microsoft's Kubernetes Engine, Microsoft-- >> Microsoft's AKS, Amazons EKS. A lot of TLA's out there, always. >> Thank you for the TLA dissection. If you've written the applications already having your own Kubernetes is great, because then your applications simply port and run on that. And we help customers get there. However, if you haven't written your first application, that's where actually, most of the industry is today. They want a Kubernetes, but they're not sure why. So, to that end, we're helping bring some of the interesting workloads that exists, open source workloads and putting those on top of Canonical Kubernetes. Yesterday, we press released a new product from Canonical, launched in conjunction with our partners at Rancher Labs, Which is the Cloud Native platform. The Cloud Native platform is Ubuntu plus Kubernetes plus Rancher. That combination, we've heard from customers and from users of Ubuntu inside and out. Everyone's interested in a developer work flow that includes open-source Ubuntu, open-source Kubernetes and open-source Rancher, Which really accelerates the velocity of development. And that end solution provides exactly that and it helps populate, that Kubernetes with really interesting workloads. >> Dustin, so we know Sheng, Shannon and the team, they know a thing or two about building stacks with open source. We've talked with you many times, OpenStack. Give us a little bit of compare and contrast, what we've been doing with OpenStack with Canonical, very heavily involved, doing great there versus the Cloud Native stacking. >> If you know Shannon and Sheng, I think you can understand and appreciate why Mark, myself and the rest of the Canonical team are really excited about this partnership. We really see eye-to-eye on open source principles First. Deliver great open source experiences first. And then taking that to market with a product that revolves around support. Ultimately, developer option up front is what's important, and some of those developer applications will make its way into production in a mission critical sense. Which open up support opportunities for both of us. And we certainly see eye-to-eye from that perspective. What we bring to bare is Ubuntu ecosystem of developers. The Ubuntu OpenStack infrastructure is a service where we've seen many of the world's largest organizations deploying their OpenStacks. Doing so on Ubuntu and with Ubuntu OpenStacks. With the launch of Kubernetes and Canonical Kubernetes, many of those same organizations are running their own Kubernetes along side OpenStack. Or, in some cases, on top of OpenStack. In a very few cases, instead of Openstack, in very special cases, often at the Edge or in certain tiny Cloud or micro Cloud scenarios. In all of these we see Rancher as a really, really good partner in helping to accelerate that developer work flow. Enabling developers to write code, commit code to GitHub repository, with full GitHub integration. Authenticate against an active directory with full RBAC controls. Everything that you would need in an enterprise to bring that application to bare from concept, to development, to test into production, and then the life cycle, once it gains its own life in production. >> What about the impact of customers? So, I'm an IT guy or I'm an architect and man, all this new stuff's comin' at me. I love my open source, I'm happy with space. I don't want to touch it, don't want to break it, but I want to innovate. This whole world can be a little bit noisy and new to them. How do you have that conversation with that potential customer or customer where you say, Look, we can get there. Use your app team here's what you want to shape up to be, here's service meshes and plugable, Whoa plugable (mumbles)! So, again, how do you simplify that when you have conversations? What's the narrative? What's the conversation like? >> Usually our introduction into the organization of a Fortune 500 company is by the developers inside of that company who already know Ubuntu. Who already have some experience with Kubernetes or have some experience with Rancher or any of those other-- >> So it's a bottoms up? >> Yeah, it's bottoms up. Absolutely, absolutely. The developer network around Ubuntu is far bigger than the organization that is Canonical. So that helps us with the intro. Once we're in there, and the developers write those first few apps, we do get the introductions to their IT director who then wants that comfy blanket. Customer support, maybe 24 by seven-- >> What's the experience like? Is it like going to the airport, go through TSA, and you got to take your shoes off, take your belt off. What kind of inspection, what is kind of is the culture because they want to move fast, but they got to be sure. There's always been the challenge when you have the internal advocate saying, "Look, if we want to go this way "this is going to be more the reality for companies." Developers are now major influencers. Not just some, here's the product we made a decision and they ship it to 'em, it's shifted. >> If there's one thing that I've learned in this sort of product management assignment, I'm a engineer by trade, but as a product manager now for almost five years, is that you really have to look at the different verticals and some verticals move at vastly different paces than other verticals. When we are in the tele close phase, We're in RFI's, requests for a quote or a request for information that may last months, nine months. And then go through entering into a procurement process that may last another nine months. And we're talking about 18 months in an industry here that is spinning up, we're talking about how fast this goes, which is vastly different than the work we do in Silicon Valley, right? With some of the largest dot-coms in the world that are built on Ubuntu, maybe an AWS or else where. Their adoption curve is significantly different and the procurement angle is really different. What they're looking to buy often on the US West Coast is not so much support, but they're looking to guide your roadmap. We offer for customers of that size and scale a different set of products something we call feature sponsorships, where those customers are less interested in 24 by seven telephone support and far more interested in sponsoring certain features into Ubuntu itself and helping drive the Ubuntu roadmap. We offer both of those a products and different verticals buy in different ways. We talked to media and entertainment, and the conversation's completely different. Oil and gas, conversation's completely different. >> So what are you doing here? What's the big effort at CloudNativeCon? >> So we've got a great booth and we're talking about Ubuntu as a pretty universal platform for almost anything you're doing in the Cloud. Whether that's on frame infrastructure as a service, OpenStack. People can coo coo OpenStack and point OpenStack versus Kubernetes against one another. We cannot see it more differently-- >> Well no I think it's more that it's got clarity on where the community's lines are because apps guys are moving off OpenStack that's natural. It's really found the home, OpenStack very relevant huge production flow, I talk to Johnathon Bryce about this all the time. There's no co cooing OpenStack. It's not like it's hurting. Just to clarify OpenStack is not going anywhere its just that there's been some comments about OpenStack refugees going to (mumbles), but they're going there anyway! Do you agree? >> Yeah I agree, and that choice is there on Ubuntu. So infrastructure is a service, OpenStack's a fantastic platform, platforms as a service or Cloud Native through Cloud Native development Kubernetes is an excellent platform. We see those running side by side. Two racks a systems or a single rack. Half of those machines are OpenStack, Half of those are Kubernetes and the same IT department manages both. We see IT departments that are all in OpenStack. Their entire data center is OpenStack. And we see Kubernetes as one workload inside of that Openstack. >> How do you see Kubernetes impact on containers? A lot of people are coo cooing containers. But they're not going anywhere either. >> It's fundamental. >> The ecosystem's changing, certainly the roles of each part (mumbles) is exploding. How do you talk about that? What's your opinion on how containers are evolving? >> Containers are evolving, but they've been around for a very long time as well. Kubernetes has helped make containers consumable. And doctored to an extent, before that the work we've done around Linux containers LXE LEXT as well. All of those technologies are fundamental to it and it take tight integration with the OS. >> Dustin, so I'm curious. One of the big challenges I have the U face is the proliferation of deployments for customers. It's not just data center or even Cloud. Edge is now a very big piece of it. How do you think that containers helps enable the little bit of that Cloud Native goes there, but what kind of stresses does that put on your product organization? >> Containers are adding fuel to the fire on both the Edge and the back end Cloud. What's exciting to me about the Edge is that every Edge device, every connected device is connected to something. What's it connected to, a Cloud somewhere. And that can be an OpenStack Cloud or a Kubernetes Cloud, that can be a public Cloud, that could be a private implementation of that Cloud. But every connected device, whether its a car or a plane or a train or a printer or a drone it's connected to something, it's connected to a bunch of services. We see containers being deployed on Ubuntu on those Edge devices, as the packaging format, as the application format, as the multi-tendency layer that keeps one application from DOSing or attacking or being protected from another application on that Edge device. We also see containers running the micro services in the Cloud on Ubuntu there as well. The Edge to me, is extremely interesting in how it ties back to the Cloud and to be transparent here, Canonical strategy and Canonical's play is actually quiet strong here with Ubuntu providing quite a bit of consistency across those two layers. So developers working on those applications on those devices, are often sitting right next to the developers working on those applications in the Cloud and both of them are seeing Ubuntu helping them go faster. >> Bottom line, where do you see the industry going and how do you guys fit into the next three years, what's your prediction? >> I'm going to go right back to what I was saying right there. That the connection between the Edge and the Cloud is our angle right there, and there is nothing that's stopping that right now. >> We were just talking with Joe Beda and our view is if it's a shoot and computing world, everything's an Edge. >> Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. >> (mumbles) is an Edge. A light in a house is an Edge with a processor in it. >> So I think the data centers are getting smarter. You wanted a prediction for next year: The data center is getting smarter. We're seeing autonomous data centers. We see data centers using metals as a service mask to automatically provision those systems and manage those systems in a way that hardware look like a Cloud. >> AI and IOT, certainly two topics that are really hot trends that are very relevant as changing storage and networking those industries have to transform. Amazon's tele (mumbles), everything like LAN and serverless, you're starting to see the infrastructure as code take shape. >> And that's what sits on top of Kubernetes. That's what's driving Kubernetes adoption are those AI machine learning artificial intelligence workloads. A lot of media and transcoding workloads are taking advantage of Kubernetes everyday. >> Bottom line, that's software. Good software, smart software. Dustin, Thanks so much for coming theCube. We really appreciate it. Congratulations. Continued developer success. Good to have a great ecosystem. You guys have been successful for a very long time. As the world continues to be democratized with software as it gets smarter more pervasive and Cloud computing, grid computing, Unigrid. Whatever it's called it is all done by software and the Cloud. Thanks for coming on. It's theCube live coverage from Austin, Texas, here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, We'll be back with more after this short break. (lively music)