>> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '17. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Google Next, here from our Palo Alto studio. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Udi Nachmany, who is the Head of Public Cloud at Ubuntu, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here. >> All right, so I think it goes without saying, anybody that understands the landscape. Oh wait, there's Cloud, there's Linux, and especially Ubuntu, you know that's going to be there. Before we get into some of these, just tell us a little bit about your role there, and inside the company. >> Sure, I've been with Canonical for about three years, and I head up our partnership with the public clouds and the public IS providers as a whole. >> Yeah. >> That includes Google, AWS, Azure, and many, many others. >> So can you just clarify one thing for us, though? >> Yes. >> You just said Canonical, I introduced you as Ubuntu. >> Yes. >> Which is it? How should we be referring to these two? Well, we are very well known for our products. >> Yeah. >> We're best well known our corporate brand and we're very happy with both names. I usually introduce myself as Udi from Ubuntu, >> Yeah. >> Slash Canonical, so we're used to that. >> Totally understand. So public cloud, give us your view on the landscape today. We want to talk specifically about some of the Google stuff, but what's happening, and what are customers to you for public cloud, where does your suite play into that environment? >> Sure, Ubuntu is a very popular OS, and I think probably the most popular, the area where we're most dominant is public cloud, So a large majority of workload's on Google Cloud, Azure, the Linux part of Azure, AWS, and many, many other providers is running on Ubuntu. A lot of high-visibility services actual develop on Ubuntu. And we have responsibility in that. We need to make the Ubuntu experience predictable and optimized for that cloud platform and have people trust that experience, and believe in it. So that's our job on a technical level, and then on the second level, our job is to help users access support and tooling on top of that, to help them with the operational reality. Because what we see, unless you've probably heard it before from Canonical, what we see is it's great that the licensing cost, the cost of software has gone down, that's great news for everyone, however what a lot of people don't realize is that the cost of operations has gone up, it's skyrocketed, right? It's great Kubernetes is open source, but how do you actually spin up a cluster, how do you deal with this architecture, what does it mean for your business? So that's where we critically focus on private and public cloud. >> Yeah, it's funny. I did an interview with Brad Anderson a few years ago, and I'm like, "Customers are complaining "about licensing costs," and he starts ranting, he's like, "Licensing costs? Do you know that licensing is 6% of the overall cost of what you have?" So, look, we understand operations are difficult, so why is that such a strong fit? What do you bring, what customers do you serve that they're choosing you in such a large preponderance? >> I think the two things we do well, one is we're very well-embedded in the industry and in the community, and pretty much where people are developing something exciting, they're developing it on Ubuntu and they're talking to us through the process. We get a really good view of their problems and challenges, as well as our own. And the second thing is we have come up with tools and frameworks to allow a lot of that knowledge to be crowdsourced, right? So a good example is our modeling platform Juju, where you can very easily get from not knowing anything about, for example Kubernetes, into a position where you have a Kubernetes architecture running on a public cloud, like Google, or in another public cloud, or in bare metal, right? So because we tackled that, we assume that somebody's done this before you, somebody's figured this out. Take all that knowledge, encapsulate it in what we call a Charm, and take that Charm and build an architecture on Juju, on the canvas, or through the CLI. >> Okay, maybe could you compare, contrast, Google, of course, has some pretty good chops when it come to Kubernetes, they're really trying to make some of these offerings really as a service, so ya know, what does Google do, what do you do? How do they work together? Are you actually partnering there or are you just in the community just working on things? >> Google is in this in two different ways. One is they have their own managed service GKE, and that's great and I think people who are all in on Google, then that's a probably a good way to go. You get the expertise, and you get the things that you need. Our approach, as always, is cloud-neutral and we do believe in a hybrid world. We are members of the CNCF, we're silver sponsors of the CNCF, we're very well-embedded in the Kubernetes community, and we do ship a pure upstream Kubernetes distribution that we also sell support for. So we work very closely with Google, in general, Google Cloud, on making sure Ubuntu runs well on GCE, and on the other side, we work very closely with the Kubernetes community in that ecosystem, to again, make sure that it becomes very easy to work with that solution. >> Every player that you talk to in the ecosystem gives you a different story when it comes to multi-cloud environments. Google's message tends to be pretty open. I mean, obviously, with what they're doing with Kubernetes and being their position of where they are with customer adoption, they understand that a lot of people that are doing cloud aren't doing it on Google's Cloud, so they want to make it, you can live in both worlds, and we can support it. I listened to Amazon today, they're like, well, the future's going to be, we're all going to be there, we're going to hire another 100,000 people throughout all of Amazon in the US in the next 18 months. And Microsoft is trying to wrap their arms around a lot of their applications, IBM and Google are there, doing their thing. You've got visibility into customers in all of these environments due to your place in the stack. What are you seeing today? How is Google's adoption going? Is one question I have for you. And two, most customers, I would think, are running kind of multi-cloud, if you will, is the term, is that what you see? How many clouds are they doing? What are you seeing, kind of shifts in there, and I know I asked you three different questions there, but maybe you can dig into that and unpack it for us. >> Sure. I think, in terms of what they, at least top three clouds are saying, I think it's more important to look at what they're doing. If you think about the AWS and VMWare announcement, if you think about Azure Stack for Microsoft, I think those are clearly admissions that there is an OnPrem story and there's a hybrid story that they feel they need to address. They might believe in a world where everybody's happy on a public cloud, but they also live in reality. >> We're on a public cloud show, we're not allowed to mitt about OnPrem, right? Next you're going to, like, mention OpenStack. >> Absolutely. And then, in terms of Google, I think the interesting thing Google's doing, Google are clearly in that, even in terms of size and growth, I think they're in that top three league. They are, my impression is they are focused on building the services and the applications that will attract the users, right? So they don't have this blanket approach of you must use this, because this is the best cloud ever. They actually work on making very good, specific solutions, like for big data and for other things, and Kubernetes is a good example, that will attract people and get them into that specific part of Google Cloud platform, and hopefully in the future, using more and more. So I think they have a very interesting more product than approach, in that sense. >> Okay, so. >> I think I answered one question. >> Yeah, you touched on, yes customers have public and OnPrem. >> Yeah. >> Kind of hybrid, if you will. What about public cloud, you know? Most customers have multiple public clouds in your data or are they tending to get most of it on a single cloud, and might having a second one for some other piece? >> Yeah, I think right now, we're seeing, is a lot of a lot of people using perhaps a couple of platforms. Especially if they have certain size, I'm putting things like serenity and data prophesy aside, but just in terms of public cloud users, they might, again, use a specific platform for a specific service, they might use bare metal servers on software, for example, and VMs on the cloud. People are, by and large, the savvy users do understand that a mix is needed, which also plays to our strength, of course, with tools like Juju and Landscape, we allow you to really solve that operational problem, while being really substrate-agnostic, right? And you don't have to necessarily worry about getting logged in to one or the other. The main thing is, you can manage that, and you can focus on your app. >> All right. Udi, what's the top couple of things that customers are coming to you at these shows for? Where do they find themselves engaging with you as opposed to just, ya know, they're the developers, they're loving what you're doing? >> Sure. So the one thing I mentioned before is operations, right? I've heard about big data, I've heard about Kubernetes. What are my options? Do I hire a team? Do I get a consultant? Do I spend six months reading about this? And they're looking for that help, and I think Juju as an open-source tool and conjure-up as a developer tool that's also open-source. Really expand their options in that sense, and make it much more efficient for them to do that. And the second thing I'd say is Ubuntu is obviously very popular on public cloud, it's popular in production, so production workloads, business-critical workloads. And more and more organizations are realizing that they need to think long and hard about what that means in terms of getting the right support for it, in terms of things like security. An example, this week there was a kernel vulnerability in Linus Distros, I don't think it has a name yet, and we have something called the Canonical Livepatch service which patches kernel vulnerabilities, you can guess by the name. Now, people who have that through our support package have not felt a thing through this vulnerability. So I think we'll start to see more and more of these, where people have a lot of machines running on different substrates, and they're really worried about their up time and what a professional support organization can help them do to maintain that up time. >> It's real interesting times, being a company involved in open sourced, involved in open cloud. I want you to react, there was a quote that Vint Cerf gave at the Google event, I was listening, they had a great session Marc Andreessen and Vint Cerf. >> Yeah it was overcrowed. >> Go there. There was actually room if you got in, but I was glad I got up there, and Vint Cerf said, "We have to be careful about fast leading to instability." What's your take on that? I hear, when I go to a lot of these shows it's like, wow, I used to go from 18 months to six months to six weeks for my deployments. And public cloud will just update everything automatically, but that speed, ya know? As you were just talking, security is one of the issues, but there's instability, what's your take on that? And how are customers dealing with this increasing pace of change, which is the only constant that we have in our industry? >> Yeah, that's very true. I think, so from conversations with customers I've had recently. I've had a few where they've been sitting around and really deliberating what they need to do with this public cloud thing that they've heard about. Trying to buy time, eventually might lead to panicking. So a big financial institution that I met, maybe a month ago are trying to move all in to AWS, right? Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for them, whether it's the right thing for them, I don't think that discussion necessarily took place, it may well be the best thing for them. But it's the kind of, they're rushing in to that decision, because they took so much time to try and understand. On the other hand, you see people who are much more savvy, and understand that in terms of the rate of change, like you said, it's a constant, so you need to take ownership of your architecture. You can't be locked in to one box that solves all your problems. You need to make sure you have the operation agility and you're using the right tooling, to help you stay nimble when the next big thing comes along. Or the next little thing, which is sometimes just as scary. And I think, again, that's where we're very well placed and that's where we can have very interesting conversations. >> Really interesting stuff. Actually, I just published a case study with City, talking about, they use AWS, I would say tactically would be the way to put it. They build, they have a number of locations where they have infrastructure. Speed and agility absolutely something they need as an outcome. Public cloud is a tool that they use at certain times, but not... There are things they were concerned about in how they build their architectures. Want to give you the last word. We see Canonical, Ubuntu at a lot of shows, you're involved in a lot of partnerships. What do we expect to see from your cloud group, kind of over the next six months, what shall we be keeping an eye on? >> I think on the private cloud side we've been doing some great work into the toggle vertical, and I think you'll see us expanding into more verticals, like financial services, where we've had some good early successes. >> Can I ask, is that NFV-related? It was the top discussion point that I had at OpenStacks on it last year was around NFV. Is it that specific or? >> Yeah, that's an element of it, yeah, but it's about, how do I make my privat cloud economically viable as AWS or Google or Azure would be? How do I free myself from that and enable myself to move between the substrates without making that trade off. So I think that's on the private cloud side. And I think you're going to see more and more crossover between the world of platforms and switches and servers and the world of devices, web-connected devices. We just finished MWC in Barcelona last week. I think we're in the top 13 or 14 bars in terms of visibility, way ahead of most other OS platforms. And I think that's because our message resonates, right? It's great to have five million devices out there, but how do you actually ship a security fix? How do you ship an update? How do you ship an app, and how do you commercialize that? When you have that size of fleet. So that's a whole different kind of challenge, which, again, with the approach we have to operations, I think we are already there, in terms of offering the solution. So I think you're going to see a lot of more activity on that front. And in the public cloud, I'd say it's really about continuing to work ever closer with the bigger public clouds so that you have optimized experiences on Ubuntu, on that public cloud, on your public cloud of choice. And you're going to see a lot more focus on support offerings, sold through those clouds, which makes a lot of sense, not everyone wants to buy from another supplier. It's much easier to get all your needs met through one centralized bill. So you're going to see that as well. >> Udi Nachmany, really appreciate you coming to our studio here to help us with our coverage of Google Next 2017. We'll be wrapping up day one of two days of live coverage here from the SiliconANGLE Media Studio in Palo Alto. You're watching theCUBE (electronic music)