>> Voiceover: Live from Austin, Texas. It's the Cube, covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its Ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and joining me, my co-host, for the second day of theCube's program, Jim Kobielus. Really excited to have, not only the founder of Docker, Solomon Hykes, he's also the CTO, Chief Product Officer, did some keynotes here, all over the place. So, Solomon, thank you so much, thanks for havin' us. Congratulations on all the progress and welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot! It's a lot of fun! >> So many things to talk about, but let's start with you. How ya doin'? I'm sure there's so much that went into this week. What are you most proud of? What are you most excited about these days? >> Where to start? The cool thing, for me, about DockerCon is I focus on the keynote. We just package up the nice story, try to explain what we're doing, where we're going, and that's a pretty massive team effort. I think it's 30 of us for months preparing, deciding what we want to talk about, working on demos, pulling all-nighters. It's just really fun to see a keynote go from nothing to a really nice, fun story. Then I get to show up and discover all the other cool stuff. I'm like everyone else. I just marvel at the organization, the crowd, the energy. I'm a happy camper right now. >> It's interesting some of the dynamics in the industry. Okay, what's the important part? Who contributes to what? What fits where? Two years ago we had the hugging out as to the runtime and had the Open Source Foundation step in. Big thing at the keynote yesterday, two big things: it was Moby project and Linux Kit. Can you, maybe, unpack for our audience a little bit? What is Docker, the company? What's the Open Source? Who are some of the main players? It was the whole keynote, so we don't have time to get into it. What's real, and what was there? >> You're right, that was the big announcement, the Moby Project. Basically, in a nutshell, we launched Docker and we made it a product and an open source project, all rolled into one. We just kind of adopted this hybrid model, building a product that would just help people be more efficient, developers and ops, and at the same time, we would develop that in the open. That really helped us. It participated in the appearance of this huge Ecosystem. It was a big decision for us. Over time, both grew. Docker grew as a product, and it grew as an open source project. So over time we had to adapt to that growth. On the open source side that meant gradually spitting out smaller projects out of the main one. Now we have dozens of projects, literally. We got containerd. We got SwarmKit. We got InfraKit. We got all these components, and each of those is a project. Then we integrate them. What we're doing now, is we're completing that transformation and making sure there's a place for open source collaboration, free-for-all, openness, modularity, try new things, move fast, break things maybe. Then there's the product that integrates, takes the best parts, integrates them together, makes sure they're tested, they're solid, and then ships that to developers and customers. Basically we're saying, Moby is for open source collaboration. It's our project and all of it. And Docker is the product that integrates that open project into something that people can consume that's simple. It's two complementary parts to our platform. >> Could you talk a little bit about, there's kind of that composable nature of what you're building there. There's what Docker will build from it, and I think you've got a couple of examples of some of your partners. What's going to happen in the Cloud? What's going to happen with some of these others? Walk us through one of those. >> Everything about Docker's modular. So really, if you installed Docker for your favorite platform, whether it's the Mac, Windows, your favorite Cloud provider, Linux server, etc., you're actually installing a product that's an assembly of lots of components. Like I said, these components are developed in the open and then they're assembled. Now with the Moby Project, there's a place to assemble in the open, start the assembly in the open, so that other companies, the broader Ecosystem, can collaborate in the assembly, kind of experiment with how things fit together. The really cool thing about that is it makes it way easier to ports the platform, to expand it and customize it. So if you're a Cloud provider and you see all the pieces and you think "Well, I could optimize that. "I could add a little bit of magic "to make it work even better in my Cloud or in my hardware." Then you can do that in the open. You can do that with a community. Then you can partner with Docker to test it, and certify it, and distribute it as an easy-to-use product. Everything can go faster. >> You mentioned open a lot there. Does that mean that Docker is now closed? There's certain people that are very dogmatic when it comes to open source, so maybe you can parse that for us. >> I think it's the same people that were complaining before that we were confusing our product and an open project. We think of ourselves as having a lot to learn, and there's an Ecosystem that's made of a lot of people and companies and projects that have had a lot of experience with openness in the past. We spend most of our time listening, figuring out what the next step should be, and then taking that next step. People told us, "Clarify the relative place, "open source collaboration and your product." That's what we did. Now, I'm sure someone's going to say, "I preferred it before." Well, we just have to, at some point, chose. The key thing to remember is, Docker does everything in the open, and then integrates it into a product that you can use. If you don't like the product, if you want an alternative, then you still have all the pieces in the open right now. I would say, no. Not only is Docker not going closed, we're actually accelerating the rate at which we're opening up stuff. >> Personally, I felt it was a nice maturation of what you've done before, which was batteries are included but swappable. But we've taken the next step. It reminds me of those cool little science kits my kids get. Where it's like, oh okay, I could free build it or I can do it or I could do some other things. >> We use that tagline. It used to be, Docker has batteries included, but swappable. You can make other batteries and we'll swap them in to the product. We'll decide what's in there. Now everyone can do the swapping. It's a big free-for-all. Honestly, it's fun to watch. >> Is there any piece of Docker, the project, outside of core Docker, that Docker the company will refrain from building, will rely on ISVs to build? Or will Docker the company get involved, or reserve for itself the latitude to get involved in development of more peripheral pieces of the overall project going forward? >> We spent a lot of time thinking about that. Honestly, there's so many different constraints, we just decided we're going to follow the users, follow the customers. We just want a platform that works and solves people's problems. That's the starting point. From there, we work out the implementation details, what technology to use, the order in which to build things. Also, what makes more sense in the core platform and what makes more sense as an add-on. It's kind of on a case-by-case basis. >> Is there a grand vision document or functional service layered architecture that all of these components of the project are implementing or enabling? In other words, will Docker, as a project ever be complete or will it always be open-ended, will it constantly evolve and possibly broaden in scope continuously, indefinitely? >> If you look at the Moby Project on the one side, with experimentations and all the building blocks, I think that's going to just continuously expand. Really, openness is all about scale. There's only so much one company can build on their own, but if you really show the Ecosystem you're serious about really welcoming everybody and allowing for different opinions and approaches, then, honestly, I think there's no limit to how large that project can scale. I think Moby can go into tens of thousands of contributors as open source becomes easier and more accessible, which we're really working on, I think it can go into hundreds of thousands. That's going to take a while. That will, I think, never end growing. I think Docker, the product, the company, the reason we've been so successful is that we've been, well at least we've worked really hard to focus and be disciplined in what problems we want to solve, so it's a more iterative approach. We would rather solve less problems, but solve them really, really well, so that if you're using Docker for developing or going to production, you're really delighted Just every detail kind of fits together. There's a roadmap, of course. We're going to do more and more. But we don't want to rush trying to do everything. >> Solomon, great progress on all of these pieces. I've got the tough one for you. In the last year or so, Kubernetes has really exploded out there. Lots of your Ecosystem is heavily using it. Is it that Docker Swarm and Kubernetes will just be options out there? I look at Microsoft Dasher and they're very supportive of both initiatives. Many of your partners are there. How do you guys look at that dynamic and how would you like people to think of that going forward? >> It's a great case study of why we're transitioning to this open project model with Moby. The whole point is that at any given time, Docker, the product, will not be using all of the building blocks out there. It's just not possible. There's too many permutations. So we have to chose. One of these building blocks is orchestration. A year ago when we decided to build an orchestration, we had really specific opinions on what it should look like, as product builders. We looked around and we decided it needs to be a new kind of a building block. So we built Swarm Kits for our own use and we integrated it. Now that there's an open project for elaboration, we're throwing Swarm Kit in there so that everyone can modify it, extend it, and also replace it with something else. I think the big change, now, is that if you look at something like Kubernetes or Rocket as a container on time. Honestly, I could make a super long list of all the components out there that are really cool and we don't use in Docker. Now you can combine them all in Moby in custom assemblies. And we actually demoed that on stage yesterday. We showed taking some pieces from Docker and taking Kubernetes as a piece and plugging it together and saying "Look, there you go! "Weekend project." I think we're going to see a lot of conversions and reuse of ideas and codes, especially in the orchestration piece. I think over time, the differences between Kubernetes, Swarm Kit, and others will really diminish. We'll just integrate the bits and pieces that make the most sense. I don't really think of Kubernetes as a competitor or a problem. I think of it as another cool component in the Moby Ecosystem. Yeah, I think it's a lot of cool stuff. >> I tell ya, the Kubernetes community is just so thrilled that containerd is now open source. It really solves that issue and really it hasn't been something I've heard a lot, coming into the show. It's one of the themes we wanted to look at, and it hasn't been something that is like, Oh boy! Fight, war, anything like that. Hey! Congrats on that! I want to turn back to your root there. I think about dotCloud to Docker. It's a lot about the application modernization. Fast forward to today, Ben's up on stage talking of the journey. How do we take your legacy applications and wrap them in? What do you think about that kind of progression? We like that spectrum out there to help customers, at least partially, and be able to make changes. But I can't imagine that's when you started Docker that that was one of the use cases that you really thought you'd use. What surprised you? What's changed how you built things? What do you see from customers? >> Actually, you'll find this surprising, but this actually was a use case that we had in mind from the very beginning. I think that was lost in the noise for the first few years in the life of Docker because it became this exciting, new thing. >> Come on, Cloud native, Cloud native! >> Yeah, exactly! Docker has a huge developer community now. We spent a lot of time making it great for devs. The truth is, I used to be sysadmin. I used to be on call. I'm an ops guy first and we learned how to help developers. Developers are the customer. The Docker came out of our ops roots and then it evolved to help the developers. That's something that's now lost in the noise of history. It's a really pragmatic tool. It's built to solve real problems. One design opinion we baked in from the beginning is that it has to allow you to do things incrementally. If Docker forces you to throw away what you have, just to get the benefits, then we screwed up. The whole point is that Docker can adapt to what you're doing. For example, you'll see a lot of details in how Docker's designed to allow for stateful applications to run in there, to allow for your own network model to fit. Before Docker, all the containers solutions, all the paths, required you to change your app. Even things like port discovery. You had to change the source code. Docker did not require that. It gives you extra things you can do if you want to go further. But the starting point is incremental. Honestly, I'm really glad that now that's resonating, that we're reaching that point in the community where there's a lot of people using Docker interested in that, because for a few years I was worried that that would be missed in the noise of early adopters that don't mind rewriting everything. From the beginning, Docker was not just for Cloud-Native, microservices, Twelve-Factor, etc. I'm, personally, as a designer of products, as a pragmatist, I'm just happy that we're there. >> How do you see Docker evolving to support more complex orchestrations for data? For hybrid data cloud, environments private and public? You got the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM as partners and so forth. They have these complex scenarios now, their customers or petabytes scale and so forth. Where do you see that going, the data, the persistence of storage side of the containerization under Docker going? >> I think there's a lot of work to do. I think over time we're going to see specialized solutions for different uses of data. Data has such a big word. It's like computing. Just like computing now is no longer considered one category but it's specialized, I think data will be the same. I think it's a great fit for this modular Lego approach to the Docker Ecosystem. We're going to see different approaches to different data models, and I think we're going to see a lot modularization and a lot of different assemblies. Again, I think a lot of that will happen in Moby and we'll see a lot of cool, open stuff. We, ourselves, are facing a lot of data related questions, in request for customers. There's stuff in there already. You've got data volumes. And I think you're going to see a lot more on the data topic in the next year. >> Like containerization of artificial intelligence and deep learning and all that. Clearly, that's very incognito so far because, yeah. >> We're seeing a lot of really cool machine learning use cases using Docker already. OpenAI is all on Docker. We watch what they're doing with great interest. >> Are you a member of that consortium? >> Let's say friends and family (laughs). So OpenAI came out of the Y Combinator Ecosystem and Docker is a Y Combinator company. We spend a lot of time with them. I think AI on Docker is a really cool use case. I'm a big fan of that. >> Jim: Cool! Us too! >> Solomon, unfortunately, we're runnin' low on time. Last question I have for you is, there is so many things we can do with Docker now. Here's a bunch of the use cases like, "Oh, I can run lots of applications." Everything from Oracles in the store now, things like that. What is the quick win when you're talking to customers and let's get started? What's the thing that gets them the most excited that impacts their business the fastest? >> Ya know, it's-- >> And it never comes down to one thing, but, ya know. >> Honestly, we keep talking about Lego. I think it's like asking, what's your favorite Lego toy? I think we're maturing in the model. I think Lego is just the perfect analogy because it's a lot of building blocks. There's more and more, but there's also the sets. I think we're consolidating around a few different sets. There's maybe a dozen main use cases. We're seeing people identify with one, and then we're helping them see a starting point there. Here's a starter set for your problem, and then it clicks. >> Yeah, I hear that, and I can't help but think back. You're the big green platform that all my Legos build on. I can have my space stuff. I can have my farm set. Maybe the Duplos don't quite fit on it. It's the platform helping me to modernize a lot of what we're doing. Solomon Hykes, always a pleasure to catch up. >> Likewise! Congratulations on all the progress here, and we look forward to catching up with you the next time! We'll be back. Jim and I will be back with lots more coverage here from DockerCon 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)