 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE on the ground. Covering KubeCon 2016. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, we are here live in Seattle for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, this is theCUBE special on the ground coverage of what's going on in the developer community and we have two great guests from Red Hat. We have Joe Fernandez, Senior Director of Product Management and Clayton Coleman, Architect, the number two contributor in the individual pool, it's like it's gamification. Contributor in Kubernetes, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming by. And thanks for support, it's really appreciated. Clayton, your big contributor behind Brendan Burns, who's obviously you guys are lemon luminaries and it's going to be still early though. Go back two years ago, Kubernetes was kind of like this cult. People saw the orchestration challenges kind of in the open stack world overlapping in within the software world. And now it's like the fastest growing component mainly driven by this clear vision that CloudNative and containers are booming. Yeah, and it's very much about the application. And I think that was the thing that brought everyone together and has contributed so much to that rise is when you put these patterns together, you're trying to make applications run well. Everybody knows what it takes to make applications run well. When you see that, when you see it happening, you instantly see the value. And I think that's really been what's exciting about it is everybody's come together and people instantly see the promise and they want to get involved. And it's grown immensely, this is a huge. For the folks that are watching this who probably couldn't make it here because they had to shut down the attendance because of the fire marshal's task, which is very rare to let in these open source events to let turn people away because the mainly it's around venue because it's really inclusive. What's the key notes like? What are some of the sessions? Can you just spend a minute talking about some of the color around the show here? What's the session like? What's the big topics of conversation? Well, I'll take that. Yeah, so we've been involved obviously with Kubernetes from the start from two years ago. What we're really seeing here now is the things that are needed to have that widespread adoption in the enterprise. So you see a number of startups as well as large companies like Red Hat, like Microsoft, like Google getting involved and really working on different areas, whether that's areas around, how do you manage Kubernetes in an enterprise environment? How do you enable different types of application workloads? How do you address concerns around security, around usability and so forth? So, we definitely feel the energy and the key notes, but we also see a lot of energy in the breakout sessions and what's going on in the individual booths. Yeah, even in the hallways, I mean, I think there's been a huge number of people I've spoken with already today around how they're deploying Kubernetes, how they're deploying OpenShift, challenges that they're having and integrating, excitement about new features and new ideas. It's really been one of the most dynamic programming conferences I've ever been to. And there's a lot of users here too. So it's an awesome, the number two contributor is the individual at large component, Google's number one. The ton of users out there, so their hands are getting on the product, they are deploying, but you guys are number one in the enterprise in terms of open source and the history of Red Hat. You're dealing with customers every day that have to operationalize Kubernetes. That's the number one thing we're hearing is, okay, rah, rah, this has got some lift in the industry with the community right now. So this is looking like it's gonna clear the runway clearly on Kubernetes. So that's great news for everybody. But now getting into the enterprise, challenges. What do you guys see as drivers and inhibitors? Well, so I think very early on, when we saw Kubernetes, we said, great place to run applications. But the flip side of that is you have to be able to understand how to keep those applications running and to keep the lights on. And so one of the things that we had experience in at Red Hat is working with enterprises, understanding the policy and security, the kinds of requirements that really ensure that not only can you run one or two or 10 applications, but you can run thousands of applications. And so over the last two years, we focused on OpenShift and in the Kubernetes community on bringing the enterprise side, how to run and rely on these clusters. And it's really what we do. Yeah, and I like to think about it in terms of use cases. We have a lot of customer meetings and a number of conversations. Everybody's talking about digital transformation. Nobody quite knows how to get there. What's the first step? But really it comes down to, how are they gonna evolve their applications for maximum agility? So you see a lot of sessions around microservices architectures and evolving for more traditional monoliths. Containers is a good match for that. Kubernetes is an enabler of both new and existing application architectures. You also see companies focusing on portability, right? They want to be able to not only architect the applications the way they want to, they want to be able to run them in different public clouds, in different private clouds or virtualization platforms. So the portability of the Docker packaging format and containers and platforms. So phase one is set the table for microservices and the concept of cloud native. So build the applications the way you want, run them where you want and then tie that together with process. So things like DevOps and continuous deployment, continuous delivery. And really those are the three areas where we get into the most conversations and they're all sort of interrelated and I think they're all really enabled by platforms like Kubernetes. So Joe, I gotta ask you a question because you guys have OpenShift which is a platforms of service layout. I was in the hallway, they won't say the name of the person once because you might know who it is given maybe the comment. But they said the platform as a service is really a bastardized concept right now because what Kubernetes is freeing up is the notion of a multi-cloud from past to Kubernetes. So I want to get your thoughts on that. Do you agree with that statement? And two, what does that mean for things like OpenShift and how does OpenShift fit in with Kubernetes and why not have customers just go along with Kubernetes? So actually in fact, what OpenShift represents is it's basically our enterprise distribution of Kubernetes. This is how we bring Kubernetes which is essentially an upstream project to enterprises as a supported product. So OpenShift has been around since 2011. It was competing in the PaaS space with other platforms like Heroku, like Cloud Foundry, all of the platforms use containers but containers were sort of underneath the covers. You didn't really, they weren't really exposed. But the drawback to PaaS systems was they were always very opinionated, right? They kind of limited you to a certain type of patterns and those were codified in things like the 12-factor app. And they didn't really fit the majority of applications that customers were building. What we also, the inter-cloud thing too, you have now a diversity of clouds. You kind of have legacy constraints that are handcuffs, if you will, based upon, they didn't even need them. Exactly. It kind of grew on its own there. Is that kind of freed up with Kubernetes? Well, that's what, yeah. Exactly. Is that a hope or is that reality? Yeah, so what we saw in 2013 when the Docker project launched, Red Hat was one of the first vendors that saw the opportunity to standardize that containers layer. And then as we started talking to Google about the work that we were both doing in that project, they sort of saw the same things we did, which is you needed an orchestration layer to manage those containers across all these servers, across the different clouds. And at that point, we essentially rewrote. So OpenShift 3 represents a full rearchitecture, everything from the operating system to standardizing on Docker, which is the container runtime, to standardizing on Kubernetes. And then, you know. How do you focus more with the past layer with OpenShift, given the clarity of some of the industry dynamics kind of sorting themselves out, containers becomes kind of de facto standard? That's right. So when customers consume OpenShift, they can consume it in a highly abstracted way where they may not even know that it's containers or Kubernetes running their applications, but they can go down to directly access like the Kube API, the Docker API. So we eliminate that sort of block in terms of making the platform too opinionated where customers can't do what they wanna do with it. And I would say when people talk about Kubernetes, a lot of times we talk about containers, but it's really not about containers, it's about applications. And I think what I see of it in Kubernetes is the continuation of the idea of Linux as the first application platform that was truly open source, it was truly vendor neutral, taking that to the next level, which is, well, what is the vendor neutral cloud application platform? And it's Kubernetes and OpenShift. It's really, it brings that kind of the freedom aspect of software development, that's the ethos of open source, which Linux has proven, just the longevity of Linux is uncontested. You can't really debate that. And people may say Linux has opinions, but at the same time, just like OpenShift and Kubernetes, we have those opinions, but we like to choose your own opinions to bring your own code for ISVs and vendors to work equally. And that really makes it an open platform and an open ecosystem. It's a proven model as well on the open source side, but now on the innovation side, where there's always conflict, Clay, now let's get your thoughts on this. Right now, Kubernetes represents probably the first shift above the DevOps line that allows for a much more broader development uptake in terms of freeing themselves up from under the hood network stuff. So plumbers are becoming machinists now, developers are now completely independent. So that's the goal, right? That's the end game. Where are we on that progress line as, what's your vision and how would you talk to other developers that might be watching this and saying, what does this mean for me and my future? I think we want to make as many of the tools that are available for developers to accomplish what they actually need to get done to build applications, to serve customers, to make revenue. Those challenges benefit from abstractions. And so every tool we have in Kubernetes and containers and microservices, build systems built on top of that, and all the systems that sit around it are really about empowering the developer to get their job done as quickly as possible. And this is just making cross cloud application development easy. At the end of the day, it'll really depend as well on how operations teams, whether that's the developers themselves and the DevOps model, or the people who run the infrastructure like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or the operators in the bare metal clouds, in their own private clouds, they're the ones who need to be able to ensure that all of this is safe and secure and that's hard. And in this period of the politics was this election day of this historic election, trickle down economics or trickle down dynamics of what's going on here. Kubernetes in a way is a forcing function below the stack to get their act together. That's right. I mean, in a way, if you look at it, if the developer community can organize around it, it clarifies a lot what needs to get done. The hard stuff. Absolutely, yeah. So our VP of engineering, Matt Hicks, did a session here yesterday and he was talking about modern applications need to be able to take care of dynamic infrastructure, scale out infrastructure, infrastructure that may not live in your data center, may live out in the cloud. How do you do that, right? So obviously you need Linux. It's hard to tell. Yeah, exactly. It's not easy. So Linux is at the core of that, right? So at the core of modern applications, modern infrastructure, but then how do you go beyond a single Linux server to basically span that across the cluster, across your data center, across multiple data centers? That's the type of stuff that we're working on in the Kubernetes community. And then as Clayton mentioned, unlike virtualization or things like infrastructure as a service, containers is really about the application. How do you abstract and enable application development versus how do you just abstract the hardware? Joe and Clayton, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE. I'll give you guys the last word real quick. Bottom line, what's the bumper sticker for your customers around them evaluating what you guys are doing here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon? What's the impact to the customer? Yeah, well we're all about how do you bring Kubernetes, how do you bring all these great capabilities to enterprise customers, enable it to run anywhere, whether it's in your data center, whether it's in any public cloud, that's what Red Hat's about, and that's ultimately about helping them enable their applications. It's about running every application in the world safely and securely. All right, theCUBE, bringing you all the KubeCon coverage with a K, K-U-B-E, not Kube, so you don't have to be confused. This is the KubeCon, Kube at CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More after this break.