 The Cube at OpenStack Summit at Lata 2014 is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone here live in Atlanta for the OpenStack Summit. And we're excited to be sponsored by Brocade. Thanks a lot to Brocade for supporting us coming out. I want to give them a shout out. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm Joe, my co-host, Stu Miniman with Wookie Bond. Our next guest is Simon, welcome from Dreamforce. CEO of Dreamforce. Your host. Dreamhost. I'm getting late in the day here. That's good. So we were out last night. You were playing pool with Luke Tucker. He was on the Cube yesterday. Who won the pool game? You were sure. You were sure. I lost because I sunk the white off the black twice. He gave me a leaf pass the first time and then I lost the second one. So, Lou won. So Tels, what do you think about going on OpenStack this event? What's your thoughts here? What's your take on it? The vibe? Well, the last year has been a lot of focus on users and making sure that OpenStack is well tuned and easily to configure for users and getting use cases and adoption because with adoption, we just know with any software the more users you have, the more feedback you get, the more you can harden it and that sort of thing. I think what's happening here is we know enough about what cloud is today. We know what the components are. That a lot of it is about defining the core of what OpenStack is and getting to a point where the market can have confidence that when the OpenStack brand is applied to software or it's applied to a service or it's applied to even drivers that plug into OpenStack, that it will work and that there's a certain amount of quality control that's there. That's a lot of what the work that's going on at the conference is related to that. Of course, with 4,700 people here, there's a lot of other work going on as well. Blueprints for the next release, the Juno release and so on. What kind of use cases do you see? Now, the customer stories are light here. There's not a lot of public discussions on the stage. You see some names out there, Disney Wells Fargo, but there's a lot of kind of confidential or kind of non-public conversations. So what are you seeing in terms of the uptake on the customer side? I know there's a lot, but people aren't saying the names, but what are some of the high level use cases that you're seeing with OpenStack right now this year? Well, through Dreamhost, we are a public cloud provider. We've got DreamObject's cloud storage and then we're coming out with Dream compute, our cloud computing offering. Our target customer is entrepreneurs and developers worldwide. So we're very much a long tail company, kind of like eBay or other companies. So for us, we see a lot of the typical early Amazon use cases. We're seeing backup of media files. We're seeing two object storage. We're seeing web acceleration. We're seeing new ways of architecting applications like WordPress, where instead of running everything through the web server, you're running it off cloud storage as well as the web server. We're seeing those sort of scale out applications. Through Ink Tank, which I was co-founder and chair of up until about a week and a half ago, basically we got to see a lot more use cases. And interestingly, I mean, a number of folks have talked publicly about it, Bloomberg, Comcast and so on. In those cases, you know, they often start with typical developer environments because part of getting OpenStack into the IT environment is actually to get your developers, your in-house developers, using it, understanding it as a platform instead of their traditional IT. And through that, then you can start to deploy it in different use cases. So Dev environments was first, I think anything content or web acceleration has been seconded. So that's where Comcast comes in. You know, some of the other discussion points, analytics. We're seeing some analytics use cases as well. So I think it's starting at the places where... Low hanging fruit. It's the low hanging fruit, exactly. So I want to ask you, you know, with Dreamhost, obviously the bare metal market has been great and certainly the cloud has benefited from that. But also with the Ink Tank, you know, you talk about software, right? We talk about software-led infrastructure, software-defined, we're kind of joking about that earlier. But this is a DevOps show. In the day, no matter what people call it, it's a DevOps show. The cloud acceleration is coming from the guys who were doing the DevOps. Not every company could have a DevOps ninja, because DevOps is almost a unique skill set. What do you see happening with a DevOps culture permeating into the enterprise? As customers realize, hey, you know what? I'm going to host and have cloud, I have bare metal inside my data centers and do some hosting, do all that stuff. Now I've got to hire people. And so like, who are the, I call the, maybe the cloud off might be a better term, but DevOps culture, I mean, you don't see a lot of DevOps in some enterprises. You know, I think what it is, I actually think, you know, enterprise is actually embracing the DevOps type culture. And I think what it is is a DevOps person, whether they've come from the operations admin side, if they've been a Linux admin, or whether they come from developer world, Python and so on, they often don't look to an enterprise like a reliable person. But that's because they're so used to doing commits. I mean, we have a commit cycle at Dreamhost. I mean, we're doing pushouts every few days, right? Code is committed, it's in our development environment, it moves to our staging environment, and then it gets pushed out. That is very unusual, but because of that, the skill set means that these developers, or these DevOps teams, they have to be thinking beyond just their own code. They have to be thinking about how does it integrate with the rest of your platform and so on. So one of the things that Facebook announced at their developer conference two weeks ago was Mark Zuckerberg got up on stage and said, hey, you know, our famous motto, move fast and break stuff, which is kind of like, you know, they are DevOps guys, they are the ultimate DevOps use case in my opinion. They built everything in scratch, it's kickass. So now the new slogan is, move fast with stable infrastructure. So they're growing up and they're realizing, hey, you know, you got to have operate at this kind of scale. That's what enterprises are dealing with. They want, they're at scale, but they have legacy. So how do they, how do you do that? How do you move fast with stable scale for an enterprise? What's your take on that? I think you've got to have a lot of process. So that's what, you know, you've got to have very disciplined sprint processes. You've got to have very disciplined QA. So it's actually all the things that the enterprise does today in IT. It's just at a much more rapid pace. And so to some degree, yes, there are some special, you know, ingredients that need to go into that kind of agility and speed, but a lot of it is around recognizing, it's really about the DevOps guys, the individuals realizing, just because I'm DevOps doesn't mean I can work outside of process, right? And then it's also about the enterprise realizing that just because this is moving at the speed of light, you know, the speed of commits and pushouts and testing and QA and so on, you know, on a weekly basis or on a, you know, a bi-weekly basis that you still need agility and so on. So it's really a meeting of those two worlds. What do you think the biggest change is for your business? Obviously being in the hosting and now with the cloud right on your doorstep, which you are in too. Now it's cloud, it's a rack space. Move quickly to the cloud and then kind of bolt it on some stuff fast, which essentially became the genesis of OpenStack. So, you know, how do you look at your vision? What's the vision around the corner for you? What's next? Well, hosting in the early days, if you even go back to the 90s, was all about those tinkerers, those guys who were going, wow. I mean, you know, it started out with PCs and all of a sudden you could go to Dell and you could order your own PC and you could tinker with it. You could, you know, it started out even before that. But in our world with hosting, that's what it was. And so with cloud, we just see it as a natural evolution. A lot of the demand for our cloud services, interestingly, is coming from international. So 50% of our customers, new customers for cloud, come from international outside of the US. And who is it? It's the guy in India who's saying, I wanna be on this new platform. I wanna learn it. I wanna learn how to leverage it for my own applications. I wanna have my own little website. I wanna spin up, you know, a statistical app that is a passion project of mine and so on. So I think what a lot of it is, it's, you know, for us, it enables us to put something in our customer's hands that they can learn, that they can grow. And actually they will advance in their career because a lot of our customers are actually those guys that are moving up through the IT organizations. What are the pain points with service providers and cloud service providers out there right now as they, you know, want to build, grow, and monetize into the cloud? I think one pain point is doubt and you have to fight doubt at every point. I have to fight it with my board. We have to fight it with, you know, within the team that I think there's, like with any early transformational platform, there is a certain amount of doubt and, but I think that's being overcome to a degree. People are seeing real production use cases. The other big pain points are definitely stability. You know, when you pull together compute networking and storage and we're actually doing all three and we're doing them all in novel ways. So, you know, compute open stack, obviously. Network, we're using network virtualization and a lot of new innovative ways of doing IPv6 all the way through and, you know, fully separating tenant instances at layer two and then we're doing storage. We're doing distributed storage with Cef. That's a lot of innovation that's happening at once. So making that all work together and work at a, you know, 99.99% reliability as a challenge. What's going on at the network level? What do you guys have going on there? Networking is in such an innovation. I mean, companies like Brocade, you know, a lot of the other competitors as well. I just really, I think what's happening is it's pushing the envelope here of networking. Even software defined networking, you know, Brocade went out and purchased Viata, which we actually were very interested in and have been sort of playing around with quite a bit. I think it's forcing a new way of looking at networking where instead of it being, you know, a hardened box with a certain number of ports and, you know, you buy that box and you architect your data center in that way, there's a realization that if networking moves down the path of distributed networking that is resilient and reliable, then it can really unleash a lot of innovation even in the data center. So it's a very exciting time for networking. So Simon, can you talk a little bit more about what it takes, you know, how it's changed recently to really scale your environment and operationalize it. Obviously, networking has a lot of change and how is OpenStack playing into, you know, the kind of scaling and operating your environment? Sure, so we've moved from two points of presence, essentially, two data center environments on the West Coast. We set up a new data center environment on the East Coast and in that environment, we really tried to adopt a lot of best practices. So it's everything from power utilization and a lot of the power benefits of the new servers that are out there. You know, we can rack servers with a top of rack switch, you know, from floor to 50 rack units high. You know, we can run 18KW through that rack and because of a lot of the power capabilities now in terms of that a lot of the co-location facilities have or some of the big data center providers, you know, the real estate providers, we're getting a lot of resiliency in that way. So I think the interesting evolution there is that Amazon, whereas in the early days, you know, the big public clouds had to sort of engineer around that. They had to have availability zones because there were risks that a whole pot of infrastructure would go down. That's actually being eliminated. So there's a lot of things happening in that way and we're taking advantage of those. On the network side, there's a lot of resiliency that's being built into networking where all of a sudden it's no longer about, you know, spine and leaf and put switches just at the top of the racks so you can do these big distribution switches at the end of a row, which gives you a lot of flexibility about how much infrastructure you put into a row in the data center. That's a really exciting development for us. We're taking advantage of that as well. And then I think the other thing that's cool is that you're seeing a lot of server admins start to really want to administer more of the infrastructure. And there's quite an efficiency in that as well. So we're experimenting with allowing them to sort of enter the network realm and sort of cross-training them with network operations, which brings a lot of efficiency to our data centers. And then of course OpenStack ultimately is the holy grail because the density that we can run OpenStack at just in the physical environment as well as the power savings associated with that as well as the skill set efficiencies of being able to run an OpenStack cloud with like two admins, for compute storage and networking, it's pretty significant. Or no admins. Or not. Not quite no admins. Well, I mean, that's the whole DevOps models that you don't have to hire a zillion admins to... Finlayer. Exactly. Keep a nice little lean staff, which we do is why we love the cloud. So I got to ask you, what tasks on the compute on the app side are going to be irrelevant in the next five to 10 years? What do you see getting abstracted away or in terms of complexity? What is going to be, what's going to go away in your mind in terms of compute and apps? Well, I think, I mean, starting really in the operations side of things, I mean, tools like Puppet and Chef have really transformed a lot of, like we would script out our data center and we'd script out a lot of our applications and security updates and so on. And that was all stuff that we had to develop ourselves. So I think there's layers of very smart software that are open source, largely, actually, which is great. Some of which is part of, you know, the broader OpenStack ecosystem as well. That's actually enabling that and it enables the DevOps teams to spend just less time on that kind of thing and really concentrate on higher level aspects. Ultimately, it is interesting. Our customers do want managed environments. So they want configurability. So if they need to drop down and, you know, configure the Apache web server or even go down to the compute layer and tweak the OS, they want to be able to do that, but they don't want to have to do that. So I do think there is a very strong role for platform as a service and it doesn't mean that infrastructure as a service goes away. All it means is that you need to be able to offer that managed environment where the end user trusts it, but at the same time, you need to be able to offer them the tools and the ability to be able to plum down and make changes if they want to, if they're really wanting to customize an application. We're getting some commentary on CrowdChat and so people say that you're a Bitcoin fan. Is that true? And what do you think about Bitcoin? You're talking about, you know, innovations and disruptions on some cases, fraud, but with Bitcoin, it's a lot of activity around Bitcoin. Some see it like Mark Andreessen and we see it as an innovation opportunity. I think Bitcoin is an amazing thing that came out of nowhere that really related to payments. I think in a few years, it's not going to be seen as a payments-oriented system. Really what Bitcoin did, I think, for a lot of people, a lot of smart people is, it made them realize that this incredibly heavy, expensive system that we have worldwide that is the medium of exchange, which, by the way, doesn't deliver exchange instantaneously at all. I mean, there's a lot of inefficiencies in that system. Bitcoin is a model that shows that you can transfer value instantly, globally, for anything. Think about that. Think about how if that... And it's peer-to-peer angle too. And it's peer-to-peer angle as well, exactly. So I think what it will do, you know, I guess my own personal opinion is, to some degree, it's less about medium of exchange or Bitcoin as a currency to dollars. And I think it's more about the fact that this is an instantaneous system. Did you make some good money on Bitcoin? That dream host being given a unique position that you were in with all those servers? Well, I could have. I could have. But actually, one of the co-founders of Dream Host, Josh Jones, he went big in Bitcoin. And I remember a meeting with him sitting down in Santa Monica, just the two of us, chatting about Bitcoin about a year and a half ago. And he's like, I'm going all in. I'm going to buy a lot of Bitcoin. And at the time, it was $6. And he still has that Bitcoin. And he still sells some. Take the little cream off the top. Okay, so, but Bitcoin is a great example of some of these new experiences that cloud potentially will enable. Right. You know, we've got the crowd chat, which is a peer-to-peer thing. Stu, you want to comment? Yeah, just Simon, you know, I want to get your viewpoint on just open source in general, you know, think about, you know, you've got Bitcoin, you've got the web, we've got OpenStack, you know, Ink Tank, you know, you've seen a lot of open source. You know, it's been around for a couple of decades, but it seems like it's almost coming to a new age. What's your thoughts on that? Totally agree. And I think, you know, I think open source, it's not just about software. Open is a way of doing business that I think is starting to permeate problem-solving and doing business. I mean, at Dreamhost, we're a very open company. We're on this world blue list of, you know, top most democratic companies in the world. But the reason for that is we recognize that when you put things out there to your team and you do it in a way which is consumable, you get really good feedback back and you get buy-in earlier and you don't get resistance later on. And so I think open source specifically is riding that wave. And the only thing I would say about where to from here is, and this is particularly with OpenStack as well, is that we can't be afraid to be continuing to try and create a new model. Remember, the current model of open source came from somewhere and it came from a set of circumstances that arose around Linux and arose around other needs for big problems that were networked problems. But that doesn't mean that it has to stop and that doesn't mean that our circumstances today aren't evolved or different and so on. So I think there's gonna be some very interesting, particularly in the OpenStack community where there's a lot of, it's a big community and it's grown very, very fast, new ways of doing open source where there's collaborations between very commercially interested parties and contributing back to this pool of capability that everyone needs to use. So that's one of my big things is let's not stop here, let's not be afraid to experiment and try new things in open source and how we go about doing open source. And open source certainly is accepted in the enterprise right now. You're seeing acceptance, big time and enterprises now want to embrace that. So I got to answer the next question. How do enterprises evaluate cloud opportunity and providers in context to the open source? Obviously OpenStack is a great bridge to that concept. How does an enterprise evaluate who to choose? What do you take on that? And what do you see consistently? I mean, that's a pretty broad question, but what's the common thread? I think, look, enterprise is always gonna have their, their set of RFP criteria where they'll be, look, I mean security, I need isolation, I need all these sort of reliability and security, black box type of capabilities. But I think the thing that cloud offers is it offers the flexibility and agility to compete. And by the way, big enterprise is not just competing with itself nowadays, it's competing with startups. And we only have to look at how the acceleration in the growth of startups from zero to a billion or, you know, WhatsApp in the case of that, that company, you know, zero to 450 million users. I mean, faster than any other user base previously that I think that's what open source offers. And, you know, open stack and other open source collaborations are really heavily focused on not only offering that agility, but then solving those security issues, you know, solving those reliability issues, educating, you know, the enterprises as to way to use open source in a safe and secure way. So I think it changes things too much apart from the enterprise being open to the fact that, you know, with flexibility and with speed will come a certain amount of adaptation. They're going to need more DevOps people who can respond quickly to issues before they become problems and those sort of things. Simon, final question for you to share with your own words to the folks here. Why is this year so important in the cloud and technology business? You've seen some innovation cycles before, booms and busts, we're part of a boom cycle right now. What's going on right now? Why is all the insider so excited about what's going on in the industry right now? I think in any transformation that's sort of technology related, we've all seen this. There is a tipping point that happens. You know, some people say it's 20% adoption or, you know, typically is in that sort of 15 to 20% and then all of a sudden the landslide begins. And so I think the reason that we're here and the reason that people are working so hard to make OpenStack a viable, reliable, sort of enterprise grade platform or service provider grade platform is because we know we are reaching that tipping point real soon. And when we reach that tipping point, we don't want the reputation of this platform to be that it is not those things or it is not capable. You know, the value of it is such that it is going to reach that tipping point. I don't think anything is going to stop this pretty much at this point. But what- The train has left the station. The train has left the station, but I think the train could get derailed or could, you know, have some issues unless we all work really hard on these things. And that's why you've got 4,700 participants here. That's why you've got a lot of companies spending a lot of money and contributing a lot of developers to the project. Simon Anderson, CEO, dream host. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest at the short break live in Atlanta for the Opus Dex Summit. We'll be right back. Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.