 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back to the program Chip Hilders, who's the CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Chip, you started off this morning saying, the runners this morning got a taste of the Boston Marathon. It's raining, it's cold, it's miserable. At least there was less wind. Yesterday was absolutely beautiful, right? So we kicked off the summit, beautiful sun, but then we had our fun run this morning. As a local, I do apologize for the weather. Normally, April's a great time. We want more tech coverage here in the area, more tech shows. We're in the center of a great tech hub here in the Boston seaport. So we've talked to a couple of Boston startups here at this show, and great ecosystem if you go there. So thank you for bringing your show here. Absolutely, happy to be here. All right, so last time we caught up was a year ago at the show. And I think it was, what, 213 working days or something? I think Molly said something like that there. So the good thing is in our industry, nothing's changing. We can talk about the same stuff as last year. Easily pays. No concern, let's just sit back and talk about our favorite pop culture references. But Chip, what's hot on your plate and what are you hearing from the users in the community? Sure, so this year the theme, our events team came up with a very fun pun which is running at scale. It means two things. One, the Boston Marathon was on Monday. But two, it really does represent the stories that we're getting from our users, right? The customers and the distributions, those that use the open source directly. So not only are we seeing a broadening of adoption across new organizations, but they're getting really deep into using it. We field a survey, a user survey. We just did our second run of it. In fact, we didn't have this data back in Santa Clara last year. So it's been less than a year since the 2017 one. And what we found was that there was a 21 point swing in those companies that were using Cloud Foundry with more than 50 developers, right? So 50 developers and higher. When you really talk to the interesting large scale, Fortune 500 companies, they're talking thousands of developers working on the platform, being productive. And that truly is kind of what this event is about for us. Yeah, you know, I grew up around the infrastructure stuff. And scale means a lot of things to a lot of people, but had a great discussion with Dr. Nick just before talking about how, if you were to build your kind of utopian environment, you look at some of the hyperscale companies, you know, the Facebooks and Googles the world. And the thing is they are at such a scale that if they don't have good automation and don't have really the distributed architectures that we're all talking about and things like that, there's no way that they could run their businesses. Yeah, and the reality is a lot of the businesses that aren't Google, aren't Facebook, they have to be able to think about that level of scale. To me, it really boils down to three basic principles. And to me, this is the best definition of what cloud native means. Whether you're talking about a platform, whether you're talking about how you design your applications, it's simple patterns, highly automated, which can be scaled with ease. And through that, you can do really amazing things with software, but it has to be easily scaled, it has to be easily managed, and you do that through the simplicity of the patterns that you apply. Yeah, and being simple is difficult. How much, you know, we have arguments in the industry, it's like, well, let's throw an abstraction layer in or do an overlay or an underlay, but really building kind of distributed systems is a little bit different. It is a little bit different. So one of the things that the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has is a rich history of iterating towards a better and better developer experience. At its heart, the Cloud Foundry ecosystem of distributions, and tools, and the different projects we have, they're all about helping a developer be a better developer in the context of their organization. So we've been iterating on that experience and just doing incremental constant improvement and change. And we're very proud of that productivity, right? That's really what drives these organizations to say, look, this is a platform that is operated very easily with small teams, right? I think you've spoken with a couple companies, and if you ever ask them how many operators do you have to handle thousands of engineers, tens of thousands of applications, they say, well, maybe 10. The T-Mobile example is 10 to 15 operators with 1700 developers. So that's good, it's funny, because I remember we used to talk about, like in the enterprise, how many servers can a single admin handle, and then if you go to the hyperscale ones, it was three orders of magnitude different. But in the hyperscale ones, they didn't really have server people, they had people that brought in servers and people that threw them in the woodchipper when they were done, and they didn't manage them. It was the old, you know, cattle versus pets analogy that we talked about on the other roof. So it's, you know, different, it's just totally different mindsets is how we think about this. I love, you know, for me, it was in the enterprise, you know, we harden the hardware, we think about this, and in the software world, it's, you know, no, no, I built it in the application layer because one of my favorite lines I use is, you know, hardware will eventually fail and software will eventually work, right? Absolutely, I think that's the difference between sort of application-centric thinking leads you to, necessarily, you have to have infrastructure to run it, right? My favorite, you know, favorite thing is this whole serverless term is absolutely ridiculous if anybody understands it, but there's a little bit behind it which is, in fact, I don't argue Cloud Foundry is fundamentally serverless because when you push code into it, you don't care what operating system's underneath it, right? All you care about is the fact that you've written some code in Java or in Node.js or, you know, in Ruby, you're handing it to a platform, it deals with all of the details of, you know, building a container image, scaling it, managing it, pulling in dependencies. You don't care what underlying operating systems are, and then that 10-person platform operations team in the Cloud Foundry world, they have the benefit of the upstream projects actually producing the operating system image that they can consume within hours of major vulnerabilities being announced. Yeah, and it's, I love actually, at this show you've got a containers and serverless track, and I'm an infrastructure guy by background and when we went to virtualization, we went a little bit up the stack, I don't think about servers, I'm trying to get closer to that application. What, you know, I'd love you to comment on is Cloud Foundry helps give some stability and control at that infrastructure level, but, you know, it's still involved with infrastructure from in my own data center or hosted data center, or I know what cloud I'm on. When I start going up to like serverless, it's, I'm a little bit higher up the stack and that's why they don't, they could live together and it's, you know, it's closer tied to the application than it is to the infrastructure, so maybe you could tease that out for us a little. Yeah, so I think one of the main things that we've heard from the user community, this is actually coming from users of a number of the different distributions, they're saying, look, there are roughly today, roughly two different modes that we care about cloud native application workloads and this might expand to include functions as a service, but predominantly there's two. There's the custom software that we write, which the Paz experience is grateful and then there's the ISV delivered software, which today, increasingly the medium of software delivery is becoming the container image, whether it's an OCI container or whether it's a Docker image, ISV ships software as container images and you need a great place to land that. So those two abstractions that Paz just hand the system your code or the container service just handed a container image, both of them work really well together and part of what we're trying to do as a community, a technical community is we're evolving those integrations so that we can work really well with the Kubernetes ecosystem. There are different options for how these things might be stacked depending on the vendor you're talking to. I think mostly that's immaterial to the customers. I think mostly the customers care about having those two experiences be unified from their developer or app owner perspective. Yeah, when you come to this show, there's more than just cloud foundry. There's a lot of other projects that are coming out of the space. Give us a little viewpoint as to how the foundation looks at this, what's the charter which it fits under Linux and the Linux foundation and there's so many different pieces and some kind of bleed into what the CNCF's doing and I'm just trying to help map out to have some of these pieces and it's this great toolbox that we've talked about in open source, I love the zip car guy got up and he's like, I use all the peripheral stuff and none of the core stuff and that's okay. Absolutely, that's the fun of open source. So there's a couple ways to look at this. So first, the open source communities collectively. There's a lot of innovation going on in this space, obviously, what the cloud foundry ecosystem generally does historically has done and will continue to do is that we are focused on the user needs first and foremost and what our technical project teams do is they look at what's available in the broader open source ecosystem. They adopt and integrate what makes sense where we have to build something ourselves simply because there isn't an equivalent or it's necessary for technical reasons. We'll build that software. But our architecture has changed many times. In fact, since 2015, right? It hasn't been that many years, as you said, we move slow in this industry. We've changed this architecture constantly, right? The upstream project's releasing at minimum of twice a month. That's a pretty high velocity and it's a big coordinated release. So we're going to continue to evolve the architecture to bring in new components. This is where CNCF relates. We've integrated Envoy, which is a CNCF project. We're now bringing in Kubernetes in a couple of different ways. We're working closely with Istio, which is not a CNCF project yet, but it looks like it might head that way. Service mesh capabilities. We were an early adopter of the container networking interface. Another Linux Foundation effort was the open container initiative, right? Seated from some code from Docker. Again, one of the earliest platforms to adopt that outside of Docker. So we really look at the entire spectrum of open source software as a rich market of componentry that can be brought together. And we bring it together so that all these great users that you're talking to can go along this journey. And think of it as almost a rationalization of the innovative chaos that's occurring, right? So we rationalize that. Our job is to rationalize. Our distributions use that rationalization and then all of the users get to take advantage of new things that come up. But also we take what gets integrated very seriously because it has to reach a point of maturity. T-Mobile again, running their whole business on Cloud Foundry. Comcast, running their whole business on Cloud Foundry. US Air Force, fundamentally running their air traffic control, right? How do they get fuel to the jets on Cloud Foundry? So we take that seriously. And so it's this combination of harvesting innovation from where we can harvest it, bring it all together, be very thoughtful about how we bring it together. And then the distributions get the advantage of saying, here's a stable core that's going to evolve and take us into the future. All right, Chip, I've loved the discussion with real customers doing digital transformation, what that means for them, how they're moving their business forward. Want to give you the final word? For those that couldn't come to the show, I know a lot of the stuff's online. There's a lot of information out there. Anything in particular you do want to call out or say, hey, this is cool, interesting, or exciting you that you'd want to point to. Yeah, I actually, there are a lot of things. But the one thing that I'll point to is, as a US citizen, I'm particularly proud of some of the work that's happening in the US government through 18F with cloud.gov as an example. But if I step back even further, Cloud Foundry is serving as a vehicle for collaboration across multiple nations right now. We're seeing Australia, we're seeing the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, South Korea. All of these national governments are trying to figure out how to change citizen engagement to follow the lead of the startups, which are the internet companies, at the same time that these large Fortune 500 companies are also trying to digitally transform. Governments are trying to do the same thing. So we're almost done the day here. But there was a full day track of governments talking about their use of the tech, talking about that same digital transformation journey. So to me, that's actually really inspiring to see that happen. All right, well, Chip Childers, he was a dancing stick figure in the keynote this morning. I was. Thank you so much for joining us once again and thank you to the foundation for helping us bring this program into our audience. We're happy to have you here. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.