 Live from Mountain View, California, it's The Cube at OpenStack Silicon Valley, brought to you by headline sponsor, Mirantis. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Silicon Valley at the OpenStack SV conference. This is where all the thought leaders are gathering to talk about the future of the open cloud. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm Joe Mike Co-host. Jeff Frick, who runs the Cube Silicon Valley operation, which is new this month to go out in Silicon Valley, hit the ground, get to the corners of the valley, all the corners and get all the stories. Cube Silicon Valley, look for all the events and videos. We're doing a lot more coming on. Our next guest, Jesse Proudman, founder and CTO, a blue box group, bluebox.net. Welcome to The Cube. Great to have you on. It was one, I got to know you through the crowd chat because you're a prolific tweeter and early adopter of the crowd chat engagement container. And you're doing a great job. Thank you. Thank you, I'm on fire this morning. He wants more money. Keeping us up on all the Q&A. Thanks for, so you're posting some photos up there. Give us a quick take of what's going on OpenStack right now. I love the Miranda slide, five things to do. You're like, yes, yes, yes, maybe. What's your take of what's going on at this event? What's the big story? Yeah, I mean, I think we've reached a point in maturity of the platform where it's no longer a discussion of do we have the right features or do the features work? But it's really now a discussion of where we headed with OpenStack. What does it mean? So Randy started off sort of the existential section with what's the vision of the project? I think he searched through the OpenStack Foundation's website. There's a defined mission, but he's true. There is a missing vision to define the broader spectrum of what OpenStack means over the next couple of years. And then, Morantis had a very interesting perspective on OpenStack as it relates to Docker or as it relates to DigitalOcean and how we continue to have relevancy in the marketplace. I think the quote was, does OpenStack become sort of the DIY deathbed or does it really hit mainstream adoption? And there are interesting challenges around ease of use, around developer excitedness around the platform itself. Questions that I think is really important as a community, do we ask each other? What's the big deal with DigitalOcean? That's been kicking around all the time. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think DigitalOcean is a great company. I have friends who work there. To me, it's just the modern cut on the same type of company that's existed for years, the line-oads of the world or the slices of the world. So the premise is to make VM deployment incredibly simple, and they've done that. And the original niche was, hey look, these are cheap SSD-backed servers. Now it's about simple developer adoption. If you look at Amazon or even OpenStack today to actually get VMs up and running and operating, it can be a lot of work. And the platforms have become so complicated that somebody that's trying to deploy just a simple WordPress application gets overwhelmed. And so a company like DigitalOcean came in with a very inexpensive, very performant platform that made deployment easy for developers and captured the hearts and minds of folks. Talk about what you guys are doing at this show here, your company, give a quick commercial on what you guys are doing and why you're here. Yeah, absolutely. So BlueBox creates a product called BlueBox Cloud which is a hosted private cloud powered by OpenStack. Each customer gets a single tenant OpenStack installation on dedicated bare metal. It's billed by the month or renounced month to month pricing today. And the customers can add capacity in physical chunks of 32 cores, 128 gigs of memory. So it's our perspective that OpenStack delivered as a distribution is fundamentally the wrong approach. I know we'll get in large disagreements with many of the vendors here since that's been the primary methodology to deploy OpenStack. But in our opinion, those who use OpenStack should not be worried about the actual operations of the platform. They should be focused on what they can do on top of the platform. And so we believe we can bring many of the benefits of private cloud, traditional on-premise private cloud which are control both of the environment and of cost, security and performance and couple those with the ease of use and the outsource operations of public cloud and the elasticity of public cloud. Jesse, talk about the born in the cloud DevOps revolution with the IT on born on the premise revolution, evolution I should say. I don't necessarily say revolution anymore but it's evolving. Hybrid cloud is the gateway to public cloud. So our product is perfect for hybrid cloud and I think that's where we'll see that sort of the transition from traditional IT workloads being operated on premise into truly cloud native development. So every enterprise today has millions of dollars invested in those on-premise infrastructures and they're not going to throw those away to lift and shift everything into cloud environments. It just doesn't make sense. But what they can do is use hosted private clouds or even public clouds in a hybrid capability putting them adjacent to the existing infrastructure and use that adjacency as a place to then build next generation applications that can tie back into the existing footprints that run on-premise today and they can allow their application developers internally the option of flexibility of beginning to architect new things utilizing cloud services. So the thing that Randy Bias brought up was interesting. He said product leadership is needed for OpenStack. Do you agree with that or disagree? Yeah, great question. After four years with a board that's done incredible work what I actually believe is it's time for some additional thought leadership on the board and additional members of the board to just shake up the way the organization is thinking. So I'll be running for a seat at the OpenStack Board Foundation election later this year. But I think he does raise a great point in that one of the challenges today is that we've got as a community a mission but what is that larger picture of OpenStack? What does it mean three or four years from now? And with all of the projects that have been added into the spectrum of OpenStack the lines become blurred and ultimately things get a little confusing and those projects don't interrupt well together. Things are a little bit of a challenge today in terms of where do the core services actually reside and how are they gonna interrupt together in the future. So I don't know if we designize the product management. I like that he's thinking creatively. I like that there are folks on the board who are putting some thought process into it. I think it's time to actually have those conversations. I believe needs to be more than just the technical committee deciding direction. Whether that's a dedicated set of individuals and whether that's elected or not I think is up for debate. I do like the idea of the foundation having some stake in the game there. They certainly have a budget and that budget can be used to hire additional folks as they've been doing. Excited to see where it goes. It's a great debate to be having. So talk about your role and your seat that you're going for. You mentioned you want to go for the board get some good commentary on Twitter. You have some fans out there who think you'd be a good fit. Why? I mean, what's the motivation? Is it just passion? You see some specific change. What platform are you running on to platform unintended? I guess what are your issues and what do you want people to know about why you want to be on the board? Yeah, great question. So again, I think there's an opportunity now four years in to bring new blood into the organization and particularly blood from companies who have operational experience. So if you look at most of the organizations today that have representation on the board they are companies that produced ship software and are packaging OpenStack as a distribution. We're coming at it completely differently. We're coming at it from the operator perspective which is similar to where Rackspace or HP came from in the early days. But that's our only product. And so that operator perspective it's actually come up a couple of times today. We need to hear the voice of the user. We need to hear the voice of the customer. I also believe we need to hear the voice of the operator because at the end of the day somebody has to run any OpenStack installation regardless whether it's on-premise, it's public or it's a hosted private cloud. And I think I can bring that perspective into the mix. And the challenges are only going to get harder, right? With your success. Because then more and more people are going to have more and more customers that are asking for more and more features. And I think Randy hit a really, really salient point if anyone's been out here for a while saying no is very, very hard. And as soon as you get customers that are paying you money that are trying to drive product direction where you draw those lines of what is the edge of the core and what is okay a custom extension or maybe it's a different product or different company have become harder to fight those battles because you're pulled naturally based on people paying you money to do things. But if it's going back into the core product or another project then the complexity is going to grow immensely with the actual success of the project. Yeah, it's a really great point. I think this is where the differentiation or the distinction between having a foundation as its own operating entity and then the individual companies who take the code that's produced by the foundation and actually package it and distribute it is really important. So the foundation has the ability to cut through the noise and have a buffer between those end user customers to really be able to decide what's meaningful to the foundation's mission and vision. And then each company then has the right to take those bits and add on what they believe the customers need and add their level of differentiation. I think it's unique to this type of project. It's unique to the open source software community the way we've got such a diverse vendor support today. And I think it helps alleviate some of that pressure inside of the foundation around FutureSend. It doesn't eliminate it. And I think we're certainly seeing some of the pain that that pressure causes, but that buffer is important. With the eucalyptus acquisition commentary from the Twitter fear crowd chat crowd is, is blue box next? Is that the solution for the incumbents? You know, I think we're going to see a wave of market consolidation over the next six to 12 months. I think it's just inevitable, particularly if you look at the timeline of many of the companies, Cloud Scaling and Piston, Nebula all funded three to four years ago. Cash is king and we'll see much like eucalyptus I anticipate we'll see some acquisition activity in the market there. Blue box has been around for 11 years. I founded the company in 2003. We grew up as a managed hosting company and we pivoted into the open stack private cloud space in October of 12. That's given us the luxury of having a cash flow and a revenue stream that can support the operations of the business. And so we're in a really unique position to be able to focus on delivering a single product to do that very, very well. We will have some additional news on our capitalization coming in the next couple of months, which I'll be very proud to announce. But we're in it for the long haul. Sounds like some funding coming. Could be some funding coming. We're in for the long haul. We believe again that this is the right way to distribute and consume open stack, that there aren't other companies effectively doing it this way today. And that as the market leader there, we'll have an interesting future ahead of us. And just one more clarification. So you're saying it's better to deliver it as a service. So you're basically delivering a distribution except you're wrapping a service around it as well. So as you said, I get the Amazon effect where I can basically dial it up, turn it on, and now I have the capacity. But unlike the Amazon, it's my private cloud. It just happens to be powered by open stack. Is that accurate? That's exactly right. We call it private cloud as a service. There's elasticity built into the offering so customers can add capacity on a month to month basis or remove it as they need. But instead of being built on a VM by VM basis, you're being built on that, that are relying cloud capacity. We'll have that fully automated by the time Paris comes around. So much like Amazon where I can go request an instance, I'll be able to go into a blue box cloud and programmatically request additional capacity on demand. So we're trying to bridge those two sets of economic, the two sets of benefits of public and private. And there's nobody else really approaching open stack like that today. And so there's a comment here. First of all, Rod Regio Flores is a great comment. He finds freshman of the conferences. It's, I can't explain it to senior management in an actual way. It's all bits and bobs lost in the weeds. Also, we have another comment from David Pollock that has a great quote here. Customer perception, Poland, big vendors equals full service. Smaller vendors equals do it yourself. So some interesting commentary from some senior people who know the space. I'll see Rod Regio entrepreneurs like actional senior level conversations about business, right? Business outcomes, not, you know, who's going to do the neutron API debate, whatever, Randy and things to focus on. And then obviously David's comment is interesting. The fun is your big company, you get full service and the little guys really are just niche players. That's a problem. Yeah, I think that is a problem, but I think again that that's a result of how OpenStack has been delivered and sold over the last four years. It's not, it was never, in my opinion, it's never meant to be delivered as a set of software because the operational burden that goes into an enterprise to actually operate that software far exceeds the operational burden of what they're traditionally used to, a VMware or a Microsoft installation. OpenStack was designed from day one to deliver cloud services, but cloud services should be managed externally. That operational burden should be put on another organization. And it is a set of bits and bobs and you need organizations that know how to put those pieces together in the right combination and deliver that as an operable entity. And it just doesn't exist in the distribution part of it. But it's funny, because I think the disagreements comes as you think it's cloud and your point of reference is AWS. So of course it's got to be easy and then they get the bits of bobs and implementing and installing OpenStack is not what I expected. It's almost, it sounds like you're really bridging that discongruity between what I perceive a cloud to be and the benefits of a cloud versus I want to do my own, so I'm going with this OpenStack option. Oh my gosh, this is not the dial it up and drop the credit card solution. Yeah, exactly. And I think if you look at the marketplace, we had OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus argument was, hey, we're easy to install, we're easy to operate, we've got Amazon compatibility. Well, they're now part of HP. You've got CloudStack with the leadership shake-up there over the last couple of weeks and some uncertain future on the long-term viability of software and then you've got OpenStack, which arguably is one of the marketing war. So now the challenge is how do you take OpenStack, which is much less of a product than either of the other two offerings and get people to understand the various ways of consumption and be able to actually use it. That's our key, right? Everybody, every vendor here at this conference wants more and more user adoption. So talk a little bit about hybrid cloud and the reality of customers, right? Because they've probably got some public cloud and there's still some benefits to being able to spin stuff up, spin stuff down and test dev, obviously, is the entree for a lot of that and there's some stuff you want to keep in house. You've got legacy stuff that's probably not going to swap over. Talk a little bit about how you're seeing customers manage that and the other one I always think is interesting is this direct connect, this concept of direct connect and having your private cloud be very close to your public cloud and I always like to ask is that across the state, across the city, across the street, across the wall, we're inside the same piece of sheet metal. How do you see that evolving in those lines maintaining from a purpose point of view but in terms of real execution and performance, how that's going to, it seems like it's just going to mash down? Yeah, I love the topic of hybrid cloud because I think it's the perfect use case for what we've built. In fact, I'm on a panel this afternoon talking about hybrid cloud here. So first challenge with hybrid cloud is actually defining what hybrid cloud is because everybody has a different definition. I tend to like the one that 451 puts forward which I will summarize as essentially eight in business utilizing two different types of infrastructure to operate the same workload. So that could mean- The same workload, two different. The same workload. So that could mean on premise and private, hosted private, that could mean on premise and public, that could mean public and another public. The point is that the workload needs to actually span the two types of infrastructure. Otherwise you're just talking multi-cloud or multiple types of infrastructure. So for example, we have a gaming customer in Seattle who has a data center installation inside of Equinix. They run all of their file servers, their database servers, their load balancers, all their egress IP out of that data center, yet they're cross connected in a blue box using a blue box cloud where they run all their application compute. So in that scenario, the workload spans both data centers. They're able to get elasticity out of that private cloud. They're able to integrate it with their on-prem existing infrastructure which they have no desire to lift and shift. They're able to manage cost which they were challenged to do in Amazon. And they've got a solution that really delivers everything that they want to do. So when you talk of that integration, I think ultimately it becomes a question of latency. How can you get private clouds adjacent to the existing workloads that enterprises are running today? So we have three data centers operating today, Seattle, Virginia, Zurich. Our goal is the ability to spin up, our vision is the ability to spin up a private cloud anywhere in the world in under an hour. So it's a very lofty vision. It's going to require a lot of partnership with other organizations to make that possible. But our belief is that if we execute well there and we can get latency from an interconnection perspective down to the three to five millisecond range, which kind of goes to your, where does it need to reside question? It basically means within the same metro that we can really solve that hybrid cloud challenge for organizations. We can lift the burden of the operations of that cloud away from the enterprise. And that we've really got a compelling argument. So each release that we do, each piece of news that we announce is a step forward in that vision. You get a good crowd commentary going on. Guys keep commenting. This is fantastic. Quotes from a year ago, should Opus Tech be an automobile or a faster horse? And then cloud opinion, anonymous handle, which sneaks in. But it's definitely not a bot that we want to keep him in there or her. And I tweeted about your comment. I quoted you saying, Opus Tech has won the marketing war. I think he's responding to that tweet and he writes, I think that is a problem. Dash, reality does not match marketing promise. And we will see a series of high profile failures and implementation, period. It's going to be a brutal, it's going to be brutal in 2015, comment. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fair assessment. I think, again, the challenge there is, what does OpenStack actually mean? You've got vendors distributing many different flavors or types or packages of OpenStack. And because it's one of that marketing war, there is an expectation that things work. I disagree that we'll see a brutal 2015. I think we'll see a fascinating 2015. But the reality is there really aren't alternatives. You've got, again, Eucalyptus, which is now part of OpenStack, or HP's OpenStack strategy. You've got CloudStack, which is uncertain or has an uncertain future. Where are people going to go? I think the reality is the community needs to get better at explaining what OpenStack isn't, what the core components actually are, how they're defined, how they're packaged and released. The board is working on those requirements. So I think everybody's aware of the challenges ahead of us and now it's really just a matter of working through each and every challenge step by step, one by one. So years ago I called out OpenStack and many did about being too much of a marketing hype, being a marketing program rather than being real. The truth came out, the community listened. They did focus on that. They got to give props to OpenStack. We've been documenting that from day one. Now we're in the second transition where the marketing actually helps crossover and cleans up the dysfunctional nature of the different offerings, all the woods behind one arrow, done. So check the box. So we are going to the next level. This is where I think the risk is and this is where I think you're pointing at the marketing flaw. There's not the marketing flaw, but the marketing and the comment from the cloud. Yes, now we're in a dangerous position of okay, we marketed our way to a position, now we have to deliver. So if that's the case, if we are going to the next level, what is those delivery highlights need to look like if we were going to run a highlight reel at the end of 2015? From a good scenario perspective, what would the highlight reel look like? Yes, I'll borrow a quote from the Docker conversation earlier this morning. One of the threads on Hacker News said, I like Docker because it just works. And I think that's one of the challenges we need to overcome with OpenStack. There is a perception, and a perception that's been really driven by presentations from companies like eBay who have 20 or 30 engineers working on OpenStack that it takes a massive footprint of engineering talent to get OpenStack up and running and operable. That perception is not necessarily matching reality if you look at various ways to actually consume and utilize OpenStack. And so the challenge here is getting organizations to recognize that there are installation methodologies that work if you're going to deploy OpenStack at hyperscale over hundreds or thousands of physical hypervisors. And there are installations and methodologies that work for organizations that don't need that type of scale. It's really about how do you pick the product that fits your use case? And that's where I think what the foundation has done with Marketplace is really compelling and beginning to consolidate and collect information across all the different consumption methodologies is key. Jesse, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your wealth of knowledge. Good luck in your seat. Let us know if you need some debates. We'll put that together. We'll get a couple people to see if they show up. If not, you win the debate. Congratulations. And I think it's really a testament to your leadership and success. Certainly a little bias on the whole point about the service, but I get that. You funded the company, it's self-funded. You have cash flow. You're in a good position. While others need to raise more money, if there's no revenues, it's going to be a challenge. So I think you're in a good spot vis-à-vis your competitors and we're going to talk with Chris Kemp and others here on theCUBE. We'll get their perspective on their prospects. So appreciate your time. This is theCUBE, getting it from the thought leaders, entrepreneurs and industry leaders here OpenStack's looking right back after this short break. Thanks.