 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Okay, welcome back everyone, live here in Los Angeles, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host, Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Our next guest is Ross Turk, Director of Evangelism at Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. So, evangelizing is now going to be super more important as Open Source Summit, formerly called the Linux Con, Linux Kernel. So Linux is really now the foundation. So now all these new products are emerging, hence the new name, Open Source Summit. You guys are in the middle of it. What's the themes that you guys are pumping out there right now? From an evangelistic standpoint, give me the order of operations in terms of priorities. Well gosh, we're trying to tell stories about how people operate infrastructure in today's modern world, right? Which is a lot about making sure that dealing with ephemeral infrastructure, dealing with containerized applications and that sort of thing, it gives a lot more flexibility to people who are doing modern operations. It's about applications that spill over across multiple machines and doing so in a way that doesn't require a lot of heavy lifting or wiring things up by hand. So there's this whole modern operations experience thing we talk about. But we also talk about a modern developer experience. What does it mean to build applications today? And of course, you combine those together. It turns into DevOps, right? But a lot of companies still work in these two separate worlds. But people are building technology differently than they ever did in the past and they're deploying it differently than they did in the past. So there's lots of stories that can come out of that. Let's start with the story that we love. Stu and I were talking about Serverless at the beginning because you have the DevOps movement certainly is going mainstream. You're seeing a lot of enterprises looking at that as viable. Now they're operationalizing it and they need to have that industrial strength. Red Hat, Linux. But now, Kubernetes and Serverless, the younger developers, they just want infrastructure as code. So that seems to be a very hot story here and Kubernetes Serverless is kind of in the hallway conversations. How do you guys bring that to bear? Well, I think that what Red Hat does is we give an operating environment that can sit underneath all of it with RHEL and everything else we build that is stable and secure and reliable. And you need that in order to have all of this chaos happening above it with developers deploying microservices and moving things around and, you know, demands changing and all these other things. You need to have something really stable and reliable underneath that. Something that you know can be, you know, if the applications and virtual machines and containers aren't long running, what sits underneath them is long running and it still needs to be stable and reliable. So a lot of the work we've been doing for the past 20 years around Linux engineering, I think, contributes to making this stable environment for a modern developer. Yeah, Ross, one of the challenges in scaling is usually, you know, I got to worry about things like storage. State is there. Data gravity is something we need to be concerned about. It's great to say ephemeral and I want everything anywhere and I can put it in this cloud or use it in that application, but at the end of the day, it's tough to build some of these pieces. How's Red Hat helping there as containerization and scale? How does that fit into the storage that's got you on? And it's a real struggle, right? Because you can talk to people and they say, oh, you know, every single one of our microservices is failover and they scale out and all this. And they talk about this really elaborate infrastructure. You're like, well, where's all your data being stored? Well, it's sitting in Oracle, you know? So you find this sort of like this dissonance between how data is managed and how applications are managed. At Red Hat, we believe that storage should be another microservice alongside all the other microservices make up an application. So that's why we put a lot of engineering effort into making things like Cep and Red Hat Gluster Storage work well alongside OpenShift so that a developer can provision storage as needed without having to go to an ops person and that when that storage gets provisioned, it's just, it's in containers alongside other containers that are providing the other things that your application needs. Software-defined storage was the answer. It's the holy grail. We've heard software-defined data center. We've been covering this at VMworld. We've heard all a lot about that. But that still is a key part of its software. And now you have hardware stacks. So IoT and cloud are opening up these new use cases for enterprises where, whoa, we actually kind of didn't test that hardware with that software. So it's kind of interesting dynamic. Software-defined is still super important. What's your view on software-defined storage in particular? Is that an answer? Is it stable? What's your thoughts? Well, I think it's an answer, but it depends on what the question is. Just to be kind of, what is software-defined storage? Let's start with that one. Well, so what is software-defined storage? Software-defined storage is, okay, so I'll say it in more like what it isn't. The traditional storage, traditional storage solutions get deployed as appliances, which are vertically integrated hardware and software solutions that are built to do one thing to do that one thing well. And that one thing is stored data. They're kind of like big refrigerator-sized things that you bring into your data center with a forklift and it's a big operation and then they provide storage for any number of applications. What software-defined storage does is it implements those same services and those same capabilities, but it does it entirely in software. So instead of being this vertically integrated software hardware solution, you end up with software that lets you build it on any hardware. And that hardware can be physical hardware, so you can build a storage cluster made up of a thousand bare metal servers or you could build that same cluster on a thousand VMs inside of a public cloud. So in making storage no longer a hardware problem like it used to be, I mean fundamentally it's a hardware problem. You get down bits of storage somewhere, but the management of storage is no longer a hardware concern. It's a software concern now and that means it's a little bit more flexible. You can containerize it. You can deploy it in the public cloud. You can deploy it in VMs. You can deploy it on bare metal. So that's what software-defined storage is doing is it's changing things around, but it requires different skills. Come on Ross, I want a storage-less environment. Can we get on that? A storage-less environment? Sure, I guess. Storage just becomes somebody else's problem at that point. Absolutely. How about, how's containers changing that whole discussion? It took us like a decade to kind of get storage working in a virtualized environment. Networking seems to be really tackling the container piece. Storage seems a little further behind. What are you seeing some of the big challenges there and how are we looking to solve that? When you look at containers and storage, there are really two things to consider. The first is, how do you make storage such that a containerized environment can consume it easily? This is what at Red Hat we call container ready. So while a storage solution container ready, when it means that your container platform knows how to consume it, most storage is container ready. All it takes is a Kubernetes volume driver to be container ready and that's one half of it. And that's really, really important. It's the same kind of thing we had to do with virtualization, making sure every hypervisor could talk to every storage system. Now we're making sure every container platform can talk to every storage system. That's important, but it's only half the puzzle. Because the other half is, now that you have storage as a software thing, a distributed software thing, you can actually deploy that storage inside the same containers that you're using, that are driving the demand for that storage. So it's this kind of weird, snake eating its own tail thing where you as a developer, let's say I'm deploying an application, I need a database, I need a web server, and a bunch of other things, and I need a scale out storage system. I can deploy that in containers just alongside everything else. And it uses the local storage of each of the container hosts to build that shared storage that then is used to provide services to other containerized applications. So it's the ability to have storage in containers, which is really strange. We call that container native storage. It's interesting, the market's going pretty crazy. So if you kind of take the DevOps and say, assume for a minute, infrastructure is programmable. But then you look at the developer action right now on the app side, you're seeing all kinds of new stuff. Apple has their announcement today with the new iPhone 8, we've been covering that on SiliconANGLE.com, Forbes has got great stories as well. New AR kit, so augmented reality is a huge deal, virtual reality obviously, still hyped up, but still promise. Those are going to require new chips. That's going to require consumer behavior change. So the developers are staring at a different market and worrying about provisioning storage. But these are now new pressures, new hardware, new opportunities. As a developer advocate and evangelist and an industry participant and user, how do you look at that? How does that impact in the developer market? Because Android's got good stuff coming down too, not just Apple, Samsung. It's all multimedia. What's interesting about AR kit is that if you go just back five years, that same capability required a very, very particular type of phone. The Project Tango stuff required all these depth cameras and connect style stuff to do the AR kit, and Apple was able to solve a lot of that in software just using two cameras and in software. And I think that's really- On a phone. On a phone, on a phone no less. And I think that's what's amazing about that is all the capabilities that we walk around within our pocket now were really hard to get a long time ago. This is interesting, your point. Let's stay on this for a second. This really illustrates the point. AR kit, for example, is proving that the iPhone now is smart enough with software, enough horsepower to do that kind of thing. But that's replicable across all devices now as an IoT device. So the internet of things is going to be a freight train coming down the tracks. Security, endpoint, security, whether it's all kinds of coolness, but yet threats are there. So software has to do all of this, right? So how's that going to impact the cloud game, your business, you guys, you have to move faster on hardening things, be more organic on the innovation side, not business-wise, but technical strategy. Well, I think a lot of it is enabling developers to work more quickly and build features more quickly. Also, educating developers on the security and privacy ramifications of the things that they build because it's really easy to just go out in front and advance and innovate and forget about all that stuff. So it's about changing developer culture so that you consider security and privacy first as opposed to later. And also, maybe you want to consider storage as well if you're talking about machine learning or IoT and all of these types of things you're gathering tons of data. This is video, software rendering, that's storage nightmare too. It's all got to live somewhere. And once you put it in that place where it lives, it's really hard to move it. So this is the thing you want to plan from the very beginning. And I think that's what's cool about AI too in self-driving cars. It's a consumer, flashy coolness that can say, hey, this is happening. I mean, how fast is it happening? But the developers now bring it to the business and saying, okay, we don't have an AR virtual reality strategy for our retail, for instance. You potentially could be out of business. So these are the kind of thoughts that are going on the C level that now are going into what used to be IT but all of IT, how do you handle this? This is an architectural question. So your thoughts on that because that seems to be a conversation we see a lot. Architectural, that's going to solve problems today, not foreclose future opportunities. Well, it's cultural too inside of a company. Like everywhere inside of a company, there used to be internet teams in companies, remember? It used to be like, oh, go talk to the internet team because something's wrong with the web or whatever. Now there's no internet team. Everybody's the internet team. Every single team in an organization is thinking about how to leverage the internet to make their job more effective. The same is going to be true for everything that we're talking about, you know? It's security, interestingly enough. So many people always thought security was somebody else's problem. But just this week we were reminded that it's everybody's problem, hundreds of millions of people's problem, security. So I think that as these things kind of advance. Security first and privacy first is critical. It is absolutely critical. And there used to be, I mean, I think at some point maybe there won't be a security team inside of a company because everybody's going to be the security team. Just like everybody's the internet team now. And I always felt the same way about open source communities. I thought there would never, there were always everybody. Well, people are rolling their own security now. You have these life lock or whatever they're calling these services for password protection because you can't trust even all these databases that are out there. You have blockchain with immutability. Certainly the wallets are not yet. But I mean, certainly this is where it might be a future scenario. I mean, yeah. And I think for all of these things, agility is going to be key. The ability to go down a path a certain distance and realize, whoa, I've run into a privacy problem, back up a little bit, continue down another path. I think that the faster we can make a development process, I think the less risky we make going into all these new frontiers. Yeah, Ross, one of the things we've really liked watching in the last kind of five years or so is storage turning into a discussion of data and how can we leverage that data? Real-time data, decisions at the edge, analytics. What's exciting you the most about the kind of the storage world these days? Oh boy. Well, you know, I just spent about five years in the storage infrastructure world. So a lot of what kind of kept me going day and night was saving people money, making things faster, making things easier, but also giving storage platforms that were elastic enough to handle all of this really interesting stuff that happens on top of them. So there's all kinds of new big data stacks that I find particularly interesting. A lot of the real-time analysis stuff like Apache Spark and things like that. There's so much going into visualization right now as well, how you handle large amounts of time series data and that sort of thing. It's been a lot of, there's been a lot of advancements in exactly that. Personally, I'm really excited lately in all the data-vis stuff. All the ways you can extract meaning from all this data. You know, the ways that you can make it, give it a business context that allows you to make better decisions with it. Not a lot of data conversations here at this conference. Obviously it's open source software, but I mean data, I mean I've said, I wrote a blog post in 2008, I always, Dave always jokes them because I always reference it, but I said data is a new development kit. Meaning data is going to be part of the software development model and it actually is with big data, but you're not hearing a lot of it here because most people are talking about their communities, their projects, but the role of data is fundamental at the edge. Absolutely. And so how is that going to change some of these conversations and if, can data be developed on? And is data now part of the software development lifecycle that's coming to fruition in the new way? Interesting, I think that's an interesting observation as we see sort of like Dev and Ops coming together, right, the world of the operator and the world of the developer coming together, I think we'll probably at some point see the world of the developer come together with the world of the data scientist because as I kind of rack my brain, I'm thinking what type of future developer wouldn't have to be dealing with large amounts of data, wouldn't have to have that kind of skill to be able to deal with it. So I think we're going to start to see more software developers getting more involved in big data machine learning, data analytics and things like that. So either way, the open source growth that's coming is going to be exponential, data's already there. I mean, we had a joke in our office, software's eating the world, as Mark Andreessen would say years ago, but data's eating software. So in terms of, in terms of how you look at it, who someone's eating somebody, but this becomes interesting for the IoT developer or the industrial developer. Those systems were never connected to IT in the past. It was like they ran their own stuff and their own terminals. And there's this idea that everybody's heard that data has gravity, right? And I actually was talking to somebody about this and they said, well, actually the data has inertia. And I'm like, nah, that's not really it because once it's moving, it doesn't, you can't, it's not hard to stop it. But the idea that data has gravity means that, let's say I'm putting together this new IoT application or whatever, I'm gathering data from a bunch of sensors or whatever. And I've got the data in that place. Now, having all that data in that place is more meaningful to me than most of the software that I wrote. Do you know, it's like, that is the value, the kernel of the data is there. And data having gravity means that it's hard to move once it's in a certain place, but it also means that it attracts workloads to IT, right? So it used to be that software was king and software created data and managed data and now data is king and it brings software to IT, I think. I totally agree with you. I think they might even call this the open data summit soon when it's beyond open source. Now, this is going to be great. I think we're canned in hand. Software and data are going to be great. Stu, what's your thoughts on the role that data is not being talked much here? Yeah, well, John, Amazon reinvented last year when we talked to Andy Jassy. It was the customers were the flywheel and I think data is going to be that next flywheel. We're really feeding into that data gravity discussion that you were having Ross. You know, we talked when Hadoop came out, it was like, oh, we're going to bring the code to the data. Well, we know if I'm going to have more data, I'm going to have my data sources, I'm going to have third party data sources that I want to be able to work and interact with those. So, you know, data, absolutely huge opportunities there and the companies that can leverage that and get more value out of it, it's going to be able to make it more competitive. I see it's a competitive advantage, no doubt, but it's the privacy issue. So the big debate that we know in our media businesses, look at Facebook, I get a free app, I get to UC, all my friends' photos, their vacations, everyone's living a great life on Facebook, but then all of a sudden I give my data away for free for that privilege to use that app, but all of a sudden they start injecting fake news at me. I didn't, I don't want that anymore and you're still making money off my data. So that's interesting. Facebook makes money off my data. Yeah, that's my contract with them. Yeah, if you ask what their asset is, one person might think it's traffic, you know, or eyeballs, but I think it's data. So they're using data, I might not like it, so that might be an opportunity for somebody else to your points do. So, if you start thinking about it differently, data decisions are going to be an architectural challenge. Yeah, absolutely. I think enterprise architects are thinking, even today you're seeing enterprise architects thinking more and more and more about data than they have in the past. Ross, what do you think about the show, final word in the segment, what's going on, OpenStore Summit, share with the folks that are watching, vibe here, it's now a new name, but still the same game, multiple events come together. Yeah, multiple events together. I like OpenStore Summit as a name. I think it's a good name. It's properly named for what's going on here. It's been an interesting experience for me because I've been in this community for a really long time. So I come here and I run into all kinds of old friends. The hallway tracks, always a good track for me. The content is fantastic, but the hallway track is always really good. And I just, I can't think of anywhere else where you can go and get this selection of people, right? You have people who are working on all layers of the problem and they can all come together and talk. So, I don't know. It's really a cross-fertilization, cross-pollination, whatever you want, word you want to use. I find, I think this event's going to be in the 30,000 pretty quickly. I mean, this is going to be, well, if you look at the growth and the numbers, you know, presented on stage, Jim Zemlin was pointing out the growth by 2026, 400 million libraries. And people still think that's underestimated. Yeah. So that's a lot of growth. I think it could get there. Well, and I think that, I think these folks organize great shows. So I look forward to seeing them scale up to 30,000. Ross, thanks for your commentary. Appreciate the perspective and insight here on theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. This is theCUBE live coverage from open source Summit North America. I'm John Horst. Do many, many back with more after this short break.