 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2015. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage, downtown Boston Heights Convention Center for Red Hat Summit 2015. So I did a pickup conversation actually, had a few weeks back at the Open Stack Summit in Vancouver. Mike Cohen's coming back to the program. You're with the director of product management at Cisco. Mike, thanks for joining us again. No problem. And Shashi Kiran, who had been on the program a couple of years ago, but it's been a while since we've caught up with you. Shashi, you're director of marketing in the cloud networking group at Cisco. Thanks for joining us. Good to be back, Stu. All right, so guys, you know, Red Hat Summit, talking about open source, talking about things like, you know, OpenStack, OpenShift, Paz and everything like that. Tell you, you know, maybe Shashi start, you know, what brings Cisco here and, you know, why is the Red Hat relationship so important? Cisco and Red Hat have been spending a lot of cycles on collaborations. We share a lot of common goals. Open source, which is a theme of this conference, is very near and dear to both of our hearts. We've been collaborating with Red Hat on the compute side with UCS, integrated infrastructure, UCSO, on the ACI front with network and then obviously with InterCloud. So several areas of synergy where both companies are allowing their trust and we're obviously both passionate about OpenStack. So a lot of common ground for us to collaborate on. Yes, Shashi, maybe you could just, you know, unpack for us a little bit. You know, there were some, if you say, you know, open source is near and dear to Cisco's heart. They say, well, you know, I mean, Cisco, you know, I go back in networking for a couple of decades now. You know, Cisco has helped driven standards throughout their, Cisco is the leader in this space. And obviously Cisco has been involved in a lot of open source, especially more the last few years. You know, can you walk us through, you know, you've been at Cisco for a few years now. You know, has there been a shift in Cisco's thinking is open source has been kind of in the background that we didn't know. You know, how does open source fit into the Cisco discussion? Yeah, so if you look at some of the people with Cisco who have been actually part of the open source movement, there's just been a tremendous amount of engagement over the last several years, both in terms of the open source contributions that we make from a code perspective, the amount of code that we review, absorb into our own product lines, many of which are based obviously on Linux. And then the way that we've been engaged with different communities as well, whether it's open daylight or open stack. And obviously you talked about the standards bodies as well. So Cisco's always been engaged, but I guess in some ways it's the whole network landscape that's becoming much more open. And that's probably put Cisco in the limelight. And we're also seeing a shift in terms of how people consume open source in the mainstream today. The DevOps model, for example, has put a spotlight in terms of the accelerated time to deployment. Again, you know, open source is a key mover there. So I feel it's a combination of different things that have sort of cost Cisco also to shift its posture. We're still aggressively involved in standards, but obviously open source and our contribution there is increasing. We will be again, very active in communities and then ecosystems. So that's another part where it isn't just Cisco, but we're bringing a number of partners on board and we're again, aligning with several partners in the industry. So the whole open movement has become bigger and better in many ways. In fact, actually Cisco is one of the founding members in OpenStack of the project called Quantum. So the networking layer for OpenStack actually came out of work where Cisco was a critical founding member of it and that's grown into Neutron and become a critical layer where everyone plugs in. But actually Cisco is one of the largest contributors and was one of the founders of that piece. So we've been with OpenStack from the beginning and it's actually been a critical part to contribute code there. We've also found that it's just also, it is what our customers are using. So as we're selling UCS, we're selling our ACI solutions, customers are asking us to work with open source technology and working with open source means contributing and being part of the community. Yeah, that's great stuff, Mike. You and I even bumped into each other earlier this week at DockerCon, maybe you know, Cisco at DockerCon, that obviously a major open source technology there. Could you give us a taste of what was going on there from a Cisco standpoint? Sure, so Cisco, we're really excited by the movements going on with containers and I think that opens up an entirely new landscape through which people are thinking about applications and how they're thinking about managing applications and that places a whole new set of taxes on the network and a lot of areas where we can deliver a lot of value. You know, I think one of the things we saw with Docker was, you know, there has to be a maturation of the networking stack in the container landscape. You know, what was developed so far is very immature. It doesn't tie into the networks people run today and you know, I think the Docker community is doing a great job in building plug-in frameworks. We've been part of that movement, you know, Cisco became part of the open container project that was announced. So we're making a lot of investment in there as well, basically to enable, you know, our customers to take advantage of this new technology that's coming out. Yeah, by the way, congratulations for being part of OCP. My understanding was from, you know, when the first call went out to partners to, you know, when we launched the event, it was like less than three weeks. So, you know, there were some that would say, you know, wait, Cisco can move fast enough to actually agree to this and move out. I mean, you know, I used to be part of some of those standards committees where, you know, three weeks, you know, we could agree where we, you know, what options we were going to have for the, you know, after show dinner or something like that. But, you know, so, so congrats on that. And, you know, the plug-ins are pretty exciting too. Yeah, I know, absolutely. I think the plug-in framework, so we, again, have been involved with the, you know, the Docker team and the Stock and Plain team has been developing some of this technology and we're already building some open source contributions in that domain. Particularly, you know, it's one of the means of tying back to our solutions around ACI. So a lot of the inspiration around ACI was enabling application-centric policies that can actually align the network with the application and make it easier and faster to deploy. And this is tying directly into the work going on with microservices and Docker today because that is now the way people are thinking about building and shipping applications. And our ACI solution is really purpose-built to enable that. Yeah, so, I'll throw this out to both of you. I tell you, one of the interesting discussion I had was talking a lot of the networking folks at DockerCon is they said, you know, Docker networking, well, it's only experimental at this point. It allows multi-host networking. It has micro-segmentation. I mean, you know, the SDN discussion feels like it hasn't progressed really far over the last kind of three, four years. And that maybe, you know, this activity around containerization will supercharge that. But what's your thoughts and responses around that? I think containers and the whole movement with Docker is certainly going to interest a lot of people. We see a tremendous amount of coalition that's coming in there, a huge amount to learn what containers, about how they can leverage it. It'll definitely be a prime mover. Having said that, I do believe there's been good progress overall across the industry in terms of the SDN movement. It still depends on what somebody's interpretation of SDN is, but- And that's some of the challenges, right? And that's some of the challenges as well. The thing that didn't get defined with SDN was the definition in some ways. But we've actually had a really good attraction with customers and we've taken this approach of not just going behind what the definition is, but what is it that customers want to do when they say I want to go down the path of SDN. So whether it's, you know, direct network programmability, whether it's taking a controller approach or whether it's this integrated approach across physical and virtual that ACI brings in, it really doesn't matter which path they go down. It's getting to agility, it's getting to automation, it's getting to programmability, using policy as a means. So these are all the different, you know, mechanics of SDN. And today, fortunately, we're in a position to make all of these come to life. And we have customers that are embracing each one of these different paths and getting to SDN, which is more of a destination in terms of the network agility automation. So I would say that it's still a journey, but if I were to look back two to three years ago to where we are now, there's been a significant amount of progress, which as an industry, we should not undermine. Yeah, fair enough. So one of the main things we look at is the goal of infrastructure is to help us with our applications. And the discussion we talked about in this space is I want to get agile, I want to go faster, I want to be able to build these more modern applications. Actually, one of the things I loved when you guys rolled out your solution, I mean, application-centric infrastructure. I mean, we need to put the application back in the center of it. Too often in networking, it's like, it's networking for networking sakes and we're going to fix networking problems. And my BGP and my IPv6 and, you know, all of my networking protocols are there. You know, can you maybe give some examples of how ACI helps customers become more agile, helps them with kind of that movement towards being kind of more modern, you know, use IoT, edge devices, you know, how does that fit into the whole picture? Yeah, so I'll start off and Mike can add to it. So ACI is one of the best tools that you have in the toolkit to take customers down the path of SDN. And today if you look at the whole DevOps movement, that's sort of cropping up, but also in mainstream enterprises, which aren't going down DevOps who just want to make sure that their network's a lot more efficient. Today, if the vision is one of going down and embracing digitization, and that's causing a fair amount of disruption, right? So you have these new business models that are creeping up and eventually it's the IT that has to really be responsive to those needs. And then there are these lines of businesses, the shadow IT organization, if you will, that are sort of cropping up to bypass traditional IT models. So that's where the spotlight has been on IT and networks in particular over the last several years to see how can we be fast enough? How can we be responsive? And that's where I think ACI really looks at it from an application point of view, because it is about looking at how quickly you can deploy applications, but also how can you troubleshoot it? It's the whole life cycle, day zero, day one, day two. And it looks at it from the vantage point of the application architect, but also in terms of how you can collaborate with a different team. So how can the network step up where there isn't necessarily a black hole between the network and the applications as it was existing before, and you are in a position to accelerate all aspects of day zero, day one, and day two. So where customers have really given a two thumbs up to this whole ACI architecture is number one, from a whole network perspective, it brings that physical, the virtual elements in, and gives them the ability to treat it holistically, scale to millions of endpoints, and the second aspect is in the troubleshooting pieces. If there's something that goes wrong, it's easy to correlate where it goes wrong, and there's a huge amount of openness that's built into the architecture. One of the challenges that we see is in terms of silos between the different teams, the ACI policy model gives them this opportunity to really collapse the silos, collaborate more, and speed up things, and then you get into aspects of security scale. Again, it's a holistic approach which you can sort of build on and map to the application architectures that you have today. So the critical part I want to highlight that I think resonates best with the application developers is that we need to make things simpler. Networking is hard, and it's a special skill set, and it's not something that people that build applications really think about. So one of the best innovations we had with ACI was we actually separated out what the application requires from how the networking works. So now it's easier to describe what you need if you're an application developer and have a network that can adapt to that, and a network that's still friendly to a network administrator. It can give them the telemetry, the visibility, the stuff they need to do their job. That was the innovation we had with ACI, and it's exciting to see those models start coming up in containers, coming up in OpenStack, and taking shape in these open source communities. Yeah, that's the great points there. Mike, I'm curious, talking about what you're doing with application developers, here at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat looks at themselves as not necessarily the ones that bring everybody along. They're the catalysts for the community, and they talk about things like co-creation. At OpenStack, Mike, they give out jackets. We are OpenStack. At DockerCon, it's how many people are all contributing code. How does Cisco look at co-creation with its customers? I mean, I know the traditional product management, you pull in those people, but are you having more of that discussion as to how customers are part of that? Do you pull them into the open source engagement when products are building? I'm wondering if you can comment on that. Sure, absolutely. We have teams dedicated to upstream open source development. OpenStack is a great example. We have an entire team focused on building, contributing to the community, working in Neutron, one of the biggest contributors to the Neutron project. We've started a number of other OpenStack projects ourselves. So I'm sorry, the nuance I'm asking for, do you help pull customers in? Or I'm saying how do you pull in your customers in the community? So we certainly do that as well. I think it's been a lot of examples. One of the more public ones has been with Comcast. We've actually been working really closely with Comcast where they've been writing code, we've been writing code all around solving their use case and helping them go to market with an OpenStack solution. Yeah, no, that's exactly what I was looking for. If the customers will buy in more when they've helped solve their specific problems. So talk to me whichever one of you makes sense. What do you guys have going on the show? What should people be checking out? And how can people participate? Yeah, so there's a lot that's going on in here. But one of the things I want to double click on is what Mike mentioned in terms of the abstraction that we've been able to bring about. And I think that's a game changer for the industry and for the data center operators or cloud operators as the case may be. And one of the things that we are passionate about and it's getting contributed in the open source community is this notion of group-based policy. So I think maybe you should talk a couple of things about group-based policy. That's on the show floor as well that we are talking about. For example, certainly one of the things we're highlighting here that group-based policy is a project we created in OpenStack. It's one of the ways we're bringing the separation of application policies from networking policies and making that available as an open source project in OpenStack. And we also have similar projects going on with Open Daylight and we're working with the Docker community as well around some of these concepts. So we're trying to bring those models into open source and make them generic frameworks that help people think about applications. So if you want to see some of that work also tied at ACI, we have that in our booth over in the show floor. Okay, and which project is that in OpenStack? That's a project called group-based policy. Okay, that's just the name of it. Usually it's something like heat or trove or one word thing, but it's the base policy. So the name of it, those names don't always change. I've gotten feedback that we should call it all kinds of wacky things. So maybe we'll do that one day too. Use the open source community. Ask the community what we should name it. I'm sure they will come back with something. Oh, we already have a list. There's already an etherpad where people have put in all kinds of funny names. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm curious just personally, think about how you guys communicate and interact, product management and marketing and the like. Cisco's been involved in a lot of the kind of internal social networks and pushing these out. How do you see kind of the internal work versus the more open innovation? That changed in kind of your time at Cisco? There is a balance that is required across both. So if you look back at the way standards were, in many cases, people thought that standards was the lowest common denominator that different vendors in an industry could agree upon. And maybe that wasn't the most innovative approach, but it was the most agreed upon approach. So we've always tried to make a, maintain a healthy balance between innovating for a customer's needs and then also making sure that there is a standardization activity that we're contributing to, leading or participating in. And I guess it's the same with open source as well. There will be elements of open source that we're actively participating in, contributing to, but there will also be innovations that we go ahead and do that requires the time to market, which is what customers want. So there is this healthy dichotomy, if you will, both internally within Cisco. Our CTOs are very passionate about open source, but they're also pragmatic in terms of what certain customers want as well. And I think product management gets into the act of prioritization where we belong to the community on one hand, but also make sure that we're innovating as a leader in the industry. Yeah, absolutely. So we do both inbound open source where we'll actually leverage things that have already been built by the community rather than rebuilding them ourselves so our customers have an open solution. They can leverage all the advantages of what's going on in the community inside our products. And then we also do outbound open source where we're directly contributing and making sure everything is upstream. And DevNet organization within Cisco is really taken off. Two weeks ago, we were at Cisco Live where we actually had these DevNet hackathons. A lot of it really encouraging young developers and somebody who's getting into this, and that's packed. It's a shift. We've just begun this over the last couple of years and it's one of the things that gets booked earlier than anything else. So there's definitely a shift that's very apparent today. Yeah, absolutely. They've got the DevNation sub-conference here at the show. Lots of people getting involved in that. All right, well Shashi and Mike really appreciate you taking time coming out here, sharing how open source, the communities, your partnership with the Red Hat are impacting what's happening in Cisco. We'll be right back with lots more content here from Red Hat Summit. Thanks for watching. Thank you.