 The only way to prepare for change is to use a platform, a framework that can adapt to that change. And that's exactly what containers do. They give you a unit to incorporate change on your own terms. As exciting as containers are now, it's only getting started. The model is changing, the architecture is changing, the impact on the business is changing. Containers and Docker are part of this change, but it's a much, much bigger change than any one company. Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2016. Brought to you by Docker. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Seattle, Washington for Docker. I remember when I had such a fantastic batting practice. With theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Brian Grachly, analyst in the cloud, business with theCUBE and Wikibon. Our next guest is Rob Herschfeld, who is the CEO and co-founder of REC and Industry Influencer. It's been around the block. We've seen the early days of Clouderati. Rob, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. So, let's go back and do a little compare and contrast. Go back seven years, theCUBE was started. Eight years, Clouderati was formed. We were all kind of kicking the tires. In those early days, DevOps was kicking ass, concept-wise. Now, today, we're mainstream with DevOps and the world's changed. Your thoughts on kind of where we've come from and where we are today and how your new venture fits into it. Wow. We've come quite a ways as far as automation and understanding that, right? I mean, back then, the idea that Amazon would offer you an API with very minimal user interface at all was considered a no-show, right? There was a joke. And no SLAs and things like that. And in a lot of ways, that offering is what created this DevOps concept of automate everything and go back to it. It's funny to me. I actually have training as an industrial engineer. And so, a lot of the DevOps work is really lean software. And the quiet thing behind this is you look at it and it's really about inventory. And so, all this DevOps stuff is really just said, we're going to ship software faster. We're going to do quality and make it happen. And people forget when they talk about DevOps. We're going to apply it to software. It's a supply chain. It's a supply chain question. And it's happened in spades, right? Amazon has become this engine of reducing software inventory and debt. Well, the thing about that is interesting. I want to get your thoughts on this because we were talking before we went on about ops changing. And what Amazon did, you know, there was no real brilliance. It was really, they were bootstrapped organization. Andy Jassy publicly talks about this. The creativity came from those assemblers or those manufacturers of software. It was the ecosystem and the DevOps guys who created, who were creative with the solutions. So that really speaks to the ecosystem. Today, the ecosystem is flourishing with opportunity. It has. Although it's, in some ways, it's being pulled apart like Taffy. And in some cases, I think we've regressed operationally in the last year or two, as people really struggle on that get out of the box experience. Got to be up. We were just having a conversation with Lexus. And it was like, got to be up in five minutes. Got to be in this rush to the easy button. It's sometimes making it harder for us to talk about the real ops, which is sustaining operations and day two operations. So the developers want five second, five minute installs. But the ops guys have to basically ensure security, the five nines. So there's a lot of under the hood to the engine of that infrastructure. So the ops team has to come back and keep the bus running. It's not just the zero to five. How fast do you get to 60? But how do you sustain 60? It doesn't help you if the wheels burn off after you've gotten across that first finish line. And the other thing that's happened in the last year is this hybridization of the infrastructure. As we get real competitors for Amazon, as people are trying to be on their own premises and then also on Amazon and other clouds and then move off of Amazon as they see other options, it's created this hybrid infrastructure that from an ops perspective is just a very challenging landscape. Yeah, let's touch on that a little bit. This morning during the keynote, Ben sort of said, well, you know, most of you probably aren't Greenfield. You've got a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But you know what? Just dockerize all of it. Like, let's talk about that. Did my role come through on that? I can roll my eyes. What about the reality of that? And let's talk about where Racken fits in the reality side of that world. So Racken is a hybrid infrastructure automation company, right? We specialize in being able to take workloads and make them not care about where they run. So physical infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, different clouds. We really took a composable approach. So we looked at this big problem and instead of building a single channel through it, we say, look, we're going to break into a lot of little pieces and then coordinate the pieces. Racken does through an open source project called Digital Rebar that my team founded based on a prototype we built back in the early OpenStack days called CROVAR. So it's sort of our shared history as a team. So you're trying to bring some reality to, you've got VMs, you've got bare metal, like databases that you may not want to move. You may not be able to move for various reasons. You may want to put part of that on Amazon. I mean, that's a lot of complicated plumbing. I mean, that's what you guys are trying to solve for. So stuffing everything into a round shaped, round hole is not the right answer for an ops perspective, right? And it doesn't help. We had this problem with OpenStack in the early days. Moving everything to OpenStack actually slowed down adoption. And for Docker and containers, move the things that are easy. Do that fast, get value, but moving a database, an Oracle database into containers just because you're trying to be all containers is very little value for that, right? It's going to create a lot of churn and pain. And so from that perspective, take the low hanging fruit when you go, but that means you're going to be hybrid. And there's another hybrid side to this, which is the pace of innovation means that any choice you make today, I've been calling this hybrid madness after March Madness. We were saying that yesterday, cube madness. It's insane. So you've got this crazy thing. It's like, well, I picked this stack of technologies and Docker just came out with a new release and parts of it I'm going to switch. That happens every six weeks. Well, let's talk about that cube. I mean, the cube madness, Docker madness. Because it is a lot like the Final Four brackets. Some people are going to make it, some aren't. There is a little taffy pulling in the ecosystem. Where is the signal from the noise? Because, you know, the customer complaints that I heard from about this show was, how do I make sense of what's going on? Where does this fit that to Kubernetes, these guys over here? So there's kind of like a lot of noise. There is a lot of noise. I don't think the noise is going away. So I've sort of resigned myself to the idea that we're not going to have a winner. A lot of people want, who's going to win? I don't think we're going to have a winner. I think we're going to continue to see Kubernetes, Mesa, Docker, Rancher. New players emerge who do similar things. Have value propositions that attract customers to different pieces. So I'm not expecting us to sort of, you know, one to die out. And they have different use cases and different pieces where it's important. That said, I think that there's a lot of different moving parts with this, and we'll see a lot of churn with it. Let's get back to hybrid. Customers will have a hybrid environment. Most large enterprises all have hybrid. Hybrid is an engineering outcome of on-premise or private and public and that integration point. That's going to come a ton. But as you talk to customers, you know, lots of talk about build new apps, build new cloud native apps. How much of that do you see and how much do you see people sort of modifying what they have to make it a little more streamlined, a little more modern? That's a great question. It's a mix. People are picking out things that they can move and moving those things. I think the next generation of hybrid apps is not coming, you know, it's going to really pure Docker apps. It's coming slowly. So we actually took our stuff as applications and we had to learn from it. You wrote up a great post. How long did that take? Just so people have some sense of they're thinking about their application, they're going to dockerize it like Ben said this morning. How long did it take you guys to do that? Six months, I think. We started earlier by using console so we had service registry already in. We had basic, we could start the app but not shut it down type of things. We kept the wheels on the bus a lot but it was a six month migration where we just kept finding stuff and we're still only now so I feel like it took six months to sort of turn the corner and now we plug things in. It's like wow, that was easy. This is great. So we just added reverse proxy into our infrastructure so we can start actually exposing web interfaces for other services. So we keep sort of digging deeper into that well of capability. Rob, take a minute to explain to the folks what your company is doing, what you're talking about, some of the updates and value proposition. So what we do is we have an orchestration system that coordinates operational tasks. Sounds like scary. Basically what we do is we can take a complex application and then still stitch the pieces together like LEGO blocks. So effectively what we're doing is we're creating modules that we can stitch together very dynamically to run customers' applications and infrastructure. And the problem that you solved is it's very hard to, it's a hybrid problem. So the problem that we see customers have is that every environment has a lot of moving parts, a lot of different vendors, a lot of different choices. And so we help them not care about oh, I bought Dell, I bought HP, I bought Super Micro, I bought Amazon and Google. What we're doing is we're making that infrastructure layer abstract basically so they can deal with that without it becoming exactly right. And so that becomes the real challenge for our customers because they can't pick a winner. This is right back to the Docker Madness, Cube Madness. It's, if I can't pick the winner, I'm spinning. And we watch this a lot. We watch it a lot in OpenStack. We would get, you know, we'd sell somebody Essex and they say, hey, Folsom's out, I'm not going to install Essex. And what we do is by creating this ability to deal with all this change in hybridization is not just cross, but also time. Right? Oh, OpenStack came out. How do I upgrade it? That's a hard problem. If you can't solve that, then customers just spin and spin and spin. And that in this environment is deadly. You have to move. What's the new model for, we talked to Alexis before about what the new software company might look like. You've got part of, is you as an open source, part of you as a commercial, part of it is services. What's the engagement these days? When does a customer go, I know enough, because I got it from open source to, I want to engage you to, let's have an ongoing, what does that look like? Because you've been at Dell, you've run your own companies before. How's that changing? Wow. So open source is definitely a requirement. People want to be able to download, try and touch. And I think that I've become convinced that SaaS is also a requirement for these, from a monetization perspective for open source. And so I think things have really changed in that the first experience people have out of the boxes, they want to do it. I've been in a lot of calls lately where I will show off what we're doing. They'll be, that's really exciting. Let's set up a call. We can walk you through an install. And they're like, no, no, no. I'm going to install it. I need that experience first. They have to feel like they can understand it before they sell it. So the idea that people aren't going to understand how things work under the covers is dead. They have to be able to see inside the box. Rob, final question for you. Two parts, rather than doing a final, final question. Explain the vibe of the show this year. What's the main theme of the show? And two, how do you see the ecosystem evolving in the Docker ecosystem? The Docker specifically or container ecosystem? Both. Both. Okay. So three questions. A and B, two A and two B. So the show, the shows, and there's a reason why I love to make that distinction. So the show has a great vibe. The energy and the people, it's really a user show. People are talking about using the technology. And so I think that that's a really important thing. I've been to a couple of Docker cons and we've shifted from sort of community contributions into I'm just using the stuff, just get out of my way. I think that's a really important vibe. I think the ecosystem is much more challenging. Docker is not sending signals of their signal they send is, wow, we're including all these pieces in and there's container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. I'm really involved in Kubernetes where it's much more, oh we want to have a whole bunch of pieces and let you stitch together and we have a whole bunch of partners in this ecosystem as opposed to I am providing you with a full stack and I'm going to incorporate this. Docker feels a little bit more like a VMware play from a go to market. Companies want to come and buy a stack from us. Wasn't a bad play for VMware at the time. It was an incredibly strong play for VMware but they didn't have an open source core. They had an asset that they were very good at defending until open source came along and said, wow, we're not going to use your technology and then it's been taking some time to unwind it. You know I think there's a really big market. I think Docker is realizing that people want to learn how to do this application. We've got at least five years while people listen to multiple parties on this transition. And finally the ecosystem on container side just more about open. Oh, it's exploding. And I think that if you look at the things that are coming up in answers to Docker owning Docker, you're seeing some really interesting foundations. You're seeing RunSea. You're seeing capabilities come up where containers are really a big deal. And if you listen carefully, most of the market has shifted from talking about Docker to talking about containers. And so that becomes a really exciting piece of all this. Rob, thanks for spending the time on the Cube. We really appreciate the insights. Rob here, her shell from the REC and CEO co-founder. This is the Cube. We are bringing all the container action. We're containing all the content sharing it out openly to you. This is the Cube here in Seattle Live. I'm John Furrier with Brian Gracie. We'll be right back.