 From Seattle, Washington, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE on the ground at OpenStack Day Seattle 2015. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE on the ground here in Seattle. We are here for the LinuxCon, which happened yesterday, but here, OpenStack Innovation Day. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Our next guest is Shiram, at Cloud Don on Twitter. Thought leader, influencer in the OpenStack community. Great to see you again. Thanks, John. Great to see you again. It's nice to have you back. I really appreciate our foray to the Pacific Northwest with theCUBE. It's not live, but it's on the ground, which we love doing, and captioning the thought leaders. I gotta ask you, OpenStack's having an innovation day here at the Washington Athletic Club. Great participation. This is not just a meetup. It's a mini event, and a lot of folks here right off the road from Taipei, and you've got Tokyo right on the corner, OpenStack SV coming up. What's happening right now? Sure, that's right. I want to stress it did. This is the first time we are having a one-day OpenStack event in Seattle. It's kind of surprising to know that on a cloudy city like Seattle, we never had an OpenStack conference. So I'm pretty excited to bring that here. And this is also the first time that we are having a fully loaded track on telcos across any other city on OpenStack days. So those two are really good. And what is happening about OpenStack, you just got out of LinuxCon, and of course there was a lot of buzz about containers, right? So the three things that I'm seeing that two combined essentially towards enterprise, but one out on telcos, right? So there's a big push on making containers native on OpenStack. Make OpenStack the native platform for containers. There's a big push there. And that kind of ties in with how to make enterprises happy. So OpenStack enterprises, and then the second major pushes that enabling telco applications, and our free applications. So those two are the real thing, and those three are the real thing and are the biggest things happening in OpenStack. Well, the continued mission of stability, obviously one of the core tenants we're hearing over and over again, but yet run faster, more functionality. Keep the stability, but add the innovation. Kubernetes, you've got a bunch of stuff going on around container, container management. It's gotta be easy to deploy. But now the wrinkle in the equation is not just developers and partners, it's operators. So talk about the role of the operators. You mentioned telcos. What's the status of the operators? Are they happy? Do they want more? What are they, what's going on right now? Sure. I think the right way to answer this is like they're happier, right? And you mentioned on stability part, and I would take it for any projects, right? So yes, Kubernetes can scale too, but generally like speaking, it's when the rubber hits the road that's where the problems will be, right? But one good thing is OpenStack has taken operators feedback much more seriously, and then we have a better loop of feeding back the operator feedback into OpenStack product development. So a bunch of folks here are just coming back live from the operators mid-cycle meetup in Bay Area. So bottom line is operators have more say in how OpenStack is gonna be, and it's much more clearer now than last year. And they're participating more. We just interviewed eBay, and we heard Walmart mentioned by Jonathan Bright. So what's, I mean, operators are in the ecosystem. Any new names you can share? What's the key operators up here in Seattle? What's, give us some more data. Oh, nice. It's interesting in operators here, right? I think the Blue Box crisis is the biggest players in OpenStack. Their model was interesting because they own the operator spot, right? The clients are not really, because of the managed product model. So they are the biggest operators per se, even though they're one of the vendors and a part of IBM. But they're also like, they serve a bunch of customers like big, big fish games, and then Conquer was served by somebody else. So there's a little bit of operators, sorry, users community here, even though there are two big vendors, it used to be three big vendors, but with Nebula going away, it's just HP and IBM on Blue Box, right? Thank you, Bram, to a good point about Blue Box. We love Jesse, you know, it's a Blue Box big fan, but now they're part of the mothership at IBM, I wish we cover all their events. So IBM, the big push in here. Is there an opportunity for a new operator? I mean, we're seeing huge opportunities, obviously Blue Box was a great example of some entrepreneurial creativity and growth, and self-funded, they took some outside financing, ultimately had a great exit. But there's more opportunities, or is there more opportunities? So interesting thing is, I think, I want to tie this conversation into, we have startups hard in the OpenStack ecosystem, right? The first round of startups are all about installations and make the distributions better. And then now the big players getting in, Red Hat, HP, Canonical, Suzie, so they are having a good handle on how to make the distribution solve some of the problems that operators face, that enterprises face, right? No, that's kind of settling down, but interesting thing to look at is now, we're talking more about applications, right? Whether enabling the containers, or it's not exactly a past there yet, but think about what kind of applications I can run on, right? So, and I'm seeing a lot of more startups working on solving those problems. So, that's what I want to say where the OpenStack ecosystem is going, but it doesn't mean to say that there is no role for operators. Still, it is, the infrastructure will be largely like operator dependent, right? So the one thing that we can hope for, which is good for OpenStack would be like, how to make it much more easier for operators? I am not seeing the operators role completely going away, which as long as we stay at IAS level, right? How the customers are consuming it? Are they gonna consume it like how managed private cloud is? So they are not, they are oblivious to the infrastructure layer, or they are just only talking about past layer or anything on top of it. That's still like, it's a different consumption model. Someone is gonna still deal with operators, and as long as they are there, we need to make their life easier. If there's opportunities, entrepreneurs will sniff it out, but you bring up the question about entrepreneurial opportunities. We were just talking earlier here on theCUBE, on the ground, is that it's a software problem, not an IT problem here at OpenStack. So that's a big opportunity. What software opportunities are you seeing or white spaces? Do you see entrepreneurs focusing in on? We've heard portability from Swarm to Kubernetes, making Kubernetes easier, making container management easier. It seems to be a slew of little white spaces that entrepreneurs can come in and get a position. No, I agree with you. I think with everybody talking about containers and orchestration, right? There's definitely a lot of opportunity. There's also a lot of good players there, right? Coroists, missiles, they're all kicking ass there. So it's interesting to, I'm not saying it's a white space that I'm not saying there's no innovation possibly there, but definitely we can make it easier. But I also want to look at something more, right? So the customers really care about their LOB applications. What can we do that? Can we make running the applications easier? Can we get more monitoring better on that? Can you make your life, can you make your application life cycle management easier, right? There are a bunch of startups, like we have AppFarmX here and doing the store, right? And then the other side of the equation is like, what is the security story, for instance, right? How does the compliance story? There's still white spaces out there. From a developer point of view, we can say that, hey, just everything is in the log, I can just check market, right? But that's not how customers want it, right? So what is a good package solution there, right? So, and then again, like, there are other kinds of innovations too, right? We talked about NFE a little bit, right? Now, there was a lot of innovations on like storage and networking. We had a lot of solid fires, SAV, ink tank, big M-brain, big switch, those kind of startups, right? But what would be the next one, right? So Acanda, for instance, so they are moving a level above, still like solving the problem of virtualized networking, but instead of the level two and below, right? They're doing at the level above. So those are some of the opportunities that we are, they are looking at it, but of course there's more. And one more thing taking is like, I think there's a talk about hyperconvert solutions are like entire, so how can we do it better? Can you have, I hate to say the single pen of place, I mean, it's a very cliche expression, but you know, like anything that just don't do it just a piecemeal computer storage and networking, but can you do it at a much higher level? So those are the some spaces that I'm seeing actually happening and expect to happen more. The good news is we heard from Cebu from eBay is that it's an engineering opportunity, it's not just so much write some code and you're off the races, it's a combination of software plus some engineering. So that's cool. So great opportunities for entrepreneurs. Obviously they can get involved in meetups, local environments, but it's this local scene, OpenStack, certainly we're in Palo Alto and in Massachusetts, but we're seeing it there. But here in Seattle, you're here, you brought this together, this event together. Are you happy with what's going on here? Do you want to see more? I mean, Blue Box is sold to the dark side with IBM, they no longer a standalone venture. I mean, I think I'm more cashed to work with IBM, but I mean, what else is out here? I'm excited, you know, like what else is out here? Like of course, like it is, it just shows like what is the awareness of OpenStack in this city? Like it's a home time of cloud computing. We have Amazon and Azure here, right? But you know, as much as there's a mind share for them here, we do not have a lot of mind share with OpenStack, but it's definitely increasing, right? The Blue Box guys and HPKs were like doing a lot of OpenStack meetups, creating a lot of momentum out there. This is just like, I would say this event is kind of establishing the flagpole of Seattle into the OpenStack roadmap and then say that this is a significant presence here. And then not to mention this, there are at least couple of startups here working on like stealth mode, I've been talking to them. And then one of them is working on storage, making storage much easier based on using OpenStack, right? So it is going to be interesting to see whether like we have the big players here, who's going to be next as an interesting question to ask. But I would say that like we are at a much more state, which is more hopeful for OpenStack and more positive for OpenStack. And this event is a demo of that one. We were a little bit hesitant, I was a little bit hesitant to have like 150 people here to have the event. I scaled on from 200 to 150, but we were sold out. And then like we got 175 registered and we got 30 more waitlisted. So I'm very ecstatic. And I would like to thank all the sponsors and specifically thank the OpenStack Foundation. And I also want to thank the next Foundation who allowed us to be a co-located event. So with all their help, this event is going to be a huge success. Well, OpenStack certainly has been resilient. I've been following it since it was a glimmer in the eyes of a lot of folks and then watched it turn into a marketing event. Then it really became real. And since that point, it's always survived the rhetoric of OpenStack is dead. I mean, it always moves faster, always gets stable. I mean, even some are saying, oh, you got this and that and OpenStack, it's not dead. Share your perspective on that. No, absolutely. So the community is very resilient, right? I would say it's more than resilient, it's more agile. And then the developers, of course, are the key. And then now the users and the equation, right? So there was a little bit of mismatch between what developers implemented that brought in for the users and then users were not very happy with it. Now that the loop is much more tighter, you know? So we are in a better shape to handle anything anymore. So kind of stepping back from the, stepping up from the software part of it, right? It really, what matters? Like how many users are going to adopt it and then what happens at the customer side, right? You can talk a lot about like this cool new toys, containers, missiles and all those things. They will also face the same problem when they go sell to the customers. And then select what two years ago was OpenStack. Now we are seeing with the container ecosystem, right? But when you go take to the data centers and put down in the world production, that's where the issues are gonna be. So taking that, combining with where OpenStack is right now, OpenStack is at much more better state to handle those things. We have been getting a lot of feedback from real users. Of course, I would appreciate, I would like to have much more users, much more larger deployments. And one more thing is like, we should not treat OpenStack as an isolated entity, right? Like it's gonna be, realistically speaking, users are gonna have multiple abstractions there. So how much well that OpenStack is able to adapt to these new things, that's gonna be successful at OpenStack. And the indications are correct. It's going in the right direction. I want it to continue in the right direction. And in Seattle, great tech community here. Obviously a lot of smart people. Obviously, well-educated, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenStack, a lot of developers. You know, they got a football team that's competitive now. So, you know, you know. Yeah, we just thought a little bit, but yeah. If you look at, you know, San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, Seattle, and then obviously New England with Tom Brady, very competitive environment here, technology-wise. Yes, it is very competitive. I think what could be a little bit lacking from an entrepreneurship point of view is the VC funding, VC pull of money, right? So, a lot of Microsoft millionaires and Amazon millionaires are not there yet quite to give it back, but it's improving. It's a lot. I've seen the last five years that it's improved a lot. There's a lot of activity happening around the... There's a generational DNA established here in Seattle, going back to Microsoft. Now you have Amazon exploding. Now you have OpenStack exploding. A lot of great stuff. That's true. And also, we are a little bit nicer. We are Dan Bay area. I would say the Seattle community is a little bit more... People are chill here. They seem relaxed all the time. Yes, it is. Everybody who comes here. So, you know, but it doesn't mean to say that we lack entrepreneurship here. The Seattle tech community is improving. It's entrepreneurial shows. So, you can expect to see much more startups and making more names soon. All right, we're here in Seattle. This is theCUBE on the ground. We're exploring all the data out here in Seattle. OpenStack Innovation Day meetup here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. This is theCUBE on the ground. Thank you so much, John. And I would like to add one more thing. This particular event, we had stress on including diversity and inclusiveness. So, that has shown off. We have a lot more female participation and then people of minorities participating here. And anybody who's watching here, I would like to say that please think those two things and try to include that in your tech events. Tech is very inclusive here in Seattle. And obviously great community. Thanks so much for organizing this. This is theCUBE on the ground. Thanks for watching. Thank you.