 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. And we're back. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program two of the keynote speakers this morning, worked on some of the container activity, Kendall Nelson, who's a upstream developer advocate with the OpenStack Foundation, and John Griffith, who's a principal engineer from NetApp, excuse me, through the SolidFire acquisition. Thank you so much, both, for joining. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. See, we have any slip-ups when we're live. We just run through it. Kendall, you ever heard of something like that happening? Yeah, yeah, that might've happened this morning a little bit. So, let's start with the keynote this morning. I tell you, we're pretty impressed with the demos. Sometimes the demo gods don't always live up to expectations, but maybe share with our audience just a little bit about kind of the goals, what you were looking to accomplish. Yeah, sure. So, basically what we set out to do was once the Ironic nodes were spun up, we wanted to set up a standalone Cinder service and use Docker Compose to do that so that we could do an example of creating a volume and then attaching it to a local instance and kind of showing the multiple backend capabilities of Cinder, so. Yeah, so the idea was to show how easy it is to deploy Cinder, right? And then plug that into that Kubernetes deployment using a Flex volume plug-in and voila. It was funny, I saw some comments on Twitter that were like, well, maybe we're showing management that it's not a wizard that you just click, click, click and everything's done. There is some complexity here. You do want to have some people that know what they're doing because things can break. I love that the container stuff was called Ironic. The bare metal was called Ironic because, right, when you think open stack at first, it was like, oh, this is virtualized infrastructure and therefore when container first came out, it was like wait, it's shifting, it's going away from virtualization. You've been on Cinder, you help start Cinder, so maybe you can give us a little bit about historical view as to where that came from and where it's going. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because you're absolutely right. There was a point in the beginning where virtualization was everything, right? Ironic actually, I think it really started more of a means to an end to figure out a better way to deploy open stack. And then what happened was, is people started to realize, oh, hey, wait, you know, this whole bare metal thing and running these cloud services on bare metal and bare metal clouds, this is a really cool thing. There's a lot of merit here. So then it kind of grew and took on its own thing after that. So it's pretty cool. There's a lot of options, a lot of choices, a lot of different ways to run a cloud now, so. You want to comment on that, Kendall? No, just there are definitely tons of ways you can run a cloud and open infrastructure is really interesting, growing. That has been one thing that we've noticed here at the show. So my first summit, so it was really interesting to me as an outsider, right, trying to perceive the shape of open stack, right? Here the message has actually been very clear. We're no longer having to have a one winner, you know, one size fits all kind of cloud world, like we had that fight a couple years ago. It's clear there's going to be multiple clouds in multiple places, multiple form factors, and it was very nice people and acknowledgement of the ecosystem, that there's a whole open source ecosystem of containers and of other open source projects that have grown up all around open stack. So, but I want to talk a little bit about the, and the fact that containers and Kubernetes and that app layer is actually, doesn't concern itself with the infrastructure so much. So actually it's a great fit for sitting on top of, or an adjacent to open stack. Can you all talk a little bit about the perception here that you see with the end users and cloud builders that are here at the show, and how are they starting to use containers? Do they understand the way these two things fit together? Yeah, I think that we had a lot of talks submitted that were focused on containers, and I was just standing outside the room trying to get into a open stack event, and like the number of people that came pouring out that were interested in the container stock was amazing, I definitely think people are getting more into that, and using it with open stack is a growing direction in the community. There are a couple new projects that are growing that are containers focused, like one just came into the project's open stack helm, and that's a AT&T effort to use, I think it's Kubernetes with open stack, so yeah, tons. So it's, yeah, it's interesting. I think the last couple of years there's been a huge uptick in the interest of containers, and not just in containers, of course, but actually bringing those together with open stack, and actually running containers on open stack as the infrastructure, because to your point, what everybody wants to see basically is commoditized, automated, and generic infrastructure, and open stack does a really good job of that, and as people start to kind of realize that open stack isn't as hard and scary as it used to be, because for a few years there, it was pretty difficult and scary. It's gotten a lot better. So deployment, maintaining, stuff like that, it's not so bad, so it's actually a really good solution to build containers on. Well, in fact, I mean, open stack has that history, right? So it's been solving a lot of problems. Right now, the container world, both on the Docker side and Kubernetes as well, you're dealing with storage drivers, networking overlays, multi-tenancy, security, all those things that previous generations of technology have had to solve. And in fact, I mean, right now, I'd say storage and storage interfaces actually are one of the interesting challenges that Docker and Kubernetes, that level of containers and container orchestration is facing. I mean, it seems like has open stack already solved, in some ways already solved some of these problems with things like Cinder? Absolutely. Possibly is there an application to containers directly? Absolutely. I mean, I think the thing about all of this and there's a number of us from the open stack community on the Cinder side, as well as the networking side too, because that's another one of those problem spaces that are actually taking active roles and participating in the Kubernetes communities and the Docker communities, to try and kind of help with solving the problems over on that side, right? And moving forward, the fact is is, storage is, it's kind of boring, but it's hard. Everybody thinks- Or just not boring, it's really possibly hard. Everybody thinks it's, oh, I'll just do my own. It's actually a hard thing to get right and you learn a lot over the last, you know, seven years of open stack. We've learned a lot in production and I think there's a lot to be learned from what we've done and how things could be going forward with other projects and new technologies to kind of learn from those lessons and make them better. Yeah. In terms of a multicloud hybrid cloud world that we're seeing, right? What do you see as the role of open stack in that kind of a multicloud deployment stuff? Open stack can be used in a lot of different ways. It can be on top of containers or in containers. You can orchestrate containers with open stack. That's like, depending on the use case, you can plug and play a lot of different parts of it. All the projects were trying to move to like standalone sort of services so that you can use them more easily with other technologies. Well, in part of your demo this morning, you were pulling out of a containerized repo somehow. So is that kind of a path forward for the mainline open stack core? I personally, I think it would be a pretty cool way to go forward, right? It would make things a lot easier, a lot simpler and kind of to your point about hybrid cloud. The thing that's interesting is, you know, people have been talking about hybrid cloud for a long time. What's most interesting these days though is containers and things like Kubernetes and stuff, they're actually making hybrid cloud something that's really feasible and possible, right? Because now, if I'm running on a cloud provider, whether it's open stack, Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, it doesn't matter anymore, right? Because all of that stuff in my app is encapsulated in the container. So hybrid cloud might actually become a reality, right? The one thing that's missing still is data, right? Data gravity and that whole thing. So if we could figure that out, we've actually got something, I think. Interesting comment, you know, hybrid cloud a reality. I mean, we know the public cloud's here, it's real. With the Kubernetes piece, doesn't that kind of pull together some, really enable some of that hybrid strategy for open stack, which, you know, I felt like two or three years ago, it was like, no, no, no, don't do public cloud. It's expensive and hard or something. And yeah, infrastructure's easy and free, right? No, I think I missed that somewhere. But yeah, it feels like you're right at the space that enables some of those hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities. Well, and the thing that's interesting is if you look at things like Swarm and Kubernetes and stuff like that, right? One of the first things that they all build are cloud providers, whether open stack, AWS, they're all in there, right? So for Swarm, it's pretty awesome. I did a demo about a year ago of using Amazon and using open stack, right? And running the exact same workloads, the exact same way with the exact same tools all from Docker machine and Swarm, right? It was fantastic. And now you can do that with Kubernetes. I mean, now that's just, there's nothing impressive. It's just normal, right? That's what you do. I love the demos this morning because they actually were, they were CLI, they were command line driven, right? I felt at some conferences, you see kind of wizards and GUIs and things like that, but here they blew up the terminal and you were typing. I looked like you were actually typing. Oh yeah. I was. And I actually liked the other demo that went on this morning too, where they interrupt demo, right? They spun up 15 different open stack clouds from different providers on the fly right there and then hooked up a Cockroach DB, a huge cluster with all of them, right? Can you maybe talk, I just described it, maybe talk a little bit about that. That seemed, that seemed actually super cool and surprising that that would happen, that you could script all that, that it could happen in real time on stage. Yeah. I don't know if you like noticed, but after our little flub up, some of the people during the interop challenge, they would like raise their hand like, oh yeah, I'm ready. And then there were some people that didn't raise their hands like, I'm sure things went wrong and with other people too. So it was kind of interesting to see that it's really happening. There are people succeeding and not quite getting there and it definitely is all on the fly for sure. Well, we talked yesterday to a CTO Red Hat and he was talking, saying, no, it's simpler, but you're still making a complicated distributed computing system, right? There are a lot of, this is not a, there are a lot of moving parts here. Yeah. It's funny because I've been around for a while, right? So I remember what it was like to actually build these things on your own, right? And this is way better. So it gets your seal of approval. We have reached a point of usability and maintainability. Yeah, and it's just going to keep getting better, right? You know, like the interop challenge, the thing that's awesome there is, so they use Ansible and they talk to 20 different clouds and it works. I mean, it's awesome. It's great. So I guess I'm hearing containers didn't kill open stack. As a matter of fact, it might enable the next generation of what's going on. So how about serverless? When do we get to see that in here? I actually was looking real quick at there. There's functions as a service, session that somebody's doing, but any commentary as to where that fits into open stack. So I'm kind of mixed on the serverless stuff, especially in a public cloud I get it because then I just call it somebody else's server, right? Yeah. In a private context, it's something that I haven't really quite wrapped my head around yet. I think it's going to happen and there's no doubt about it. I just don't know exactly what that looks like for me. I'm more interested right now in figuring out how to do awesome storage in things like Kubernetes and stuff like that. And then once we get past that, then I'll start thinking about serverless. Because where I guess I see is at like an IoT edge use case where I'm leveraging a container architecture that serverless driven, that's where it kind of fits. And sometimes that seems to be an extension of the public cloud rather than, it's the edge of the public cloud rather than the data center driven. But yeah. Well, that's kind of interesting actually because in that context, I do have some experience with some folks that are deploying that model now. And what they're doing is they're doing a mini open stack deployment on the edge and using sender and an instance and everything else. And then pushing, and as soon as they've pushed that out to the public, they destroy what they had and they start over, right? So it's actually really interesting. And the economics, depending on the scale and everything else, you start adding it up, it's phenomenal. So, well you two are both plugged into the user community, the hands-on community. What's the mood of the community this year? Like I said, my first year, everybody seems engaged. I've just run in randomly to people that are spinning up their first clouds right now in 2017. So it seems like, you know, there's a lot of people here for the first time excited to get started. You know, what do you think the mood of the user community is like? I think it's pretty good. I actually, so at the beginning of the week, I helped run the OpenStack Upstream Institute, which is teaching people how to contribute to the upstream community. And there were a fair amount of users there. There are normally a lot of operators and then just a set of devs. And it seemed like there were a lot more operators and users looking that weren't originally interested in contributing upstream that are now looking into those things. And like at our, we had a presence at DockerCon actually, we had a booth there. And there were a ton of users that were coming and talking to us. I'm like, how can I use OpenStack with containers? So it's like getting more interested with every day and growing rapidly. So, yeah. All right. Well, I want to thank both of you for joining us. I think this went flawless on the interview. And yeah, thanks so much. All these things happen, live is forgiving as we say on theCUBE and absolutely going forward. So thanks so much for joining us. John and I will be back with more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit in Boston. You're watching theCUBE.