 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Okay, welcome back everyone, live in San Francisco, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural DevNet Create event, targeting the DevOps open-source community as they put their toe in the water, their foray into a community approach to build on top of their success of their classic developer program, DevNet, which is only three years old, shouldn't call it classics, it's actually emerging still and growing. Our next guest is our pitch, Ashupura GM Network and orchestration at the Linux Foundation. I'm also joined by co-host Peter Barris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to see you again, welcome back CUBE alumni, so obviously open networking. You guys are involved, you're on a great show, we cover it every year, open networking summit, among other things, huge demand for the technologies and appetite for content in your area. Here at Cisco DevNet Create, you're seeing the emergence of Cisco taking their roots in networking and plumbing and operations, which by the way, you know from the networking world, sacred cows and all over the place, bringing it to the Wild West agile developer who wants infrastructure as code. Cisco's bringing that application to infrastructure, saying we're going to bring programmable networking. That's music to the ears to the developers, so we are getting infrastructure as code, that's your wheelhouse. What's going on in the Linux Foundation to continue this momentum? How do you guys look at this trend? Give us the update on how the Linux Foundation is participating, supporting, getting involved with this programmable networking infrastructure as code trend. Sure, so first of all, let me baseline everybody. Linux Foundation is here to create the largest shared technology investment by building sustainable ecosystems. That's the mission in life. And within the Linux Foundation, obviously the most successful open source project is Linux, but we're way beyond Linux, right? We host a whole set of projects, open source projects starting from cloud native, you know, CNCF, Cloud Foundry, to blockchain projects like Hyperledger, Automotive-grade Linux, and a whole variety of Let's Encrypt, you name it, right? That we facilitate this shared technology investment. The area I own, which is networking, has several projects up and down the stack, all the way from data plane acceleration to orchestration, analytics, and it's intended for carriers, enterprise and cloud service providers, including one of the most recent, highly successful and much-in-demand project called ONAP, which is a full network automation stack, you know, open network automation platform, which again, is an open source way to sort of connect apps to infrastructure, right? So this is the movement that you just mentioned, and I'm really excited that, you know, the community is finally, you know, realizing the implications of the three-letter acronym that started this whole thing called SDN. SDN, SDWIN, all that stuff going on, Software Defined, Data Center, obviously Cisco has a huge dominant proposition in the enterprise, Data Center in particular, but also they have a huge service provider business MSO, all that, they've been connecting networks at internet scale since the 90s, really doing a great job. Now they got to really think about the future. What's your view there? Because I think the Linux Foundation, you guys have been great stewards for sustainable ecosystems, but now Cisco has to put their toe into the new ecosystem. What's the meaning of that? What's the view outlook? What's your take on where they're at? I mean, it looks good off the tee, in the middle of the fairway, as we were saying earlier, messaging's good, 90% of the content's community, which end is relevant, it looks good. I think our perspective is there's a major disruption happening, but it's not a technology disruption, it's an end user disruption. And what I mean by that is the end users, whether it be carriers, whether it be enterprises, whether it be cloud service providers, they are demanding, they are demanding that open source be part of the agenda. And the reason for that is very simple, right? It's providing more agility, providing the access to the source code to allow for much faster feature development. They want to contribute. They want to develop the ecosystem to meet their requirements, and everybody is unique, as we all know. What is happening is in this new environment, vendors, service providers, carriers, everybody is reinventing themselves. And they're reinventing themselves with a new business model, and the business model is essentially, how do I take a leadership role in developing this shared technology investment? And it's not about a box. It's not about the fastest and the smallest and the largest switch routers, et cetera. It's about a software platform. It used to be about free software. Now, nothing's free because people are putting their company's name on the line, their business model's now integrated open source, and they have people involved in the process. Technically, it's free software, but it's really technically not free. But this is the new business model. This is what people are doing. I think you can... It's the tier one resource. I mean, if you look at the world's largest carriers today, whether it's in China, whether it's in US, or in Europe, they have deployments that are built on open source, right? And so open source is becoming, open source networking specifically is becoming mainstream in terms of deployment. What's the hottest mainstream product right now? Is it SDN? What's the hottest area? SDN is a technology, SDN and NFV, network function virtualization. Those are technologies that enable the deployment of open source projects. So we got projects like Open Daylight, ODL, OPNFV, ONAP, these are just names. And again, as networking... What's the hottest area? NFV or... Right now, ONAP is the hottest, right? And as networking guys, we always make these three or four letter acronyms. Sorry to bug you, but that's how it is. So one of the observations, at least we made a Wikibon, and we made it here a couple of times, is that open source has proven to be magnificently successful when the target is well defined. In other words, conventions of an operating system, there's no disagreement about what an operating system does. Hence, open source could create a Linux that has been just wildly successful. Open source has not been as good at redefining the new use cases or where the technology might go. And therefore, a lot of times open source developers end up looking at each other and making each other's tools work, which is, for example, in the big data universe, restricted the adoption of Hadoop and the applicability of Hadoop, for example. Still getting value out of it, but it's not as successful as it might be. That raises a question. I'm wondering what role you play in all this. Is there a need for a degree of open source leadership that can kind of set the big picture, the long-term trends, without undermining the innovative and inventive freedom of how developers have demonstrated they want to work together? What do you think? I think that's an excellent question. What happens is just by throwing software on, say, GitHub doesn't make you an open source project. I mean, yeah, it does make you open source, but that doesn't make you a successful open source project. You need a community behind it. You need a community of developers and a sustained ecosystem, right? So one of the things we are championing, and I'm personally driving that agenda, which is thought leadership on how do these pieces fit together? So as we are moving from components that were like disaggregated in networking to production-ready software components to production-ready solutions, right? These all need to fit together and developed in its entirety. So when you look at it holistically from a solutions perspective, the most important thing that matters are use cases. And so what we have done, what we have done is for every project strategically when the requirements are laid down, think of that as a requirements document, or when the architecture is laid down, the end user use cases are explicitly defined for the community, the architecture is laid out, and in that framework, the Lenox Foundation facilitates the developments, the infrastructure, the DAWO ops, the agile model to come and co-create this technology in this area. So that's how you do in the ideation. Are you then taking that and stepping up and also doing some of the design work and it sounds like you are? We facilitate the community to do the design work. We give them architectural thought leadership. We give them inter-project cross-leadership. So for example, we have in my group, like in networking, we have about 11 plus projects, right? There are multiple data plane acceleration projects. Now when you're putting a solution, you want a portion of data plane acceleration to ride on a control plane, to ride on orchestration, right? To be tested end to end. So projects like OPNFV for example, they test all the pieces, they test things like FTIO, which is an acceleration project, they test OpenStack, right? Which again, it's not Lenox Foundation, but we do bring all the pieces together. So effectively the end user has it relatively easy to adapt and start installing. Congratulations, I saw that the Lenox Foundation recently hired Cheryl Chamberlain as the chief of staff. Cube alumni, I've been on many times. Yes. Shout out for Cheryl. So you guys are growing. So how are you guys handling the growth and I want to get your thoughts. I don't know, you don't have to speak for the whole foundation, but in general, for the folks not necessarily familiar with the inner workings of the Lenox Foundation, like Open Source, you guys are always evolving and growing. Well, how are you serving your stakeholders, your members and taking care and maintaining the sustainable ecosystem? Yeah, so the difference between a typical, throw the code up on GitHub versus actively managed sustainable ecosystem is where Lenox Foundation comes in, right? So what we provide to projects in different capacity is everything from IT as a service, marketing as a service, program management, thought leadership, executive directors, PR, media and most importantly events, global events to get the word out, right? All of that service, if you may, is what facilitates the community. And once the community is all coming together, things happen, right? I'll just give you an example. We just completed a developer summit that on one of the projects called ONAP, ran out of capacity, clearly. 200 people from worldwide top-notch architects got in a room and they discussed how to merge almost, you know, 15 million lines of code. And they figured it out in four days. Or coffee. Not over coffee, it's like four days, but they figured it out, right? So I think that level of facilitation that we can provide. Because you can't have it on a blank piece of paper. You need some framework, some governance, some, you know, model and some processes on how to do it, right? And that's what Linux Foundation Excel said. Okay, talk about the, I want to move into the third area I want to discuss with you. As you mentioned, the three major customers and users. Carriers, enterprises, cloud service providers. How does that, how do you guys relate and serve those customers? When there's other stuff going on in the industry? We see open compute, Facebook's donating a lot of stuff. Google's throwing in a ton of open source. We haven't yet to see Amazon make their move with donating really good networking stuff. Certainly we've seen some machine learning out there, but we're expecting to see an arms race of presence coming in. It's like open bar at the hotel. More goodness is coming in from the big guys sponsoring great code. Yeah, so my mission is this year at least, one of the things that I've laid out at ONS this year was to harmonize the ecosystem. And harmonization doesn't mean, you know, merge it also, now you have one solution. Harmonization means, you know, understand where each other solutions inter-work, inter-operate, and if they sort of overlap, we end up merging the projects, like what we did for ECOMP and OpenO, right? So that's one of the missions. Now, in that process, we're looking not just within the Linux Foundation and in my role, but also outside. And that includes not just the software stacks, but also the hardware infrastructure layers. So that could be OCP, that could be TIP, et cetera. And several others that are coming up. As well as harmonization with standards bodies, right? So we believe that standards and open source coexist. Absolutely. Complementary relationship there. So, you know, we've been, you know, actively working with several of the standards, you know, MEF, DM Forum, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Trying to get a view, we just published a white paper on the Linux Foundation website on harmonizing standards and open source. So there is a whole movement of ecosystem because at the end of the day, a carrier wants to solve a problem. They don't care how we solve it. I mean, they do, but not in a fragmented sense, right? And that problem is different from what an enterprise wants to solve. And it's different from what a cloud. Now, to your earlier question, the great news is cloud carriers and enterprises, they're looking and smelling the same as, you know, cloud native apps, cloud container networking, and open source networking, they all start combining, coming together. So I want to share with you a comment we had the other day and there's a story of the four wolves that were put into the Yellowstone Park and changed the ecosystem because the Yellowstone had a river problem. And so they injected four wolves into the ecosystem. Turns out, the deer went away, things started growing, and then the whole ecosystem became so much more sustainable. So not that we're trying to get at who's the wolves, but balancing in coexistence is the point here. You can live with wolves and not get eaten unless you're their target, but there's a balancing act on ecosystems and to have a good sustainable ecosystem, you need to have freshness, certainly standards and new blood, new ideas. What is your vision on coexistence? Because this is one of those things that we're seeing right now emerging less about my project's better than your project. You're seeing a lot more collaboration going across communities. More than ever. 100% agree. I think the fundamental problem has always been only the technical geeks understand the differences between the projects. And then the layer of abstraction in people, whether it's management or media, they start looking and feeling that as if they are competing. I'll give you an example. In the data plane acceleration kit, we have projects like FDIO, DPDK, Wiser, OVS, there's lots of projects there, right? And people are like, oh my God, there's so many. Well, guess what? One of them is a kernel-driven thing. Other one is a set of libraries. Third one builds on the libraries. So that level of understanding is missing. It's interplay between all the projects. It's interplay, right? So that's one. And dependencies. And dependencies, right? So that's one of the things that we want to highlight here very significantly this year in terms of just sheer education, right? Because part of the coexistence is understanding each other, right? If we understand each other on what role each of the projects play, it's easy, whether it's Lennox Foundation or outside. So that's the first step. The second step is, if they're complementary, I want to take the next step and test them out for interoperability, because now you have put two pieces together. Remember, networking was a fully black box five years ago. We took it, blew it up, fragmented it, desegregated it, and now we got a pull, and we got tremendous innovation out of each of these layers. So we were very successful on the whole desegregation and SDN disruption. Now it's time to put it into a production-ready solution. So as we put those things in, we'll see that harmonization is going to play a big role. Are great to have you on here and sharing the insight. Always great to get the inner workings, plus a great perspective on the industry trends, and congratulations, success, and we'll continue to follow you at all your work in the networking area, all the projects, Stu, Miniman, and team, and we're going to continue to see you at the open networking summit among all the great shows. Thank you very much. All right, thanks for coming on. Live coverage here in San Francisco as part of our exclusive two-day coverage of the inaugural Cisco DevNet creative event. I'm John Furrier, Peter Barris. We'll be back with more after this short break. Stay with us. Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of...