 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. Hi, and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE Worldwide Leader in Enterprise Tech Coverage. We're here at OpenStack Summit 2017, Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host Stu Miniman. Happy to welcome as my co-host for the week for three days of live coverage. John Troyer, the Chief Regener of Tech Recreation and our guest host. John, great to have you here in my home airport, Boston. It didn't have two weeks, I haven't had to be on the road, so brought you across the country, how you doing? Doing great, thanks for having me here, Stu. Very excited, it was a good kickoff and it's going to be a good three days. Yeah, so let's start, we've got three days of coverage, we've got lots of guests from a very broad ecosystem. Why are we here is a question. There are some out there on Twitter that said, well, you know, there in Boston, you're sitting on the deck of the Titanic because OpenStack is dead, you know, there's a, and I love that in the opening keynote, you know, one of the OpenStack Foundation guys, you know, got up there, Jonathan Bryce, and put up a tweet from like Cloud Opinion, who said, you know, OpenStack is dead, circa 2013. So, I think a lot of what we have usually is, you know, improper expectations about where things are. As anybody that's been in the industry knows for a while, there are multiple waves of what it takes, you know, you got to harden the technology, you got to look at, you know, general adoption, you know, big question is anybody making money in this space? Open Source puts a whole interesting spin on all of this, but it's our fifth year for theCUBE doing the show when we went the first time to the OpenStack show in Portland, Oregon, people were like, wow, theCUBE's here, you know, OpenStack has arrived, we've gone through ups and downs of, you know, where it fits in the whole hybrid cloud space versus public cloud, where it fits via VMware, all those pieces. John, it's your first show, what's your first take on it? Yeah, my first OpenStack summit, I guess we're seven years into OpenStack, I'm actually impressed. I think as an outsider looking through the hype cycle, you know, we've certainly been through the whole thing. What I see here now is there are thousands of people, I'm not sure what the final count is, maybe five to six, steady, that's a steady, that's a steady number, it's not growing hugely, but a growing number of real world implementations. I see people here who are real technologists, who are, they are not tire kickers, they want to implement, they are implementing, I see a number of use cases that we've already seen highlighted and that we'll talk over the next three days, real world implementations of OpenStack, and I see kind of a growing maturity in people's expectations, just as you said. We are not in a one cloud fits all kind of world, we're not in the same arguments we had back in 2008 and 2013. I think we've realized that we're in a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, there is a portion of that, that maybe is on-prem, maybe is not, but is a private cloud where, and that is concerned with managing infrastructure and resources that OpenStack is a good fit for. Yeah, I mean, John, I know you commented during the keynote, and the analysts always tend to argue as to what terminology fits well, the term that's come up a lot lately, right. There's that hybrid slash multi-cloud, and what the heck is open cloud? Google talked about it when I saw them last week at the Red Hat Summit, Red Hat talked about it, Morantis was talking about it, what is kind of open cloud because there's open sources, pieces of it, how easy is it to move between different pieces. When it comes to it though, OpenStack itself, according to their user survey, about 80% of those deployments are in private cloud environments. A lot of the bigger initiatives to do public-type clouds seem to have fallen by the wayside. There are some examples, you know, Rackspace still uses a lot of OpenStack, but they do VMware, hosted cloud, they do a lot of revenue in that space, they work with Microsoft, they work with AWS, HPE Helion was going to be a billion-dollar investment, and boy, they're not really here all that much, they still do some with OpenStack, but their contributors all moved over to SUSE, so the ebbs and flows of who the big players are, and it's still a question I've had in, is where is the money? I talked to a VC that I've seen at this show for many years, said, are you going to be here? And he's like, Stu, I would not invest money in companies that are doing OpenStack as the core for their company, he's at the AWS show, the Google show, and I've talked to plenty of startups that leverage OpenStack, but the OpenStack's going to be our business, doesn't seem to be the one, heck, Mirantis used to be the OpenStack company, they're now the managed open cloud and some Kubernetes and some other stuff, so, I mean, John, you work with a lot of startups, what do you see in that space, kind of the big guys, small guys, where OpenStack fits for them? I think we still see OpenStack ecosystem dominated by a lot of large players, we do see some startups here, the startups have a tendency to be multi-valent, let's call it, multi or polyglot. A lot of people that were here were at the Kubernetes show, you saw Kubernetes on a lot of the charts, leading the pack of services that were maybe on top of OpenStack. So I don't think OpenStack as a pure play is realistic for most of the ecosystem. We saw a good sprinkling of open, the open word in a lot of the presentations this morning. I did see a few digs at kind of the commercial enterprise software vendor here and there, but not too religious, I think people are practical, if you're going to have to either pay or contribute if you want the value out of a system, but it remains to be seen over the next three days, both the mood of the vendors here and the mood of the community, whether is the OpenStack ecosystem as a whole growing in monetary value or is it a niche play for a certain set of players? Yeah, I remember when this initiative first launched, it was the rocket scientists of NASA and Rackspace, down in Texas, putting this together. I forget if it was John Furrier, Dave Vellante said. This is the Hail Mary by all these infrastructure players against Amazon. Now, Amazon's growing gangbusters, it's over $13 billion worth of revenue last year and if you take everybody that's doing OpenStack and put them together, gosh, it's probably not even a billion dollars this year. We actually did some research on what we call True Private Cloud at Wikibon and in the top 10 list, there's 10 companies with over like $240 million worth of revenue and the only one on that list that you'd look and say, oh yeah, a big OpenStack player is Rackspace and really it's way more their VMware managed environment than the Rackspace environment. Red Hat, who probably is the leader in revenue associated with OpenStack and we're going to have a bunch of Red Haters on to talk about this. They've got 500 customers in production but where that money for OpenStack fits in with everything they're doing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all their other subscriptions, OpenShift and everything else is a little bit difficult to parse out. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. We've got a broad set of the ecosystem players here. Customers using it. I'm a little disheartened when I see the keynotes. These are all big companies and it's GE, it's Verizon, AT&T. The Telcos are an interesting space. Last year, NFV was a big, big, big push and the other thing that I want to dig into a little more this week is those edge pieces. We saw the poll and said, okay, your own data centers are all going to get pulled by the public cloud. Now the public cloud is getting pulled by the edge so Telcos obviously play there a lot on the edge. Some of the infrastructure players fit there and where OpenStack fits in that or will other things like the whole container ecosystem, Docker and Kubernetes and the like, do I really need OpenStack if I'm doing those things? Do I put them together? It's kind of an interesting sandwich that people put together. What's your thoughts? A couple of things, Stu. One, I would point out that in the latest OpenStack survey, I think 25% of the respondents were under 100 people in terms of company size. So there are a set of smart startups, kind of small lab-like players that are using OpenStack for their business. I don't know what that says about the whole ecosystem as a whole. The other thing that I thought was very interesting, well even in the keynote AT&T talking about their entertainment cloud, right? You saw a set of services like Kubernetes, like containers, microservices function as a service built on top of them. They are, those kinds of services are explicitly not really concerned with the infrastructure. Somebody still has to manage the infrastructure, the storage, the networking, the resiliency, the management of that layer. That layer doesn't change as frequently as that layer above it. And so I think what I heard emerging in this morning's keynote was that kind of a story where OpenStack is a stratum here of support for kind of maybe the newer, younger, sexier kind of technologies on top that are more rapidly changing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the big move is, where is that application modernization? And that's where some of these other technologies that sit on top, things like Kubernetes. There's Cloud Foundry here at the show. Red Hat was talking about a lot, how Ansible helps with some of that orchestration inside there. But right, changing that underlying infrastructure is a first piece to getting really that modern architecture. It's the boring piece. I mean, John, come on, we're all going to go serverless now, right? Serverless, I don't need to worry about it, it just works. We know that, of course, how that underlying infrastructure works. I mean, John, you and I both have lots of background with virtualization, with what VMware did, and it was like great to say, let's take the OS, modularize that some, but underneath that storage and networking still need to fix the same things happening with containers. We have to fix the networking storage and even serverless, how that fits with the rest of the stack is kind of interesting. Sure, one word that we heard a lot this morning was managed, managed Cloud. And that is a new term, an emerging term that I've been hearing more of. I think it's very interesting, talk about abstracting computers. I can abstract them by consuming them as a service. So I think we may be seeing this IAAS layer morph into something that is a little bit more truly as a service. Somebody else actually even manages it. Mirantis was talking about that. There've been other players, even the foundation came out and talked about it this morning, that they feel like that's a fundamental new channel that a way to describe how to consume OpenStack. And really when you talked about it as a science project, I don't necessarily want to have a team of 50 computer scientists to run an OpenStack Cloud, right? I would like to just to be able to consume it. Yeah, I love. Two years ago, Gartner came out and said, OpenStack's a science project, blah, blah, blah. Last year, Gartner actually was in the keynote and there was lots of back and forth as to what that means. I liked in the keynote this morning, there was discussion about where your applications live and how you choose. And they said it was the three seasons, compliance, cost and capabilities. Now, of course, it'd be really nice if we could just do a nice little decision tree, a grid to say, okay, if your company is this size and your application does this, this is where you build it or where it grows. We know it's heavily nuanced. Lots of devils in the details. We see everything from big companies that say, oh, hey, I moved off of Amazon to Google or I moved, built my own data centers after I've been running for a couple of years. This is highly nuanced. It changes greatly. I love it. I actually saw a tweet from Clay Christensen and said that any strategy is relatively bound in time. So we know you have a good strategy today, a month from now or a year from now, you need to readdress where that strategy is. Once again, key of the show that I see is readjusting where open stack fits, where it goes, where customers can use it. And I'm excited for three days. What are you looking forward to in the three days of our program in here, John? Well, it'll be interesting. We're talking to a number of the big players today as we kick off and as we go along. So that'll be very interesting, kind of from a business steering the ship perspective. I'm, you know, the whole big picture, Stu, as we took off this morning, I mean, the foundation spent 15, 20 minutes just kind of saying, kind of being introspective. And so I'm very interested to see how introspective people will be here today. This was not a huge marketing rah-rah kickoff as you bring in customers, as you bring in other vendors in the space. I'm very interested to see, I don't know, I'm looking for an energy. I'm looking for, yes, we are concretely moving forward. This is a component of our solution. I'm looking for real world solutions. This is seven years in. You know, you can only sell vision for that so long. Yeah, yeah, John, and like you, I think I was happy to see the foundation and the structure of the keynote had some self-awareness. They didn't say, we're dominating the world and you know, we've done something. It's like, we understand there's critics out there. How are we putting together? So just to bring in a wrap here, you know, really want to have, you know, big thank you to the OpenStack Foundation. Without their help, we wouldn't be able to do this. Big thank also to our sponsors. Our headlight sponsor is Red Hat. Going to be starting off with Jim Whitehurst, number Red Hat executives, as well as customers. Additional sponsorship from Canonical, Cisco, and Netronome. Without our sponsors, we couldn't do this. The Cube is doing so many shows right now. We actually have simultaneous events going on right now in Las Vegas at the Dell EMC world. Got everybody from Michael Dell. Some really interesting customers. Big team doing two sets. I think like 75 interviews there, as well as we're at the Service Now Nellid show in Orlando, Florida. Dave Vellante and Jeff Fricker down there. If you go to SiliconANGLE.tv, you can catch all of our coverage as well as all the shows we're going to be on. For Stu Miniman, John Troyer, we're going to be here for three days of live coverage. Stay with us for all the execs, the customers, and the analysis. Thank you for watching The Cube.