 We're here at the OpenStack Summit on the ground. Exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE Wikibon. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host for this segment, David Floyer, senior analyst, co-founder of wikibon.org. And our guest is Bailey Caldwell, VP of BizDev at RightScale. It's been around the block. Had done a few laps around the infrastructures service cloud management track. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. You guys are really the pioneers with Amazon that are known, you guys are known really all about making Amazon usable. And I once quoted saying that Amazon was the junkyard dog of cloud, meaning it was a place where you could get your parts and build your own and have great advantages. And hence the developer community took to that like a big time, just so easy to use. And just that was the cloud. That was infrastructure to service. Now platform as a service is going on full tilt. Amazon is doing extremely well. They're adding more and more stuff every day. Real powerhouse, really putting a lot of people on notice recently going into the enterprise. So tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing now and try to compare and contrast where you were just a few short years ago. Sure. Yeah, so as you mentioned, we started when EC2 launched and our CTO Torsten Van Iken had the foresight to see that this cloud world would require new management tools. Not only that, we also saw a world where there wasn't just one cloud. And it was really about having multiple resource pools you could choose from and running your applications on those resource pools as quickly and as easy as you possibly could. And what are you guys doing here at OpenStack and talk about what you guys are offering now because you guys see the world's expanded, the rising tide is floating boats. One of them is called OpenStack, a competitive platform. But in the same grain, Amazon has got some steam as well. So we really see the hybrid model emerging where enterprises want to build cloud-like services for their IT organization. What Public Cloud has done is allow the business to innovate really rapidly. And there's no reason that IT can't provide those same services using technologies like OpenStack. So we've been part of the project for basically the inception, but formally joined the foundation in September as a corporate sponsor. Dave, what's your take on Rackspace and OpenStack and what they've done vis-a-vis what Amazon has built because Amazon's got a trajectory, right? So, you know, diseconomies of scale exist at some level, but you have a rapid rise in OpenStack with open source. And yet Amazon's on a trajectory. Well, Amazon's a very strong trajectory and it's on a strong trajectory with the types of services that it's offering as well. Rackspace is focusing very much on, in my opinion, on the cloud service providers as the primary consumer of the products. Making cloud services applicable in volume with all of the interconnections, making that the focal point. And then from that it'll go into either cloud services providing stuff for the enterprise or the enterprise taking that over at that particular time. Both of those are models, but the primary starting point is, how can you enable cloud service providers? And is that your experience as well? Are you seeing most of the people that you support in the cloud services area? It's becoming more difficult to differentiate an internal IT organization's role with a cloud provider or service provider's role. So, what we see is that the innovative IT, enterprise IT organizations are really becoming sort of travel agents for these resources, right? They want to govern it. They want to provide access in a controlled manner and get the best price, but it's ultimately about facilitating in a controlled way the choices that businesses need to make with regards to these public resource pools as well as their own private cloud. So, I certainly think the service provider market is being revolutionized. Everyone, there's 30,000 independent data center operators, right? Their businesses are getting threatened by this public cloud thing, so they have to innovate. And I think OpenStack is a great way to do that for their business. Do you see the rise of mega-datas where a whole number of cloud providers and users in a particular vertical are going to be and some data aggregators as well? Yeah, I mean, Rackspace actually this week announced their service provider strategy with regards to federated cloud resource pools. And I think that's a really compelling vision. I think it's probably fairly early. But in general, I think that's certainly a really great use case. So, we do see universities going down that path where they're starting to share resource pools across multiple use cases that share similar requirements. Excellent, so you've joined Rackspace, you've joined OpenStack relatively recently. So, what area are you focusing on? What's your contributions? What are you working on? Sure, so, you know, RightScales Platform is really about what you do after the cloud is built. All right, so it's a lot of people focus on getting the cloud service there. What we focus on is the content, the apps and the data that you really need to run on that infrastructure. So, we're working with Rackspace and their private cloud software, which is their installation reference architecture of OpenStack. We've done a ton of testing, a lot of application provisioning. So, really above the cloud where applications run is where we're really making sure OpenStack can scale. The orchestration layer, the management layer. Yep, management orchestration, automation of those apps, sort of self-healing architectures. We're doing an HADR session, I think, tomorrow about how you can use RightScales Management Platform on top of an OpenStack cloud to build, you know, highly fault-tolerant architectures for your data center. What white spaces do you see out there? Obviously, in the management space, you guys filled a lot of holes on the Amazon side. What white spaces do you see in the management side for OpenStack that developers could come in and fill a hole? You know, it's a really good question. I think that we've seen Amazon evolve their feature set. They have multiple different ways of using their own tools to manage their cloud. Obviously, for RightScale, because we support multiple resource pools, we still think there's a lot of area to innovate, especially when you look at something like OpenStack. So, the whole software-defined networking space, adding things like a database as a service, building more platforms as a service, like features into the OpenStack foundation is really going to be an interesting opportunity for a lot of companies. We've been strong proponents of getting compute storage and network right and making that solid and scalable, which I think with Grizzly especially, the foundation has proven it's capable of doing. What about storage in the high availability market? Because obviously, Cloud, you have a lot of people that have latency. Dave and I were just talking about when he was on earlier, given his overview of what the analysts at Briefings were yesterday. You know, storage, high availability storage, low latency is really a focus. Obviously, Flash is a medium that people are deploying with. But how do you guys look at that storage side of on the management side? What are you guys doing there? Yeah, so for us, you know, we really rely on the API of the cloud software itself. So, I think when you look at something like Swift, or you look at the new block storage in OpenStack, those products are in sender. Those products are evolving to a point where ultimately it's going to be further and further commoditization of that hardware. So yeah, SSDs are great, super fast, I was really good. I think the biggest issue with data is location, right? And data has mass. So how do you take these petabytes of information that live in a corporate IT data center and move it somewhere that you can process it? And I think that's still something that the speed of light is creating challenges for. That's one of the reasons I was asking about these mega data centers, because if you can backhaul it across a mega data center, that's a lot cheaper than, and a lot less elapsed time than trying to crawl it over the network. Equinix and CoreSight, who are partners of ours, are building these sort of cloud campuses, CoreSight calls them, where they're pulling all the fiber there. And then it's much easier to get to a particular facility. So I certainly think that high speed connections are going to solve some of the problem. But the reality is this data is transactional. This data gets created in real time. So the closer you can move the data to the processing source, the better. I agree, I totally agree. Yeah, we agree. It's interesting that the philosophy of people like Supernap, on the West Coast in Las Vegas, they are courting all of the cloud providers for certain industries, they're bringing those certain industries like the media into their data house. And that seems to be a very strong way of growing that infrastructure. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've been to that facility, it's pretty amazing. Amazing, isn't it? Yes. If anyone can get a pass, I highly recommend it. But no, I think that's very true. But I think one thing we forget living in this cloud bubble is the majority of the software and the majority of the processing power in the entire world is not cloud, right? It's still existing apps. Many of these apps are decades old and they're not going away overnight either. Plus, it's really questionable what the value is of moving those to the cloud. So how are you, so what should people do? Should they try and integrate a hybrid cloud from their installation to the cloud? Or should they move their applications to the cloud, run them on their own hardware, but run it as a co-location on the same area? This is the good news, bad news, I think for everyone in the IT industry, which is a mainframe to client server, client server to virtualization. Virtualization to cloud is not a natural, it's not a natural progression because the apps don't benefit from moving to that model. So ultimately, I think we end up with, in a world with too many choices, really the key is having choice and being able to pick and choose where you place your workloads, depending on their value to the organization, how they're architected and what you want to spend. There may be things you just want to let them sunset off and not ever come back to life. So what you really want is you need to have a strategy that lets you maintain what you've got, take advantage of all these new technologies, and certainly build anything new in a cloud model with cloud aware apps. So I think that's what we try to help our customers with and try to convince them that you need to start now because it's not an overnight journey, it's kind of a, it may take you multiple years, but you can get there if you start now. Bayley, you've guys had a good view of the cloud market, obviously from in the trenches and sitting up in the executive ivory tower of RightScale, you've been close to all the action, certainly on the Amazon side. What's the most impressive thing that you've seen with the OpenStack Summit here and in and around the community that you can share in terms of technical, business, users, open source? Pick a few and chime in and share just for the folks who aren't here can't see the crowd. Well, so this is my third summit and other RightScalers have been all the way back to the original ones. And I think it's amazing how it, I think it's doubled every single time. So literally almost to the T. It's twice as many people as it was last time. And I think Jim Curry from Rackspace said it well, this is about the users. And it's really cool to see the conversation shift from the theory of building compute storage and network to actual use cases, actual customers who are really using OpenStack in production to do all sorts of interesting things. Yeah, David was commenting, there's not a lot of vendor hype here, it's pretty much meat and potatoes, put your meat in the table and everyone look at the size of the code or contribution or implementation. And that's what we need in the cloud. Shameless plug, RightScale compute is next week in San Francisco. If anyone- Is there a hashtag? Shouldn't going? Yeah, I think so. But we'll definitely get the hashtag but it's our compute conference and we have a really cool panel with what we call the mega cloud providers all on the same panel. So you can hear- Shameless plugs are okay in the queue as long as they don't go into the sales pitch. You can hear directly from them. You're sharing information. I'm just sharing information. We had a guy in earlier who shared a GitHub link and I'm like, it's not a plug, that's a resource, it's okay. So, but taking OpenStack in particular, obviously you cover a lot of different platforms. So how are you envisaging integrating into Horizon and into that orchestration and other layer? So, you know, I think what we're really focused on is continually improving our own product as a platform because what's happened is we started as a web front end to a command line interface. It was pretty easy to tell somebody, oh, you want to use Amazon? Well, here's a web UI for it. And we become much more of a platform, much more of a horizontal abstraction that normalizes the experience of all these resource pools in a way that makes it much more accessible for anybody, whether that's developers, IT end users, DevOps people, managers who are worried about costs, security people worried about governance across all of these resources. So, each cloud and each cloud technology will build its own pieces of right scale. Our job is to innovate ahead of that and or around it, but also to provide that uniform experience across all the resource pools that people want to consume. Bailey, talk about DevOps. Obviously we've had a site two years ago called DevOps Angle ahead of the curve. And now it's pretty much mainstream. And actually that's a mindset shift. But that really points to a term that we've been hearing in the, that's been amongst the industry alpha geeks for a while, but now it's hitting mainstream enterprise service provides infrastructure as code. In your opinion, what do you, what does that mean? What does infrastructure as code mean? Yeah, so, I mean, the DevOps movement is sort of universal. We see it, we just did a survey and I think 73% of all the enterprises who responded are doing something with DevOps in terms of how they view their IT organizations. And that's pretty amazing. I wouldn't think that would have happened so quickly, but it's clearly points to the fact that software's ability to interact with infrastructure is really the future of software development, right? So why write an app that then runs on a server? Why not write an app that knows how to run itself on a server or a platform? And it's actually an area we've done a lot of work ourselves with a product that's in private beta right now that actually has a fully featured programming language that allows you to control compute storage and networking in line in the code that you're writing. Cause wouldn't that be great, right? Why do I need an ops guide to determine I need more CPU when the app itself can just take advantage of those resources and spin them up and provision it on its own. But what does infrastructure's code mean to you? I mean, it's obviously DevOps is a movement. So what is it? I mean, people are trying to say- It means turning the cloud into a computer. It means making it as programmable as the hardware in this laptop, right? That's really what it means to me is that when you can synthesize the business functions with the infrastructure as software, then I think you've hit the sort of- And scale's a big part, right? Scale is a big part of it. Absolutely. Sure. So yesterday we were talking to a number of the users and they were looking, they were asked the question, what's the cost of the software that you have to buy? And one of them said, well, I've got to play for an old Microsoft installation and I'll pay $50,000 of that. But the rest of the code put together is $2,000 a month that I'm paying. Your model is obviously a higher touch or higher end model. How do you see, I mean, I asked the question before, how are you integrating into it? Or how are you moving towards that much lower cost type of environment? Yeah, so this is one of my favorite topics. It's also, it's probably a good news, bad news story. I just, I'm sure it's trying to find the good news. But essentially the OSI model, right? The seven layer cake that everything we have consists of network, hardware, physical server software is getting compressed. And I think the companies that fight that compression are going to have a really difficult time in the future. And there's very few businesses that will survive that transition. So a couple of examples, Salesforce.com, I don't think has ever dropped their prices. In fact, they've probably only increased them. And for a software company, that's normal. That's nice, but they're delivering the application itself and that's value to the business by making it more streamlined. And that's a value sale. Stuff on top of IT is not quite the same, is it? Well, I think it can be, but I think the reality is that as people see the commoditization of infrastructure and physical networks and hardware, they're going to expect software to follow that trend. And that's why I say it's a good news band of stories. It's good for the consumers and the challenge for companies who are software development businesses is to figure out an innovative model to take advantage of those price points and pass that value down to the customers while building a strong business. We're here at Bailey Caldwell VP Business Development RightScale, we're getting cut on time here. But I want to let you get to the last word in RightScale, obviously good business decision, great team, been following you guys for a while. Haven't been recently, I just put a plug out for your event next week and we'll keep an eye on that. But I want you to just share your vision around, take your RightScale hat off and just put your kind of industry participant hat on and share with the folks what's going to happen the next one, two years around. OpenStack, multiple clouds, data center transformation, obviously modern era infrastructures upon us. And every, all industries are affected. And how do you look at that and then share your vision of what you see unfolding? So, we see a world where the mega cloud providers, the sort of household names that we know, Amazon leading that front, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, in that market who a sensory characterized by they have enough infrastructure to deliver a cloud servers without building another data center, right? Google has a big enough network and enough servers, they can just do it. We see the public cloud as the innovative force in this new era of IT with private cloud copying it as it goes along and innovating behind public cloud resources. So I think that it's exciting times. And I think that any IT professional who's paying attention will realize that building your own private cloud is an important strategy for whatever business you're in and understanding that following and using public cloud where you can because you're not going to be able to innovate as fast as those guys will is going to be really interesting to watch. Okay, softwares of service, obviously is the preferred business model for all businesses, but before to get softwares of service you need platformers of service, you need infrastructure underneath it. Lot of transformation, exciting times, this is the open stack summit, this exclusive live three day wall-to-wall blanket coverage here on SiliconANGLE.com. Go to SiliconANGLE.com for reference point and emerging tech and the enterprise and go to wikibond.org to check out all the research around big data, big data analytics, Hadoop open source and more recently David Fleurer and team's work around software-led infrastructure. Lot of great free research there and it's been great to have all these great guests. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.