 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program. It's been a couple of years actually. Boris Rensky, who is the co-founder and CMO of Morantis and also was on the keynote stage for the OpenDev part of this show here. Boris, great to see you, thanks for joining us. Good to see you guys, I'm great to be back. Thank you for having me back. Absolutely, so we're going to talk about OpenDev, we're going to talk about a few things, but let's start with Morantis. Your company, I think back to some of my first experiences at the OpenStack show. First of all, Morantis always does great keynotes. Remember, there's dancing on stage, there's fun t-shirts. It's like, I actually coveted. I don't go after swag much, but it was like, the Heisenberg 99.999% t-shirt for the Breaking Bad fans out there to date myself on this. But always bring some energy and excitement and Morantis was one of the companies really super glued to OpenStack. So bring us up to 2018. When I think of Morantis, what should I be thinking of and let's get into it from there. Yeah, so let me see. We are still super glued to OpenStack. We did go through some changes and some evolutions. I think given how long it's been since we've talked, the notable changes have been a change to our delivery approach. And with it, some of the changes to actually the underlying software stack. So the most common thing is that we've evolved Morantis OpenStack into what we now call Morantis Cloud Platform. And the key difference is how we approach actually the life cycle management of the OpenStack itself. Before our tool for installing and basically updating OpenStack was Fuel, which was very kind of prescriptive and monolithic type of delivery method. And what we realized is most of the large customers that we have, they have a fairly heterogeneous reference architectures that you have to cater to and you have to be able to do that in such a way that it's cost effective. So we've rebuilt Fuel to a new tool called Drivetrain, which uses kind of a continuous delivery pattern to manage and deliver updates to OpenStack. And with that, we've also kind of tweaked our delivery model a little bit. Before we just followed traditional distro model where we just kind of like throw out our software out there, you can download and play with it and call us and we'll support you. When it comes to complicated distributed systems like OpenStack that are life-cycled following a continuous delivery pattern, most of the companies simply don't have the in-house talent and skills to just take it on start deriving value. So we've moved to what we refer to as a build-up or a transfer model where we actually come in and we set up the environment we manage an environment to an SLA, give customer four-nines SLA on the uptime or the OpenStack environment we're managing. And after a period of a year, give the customer an opportunity to kind of gradually take over the operations. And by operations, I mean like patches, updates, et cetera. Until after some time, we just completely, we can completely go away or we just take a role of the software support vendor effectively. So that's on the core business side since we haven't talked in a while. So it's a little bit of a long holidays. Sorry. And the kind of the thing that we've been talking a lot about recently has been the new thing we launched in beta about a month and a half ago called Mirantis Application Platform. So Mirantis Cloud Platform is OpenStack as our core business. Mirantis Application Platform is a new thing that we have launched about a month and a half ago that is based on Spinnaker. And Spinnaker is this continuous delivery open source tool that's been built by Netflix originally. Yeah, so before we get into kind of the open dev and Spinnaker and all that stuff, what your viewpoint on the OpenStack piece? So we really appreciate that update. There were years that we thought, oh, it's the battle for who's going to do distributions and as you said, it's not that easy. And maybe we had kind of poor expectations as an industry as to where we could take it and where it should be used. So how should people be thinking about OpenStack in general? Can you give us one or two of the kind of the key use cases that you see in your customer base? Yeah, so I think that what we realized is that when it comes to a kind of general purpose cloud, so to speak, there is not tremendous value, at least among the customers that we had the opportunity to interface with to use OpenStack. You have something that's already in place and you don't touch it and that's usually a VMware or you want something new general purpose, people go to public cloud. But there is an enormous opportunity for what we refer it to as like tune stacks or clouds that are tuned to a particular kind of business use cases. And this is where I think is an opportunity for OpenStack to excel and this is historically where we as Miranda's been actually delivering value to our customers. So speaking of the use cases, our customer base is split into, we split it into enterprise and telco. And more than half of the customers actually are from the telco side. So, telco clouds, there's a variety of use cases. And typically, most use cases are a function of the overarching use cases, NFV, virtual network function, virtualization. But the specificity and the reference architecture of the actual infrastructure environment is a function of the VNF that is running on that cloud. And in some instances, you know, if you were to categorize as the telco space, you can think of it in terms of kind of big clouds for VNFs that don't need to be close to the edge and those that are kind of stretching out to the smaller footprint all the way to the edge. And those are vastly different reference architectures and you do kind of different performance optimizations and tuning. And this is something that you can only do with something like OpenStack. Now when it comes to the enterprise side, the actual kind of emerging use case that we've been seeing quite a bit of is HPC. Because again, HPC is full of kind of a purpose-built equipment, you do networking differently, you do a lot of things differently. And a lot of the times, just general purpose public clouds don't work for it. So, for HPC, again, we have a set of reference architectures that are modeled within drivetrain that you can just deploy fairly easily out of the box that cater specifically to the HPC use case in the enterprise. For us, do you think HPC then either includes now or evolves into ML and AI as well? Again, bespoke hardware, very specific use case? Yes, eventually, eventually. I think that there is an opportunity there for some of the actual kind of reference architectures and deployment topologists currently used for HPC to evolve towards maybe some of the AI use cases. Again, I think that when it comes to enterprise and AI, it's a bit early, so yeah. Boris, the tagline of the company, the managed open cloud company, and you talked about managing, being a managed cloud, that's been a fascinating development over the last few years, we're seeing it at the open stack level and for instance, at the Kubernetes level as well. Can you talk a little bit about that approach and who are the customers that need that entry ramp or accelerator for these private cloud installations? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I think that there are two types of ways to implement infrastructure or implement the cloud. There is those that are trying to, they're looking at public cloud and they're saying, okay, this is like, I see what Amazon's doing, what Google is doing is great. I want the same thing and I want it in-house for security reasons, for whatever, compliance reasons, doesn't matter. So, all of these guys that fall into this category, I think for them to become successful with the cloud on-prem should follow the managed approach. Again, I'm a little bit biased on this and that I'm selling this. But that was always the hit against running your own private cloud as you didn't have the, one did not have the expertise in cloud, so. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly correct. So, first of all, the whole evolution between fuel to drivetrain and using the CD pattern to life-cycling the infrastructure stack is something that there isn't talent out there, there isn't DNA out there, and enterprises simply are not able to just kind of go ahead and start doing it, right? And the whole model that, when you go to Amazon, you just have this cloud that is continuously updated for you. You don't have to worry about anything, right? So, this model implies that you focus on delivering the end service rather than delivering the software, right? When you go to Amazon, you don't get software. You don't get to pick and choose. You just get certain reference architecture that is delivered for you. And the guys that want to replicate the Amazon on-premise effectively, in my view, have to kind of be gradually on-ramp onto that. You can just grab a software, do DIY, and expect you'll have an Amazon. There's a second category, and the second category is basically like the software guys. The guys that are not looking for Amazon, they're really looking for cheaper VMware, right? Which is a different experience. Like, I have my own team. I have my OBS guys. VMware is great, but hey, it's too expensive. I don't want to be locked into it. Give me something that's different. So, there is value in that, right? But this is not the segment of the market that we are going after, and I don't think that kind of cheaper VMware is what most people refer to when they talk about cloud. So, hope that answers the question. Yeah, great. Absolutely. So, you brought up Spinnaker before. What, want to get your thoughts on kind of the things usually typically on top of OpenStack, but you know, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, containers in general, what's your interest position on this? What are you hearing from your customers? And yeah, we'd love to tease out some of the Spinnaker stuff a bit more. Yeah, yeah. So, Spinnaker thing is fairly new for us. We've been tracking the space on Spinnaker in particular probably for a year, although have come out publicly just recently about it. The reason why the space was interesting to us is because I think that everybody who is undergoing kind of digital transformation and embracing cloud as a kind of a byproduct of it is really after kind of, you know, being able to run the company like a startup, being able to release faster, being able to release more often. And in fact, when we'd come to our customers, our kind of, you know, opening pitch even for OpenStack has always been, you know, buy OpenStack that'll help you build software faster. And, you know, on the one hand, it's kind of like a cool pitch. On the other hand, I think everybody in the company, including myself, were kind of, you know, not entirely comfortable with making that leap. Like, okay, OpenStack means I can have, you know, an API for my VMs and maybe containers release software faster. Like, how do you connect the two, right? So we decided to kind of in trying to solve this problem of helping companies release software faster for once, rid ourselves of, you know, via kind of our existing business and kind of our kind of infrastructure centric views of the world and kind of unpack the problem and see like what are the real kind of, you know, big issues with releasing software faster today. And what we realized is that one of the biggest bottlenecks is actually the continuous delivery part. Because when it comes to continuous delivery or even, you know, not to use fancy terms just deploying anything to production in the enterprise. It's a very complicated process that requires coordination between multiple teams like the application team, the SRE team, the SecOps team, all of these teams are using different tools. And the handoff process and kind of the handshakes between are kind of very loose generally. So, you know, a developer can build something very quickly but for it to hit production environment and for, you know, the enterprise to actually get feedback from the customers on this it takes a very long time. So we started thinking about how do you actually, you know, shorten that cycle, what can you do? And with that kind of frame of mind we've come across Spinnaker. And what we realized is that Spinnaker is actually in a sense to continuous delivery what OpenStack is to infrastructure. Because, you know, the reason why OpenStack became popular is because it effectively, you know, on one hand has all these plugins for diverse infrastructure and on the other hand you can automate the orchestration process of like bringing up a VM instead of having, you know, your, you know, server people come in, put in a server, your operating people come in, install operating system, the network people come in, configure the network, etc. It's actually, you know, kind of built a workflow and orchestrated the whole thing automatically without necessarily requiring companies to like throw away their existing infrastructure investment. And if you go to the CD space the situation is kind of similar, right? You have all these different teams, you have all these different tools and you need to find a way to automate and orchestrate this process. So that you minimize the number of human steps. And this is exactly the problem space that Spinnaker's been tackling, right? So it's a kind of a core tenet as plugability and having a single API for the entire CD chain. And the, you know, the best implementation would be the one like, you know, what Netflix has is where the actual developers are able to just deploy to production directly. All of this orchestration between all the testing and all the stuff is done by Spinnaker behind the scenes. So we feel that actually tackling that problem and bringing this innovation into the enterprise is going to be, you know, something very dramatic of producing an auto-magnitude kind of performance gains for our customers. For us, one of the things the foundation announced was the Zool CI CD. Can you help us reconcile Spinnaker and Zool? Yeah, so Zool is from what, you know, I would characterize it primarily deals with the CI side of the spectrum. So, and I mentioned this in my talk. So one of the things that we learned as a company is, you know, if you unpack CI CD, which most people, at least in infrastructure space, look at it as like it's one thing, like all CI CD things, like one thing, basically. In reality, it's not one thing. It's completely separate things. So CI primarily has to do with actually, you know, building the code into something that can be deployed into some deployable artifact and CD takes on from there. So Zool deals primarily with CI part and it deals with it in a particular way for a set of specific use cases. So Zool emerged as the CI infrastructure for OpenStack project itself. And OpenStack is a very peculiar project in that, you know, there's, you know, thousands of developers with kind of different, you know, viewpoints on the world that are highly distributed, building many different components that are loosely coupled that all need to kind of come together somehow, right? So you need to have distributed CI systems that talk to each other and you can merge all of this code and test it all together, right? So that use case is very relevant for large open source projects and it's probably relevant for enterprises who want to adopt similar type of practices for software development internally, right? So if you want to some extent, de-silo many distributed dev teams that you have internally as an enterprise and overlay standard process for the CI piece of it for everybody, I think Zool is a good solution. And Spinnaker then comes after that, kind of an additive that does the deployment part. Yeah, that's it, makes sense. So for us, unfortunately we're running low on time, not going to have much time to dig into the open dev piece. Last question I actually wanted to ask you is, what do you say to the naysayers out there? There's, you know, the people that aren't here sometimes tend to throw stones at, you know, OpenStack failed, you know, OpenStack's dead, all the VCs pulled out years ago. Brian has been through it, you've got customers, we've had a good experience this week. But it's a different OpenStack than it was a few years ago. So just give us the final word on that. Yeah, so good question. I think that basically OpenStack was at this insane hype back in the day. And it's natural to kind of expect that the higher the hype, the bigger going to be the drop, right? But I think that all technologies ultimately, they cannot sustain the hype. You have to kind of, you know, level out at a certain point that is, you know, equal to the true customer value that you are delivering. So I think that the naysaying is a function of, you know, just kind of very high hype that has now leveled to the, you know, kind of, you know, what it should be really in terms of the value being delivered by OpenStack. But, and there's this pool, it generated this big pool of the naysayers that are walking around and saying it's dead. And the reason why there's the pools, because indeed there's a lot of investments, you know, there's enormous amount of startups that kind of, you know, like, ah, we are the cool guys, we are, you know, going to change the world, we're going to kill Amazon, whatever, that now are completely gone, and now of course there are naysayers and saying that the whole thing's dead. But on the flip side of it, I mean, if you just walk around the summit, you can see that there's many more users, there's many more customers that are actually talking about real use cases. And then the companies that did stay and stick around, like ourselves, like Red Hat, like Canonical, and Suzy actually, are seeing continued kind of growth and increased usage. So just, you know, like a nice kind of closing comment is, you know, our biggest customer for OpenStack is AT&T, we've been with them for five years now. And they've been like very excited about it, and they know it's all going to be dead, it's going to be containers now, and, and, and, but despite all of that, the usage is continuing to grow, and there is 10,000 nodes plus now running physical servers with OpenStack, and it continues to work, and it just, you know, workloads are moving to it, and AT&T is not the only one. There is plenty more that are kind of following this trend. So, you know, it's a very lonely answer to your question, but I mean, I remain optimistic. For us, it's still very much core of our business, and we're continuing to see growth and usage, and you know, we're sticking around and sticking to OpenStack. All right, well, Boris Franski, as you know, one of our earlier taglines was, you know, helping to extract the signal from the noise. We appreciate you helping us to understand the reality outside the hype. So, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. More coverage here from the OpenStack Summit 2018 and Vancouver, thank you for watching theCUBE.