 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, an additional ecosystem of support. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, John Troyer, we're here at the Boston Doubleheader. Happy to bring back to our program, Paul Cormier, who's the president of products and technology, and Matt Hicks, who's vice president of engineering, both with Red Hat, both were on the program last week at Red Hat Summit. So, Paul, I'll start with you. Game-changing events happening. You threw out the first pitch at Fenway. I mean, you know, so tell our audience what that's like as you're a local guy. It was, I mean, Red Hat Summit was last week, great summit, really exciting, but I have to say, Wednesday night, throwing out the pitch, maybe a little bigger for me personally, just looking around. It was an amazing thing. And it was a great sinker, by the way I was told. So, it worked well. Absolutely, well, congratulations. Matt, last week we were talking about some of the public cloud stuff. Why don't you bring us up to speed some of the announcements around OpenStack this week? Yeah, sure thing. So, I think you'll see as a theme at OpenStack this week, just how broadly used the technology and the products are becoming our big announcement that we announced today is RHEL OSP11. So, it's based on the Ocata release, and we're really excited about that. It just follows on the theme of every sector from enterprise customers to academia, having a really capable product and we're excited about it. All right, yeah. I think Chris, right, our chief technologist and his keynote said, you know, late out today, we've got 500 commercial customers running on our OpenStack today across every single vertical market segment out there. So, it really is the year and has been the year of going to production with this technology. Yeah, it's nice to see the maturation, you know. Remember, previous years it'd be like, oh, who did more commits and more lines of codes in the stack of litics and all that stuff. You know, core, you know, seems pretty stable, a little bit of networking stuff. We might want to still work on some big, tense, interesting mix of what we've had. But, you know, we're talking about users, talking about what they're deploying, how they're changing business. I know it was big theme at Summit last year, last week was, for Red Hat Summit, was the user. And it's always been one of the themes here at, you know, OpenStack Summit is the super user. So, it's some customer stories you want to share, what your Red Hat customers are doing with OpenStack. Well, I mean, one is right here. I mean, actually it's more a partnership than a customer is the MLC. We talked about that, the Mass Open Cloud, where Massachusetts universities have gotten together to build a cloud for use by the researchers across universities, et cetera, powered by Red Hat's OpenStack. And so, for them, it's a way to really put together a very big infrastructure for us. It's, frankly, a way to have an enterprise lab for our products. And so, we're working hand in hand with them, working well, they're solving real world problems on the application level. We're just making our product better and better every day because we have such a big laboratory. Yeah, and probably actually with the MLC, one of my favorite examples of it is they run the environment on three users. And if you went back a couple of years and they go to OpenStack when it was early, it took a lot of effort. And, you know, the technology was just changing fast. When you see a deployment that large, that can be run by three individuals, it just goes to show how stable and consumable it's gonna be. Matt, can you give us, what's the scale of that? You know, one of the things we always track is like, right, how many servers could I manage with a single individual? Three users running it is great, what's the scope? Three users, the way they look at their scale, it's research-based, it's largely on storage, storage consumption. I think they're at 700 terabyte deployment today and they actually have plans to go to 20 petabytes right now. So it's a non-trivial deployment. It's used on a pretty diverse set of use cases. We work with them on everything from open shift to general analytics research tasks. So, yeah, it's not an easy environment in terms of all the things that run on it and still able to do that with a pretty small cost. Yeah, academics typically have a very diverse set of workloads, sometimes high compute, sometimes high storage. I was impressed this morning, five million cores under OpenStack management right now was one of the statistics from the keynote this morning. You know, we're seven years into OpenStack. You talked about real world customers. What do you see as a typical profile? I mean, there is no typical, we looked at the OpenStack user survey, right? You have 25% of the respondents at organizations a hundred or smaller and then going on up to the very largest. Is there a typical OpenStack use case at this point that you're seeing? Where are the sweet spots? I mean, if there's a market segment that's really on fire OpenStack, it's the telco space. That's one. I mean, we are across all segments and even the telco space is not, it's not like it's 50% or anything. It's, I don't know, I have the exact number, but it's somewhere around maybe 20 something percent. But for us, and the telco space is on fire with OpenStack, because they're retooling. I mean, the telco folks, they retool every 10 or 12 years or so and they're coming out of a world where, you know, stack all away from hardware through OS, networking up to application on one thing for each application to really an application-centric stack. Now to have the ability to have an infrastructure underneath it scales dynamically as one application needs more resources than the other as they begin like a 12 year cycle, that's really, really hot right now. So you see it both from the neps as on the telco side and both, as well as the providers as well. And we sat this morning, AT&T had a keynote this morning, one of the biggest OpenStack telcos out there, but that's really an interesting segment right now. I mean, I don't know if there's a typical in another area that you can- Yeah, I mean, the enterprise issues, it's one of the things I like of it's pretty diverse and I think the reason is you hear the talk of applications a lot where you want infrastructure to be fairly invisible, but it's still there and you still have to be able to tune it and structure it and cater it to the applications. And so I think that's why you see so much, all the deployments are there to serve apps and whether you're a 20% IT shop or a 20,000 person IT shop, you still have that core infrastructure requirement. One of the other keynotes this morning, Verizon, which I know leverages Red Hat technology, talking about the Edge, where does your offering fit with Edge? What are you hearing from your customers? What do we need to do to kind of mature that piece of the solution? You mean the Edge server type? Yeah, exactly, or IoT type environments? I mean, many, if not most of our 500 customers they've quickly moved from the Edge inward to the core. We're running core business applications with many of our customers on OpenStack today. I guess what I'm talking, it's the interesting use case like IoT centers at the Edge, the telco Edge a lot of times too. Well, I mean, from an IoT perspective, I mean, we see IoT as a use case with our customers and they're using our back end services and servers to support that. The telco side, I don't really think it's on the Edge, I think it's in the center. So, running the whole thing. Well, I mean, this used to be, the joke used to be right in the science project. It sounds like, I mean, if three people can really stand up an academic cloud, it sounds like a normal IT group could go in and run this thing. Yeah, and I think with some pretty sophisticated capabilities too. So, if you look at, when you get into the networking areas, whether it's IoT or the Edge, you have things like the distributed virtual router or the work we're doing with a DPDK and just lots of enablement that I'm from an IT background back in the day and you just didn't have that sort of power to get your fingertips for a long time. The other interesting thing to think about too is the neps who sell to the providers, they're now building OpenStack into their equipment. So, that's why I was so pushing on in the center. I mean, it's coming, as part of the equipment coming from the telco providers, hardware providers to the actual telco providers. So, that's how it's almost working its way from the center out in many cases right now. Great. You guys have been involved in OpenStack for a while. What do you still think needs to mature in the space, past the hype cycle here? What would you see going forward? I'll give you mine and you can, I mean, it's still management, usability, all of the things upfront that usually community development is not great on. That's up my, frankly, I think that's where the vendors add a lot of their value. But I think in the beginning with OpenStack, you had to be a computer scientist like anything. Linux started the same way. I mean, we saw the same thing when we started RHEL 15 years ago. And so, it's really the refinements in the usability. And I think over time, we talked about it last week. I ended my keynote at the summit last week. I think you're actually going to see things like OpenShift containers, containers for us coming together with OpenStack underneath. I mean, you hear a lot of even talk here about Kubernetes. So I think, you know, Matt said, infrastructures for the application, absolutely right. You're going to see those technologies come together even more. Yeah, please. Yeah, I think for me, Upgrades is probably the biggest one of, we went through a phase of heroic efforts to install at once. And it was actually last week I got to a customer, talked to a customer that had been through multiple upgrades now and told me it was seamless to them. And even if you look at like the OSP11 announcement of the composable roles and supporting upgrades for them, that's critical because we can't leave people on islands with it. And I do think that's where a lot of our value comes in. And then to Paul's point, like areas of connecting the Kubernetes world and OpenStack, the networking layers out there, I think you'll see a lot of investment and interest on our side. That's really nice. I love that death of the war room is the way I like to think of it. Nobody should go into a war room every two years and try to upgrade stuff anymore. Yeah, exactly. You all have, you know, Red Hat, Red Hat is hitting good this year, right? It seems like it's a good year of Red Hat. You're involved in a lot of interesting projects and communities that are kind of on the cutting edge of where we are in the enterprise and IT space. I think Jim pointed out in an interview on theCUBE at the Red Hat Summit that Red Hat invests in communities, not necessarily technologies. So how are you feeling in general? You know, you're all over Kubernetes and with OpenShift and now all over OpenStack and we see that it's live and real and actually driving revenue. I don't know, how are you feeling about Red Hat as a community investment organization and how your portfolio is kind of impacting real world productivity? Yeah, I feel great. But you know, I think the thing for us is we've got a pretty good arc about picking communities that are going to stick. But I think the rubber meets the road of our customers being successful with it and you saw it at Red Hat Summit. You'll see it extended to this week. That's really what drives me at the end of the day is we know we can make the community bets. I think we, hindsight's always 20-20, we've made some good ones and we're proud of that. But we've been able to take them all the way to customer after customer, which that's what gets me out of the bed in the morning. I mean, the other thing too is it's a great year for us because three, four years ago when we took these bets, you know, everyone was asking us when's the revenue start? When does things start to flow? Now it's, we're enjoying it now. But having said that, over the last five years, we've had this vision of hybrid cloud for four or five years. And over the last four or five years, every community we've gotten involved in, every new product we've done, every M&A that we've done, frankly, has been in support of that vision of hybrid cloud. So we've stayed insanely focused on that over the last years and I think now it's starting to pay off. Yeah, it was something at the end of last year's OpenStack Summit, I felt like I was finally understanding where an OpenStack fit in that hybrid world because for the longest time it was, oh no, Amazon's the enemy and that's how you guys are a software company but many of the companies here are the infrastructure guys and one of them said when Amazon wins, we all lose and things like that. Do you feel we've kind of matured enough to kind of understand where we live? It's not a zero sum game. We're kind of as an industry moving forward. I mean, I think we've matured and I think the market's matured with that a bit. I mean, I think for the first time this year, I'm actually, as you said, I'm actually seeing even a lot of people that follow us start to see that, oh yeah, that's where it fits in. Amazon's a partner. We're helping our customers move to the various public clouds with OpenShift because for us, we cover all bases within that hybrid cloud so where the customer chooses to run is fine with us. Do you feel like OpenStack, the foundation and the project has a clear path forward because doing that in public over the last seven years has had some zigs and zags. How do you feel about that pathway going forward? I think the project is always going to be technology to solve, technology problems to solve along the way. I mean, I think this year they split up the developer side from the business side with the conference. I think that's a good thing to really separate that too. So I think as- Try to miss the hoodies. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there's still a lot here. I see them around, but I think the thing here is that is the whole thing about OpenSource. You sort of feel your way through. You don't go with a big set of requirements on day one. You sort of see where you're going as you get through the project. So I think they're in great shape. Yeah, and I've been seeing a lot of foundations, seeing a lot of OpenSource structure foundations. I don't think any of them are static. So OpenStack's in the same boat as CNCF and all others where you've just got to evolve and keep tracking, make sure it's still relevant and healthy as it goes. All right, so unless the Red Sox call you up, what do you see moving forward? Start with you, Paul. Just looking forward. I think what we're looking at in the coming year for us is just what I just said previously is I think you're going to start to see the worlds of containers, container orchestration and dynamic infrastructure services underneath starting to come together and work more and more hand in hand. Having said that, it's just like OpenStack. It takes years to get these things to market, but that's the point we're in right now. The good news is we have two powerful platforms to solve real problems today. Now we just move them closer and closer and closer. Any final predictions Matt? No, I think it's the same space and it's really, we have a lot of technologies that are, they're changing how customers build apps and it's a lot of fun. Whether it's more infrastructure focus, whether it's container focus dynamic, we're seeing a lot of convergence in the space and yeah, it's going to be fun to work through and watch. Matt Hicks, Paul Cormier, appreciate you both joining us again and back to back weeks in Boston. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2017. You're watching theCUBE.