 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. Okay, welcome back everyone, live in Palo Alto here, covering Mobile World Congress. This is the afternoon in California, evening in Barcelona, Spain, where Mobile World Congress 2017 is happening. And this is theCUBE's special coverage of Mobile World Congress where we bring our friends and experts and colleagues inside the studio to analyze the news and reach out to friends in Barcelona to get the scoops, get the news, opine, commentary, give reaction, and of course, color commentary, which we're not afraid of doing. And of course, our next guest is Lauren Cooney, who's an open source peer of, and she's currently retired, looking at her next opportunity. She's a guru, good friend, and we've met her in a variety of passes through the Dockercons, the Linux Foundation, CNCF, open source community, Lauren, great to- A brief sabbatical. A brief sabbatical to do some traveling, and you know, I won't bore you with Paris or London or Hawaii or anything like that. I just like to say retired because it sounds better, but you know, you're all rich and famous. But you are internet famous. I mean, you have been very active in the open source community. Yeah, I wouldn't say internet famous, but I have been pretty active. But wait now, you've been on theCUBE multiple times. I know, but all seriousness, this is a fun time of open source. You couldn't be more pleased, at least from my standpoint, I love the action. If you look at what cloud native has turned into and where it's going and the forces around where Mobile World Congress is bringing the old telcos into, in essence, an enterprise data-centered scale-like environment. You're seeing the collision of what was once like large scale enterprise scale with software coming in with an old school telco trying to reinvent themselves. And that is the future of the world and that's exciting. And you know, you're in the middle of it. And so a lot of stuff that we're involved in is the center point of innovation. So I think it's a great time to talk about that. First I want to get your thoughts on Mobile World Congress. What are you hearing from your sources? I'm hearing a couple things from my sources. So FIDO, which is actually a project that's under the Linux Foundation, is gonna be announcing some things this week. There you are, a software router that actually is operating at, I believe, half a terabit right now. And they're gonna be, I believe, improving that performance significantly. And that will be announced, I think, at Mobile World Congress or potentially in the next week or so. So this is not yet hard news yet. This is not yet hard news, but I'm keeping my ear on the street and that's what I'm hearing. And what's the impact on it? Let's talk about what this means and kind of in context to where it's been and the progress in that area. Well, if you start to look at the overarching umbrella that you're looking at from a networking perspective, things are all gonna be faster. You know, there's 5G. Everyone's talking about how 5G is gonna work, what it's gonna do, how it's going to enable IOT, artificial intelligence, et cetera, things along those lines. What you really have to look at is how at the networking layer it's going to actually impact that. And you have to actually have the plumbing working so that you can actually have the 5G working in the right way. So the plumbing has always been the problem. And again, the big buzzword and the theme coming out of Mobile World Congress is the same game, but now in a different arena, which is network transformation. What you're getting at is the network is still a bottleneck. So a lot of talk about NFV and a lot of talk about SDN, kind of in a new context, your thoughts on what you're seeing around the positioning of how people are looking at NFV now. Visa V, obviously on the horizon, which is kind of the glam super demos. You're seeing all the sizzle reel as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, smart home, media entertainment over the top, Netflix was out there, Reed Hastings was giving one of the keynotes. So those are the four key areas, what I call the mental models of sex appeal for the tech. And obviously VR and AR, which reality is in there too. I put that in with autonomous vehicles, with drones and whatnot. I mean, that's cool stuff, but yet the operating model for that stuff is completely different. Totally different, totally different. And what you have to look at is really how the network's going to enable that with virtualized functions and things along those lines. When you start to look at how these telcos are actually gonna deliver on 5G, you have to look at how their networks are implemented and how they're actually implementing NFV and SDN. Most of them have already implemented SDN successfully. NFV is something new. People are looking at OpenStack. People are looking at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. People are looking at Kubernetes. They're thinking, how are we gonna actually have this work all together so that we can actually achieve this at that higher abstraction layer? Lauren, talk about the sentiment in the developer community around the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, which has evolved under the Linux Foundation. And it really is a top of, I call, I won't say top of the stack, but much more of a glue layer around orchestration, containers, microservices. These are beautiful paradigms for developers in a world where you have need dynamic networking. Yeah, it's essentially, I mean, Kubernetes is essentially container management, right? So when you start to look at the impact that containers are having, you start to look at and where they're going, right? You're looking at containerization of network functions. So you're not just looking at applications now. You're looking at network functions as well. And how's that gonna happen? And I see Kubernetes moving down the stack. Effectively, one of the things to look at is how Kubernetes and OpenStack are gonna work effectively together going forward. Yeah, and I think that's gonna be, if the vendor arm wrestling and body slamming doesn't take toll on the industry, I think that could be a nice collaboration. And I wonder about the ecosystem. So the questions that I'm asking myself when I look at the world is, who's gonna be caught with their hands in the cookie jar trying to influence for their own vendor purposes, their own spiel, because Open Source has been an honor system for many decades and generations. So I find it fascinating, because I think the stakes are very, very high right now in the work that the Linux Foundation is doing in some of these areas where Open Source has been the key to most of the innovations. We're gonna have our next guest coming on. He's one of the early engineers at Yahoo, I think it was like the fourth or fifth employee built that up at large scale. I think it built on Open Source. I mean, everything now has been built on Open Source. So again, not much of this is being talked about at Mobile World Congress, yet words like software-defined radio, software-defined networks, software-defined blank. I mean, it's becoming software-defined. So I'm kind of thinking, what's your thoughts on the role of the developer community as the hardcore developers, whether they're the full-stack hardcore developers or more artisan composable developers. I mean, I don't mean that over generally. Well, you have to look at kind of the layers of developers, right? There are fewer layers at the networking or there are fewer developers at the networking stack layer. It's just more complex. There's just not a lot of programming that you can do. You move up the stack, you get to Kubernetes, you get to Cloud Foundry, you get to things like that, and there's people that are building really cool things. I think that what we're gonna have to be looking at is the communities out there that have the most developers today, and those are already well-established companies. You've got Microsoft, you've got AWS, you've got Salesforce. You have Open Stack to a certain extent. You've got a lot of folks that are cooking lots of developers in there. And they're gonna be building. You also have people like Oracle and Cisco trying to boot their developer program. Cisco's got a great developer program, I gotta say. Their DevNet has been really impressive, but when you look at DevNet, though it is, although I would agree it's impressive what they've done, it's still Cisco, right? So I know DevNet creates coming out in May, and that looks really promising to go outside of the classic Cisco world, but this brings up, not almost, I hate to say the word retraining, but you're seeing people who want to be a little bit more horizontal in their skill set because of the cloud native opportunity. So I want to ask you how are, because this is the same problem that telcos face, these classic developers, what is the key to success in these communities to get these developers that know really hardcore, say Cisco, for example, hardcore networking. And those guys just are a different breed than some DevOps guy. I mean, some parallel similarities, but for the most part, they're different. The guys are doing network stuff, right? Well, even with serverless, you're going to need operations, folks. I mean, let's get real, right? Like serverless is just an easier way to deploy applications and things along those lines. But I think that one of the things that people need to be looking at is what is the skill set up the stack? Because if you look up the stack, what you're seeing is actually more of those things that like Kubernetes and containers and microservices and things like that, trickling down to that networking layer. So those technologies and those capabilities are going to be needed at that networking layer. And so folks need to actually learn those skills that all developers are learning today and to be able to apply them at the networking layer is going to give them a competitive advantage. Serverless, really, let's unpack that. What defines serverless are the folks out there? And that's, generally speaking. Serverless is a marketing term. It's a marketing term for essentially cloud native like stuff. So I mean, that's really what we're talking about. What does the, what does it mean? What does it impact? Basically you have, so you have microservices, right? I tweeted this earlier, right? Because Rube was on here just yesterday, right? And he was unpacking it, so I won't rehash what he said. What I will say is you're, you know, you're kind of taking components of different sorts of applications and you're putting functions in different areas for microservices. And when you're looking at serverless, you can take microservices and you can deploy them across a serverless environment, which is actually a bunch of servers that are managed by someone, essentially, so that you, it's automated and the developers don't have to do the work when it comes down to deploying the applications. I get a lot of tweets coming in, I can hear my dirt misses going off. They hear servers, yeah. Well, what about a fog computer? I know it's completely different, of course, invented in the Bay Area with all the fog. But this is all buzzwords. I mean, with buzzwords, Bingo is at an all-time high at Mobile World Congress. But I think the serverless thing, although is trendy, is very relevant because it speaks to cultural shift on development philosophy, which is, hey, a bunch of servers can be shared whether it's virtual servers or physical servers. And it really focuses the emphasis on different kind of abstractions, declarative versus specific configurations. How does that advance? So I guess the question is, in your view, what's the scuttle butt in the community around? What is needed to accelerate the movement towards cloud-native evolution? What's some of the things that you see being talked about in the community around? How do we accelerate the movement? Well, I think it's going to be interesting. I mean, I think it's going to be, like, let's take it a step back, almost. And let's take a look at open source and where open source is going. And then let's take a look at AWS. And I think it's, they've got an IoT platform that is in, I think, limited trial right now. And are they at Mobile World Congress? No, it's Samsung isn't, Apple isn't. But it's interesting because they've got a lot of developers, right? So it's going to become a war of AWS versus open source, I almost think, when you start to look at this. And you've got to kind of hedge your bets and look at the technologies and figure out which one you're going to use. That's a great observation. In fact, I was thinking that same thing and I kind of tweeted and mentioned on theCUBE that after KubeCon up in Seattle this past year where it was pretty obvious besides the devastating loss of the election. But the point was is that I saw a direct collision course between open source developer community and Amazon because there was some hallway conversations around people saying, hey, you know what? I'm afraid to invest in that project is what if Amazon just makes it native in this stack? It essentially decimates actually potentially a community. So I think Amazon's certainly aware of this, although they will act like they're not, but I think they are aware of this interesting dynamic. Now the telcos could benefit from this. So don't you think that, my enemy's friend is my enemy? What's the other expression goes? I mean, the telcos could say to the open source people, hey, let's do this. Well, I think Amazon's going to be smart and make some good partnerships as well, right? Because you've got off-prem and you've got on-prem, right? And you've got to kind of figure out how to do that hybrid environment for the cloud and what developers want and what telco providers want and things along those lines. There's not just, no one's going to take all their stuff and push it into the public cloud. I think it's a wake up call for the developer community. I mean, I think being a developer of early days of open source was interesting because I think the developers can be a little bit arrogant. I don't mean there's a negative thing, but I mean, Amazon is not as Machiavellian as people think, give them credit for. They're very customer centric and they'll weigh on the side of the customer. They're excellent. They're excellent from a developer-focused perspective. They're very customer-focused, but that being said, I think the developer community can be customer-focused too as well. So the question is, there's a trade-off and this tension between, as an entrepreneur, I would be nervous about starting a company where Amazon could literally put me out of business. This is the same rationale that we, when I was growing up in the business, Microsoft was the big enemy. They can just put you out of business with a feature. So there's always that entrepreneurial balance. So it's going to be very interesting. Again, cloud natives seems to be the key. Are any other news for us from Mobile World Congress? No, I think I kicked it off with some of the news. I think that it's interesting. Cisco's doing some things with Jasper and things along those lines and they've increased the number of devices that are connected to that management platform pretty significantly. I think that's interesting. Also, Cisco also partnered and did some work with 5G and Verizon and when is 5G really going to come out? I know you guys have been talking about that. It's a mixed reaction on that. I mean, Intel says Olympics in 2018. Most probably would be a trial network. They already have some trials, but I think the general consensus is there's a lot of foot now being put into the network because Intel's put a big stand. I mean, Intel's going big on this thing. I mean, the question comes up is, do I want more bandwidth or more mobility or more battery life? Yeah, I mean, I just reviewed a bunch of sessions for the Open Networking Summit. So I was in the group that actually picked the sessions for what's going to be at the Open Networking Summit and 5G is going to be covered. There's a lot of different things there that are going to be covered around this area. SDN is going to be covered in an advanced way. So new and, you know, how. Well, take a minute to do a preview of the O&S Summit. Open Networking Summit. Scott Rainovich will be co-hosting theCUBE with Stu Miniman. So I'm not going to be able to make it this year. What's the preview of the O&S Summit? Give it a little commercial. What's the next generation architecture for networking and what's that going to look like and how does 5G play into that and how do things like IoT play into that? A lot of things from Mobile World Congress but more at the networking level. You're going to see how open source is actually driving this and actually how, you know, one of the things that I focused on when I was going through all the sessions was I want real world use cases. I want things that are in deployment. I don't want things that are in test, right? So what's working, what's not? I don't want the BS. I want the real stuff. And it's a real technical show. What's the profile? There's a business track and there's a technical track. So there's actually two tracks this year so it'll be actually great for both business and technical people to attend to kind of understand what's going on. If you could just summarize the problem statement or current status of that industry and those communities, what's the big focus area right now? Where's that emphasis right now? Interoperability. Interoperability. Yep. And then the business impact, what's the business impact side? I would say from the business impact side, it's how do we make more money? Yeah. So the network still becomes that. ARPU is going to be critical. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Lauren Cooney, open source guru. Honest sabbatical, trying to, she's not sharing what she's going to do next but she's got a spring in her step. I can tell she's got something cooking. Certainly we see the Linux events and the open networking summit with theCUBE will be there. Of course, more Mobile World Congress coverage and analysis with more guests here in Palo Alto after this short break.