 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 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. It's Victoria Day, but we're working. So, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to welcome back to the program. We've got Tim Burke, who's the Vice President of Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering with Red Hat, and fresh off the keynote stage, we have Mark McLaughlin, who's the Senior Director of Engineering for OpenStack also with Red Hat. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Our pleasure, thank you. All right, so Mark, I'll start with you. Keynote stage, had a good discussion about, we're talking about open source, talking about community, is the themes that we heard at Red Hat Summit last weekend, and again here at OpenStack. It's a nice couple of years in a row, we've had the back-to-back of those two shows, so give us a little bit encapsulation of that message. Sure, I mean the key message of the keynote really was talking about the overlapping missions between the OpenStack and Kubernetes, and really kind of showing how they come together for our customers and for users generally, in terms of tackling that kind of broad open infrastructure challenge, of trying to give businesses the opportunity to be free from the infrastructure providers in terms of being able to switch between infrastructure providers, and also OpenStack in terms of its role offering kind of on-premise infrastructure as an alternative to the public cloud. Yeah, Tim, I want to get your view point on some things. It's interesting, we talk about, we're at the OpenStack show, but we're talking about containers, we're talking about edge computing. I think about one of the other foundations, the Linux Foundation, does way more than Linux these days. They're doing all the cloud-native things, reminds me a lot of Red Hat themselves. Broad spectrum of products, sometimes it can almost get a little bit overwhelming for most people to say, oh my God, there's so many projects, there's so many products, how do you help me get to where I need to go and where I need to go tomorrow? What are you hearing from customers? How do you manage that? I think a lot of this mirrors Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and back when we started, it was the day of the Unix Wars, right? And in the early days of Linux, it was this big challenge of getting your graphics drivers and putting all these pieces together, right? And now today, it's more about broader infrastructure orchestration, and you see Mark Collier, for example, from the OpenStack Foundation that we started today, showing a list of 30 different components that you have to piece together. And really, I think that that's what Red Hat focuses on is two things. It's one is where do we want to take the technology tomorrow through our open source, ranging from Linux to OpenStack and set file systems, for example. But it's not just that, it's how do you get these pieces to work together? And I think that that's something that hasn't traditionally been the strength of the open source community, because they may stick into these silos of operation. And I think that Red Hat's focus and strength right now is to do what we did for Red Hat and Enterprise Linux in the open stack space by pulling all of these pieces together in a consumable and supported manner. It's funny you mentioned like getting graphics cards in. Come on, with the Queen's announcement, we now have the virtual GPU support. So it feels like we've come so far yet we're doing some of the same things over again. What are you hearing that's just massively different about kind of the state of open source today? We just had one of your customers on talking about their digital transformation. I think what's really changed over the years in open source is, I think it started out honestly as a clone. It was like, can we compete with the likes of Solaris? And so it was, I'd call it catch up for innovation. Now you look at open source, it's not catching up, it's leading all the innovation today, whether it's all the major public clouds or based on open source technologies. When we started, open source was unproven and many customers were skeptical of consuming it. Now you're seeing customers, governments, all sorts of different businesses demanding open source because they want choice, they don't want to be locked into any one vendor and they want to be able to work collaboratively to harness the power. And I think that collective collaborative model has really proven its effectiveness. Mark, I wanted to talk a little bit about OpenStack itself. I think last year at OpenStack Summit, there was a lot of talk. People seemed to be a little bit confused or at least there was a lot of interesting architectural conversations. Containers on top, containers on the bottom, what sits on the bare metal. This year, both at Red Hat Summit and here and even in the industry at large, I think a lot of that conversation has clarified. You know, there's the application layer and there's an infrastructure layer which does very hard things that the application layer does not have to worry about. How are you looking at OpenStack as a citizen of the industry and of the stack connections with other open source and taking care of that infrastructure piece in 2018, right? Which is, we're pretty far from where we started. No great points to highlight those architectural discussions and really trying to figure out the kind of layering there. You know, obviously we kind of approach OpenStack as kind of the best tool for managing your infrastructure, getting your infrastructure under control, making it scalable, making it automatable and then building an application platform on top of that. I may have confused the architectural discussion a little bit this morning with the keynote because what we actually showed in the keynote was on the rack on stage, we had an OpenStack cloud running on bare metal and then we were then deploying Kubernetes, our OpenShift distribution, we were deploying that also on bare metal alongside OpenStack. Whereas I think often people would assume if you're going to do Kubernetes on OpenStack, you're going to do it in virtual machines that are managed by OpenStack. But we were actually showing how you can use OpenStack to manage the bare metal that you're actually running Kubernetes directly on the bare metal, but that there's still integration between Kubernetes and OpenStack when they're side by side. So maybe confused the architectural discussion a bit more, but I think it's really trying to highlight that that assumption of running Kubernetes inside virtual machines is necessary. You use one of my favorite tools in your keynote, you use Venn diagrams because it is not a thing over here and a thing over here, there's overlap and there's decisions that you'll make and lots of customers want a platform that will guide them down that path. And they also, oh wait, but I have this custom thing that I need to do. I mean, what's the biggest problem we have in IT is it's not standardized and nothing ever gets thrown away. It's like, I went around my Docker image on a ZVM in a mainframe. Oh, Walmart does that, but they also have an OpenStack deployment. So you hear all of these discussions out there and it's like, wait, is this the main thing? Is this modified, what sits on what and where? So it's and, it seems to be and there's a lot of choices. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the really interesting things when you're working in this space is you realize that customers are making really long-term strategic decisions up here. The example I use today was BBVA and they realized that they needed to kind of keep up at a fast changing market and they needed an internal platform to allow them to do that. And this is about them making a long-term decision about how they were going to build that platform into the real kind of long-term and basing their business on that in the future. So that's, it's kind of humbling in terms of having that responsibility of making that work. Yeah. Tim, maybe we can get your comments on the ecosystem. We sure have watched three years ago when we were here, you know, HP had a big army coming in here as to they're doing their distribution. Well, HP's a hardware, HPE I should say is they are now, is a hardware partner, you know, Red Hat works across all of the, you know, traditional infrastructure companies. This ecosystem change, Red Hat has as a broad ecosystem. What are you seeing out there? What do you get from the partners that they're asking and how does that play? Yeah, I think this really, again, mirrors how our approach to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so if you look at all the different dimensions of compute, network and storage, we have ecosystem partners in all of those. So we have the likes for storage, we have NetApp, EMC, IBM, many others. We have backup vendors like Trillio in on that. On the network front, we have Cisco, Juniper, many others. We have ecosystem partners of all the major hardware OEMs. We have ecosystem partners in NV and Telco, all those spaces. So I think what really is the main driver of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ecosystem. It's not really the kernel anymore. It's like, how do you run a consistent platform across multiple footprints? And that's what Red Hat is trying to provide because today I see there is a risk of vendor lock and just like back in the day it was mainframe, right? Try to get everything from, you know, the lowest layer to the top layer on one platform. Many of the public cloud vendors are trying to be that one-stop shop, almost analogous to the mainframe. And what we're trying to do just like we did before for this ecosystem is to provide, through leveraging the power of open source, a platform that people can run, a hybrid platform that they can accelerate their business not only on all the different public clouds but also on premise as well. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, last week, of course, big announcement with Red Hat is Microsoft's up on stage. It was like cats and dogs living together. Year before, Amazon, you had a big announcement with, with Kubernetes and so many of these different tools. Yes, there's that vertical integration but most of the companies understand that they're going to be in a customer environment and other people are. There's no longer, it's, you know, oh, you know, IBM of 50 years ago where I'm going to be full in on that shop. Right, and I see Kubernetes is also, it's a huge open source project. And so this is the difference between upstream and productization. That's what Red Hat does, is we do our maintenance, our support, our hardening, creation of this ecosystem, long life cycle support. The same thing's going to happen in Kubernetes where it's, you don't just grab it upstream and run with whatever happens to be in it. And I think that there's a lot of companies that are claiming that, just, you know, that Kubernetes is ubiquitous and it's like the community innovation is ubiquitous and we're all in for advancing that. But it's really, if you're going to bet your business, you want something that's productized and hardened by a contributor that you can trust. Well, Tim, I want to connect that back with some of the other stuff that we've talked about and on stage today, you know, RHEL, super solid, history of engineering, the lower levels of your stack, need to be solid because you depend on them. We talked a little bit about, on stage, about upgrades and things like that and how people are moving forward, the release schedule. I don't know, Mark, how are you approaching both upgrades and automation with Ansible, but other, I mean, OpenStack has other components too. How are you approaching that in the OpenStack, you know, day two to day, you know, 1,000 scenario? Well, absolutely great question because today we've just announced our upcoming Red Hat OpenStack platform 13 release and that's our long life cycle release. So, our last long life cycle release was version 10 and we've had a couple of shorter life versions in between, but when it comes to the upstream community, what's supported in terms of upgrades is between those individual versions. When we came out with version 13, this long life version, we have to support seamless upgrades between 10 and 13 in place without disrupting workloads that are running in your environment and make it completely smooth and seamless and we're doing that with a feature called Fast Forward Upgrades, which is completely automated with Ansible. So that's been a big part of our focus with our engineering investment for OpenStack. Ansible came up a couple of times on stage, both with Zool and also with the Fast Forward Upgrades and it might have slipped in there a couple more times. It seems like Ansible is a big part of even this community. No, we're very happy with Ansible and it's a really powerful tool when it comes to automation. Got an amazing community around us, kind of real, you know, it's been a kind of an organic growth and we've been really happy with the team since they've joined Red Hat. It's a great foundation for everything we're doing. And Ansible is not just the foundation with an OpenStack. It's, for example, we have Ceph integration in with Ansible. We have OpenShift is how we deploy it using Ansible. It's how we're using it in rel to what we call system roles to be able to make it easier to upgrade from one to the other. So by combining a single technology, it's making it easy for us to put together an integrated portfolio. Great, Tim, when people leave this show, what are some of the key messages you want to make sure that they've heard from Red Hat as part of this community? I would say that it's, Red Hat is bringing an integrated portfolio stack because it's not just about components. It's how can you, it's really all about, how can you build, develop, and deploy applications rapidly? And what's the most enterprise ready, dynamic environment that enables you to do that? And that's what we think that the power of Red Hat through its credibility in the open source community to bring all of those pieces of the stack together from top to bottom. All right, and Mark, we'll give you the final word. Yeah, I'd actually reach for what we're reinforcing a lot in this summit. We're talking about innovating, empowering, and accelerating. That's really about these businesses that are, you know, our customers who are dealing with the challenge of trying to keep up at a rapidly changing market and they need to innovate more. They need to move faster, need to accelerate, but they also need to empower their own application developers to do that innovation and to really kind of keep pace with the market. All right, well, Tim Burke, Mark McLaughlin. Thanks so much for all of the updates here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.