 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the Kube's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Austin, Texas. This is the Kube's exclusive coverage of the CloudNative Conference and KubeCon for Kubernetes Conference. This is from the Linux Foundation. This is the Kube. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, my co-host. Our next guest is Dustin Kirkman, Vice President of Product, the Ubuntu-Conautical. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So, you're the product guy. You get the keys to the kingdom, as they always say in the product circles. Man, what a best time to be. They always say that. I don't think I've heard that one. Well, the product guys are, all the action's happening on the product side. We're right in the middle of it. Because you got to have a roadmap. You got to have a 20-mile stair on the next horizon while you go out into the pasture and deliver value. But you always got to be watching for and always making decisions on what to do, went to ship product. Now you got the cloud, things are happening. At a very accelerated rate. And then you got to bring it out to the customers. So you got to kind of, you're living on both sides of the world. You got to look inside. You got to look outside. Well, all three. There's the marketing angle too, which is what we're doing here right now. So there's engineering sales and this is the marketing. All right, so where are we with this? Because now you guys have always been on the front lines of open source. Great track record. Everyone knows the history there. What are the new things? What's the big aha moment that this event largest they've had ever? Not even three years old. Yep. It's great to, I love seeing these events in my hometown, Austin, Texas. So I hope we keep coming back. The aha moment is how application development is fundamentally changing. Cloud Native is the title of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Cloud Native Conference here. What does Cloud Native mean? You know, it's a different form of writing applications. Just before we were talking about systems programming, right, that's not exactly Cloud Native. Cloud Native programming is writing to APIs that are cloud exposed APIs, integrating with software as a service, creating applications that have no intelligence whatsoever about what's underneath them, right? But taking advantage of that in all the ways that you would want and expect in a modern application, fault tolerance, automatic updates, hyper security, just security, security, security. That is the aha moment, that the way applications are being developed is fundamentally changing. Interesting perspective we had on earlier, Lou Tucker from Cisco, Legend, obviously had some stuff in the computer history museum, CTO at Cisco, and we had Kelsey Hightower, co-chair for this conference and also very active in the community. In the perspective, I'll oversimplify and generalize it, but basically was, hey, this stuff's been going on for 30 years, it's just different now. And so tell us the old way and new way, because the old way you're kind of describing it, you got to build your own stuff, full stack, build all parts of the stack and do a lot of stuff that you didn't want to do. And now you have more, potentially, time on your hands if DevOps and infrastructure as code starts to happen. But doesn't mean that networking goes away, doesn't mean that storage goes away, that some new lines are forming. Describe that dynamic of the, what's new in the new way and what's changed is from the old way. Yeah, I think we've kind of, virtualization has brought about a different way of thinking about resources, be those compute resources, chopping CPUs up into virtual CPUs, that's KVM VMware. You mentioned network and storage. Now we virtualize both of those into software defined storage and software defined networking, right? We have things like OpenStack that bring that all together from an infrastructure perspective. And we now have Kubernetes that really brings that to bear from an application perspective. Kubernetes thinks about, helps you think about applications in a different way. I said that paradigm has changed. It's Kubernetes that helps implement that paradigm so that developers can write an application to a container orchestrator like Kubernetes and take advantage of many of the advances we've made below that layer in the operating system and in the cloud itself. So from that perspective, the game has changed and the way you write your application is not the same as the monolithic app we might have written on an IBM or a traditional system. Yeah, Dustin, you say monolithic app versus, oh my gosh, the multi-layered cake that we have today. We were talking about the keynote this morning where just CNCF got went from four project to 14 projects. You got Kubernetes, you got things like Istio on top. Help us tease out a little bit. What are the ones that, where's canonical engage? What are you hearing from customers? What are they excited about? What are they still looking for? Yeah, in a somewhat self-serving way, I'll use this opportunity to explain exactly what we do in helping build that layer cake. It starts with the OS. We provide a great operating system of Ubuntu that every developer would certainly know and understand and appreciate. That's the kernel, that's the system D, that's the hypervisor, that's all the storage and drivers that makes the operating system work well on hardware, lots of hardware, IBM, Dell, HP, Intel, all the rest, as well as in virtual machines, the public clouds, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, VMware, and others. So we take care of that operating system perspective. Within the CNCF and within the Kubernetes ecosystem, it really starts with the Kubernetes distribution. So we provide a Kubernetes distribution, we call it canonical's distribution of Kubernetes, CDK, which is open source Kubernetes with security patches applied, that's it. No special sauce, no extra proprietary extensions. It is open source Kubernetes, the reference platform for open source Kubernetes, 100% conformant. Now, once you have a Kubernetes, as you say, what are you hearing from customers? We hear a lot of customers who want a Kubernetes. Once they have a Kubernetes, the next question is, now what do I do with it? If they have applications that their developers have been writing to Google's Kubernetes engine, GKE, or Amazon's Kubernetes engine, the new one announced last week at Reinvent, AKS, or Microsoft's Kubernetes engine, AK, Microsoft. Microsoft's AKS, Amazon's EKS. Okay. A lot of TLA's out there always. Thank you for the TLA dissection. If you've written the applications already, having your own Kubernetes is great, because then your applications simply port and run on that, and we help customers get there. However, if you haven't written your first application, that's where actually most of the industry is today. They want a Kubernetes, but they're not sure why. So, to that end, we're helping bring some of the interesting workloads that exist, open source workloads, and putting those on top of canonical Kubernetes. Yesterday, we press released a new product from Canonical launched in conjunction with our partners at Rancher Labs, which is the cloud-native platform. The cloud-native platform is Ubuntu, plus Kubernetes, plus Rancher. That combination we've heard from customers and from users of Ubuntu, inside and out, everyone's interested in a developer workflow that includes open-source Ubuntu, open-source Kubernetes, and open-source Rancher, which really accelerates the velocity of development. And that end-to-end solution provides exactly that, and it helps populate that Kubernetes with really interesting workloads. Yeah, Dustin, so we know Shang, Shannon and the team. They know a thing or two about building stacks with open-source. We've talked with you many times at OpenStack. Maybe give us a little bit of kind of compare and contrast. What we've been doing with OpenStack, which Canonical very heavily involved, doing great there, versus kind of the cloud-native stack. Right, if you know Shannon and Shang, I think you can understand and appreciate why Mark, myself, and the rest of the Canonical team are really excited about this partnership. We really see eye-to-eye on open-source principles first, deliver open-source, great open-source experiences first, and then taking that to market with a product that revolves around support. Ultimately, developer adoption up front is what's important, and some of those developer applications will make its way into production in a mission-critical sense, which open up support opportunities for both of us. And we certainly see eye-to-eye from that perspective. What we bring to bear is the Ubuntu ecosystem of developers, the Ubuntu OpenStack infrastructure as a service, where we've seen many of the world's largest organizations deploying their OpenStacks, doing so on Ubuntu and with Ubuntu OpenStack. With the launch of Kubernetes and Canonical Kubernetes, many of those same organizations are running their own Kubernetes alongside OpenStack, or in some cases on top of OpenStack. In a very few cases, instead of OpenStack, in very special cases, often at the edge or in certain tiny cloud or micro-cloud scenarios. In all of these, we see Rancher as a really, really good partner in helping to accelerate that developer workflow. Enabling developers to write code, commit code to a GitHub repository with full GitHub integration, authenticate against an active directory with full RBAC controls, everything that you would need in an enterprise to bring that application to bear from concept to development to test into production, and then the lifecycle once it gains its own life in production. What about the impact of customers? So I'm an IT guy, or I'm an architect, and man, all this new stuff's coming at me. I love my open source, I'm happy, it's big, don't want to touch it, I want to break it. Oh, but I want to innovate. This whole world can be a little bit noisy and new to them. How do you have that conversation with that potential customer or customer where you say, look, we can get there. Here's your app team, here's what you want to shape up to be. Here's service meshes and pluggable, whoa, pluggable architectures, I can plug it. So again, how do you simplify that when you have conversations? What's the narrative, what's the conversation like? Yeah, usually our introduction into the organization, the Fortune 500 company, is by the developers inside of that company who already know Ubuntu, who already have some experience with Kubernetes or have some experience with Rancher or any of those other- It's bottoms up. It bottoms up, absolutely, absolutely. The developer network around Ubuntu is far bigger than the organization that is canonical. So that helps us with the intro. Once we're in there, and the developers write those first few apps, we do get the introductions to their IT director who then wants that comfy blanket, customer support, maybe 24 by 7 or 25. What's the experience like? Is it like going to the airport and going through TSA and you got to take your shoes off, take your belt off? I mean, what kind of inspection? What is kind of the culture? Because, I mean, they want to move fast, but they got to be sure. There's always been the challenge when you have the internal advocates saying, look it, we want to go this way. And this is going to be more of the reality for companies. Developers are now major influencers, not just some, here's the product, we made a decision and they ship it to them. It's shifted. Right. If there's one thing that I've learned in this sort of product management assignment, and I'm an engineer by trade, but as a product manager now for almost five years, it's that you really have to look at the different verticals and some verticals move at vastly different paces than other verticals. When we're in the telco space, we're in RFIs, request for quote or request for information that may last months, nine months, and then go entering into a procurement process that may last another nine months. And we're talking about 18 months in an industry here that is spinning up. We're talking about how fast this goes, which is vastly different than the work we do in Silicon Valley, right? With some of the largest dot-coms in the world that are built on Ubuntu, maybe in AWS or elsewhere, their adoption curve is significantly different and the procurement angle is really different. What they're looking to buy, often on the US West Coast, is not so much support, but they're looking to guide your roadmap. And so we offer for customers of that size and scale a different set of products, something we call feature sponsorships, where those customers are less interested in 24 by seven telephone support and far more interested in sponsoring certain features into Ubuntu itself and helping drive the Ubuntu roadmap. We offer both of those as products and different verticals by in different ways. We talk to media and entertainment and the conversation's completely different. Oil and gas, conversation's completely different. So my verdict, okay, so what are you doing here? What's the big effort at Cloud Native gone? Yeah, so we've got a great booth and we're talking about Ubuntu as a pretty universal platform for almost anything you're doing in the Cloud, whether that's on-prem infrastructure as a service, OpenStack, we still have, people can poo-poo OpenStack and point OpenStack versus Kubernetes against one another. We could not see it more differently. Well, no, I think it's more that it's, you've got clarity on where the community's lines are because apps guys are moving off OpenStack best natural. It's really found a home, OpenStack, very relevant. Oh, without a doubt. Huge production workload. I talked to Jonathan Price about this all the time. Yeah. I mean, there's no poo-pooing OpenStack. Right. I mean, it's not like it's hurting. Right, right. I mean, just to clarify, OpenStack is not going anywhere. It's just that there's been some comments about OpenStack refugees going, but they're going there anyway. Right. That's up to Stack. Right. And we offer, you agree? Yeah, I agree. And that choice is there on Ubuntu. So infrastructure as a service, OpenStack's fantastic platform. Platforms as a service are cloud native, true cloud native development. Kubernetes is an excellent platform. We see those running side by side. Two racks of systems are a single rack. Half of those machines are OpenStack, half of those are Kubernetes, and the same IT department manages both. We see IT departments that are all in on OpenStack. Their entire data center is OpenStack, and we see Kubernetes as one workload inside of that OpenStack. How do you see Kubernetes impact on containers? A lot of people are poo-pooing containers, but they're not poo-pooing anywhere either. No, yeah. It's fundamental. The ecosystem's changing. Certainly the roles of each part. My cursor is exploding. How do you talk about that? What's your opinion on how containers are evolving? Containers are evolving, but they've been around for a very long time as well, right? Kubernetes has helped make containers consumable, and Docker to an extent before that, the work we've done around Linux containers, LXD, LXD, as well. All of those technologies are fundamental to it, and it takes tight integration with the OS. Yeah. Dustin, so I'm curious. One of the big challenges I have to think you face is the proliferation of deployments for customers. It's not just data center, or even cloud. Edge is now a very big piece of it. I have to think that containers helps enable a little bit of that. Kind of cloud native goes there, but what kind of stresses has that put on your product organization? Containers are adding fuel to the fire on both the edge and in the backend cloud. What's exciting to me about the edge is that every edge device, every connected device is connected to something. What's it connected to? A cloud somewhere, and that can be an open-stack cloud or a Kubernetes cloud. That can be a public cloud. That can be a private implementation of that cloud. But every connected device, whether it's a car or a plane or a train or a printer or a drone, is connected to something, and it's connected to a bunch of services. We see containers being deployed on Ubuntu on those edge devices, right? As the packaging format, as the application format, as the multi-tenancy layer that keeps one application from dosing or attacking or being protected from another application on that edge device. We also see containers running the microservices in the cloud on Ubuntu there as well. The edge to me is extremely interesting in how it ties back to the cloud. And to be transparent here, canonical strategy and canonical's play is actually quite strong here with Ubuntu providing quite a bit of consistency across those two layers. The developers working on those applications on those devices are often sitting right next to the developers working on those applications in the cloud, and both of them are seeing Ubuntu helping them go faster. Bottom line, where do you see the industry going? How do you guys fit into the next three years? What's your prediction? Yeah, so that, I think, I'm going to go right back to what I was saying right there. The connection between the edge and the cloud is our angle right there, and there's nothing that's stopping that right now. I mean, we were just talking with Joe Bita, and our view is, well, if it's a distributed computing world, everything's an edge. Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right. Data center's an edge. A light in a house is an edge with a process in it. Yeah, so I think the data centers are getting smarter. You wanted a prediction for next year. The prediction, the data center's getting smarter. We're seeing autonomous data centers. We see data centers using metals as service masks to automatically provision those systems, and manage those systems in a way that makes that hardware look like a cloud. AI and IoT, certainly two topics that are really hot trends that are very relevant, is changing storage and networking. Those industries have to transform Amazon's telegraphy, things like Lambda and serverless. You're starting to see the infrastructure as code take shape. Yeah, and that's what sits on top of Kubernetes. That's what's driving Kubernetes adoption, are those AI machine learning, artificial intelligence workloads, a lot of the media and transcoding workloads that are taking advantage of Kubernetes every day. Bottom line, that's software. Good software, smart software. That's right. Dustin, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Congratulations all of continued developer success. Good to have a great ecosystem. You guys have been successful for a long time, and as the world can be democratized with software as it gets smarter, more pervasive, and cloud computing, grid computing, unicred, whatever it's called, it is all driven by software and cloud. Thanks for coming on. It's theCUBE live coverage from Austin, Texas here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break.