 Okay, we're back here live inside the Cube. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We are here at OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, day three of wall-to-wall coverage. My co-host is with Jeff Frick. He has a little punchy. You know what we're going to say in the Cube. We just heard from Martin Casado talking about aliens in reference to SDN. But great to have some great guests this week and one of the guests I'm really excited to talk with now is Jim Curry, who's the Senior Vice President General Manager of Private Cloud at Rackspace, Cube Alumni. Welcome back to the Cube. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. I'm really excited to have you on because we've had conversations back when I started SiliconANGLE 2009. You guys were running Corp Dev at the time, I believe, at Rackspace. You had cloud sites. You guys saw the movement of cloud. You were all an open-source company at the time. You had the big hosting business, which was lock and loaded, but the cloud was a new adventure for you guys. I remember our conversations back then and for the folks that don't know and Rackspace early on saw the need for developers to embrace open standards and technologies and open interfaces to build the new world. And that was the seed that ended up becoming OpenStack. And then I'll see why I just wrote a story about how it would happen with NASA. So that's from that point it just exploded. So you're kind of like the man behind the curtain, you, Lou Mormon, and the folks over there, Brett and Mark. Mark Collier. Mark Collier, yes. Jonathan Bryce. The one guy that never gets talked about, Jason Seats, who was one of the founders of Slicehost, who I think deserves a lot of credit in where OpenStack was and now is actually working at Techstars. Yeah. Shout out to those guys. Big props. Yeah. Big decision at the time. And we were just talking with an HP executive and they were talking about their cloud strategy was they were thinking in proprietary, obviously HP's got a huge tool chest, and then such side they wanted to go open, so they made the bet on OpenStack. But the halo effect for Rackspace has been pretty significant. Would you say, can you just elaborate on what this means to Rackspace? What OpenStack is now, obviously crossing over the mainstream, how has that changed your business? Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, looking at this summit to put some perspective on how big this movement has gotten, we had a budget of about $15,000 and 75 people that we could jolt into coming down to Austin to hear about this crazy idea and now this is a, you guys are here, and we have a $2 million budget for this conference. So it's changed a lot. You know, in terms of our business, I think you really hit it on the mark. Open source is part of our legacy. You know, we have built our business on open standards. We had been very familiar with consuming them and participating in projects. We'd never, we'd been one of the early leaders in cloud, but we never had actually led and created a project like this. And so when we launched it, it has also been a learning experience for us. What has been amazing is that it clearly struck, it's fair to say, we struck a real vibe with people and the idea that we need to have an open cloud platform. And when you think about the scale of what we've actually done with OpenStack, we have this vision statement from back in 2010 that says, we want to build the ubiquitous cloud platform for public and private clouds that can be massively scalable and easy to install. That sounds great on paper. Think about that. It's really hard to do. And so now Rackspace has proven out that you can run OpenStack at very, very large scale. In my keynote yesterday, I talked about the fact that we have 550 million API requests we've handled with NOVA since we launched it last August. And you have enterprise stories all over the place. So we've succeeded in working with the community to build a platform for solving a very complex problem across a wide variety of use cases. And I think that's really amazing. And we don't hold back our opinions when we blog or do our videos. And obviously big fans of OpenStack when it came out, we were also kind of screaming, hey, don't make it a pool party. People were worried about that, jumping in the pool, splashing around. We weren't going to call it St. Gria. And that was a big concern, marketing hype taking over. And a lot of companies didn't have a cloud strategy. So Amazon coming down the pike on 100 miles an hour on-boarding developers, making DevOps a reality. And so there was this hustle. I need a strategy. We were afraid that OpenStack could be that. And since we also are very vocal of success, you guys have done a great job of making sure and shielding away that risk for being a marketing hype. How did you guys do that? So explain to the audience how that all happened. Let me give you some credit first. You were actually right to a great extent. So we had to, OpenStack really did start as a promise. We didn't have, we had object storage, which people in the project know is Swift, which was running in production at Rackspace. But we were very early stage with the rest of it. And we brought together a lot of people and had to architect a solution from the beginning. We had to design it and work together. And I think the way we did it is we at Rackspace, because we're not a software vendor, I think people had a lot of faith that we are ultimately a user of OpenStack more than anything else. And we've been very clear our intention is not to monetize it by ever packaging it up and having an enterprise version and selling it. And I think that actually gave people a lot of confidence that we were going to be able to work with them. There was no hidden agenda to monetize. And then we just frankly worked our butts off to find people that agreed with us and that wanted to have a world in which Open Standards existed because it was either relevant to their business model as a company. It was required for the success of their business. Or frankly, they just had a bunch of developers that, hey, that's a great, cool idea and we want to help with that. So you're saying what happened was is that the kernel of folks that got involved really were building. And so the proof was in the pudding. That's right. And that was the key. You had to start from day one building together. I mean, I could go back and name a lot of names, but if you think of the Zen source guys that were et cetera, you know, Gordon Manjone and folks like that that were very involved in helping us get this started and the folks of Dell on John Igo's team. And, you know, just I could keep going down the list. We had to obviously the folks at NASA, you know, we had a lot of people that had to get together on day one and craft out a vision. In fact, if I think back to the initial NASA meeting that we had, we took a bunch of developers and architects and we flew them to NASA and they sat in a room and they architected out what basically has become OpenStack today. And they had listed the initial vision for it and said, okay, we all agree on actually what we want to build. Now let's actually get to work doing it. And so when you can keep people from being distracted from other things by actually having them there be work to be done, it's great. So anyway, I think that was a big reason why. Well, big props to you guys. Got a lot of credit from the other folks that have been on the Cube today and yesterday. So congratulations. But let's talk now about OpenStack today. Obviously record numbers and it's this talk of, you know, more coming on next event. Obviously we'll bring the Cube to all the events now. Now that we've seen all this action happen and we're excited by it as well. There's a lot of demand. Enterprise and service providers like Cloud Builders, they want unique plug and play choice. What's happening now and what's your role in the next foundation, I know Mark Collier's on the foundation, so he's involved. So what's the next step for Rackspace? What does this evolve into quickly? So one of the things we announced this week is that we are going to be enabling service providers and telcos with OpenStack based public clouds. So we'll start packaging up our public cloud and deploying it for service providers and telcos who want it. To run it on their own, not a reseller too. That's actually the big part of it. We're going to run it for them. Okay, so I think one of the problems that people miss in cloud is this community has been very focused on deployment as a topic and I think three years in, we need to get past this. The deployment's not the problem with cloud. Running a distributed cloud architecture is hard. Doing a DevOps model, a true DevOps model with continuous integration and continuous deployment is something that not many people have done. And so we think one of the values that we can bring to the community is to help other service providers who don't know how to get these things stood up to not only stand them up but then to operate them. So we'll deploy in their data center. We'll operate with them. We'll help them learn how to support their customers who are running on that cloud. And then we'll help them with a go to market. How do you go out and find people who need to be in the cloud and workloads that need to be in the cloud and work with them. But most importantly, we'll federate it together so that customers will be assured that they are given the ability to get into one cloud provider and have access to them all. So is that a professional services like function? Or is it, are they buying the gear? Are you guys provisioning the infrastructure? They're buying the gear. They're giving us the data center and we're going in there and putting the code in and running it for them. That's great, that's great. And Miranda's having a lot of success doing similar things. That's right. And they've been, they're just another great example of early collaborators who, I don't know the story of how Boris and team got involved. I can't actually remember it. But what I can tell you was it was very noticeable because they brought a large army of development talent. And most importantly, they went out and found customers who wanted to work with them on building it. So yeah. So we've got this phenomenal event, 3,000 people from the 750. Yep. For the people. From 75. Excuse me, 75, it is late Wednesday. Yeah. For the folks that aren't here. Can you share a couple of some of the more fun stories that you've heard while you've been here? As you've been talking to both early adopters as well as some of the more recent people to open today. Yeah, so first I think the story of this conference, my keynote was titled The Year of the User. And I actually didn't mean to title it that way because I had any knowledge of what was going to occur at this conference. But right before I went on stage, we marched out three different companies in the keynote and Mark and Jonathan's keynote that talked about their usage of OpenStack. And then I marched out HubSpot, who's a marketing software company that we work with around OpenStack. And then as you've gone around to all these summit sessions, it's about users telling their stories. I thought the NSA presentation this morning was, I mean, anyone who's concerned about security if the NSA can run it, I think it's a pretty secure system. It was a great presentation. We have run into companies of all sizes and shapes and nationalities running OpenStack. And what's been fun for me is, if you came here a year ago, it's a very developer focused conference where you can go and listen to the developer talks. You can now really go hear users tell their stories about what they're doing and more importantly, see the exchange of ideas. And there's still a lot of developers. I mean, there's a real high-end developer. Oh, yes. All developers and users. Yeah, you could also watch that shift when we started off. It was an entire development conference and then users showed up. And then that's why the conference started to where we had two different tracks because they don't necessarily want to be working on the same topics together. But we have this strange interaction between users and developers that works. And maybe because that's the new model with DevOps, that's just how the world operates. But yes, it's an interesting, eclectic group of people. David Floyer from our analyst team at Wikibon was here and he said, I'm going to post on today, it's a hype-free zone. It was one of the best analyst events he's been to. Yeah, it was great. Because it was all users, no vendor hype. That's right. And that's a real testament to this year's event. Yeah, no, it was, I went to the analyst stage because I wanted to hear some of the presentations from some of the users. J.C. Martin at eBay, who's a, if you ever get a chance to interview him, I highly recommend it. He's doing some very innovative things around OpenStack. It was just some great talks. And again, what's amazing is not just the diversity use cases, it's the size of them, it's the commitment to production. And it's really at this point, it's very safe to say, I'm willing to bet we've hit the tipping point, this thing's going to be successful. So I got to ask you, you've been in the corporate dev side of Rackspation now running the big P&L and GM and SVP. You're in the upper management of Rackspace. But you've seen a lot of things happen over the past couple years. And we're at the beginning of a major paradigm shift. A lot of action, Martín Casado was saying, you know, people are shooting at each other, kind of the saloons, it's like, okay, Corral, it's fun, people winning and losing. It's just like, it's early on, and Jeff's like, the Model T needs to come out, right? Come on, where are those use cases? And that's what he was referring to. What are you seeing right now as the key deployments that you can point to and say, you know, these are, this is the Model T of what OpenStack could deliver. What are some of those things? So, you know, again, I'll talk about one of our customers. So HubSpot, their use case is really interesting. They used to be an Amazon only customer. They had a lot of problems fine tuning their application to work in the cloud only, much less just on Amazon. And they wanted to have more control over their environment. And so we worked with them to architect a solution that consisted of OpenStack Public Cloud, OpenStack Private Cloud, as well as Dedicated Gear, all operating together as a single architecture. That's really powerful. This, you know, everything's not going to the public cloud. Everything's not going to stay in Dedicated. There's going to be some world in between. So I think that's actually an interesting use case because much of what happened early on is there was a focus on getting, working with early adopters who were all in on OpenStack. But the rest of the world is not going to go all in on one model they're going to do. They're going to do hybrid models. I think a lot of the discussions around how OpenStack and VMware environments coexist together and have different use cases has become one way this movement has matured. Look, if you'd been here two years ago, what you guys were, a lot of people are just zealous of OpenStack. You know, they're just zealous for the technology. I am, I love it, I want to see it succeed. You get a lot more practical realists now who are actually trying to deal with real world business problems who are coming in and talking through these things. Yeah, and the environments that they had to deploy into. Yeah, for the customization. But you don't believe, you don't think it's hit a tipping point, you don't think there's use cases out there? I think there's great use cases. No, absolutely. What I like is what Sar said earlier today is that ultimately whatever, whether it's a private cloud, a public cloud, whatever the resources are behind the application, I don't really care. I just, he said, look at your mobile phone. You see what you want to do, you push the button and however that particular application is provisioned and even portions of that application. They don't care. I don't really care. I just want to work. And the ability to manage across multiple types of cloud so that you use the appropriate resources, the appropriate level of security, the appropriate horse power for that application. And that's all the stuff in the kitchen that I don't need to see. I just want a nice, I just want a nice. Then he went out and said, there's a lot of work to do. But it's a lot of work to do, right? No, I'm not there yet. The really elegant solutions are usually a lot of work. Yeah, it's very early days in this, but I'll give you another kind of proof point that's interesting about the evolution of the market here. Rackspace is historically an SMB company. We focus on smaller enterprises. And a lot of these people, forget cloud. They don't want to know anything about their infrastructure. They just want us to run it for them. Well, we've seen a big uptick in customers whose applications are really fine tuned. We're not, I'm talking specifically about private cloud that are fine tuned for private cloud and work really well in private cloud. And we've been signing them up as customers left and right. What's very interesting about them is most of them don't care it's open stack, don't know anything about open stack. They just want us to run it for them and maintain it. And we're working to make sure that the applications work. Yeah, you're the user. You are the user open stack. You need to make it work cohesively across all elements. That's right, that's right. So anyway, we feel very confident about it's adoption level where we continue. I would say we invest more in it now than we ever have and we used to have to run the foundation. So that was a costly endeavor, but we only continue to pour money into it. So in the early days of cloud, when going back, even 2009, 10, when open stack was started, DevOps was a term we all kicked around. Everyone knew it was called. Now that's gone mainstream. You talk to anyone on IT. DevOps is now a mindset that's shifting over helping accelerate or the Kool-Aid, if you will, for the modern infrastructure. But one word that we're bringing forth that's in the trenches that we wanted to go mainstream is this concept of infrastructure as code. Yep. Okay, and so I want to get your take. What do you view as a user of cloud and there are other cloud builders out there with this enterprise. Infrastructure as code is a concept. Yep. And can you share the opinion of what you think infrastructure as code is? Well, I mean, we use a term IT as a service, which means we want to give customers, we want to give them an API that just works and they shouldn't care about anything that goes on behind the scenes on it. But I mean, look, cloud is all about cloud. The beautiful part about cloud for us and our business is because it abstracts you away from the underlying hardware and all the underlying infrastructure. We can actually do a lot of stuff that we couldn't do before in terms of remote management and support of customers. And so when we launched the private cloud effort, we are now remotely logging in to customers' environments without their knowledge, right? They don't, they want to give us and let us run it and have control of their environment or run in their infrastructure for them because infrastructure is now software. It's not physical. And it's been a big business change for us. And so the previous cap that actually has had on its growth as a company was how quick we expand data centers. The cap they have on our growth right now is how many people can we get to this concept of we can deliver IT as a service to you and if you want that and our data center is great, but if you want your own data center, we can do that as well. And we've been really growing dramatically. And one of the benefits of having successfully participated and contribute and forming OpenStack is that your population of workers is growing as well. And they're not necessarily Rackspace employees. That's right. As a job market, you're enabling job creation, you're enabling the market. And that benefit to you is significant. So you guys move the ball down the field significantly for Rackspace as a company. Well, if you sell it. That's a business model for open source. Yeah, no, I have a, just on this point, I have this chart that I show. It's my favorite declining chart down into the right, which says Rackspace's relative code contributes to the community. And we keep going down and down and down, right? At the same time, overall uses of code as a company from OpenStack goes up. We deploy everything. We are running everything OpenStack produces. The good news is we don't have to build it all anymore. We're getting it from the community and being able to consume it. And HP pointed out in their talk here in theCUBE that security is solved by open source because more people can see it. More people can see it. And that's a fundamental mindset shift. If you went into, you know, we talk about cloud and enterprises willing to stop cloud, but one thing that is a real sea change is open source in general. Again, three years ago, we went and talked to enterprises about cloud and a lot of ways they're more concerned about open source than anything else. But they just had not adopted it as a key part of their strategy. They would do it when they had to, but they had a lot of concerns. Usually it would be around this idea that's less secure. Today, most of the companies we work with have a mandate to have open sources as a key part of what they do, if not the default. And that has been a dramatic change in a very short period of time. Yeah, and I don't think, I think originally, open source was just a cost saving, right? It was an alternative to buying a license, you thought. And it's amazing how your company, and again, HP choosing to go open stack instead of their own stuff that they could have pulled out of the back room is really a fundamental way of using open source in your business. And you guys take it to the next level and actually leading one of the projects. So it's a pretty interesting story. So my final question, Jim, I know you've been exhausted, and we're on day three. Day three is always the hardest. Thanks for doing that to me. Day three is always the hardest for us. My final question is much more of a reflection for you. And if you can reflect and share with the audience. Over the years, your journey here with the cloud at Rackspace, where it's come from and now where it is today on the edge of exploding with success in the community and open source things you mentioned, what have you learned in building the cloud over the speed bumps you've hit, the scar tissue that you've learned, the success, the failure, the interactions? What have you learned in all this and that you could share with the folks out there? And a 30 second answer, that's a tough one. We can take your time. We have 30 seconds to expand if you want, but we're not getting to commercial breaks. You guys did a lot of R&D and you were in real time and you bought cloud sites and you had to expand that very rapidly and you guys did a great job with OpenStack and Parallel. So what have you learned? I have learned that personally, big bets are important to make as a company. You talked about OpenStack being a game changer for us. And actually in the big scheme of things, it was an obvious thing to do as you look back at it. But I do think that one of the things I enjoy about, I've been at Rackspace for seven years, we have never been unwilling to pivot and move in a completely new direction and really try to be at the forefront of the industry and that for me personally has been rewarding. I also think that one of the things that also gets lost around OpenStack is just the culture that this has created of collaboration. I made a comment when IBM joined the community, I talked about the fact that IBM has got a lot of history of knowing how to both collaborate and compete at the same time. Early stage OpenStack, sometimes you brought this up, knives came out inappropriately and the process is getting this started. But we've gotten a culture that has seemed to have worked where because we put developers first, because we made it to meritocracy, because we made it, if you write code and it's good, then you can decide where the project goes or what succeeds. That culture is really amazing and it is something that's not been limited to OpenStack. It's actually permeated the way our company operates. As I talked to other companies here, I think it permeates the way they operate. People talk about the OpenStack way of doing things. I've been approached by people who want to understand, hey, we're doing this open source project X, what's the magic behind OpenStack? I'm like, wow, if I wish I knew that, if I knew that I could probably make a lot more money and go off and do it. A lot of it was just right timing, but I do think this culture really matters. And if you guys, I don't know if you've talked at all about interoperability this week and the debates that are current around this, that was a number one issue that people are focused on right now. Making that work. It's a good issue. There's a project called, I'm on the board of directors and we're going to debate how to actually enforce this over time and we'll get to a good answer. But in true open source fashion, the community's already answered it for us, in my opinion. A group of smart developers got together, created this project called RefStack, which is going to look at what clouds are running and document the services and then publish it out there. And guess what? All of a sudden we're going to have a map of what people are using and I think that will probably be a good standard for what we decide. A leader board. Well, you'll decide that if 90% of the world is using that service, that probably should be a key design attribute. Yeah, but that's unique to OpenStack. You developer solved the problem. It wasn't done by mandate. It wasn't done by business people. It just developed. They just figured it out. Yeah, so the culture is cool. Well, we're excited to be here. This is theCUBE and again, we're excited to make the trip and document everything here at OpenStack. Thanks for putting it all together with the Rackspace team and kudos to the foundation and all of the collaboration there. It's been fantastic. Jim Curry, a general manager, senior vice president at Rackspace and the private cloud. One of the key figures amongst all of Rackspace employees and made it happen. Appreciate it. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break.