 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to live Kube coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, breaking down all the action here for a CloudNative trend, and a lot of ecosystem partners, a lot of new developers, a lot of great open source action, theCUBE's here covering it. We've been there from the beginning. Our next guest, end user, Max Schultz, who's the advisor and founder of NBF. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you, thank you for having me. Just talking about what you're working on. You're doing something pretty compelling with Kubernetes and CloudNative. Take a minute to explain what you do. Yeah, actually, so we are advising a very large energy utility in the Nordics, and what we're trying to do with OpenShift and Kubernetes is actually to shift loads between different data centers based on power availability. So if you have wind and solar power, you know that you only get energy when the wind is blowing, so you really need to be able to match that the load of a data center with the actual energy production, which is quite challenging, to be honest. Max, you have a different take on follow the sun that we used to talk about in IT, I'm guessing, yes? Take us inside a little bit. The sustainability is really interesting some of the power usage and heat and everything, and maybe you can explain that a little bit before we get into the tech. Of course, so generally how we got to a sustainable data center was that in the Nordics, you see a big growth of data centers in general, so all the hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, AWS, they're all coming to build data centers in Nordics. It's cold, power is cheap, you have lots of renewable energy available, and we started to think, okay, but they have two problems, essentially. They generate a lot of heat, which is just emitted into the atmosphere, so it's wasted, and the second problem is that they want 100% reliable power, and reliable power, you only get from nuclear, you get from gas, coal-fired power plants, not from renewables. So we looked into this, and we started to think about, okay, can we maybe get the heat out? Can we extract the heat from a data center and inject it into these tracheating grids and actually heat homes? With a hyperscale data center for Microsoft, 300 megawatts, you can heat about 150,000 homes. That's quite significant. Yeah, and how are you doing that? I mean, I talked to company ones that was like, oh, well, we're going to, we'll just distribute the servers different places and then just ambient heat off of it, but you're extracting the heat and sharing it. Explain that a little bit more. So most existing data center projects, they extract the heat out of the air, but that's really inefficient. You get to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not high quality heat. So what we want is 140 degrees Fahrenheit, about 60 degrees Celsius, which means that we have to use liquids. So we have to use water in this case and we use a cooling system that's quite ironic from a startup in Germany called Cloud and Heat that uses hot water to cool servers. So the water really flows at a very, very high speed through the data center and on its way picks up a very low amount of temperature and we get out the water at 140 degrees Fahrenheit and we put it in at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's quite, not a big difference, but it flows at a very high speed. So it makes it work, makes the numbers work. So what's the home count again? You mentioned one hyperscale data center, like a Microsoft data center powers heat for how many homes? About 150,000 homes from 300 megawatts worth of data center. And you guys put this into a grid. So does this location of the homes have to be nearby? Is there a co-location kind of map? Yeah, actually we, in order to do this, we have to move data centers closer to cities, but luckily data centers actually want to be closer to cities because you're closer to peering points. And one of the reasons why they usually can't come closer to cities is because power is not available near a city. So we try, we can give them both, right? They can come closer to the city, we can give them power and we get the heat in return. So everybody wins. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of the discussion we've had is the interaction between software and my data center infrastructure. You've got a story of software with actual city underneath the infrastructure. I hope explain how that was built out, what tools you're using and walk us through this all. So we originally started with OpenStack, which was the first test because we need, in order to do this heat extraction, we need to also steer really the software, the workloads that run on the data center because a chip only gets hot when the server actually does something. So we really had to figure this out. And we started with OpenStack and then we started looking into load shifting, which immediately brought us to Kubernetes and OpenShift because you can use the internal scheduler to basically force loads across different locations. We connected to our energy systems, to our forecasting systems and to our heat load management systems and then basically push workloads around. Right now we have two sides where we test this and it's not as easy as it sounds. And we basically want to move workloads, concentrate them where we have heat. So, yeah, Reddit is helping us a lot doing this, but still it's not that easy. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I think back, you know, virtualization was about, you know, oh, how can we drive some utilization and get some out? You really want to, you know, concentrate and run things hot. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, quite interesting. All right, tell us about your involvement in this ecosystem. You know, what brings you to the show this week? What do you get out of coming to a show like this? Yeah, actually, I came because Reddit invited us to talk at the OpenShift Gathering at the beginning of the conference. And generally, we don't really have a commercial interest in making data centers or data infrastructure sustainable. We don't gain anything from that, but we believe it's necessary. If you look at the growth curve of data centers, you can really see that they will consume more and more power and the power they consume is not compatible with renewable energy. So we are hoping that we can influence people and we come here to tell people our story and we actually get great feedback from most of the nerds. Well, it's a great story. It's one of those things where starting to see data centers trying to solve these problems, great with the renewable energy, having that kind of success story. It's really huge. You mentioned that data centers want to be close to the city. They go, I got to ask the question. In Europe, you've lived around a lot of places, is there a more cloud city oriented? Like, is it London? You got Paris? I know Amazon's got data centers in Ireland. Is there certain cities that are more cloud native culture? How would you break down the affinity towards cloud native if you had to map Europe? Which major countries and cities would you think are advanced cloud thinking versus tire kickers or people just kind of just trying it? And in Europe, there's a region called the Flapp region. It's Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris. Those are where you have the highest concentration of data centers. But in terms of cloud native adoption, I would say that probably in the UK, you have the most adoption rates and in the Netherlands. Germany is always, I am German, so I can say this a bit. We are always a bit behind in terms of cloud technology because we're a bit scared. Don't watch everyone test it out, then you guys will make it go faster. Maybe, maybe, maybe make it a little bit more efficient, but generally I think the cloud adoption rate in Germany is the lowest and the UK Netherlands is the highest, I would say. Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Congratulations on your success. We'll keep following you. And we're in Europe. We're going to come by and say hello. Thanks for coming to share in the stories. The Cube breaking down all the action at KubeCon, cloud native con. I'm John Horst, two minute in day two. We've got three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Thanks for watching.