 EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to all the enterprise tech shows, help extract the signal from the noise. This is EMC World 2016. It's actually our seventh year at the show. Personally for me, it's my 14th year coming to the show. So lots of familiar faces. Happy to bring on as our first guest here on this set, Brian Graceley and I are welcoming a first-time member of theCUBE and a new person to EMC, Josh Bernstein, who's the VP of Technical Strategy with EMC. Josh, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. All right, you will be joining an illustrious audience of thousands of people who we call CUBE alumni. Everyone from Michael Dell, who happens to be being interviewed right now, John Cleese, Satya Nadella and yourself. We came from Apple about a year ago to EMC. Give our audience a little bit of understanding about your background and what would bring you to leave Apple to join EMC and storage companies. That's a great question. I had the pleasure of working with some really talented people at Apple. We basically designed and built the Siri infrastructure from the ground up from day one up until about the time I left about a year ago. And I wanted a different challenge. I wanted to do something different. At some point, it's year four and they're like, how many servers do you need to add? And you're like, oh, another 5,000 boxes here, 5,000 boxes there. It was sort of rinse and repeat, but we went on an amazing journey. We ran the world's largest VMware environment and then ran what I still think is the world's largest Mesa containerized environment. And the one problem, you know, the engineering me, the one problem that kind of stuck with us was that at that time we couldn't figure out a good way to run persistent applications in our containerized environments. And we kind of punted and kind of worked around the issue. But as an engineer, I wanted to go solve that problem. Brian and his team had created amazing work with EMC code previously and it was just a, I was really passionate about solving that problem technically and that's the biggest reason I came was to do something different and to solve a problem that bothered me. Yeah, so yeah, my co-host here, Brian Grace Lee Wright, was a year ago at EMC doing the EMC code team. I actually have some history. I was the product manager for Linux back at EMC back in 2000. So I know for a fact, how many people knew open source over my time there and what's there. So talk a little bit about kind of the trend of open source and what's that mean to EMC? Yeah, I mean, I think that open source is always something that's been near and dear to my heart. I think really what it comes down to, technically customers talk or people talk all the time as it's cheaper, is it better code quality, is it all these sort of very qualitative kind of ideas. For me, I think it's about integration, right? Open source allows me to take software, consume software in a way that makes it easier to integrate with the rest of my environment. And as we move towards cloud native applications, as we move towards microservices starting adopting 12 factor applications, the ease of integration is really what I think people care about in the end. And so that's why open source is important. And I think that if you look at our customer base, they want a solution that has real value. And so they're not necessarily just concerned about the fastest this or the largest this. They want to see how it fits into their environment and the work that we do in the community around EMC code really solves that last mile if you want to think about it that way. So I'm thrilled to be a part of it. Yeah, so I mean you've been around EMC now for a year. Yeah. A lot of enterprise customers you get access to. And one of the things I, you know, we talked about IT throughout the keynote today. And one of the things was when you were at Surrey, Surrey essentially is a product facing. It's not so much an IT function. It's a business facing. How much business facing conversations are you getting to have now as EMC evolves, as Dell evolves, that people want to know like, how do I do that digital business thing as opposed to just, you know, IT more efficient? Yeah, I think I have that conversation probably nine times out of 10, actually. Every CEO or every executive that I speak to has a customer facing application or some sort of customer facing support. So I have that conversation constantly. And what Surrey did was just, it was just another business application. You know, for an airline, it's a reservation system. For a bank, it's their app, their mobile app. Right, Surrey was just another app in the end. And so that's the conversation I find myself having all the time. Right. One of the things that your team's heavily involved with, you said persistence with containers, persistence with, what does that mean for somebody who's not living that every day? Give us the one-on-one version of what that means and why it's important for this new world. Yeah, I mean, I think that in the earlier years with virtual machines, we got this idea that applications could be stateful or can store data inside the virtual machine. And when the virtual machine needed to be moved or spun up or operated on, the storage or the data of the application kind of came with it. Containers are much more lighter weight so you get a lot more agility out of things. They're a lot simpler. But unfortunately, that ephemeral nature, that idea that they don't persist or they don't kind of store state with them makes migrating applications to containers relatively difficult. So I felt like if we could solve that issue technically, if we could solve it operationally, then we could really help customers move the ball forward into a third platform and into these container worlds. Because I don't think it's realistic to expect people to rewrite their applications all the time, right? And some applications are never going to be rewritten. Customers run Oracle, customers run MySQL, Postgres, these databases. Why can't we run them in containers? And that's really what we're enabling with this. Yeah, Stu and I were sitting in the analyst briefing this morning. Jeremy Burton was talking about either OpenStack or some open source technology and was throwing around words, open source words as if he was at any meetup, right? So talk about just over the last year, how much has open source changed within EMC? How comfortable do you think they feel in the executive team and out in the field? Well, first of all, Jeremy is the biggest supporter. I mean, I think that he's very passionate about this. I think he understands the value that it's bringing to his business. From a community standpoint, we've contributed over 350,000 lines of code. We have 48 active projects and we have 1,100 community followers in our Slack channel right now. So I think that the traction that we've gotten and the interest has been tremendous. We've also provided a facility for other people inside of EMC that have side projects to open source those projects through EMC code, through the Dev Hi-5 program. And the amount of support is just continuing to grow. It's been fantastic. It's great to hear. It's great to hear. As you're here, sort of last year, you got announced on stage, there's a new guy, you've been here for a year, you've got a lot going on. What are some of the highlights for you that you're looking for this week and that you want people to go watch the next couple of days? Yeah, that's great. I think it's, I mean, hopefully you'll watch my keynote on Wednesday. But I think from a technical standpoint, I have a guru session on Wednesday at 3 p.m. Pacific. Hopefully you all will stream it. And we're really talking about how open source has changed the data center and how running persistent applications or stored state applications in containers matters and why it matters. And I have my friend Toby from Asosphere on stage with me then, and we're actually going to do a demo in front of everybody real time. So I'm very excited about that. So Josh, you know, a lot of the people who come to EMC world, they're infrastructure people. Yeah, right. Can you help, you know, what's that journey from infrastructure to infrastructure as code? Yeah, I think infrastructure as code is sort of a subset of DevOps, right? And if you kind of have to organize a little bit, DevOps is really this adaptation of a operational model, an IT operational model, where traditionally we have these silos of, you know, compute network and storage that manage and maintain that environment. And when you adopt DevOps, it's all about tearing down those walls. And one of the ways by which you do that is through adopting infrastructure as code. And it's this idea that I can declare my given state of infrastructure in software, and therefore I can apply software development principles to my infrastructure and operate much more efficiently that way. And so that's why infrastructure and code is very important stuff. All right, so when we hear announcements about, you know, Unity and the latest converged infrastructure, how much is the work that you've been working on, you know, make its way into stuff that looks more like traditional storage products? I think that's great. I mean, that's a great question. If you look at the Unity platform, you'll have some interesting surprises over the way that that platform is put together and assembled. But also that we still realize that there's plenty of people that want to leverage Unity with containers or leverage some of our other more traditional storage lines with containers. And a lot of the work we're doing around Rexray is really, and the other EMC code products is really focused on that. It's about delivering a solution end to end and not just dropping a product off and helping people plug it in. Yeah, but open source is always a little unusual for anybody who's used to commercial software. You can kind of track it, you can eventually figure out customers. Have you guys seen examples where, you know, a company, a customer, a partner is gone, I'm using your software, I'm collaborating with you and we're now starting to move it, you know, how do you connect the software you're building to what's going on in the marketplace? Yeah, that's a great question. We have a lot of customers now that are picking up our projects saying, hey, we love this, we're really looking forward to it. How do we maintain support for it? We like to pay for a support contract and things like that. And we're happy to have those conversations. Some of the largest EMC customers are actually going down that right now. They realize that the open source is key to integration and if it delivers real value, then customers are actually volunteering, wanting to pay for that value and looking for that commercial support. So I think that's the biggest yardstick if you can look at what's happened in the last year is customers are coming back to us now and saying, hey, this one project I use every day, it's really critical to our business. Can you officially support it with the world-class support that EMC has delivered for so many years? And so that's really exciting. And that's really validating. And when you talk to those customers, a lot of them, we see in talking to them, they're trying to figure out open source, right? So Capital One Bank or Nationwide or something. How do you help them take the learnings that you've had in the EMC code team for them for whether it's open source licensing, contributing, how do you help them a little bit? Yeah, a lot of the questions I get from those customers are what is it that I open source and how do I do it and why do I do it? I mean, I think that you open source something because you feel like you can benefit other people and you can take benefit from those other people's interests. I think that's why you do something. You also do it because you want to make something consumable or easily consumable for somebody. How to do it is a little harder. A lot of these organizations don't have that. We have a phenomenal program with EMC code that helps our customers and internally at EMC do it. We've extended that to our customers now. And so I think that that's why people are interested. So really helping people kind of go through this journey. Yeah, and I'll give a plug for folks that go back to the Wikibon research side of things. We just did a big thing with Northbridge Ventures, the future of open source survey. A lot of really good survey data that's in there aligns a lot to what you're talking about. Really, where are customers putting open source into production? What are they thinking about? But also, what are the business models? So we're seeing people say, can I take open source and build a SaaS application? Should I go build an IoT device and so forth? What are you guys excited about the second half of the year? How do you think about roadmaps or the types of projects you should try and work on? I'm very excited about a roadmap for the rest of the year. I think that you'll see us integrate a little bit more clearly with the leading containerized environments. One of the other biggest problems that I think customers have is bare metal provisioning on infrastructure. A lot of our customers, despite wanting to move to the cloud, have requirements around on-prem. So it'll be a tremendous amount of work on that. So I'm very excited about making storage and making containers more palatable and more consumable for our larger customers. That's great. Josh, one of the things we've been seeing is the line between the vendor and the customers has been blurring. When we go to some of the open source shows, they see the like of GE and Nike and everything else, not only using, but contributing, presenting. Do you have any examples you can show? You mentioned your partner Mezos is going to be doing presentation with you. So, any other kind of the big end users that are kind of buying in that you can speak of? Yeah, you'll see some of those on stage with us on Wednesday. I think that kind of validation is amazing. When you can work so closely with customers and they will voluntarily stand up on stage with you and sort of validate the work that you've done, I think that'll be, that's incredibly rewarding. And you'll see those guys come up on Wednesday. So one of the hardest parts about that is of course finding the people. And that's one of the reasons they participate. How's the job search go for people? I mean kind of the talent acquisition, how do you find the people? How do you train the people? For open source people? Yeah, for open source people. I mean, I think that's the interesting thing. The community is a small place. We joke in the Bay Area, right? The Bay Area is a small place and you know somebody and you know somebody else and this other person. And so, at least for my team, the way we've staffed up is who do you know? And the interesting thing about it is we're less interested in what's on their resume and sort of more interested in what's in their GitHub account or what they've done with the community or what their interest is. And that's a really great way to validate key contributors and key engineers is what have you done lately? Yeah, GitHub's the new LinkedIn for developers. Yeah, GitHub's the new LinkedIn, but you know you want to see what people have done and whether or not they're passionate, right? It's very easy to throw a bunch of projects up there and look like you have a nice resume. But you want to select people that have a passion. And that's really what's been important to us and that's why our team has grown so well over this past year. All right, so Josh, I want to give you the final word. People want to not only find but contribute. Where do they go? Yeah, check us out on emccode.com. If you're at the show, come see us in booth 1044. We have some really interesting demos there. And I'm excited, I'm very excited to be here. All right, Josh Bernstein, congratulations on all you've done over the last year. Looking forward to your keynote on Wednesday and all the sessions that will be there. We've got three days of live full coverage, two sets, Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Brian Gracely, myself. We've got a new host, John Walls here, Jeff Frick's also here. So Cast of Thousands helping to bring the CUBE experience to EMC World 2016. Stay tuned, we've got lots more coverage coming and you're watching the CUBE.