 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube. Covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Welcome back to Silicon Eagle TV's live coverage of EMC World 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.com. Crowd-sourced and open-sourced, analyst firm, been around for eight years. Real excited to have a good friend of the show, been on many times, in a new role, and went to hoody. Brian Gracely, senior director of EMC code. Thanks for coming back, Brian. Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. I think it's been a couple of years, maybe, now. Wow, so I mean, you were actually on the first show we ever did in the enterprise, which was EMC World 2010. You've had a bunch of roles, but it's funny. I think of EMC World when it first started. You were doing the use of wizards in EMC Technology Summit. I mean, I worked at EMC back there, and I'd come in in a logoed polo and khakis, and that was kind of the uniform for all the techs here. And I remember Joe Tucci said, if you're wearing a tie, you know, get out of here. And now we've got a lot more suits that come in from the executive side, but you and your team are also bringing in the hoody community. So, I guess we're bringing in the hoody community. Yeah, it's crazy. When Jeremy Burton first asked me to go look at this thing, one of the first meetings I had to have, I had to go sit in front of his staff, and I asked Chad, I said, if I'm going to go do this, and I want to figure out if they're committed to this, I'm just going to show up in a t-shirt and jeans, and he was like, go for it. Because if they get a rash, you probably know what kind of support you're going to get. So, yeah, we're trying to fit in. And that's really it. Fit in with what the communities look like and then contribute code so you're legitimate. So, to get into the executive boardroom, there wasn't some center that blocked you out there if you didn't have proper attire? They probably thought I was lost. Yeah, they probably thought I was lost. Yeah, so for those of our audience that haven't heard, can you talk a little bit about what is the EMC code project and what's your team's initiative? Yeah, so EMC code is, it's a group that's put together to focus on EMC's contributions to open source, how we engage with open communities, trying to get the larger EMC community to start contributing projects back. So it's a small group, we're about 10, 12 people. We're focused on not only wrapping sort of dev ops and open source technology around EMC technology, but also going out and making contributions to Docker and CoreOS and a lot of the sort of modern infrastructure, if you will, and trying to be relevant in that space. Yeah, and you had, talk a little bit about, you had a half day event to kick off EMC world. Steve Chambers from Wikibon attended it, said it was phenomenal, he's been asking all of the practitioners that come here, how does DevOps fit into it and what's doing? So give us the highlights. Yeah, so we hosted an event, so there's a whole series of events that are called DevOps days, if there's a devopsdays.org, and we reached out to them and we said, we want to host an event that's really the space that we want to go after, sort of DevOps, modern operations, they gave us a lot of guidance, how to host them, and basically it was a lot of learning, there were no sales, no hard pitches, it was folks from Chef and Puppet and Pivotal was there, my team gave a talk, VMware was there talking about their open source work, Intel was there, LinkedIn was there, Dropbox, so really great guests, we had folks, we had about 300 people in attendance, I think we had about 500, 400 registers or something, which was, blew away our expectations, but people loved it and people said, I hope you give us more of this, we'll see what happens next year, but it was very different for us. All right, so Brian, in general, this is an infrastructure show here. Sure is, yes it is. I've heard this term that gets thrown out on a lot, infrastructure as code, I'm wondering if you could explain really what that means. So, at the most basic level, so if you're an application team, everything you do is code, and how you manage it has a very structured model to it, so I write software, I put it in a software repository, and there's a bunch of tools that we'll do testing around it, right? So, when we talk about infrastructure as code, it's really, when people talk about software defined, whatever, networking, storage, so it's treat that software just like you would your application software, so start getting it into configuration repositories, start thinking about how you automate it, start thinking about how you document it as software, and that's the beginning stages of it, when people start talking about DevOps, it's really, there's a lot of culture there, there's a lot of collaboration, are you beginning to sort of think in similar patterns? Are you starting to think about how actions that the development team takes, impacts operations, and vice versa? All right, so Brian, when you look forward, are you trying to teach all of EMC and its partners to become coders, or what is kind of the end goal of what this code initiative does? So, we'd love to, I think the reality is, as people talk about doing things at larger scale, or they're thinking about, we get these questions all the time, and I think you gave a talk at Interop last week, should my infrastructure look like Google's? Well, maybe, right, but if you take some of the best practices they have, they treat their infrastructure as if it's software, they automate a lot of things, they do a lot of things consistently, and so yeah, we'd like to help push those principles, and the biggest thing we're trying to do is instead of just teaching people, is we're going, here's the software to go do it, here's examples, here's how to interact with an API, here's how to put things in Docker containers, here's how to deploy them across multiple clouds, so yeah, is it going to be for everybody? No, but I think, just like we saw the last seven, eight years with VMware and the VX experts and those things, there's a set of people that want to push the envelope and be the next generation of great operators. All right, so Brian, you talk to a lot of the people in the industry there, help driving this change, EMC is headquartered on the East Coast, now while many of the executives have now shifted out the Westcoach and the company's been going through quite a bit of a transformation. Now how do you teach an 800 pound gorilla to dance to this fast paced tune? Yeah, that's totally fair, so the biggest thing that we've found is, we don't do anything in PowerPoint. Everything we do is I'm going to give you examples and we've been trying to push this culture that shows the company, it's okay to publish things open source, it's okay to want to collaborate with open communities. What's been really interesting is we had to break a lot of glass to make some of the EMC code stuff happen and get stuff publicly done. We've had teams from the back of a recovery group give us projects that are now in open source. We've had the VMAX team come to us and go, we held a hackathon like three weeks ago and we've got a bunch of things that come out of that. It's actually been a little easier than we thought. There's been a lot of people that sort of went, the door's open a little bit, I want to do that. There's developers that want to showcase what they do. There's people that think some of that new technology is cool and so yeah, it's still a little bit tricky but it's actually more things are happening than we expected to happen this pace. So you and I have also been involved a lot into the blogging community, social media. Change is hard on these kind of things. How do you get people to kind of get out of kind of their blinders look at the world, doing what they're doing and embrace some of these new ideas? Yeah, so I think for anybody for change the biggest thing is two things. Are you willing to commit the time and then show me somebody else that's done it. I don't want to be the first one. So we've been, with the few people that we have on our team that are evangelists, we've been trying to get them to talk about not only what they built but how they got there and everybody that's on my team at one point was a VMware admin, they were a VMware expert. None of these folks were like, hey, I'm right out of computer science school, I grew up in the valley, that's all I do. They're not getting ex-Google, Facebook, Twitter people. But they've spent some time, they've stretched their, they've grown some new muscles, they've stretched some muscles, we're trying to give them examples. The biggest thing for me is, and I'm 40-ish, I have a lot of people that come to me and go, I see where the industry's going, I got another 20-something years and you go, good, here's a starting point. Just start here. Are you going to write the next great application? Maybe not, but baby steps, baby steps. And they, we're seeing more and more people do that in storage, in networking, in DevOps, all those sort of areas. All right, so getting towards the end of the MC world, other than your event, what have you seen across the show that kind of jumped out at you? So, obviously I'd be very interested in people's reaction to us open-sourcing Copperhead. It's funny, I was watching some of your videos from a year ago, Jeremy talked about it, I sort of hinted around at it, because they did a free version and he said, well, we internally want to open-source this, so there's some culture of that happening, and people aren't freaking out and saying, for us the biggest thing is we ran a booth in the solution area that was called open at EMC world, and it really, it was us, but a lot of gathering. There have been so many people coming through there going, I want to work with the teams that do continuous development, I want to work with the chefs and puppets and Xevia Labs and people asking about OpenStack. There's a demand for that stuff, and there's, but the biggest thing is people are going, how do I do it? Not skepticism, and I think that's a good, it's a good problem to have for us to help you and kind of solve and teach them. All right, yeah, definitely seeing a lot of new companies here at the show partnering with EMC that I hadn't seen in the year past. Brian, unfortunately, we're probably going to need to cut it there, so. That's fine, it's good to be on. Give you the last word on this. When you look forward and say kind of a year from now, what milestones should we look for? How do we see that, how do we measure that EMC is actually making progress to have credibility in the open-source community? So it's, you know, in this world, code counts. So if we're not making contributions to the big container, to basically all the big infrastructure areas, containers, OpenStack, Cloud Automation, if we're not making active contributions, if we're not actively making our software far less frictionless, then we failed. And if we're doing that a year from now and doing it very well, and we've got 1,000 people at DevOps Day EMC, then we're making progress. Great, and what's the website for EMC code? EMCcode.github.io. All right, excellent. So GitHub is the center of the universe for the developers. Most of you know that, if you don't, you probably should. So thanks so much, Brian, for joining. We've got lots more coverage here coming from EMC World as we wrap up in the third day of two cubes, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching.