 from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE on the ground. Covering KubeCon 2016. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Tissue host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back. We are here in Seattle for KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon. This is theCUBE special coverage on the ground. I'm John Furrier, our next guest is Steve Watt with Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE with Red Hat. Storage and Platform as a Service has really been the key conversation we hear at all the different events, because EMC World of Right, of other events and startups are coming out of the woodwork. We were covering one earlier this morning, Igneous, former Iceland guys, a different approach, but this points to this transition to Cloud Native where the operating models of cloud are obvious, but it's affecting the on-premise environment. Your thoughts, because you still need storage, but you need DevOps and Cloud Native too. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think if you look at perhaps traditional on-premise storage, you had a developer needed storage. They'd ask a storage administrator for it. They would create it for them and then get an email back or a workflow ticket back that their storage is ready. That's not the DevOps new school way at all. We want to empower the developer, get storage administrators out of the workflow. So we want to give developers the ability to dynamically create their own storage. And how does that work with traditional on-premise storage platforms that maybe don't have the APIs or the interfaces to support that? So the Cloud Native model is not necessarily so conducive with the traditional model. And the thing that we're highlighting, and you're pointing out, and if we get to this event here, is that the kind of developers that are at KubeCon, at Cloud NativeCon are real cloud developers. They're real developers. So they're application developers. They're very cloud oriented. And they use certain tools and software that are very cloud specific. Storage guys tell you what management software to use, what tools to use. So there's kind of a rebellion going on in that area. And then it's quiet rebellion, but there's a need for on-premise storage will always will be for a while with hybrid cloud. So it's not going away. But those developers and the enterprises still got to adopt the new programming methodology. So what's the impact to a customer who has all the storage? What do they do? So I think the, so typically a customer's journey, sort of if they're using Kubernetes, is they start off with a container, maybe set it up themselves a little bit. Everybody has a slightly different path. Eventually they'll pick an orchestrator. If they've picked Kubernetes, we actually have a wide amount of on-premise storage support. So what we've done is actually we've worked with the NetApps, the EMCs, the Red Hat storage, the storage community and brought those folks into our community as an example. Yesterday we had the Kubernetes Storage SIG. We had about 30 people there. And our Storage SIG is a special interest group. It's the sub community within Kubernetes that handles storage. There were folks from IBM, EMC, NetApp, Red Hat. So by and large the storage community is coming in and we're building drivers or have built drivers and to be able to mount storage, provision, storage, et cetera. So it's a matter, it's a journey. We're getting them there. But I think there's pretty decent support for vendors as well as like common interfaces, like NFS, iSCSI, fiber channel, things like that as well. So talk about what you guys have done at Red Hat in specifically with Kubernetes. What kind of contributions are you making? And what does that mean for Red Hat and your customers? So I think, specifically around persistent storage. Yeah, so persistent storage. There's like a problem with container. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this with people. It's like containers are storage. There's just no support for it, et cetera. This isn't actually such a problem with Kubernetes. Kubernetes- Is it a problem or is it a problem? It is not a problem. As of January 2015, we introduced something called the Volume Plugin Framework, where we were able to build all these drivers in for a variety of different cloud provider storage platforms so Amazon, Azure, vSphere, et cetera, as well as storage vendors. So there's that approach to be able to remediate the problem. But as far as what we do, we actually have a vision for how this experience is meant to work. And so part of that, we were talking a little bit earlier about developers wanting to be in charge of being able to create and use their own storage when they need it to be a little more productive. And so we've built features like dynamic provisioning of storage, as well as control points, quotas, which keep the operators, let them sleep at night, that know the developers aren't running up huge bills. So we can control- Well, they'll get woken up, and certainly the alarms go off. Yeah, exactly. So there's an accounting dimension, right? But productivity plus sanity is something that we've really built into the Kubernetes community. So talk about the show here. What are you hearing in the hallways relative to your world past storage? Because OpenStack, we hear a lot about that. There's a lot of stuff going on under Kubernetes that's hard to do. Managing storage, managing networks, managing servers. It's hard. I mean, there's all kinds of different configurations. A lot of dynamic infrastructure pooling of resource happening. What's the top conversations in your mind? I would say the twofold. There's an on-premise dimension and a public cloud dimension, or maybe a mix. And the on-premise dimension is, help me set this platform up and make it intuitive so that I can be quickly productive in building applications on this. So help me deploy Kubernetes, get my software-defined network working, hook it into my storage so that I can be productive, start building applications. And so maybe it's like a deployment user experience thread that's happening in Kubernetes. We have a number of different projects right now making Kubernetes deployment and configuration more intuitive. On the public cloud dimension, there's a thread there around application portability. So we've heard this a couple of times in the keynotes today, which is I want to build my application. I want to run it on-premise, but if I want to move it to a public cloud provider or don't want to get locked into a public cloud provider and want to move it somewhere else, that's something I want to be able to do easily as well. So I'd say those are the two main traits. And give me the final word. What's your message to your customers around the work you're doing and around Kubernetes and cloud-native mean for them? Yeah, so I would say, you know, a lot of Red Hat's customers are on-premise, right? We're the number one operating system in the Fortune 500. What I would say is that we've worked very hard on one particular agenda, right? Which is, you know, have an integrated platform. And so we want our customers to have the experience of being able to deploy OpenShift and have it hooked into our storage portfolio, both Gluster and Ceph, and have it work intuitively where you can buy the whole solution from one vendor. So we've worked really hard on having robust storage features on OpenShift so that you can consume and use storage the way you want to in a microservices way with your maybe legacy storage vendors. But for our own storage portfolio, we've tightly integrated that. So there's, you know, way fewer configuration hurdles and things like that, just to get it integrated and working. And we're the only vendor that you can buy all of that from one person. And we had Chris right on earlier, who's the chief architect, CTO, or chief technologist, Red Hat, bringing Kubernetes to the enterprise and making it ready is also OpenShift. So you're on both sides of the coin here. You're taking care of the storage and hard stuff and then bringing the Kubernetes goodness to the enterprise. Exactly, exactly. So that's a good strategy. Steve, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Red Hat here at KubeCon at KubernetesCon as well as CloudNativeCon inside theCUBE here. On the ground, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Thanks.