 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Radesh Balakrishnan. He is the general manager at OpenStack. Thank you so much for joining us, Radesh. My pleasure. So I want to hear a status report. Where are we with OpenStack? What does it look like? Before the cameras were rolling, you were saying we're alive and well, we're better than that, we're thriving, laid out for us. Yeah, you could look at it from three perspectives. First is, how are we doing on number of production deployments? So just from the Red Hat lens itself, we have over 500 customers across the globe, spanning across multiple verticals, be it financial, telco, education, research and development, academia, et cetera. To put a point on that, production you said, correct? Production, customers. That doesn't include all the tests, do you know that kind of stuff? That is right, that's right. So that's a healthy spot to be in. The second lens to bring in from an OpenStack health perspective is, how is the partner ecosystem shaping up? And this is a space where there have been probably misreading of some of the moves that have been happening here. From our perspective, what has happened is a very healthy consolidation and standardization of the different place that needs to happen in the space. So if you look at the OpenStack ecosystem that Red Hat has been able to pull through, we have certified solutions across compute, storage, networking, as well as ISV solutions that today customers can deploy with peace of mind, right? So that's another indication of the fact that the ecosystem is maturing as well. A dimension along which that I'm personally excited about the ecosystem maturing is the fact that managed service providers are also taking on OpenStack and delivering solutions on top of it. So for example, Rackspace, IBM, Cisco, MetaCloud, et cetera, all of them have built their managed service offering based on their OpenStack platform. So let's stay big picture here and look at the industry five years down the road. You're talking about it maturing consolidation and natural part of that. What do you see just, as I said again, big picture? So I think the largest picture here is that hybrid cloud has become the norm, right? Five years ago, is cloud going to be there real? Is it secure? All of those questions have been answered. Multi-cloud has become a real possibility. Hybrid cloud is going to be the norm implementation. And the role OpenStack has is two-fold in that context. One is clearly as a private cloud implementation for enterprises, one lack of vendor lock-in when it comes to implementing a cloud infrastructure. The second perspective is, how can you stitch together multiple clouds using an API of the infrastructure layer that OpenStack can provide? So that's the value that OpenStack is providing. Radesh, I want to dig into that a little bit because there was a vision of OpenStack, right? We're going to have, it will be the open cloud. We can build lots of clouds on that. You mentioned a few service providers. Of course, Rackspace was there since the early days. Great to see IBM, Cisco still doing some, even though Cisco kind of killed the inter-cloud piece. But when I heard Multi-cloud talked about this week, it is AWS, big partnership announcement with OpenShift. Google, Microsoft, Azure, hybrid pieces of that and stitches those all together. So I wonder, how does OpenStack in general and specifically the RADSAT solution stitch together OpenStack components with some of those other public cloud components? Does that seem to be a gap in what OpenStack did itself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So from our perspective, if you think in terms of weightage, 80% of the focus is on private cloud, right? The remaining 20% is on, think about security, privacy, compliance requirements, dictating country-specific public cloud deployments. Say, CERPRO in Brazil, or UK Cloud, which provides services for government cloud, or Swisscom, standing up Swiss Cloud, right? So that's kind of a mix and match of that. The context that I was bringing about was, even when you have a private cloud, you can use the API that OpenStack provides to manipulate the resources that are on AWS, Google, Azure, et cetera. That's where I see the future shaping up. And we're going to be covering OpenStack next week. We'll see lots of Red Hatters there. I know. My take is that we need to reset expectations a little bit. I think Red Hat's been pretty consistent with what they're doing, but many people are unclear. We talked about certain players pulling back or partially or shifting what they're working on. Maybe I'd like to see your viewpoint on that as to kind of a little bit of overblown expectations. Certain players that might have been trying to push certain agendas versus where Red Hat has seen things go and you want to see the community go. So I think the first perspective to take here is that OpenStack is not the destination in itself. OpenStack is an ingredient in the destination that customers want to get to. So I talked a little bit about the open hybrid cloud being the end destination that customers want to get to. So the usual layer cake off, there's the infrastructure layer, there's the application layer, and there's the management layer. So you want to get to an infrastructure layer that's open and OpenStack provides that one, right? Now, what has happened in the last two years is the focus around digital transformation has brought the shining light on the application layer, square and center. In other words, developers are the king makers. In other words, the speed from thought to executing code is what is going to make or break a business, which is why containers and DevOps, et cetera, is where the action is. But that doesn't preclude the need to have an agile infrastructure at the bottom layer. So rather than reinvent the need to do plumbing at compute and storage and networking level, you build on top of OpenStack so that you have open shift on top of OpenStack, like a wall row or a FICO doing it, so that you get the fungible infrastructure at the bottom and then you get the DevOps implementation running on top of that. That's what we are seeing as the path to future. Yeah, I think that's a great point because it felt like that was a big piece missing at OpenStack is, yeah, we've talked about containers there for a couple of years, but it's not about the application. And I've heard lots of discussion about applications, application modernization, all the middleware pieces. I mean, that's core to many of the things that you guys are doing at Red Hat here. And do you expect us to talk a lot about that at OpenStack Summit next week? As things like Kubernetes and kind of the container ecosystem matures, will that pull people away from some of the core activities? Because the base pieces of OpenStack are set in a lot of ways and sure there's development work that needs to continue, but we've gotten some of the base pieces working well. People have been worried about kind of some of the scope creep and the big tent and everything that falls out. So, how do you reconcile some of those pieces? Right, so I think it's a given that the world of containers and the world of OpenStack are coming together, right? Now, the confusion stems from the fact that some people are taking the view that containers are going to eliminate the need for OpenStack itself. The lens to bring to the picture is how can the customer graduate from what they have to what they want to get to? So, if you come from that perspective, then first is to bring rationalization of existing resources by bringing in OpenStack as the infrastructure layer. Bring in culture change through DevOps, through OpenShift, and then when it comes to implementing the full solution, you run OpenShift on top of OpenStack. That's the ideal that we get to see. Now, is every customer going to go through these steps? Maybe not, but the majority of the customer, if you look at the customers who are embarking on transformation over the next three to five years, they're going to be in that bucket, is my view. Can we go back to what you were saying about the beginning, it begins with the infrastructure, then the culture shift. Unpack that a little bit for us. What do you mean by that, and what are you saying in terms of how that will lead to the transformation that companies want to get to? Right, so all I'm saying is that technology is the easy part. Right? It's down to are we fundamentally rewiring the way in which we are thinking about applications, the way in which we are writing the applications, the way in which we are delivering the applications to an entirely potentially new set of customers and partners. All right? Yeah, last piece I want to ask you about is the OpenStack community. Some shifts as to who's contributing. Talk to us a little bit about Red Hat's contribution, the really health of the various projects, where you see good stuff coming out, and anything as you look forward to next week without giving away what announcements you have. What should the community be excited about going into the summit? So the OpenStack summits are always exciting because it's twice a year family reunion for the whole community to come together. As a community we made tremendous journey in identifying new use cases such as NFV, delivering against that, et cetera. The other dimension is that, back to the point about rationalization, et cetera, now there's clarity around the role of OpenStack itself in an infrastructure. The journey ahead is to make sure that containers and OpenStack can come together in a seamless manner. Secondly, in the hybrid cloud adoption model, OpenStack continuing to provide that API stability across the modular infrastructure. So those are the areas I think all the discussions are going to be centered around next week. Great. Radesh, thank you so much for your time. It's always a pleasure to sit down with you. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will be back with one last session from the Red Hat Summit 2017.