 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alums. We have Alan Clark who's the board chair of the OpenStack Foundation, and in the CTO office of SUSE. Thanks for joining us again. It's been a few years. It's been a while. Appreciate you being back. And Lou Tucker, the vice chair of the OpenStack Foundation and vice president of CTO with Cisco. Lou, it's been weeks. Exactly right. All right, so it's like I'm a regular here. Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, John Furrier sent his regards. He wishes he was here. John's always like, come on, Lou and I and everybody. We were talking about when this Kubernetes thing started and all the conferences. So it's been a pleasure for us to be here six years now at this show as well as some of the remote days and other things there. It's been fun to watch the progression. Isn't it amazing how far we've come? Yeah, absolutely. So there it's, here's my first question for you Alan. On the one hand, I want you to talk about how far we've gone, but the other thing is people, when they learn about something, whenever they first learn about it, it tends to fossilize in their head. This is what it is and always will be. So I think most people know that this isn't the Amazon killer or it's free VMware that we talked about years ago. So bring us a little bit of that journey. Well, so it started with the basic compute storage, right? And as we've watched open source grow and adoption of open source grow, the demands on services grow, right? We're in this transformation period where everything's growing and changing very rapidly. Open source is driving that. Open stack could not stay static. So when it started, it solved the need, but the needs continue to grow and continue to change. So it's not surprising at all that open stack has grown and changed and will continue to grow and change. Yeah. So Lou, it's been fascinating for me. You know, I've worked with and all these things with Cisco and various pieces for my entire career. You're here, we're in the open stack at Cisco. Sure. That's right. And Cisco's journey really through that digital transformation themselves. When I talked to Rowan at Cisco Live Barcelona, the future of Cisco is as a software company. So helps that open stack into that kind of broader picture for us. Well, I think one of the aspects of that is that we're seeing now it is becoming this multi-cloud world and that we see all of our customers are running in the public cloud. They have their own private data centers. And what they're looking for is that they want their whole development model and everything else to now become targeted towards that multi-cloud world. They're going to use services in the public cloud. They still have the private data center. Open stack is the place for they to actually meet and run all those services. Because now you can build your environment within your data center that makes it look very much like your public cloud. So your developers don't have two completely different minds that say of the same one, it's, you know, it's abstracted resources on demand. And now when we're putting on top of that other newer technology that's coming such as Kubernetes, we've got a real consistency between those environments. Yeah, please. And as I said, it enables you to leverage your existing infrastructure. So you don't want to make them, particularly with SUSE's customers, they don't want us to come in and say, throw everything away, start afresh, right? But at the same time, you got to be able to embrace what's new and what's coming. So, you know, we've talked about, we're talking about many new technologies here in open the stack summit today, right? Containers and all sorts of stuff. A lot of those things are still very new to our customers. And they're preparing for that. And as Lou said, we're building that infrastructure. Yeah, well, one of the things as I'm thinking about it, some people look at, they look at Cota containers and some of these pieces outside of the open stack project. They're like, what's the foundation doing? But I believe it should be framed and please, please love your insight on this in that multi-cloud discussion. Because this is, it can't just be, well, this is how you build private. It needs to be, this is how you live in this multi-cloud environment. That's why I think you're beginning to see us talk about open infrastructure. And this is using open source software to use software to manage your infrastructure and build it out. Instead of, you know, configuration, cabling, having guides going out, plugging in, unplugging, you know, network ports and whatever. We want software and automation to do all that. So, open stack is one of the cloud platforms for other, but these other projects are now coming into the foundation which also expand that notion of open infrastructure. And that's why we're seeing these projects expand. And lose exactly right. And it goes beyond that. Back in 2017, early 2017, we recognized as a board that it's not going to be just about the projects with an open stack. We have to embrace our adjacent communities and embrace those technologies. So that's why you're hearing a lot about Kubernetes and containers and networking and all sorts of projects that are not necessarily being done within open stack, but you're seeing how we're collaborating with all those other communities. And Cata is a perfect example of that. So Cata containers, you know, came out of Intel's clear containers. And it's now combining the best of both worlds because now you get the speed of containers bringing up, but you get the security and isolation of virtual machines. That's important in the open stack community in our world because that's what we want out of our clouds. You both have just mentioned community a few times, right? And one thing coming into this conference, I'm so impressed by the prominence of community. It's up on stage from the first minutes of the first keynote, right? People, the call to action, the please for the folks of us that some of us have been here for years and years for the new folks, please come meet us, right? That's really inviting. It's very clear that this is a community. Yeah, I was surprised actually could be sawed when we were asked from stage, how many people here for the first time? More than half the audience was here. I was surprised by that as well. That was the real surprise. And at the same time we're seeing increasingly users of open stack coming in as opposed to the people who are in core projects. So that we're seeing progressive insurance coming in. We're seeing Adobe marketing cloud having over 100,000 cores running open stack. That's in addition to what we've had with Walmart and others. So the real users are coming to our communities, not just the developers, but the users of open stack and the operators. That's always an interesting tension for an open source project, right? You have the open source contributors and then you have the users and operators. But here at the show too, right? All these different technology tracks, part of community is identity. And so as the technical work has been split off, right? And it's actually at another event, another event. These are the users, but it does with all this other technology conversations, I wonder what the core identity of I'm an open stack member. Like what does that end up meaning in a world of open infrastructure? If the projects, if the open stack itself is more mature and as we get up the letters of the alphabet towards Z. How do you all want to steer what it means to be a member of the open stack community? So we met on Sunday as a joint leadership, right? So we had, it wasn't just a board meeting. It was a meeting with the technical committee and it was a meeting with the user community. So we're very much pushing to make sure we have those high interactions that the use cases are getting translated into requirements and getting translated into blueprints and so forth. We're very, very working very, very hard to make sure we have that communication open. And I think one of the things that sets the open stack community apart is what we call our four opens. We base everything on our four opens and one of those is communication, transparency and communication. And that's what people are finding and ticing. And one of the big reasons is I think they're coming to open stack to do that innovation and collaboration. We've seen the same thing with Linux for example. Linux is no longer just the operating system when people think about the Linux community. The Linux community is the operating system and then all of these other projects associated with it. That's the same thing that we're seeing with open stack. That's why we're continuing to see wherever there's a need as people are deploying open stack and operating it and running it, all of these other open source components are coming into it because that's what they really are running, that conglomerate of projects around it. Certainly the hype cycle, Linux went through its own hype cycle right back today and I'm from Silicon Valley. I think the hype cycle outside the community and what's actually happening on the ground here actually aren't meshed quite well, right? What I saw this week, like you said, real users, big users, infrastructure built into every bank, transport, telecom in the world, right? That's a global necessary part of the infrastructure of our planet. Outside, you know, investment, things like that. It's a little harder. I hope you can help us get the message out. Because that is a major thing that we see and we experience here at the company. People who are not here, they still then maybe look at OpenStack the way it was maybe four years ago and it was difficult to deploy and people were struggling with it and there was a lot of innovation happening at a very, very fast rate. Well, now it's proven, it's sort of industrial grade, it's being deployed at very large scale across many, many industries. Well, it's interesting. I think back to, remember when we talked about like Ethernet fabrics? You know, when we talk about somebody, you know, SDN and some of these big things, well, look, sometimes these things are overhyped. It's like, well, there's a certain class of the market absolutely needs this. If I'm a telco and I sat here a couple of years ago and was like, okay, is it 20 or 50 companies of the world that it is going to be absolutely majorly transformative of them and that's hugely important. If I'm a mid-sized enterprise, I'm still not sure how much I'm caring about what's happening here in New Offense. I'd love to hear some points there, but what it is and what it is and who it targets, absolutely, they're massive, massive clouds. You know, you go to China, absolutely hear a lot about OpenStack here. Coming across the U.S., I don't hear a lot about it. We've known that for years, but I've talked to, you know, cloud provider in Australia, we've talked to Europeans that, you know, the app mail who's the provider for emails, for like service providers around the world. It's like, so it's kind of like, okay, what part of the market and how do we make sure we target that? Because otherwise it's this, right, this megaphone of, yeah, OpenStack, well, I'm not sure if that was for me, so, yeah. So we're seeing a huge variety of implementations, right? Users that are deploying OpenStack. And yeah, we always think about the great big ones, right? I love CERN, right? We love the Walmart, we love ChinaMobiles because they're huge, great examples. But I have to say, we're actually seeing a whole range of deployments. They don't get the visibility because they're small, right? Everybody goes, oh, you're running on three machines or 10 machines? Okay, right? Talk to me when you're the size of CERN. But that's not the case. We're seeing this whole range of deployments. And they probably don't get as much visibility, but they're just as important. So there's tons of use cases out there. There's tons of use cases published out there. And we're seeing it. Yeah, so I'd love, you know, one of the interest use cases with a different scale has been that edge discussion. Right. I need a very small- In fact, that's a very poignant example because they've had a ton of discussion because of that variety of needs, right? You get the telcos with their large scale but you've also got, you know, everybody else. It's open-stack sitting at the bottom of a telephone pole. You know, on a little blade and something embedded. But then it's also in a retail store. It's in a retail store. Or in a coffee shop. Yeah. So this is really where we're recognizing over and over again we go through these transitions that it used to be even fixed devices out at the edge. You know, then to change that, you have to replace that device. We, instead, we want automation. We want software to do it. So that's why open-stack is moving to the edge where you can, it's just a smaller device, much more capability, but still compute storage and networking. And you want to have virtual applications there so you can upgrade that. You can add new services without sending a truck out to replace that. Moving forward, do we expect to see more interaction between the foundation itself and other foundations and open-source projects? Yes. And how might that look like? It depends on the community. It really does. We definitely have communications from at the board level, from board to board between adjacent communities. It happens at the grassroots level, right? From what we call SIGs or work groups with SIGs and work groups from those adjacent communities. Yeah, I happen to sit on three boards, which is the open-stack board, the CNCF board, Cloud Foundry. And so what we're also seeing though now, for example, running Kubernetes, we just have now the cloud provider, which is open-stack being a cloud provider for Kubernetes, similar in a very way that Amazon has a cloud provider for Kubernetes, or Google is a cloud provider. So then now we're seeing the communities working together, because that's what our customers want. And that was all driven by SIGs. The special interest groups. On both sides, getting together and saying, how do we make this happen? How do we make this happen? All right, so one of the things you look at, there's a lot going on at the show. There's the open dev activity. There's a container track. There's an edge track. Sometimes, you worry it gets a little unfocused. It's like, let's talk about all the adjacencies. Wait, what about the core? Love to get kind of your final takeaways, key things you've seen at the show, takeaways you want people to have, when they think about open-stack the show and open-stack the foundation. From my point of view, it actually is back to where we sort of started the conversation is these users that are now coming out and saying, I've been running open-stack for the last three years, now we're up to 100,000 cores or 200,000 cores. That shows the real adoption. And those are the new operators. You don't think of Walmart or Progressive as being a service provider, but they are delivering their service through the internet. And they need a cloud platform in which to do that. So that's one part that I find particularly exciting. I totally agree with Lou. And the one piece I would add is, I think we've proven that it's the right infrastructure for the technology of the future, right? That's why we're able to have these additional discussions around Edge and additional container technologies and Zool with continuous testing and deployment. It fits right in. So it's not a distraction, it's an addition to our infrastructure. I think the idea around, and that's why we actually broke up into these different tracks and had different sort of keynotes around containers and around Edge because those are primary use cases now. Two years ago when I think we were talking here is like NFV and all the telcos were, and now that has succeeded because almost all the NFV deployments now are based on open stack. Now we're seeing it going to containers in Edge, which are much more application-specific deployments. You just, I'd love you to connect the dots for us from the NFV stuff we were talking about a couple years ago to kind of the breadth of Edge and we talk, you know, there is no Edge, it depends who you are as to what the Edge is, kind of like cloud was a few years ago. Well, we've always had some, one of the best, I mean, we actually have a white paper if you go to openstack.org and or just Google open stack Edge white paper. I think that you'll see that there are a variety of cases from that are from manufacturing, retail, telco. I saw even things, you know, space, you know, remote, you know, object, you know, remote driving vehicles and everything else like that. It's where latency really matters. So that we know that cloud computing is the fastest way to deploy and maintain, upgrade new applications, virtualized applications on a cloud. It's unfortunately too far away from many of the places that have much more real-time characteristics. So if you're under like 40 milliseconds or whatever, or you want to get something done in a VR environment or whatever, under five milliseconds, you can't go back to the cloud. It also, if you have an application, for example, a security monitoring application, whatever, 99% of the time, those video frames are the same and they're not interesting. Don't push all that information back into the central cloud. Cross it locally. Now when you see frames that are changing, whatever, you only use the bandwidth and the storage in the central cloud. So we're seeing this relationship between, what do you want computed at the edge and how much computing can you do as we get more powerful there and then what do you want back in the centralized data centers? While you simplify the management. And you, exactly right. But you still need to be automated. You still need to be automated. You need it to be virtualized. You need it to be managed in that way so you can upgrade it. Yeah. All right, well. Alan Clark, Lou Tucker. Always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, it's good to be here. John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage from OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.