 looking angles, exclusive coverage to Kube here at OpenStack Summit. I'm here with Jeff Frick, my co-host, and Randy Byas, the co-founder of Cloud Scaling. Welcome back to the Kube, Kube alumni, welcome back. So, you know, we were part of the Cloud Club going back to 2008, back in the day when it was called the Cloud Club, James Ward. And when the term cloud computing got coined. And a lot of cloud washing going on back then. So I just want to get your perspective. We now are building out a very successful business and enterprise in the cloud business. Cloud Scaling, providing services and product to people building clouds. We were commenting on the intro package that this is an inflection point for OpenStack. You've kind of been there prehistoric, open stack, prehistoric cloud. When Amazon really was making their bones with public cloud and obviously lots changed over those good six years. So what's your take of where we are right now and share with the folks what OpenStack is this year and kind of where it's come from? It's a big question. So if I had to kind of chop it up a little bit, I'd say that where we're at now is that, you know, for a while it's been a little bit unclear about, you know, kind of the path forward. But I think that's started to crystallize now. And it's pretty clear that OpenStack's become the winner. I mean, I can't see any evidence that points otherwise. And if you look at the attendees at this summit, you know, it's 2x what it was just six months ago, which is a incredible growth transition. And I think we're going to see it again in the fall summit again. We're going to see another huge number of people. And so what we've seen is, for example, last year, when we were doing deals, when we were talking to customers, we saw a lot of other non-OpenStack folks kind of in the deals, right? But these days we don't see them ever. Everybody's talking about OpenStack, they're talking about it all the time. And it's really about how do you get OpenStack deployed and how do you make it successful? Why has it been so successful? I mean, obviously a lot of the marketing, I call it the marketing swimming pool, everyone's jumping in big splashes. But a lot's changed, you know, Citrix bowed out, there was a big Citrix change. SDN became a hot trend. And then it became really a lot of code and a lot of buildout was going on. What's your take on it? Is that a fair, accurate thing? Was that not the case? What's your view on why? Now OpenStack is so successful. It's successful because it's got a large and growing number of production deployments, almost 100. It has ridden the hype curve successfully, trying to keep the technology keeping up with the hype. I mean, the Grizzly releases, the seventh or eighth major release. It has had the transition from Rackspace to the foundation and industry support. In my presentation on Wednesday morning, I basically talk about how if you look at the top three X86 server vendors, the top three storage vendors, the top three blade vendors, top three router manufacturers, top three switch vendors, all of them are all in on OpenStack. All of them are gold or platinum members. So that means that the level of industry support is so high that it's going to be hard to make OpenStack not be successful. And then finally, you know, when you're sort of trying to understand success, it's important to look at what the OpenStack folks have done around their continuous integration system and in their infrastructure team. Right now, the people who run that are doing 700 full OpenStack cloud deployments per day doing continuous integration testing. So there's created this whole development process that is like smooth firing allows us to- So they have good governance, so they have some good operations. Fantastic governance. I mean, they really, governance is key in open source. The technical and the business, yeah. Yeah, and Randy, every coin has two sides, right? So it's great to have the top three of all those categories that you just listed involved and ensure that's a big part of the momentum and keeping going. But how has that kind of changed the feel of the foundation and changed maybe some of the key contributors or are they adding to the contributor? That must change the flavor from, as you guys were reminiscing three or four years ago, when this was all kind of getting started. It's definitely changed the flavor and that there are big companies in your building who are providing a lot of contributions. But if you look at it, most of those big companies are not doing a lot of the key contributions. They're not doing a lot of this sort of go-forward core technologies. It tends to be more bug-fixing and patching. And I'll probably get pan for saying this out loud, but the reality of the situation is that in any new emerging technology market, startups are always at the forefront of the innovation curve. And in this case, I think that's true as well. And if you look at the contributions, the quality of the contributions in terms of what's being added back to OpenStack, a lot of the key innovations are coming from the smaller businesses, not the bigger businesses. Good, John. What about the startups they've seen? Obviously, the big whales coming in, you mentioned them, top three in the categories, all the different vendors. Obviously, converging infrastructures, booming. Big data's out there. You see a dupe on the horizon. There's no doubt cloud is where people want to go. How they get there, it's a home of the story. We'll get into that in a second. But talk about the startup scene because you have a kind of interesting, emerging set of companies and you're one of them. But outside of that, other technology enablers out there, talk about the startup scene here. What's it like? That's another broad question. I mean, I guess... Well, you have the whales coming in. Is it land, are they land grabbing? Is there opportunities for startups? Where do you see those opportunities? I've never seen a whale in a single deal, not once. And unless you count Rackspace as a whale. And I've never lost to a whale. And I've mostly encountered startups. And when I've lost deals, it's to open stack DIY. People who want to do it themselves rather than run a product. And I think that's fine. In terms of the startups that are here, there are a number that I think that are interesting. But it varies from people who are sort of component suppliers. They have like SDN as a point solution, like a big switch networks to folks who are doing sort of the full turnkey solution like us, like Piston and Nebula. And it's kind of hard for me to sort of talk about that as an entire... Well, let's talk about cloud scale. So give us an update on your business. What's going on right now? What is the current state of cloud scaling? And what kind of deals and environments are you playing in successfully? So most of our customer base right now is Enterprise with a couple of service providers. We announced four of those customers which are LivingSocial, Evolt Seagate, Ubisoft, and IBS DataFord, a Russian hosting provider. And each of those deployments that we can talk about to date are production deployments of a significant footprint size. And the use cases are varying from people who want to build their own platform as a service, to people who want to build public cloud, to people who want to build more elastic private cloud model so that they can repatriate AWS workloads. So we're seeing, because this is an infrastructure plane, we're seeing a wide variety of people's approach. And then in terms of cloud scaling, our whole focus is to allow people to have their own secure private Amazon zone. And that's really what it's about for us. So it's interesting. You said we're kind of open stack is kind of arrived in terms of being the winner of the space. And we had Jeff O'Neill on a little bit earlier. And if everyone's at home watching the Twitter feed, every room is packed, there's not enough space. It sounds like everyone is really excited. What was the tipping point that just recently happened, do you think, within the large enterprises that got us here where we weren't a short time ago? We just hit critical mass. We've been talking to folks about open stack. And as you may or may not know, we did the first public cloud production deployments of open stack, both compute and storage before anybody else in the entire ecosystem. And we've been talking to people since that time, since the launch of July, 2010. And things have gone from a sort of perspective that open stack is one of many to open stack is the only one. And largely because of that industry support. I mean, the foundation's arrival has really catalyzed that big vendor support. And they validate the whole space for us. When IBM comes in and says, we're doing open stack, then people listen because there are many people who will still buy a product simply because it comes from IBM. And I think we just hit that critical mass and now we're on the production. I had one CIO tell me it's the UL label for him in terms of servers, when they want to roll out, scale out servers, they want to buy commodity gear and run open source on it. He wants to have a comfort that there's going to be infrastructure there. Now I use that term, UL label, meaning it's certified. But is that really, I mean, that's a hope for him. It's a path. So that being said, what are you seeing right now in terms of the kind of open stack projects that people are talking about the most on? Is it multi-cloud? Is it more on-prem? Is it private cloud? How's all that private cloud shaking out? I mean, how real is it? What stage of the game is it you see? The private cloud piece. So, I mean, again, we're an infrastructure place so people want to use us in many different ways. But the thing that I think is very, very clear to us at the moment is that hybrid cloud is sort of this transitional step where people want to combine on-prem and off-prem solutions. And in that case, they want something that's very compatible with Amazon Web Services and that's production grade. And as far as I know, we're the most compatible Amazon Web Services cloud solution out there, open cloud system. And open cloud systems designed to be that, you know, secure private Amazon zone. And we see people just really leaning in hard on that, whether it's that they want to do repatriation from workloads that are on AWS today, or whether it's, in many cases, financial services companies, this is happening a lot. They want to go to public cloud, but they're worried about just educating their internal developers. So, they want AWS-like system insights. They can start there. They can start the process of education and then. Let's drill down on that because that's a common theme. Everyone wants to go to Amazon, but there's fear. There's like, whoa, data, all kinds of fear. I don't want to get into the fear, but how do you take someone through that process? Because, you know, Amazon's being very successful right now, and they're marching to the enterprise in a big way. They just announced a hiring of Salesforce, and their stuff's getting better every day. In terms of they're introducing new stuff, and we're just playing with elastic beanstalk, it's fantastic. I mean, everything's getting, I mean, they're eliminating ops in the DevOps equation. It's really fascinating. So, okay, that's scaring a lot of people, including CIO. So how do you take a customer through that, an enterprise customer? Is it, what's the baby steps, or what's the roadmap for CIO who wants Amazon, or wants a little bit of Amazon, a little bit of their own thing? Well, what I usually tell people is that they got to get their feet wet. So even if they're scared to use it today, they need to get people engaged and beginning to use it regardless. They just have to learn. If they don't do the learning, then they can't have the understanding, and they can't basically build a real strategy. So that's number one. Number two is that they've got to do something behind the firewall. If it's too hard to go outside the firewall, right? They need to get a pilot deployment from a company like us, or one of the other open-stack companies, and really try to understand what cloud is. I think right now, one of the big misconceptions I see is people still look at cloud as sort of virtual machines on demand. And we all know, we've talked about this for years now, John, that cloud is a lot more than virtual machines on demand. That's a very teeny aspect of capability. And it's more about building your data center to look like Amazon and Google and Facebook's data center. And that's the only way to stay competitive. And so I like to try to couch things in those terms with CIOs, so they understand that what they're really trying to do is a complete transformation of their IT business. They cannot do business as they've done in the past. They've got to move towards a future. So let's talk about marketing hype for a second, because I wrote a tweet, did a tweet yesterday, said the theme, early theme, was a self-defined data center, which is very much a marketing slogan right now. And you commented on Twitter and someone else chimed in. They slapped some APIs on there. So let's just make a statement. Self-defined data center is not yet defined. It's a moonshot, it's a mission statement, if you will. It is a little bit of a hype. But what does that really mean for someone? What does self-defined data center actually mean? What is it? What are they trying to say with this marketing? What do you think the vision is? It's the promise of a solution that can't ever be delivered. Self-defined data center is the worst piece of hype since cloud and cloud computing. And it's going to actually create huge, massive failures inside the enterprise, because people think that they can sprinkle some automation, pixie dust on top of their existing enterprise data center and they get some kind of cloud automation system. If you look at Amazon and Google, they're highly automated systems because they're homogenous. And an enterprise data center is heterogenous and all the existing stuff is painful. Just in 2009, late 2009, large medical company in California, they were explaining to me how they still had Vax 11 750s on their floor running. Yeah, wow. So the enterprise is really looking at a pretty stark change, but it's not going to be software-defined data center. Can the enterprise ever get there though? I mean, it's always been, it's always had the legacies, it's always had these processes and it's been a decade of kind of underfunded IT and they've outsourced everything. And so how do they get there? Is it a throw away? Is it a do over? I mean, because cloud could be a nice transition step. That's my point. I mean, software-defined data center is a dream, what you're saying. But how does an enterprise turn into Amazon? Is it possible? Well, I mean, it depends on the enterprise, right? I mean, I think that for different kinds of businesses, IT provides different levels of competitive advantage. And for those who are highly reliant on IT for competitive advantage, like financial services businesses, they're all in trying to, you know, do a rewrite. You know, they're trying to build a completely new type of system from the way they build the data center to the way they design the hardware. Open Compute Project has tons and tons and tons of financial services guys behind it. But then, you know, if you go over towards retail, yeah, you know, I mean, there's less competitive advantage there. However, there's still places where IT's competitive advantage, like their retail websites, places like Walmart.com, you know, are drive huge amounts of revenue for those businesses. So those systems actually do need that kind of new infrastructure. And so I think that enterprises will get there. They are gonna have to depth charge what they have and start with something new or at least put what they have kind of Chernobylize it and kind of put it to the side and sort of work on the new system. And then once they do that, they can actually build the new skill set and the new technology over here that allows them to build these next generation apps that are gonna drive value. So Randy, you've got a great perspective because you've been on this roller coaster for all the way through. And as you said, what's different now is that the path is a little bit more clear. And so my question is to kind of what what are some of the really important roadmaps or markers you see on that path? And then two, what's kind of the next challenge? What's in that summit that the foundation needs to address to kind of go up another notch? So the key things are that in the public cloud sphere, Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine are gonna win or massive, massive infrastructures with huge amounts of compute and economies of scale that nobody else can touch. And so that's important. The other thing is that it's clear that OpenStack is gonna win for kind of the private cloud sector and having an AWS and Google Compute Engine compatible OpenStack that's very robust is critical. And then the third is I think that it's still early enough days that we all have to be realistic, right? I mean, if you think of OpenStack as sort of being like Linux and its rivals are more the BSDs and they're all kind of dropping to the wayside, there's still a gap in time between where we need to get Linux in the early days to where we got it at the end. That's not to say it's not ready for production. It's in production in many places is that there are still a lot of ways that we're trying to understand our options in terms of compute, storage and networking. There's a lot. OpenStack is more like a giant framework. It's like a toolkit and you can use it to build a lot of different kinds of clouds. And so people like us are betting on a particular kind of cloud, right? That follows these attributes, you know, compatible with Amazon web services, Google Compute Engine, production grade, so on. And then, but other people are trying to do other things. I mean, use, I think HP announced their converged infrastructure that's supposed to run with OpenStack. I mean, you know, it's a little bit of Frankenstein. I'm not sure why you would put converged infrastructure with OpenStack, but, you know, people are going to do a lot of different things with OpenStack. And so, from my perspective, the main thing that the foundation needs to do to be successful is do what the Linux Foundation does, which is focus on fostering innovation and adoption and don't worry too much about standards because it's early days and don't worry too much about interrupt because I think we're going to see lots of flavors of OpenStack. And the world is moving towards purpose built. I mean, we're seeing a lot of the, and I say purpose built. I mean, specific solutions that are tailored to unique use cases. But you mentioned the Linux Foundation, so there's news that's on the web today. Zen is to become a Linux Foundation collaborative project, Amazon, AMD, Bromium, Calzata, CA, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Slua People, Zen, which Amazon runs on. They built that Amazon on Zen. How does that relate to this? Are we in cloud wars right now? I mean, is it, is that something that should be coined to cloud wars? I mean, obviously you got OpenStack, highly competitive, you got Momentum, you got the Linux project and Linux kernel being rewritten due to flash memory challenges and opportunities. What's your take of the Zen-Linux relationship? Well, there was a cloud war in OpenStack one. That's a done deal. I mean, we can talk about hypervisor wars if you want. But in terms of the relationship, I mean, the Linux Foundation is a very inclusive project. And so, you know, if Zen wants to work with them, that's great. Zen has a future. There's a lot of clouds that run on it, both Rackspace and Amazon run on it. But, is this a halfway house for Zen? Halfway house for Zen. It's a place to hang out. I think it's a chance. I mean, a couple of key things to note about hypervisors. The first is that all the hypervisors now use hardware virtualization. So they all have exactly the equivalent way that they implement virtualization in the system anymore. There's no longer any significant software differences. And then the second is that if you look at how people are betting, OpenStack, 71% of people who have responded to the user survey are using KVM. So if we actually look at the future, I think we're going to see the KVM's likely candidate to win. And then the third thing is that hypervisors should really be seen as an API for the bare metal, right? I mean, you need to go in and tune. The hypervisor anymore doesn't really make any sense. You don't need this big complex of vCenter or vSphere deployments. Because if that box acts up, you simply shut it down, throw it away, put another box in, right? The boxes are disposable. The hypervisors are run on them. Just give us an API to programmatically control them. For the folks out there that are watching, the technologists, entrepreneurs, and CIOs in large enterprises, and that aren't yet in the OpenStack community, might have, you know, kicking the tires, looking at the material, maybe watching this video, what would you share with them about what to know about OpenStack? I mean, obviously they've won. They won the war there. But like, they want to jump in. People want to get involved with OpenStack. Obviously the community's growing. Record numbers here, you mentioned it. We've got another event coming up. What would you tell them and share with them around where this community is at and what they could expect and how they can contribute? Yeah, just like with Amazon web services and public calls in general, when you ask me how do CIOs need to think about that? They need to get engaged. With OpenStack, again, get engaged. There's a lot of things going on. You can download it and you can try it on a single laptop yourself and kind of have some basic understanding. You know, you can go to a lot of these events and the foundation's going to be sponsoring a lot more OpenStack focus events inside of other non-OpenStack events, like OpenStack tracks. So there's going to be a lot more stuff going on where there's an opportunity for you to come and see and get more experience with it. And I'd say that's really the bottom line is like get involved with the community. There's, if you go to openstack.org slash start, I think that's got all the information about how, about all the places you can start. And the developer community is pretty active. I mean, the scene here for the folks aren't here. Pretty geeky. Could you describe some of the type of geeks that are here? That's a lot of the Uber geeks, right? It's a lot of the folks who basically have been hacking on this stuff for a long time who are very knowledgeable about OpenStack and in some cases very knowledgeable about infrastructures and service systems as well. And I'd say that a lot of the people here sort of feel like they're changing the world and they feel like OpenStack has an opportunity to be sort of as impactful as Linux and they are very, very enthusiastic to make that happen. Well, final question for you, Randy. You're always opinionated and have great information. It's great to have you on theCUBE. Perfect Cube guest. Stoke the fire a little bit but also share some great information. The services business is changing. As I said earlier on theCUBE in our conversation, you know, these big consulting houses are advising these large enterprises and been doing it for decades. And, you know, they might not be as motivated to have them move fast enough. You're a new kind of provider for large enterprises helping them get to the cloud. What's your take on the service delivery side of it as the final question is obviously speed is key. You're a new type of firm adding that kind of value. You're accelerating the cloud, not stalling it. What is the new service model? That's actually a complicated answer. So in the past what we've seen is we've seen a kind of business called the systems business. Examples that are EMC or NetApp or Cisco or Juniper where there's a tight bundling of the hardware and software and the software really understands the hardware very well and you get that kind of fully integrated package so you don't have to worry about dealing with the idiosyncrasies of hardware. So one of the things that we're seeing is that there's a new generation of systems companies like ourselves and the people who compete directly with us in the open stack ecosystem. And we, because we're like a systems company but we're run on open source so we don't have a closed system. And that means it's open source software but it has to run on arbitrary open hardware or relatively open hardware. So we wind up spending a lot of time writing software that controls and manages hardware, verifies it, burns it in, tests it, does diagnostics, all the stuff that you would expect from those traditional systems companies but we have to do it in this more open source way. And that fundamentally changes the game in a number of different ways. First of all, when we deploy a system and we support our customers we have to support the entire stack, the hardware, the networking, the storage, the entire stack, not just the software. And then the second is that we have to find hardware vendors who can work very closely with us and help us do the supply chain management. Cause right now, if you go and try to roll your own EMC box you wind up getting into problems that all the EMC solves for you. And Amazon and Google take that on themselves. They deal with hardware idiosyncrasies. They have whole teams that manage that. So somebody like Clash Scaling has to do that on your behalf but then deliver it into the hardware supply chain. It's a game changer. You're basically a hybrid. And that's competitive advantage. Yes. I love your business. Randy Bias, founder, CTO of Cloud Scaling. What we call modern service provider. And this is what the enterprise is moving to. And talk to Randy if you have any questions as I've been part of the community since its beginning. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of the OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier. I'm here with Jeff Frick. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.