 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. Hi, and we're back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is SiliconANGLE's production of theCUBE here at DockerCon 2017, Austin, Texas. Happy to have on the program, current committee who was CEO of ContainerX which was acquired by Cisco. And you're currently the senior director and head of container products at Cisco. And also joining us is Pradwong who is the director of product management at Docker. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Stu. So Kieran, talk a little bit about ContainerX. Bring us back to why containers, why you helped start a company with containers and went to be acquired by a big company like Cisco. Yeah, it was actually late 2014 as when Pranip and I, my co-fighter from ContainerX, we started brainstorming about what do we do in the space and the fact that the space was growing. And my previous company called RingQ, which I sold the Citrix where we had actually built a container between 2006 and 2010. So we wanted to build a management platform for containers and it was, in a way there was a little bit of an overlap with Docker Datacenter, but we were focusing on multi-tenancy aspects of it, bringing in concepts like VMware DRS into containers, et cetera. And we were acquired by Cisco about eight months ago now. And the transition the last eight months has been fantastic. Great. And Brad, just get your first time on theCUBE, so give us your background. What brought you to Docker? Yeah, so actually before Docker, I was actually a veteran of Cisco, just interestingly enough. Many different ventures in Cisco. Most recently, I was actually part of the NCME Networks team focusing on software-defined networking and application-centric infrastructure. So obviously I saw a pretty big trend in the infrastructure space, that the future of infrastructure is being led by applications and developers. So with that, I actually got to start digging around with Docker quite a lot and found some good interest and we started talking and essentially that's how I ended up at Docker to look at our partner ecosystem, how we can evolve that. Two years ago now actually. Yeah, and I think two years ago, Docker Networking was a big discussion point. Cisco's been a partner there, but bring us up to speed if you would, both of you, on where you're engaging, on the engineering side, customer side, and the breadth and depth of what you're doing. Yeah, maybe I'll start. Yeah, so two years ago, networking was in quite a different place. We kicked it off with acquiring a company back then called Soccoplane, which helped us really define. And we know actually, Madhu and Brent are cubalums, and we actually know those guys. And talk like your company from the idea to starting the company to doing acquisition was pretty quick for you and for them. Right, and we felt that we really needed to bring on board a good, solid networking DNA into the company, and we did that, and they helped us define what a successful model would be for networking, which is why they came up with things like the container networking model and LibNetwork, which actually then opened the door for our partners to then start creating extensions to that and be able to ride on top of that to offer more advanced networking technologies, like Conte, for example. Yeah, and Conte was actually an open source project that was started within Cisco even before the Container X acquisition. Right after the acquisition happened, that team got blended into our team, and we realized that there were some really crown jewels in Conte that we wanted to productize. And we've been working with Docker for the last six months now, trying to productize that, and we went from Alpha to Beta to GA, and now Conte is GA today, and it was announced in a blog post today. And it's actually a 100% open source networking product that Cisco, TAC, and Cisco Advanced Services have offered commercial support and services for. It's actually a unique moment because this is the first 100% open source project that Cisco, TAC has actually offered commercial support for, so it's a pretty interesting milestone, I think. And actually also with that, we also have it available on Docker Store as well, and it's actually the first Docker networking plug-in that's been certified as well, so I'm pretty also happy to have that on there as well. Yeah, anything else for the relationship we want to go in beyond those pieces? Yeah, so we also saw that there was a lot of other great synergies between the two companies as well. The first thing that we wanted to do was to look at how we can also make it a lot, a better experience for our joint customers to get Docker open running, Docker Enterprise Edition open running on infrastructure, specifically on Cisco infrastructure, so Cisco UCS. So we also kicked off a series of activities to test and validate and document how Docker Enterprise Edition can run on Cisco UCS, Nexus, platforms, et cetera. So we went ahead with that and a couple months later we brought out jointly to Cisco Validated Designs for Docker Enterprise Edition, one on Cisco UCS infrastructure alone, and the other one jointly with NetApp as well with the FlexSpot solution. So we're also very, very happy with that as well. Yeah, great, always, our community I'm sure knows that there's CVDs from what they are out there. UCS was originally designed to be the infrastructure for virtualized environments. Can you walk me through what other significant differences there or anything kind of changing to move to containers versus what UCS for a virtualized environment? The goal with UCS is essentially considered a premium kind of infrastructure, server infrastructure for our customers. And not only can they run virtual environments today, but our goal is as containers become mainstream, containers evolve to being a first-class citizen alongside VMs, we have to provide our customers the solution that they need. And a turnkey solution from a Cisco standpoint is to take something like a Docker stack or other stacks that our customers adopt, such as Kubernetes or other stacks as well, and offer them turnkey kind of experiences. So with Docker Data Center, what we've done is the CVD that we've announced so far has Docker Data Center and the recipe provides an easy kind of way for customers to get started with UCS on Docker Data Center so that they get that turnkey experience. And with the MTA program that was announced today at the keynote, right? So that allows Cisco and Docker to work even more closely together to have not just the products but also provide services to ensure that customers can completely sort of get started very, very easily with support from advanced services and things like that. Great, I'm wondering if you have any customer examples that you can talk through, if you can't talk about a specific logo, maybe you can talk about, are there key verticals that you see that you're engaging first or what can you say there? Yeah, maybe I'll start off. We've been working with a joint customer of ours, actually a couple of them. Once again, I don't think we can point out the names yet, where we haven't fully disclosed and collated with their relevant PRs, but definitely in the financials, especially at the online financials, there's a significant company that we've been working with jointly that has actually adopted both Contiff and is actually seeing quite a lot of value in being able to take Docker and also leverage the networking stack that Contiff provides and be able to not just orchestrate networking policies for containers, but the other thing they want to do is to have those same policies be able to run on cloud infrastructure like AWS, for example. So they obviously see that Docker is a great platform to enable their affordability between on-premises and also public cloud, but at the same time, be able to leverage these kind of tools that makes that transition and makes that move a lot easier so they don't have to rethink their security network policies all over again. So that's been actually a pretty good use case, I thought of the joint work that we did together with Contiff. Some of the customers that we've been talking to, in fact, we have one customer that I don't think I'm supposed to say the name just yet, but has rolled out Contiff with the Docker runtime in five production data centers already, and these are the kinds of customers that actually take to advanced networking capabilities that Contiff offers so that they can get comprehensive L2 networking, L3 networking, their monitoring tools that they currently use will be able to address the containers because the L2, the L3 networking capabilities allows each container to have an IP address that is externally addressable so that the current monitoring tools that you use for VMs, et cetera, can completely stay relevant and be applicable in the container world. If you have an ACI fabric that continues to work with containers, so those are some of the reasons why these customers seem to like it. So, Kieran, you're relatively new into Cisco and you came, you were a software company. Many people, they still think of Cisco's, it's a networking company, I've heard people derogatory, it's like, oh, they made hardware defined networking when they rolled out some of this stuff. Tell us about, you talked about an open source project that you guys are doing, I've talked to Lutucker a number of times, I know some of the software things you guys are doing, but give to your viewpoint as to your new employer and how there might be different than what people think of as the Cisco we've known for decades. Yeah, Cisco has, of course, it has several billion dollars of revenue coming in from hardware and infrastructure and networking and security have been the bread and butter for the company for many, many years now. But as the world moves to cloud native becoming a first class citizen, the goal is really to provide complete solutions to our customers. And if you think of complete solutions, those solutions include things like networking, things like security, including analytics and complete management platforms. At the same time, at the end of the day, the customers want to come to peace with the fact that this is a multi-cloud world. Customers have data centers on premises or on hosted private cloud environments. They have workloads that are running on public clouds. So with products like Cloud Center, our goal is to make sure that whatever they have from the applications that they have can be orchestrated across these multiple clouds. We want to make sure that the pain points that customers have around deploying whole solutions include easy setup of products on infrastructure that they have and that includes partnerships like UCS or running on ACI or Nexus. We want to make sure that we give that turnkey experience to these customers. We want to make sure that those workloads can be moved across and run across these different clouds and that's where products like Cloud Center come in. We want to make sure that these customers have top-grade analytics, which is completely software. That's where the app dynamics acquisition comes in. And we want to make sure that we provide that turnkey experience with support in terms of services with our massive sort of services organization and partners, et cetera. So we view this as our job is to provide our customers what they need in terms of the end-to-end solution that they're looking for. And so it's not just hardware, it's just a part of it. Software, services, et cetera, complement it. All right, Brad, last question I have for you. In the keynote yesterday, I couldn't count how many times the word ecosystem was used. I think it was loud and clear to everybody there that I think it was like Docker will not be successful unless it partners successful, kind of vice versa. When you look at kind of the product development piece of things, how does that resonate with you in your job that you're doing? Yeah, and we basically are seeing Docker become more and more of a platform, as evidenced by yesterday's keynote, and with every platform, the only way the platform is going to be successful is if we can do great, we have great options for our partners like Cisco to be able to integrate with us on multiple different levels, not just at one place, and the networking plugin is just one example, but many, many other places as well. Yesterday we announced two new open source initiatives, LinuxKit, and also the Movi project. You can imagine that there's probably lots of great places where partners like Cisco can actually play in that, not just only in the service space, but maybe also in things like IoT as well, which is also a fast emerging place for us to be in. And all the way up until day two, type of monitoring, type of environments as well, where we think there's a lot of great places where once again, options like app dynamics, titration analytics can fit in quite nicely with how do you take applications that have been migrated or modernized into containers and start really tracking those using a common tool set. So we think that's really, really good opportunities for our ecosystem partners to really innovate in those space and differentiate as well. Kieran, I want to give you the final word, takeaways that you want, kind of the users here and those out watching the show, to know about Cisco in the Docker environment. Yeah, I want to let everybody know that Cisco is not just hardware. Our goal is to provide turnkey, complete solutions and experiences to our customers. And as they walk through this journey of embracing cloud native workloads and containerized workloads, there's various parts of the problem that include all the way from hardware to running analytics to networking, to security and services help. And Cisco as a company is here to offer that help and make sure that the customers can walk away with turnkey solutions and experiences. Kieran and Brad, thank you so much for joining us and we'll be back with more coverage here, day two, DockerCon 2017, you're watching theCUBE.