 The Cube, at OpenStack Summit at LANA 2014, is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo, and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. And we're back. This is Stu Miniman with wikibund.org, here in Atlanta, checking out all the developers, the users, the operators all coming in, the expansion of OpenStack. We've got a segment here with a couple of Rackers. So we've got Scott Sanchez, who's a lead cloud evangelist with Rackspace, and Nicky Acosta, who is the first evangelista that we've had on the program. She's also with Rackspace. There's a hashtag going this week, in addition to OpenStack and the Cube. Check out RackStack, ATL, for all of the wonderful stuff going on. But both of you, thanks for coming on The Cube. My pleasure. All right, so Scott, let's start with you. Can you, you know, what's the latest? You've been with Rackspace for a couple of years. You've been on The Cube a number of times. What's your current role with Rackspace? So I joined Rackspace almost three years ago with a very simple mission, make OpenStack win. And so now three years later, to be able to come here and see the progress and the success of the platform and the continued stream of users that are standing up on stage and talking about that, that's fantastic. I spend most of my time these days helping both inside and outside the company, just people understand where things are headed and spending a lot of time thinking about what the future looks like and how the market is gonna take advantage of what cloud is doing. So it's part evangelism, part big thinker, and taking that out to help people be successful. So Scott, are we gonna have a big banner behind you, mission accomplished? Are we there yet? Absolutely not. Troy did a good job today, I think, of lining up the opportunities that we still have as a community and the challenges, frankly. So hopefully we can get into some of that today. Absolutely, we'll be digging into it. Nikki, why don't you share with us what your role is? Sure, so started at Rackspace three years ago, or five years ago, three years ago, joined the OpenStack team before OpenStack Foundation really came about and worked last two years on private cloud exclusively, also helping our object rocket business get off the ground and get running and ready for customers to take advantage of. All right, so Rackspace has a long history with cloud. I think some have called what Rackspace does, kind of hosting 2.0 and you guys do both the mix of kind of the public services as well as the private, you help companies build architectures that can have some of the same operational models that Rackspace does in your environment. If we look out to the future, I'll throw this out to whichever of you want to take it. Where do you see kind of the public, private hybrid cloud going? And so five years from now, what do you think that's going to look like? So there's a quote that I like to use from Highlander. There can be only one, right? And when I think about different names that we give to different types of cloud implementations, public, private, hybrid, that's how people compare them and that's the categories that vendors put them in and analysts look at them and customers shop for. But when you think about, as let's say you're an enterprise, how you might implement a strategy around that, you should just have a cloud strategy, right? And where you pull the resources from and how they look and who they're managed by and what your applications put them together as really will then dictate how you think about the world. I think everything should be hybrid, frankly. You shouldn't put yourself just in one box because that essentially defeats the purpose of the idea of cloud, that you have this inherent flexibility and the flexibility should include location, right? Not just within providers' data centers, but within your own data centers. So I think that the future will look more and more like one as the applications and the frameworks and the components drive further down that path. And OpenStack is one of those things because of the true openness of the APIs and the real granularity in all the services allows people to move further towards that without feeling like they're building on five different platforms. All right, so I'm gonna take your Highlander line and go further. So is the evil, is it the poor legacy operations model or the Kurgan? And unfortunately they're gonna have to burn out because they're working so hard. What is the real value that you see to the users for moving to that new operations model? It's speed. In the keynote this morning, you talked about good, fast, and cheap and if you can give someone enough fast, they can make up for the other things, right? Having that consistent access and the consistent platforms really delivers that, right? Yeah, it's about people think of it like how many cores and how many gigs do I have, but the people writing the checks that the business thinks about it is how fast can we get to where we wanna go? And that really is the driver and I think that's what's going to help break glass as necessary in these bigger organizations that have relied on some of the legacy platforms, legacy tools, but more painfully, the legacy way that they manage it all and move towards more automation and move towards the abstraction. Yeah, we heard that from Wells Fargo this morning, they wanna go fast. There's a strong desire for enterprises to move faster because they're competing with startups. Everyone's competing with startups. And so to be able to get products to market faster even if you're an enterprise is super important to customers of all sizes, really. Okay, so, Nicky, I know you spend a lot of time with kind of the developer community and if you look at the operations that most customers have, where do you see customer mindsets? Are they bought into DevOps? Are they hiring new people and getting rid of the old ones? Are they retraining them? What's the state of IT operations and where do you see it needing to go over the next few years? Sure, I mean, look, I think there's a big variation depending on who you talk to. I'm still shocked to this day when I tell people that I work in cloud computing and they have no idea what cloud is. We have people that don't know that you can provision a server or a database instance with a single API call. So you talk to people and it's really all over the map. I think where Rackspace is adding a lot of value is in things like you mentioned, like DevOps. We have DevOps support. There's the chef and the puppets of the world but we're also starting to see customers pulling us to newer technologies like Ansible and Saltstack. And so I think a lot of companies are making investment in their people because they have to. They have to move faster. They have to embrace continuous integration and continuous deployment. All right, so we had a guest on earlier today that's saying if you look at the big clouds, they're almost undifferentiatable. If you Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they look very similar from a tool set standpoint. I guess from what you're seeing, how are customers choosing their environments? How do they make that decision? We had a good talk about this before. You want to take that? Yeah, I talked a minute ago about cores and gigs. If that's all you're shopping for, then yeah, it's almost hard to pick at that point, right? You almost have this buyer's dilemma that which one should I pick? They're all the same. You're almost shopping at the one-size-fits-all store. The idea that Rackspace has, and it's the one we've grown up on as a company, is around services. It's around managed offerings and helping our customers not just navigate the sea of choices, but architect them properly, use them properly. And so for us, the real differentiation that we have out in the market and what we're consistently recognized for by the market is for that service level that we offer, much more than break fix, right? It's all the things that lead up to how do I do this successfully? You know, you're going to continue to see you know, an epic fight amongst the kind of commodity infrastructure players. Customers have a choice, right? They either choose to buy the cheapest cores and gigs and figure it all out themselves or to get help. And those customers that want to help know that they have that clear choice in Rackspace. I agree, I mean, I think we talk, we live cloud, right? We, Scott and I, we travel around, we talk about cloud day in and day out, but there is a vast majority of people out there who are just starting to get into cloud. And so having that expertise and that support to help through that transition is key for a lot of our customers. All right, so we want to talk a little bit more about the future here too. So, you know, absolutely, the big guys, I think there's the race to zero from, you know, core speeds and feed standpoint, it becomes table stakes, you know, support. Obviously, as we go for enterprise grade environments, you know, there's a lot of competition out there to build, you know, distributions, clouds and environments that can be there. You know, where do you see kind of room for innovation and white space going forward? I think there's still a lot of innovation happening around DevOps in general. And it's not just, you know, adopt a chef, a puppet or an ansible and go. I mean, there's a whole mindset and a cultural change that comes along with operating in a cloud model. And I think for a lot of companies, cloud is not going to solve all their problems. And we see this heavily in the database world. You know, there's still many customers that come to us and they are sort of outgrowing their sort of desire to stay on dedicated hardware for databases and they want to go to the cloud, but they're still overhead and other things that are challenging. And so with our partnership with Hortonworks and the stuff we're doing with Object Rocket around MongoDB, we're really trying to help them solve those problems as well and earn their trust to be able to put data on the cloud because right now they're just not comfortable, they're not there yet. And we're slowly starting to see that shift, but I think it's going to be a while. Are you guys involved in kind of the modernization of applications? You know, you think about kind of there's in-memory databases, there's all the fast, big data environments out there, mobile of course, you know, driving a lot of change. You see a lot of that in Amazon. Are you helping customers with, you know, the kind of modernization off of legacy apps? Yeah, I think so. I'm going to go through our digital practice. Yeah, there's a lot of good examples, whether it's in the digital practice that we have, which is focused on content and commerce, right? People that kind of started the internet when you think about how a lot of the investment happened that are now on their second or third or fifth generation of their platforms that are looking to scale even more. Other areas in general, you talked about some of the data platforms with our kind of data services and our object rocket offerings that we have. Those are customers that very often will start by running whatever that platform is. It could be Mongo or something else on a single server and quickly get to the point where they realize, wow, this is really valuable to me. How do I get this to be production grade, enterprise grade, scalable, you know, all the other attributes? And again, it's that I can go at myself or I can bring in some experts to help me with that long term, not just how do I stand it up and turn the lights on, but how do I operate it? And that's where Nikki spends a lot of her time is helping customers now understand how to make that journey to not just modernize from kind of old to new, but new to scalable. And that's really the big challenge because flipping on a database is easy, no matter essentially what platform you choose. Getting it to scale as fast as your business might scale is really challenging. All right, so let me float something for you. Wikibon CTO David Floyer made a prediction piece. If you look at any company out there, whether it be your midsize enterprise all the way up to Amazon to Google, nobody wants to own a data center or build another data center. So his premise that he put forth is what we call mega data centers, which said that not that everything goes to the Google and Microsoft of the world, but more and more people want to be able to have their environment or somebody else can manage that physical, the power, the space, the cooling, the cabling even. And they might also have their data of their industry nearby. So New York Stock Exchange was a great example that we've quoted many times, that they've got all the trading data for history and everybody wants to plug into that. So you get communities that can live together and if you're in a mega data center, we can cross-connect between cloud services. So what I want to get your take on that is, you know, let's start there. We do it now. I mean our object rocket business is a great example. About 60% of our customers do not host their application with us, but they use object rocket for their database, which is astounding and they're able to do that because of direct connects into Amazon and other places. So I think that's absolutely key in how people are thinking about cloud. It may not be that one provider gets all the business or one sort of mega data center is going to house everything, but there's going to be reduced latency and increased performance by being able to direct connect those components together. And these are all components that have great communities around them and really smart people. And so there's a benefit there too that once someone gets us off the ground, they kind of pave the way for others to do the same. I can't tell if what he's thinking about for the future is a cloud of clouds or if it's just better peering in general. And I think it's probably somewhere in the middle, but the idea of community clouds is certainly one that a lot of us have talked about and bringing that idea of the data has the value and bringing the gravity around that is important. Again, scaling a web app has become much easier than it ever has been. Scaling some of these new database types and key value stores and big data is more challenging than ever because of the demands people are realizing they can ask of those systems. So it's this challenge of we can have the best peering relationships in the world, but if I can't get my database to keep up, none of that matters, right? And so you have to kind of weigh how fast you move on one side versus how big you can get on the other side. Yeah, sure. One of the big things that we always talk about at Wikibon is the poor IT staff, every time you add something new, you're typically not getting rid of something. So our prediction is within five to 10 years, you're not going to build another data center. Not saying nobody builds any data centers, but I'm saying if you're a typical enterprise, you're not going to build another data center. So the question I have for you is if we look out kind of five years, what else, what can we get rid of? What can we kind of take off of IT's plate that they have today? I still think there's a tremendous opportunity for just pass and sass in general. I think when you talk about abstracting the data center complexities away, I mean, that rolls all the way up to hardware, it rolls up to software. You know, you look at the Salesforce model and the reason why they've been so successful is because they're abstracting all that complexity away, you know, all the way down to the data centers and the hardware level. And I think people like that model. I think our customers that we work with are moving towards that model. The partners that we're working with are finding out interesting ways to be able to build customers, to help them scale in that model. And so I think we're seeing definitely some growth, especially around the sass base, with companies that are just going to abstract all that away entirely. You know, it happened first with email. It's happened now with Salesforce and some other things. I think it's just going to continue. Just to add to that, we have customers every day that we talk to that have thousands of applications in their portfolios, some of which they just need to keep the lights on indefinitely depending on the industry that are looking at, okay, you know, I have this application. It runs on, you know, Windows 2000 and something. How do I alleviate my staff's time from having to manage those and monitor them and back them up and take care of them and all the care and feeding. And so, you know, the business that Rackspace has around kind of that custom hosting environments where we can meet your security and your operational needs, tie that into the cloud through some private networking and software defined networking. I think you're going to see a lot more of that. What I would like to see even beyond that would be the addition of automation, right? So when you move those applications, you know, we have the ability with our DevOps offerings and a lot of the management that we can deliver to customers to write the recipes and the scripts, right? So you stop kind of doing the care and feeding of that server. You stop naming that server the way you used to and really start treating it different so that you can feel more comfortable moving more and more of those applications out of your data center, replacing those with private cloud components and other pieces that will have more kind of acceleration to your business. All right, you brought up, Nikki, pass and sass. My question is, what is the intersection of pass and sass with OpenStack? Because when I think sass, you know, I don't know that I need OpenStack to be able to do sass and when I think pass it should just be a layer that it sits on top. Am I thinking about it the right way or? I think where pass and sass start is where you don't want to think about things, right? And so we have customers who are platform providers who still need infrastructure. We have sass providers who still need infrastructure but the level at which we help them might be slightly different. And so we're looking at customers that have massive platform requirements. They're building a next generation X. Not only do they want to be abstracted, they don't care what's running underneath so long as it works. It might be OpenStack, it could be VMware, it could be anything, but the point of that is they don't want to deal with it. They don't want to worry about it. And when you start to think about automation, you still need really smart people to sort of architect your applications but everything else pretty much can be automated. So you test dev, QA, deployment, scaling application, you can automate all that stuff. And so I think as we look forward to sass and pass, there's going to be a next layer of abstraction that is going to simplify it for the people who take care of those platforms which makes Raxmeets a great provider for those folks because they don't want to deal with the data center, right? They don't want to deal with making sure that OpenStack is up to date. They don't want to make sure that the, you know, the APIs are just going to work. They just expect them to work. And that's, I think, where cloud is really disruptive is, you know, I think a lot of people don't realize how much care and how much work goes into just making a cloud work. But the people at the other end, they totally take it for granted. They just expect, when I send an API call, I want my server on instantly. And that's the norm now. So there's a big mind shift that's happening there. When you think about software as a service, it's someone else's problem, right? To take care of everything. Platform as a service, it's primarily someone else's problem. When you think about infrastructure, when you go to the commodity infrastructure route, it's your problem, right? And Rackspace, it's our problem together, right? We all sit on the same side of the table. It's not us versus our customers. It's either we're all successful together or we're not. And there's no such thing as, hey, it's your problem, right? That lends itself to this interesting model where when you take our managed cloud infrastructure as a service and you layer on automation, you can get to this point where you've got the benefits of Platform as a Service in that it's managed. It's automated, it scales, but I still have all the control that I need. I'm not giving up the ability to pick which components I'm using and how it's architected and how it scales and when it scales, right? I don't lose that. It's still managed and it's automated. And it's this area that sits somewhere in the middle, right? And you see the investments we're making into Solom, into Cloud Foundry, into other automation orchestration systems that are somewhere between those two areas. That's the reason is that customers put those pieces together and realize how valuable they are. And none of them are really getting rid of dedicated infrastructure. Most of our largest customers are still using a sizable part of their entire platform is all dedicated. And so hybrid is very real for some of those customers. If you look at some of the work we're doing with CERN to solve some of the federation problems, I think we're starting to see real progress in that space during Trace Keynote, he was talking about the importance of vendors coming together to solve interoperability because it's something that our customers want and need. Yeah, you know, Nikki, you're wearing the open stack shirt. I remember I got an open stack shirt. Gosh, I think it was two and a half, three years ago. I got one and I remember half the people at that event didn't even know what open stack was. So we're coming to a close. What I want to give each of you a chance to really comment on is what makes this year important when it comes to open stack and what's happening? We've had big momentum growing, big event here. Obviously Rackspace has a lot of rackers in the area. So what are you seeing and what should be looking for this year? I think I keep thinking about a certain person on Twitter who called open stack repeatedly a dead duck. And every year, open stack happens. Every six months, the open stack summit takes place. People come together. The numbers grow. And you've got users like Wells Fargo and Comcast and Bloomberg. And so I think you're starting to see real traction in the market. Is the space crowded? Are there too many vendors involved? Maybe. But the fact is that there's a lot of users of open stack, some that we can talk about publicly and some that we can't, right? And so I think we're starting to see now people kind of dialing it back and saying, OK, let's not make open stack be everything to everybody. Let's define what core open stack should be. And let's let the ecosystem around that core flourish. And so I think what we're going to start to see is maybe a dialing back or sort of a refocus into what's important within open stack and then sort of treating that ecosystem as a very important part, but not the most crucial part of what open stack is for everyone. Yeah, I would echo the idea that defining core is important. The first couple of years where let's get everybody involved in this thing, let's get some early users. We've done that. You look at the who's who of who's involved, who's contributing, it's everyone. So we're well past that. When you look at industries that are standing up on stage and talking about it, it's everyone. And so the challenge almost is now that we've got the momentum behind the contributions and the user growth. The risk is almost moving too fast. And you've seen that. I think Troy did a really good job in the keynote this morning of illustrating core versus all the other projects and how much do we squeeze in the middle and how much do we let be on the outside? Getting really crisp on what that is and continuing to invest as a community into federation, which we've started to see real movements on and real users of. I think that's critical for us to continue to title together, make it more real for more users. All right, well, Nikki and Scott, I really appreciate you guys coming in, sharing your expertise, your progress of the community that's going on here. I also want to give a shout out to our sponsor for this event. Of course, it wasn't for brocade and red hat, stepping up and helping out so that we can bring this great content. Two and a half days here from Atlanta. This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org and we will be back right after this quick break.