 from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2016, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program, we go out to the shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Really love to dig in with some of the tech athletes in the community, especially here at the OpenStack Summit. Really pleased to have back on the program, third year in a row here at the OpenStack Summit. It's Mark Shuttleworth, who's the founder of Ubuntu. Mark, thank you so much for joining us again. Great to join you. All right, so one of the themes of the show is, six years ago, it was 75 people here in Austin. Now it's 7,500, you know, of course, Canonical and Ubuntu, heavily involved in OpenStack. Last user survey showed that more than a majority of users are using that flavor of Linux. Give us your kind of reflections on OpenStack, you know, where it started from, is it? Where you thought it would be and... Yes, so OpenStack has certainly become the forum for private or open cloud, and that was exactly what we hoped to achieve in joining it very early on. I think we can all celebrate that success, right? We just don't see any other forum that has the same attraction for either the end user community or the vendor community. I think we are at the beginning of the end for the sort of suspension of disbelief about what's possible, right? And I think we're starting to get to the point where people are refocusing on the core, on the infrastructure as a service. We now have very substantial proof points that OpenStack delivers as an infrastructure as a service, but there's this entire sort of big tent periphery around that, which, you know, to my mind, has very substantial question marks hanging over it. So I think this represents the end of the beginning and the beginning of a new phase for OpenStack as people really start to focus on the stuff they can count on versus the stuff that doesn't really have a room for itself in the future. All right, could you bring us up to speed on, you know, your team's involvement, what have they been working on, what are the kind of the key issues they see, what you're hearing from your users? So I think the OpenStack survey with Ubuntu as the number one sort of platform reflects our focus on the critical essentials, right? Standing it up efficiently, operating it efficiently, and making sure that it delivers virtual networks, disks, and compute. Those are the things that everybody needs, those are the things that everybody has to have, and they kind of have to essentially become invisible, right? So our mission is very much focused on that core, getting that absolutely right. Every industry innovates around that core in different ways, right? We see the telco industry with a very strong focus on networking and network functions. We see media with a very strong focus on scalability and efficient operations effectively. So we think things get kind of foggy when you get away from that core, and that's why we've chosen to really focus on the key pieces. Storage network and compute, vendor interoperability and performance and operability effectively for those. Last year we talked a little bit about Lexity and the container space, so maybe give us the update on that of, you know, big discussion in the keynote here about containers, how's that fit in? Well, we continue to see containers sort of steamrolling the world, and we continue to see new ideas emerging around the Docker-style sort of immutable piece of application. We call it Disco, right? Docker-inspired slice of computer. And so Disco is exciting. We see MISOS, we see Kubernetes, we see Docker Swarm, we see a bunch of others, we see a bunch of homegrown infrastructures, Paz-style infrastructures popping up around that, and I think we'll see that continue. Our focus, you know, we support all of that, a lot of that's on Ubuntu, but our focus is really containers as lightweight virtual machines, Lexity. That's taken off like a house on fire, landing upstream, all of that stuff's now on GitHub, landing upstream as part of this next cycle. And we see lots of interest in that from organizations that have large real-estates of idle VMs effectively because they get great density. We also see a lot of interest in that for, for example, real-time workloads, either analytics or telco or streaming, where dropping a packet or dropping a frame is a bad idea, because containers give you bare metal latency, bare metal performance. Yeah, you talked about, you said, the sort of the big tent, the circus of OpenStack is a little bit over. Yes, indeed, yeah. Some of the early names that were here sort of made it a big circus. Now there's sort of tent, which is sort of trying to contain it. Where do you see it going next? The last couple of days of keynotes have been talking about, a few years ago it was OpenStack is everything. OpenStack is going to be that thing that does everything the last year has been. It's a piece of a puzzle. Where do you see it going? Well, we have two perspectives on this. We have the vendor perspective on this and we have the end user perspective on this. Now if you're a vendor, especially if you're a traditional vendor, as far as you're concerned, the public cloud is close to you. You're not going to sell to Amazon. You're not going to sell to Azure. You're not going to sell to Google. So the public cloud is not a market you can think about. And so in that world, vendors are quite happy to lock themselves into OpenStack because they see it as the only outlet for their stuff. But flip it around and ask yourself as an end user, do you want to be locked into OpenStack? No, you don't. You want the benefits of hybrid cloud operations. You want the economics that Amazon, Google, Microsoft are offering you. No CIO should be saying no to that and none of them are. So from a vendor perspective, we see a lot of stuff trying to get forced into OpenStack because vendors think it's the only place they could move the product. From an end user perspective, not a lot of those things make sense to consume because they're only alive on OpenStack. And therein lies the tension, right? The tent creates the illusion of momentum, but the reality is we can be sure about the core. As for the periphery, if that stuff can't cut it on AWS, on Azure, on Google, I don't think it's going to make a difference in the world. And that's a controversial message, right? That's not something every vendor wants to hear. We're starting to see Google made an announcement a week or so ago. Hey, you can back up your OpenStack into the cloud. You guys obviously have a ton of insight because you're the number one Linux vendor on AWS. How do you think about that from a, when you think about putting yourself in a customer seat, chair and saying, they want great Linux services regardless of where they are. How do you think about that? You're thinking about private and public and that hybrid combination. Right, so I think that move by Google is fantastic. And it really speaks to the strengths of OpenStack, right? OpenStack is an open, private, on-premise infrastructure. And going back to its strengths, storage network and compute. So what Google is saying is, look, there is room for hybrid computing. There's room for your private infrastructure. And we can essentially smooth the pathway to hybrid operations for you by recognizing your storage as something we can engage with. So I think that's a great move for OpenStack, a great move for Google. It speaks to the strengths of both platforms and it's the sort of thing we'll see a lot more of. Let's shift gears a little bit. Everything here is OpenStack. A couple of weeks ago, the world kind of got turned on its head that can now run bash on Windows. Not just bash, but apt, right? You can apt get anything on Windows. What kind of world do we now live in where that's possible? What does that mean to you? I mean, for a long time, that was your competition. That was the other side of the world. Now, you've said, look, things are different. What does that mean to you now? Well, we can only see it as a healthy thing, right? I mean, the reality is we love developers. We love enabling developers. A lot of what I do is to enable the next wave of innovation, right? I'm not smart enough to innovate in every field, but I can potentially accelerate the smart people to do that innovating. So I can only see it as a good thing that we can now reach an audience that historically was closed to free software and to the tool chains that we depend on, right? I think there are those who will feel a little lost in the absence of an obvious enemy, right? We see this a lot in social things. People come together because they're opposed to something and then once they win, they start, you know, their differences start to become manifest in a new way. And we already see signs of that, effectively, in the free software community. But I think we have to step back, say this is a really good thing. It's a credit to two parties in particular. It's a credit to Linus Torvalt and the Kernel community. They do such a classy job of mapping out exactly the services that the Kernel provides, that it is possible for other people to essentially offer those services, which is what Microsoft has done. And it's a credit to the Microsoft team because they've stepped up to essentially deliver that set of capabilities. The Ubuntu image that runs in that Windows services environment is a completely unmodified. It is a perfect Ubuntu, right? It is exactly the same file system as you would run inside a LexD container. Only it's running on the Windows Kernel with a shim layer. And so I think that's a great testament to their engineering. That's a whole new talent pool that we can access. And when I say we, I mean, the free software community and the OpenStack community. Yeah, so I'm interested in your commentary about just kind of the open source industry in general. There's been lots of questions about how we monetize it. Do I have a company that's just all open source? Do I build platforms and leverage all the tools? What's your view on where we are with, in a world where Microsoft is doing lots of open source? Sure. I think open source started out very much as an alternative forum. And it had something beautiful about it in that time, right? If there was a substantial open source project focused on something, you could be pretty sure that everybody participating there was an expert and everybody was participating there as a genuine independent. Those days are over, right? I'm missing that it was a fun time to be part of open source. Today we're in a different era. Most open source today is very tactical positioning by very large organizations. Look at this forum, right? This is not a guerrilla forum, right? This is industry, right? And so I think a lot of our language hasn't adapted. We talk about community today in the same way that we talked about community 15 years ago, but they're quite different. In a very real sense today, open source is a weapon, right? It's a weapon to go faster than standards processes can go, right? And I don't think our social processes have grown up to reflect that, right? We still try to govern open source as if it was a bunch of free spirited independent experts and it isn't, right? The reality is, things catch up, people figure out how to operate and the real winner here is the end user because open source now is the de facto standard for any given industry, for any given new initiative. What about the operators? In one of the keynotes yesterday, they talked about it's kind of the DevOps ninjas versus the VMware sys admins. And of course, the Linux admins have a certain set of skills and understand how to take advantage of some of these tools. Where do you see, are things changing as much as many people put it out to be and how does that impact kind of the jobs in IT? Look, I think skills never go away, although they can stop growing, right? Skilled bases never go away, they can stop growing, right? I think what's going to happen is traditional Linux is going to go in a box and get consolidated. We're now entering a time of big software and it requires a different set of skills to operate big software, right? Remember the transition to big data? The data professionals laughed. The data professionals said, you know, you're just kids, you don't understand, you should go study SQL a bit harder, right? And you should buy bigger machines, right? Shame, you don't have access to the good stuff. But the reality is it was a phase change and we needed a new set of tools, a new way of thinking for big data. Well, I think the same is true for software, right? We had a set of tools that evolved in the 90s that essentially just allowed a human being to have longer arms. But they still require a human being to understand every aspect of the software. Well, in a big software world, that's not possible. Projects like Apache Hadoop are adding components faster than people can understand those components and it's not just a question of hiring a guy who understands that component because of course that's got to be integrated into everything else. So we need to move up a level, we need to move to a new level of abstraction where we use models effectively that encapsulate not just the code, not just the config, but the operations, right? If you have 200 people operating your OpenStack cloud, you're doomed. It may actually be a useful cloud and what matters is how much you can start doing on top of it, but you're going to have to rethink the cost structure of that base operational infrastructure, right? OpenStack should be a push button operation, a dupe should be a push button operation. All of your investments should be focused on the pieces that actually drive business value and that's not making the disk spin and the lights blink. Yeah, you've been using this phrase lately, big software and little things. That's right. You touched on that a sec, can you elaborate on that? I mean is OpenStack big software? Is Mesos big software? What's going to start to fall into that big software bucket and how do people think about it? Because on the flip side, people want to talk about microservices and small little pieces of code. Microservices are not micro, right? And people talk about microservices, what they're really talking about is the decomposition of monolithic applications into constituent parts. And that's really the heart of big software, right? Microservices I think are a symptom of big software, right? The failures of a lot of organizations to stand up OpenStack using their traditional tools and teams are a symptom of big software effectively. And I've heard it said that OpenStack is the hardest thing any organization's going to do. That's not true, it's just the first hard thing every organization has to do, right? So what are the characteristics of big software? First, any interesting thing consists of many pieces. Second, that same interesting thing adds pieces every six months, right? So OpenStack, a new set of pieces every six months. Third, the pieces themselves change, right? Nova today is not the same Nova as it was two years ago. And so think of what that's doing to your teams who have to onboard that stuff and operate that stuff, right? They have to learn about stuff faster than they can actually onboard that stuff. OpenStack is like that, Mesosphere DCOS is like that. I think you'll see Kubernetes and the container passes effectively evolve to that level of complexity. And so we need a new way of thinking about how you operate software that doesn't involve hiring a bunch of people just because you want to onboard new software essentially. You have to figure out how to grab the software and the operations as code, right? So that you don't have to go through the skills development process before you can stand up a piece of software. So you just had your recent quarterly announcements last year when we talked, we were talking kind of about the profitability. Can you give us the business update? So it's better than when we spoke last, we had an outstanding second half. We're a private company, so the details are for us alone. But we feel very much on track for everything that we discussed. Clearly cloud is the driving phase change, both public and private. Delivering ways of operating across both public and private cloud is kind of a key specialty for us. But over time, I think it really becomes big software that's the specialty, right? OpenStack is a test case, DCOS is a test case. Big data now is increasingly a test case of your ability to operate big software. And what we're doing is giving organizations a real choice between SaaS and on-prem with SaaS experiences, right? If you can operate software on-prem, but it feels like you're consuming SaaS, you get the benefits of both worlds, right? You get the control of the data, the ability to choose where your data goes, and you get the ability to essentially put the costs in a predictable bucket. You know what the operating costs are going to be before you start. Right, that's that valuable commodity. I need my learning curve to go like this as fast as possible. How can you help me, right? The bits are irrelevant, I need the learning curve. Right, well, how can we skip the learning piece, right? How can I essentially onboard big data as if I just called an API at Amazon, right? And now, if I need to, I have access to the skills, but I don't have that six months to 18 months process of staffing up, right? Right, all right. So one thing that's been lighting up the tech industry outside of the OpenStack stuff is the recent space stuff. So I'm curious, you have any preference between what's going on with Blue Origin and SpaceX? I think they're both fantastic. I think competition is fantastic. I think it's great for the USA to have leadership in essentially private access to the frontiers of space. I think it's great for the astronaut community, right? This has long been a challenging community to participate in, and now it's going to be broken wide open, creating new opportunities for people in the industry, both on the manufacturing side and the system side and the flying the things side, which is exciting. Yeah, any plans to get back up? I would love to fly again. I'd like to go further than low earth orbit. I think the next frontier for us is the moon again and Mars. And I feel like those options are being developed by very smart people. It's an exciting time. All right, yeah, we often talk in the tech industry about some of the moon shots. Now, of course, we've got the Mars shot going on. Mark shuttle mirth, thank you so much for joining us again. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack 2016 here in Austin, Texas. You're watching theCUBE. It's always fun to come back.