 Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Silicon Valley in the heart of Silicon Valley and Santa Clara, California's Santa Clara Convention Center. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm John Michael, Jeff Kelly, chief analyst for the Big Data Practice at Wikibon.org. And our next guest is Boris Rensky, co-founder and SEMA of Morantis, famous company in the OpenStack ecosystem doing some amazing work in cloud, building clouds from scratch. They lay down the big iron. They hang the iron, they put the software in, they deploy OpenStack. Welcome back. You're on theCUBE at OpenStack last year, OpenStack Summit. Welcome back. Good to be here. Thank you. Morantis for folks who don't understand what's going on in the cloud space. They're really the leader in building out OpenStack. I call them the big truck that everyone calls into backup and bring OpenStack to the enterprise. So you guys have done an amazing job with OpenStack. Certainly working from where it's at now and kind of as it's evolving, knowing the inside baseball, working the buttons on all the buttons, wiring it together and making it deployable. So congratulations. What a cloud month or two it's been. OpenStack continues to gain traction. We'll be live at OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. So we'll be there broadcasting live. Get the cloud foundry announcement. All kinds of craziness going on, HP as you are. Everything's going cloud. So everyone's talking cloud. You had the IBM CEO, Satya Natala today up in San Francisco saying cloud first. What's going on? Excuse me, what's the perspective? What's going on in the cloud wars right now? Perspective on cloud wars, well. I mean, everyone's got a cloud now. I mean, is that good or bad? I think that if we were to kind of try and discuss the situation and cloud in general, it could be a very long and non-specific conversation because in my personal opinion, and it's just not my opinion, but I think that's already a well-accepted industry opinion that the word cloud is pretty much synonymous with internet and it's kind of hard to comment on what's happening with internet. But I can talk a little bit about what's happening with OpenStack and share some of those perspective. And OpenStack is a- Before we get to OpenStack, let's get specific. I mean, I totally agree with you. It's the infrastructure. It's the new printing press of the modern era. But let's talk a little bit about these vendors. They're behind, they're catching up, but OpenStack has done some great work with shipping customers, people voting with code, we're seeing it, IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Cloud Foundry. Are they behind or ahead? What's going on with those guys? Well, when it comes to the pure play definition of cloud, which from what I believe has really emerged and been kind of indoctrinated into the world by Amazon and their elastic compute cloud offering. If you define cloud from that standpoint, if you look at cloud as infrastructure as a service, specifically hosted infrastructure as a service, then I think that it's hard to deny that there's a single leader, that leader is AWS and all the other guys are kind of playing catch up and OpenStack to a large extent is a vehicle for them to play that catch up game. And I believe that it's actually progressing fairly well. Yeah, let's talk about OpenStack then. So obviously OpenStack has an enterprise focus, people love it, people in the enterprise I talked to, Dave Vellante and the team and what Kibon talks to, they embrace OpenStack, it allows them for Lego block like mindset, they get to look under the hood, it's open source, a lot of people are playing involved. Give us the update on what's happening at OpenStack and what you guys are doing right now. So I think that the interesting thing that's becoming obvious with OpenStack is that it's kind of moving from being simply an open source cloud and potentially a rival to solutions like Eucalyptus or CloudStack to really the commoditization movement in the application infrastructure space. Originally, when OpenStack was started, it was kind of a focus solution, object storage, compute orchestration, but as the project continues to grow, it's starting to sprawl into all kinds of directions. And the interesting announcements recently have been coming out is announcement directly relevant to actually this conference is announcement about Trove, which is a database as a service, the OpenStack native service that is a database as a service. Solum, which is a competitor effectively to Cloud Foundry. And many others and new projects are actually getting at it, probably at the pace of one a month. And as this is happening actually, it's becoming obvious that OpenStack's no longer really just a cloud system, per se, it's a commoditization movement in application infrastructure space that's extremely disruptive to a lot of the incumbent players, large incumbent players like Oracle, like IBM, like HP, that actually have a lot vested in the application infrastructure space. And I actually think that this is a good thing because what OpenStack is doing is it's basically, in my opinion, leveling the playing field in the infrastructure space. What's happening historically is that, you'd have a large player come in and they would come up with some very specific niche disruptive innovative solutions, such as back in the day Oracle came up with a database effectively. And then they would leverage it to build all kinds of additional value add solutions around it, ranging from in case of Oracle, actually database management infrastructure on top of its Oracle database and then going all the way up into the enterprise applications. And they end up effectively controlling the entire stack based on one single kind of innovation that they did back in the day. And what OpenStack is doing is it's leveraging the innovations and how you can do collaborative development to actually take all the pieces inside the application infrastructure that one could classify as commodity or not so disruptive innovation and effectively rebuilds them in open source making them open and available to everybody. Therefore forcing the application infrastructure market into the situation where you have to be innovative and you have to be disruptive to actually be able to extract margins. So talk about the war and the war. War is where we use the word war so it drives more activity in the blog and commentary. Talk about the past layers. That's where the action is. And if you look at what IBM has done with Cloud Foundry and the variety of announcements that are going on around that, the platform as a service is where the action is because that's going to really move up the stack with value. You're going to see the commoditization of the infrastructure as a service. That's goodness, that's happening. Amazon's also deleting the way that you guys are doing with OpenStack. But where the developers are playing is past and above. And I want to ask you this specific question. The mindset between fat pass and thin pass. Thin is better. I feel like I had commercial on TV. It's thin better. I mean there's different approaches. Cloud Foundry seems to be a little bit bloated from people we talked to. OpenStack seems to want a more thinner approach. What's your take on it? So I don't think that the fat pass and thin pass is in my opinion the right way to categorize pass. I think that you can think of passes as being more opinionated or less opinionated. And on the extremely zero opinion spectrum of pass you can look to actually and claim that configuration management tools such as Puppet or Chef are to some extent encompass elements of pass. On the more opinionated spectrum of pass you have things like Google App Engine or Heroku where developers operate in much higher levels of abstraction. And I think that there isn't a clear answer in terms of which approach is better. It's clear that operating at higher level of abstraction using things like Google App Engine you can be faster and achieve higher development velocity. But there's definitely a kind of a gaping hole, in my opinion still, today in the pass that is less opinionated, so to speak. There's been a lot of movement. And Cloud Foundry is effectively, in my opinion, is more on the opinionated spectrum of pass. Now in OpenStack, going back to OpenStack, because I'm an OpenStack guy and I like to talk about that, recently there's been a lot of movement around the project called Solom. And the reason why I'm personally excited about Solom is because actually Solom, in my opinion, fills this gap of the less opinionated pass spectrum. What enables you to do is allows you to effectively manage what people refer to as legacy applications in the pass way. To be a little more specific, the Cloud Foundry guys primarily about web-scale applications. Now there's still a lot of money in legacy applications, but there's still a lot of opportunity in simplifying the management and operation of these applications. And if you can effectively describe the properties of this application, such as how you monitor it and how you scale it and put some policies based on the monitoring input, what you need to scale in infrastructure, you can effectively encapsulate a legacy application and give it the web-scale properties. And that's what Solom does. And that's one of the parts of the show here at Percona Live. But I want to ask you just quickly, what's the timetable on Solom? People have been saying, it's going to be delayed. Is it coming soon? Cloud Foundry is trying to use that as a lever against Solom. Is it on track? Is it slotted for next year? What's the update? It's early, and as with anything in OpenStack community, it's not tracking against a specific release, baseline, or milestone. So right now, actually Solom is one of the more actively discussed projects in the OpenStack community. And if you measure activity around different projects, you can measure them around commits, lines of code written, email send, et cetera. So if you measure in terms of discussion, Solom is actually one of the more actively discussed projects, but I think like number four out of all of the OpenStack projects. And that's a good thing. That's a good thing, and it's very specific to the stage in which it's in. And the stage in which it's in is still kind of a architectural design kind of phase, right? So people are writing code, but they're actually talking more about how to structure things properly than producing the code. Okay, so I want to shift gears and talk about your business a little bit because I know you guys have been watching you guys closely, good customer touch points. You guys have a great presence with a lot of customers using OpenStack. So give us the update. What is the current state of customers rolling out OpenStack in the enterprise? Just share with us some anecdotal figures and stats or comments around what's happening with the customers and how they're using OpenStack and what you guys are doing specifically. Of course. So this year is actually an interesting year for OpenStack, and I've predicted that this would be the year, still two years ago, and I believe that this is the year of actually enterprise adoption of OpenStack. So if you look at the earlier history, most organizations adopting OpenStack were the SaaS web guys and service provider guys. This year, we're starting to see actually a real enterprise traction. So the tech savvy organizations in the financial space and the media services space are starting to actually move their OpenStack adoption beyond just early POCs and into the production stages. So we're seeing a lot of customer interest in that respect. What kind of feedback and what do they say to you? And they say, okay, we're feeling good about it. What are some of the comments you're hearing from them? Everybody realizes that OpenStack hands down kind of a one via open source cloud war, at least from the mind share standpoint. There's still definitely some technological gaps on the platform, it is early. If I was to pinpoint specific concerns that have been raised by the customers, upgrades and patching has been an acute problem. They are just now starting to get tackled effectively by the OpenStack community as a whole. Up until now, OpenStack's been very much in kind of this feature function building acceleration mode. Now that they've built a product from the feature function standpoint that would meet the minimum viable product requirements, you start addressing operational concerns. And OpenStack in that respect is just, they're starting to think about it, the community at least, the customers need it for adoption to happen. Talk about developers. Right now, one of the things that we were commenting on the opening segment this morning was the spamming effect that developers are getting now. I mean, now it's a win for the developers. Everyone wants to win the developer community. That's good and bad, because now developers are kind of driving the market. So there's demand, supply, demand issue. But also it can be confusing if people are trying to jam frameworks and software down their throat, proprietary framework or whatever. So obviously open source will be the equalizer there. So what's your take on the developer community in the cloud? We're hearing a lot of folks saying that I want to win the developers. It's easy to say it, it's hard to do it. So what's your take on the current developer traction within OpenStack and within cloud in general? Well, I mean, there's two angles to kind of developer traction. There's the developers that are looking to leverage the platform to actually build applications on top of. And then when it comes to open source, there's the developers that are actually building the platform. And in case of open source platforms such as OpenStack, there is oftentimes kind of a bridging effect between the two because it can be building an app, but you want to be able to kind of, you know, for that app to reach all the way down to infrastructure, so you might be actually hacking a little bit on the OpenStack code itself. So if I was to comment on the developer traction around the OpenStack community, I think that it would be hard to deny a statement that hands down all of the infrastructure developers building cloud are effectively building OpenStack today with a few kind of exceptions around the periphery that are working on cloud stack and eucalyptus, et cetera. The majority has shifted towards OpenStack a long time ago. When we're talking about the adoption of the actual platform API, the situation is substantially more fragmented. I agree that OpenStack's API is not as popular as the Amazon API. Amazon is the most popular interface for developers to work with to date, but given the amount of traction behind OpenStack, I think that they can claim a solid second spot at this point. Talk about certification, obviously, there's been plenty of stories written around OpenStack certification. Where are you guys at with that? What are you guys doing with customers? You know, obviously it's still a developing market with training and deployment, moving into production. What's your take on certification? I thought you'd never ask. So yeah, there's been a number of exciting announcements around certification by us as a company and the OpenStack Foundation in general. And I would like to kind of move away from the word certification because it natively has a negative connotation and it rubs a lot of our organizations the wrong way. The reason for it is because historically, certification has been a vehicle to win, you know, kind of the ecosystem mind share and create lock-in around a particular vendor solution. If you look at, for instance, you know, try to examine the reasons why Redhead became popular in Linux, certifying a lot of workloads against their operating system was instrumental in them winning. Now, I, as I mentioned earlier, I view OpenStack as this, you know, commoditization vehicle that levels the playing field for everybody. And certification is one of the areas in my opinion that has been massively abused by the vendors in the infrastructure space but, you know, all over the software industry to actually, you know, create customer lock-in and preclude this level playing field which is, in my opinion, OpenStack's core mission. So what OpenStack is setting out to do and we are helping it do is effectively make to a large extent the concept of certification irrelevant. The reason and the way we're doing it is you don't need a proprietary vendor anymore, in my opinion, to actually certify a certain workload or a certain infrastructure solution against the platform. You can have open tools that will enable you to do the same and you can have the open tools that will have complete transparency for everybody in terms of what the certification means, what specifically has been tested, what tests have been passed and you can make the information around, you know, running those tests of, you know, vendors X platform against OpenStack. You can make them public and through that, you can actually completely obliterate the potential for creating any kind of, you know, lock-in around certification. So one of your guys, Dave Fishman, was quoted as saying, we're already seeing these kinds of closed door, open source plays happen in OpenStack which is what you're kind of referring to. Really, this comes down to transparency, right? Getting the facts on the table, right? Don't you think? I mean, that's what everyone wants and... Well, I mean, it's not, sometimes it's not very easy to put the facts on the table because, you know, when it comes to certification, you need to have the tooling for the vendors to be able to run certification in the open. And again, I'm, you know, I'm sorry, I don't want to use the word certification, it's a bad word. The testing in the open. It's not like the vendors are, you know, proactively trying to withhold some information, not be transparent. It's just, it's clear that in case of OpenStack, there's a lot of organization with existing mind share of ISVs and it's not in their interest to actually go ahead and push, you know, the open testing, transparent testing of compatibility between different solutions. So they don't proactively withhold information, but at the same time, they don't do anything to the opposite. Boris, we got to get the hook here, but I want to get you the last word. Great to have you on theCUBE and following you guys for a while. Certainly last year we did some interviews with you guys and you guys did great announcements. What are we expecting at OpenStack summit this year in Atlanta? What do you expect to see there? Brawling, LoveFest, new code pushes, new use cases. Give us a taste of what you're expecting. It's a good question to say. It's always a surprise. I think that, and this has been probably the truth for most of the summits so far, but I think that we're going to see a lot of interesting vendor announcements that will be testaments to kind of new large vendors embracing OpenStack in a new way. You've already probably seen some things that Cisco's been announcing. They've been active with OpenStack, but probably not as active as, for instance, IBM and HP. Another interesting player coming into the picture is Oracle. There's been some announcements that they've made at high level saying that they're starting to embrace the OpenStack community, which is just monumental in my opinion because if you think of proprietary, like Oracle is the apple of infrastructure there and they're going OpenStack. So I think that Oracle... There's talks at an all-time high right now given that they just surpassed IBM and the software company and Gartner just said, IT spending's up. So, and they're moving to embrace OpenStack as well. So I think that they're going to be making some interesting announcements as well. Maybe Larry Ellison was right. The iPhone for the Enterprise could be a good strategy as stocks up. HP deserves props too. They've been tirelessly supporting OpenStack from day one, continuing to do an amazing job too. I agree. I agree. Okay, that's a wrap here with Boris. You'll look for us here at OpenStack Summit. This is theCUBE. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Day one of two days at Precona Live. We're getting under the hood, looking at the database, looking at the technology, looking at what's powering the cloud. What is it going to be? Powering that mobile first, cloud first. That's data first. If you don't have the data and you don't have the engine of innovation, then cloud kind of falls on its face. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back. theCUBE...