 I'm from San Francisco, California, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2015, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, with special thanks to Docker. Now your hosts, Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here. We're with theCUBE and we're at DockerCon 2015 in downtown San Francisco. I think under here we're playing a garden long haul walk from Hilton San Francisco. Excited to be here. We're joined in this segment by Stu Miniman, who's been getting the low down, studying hard, a lot of information, and John Gosman, architect from Microsoft. John, welcome. Thank you. So what do you think? You were here last year at DockerCon 2014? Yeah, it's amazing to see how these things grow. I mean, it's a tiny little company. I remember when Ben first came and visited us last year, and there were four of them. We brought 10% of the company, how many people did you bring? Yeah. And yet there's 2,000 people coming to these conferences already. Yeah. So John, I mean, Docker, you know, the buzz around, it's been amazing. There's a huge line behind you of people at the Docker booth getting their t-shirts. I have a few friends in Microsoft that have even said that they've spotted Docker t-shirts inside the company, people wearing them. And it's pretty rare, I understand, for Microsoft people to wear like, you know, logos that aren't Microsoft, you know, around the campus. Well, there's a lot of Docker t-shirts around. We've been coming to these conferences now. It's the third one, and it's been spreading the love. And the Docker guys, we meet with them regularly, and they always come bearing gifts. That's awesome. So can you give us a little bit insight, you know, what you're working on, you're part of the Azure team, my understanding, you know, and how does Docker fit into what you're building there? Okay. I am an architect in the Azure Core team. The Azure Core team builds the core network storage and compute services. And so, you know, and then other parts of Azure are built upon the services and software that we write. And so, part of that is just getting whatever the customer wants to run on Azure, because you can't be a Windows-only or a .NET-only cloud or Linux-only cloud. Every enterprise has a wide range of software that they want to run, and they want to bring it all. And so, we look a lot at what it is that customers are asking for. And for, you know, well over a year now, one of the biggest types of things that people are very interested in is running Docker. And then internally also, I like to say that everybody in the industry has been doing containers before containers were cool. So inside our services, inside services like Bing, we've been running container technologies for a long time. There's bits of pieces of Windows, there's a thing called a job object that is basically a container technology. I'm sorry, when you say a long time, can you quantify, I mean, is it five years, ten years? Well, the job object was introduced into Windows in Vista, to give you an idea how long, and a bunch of other bits of technology were put in at that time. But like most people in the industry, we thought of containers as an advanced topic. This is something that's really fancy, and you get a hyper cool kernel engineer, and they can work on containers. And what Docker did was say, oh, look, there's a really easy to use developer experience here that anybody can use and deploy quickly. And that was what they basically taught the whole industry. So when we saw that, we knew that wanted that same capability. Our customers are asking for us, and we wanted both for Azure and for Windows. So John, was that a point of view from a design decision, or was there a breakthrough technology that enabled them to make it from that which was complex to that which is really easier for a much broader kind of developer ecosystem? So it's my opinion that these breakthroughs that are aesthetic ones, that are designed to use the ability ones, are actually the ones that are rarer and harder to land. And like look at the web browser, I was working on a hyper media system at the time, and when I first saw it, I was like, ah, no big deal. But the key was it was so simple to use, and because the technology was already fairly mature, then it just took off. And that's the same sort of thing we're seeing now with Docker, is that the technology, and like I say, people are doing, it's containers are cool. 15 years, all the technology is there. And then putting it together and the right combination of usability is the key. Yeah, interesting. People, I think, often discount packaging. Packaging UI is very, very important. And I don't know why we do that, because the industry tends to be revolutionized not by somebody come up with some incredible algorithm, but by making it really easy to use. Yeah, John, can you give us an update on Microsoft's support of Docker? I really thought it was one of the really important moments of the ecosystem building when Microsoft said, OK, we're going to containerize Windows, it's going to be management compatible with what Docker is doing. When we had the whole, almost container wars broke out over the last kind of six months or so, I said, well, this is momentum going forward. And then, you know, then when we get past that, we'll talk about the OCP announcement today, which hopefully gets us past some of that war discussion. Yeah, so our strategy is twofold and it's completely the same sort of experience that the Docker people wanted and our customers wanted, which one is to bring Docker to Azure, Docker for Linux, Docker for Windows, and then also bring Windows to the Docker ecosystem. So about a year ago at DockerCon last time, we announced that we had to integrate Docker into Azure so that we could really easy to launch a VM with Docker and launch containers. And we continued to add support for that. So this spring, we added the ability to take a compose file and launch it on Docker very easily. And then the other thing we announced last fall was the flip side of this thing, which putting the Docker work onto Windows. And the goal there again is just like Docker unifies to some degree the ability to run, say, a Debian and a CentOS, why should Windows be the same way if you want. And so we wanted people to be able to, if they're, you know, want to use containers, but they're using Windows not to be limited to having to switch operating systems and vice versa. And so that work is underway. You can see it actually live going into the Docker engine, GitHub repository, Microsoft, Windows, kernel and Hyper-V team people. The people you might think they were almost the last people to be working on some sort of open source project that started out on Linux, contributing code into this open source project to unify the experience. Yeah, all right, as you talk to users, you know, Docker gave their pitch as to where they fit in the ecosystem, the mission statement that they have. You know, can you sum up for us, you know, what are customers asking for, what's the key value and, you know, why is this whole Docker wave so important? So the key value, I think, like I said earlier, is it's a developer experience, it's very attractive. So you develop on your laptop and then you get kind of this teleport to where it suddenly magically shows up on the cloud and on any cloud and it can run on top of all of us. So the ease of use of the experience is the key reason that it's taken off. But the second part is, as I alluded to earlier, we, the, you know, the operating system elitists have known for a long time that containers are a good way to run things at high density, you know, like I, so even though right now developers are just starting out with small clusters and putting an application into a container and then uploading the cloud, they know that long-term they're going to get these other benefits in cogs and density and that sort of stuff. So it's, it's still a fairly early thing, but that's what we're seeing the interest from for customers. All right, so John, last question I have for you. There's some that would say that containers lessen my reliance on the operating system. So Microsoft is much more than operating systems. I mean, your cloud platform, you've got lots of applications. You know, where do you see that dynamic playing out? So I think Solomon actually gives a really great analogy between how container ecosystem works and the internet works, where at the top you have large range of different applications. At the bottom you have a lot of different devices and then there's a narrow waste of the ITF protocols that enable those things to run all these different types of devices. And I think there's a similar layering of operating system, hypervisor, container, and then that thing that's, that's going to be the narrow waste of how compute works. And then each of those layers can be optimized. And sometimes maybe you don't need the application layer, you just need the transport layer, something like that. And that's what's going on. And a lot of the stuff they said today with plumbing fits totally into that, that these lower levels of plumbing and then there'll be more opinionated layers as you go up. So I don't think operating systems aren't going to go away. I don't believe hypervisor's going to go away. And I know that people are going to use a lot of containers in the future. Excellent. Well, John, nice summary of what's going on. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE, sharing your insight with us. You got a busy schedule. They're giving us the hook. So again, thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff Frick with Stu Miniman. We are at DockerCon 2015. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break. Thanks for watching.