 Live 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, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live on the ground in San Francisco at DockerCon 2015, 2,000 Ampda people running around, grabbing t-shirts, are excited. A lot of buzz in the hallways. We're really excited to be here. First time we brought theCUBE here. Joining by my co-host, Stu Miniman. Stu, welcome again. And we're really excited for this next segment that I've been, doll of the CEO of Docker, kind of running this crazy thing. So first off, I've been welcome. It's been awesome to see you. Thank you so much. It's been great, it's great to be here. So what's the show look like from up on stage in the keynote, from your point of view? Up on the keynote, it's terrifying. But I mean, you know, I mean, look, for all intents and purposes, we're a two year old company. And to be able to have a situation where we've got people from all over the world and every major company here, not just to learn about Docker, but people like GE and the GSA and Disney and Activision talking about using Docker in production, it's a thrill beyond explanation. Amazing. All right, so Ben, can you lay out for us just, you know, the company over the last year? I think one of my tweets that I loved from last year was there were 42 people working for Docker last year and they might not have the answer to life, the universe and everything, but boy, this is a hot new thing. Fast forward a year to 150 people, order magnitude more committers. So, you know, where are you kind of, the company, the project, the ecosystem? Lay out lots of stories. Yeah, I mean, as you've noticed, the company has sort of not quite quadrupled, which is big, but if you look at some of the other statistics, like the number of Dockerized applications that they're out there, there were like 15,000 of them. Last DockerCon, now it's 150,000. If you look at how often those were downloaded, they'd been downloaded three million times at the last DockerCon in June. In January, that was 100 million, now it's 500 million. So, to a large extent, what, you know, life at Docker has been is just trying to keep up with this amazing ecosystem and all of the activity and it's not just web companies using Docker now, but we're seeing it being used by some of the most serious enterprises on the planet. Yeah, so, I was telling you, I just finished reading a book by Jim Whitehurst and he talked about, you know, open source is tough because you're not like just telling your employees to go do something. You're trying to, you know, incent and engage an entire community to help them build and, you know, build off of that network effect. So, Docker, of course, being open source, you know, talk a little bit about that, you know, your role in this big ecosystem versus some of your previous leadership roles. All right, well, I mean, certainly there are tough things about open source and you sort of have to accept the fact that you're not in control. I mean, so I think, you know, being a parent, that's really good training for this because you have to realize at some point, you know, this is going to develop in ways that you don't expect and that's wonderful, but, you know, Docker couldn't exist as a proprietary company. And if you think about the kind of leverage that we get, you know, 1300 people working on the code of whom we pay the salaries of 70, right? The fact that there are every major operating system, every major cloud provider, every major DevOps tool, every major ops platform latching onto Docker, right? That only happens if you're open source and now that we're moving into commercial, you know, there's no way that we could play golf with the CIOs of every, you know, every Fortune 500. In fact, I only play golf on courses with windmills, but with Docker, we don't play golf with them, but we know that every one of those companies has a Docker project going on. You know, that was one of the stats we showed, right? Is that, you know, the latest stats are something like 10% of all Fortune 500 CIOs say that they've got Docker, you know, in pilot and production and other 30% plan to do it by the end of the year. So that only happens if you're open. Yeah, so Ben, first time you and I sat down to talk about Docker, your elevator pitch was, we're going to separate my application management from my infrastructure management. Heard a lot in this keynote this morning about, you know, the great stuff you're doing around networking and all the plugins, talking about how you fit into various clouds, but there's that plumbing that needs to work. So, you know, is it as simple as just saying, hey, you know, we can just focus on applications now or, you know, there's a lot of hard work to be done, I think. Well, I think what we're sort of going is, we're going from sort of physical-defined infrastructure and we sort of have this realm of software-defined infrastructure. Now it's really application-defined infrastructure. So if you will, the, you know, people are building generic infrastructure and then the applications, in particular the containers, are saying, hey, here's what I need in terms of security, in terms of networking, in terms of storage, and then it's up to the infrastructure guy to say, yeah, I can deliver it or not. So you have separated them, but you've separated them in a really interesting way. It's not that people who write applications don't have to worry about storage or networking, it's that they don't have to worry that the infrastructure they're running on has been configured to support them. So you see just more and more of that infrastructure set up moving into the container and less and less and less in the app and then some of the definition really will define and really have a smarter container that goes out and assembles the correct infrastructure underneath the covers. That's right, that's right. In essence, I mean, you know, go back to this shipping container analogy, right? You know, you have a little label on the shipping container that says what's inside of it and where it needs to go and to some extent that lets everybody who's running the ships and the trains and the trucks and the cranes, that gives them all the information that they need to work. And in the case of Docker containers or sort of Docker based applications, you're actually stitching together multiple different containers, but the outside of that container, if you will, tells you security profile, it tells you who created it, it tells you what's in it, it tells you what it needs to run, and then to some extent you either say, yep, as infrastructure I can take that or I can't, which is sort of a much better way of doing things. And it's sort of the same philosophy as the big data guys, right? Rather than having to precisely define what questions you want to ask in advance of your data, set up your data so people can ask any questions. So you can talk a little about the Open Container Projects. So we know when you've got that many big name logos on there, there's got to be a lot of behind the scenes, moving, shuffling, guys brought in the Linux Foundation, so it gives us a little bit of insight as to what led to this, but you said the flash bulbs all went off when Solomon shook hands with Alex Pulvy of CoreOS during the keynote. So I think Adrian said even that we might have just moved over that bump that we had six months ago, so give us some insight. Well I mean, we actually, probably by the time that Docker was like nine months old, people were already saying to us, hey listen, this is fantastic, but the container itself has to be more than just Docker, right? It's got to be something that is universal. And, you know, do you sort of use another infrastructure analogy, you know, really shouldn't be arguing about the width of train tracks anymore, we should just be out there all, you know, building the faster engines. And so, you know, this is something that's been building up over the past several years, but really in the, about three weeks ago, you know, we were talking to the folks at Red Hat and the folks at Microsoft and IBM and saying, hey, let's not spend our time arguing about the shape of the box anymore. Let's worry about making things great. And so, the steamroll started, we knew we wanted to do something lightweight and that's where we brought the Linux Foundation in. And then pretty quickly, we had, you know, everybody from A to V, from, you know, Amazon up to the VMware wanting to join. And then we said, well, let's really go for broke. Let's see if we can make this work with CoreOS and the AppC guys as well and spoke to them and it was just so gratifying that they wanted to, they sort of wanted to make this an industry-wide effort as well. So, you know, I won't say it was entirely smooth. You don't get 20 big companies to agree on something without a few. And did you say that was three weeks ago is when this really started before? That was three weeks ago, yeah. You know, we thought, well, you know, putting on DockerCon is easy. It's not like we have all these demos or things like that. Let's throw one more, one more thing onto the file. So, you know, one of the things where we're all just majorly impressed. You showed some of those stats of, you know, how many applications and how many downloads and how many competitors you have there. I mean, things are moving so fast. Yes. How do you make sure you don't, you know, run off the tracks when you go around a curve if you use your train analysis? Okay. You know, it is really hard, but I think that there's certain guiding principles that keep us sort of grounded. First of all, when you have, you know, 1,300 contributors, they keep you grounded. They tell you when they don't like what you're doing, right? They're very free with their contribution as well as their suggestions, their creative suggestions for improvement. I think we also know that being open in general is fantastic. We always say, let's start with putting the hooks and holes, if you will, in place. You know, building the tools first and then building solutions on top of that. And we listen to our users and the users keep us honest. And, you know, now that we have banks and people trying to do healthcare and people, you know, trying to provide natural defense, you know, we have even more controls than ever so making sure that we pay attention to security and reliability and quality. Clearly, you guys are on a great virtuous cycle and it's funny, we're going back to the container, the container behind us. And if you've ever read the book, The Box, which is a great book about, it wasn't that easy, even in that industry, to really get a standardized shipping container. What was the moment? What was the secret sauce, because as we've talked earlier on theCUBE, containers have been around for a while, they were a much lower level, kind of more techy thing. What was it that kind of was the tipping point for Docker? Well, you know, when Docker came out, I think the difference was that before Docker, containers were kind of the equivalent of a steel box. You know, they didn't have hooks and holes on them, they weren't all the same size and shape. And they weren't designed for developers, they were just an infrastructure tool. And so I think Solomon's insight was, let's try and make this a standard, let's make it as open as possible so that anybody can design it, and then let's get it in the hands of developers first. And once developers started using it, things started taking off and suddenly it made sense for Red Hat and Microsoft and IBM and Intel and all these guys to embrace Docker and all those startups. And you know, it was probably nine months after we started the project that suddenly you could take any application written in Linux, put it in Docker container and run it anywhere. And that sort of showed the world what we could be. And so now, now there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be worked out. But I think the industry has decided this is the right way to go. So Ben talked a lot about the ecosystem and where the company is. Talk about how's Docker kind of bundling, you know, making a solution that, you know, go to market and maybe talk about revenue a little bit. You know, I'm here with my investors. No, no, no. Actually, we're really excited by the things that we're seeing on the revenue side as well. So at the last DockerCon, we announced a bunch of hosted services. And pretty much what we're seeing, and this DockerCon, we're announcing a lot of or shipping a lot of on-premise services. And this nice virtual cycle that we're seeing is that course developers adopt Docker, open source, they start using it, they bring it into their companies. It goes from an individual developer creating five containers on, you know, on five servers to a work group. And at that point, they tend to jump onto our hosted services and we've got over 250,000 individuals for paying for the hosted service as well as something like 15,000 organizations on the hosted services. And when we announced our on-premise solutions, we had in the first day 100 organizations say, hey, we want to be on the list for that. We ended up doing a beta with about 50, including half of whom are sort of fortune 500 types. And now we've got 800 companies waiting basically for the announcement we're making tomorrow about it all being generally available. So great companies and a lot of them are talking, commercial paying customers talking today at DockerCon. Yeah, give us your take, you know, you got to be pulled in a million different directions these days, every show we've been at the last year talks about Docker. So I was even at the IBM Edge, which was their storage and mainframe show. And we talked about Docker on ZOS, you know, there. So, you know, Walmart talking about how they want to use containers in a mainframe environment. So across the board, you know, from the infrastructure side, from the cloud side and talk about development and the applications, I mean, you guys are in the center of that. So, you know, you talked a little bit of guiding principles before, but you know, boy, how does the team, you know, how do you scale the team, you know, how do you think about where you do your hires and you know, where do you go? So, I mean, it obviously is a challenge, right? There are, there's sort of a lot of pressures. You know, again, part of the benefit of being open is that there are certain things like really deep storage problems and really deep networking problems that we don't have to solve. We can develop high-level APIs and then partner with a, you know, a Cisco or a VMware or an EMC as well as startups like Rancher and cluster HQ. And so, what we're able to do is get that full stack that the enterprise wants. The enterprises are all coming to Docker right now saying, hey, help us put it all together. And so we're sort of in this enviable position where we can, you know, be the people who stitch together the whole solution but we don't have to build every part of it. And that's helping keep us safe. So you talked about kind of like managing your kids at some point, they go off and are their own people. I wonder if you could share some of the things that have surprised you that you had no kind of thought that somebody would take this project in a particular direction, a particular type of use. That's a great question because it happens all the time. I mean, so for example, you know, Docker has been focusing on 64-bit Linux but if you walk around the show today you'll see people doing Docker on Raspberry Pi and Docker on mobile and Docker on Power and Z systems. And of course, you know, Docker on Windows, Microsoft came to us for a first meeting and we thought, hey, well, let's talk about, you know, making Docker for Linux work with Azure. They say, oh, no, no, no, we've got something else. We want to actually want to make Docker for Windows. Right. And so that's been really surprising. And then the use cases that you see with Docker are just, it's thrilling. And whether it's people working on genomic stuff or building new businesses. I mentioned this company, Nurtalize that has Nurtalizer that is basically running an out. They're running a cloud, but the cloud basically has equipment in 2,000 Dutch apartments. And they've got servers there where the connectivity is through the power grid. And the server is designed to run hot because it serves as a radiator, as well as a server. You know, crazy stuff. And even they want Docker for that. And they're using Docker to make that happen, right? I mean, I would not have thought of that but very cool stuff. Yeah, so there's so much going on in the show, Ben, for those that couldn't make it to the show because there was a huge wait list for that. Yeah, more people on the wait list than we were at the show last week. There's got to be so many things you're proud of, but give us a couple of nuggets that might be overlooked or that people should make sure to poke into. Yeah. Well, so first of all, first for this show is we've got a big cultural section. So we've got, you know, what it's like to develop an open source. You know, if you're part of a community that isn't particularly well represented here, I think we're really proud of that. There's a lot of stuff here that's for the contributors and making it easy for people to contribute. And that's been a big part of our focus as well. And I think that if you're into storage or you're into networking, you're into seeing live migration work, you're into seeing how you can actually sign in secure containers, there's a lot of great stuff for you. But honestly, for me, my favorite thing is just going to the use cases because in the end of the day, there's nothing that sort of shows the power of Docker more than users who are using Docker. And, you know, one of the other great stats we have this conference is we had over, I think 400 talks submitted. So we ended up accepting something like 7% of them. We felt like an Ivy League university. 7% of the talks, but all fantastic. And they're all going to be made available online. Everything's being videotaped. And so you'll get great quality if you can't go to a particular session. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, do you envision this as the container show for the industry? Or how much is it the Docker project? How much is it containers? And how much is it Docker the company? You know, I always say Docker, the company is just a tiny piece of Docker the project. And Docker the project is really a tiny piece of Docker ecosystem. And Docker ecosystem really is a tiny piece of this big movement around containerization. And so I hope that this show and everything we do really is in service of the broader movement. Ben, that's a great way to close out the segment. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of what I'm sure is a very busy couple of days. If it's a few more to go and then you can take a break and hopefully the team will get a little... Yeah, I know. If you try and interview me next week, I'll be that little greasy puddle sitting in me, all right. Yeah, does everybody get Friday off, you know? Well, no, we're going to give them Saturday off. You know. That's a nice change, so. Yeah, you know. There we go. Ben Gallup, CEO of Docker here at DockerCon 2015. I'm Jeff Frick, joined by my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're theCUBE. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. The center of the universe today is right here in San Francisco under your Vibwana Gardens. I'm Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break.