 from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage of three days wall to wall here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, where day three all the action's happening. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, Brent Compton, Senior Director of Technical Marketing at Red Hat, breaking down the container storage trends and directions, obviously containers, obviously super important. That's happened, Kubernetes has happened. Now new things are happening around a lot of innovation. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thanks for having me back. So what's the state of the art of containers, of trends, some of the market directions? What's going on around containers? Well here at this show, of course, it's been all about service mesh, right? Istio, service mesh, dynamically, dynamic discovery, dynamic invocation of services, but all of those things, well, a certain percentage of those things, according to the keynote, require some type of persistence. So yep, service message, service meshes, and persistence. So storage is a big part of the networking and compute all working together in the Cloud. That's been a big part of it. What's important here in this show? What's going on this week? That's really impacting that piece of it, the container and storage. You mentioned state versus stateless work area. Stateless is fine, no problem, but persistence and state become important in applications. How much conversation has been here this week on that piece? Well, I'll talk about this week and then I'll talk about the last couple of weeks. This week, there are a couple of significant things going on that are going to sort of unleash innovation in persistence as it pertains to the Kubernetes subsystem. First, of course, is container storage interface, CSI. Today, all of the volume plugins have been entry. You want to change, some vendor wants to change their storage capabilities that need to recompile the binaries. Very slow, very non-agile. Of course, with the advent of the container storage interface, it's okay, here's the common interface, all the volume plugin providers get right to that interface so they can then, they can iterate to their heart's content without having to change the entry source. So the impact is what, speed? Agility, absolutely, agility of innovation. Allowing all those guys to innovate. Kind of the second thing, so that's been a discussion this week. Another thing that's been a discussion that you've seen in some of the sessions and stuff is the operator framework. Coming champion by the CoroS guys, of course, now part of Red Hat. The operator framework in terms of effectively automating things that human operators would do for complex subsystems such as storage. So basic installation, basic upgrades. You know, monitoring those services so when something falls over, what do you do with that type of stuff? So I'd say CSI, container storage interface as well as operator framework. Those are some of the things that have been talked about this week. I still want to go back to talk about last week, but go ahead, Steve. Brent, I wonder if you could tease this out a little before us. So last five years, containerization, Kubernetes, massive change in the way we think about architectures. Things like networking and storage have often been the anchor to kind of hold us down to be able to make changes faster. Virtualization helped some, but containerization, we're going to have to fix some of these same things. What are the conversations you're having with customers? Give us the latest on the state versus state falls. We heard in the keynote, they said 40% of deployments have stateful applications out there. Depending on numbers, it's definitely been growing and at least I can do it as opposed to, two years ago it was like, okay, we're doing containers, but we're just going to do stateless for now and we'll try to figure out what architecture is going to work. Even a year ago at this show, I heard in the back rooms there were lots of arguments as to which one of the storage projects was going to lead and seems like we're getting some maturity. So I hope to give us some visibility as to where we are and what's working and what still needs to be done. So although the industry talks about serverless, they're not yet talking about dataless or storageless. I mean, if we throw out the basic principle of data gravity, data is the sun around which applications, services rotate. And so even stateless apps, stateless apps still do IO. Frequently the IO of stateless apps is, via RESTful puts and gets to an object store. That actually brings me, so let's talk about, let's unpack the stateless and then let's go to stateful. So I'm going to come back to some of the conversations a couple of weeks ago. Red Hat announced the acquisition of Nuba an Israeli company. So when you think about what Nuba plus SEF do to provide stateless apps with a common set of data services across the hybrid and multi-cloud. So those stateless apps saying okay I'm going to do, I'm going to do RESTful puts and gets, but man it's complicated if I'm going to have to develop to various proprietary protocols. I've got the Azure Blob protocol, I've got AWS S3, I'm talking to Google persistent disk. And then, if I want to run hybrid, I'm also talking to SEF object storage on premises. And if I'm a developer I'm thinking, man wouldn't it be nice if I had a common set of data services including common protocol to talk to all of those different cloud storage back end. So Nuba, some people kind of call it a cloud storage controller, provides that kind of common data services. So things like common API protocol. Things like mirroring. So you want to write once, your app writes once. And then it's mirrored across the various cloud object storage back ends to facilitate easy migration. You say I want to uproot to move over here. Your data is already there. So that's a couple of reasons and some of the conversation from a couple of weeks ago about how Nuba plus SEF are helping stateless apps get to hybrid and multi-cloud. I think that is a great point. You think about hybrid cloud and multi-cloud coming around the corner, which is about choice, right? But the CICD pipelining of having a consistent developer environment clearly is one of the main benefits we're seeing in this community here. Okay, I got some software developers, we got a crank, teams move around, we got consistency, no matter where the environment is, it's just really some goodness there. Storage is interesting and data is interesting because you're right, the sun is the data and everything's orbiting around it. That's the holy grail. This is what people want. They want addressable data. They want it real-time. They want to have it accessed. They don't want to have to do all this code to configure, manage data. And it's complicated, you got data warehouses, you got time series data. So data is getting more complicated, but it needs to be simpler. So this is kind of the challenge of the industry. How are you guys seeing that with OpenShift? How is your container piece fit in? How do you guys make that easy for customers to say, look, I want to have, not just a data lake, I want an intelligent fabric of access to data so my apps don't have to do all the heavy lifting. It's almost like DevOps for data. It's like data ops. It's like, I need to have programmable data. This is kind of the- Absolutely. Which thoughts on that? Yeah. So first I want to address that in two ways. The first is about OpenShift itself. And what you described is in fact the sweet spot of what OpenShift is. Providing a common set of Kubernetes services plus CICD pipeline services for developers and operation staff independent of your cloud infrastructure. So whether OpenShift is running on top of AWS, whether it's running on top of Azure, whether it's running on top of GCP, whether it's running on-premises, on bare metal, whether, you know, common set of Kubernetes services and CICD pipeline services. Okay, that's what you described there. I just wanted to just highlight that. That is OpenShift. Hybrid multi. Yeah, it's a very valuable check. That's awesome. Yeah. Data. Now coming down to data. So in fact, OpenShift container storage is the mere analog to OpenShift for providing a common set of Kubernetes volume services independent of what the storage substrate is. So think about it if you're inside of AWS. You've got EBS is what's, you know, when in Rome act as the Romans. You've got EBS there when you're inside of AWS. Well, the type of Kubernetes volume services that EBS provides natively differ them. For instance, when you're on-premises and it's surfacing via an NFS plugin, maybe different likewise, where you're inside of Azure with Azure persistent disk. So OpenShift container storage provides the same type of abstraction layer, providing a common set of Kubernetes volume services independent of what the storage server layer is. So both of them. So it's you guys abstract away the complexity. So the app developer doesn't have to do anything about storage on those discrete platforms. It doesn't know anything about storage and provides a common set of services instead of, well, let's see, this is running on this cloud. I don't have the, I have a different set of services. So common set of services. So Brent, one of the things I love about talking to Red Hat at these shows is you actually have a lot of customers that are doing this. We actually, we spoke to one of your customers yesterday talk about how, you know, Kubernetes is helping them create sustainable data centers over in Europe and the Nordics especially. So Kubernetes is awesome, but what's really awesome is the things that we can do on top of it. Wonder if you've got, you know, helped connect some of this to, you know, your customers, real things, you know, how does this, you know, change the game? How does it change their teams? You know, what can you share with us? One of the things that I can, what's top of mind? So what's not top of mind for me at the moment is, you know, what kind of new, how they're reinventing the world. What is top of mind with me right now? We've just been studying our results. As we look back, and this is a little bit of a, okay, it's a trend, but it's a different kind of trend that you're talking about. In the last six quarters, we've had 600% growth with OpenShift Container Storage. So, and now we, so in the last six quarters, we're also at a point now we're seeing some of those same folks from the Nordics that you're describing that are coming back now, you know, they've experimented, so there are some, there are some, some cruise ship, there's a cruise ship company that has deployed this on ships. What we're now seeing, what's very gratifying for us is they're coming back now for a second pass. Now a year into it, it's okay. Clearly it must be providing enough value that it comes back, it's okay, I want to buy this for another ship or more ships. So that's gratifying for us. The first year was let's see, let's try this Kubernetes, OpenShift Container Storage stuff out, but you know, coming back to the trough for another take, it's good for us. And what's going around the corner? Obviously OpenShift's been doing great. I love this abstraction layer. We're seeing for the first time in the industry clear visibility and real value proposition. Stu and I were joking yesterday, you know, we were at OpenStack years ago or even KubeCon three years ago. We would ask the question, if you had a magic wand, what would you hope to have happen? It's actually some of the things that are actually happening. I mean, clean, heavy lifting's gone on all the developer side, consistency, productivity, competitive advantage on the application development side, and then taking away all the hassles of having to train people on multiple clouds. So this is kind of happening. What's next? So what's the next bowling pin to fall down? What's the, well, you know, hit the front pin. What's next? What's going on? How do you guys see the next innovation around OpenShift and storage containers? Cloud independent, data services and mobility. So independent of the clouds, and again, it's hybrid too, so you don't want to be locked into your own cloud either. So cloud independent, data services and mobility. So you say, listen, I want to be, I want to have a common dedupe compression, mirroring, but I want to sit at a layer above my clouds, back to the data gravity thing. I want to ensure that my data is where I need it on different clouds. So I'm elevating to a new layer, this cloud storage controller, this cloud independent set of data services. We think that's where the puck's going. Yeah, I think the data is critical. I think, I mean, we said years ago, data ops. There's a DevOps model for data. If you look at it that way, it's not just putting into a data lake, it's actually making it useful. Yeah, absolutely. Brent, thanks for coming to theCUBE. We're here bringing you all the data here at theCUBE. We're sharing it here, live in Seattle. This is our third year of CUBE coming there from the beginning. This is theCUBE's coverage of cloud native con and CUBE con, bringing all the action here with red hat on theCUBE. Back with more live coverage, stay with us. Day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be back after this short break.