 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. Three days wall-to-wall coverage, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, Redesh Balakrishnan, who is the General Manager of OpenStack with Red Hat. Redesh, great to see you. It's been a week since John talked to you, and always good to have you on at this show. Great to be on. Good to be here talking about OpenStack at OpenStack Summit. Yeah, so look, OpenStack is in the title of your job. Believe it, do we have a birthday cake and a party celebrating a certain milestone? That is indeed true. So it's the fifth anniversary of the fact that we've had a product, Red Hat OpenStack platform in the market. And so if we've been doing a little bit of a look back at how far we have come in the last five years, as well as looking ahead, how does the next three to five years shape as well? Yeah, Redesh, I'm going to date myself. And when I think back to, gosh, it was 18 years ago, I was working with Linux, and there were kernels all over the place and things like that. And then I worked for an enterprise storage company and was like, oh, keeping up with kernel.org was a pain in the neck. There came out this thing called Red Hat Advanced Server that was like, oh, wait, we can glom onto this, we can support this with our customers. And that eventually turned into RHEL, which of course, you know, kind of becomes the main standard for how to do Linux. I feel like we have a lot of similarities. Absolutely, absolutely. RHOSP, I believe, is the acronym. So. That's exactly right. And we like to have long names, which are very descriptive. But, you know, Red Hat OpenStack platform, fundamentally to your point, brings the same value proposition that RHEL brought to Linux to OpenStack. With the twist of that, it's not just curated OpenStack, but it's a co-engineered solution of Linux and KVM and OpenStack. And along the way, we learned that, look, it's not just OpenStack and the infrastructure solution, it's done in conjunction with a software-defined storage solution, or it's done in conjunction with software-defined networking. Or, fast forward all the way now, it's being done in conjunction with cloud-native applications running on top of it, right? But regardless, in five years, we've been able to grow to address these different demands being placed at infrastructure level, and at the same time, evolve to address new use cases as well. Telco is an example of that. Ridesh, let's maybe spend a couple minutes, though, on the OpenStack platform itself, from Red Hat. Some of those things, guys that you were bringing to market, I know we talked about here at the show, fast forward upgrades, for instance, they're just introducing and maybe some other things in the Queen's release that you all are bringing forward and have engineered. Yeah, thanks for that question. Very topical, given the sense that yesterday, we launched OSP 13, which is the latest and greatest version based on Queen's release. If you look at the innovation packed in that, it fundamentally falls in three buckets. One is the upgrade part that you talked about, whereby anybody who's standing on OSP 10, which is the prior long release lifecycle product, over to 13. How do you get over there in a graceful manner is the first area that we have addressed. The second area is around security, because how do you make sure that OpenStack-based clouds are secured by default from the day you roll out all the way until you retire it, right? I don't know if this is going to be a retirement, but that's the intent of all the security enablements that we have in the product as well. And the third one around, how do we make sure that containers and OpenStack can come together in a nice manner? Yeah, the container piece is something else that, you know, a lot of effort here at the show. They announced Cota Containers, which is trying to give the security of a VM, lightweight VM as there. How does Red Hat look at Cota Containers? I know Red Hat, you know, Linux's containers, you know, so very strong position. Fill us in on that. So maybe pull back a little bit and then look at the larger picture of there is the notion of infrastructure or the open infrastructure that you need and OpenStack is a good starting point for that. And then you overlay on top of that an application deployment management configuration, lifecycle management solution, that's the container platform called OpenShift, right? These are the two centers of gravity for the stack. Now, aspects such as Cota Containers or CubeWord, which is for, again, similar construct of addressing, how do you use virtualization in addition to containers to bring some of the value around security, et cetera, right? So we are continuing to engage in all these upstream projects, but we'll be careful and methodical in bringing those technologies into our products as we go along. Okay, how about, you know, Edge is the other kind of major topic that we're having here. I know I've interviewed some Red Hat customers looking at NFV solution. So some of the big telcos, you know, specifically that use various pieces. What do you hear from your customers and help us kind of draw that line between the NFV to the Edge? Yeah, so Edge has become the center. It's kind of the new joke in the sense that from an NFV perspective, customers have already effectively addressed the core data center challenges. Now it's about how do you scale that and deploy that in a massive scale, right? That's a good problem to have. Now the goodness of virtualization can be brought all the way down to the Radio Edge so that a programmable network becomes the reality that a telco or a carrier can get into. So in that context, Edge becomes a series of use cases. You know, it's not just one destination. Another way to say this, there is Edge as an objective and there's Edge as the noun. Edge as the objective is a set of technologies that are enabling Edge. Edge networking, right? Edge management, for example. And then Edge as a destination where you have a series of edge locations starting from core data center going all the way to radio. Now, the technology answers for all these are just being figured out right now. So it can say, you know, put crudely KBM, OpenStack, containers, and Ansible will be on good elements that will come into the picture when it comes to a solution for all these footprints. Nice. Let's switch over maybe to talk about the summit here and the people here filled with people being productive with OpenStack, right? Either looking at it, upgrading it, inheriting it. We've talked to a bunch of different scenario, people into different scenarios. Red Hat, huge install base and you are good at helping and supporting and uplifting and upskilling a set of operators who started with Linux and now have to be responsible for an entire cloud infrastructure. Plus now, at this conference, we've been talking about containers, we've been talking about OpenDev, right? That's again broadening the scope of what an operator might have to deal with. How does Red Hat look at that? How are you and your team helping upskill and enhance the role of the operator? Yeah, so I think it comes down to how do we make sure that we are understanding the journey that the operator himself or herself is taking from a career perspective, right? The skill set of evolving from Linux and core automation-related skills too, going able to understand what does it mean to live with a cloud implementation on a day-to-day basis? What does it mean to live with network function virtualization as the way in which new services are going to be deployed? So our course curriculum has evolved to be able to address all these needs today. So that's one dimension. The other dimension is about how do we make sure that the product itself is so easy that the journey is getting to a point where the infrastructure is invisible, right? And the focus is on the application platform on top. So I think we have multiple areas of focus to get to the point where it's so relevant that it's invisible, if that paradox makes sense, that's what we are trying to make happen with OpenStack. Yeah, Red Hat has a very large presence at the show here. We were noting in the keynote, the underlying infrastructure didn't get a lot of discussion because it is more mature and therefore we can talk about everything like VGPUs and containers, everything like that. But Red Hat has a lot in the portfolio that helps in some of those underlying pieces. So maybe you can give us some of the highlights there. Yeah, absolutely. So we're not looking at OpenStack as the be all end all destination for customers, but rather an essential ingredient in the journey to a hybrid cloud. So when you have that lens, it becomes natural to you that a portfolio of offerings, which are either first party or in conjunction with our partners, we have over 400 partners with whom we have joint solutions as well. So you naturally take a holistic view and then say, how do you optimize the experience of Ceph plus OpenStack, for example? So we were talking about edge recently, right? In the context of edge, we realized that there is a particular use case for hyperconverge infrastructure, whereby you need to co-locate compute and storage in a way that the footprint is so small and easy to manage. Plus, you want to have one lifecycle both for OpenStack and Ceph, right? So to address that, we've announced Red Hat hypercloud infrastructure for cloud as an offering that is co-engineered between Ceph team and or our storage team and the OpenStack team, right? So that's just an example of how by bringing the rest of the portfolio, we are able to address the need being expressed by our customers today. Or you look forward in terms of use case, one thing that we are hearing from all our large customers such as the Amadeus of the world is make the experience of OpenShift on OpenStack easy to deploy and manage, as well as reduce the penalty of running containers on VMs because we understand the benefits of security and all of that, but we want to be able to get that without having any penalty of using a virtual infrastructure, right? So that's why we are heavily focused on OpenShift on OpenStack as the form factor for delivering that while continuing to work on things such as Cata containers as well as, you know, Cube Word as technology is evolving to make Kubernetes much richer as well as the infrastructure management at OpenStack level richer. Yeah, you brought an interesting point. We spoke a little bit yesterday with John Alessio and Margaret Dawson about really that kind of multi-cloud world out there because pieces like Kubernetes and Ansible aren't just in the data center with this one stack it's spanning across multiple environments and when we talk to customers they do cloud and cloud is multiple things in multiple places and changing all the time. So I'd love to get your viewpoint on what you hear from customers and how Red Hat's helping them across all those environments. Yeah, absolutely. So the key differentiation we see in being able to provide to our customers is that unlike some of the other providers out there where they are stitching you with a particular private cloud with a particular public cloud and then saying, hey, this is sort of the equivalent of the AOL wall gardens, if you will, right? That's being created for a particular private and public cloud. What we are saying is fundamentally three things. First is the foundation of Linux skills from RHEL that you have is going to be what you can build on to innovate for today and tomorrow, that's number one. Secondly, you can invest in infrastructure that is 100% open using OpenStack so that you can use commodity hardware, bring in multiple use cases which are bleeding it such as data lakes, big data, Apache Spark or going all the way to cloud native application development on top of OpenStack. And then last but not the least, when you are embarking on a multi-cloud journey it's important that you're not tied to innovation speed of one particular public cloud provider or even a private cloud provider for that matter. So being able to get to a container platform which is OpenShift that can run pretty much everywhere either on prem or on a public cloud and give you that single pane of consistency for your applications which is where business and IT alignment is the focus right now, then I think you've got the best of all there was, freedom for vendor lock-in and a future-proof infrastructure and application platform that can take you to where you need to go, right? So pretty excited about being able to deliver on that consistently as of today as well as in the coming years. All right, we just want to give you just the final word for people out there that often they get their opinion based on when they first heard of something. OpenStack's been around for a number of years, five years now, with your platform. Give us the takeaway for 2018 here from OpenStack Summit as to how they should be thinking about OpenStack in that larger picture. So the key takeaway is that OpenStack is a rock solid that you can bring into your environment not just to power your virtual machine infrastructure but also bare metal infrastructure on which you can bring in containers as well. So if you're thinking about an infrastructure fabric either to power your telco network or to power your private cloud in its entirety, OpenStack is the only place that you need to be looking at when Red Hat OpenStack platform from end to end delivers that value proposition. Now, the second aspect to think about is OpenStack is a step in the journey of a hybrid cloud destination that you can get to. Red Hat not only has the set of surround products and technologies to round out the solution but also has the largest partner ecosystem to offer you choice. So what's your excuse from getting to a hybrid cloud today if not tomorrow? Well, Radish Palakrishnan, thank you for all the updates. Appreciate catching up with you once again. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of three days wall-to-wall coverage here in Vancouver. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. Thanks.