 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by Jim Covellis for two days of theCUBE's live coverage, DockerCon 2017 here in Austin, Texas. We are the worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest on theCUBE. We have to also be a local here in the Austin area, so Dustin Kirkland, Bantu product and strategy with Canonical, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Stu. All right, so Dustin, give us a thumbnail, what's your role, and how excited are you to be at another local show? All the open source shows seem to be here in Austin. I mean, we love doing that. I'm super glad, we love sharing Austin, glad for people coming visit, just to make sure you go home at the end of it. Keep Austin weird and keep it open. That's right, that's right. Yeah, it's great to be local, it's great to have the Docker community back in Austin. It was a lot of these people were here for OpenStack. We'll be back for KubeCon later this year, Austin in between. All right, and tell us a little bit about your role. Yeah, so I lead product and strategy at Ubuntu. We make an operating system that runs in the cloud on public clouds, private clouds, bare metal, physical servers down to desktops and embedded devices. Okay, so I have a serious question for you. Every time we see the surveys of OpenStack, the surveys in the public cloud, canonical's always there. I mean, everybody's using your stuff, but where are people paying money for it? What's kind of from the business standpoint, maybe you can give us the quick update on that. People pay money when it's mission critical. When Ubuntu and OpenStack and soon Kubernetes, certainly more and more Docker, when that's part of the mission critical infrastructure, they pay for that. They pay for the support and the services, they pay for consulting, for design, for leads, for architecture. They pay for access to the product roadmap. And so we do have, we have some really brand name customers who pay us good money for that. Okay, it's our third year doing theCUBE at this show. And every year it seems we come in with one of the same questions, which is like, all right, is this ready for production? Is anybody using it? We back, you know, knock down the doors of everybody here and like give us more customers to talk to. So what do you see, what's your answer to that? Yeah, I mean, it strikes me as really odd when people are still asking, are containers ready for production? Containers have been part of our DNA and Ubuntu for almost 10 years now, you know? Shipping an OS that boots into a container that's able to run like Steve containers, Docker containers, and run those at tremendous scale. We run containers underneath as a control plane of every OpenStack cloud we've ever deployed, every Kubernetes cloud we've ever deployed, every Hadoop cloud we've ever deployed. So containers are part of our production system. So do you guys have a marketing term? You guys are the hipster Linux, you know, container company. You were doing it before it was cool. I guess so, I mean, I guess it's like asking, you know, wonder, you think cell phones are mainstream yet? You know, it's like, yeah, it is now, but you were probably one of the first in your family to have a cell phone, right? We're kind of at that juncture where we've been doing this for a long time and it's good to see others finally, you know, taking advantage as well. In the keynote this morning, we saw a lot about the maturation of Docker. They really started out working with the developer. They've really grown working with the business, working with the enterprise. Talk to us about your customers as it fits into the container space in general, Docker specifically, what do you guys see in? As an operating system that delivers the latest and greatest open source software across multiple architectures, public and private clouds, Docker fits into that very well, in fact. It sits alongside LexD, giving that machine container, replace your VMs experience, but also the new way of writing applications. Solomon talked about applications. If you're going to develop an application, Docker is a great application development platform. So when applications are being developed, 12-factor microservices from scratch, Docker is a fantastic approach and we see more developers choosing Ubuntu desktops and Ubuntu in the cloud as that development platform. As that matures, then we get into a situation where it becomes mission critical and then we have really interesting commercial discussions around how do we really help that platform succeed? We just had Microsoft on the program. Hey, John was on. Talked about, Microsoft is talking about being open, Microsoft is talking about choice. They actually talked, John mentioned, you're a company in your operating system. When we get to cloud solutions, Canonical's supported everywhere. How do you guys differentiate? How do you make sure that they're choosing your product as opposed to something else? So Ubuntu itself, always latest and greatest. It's fresh. You're never more than six months away from the next latest and greatest everything across the board. You're never more than two years away from an LTS, a long-term support release. That's really the key differentiator for Ubuntu is its freshness, its velocity. And that maps very well to the container world where things are revving very, very quickly. All right. Security was a big focus this morning also. What's your viewpoint as to where security lives, how that works with all of your environments and what you guys do for that specific- I've been a security nerd for most of my career. In fact, it's one of those jobs you leave but you always kind of get sucked back into because you care about it, honestly. Ubuntu has a platform, security we take very seriously. Encryption anywhere we can use. Encryption updates, latest and greatest updates. Kernel patches, live patch for the kernel. Live patch for the kernel is particularly interesting from a security perspective because it enables us to address security vulnerabilities without rebooting systems. And that's really important in a containerized environment where you're not just running one or two machines, you're running potentially thousands of machines or containers or applications and being able to update one single kernel with a live patch without rebooting any of them, that's what security people are excited about when we talk about Ubuntu kernel and security. To what extent is Ubuntu being deployed into the internet of things or to what extent is your roadmap going in that direction because we're seeing a lot of new development going into the internet of things to deploy artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms and data down to the edge. So, where you going with that? Yeah, it's beautiful. I mean, that edge to cloud story is something that we've got a very clear view on. We produce an OS and Ubuntu OS called Ubuntu Core which is a read-only operating system custom tailored for IoT devices. That's the OS. It's the same Ubuntu but rolled and managed and updated in a different way. Applications fit onto that device in the form of snaps or Docker containers, frankly. They're a little bit different in the way that they're implemented but we have a new packaging system that's well-adapted, well-tuned. A snap is something different from a container, how? It is. It's a form of a container. It's less than a container but it uses some of the same container primitives. It's frankly, it's an archive and a set of security profiles that wrap that tar ball essentially and the way it's executed in a very secure manner. So, it's wrapped with app armor profiles. It only has access to certain parts of the system. It contains its own dependencies but they're contained in such a way that they're protected from the rest of the system. A lot of that sounds like Docker and it is similar to Docker but Docker provides a little bit more of that machine experience. Docker will include a file system. It'll draw an IP address sometimes or at least route traffic whereas a snap actually runs directly on the underlying OS. It's more tightly linked to that OS. In terms of linking back to the machine learning that happens in the cloud. Inevitably, IoT drives more cloud adoption because those little IoT devices they've got so little processing power and storage by design. That information needs to go somewhere and it goes to the cloud where something like a tensor flow running in a Docker swarm or a Kubernetes or some combination of those two are really crunching the interesting problems. Google recently made a big to do about federating more of the machine learning algorithms all the way to the edge device. So, the world is going in that direction but I hear you, they're very constrained. We hear a lot about the edge. The algorithms at full power on the edge device but it's coming. Yeah, great, for sure. All right, so Dustin, I heard Kubernetes and swarm. You guys agnostic to that. You know, support all of it. You know, what do you guys code on? What do you hear from customers? Yeah, so we're very proud of our position here. I'm here at DockerCon supporting Docker. DockerInc is a close commercial partner of Canonical. Canonical is authorized to resell Docker Enterprise Edition, Docker Services, Docker Support. We've got mutual customers who buy that directly from Canonical and we support Docker and swarm and data center on top of Ubuntu. And that's a great story that brings us from the developers who are running Docker on Ubuntu on their Macs and Windows machines. John, I'm sure was talking about Windows and Docker but when they put that into production, we've got the wherewithal to support that. We offer Kubernetes as another platform. I've spoken with some really bright, just last night with a really bright cloud architect from a major internet service provider. And their role is they set up Docker swarms for their internal customers and Kubernetes clusters for their internal customers and Cloud Foundries and OpenStacks all inside of this big telco internet cable giant and it makes sense. And they can do all of that and do all of that on top of Ubuntu because it's the platform that can offer whatever they need for their customers. All right, one of the other announcements in the keynote this morning was Linux kit. So I got a little bit of a preview before the show and I don't feel that it was Docker trying to punch at the providers of Linux and it didn't seem to come off that way in the keynote. But for those that here at a glance, oh wait, Linux kit developed with a bunch of, seems like mostly hardware companies plus Microsoft and Docker. What do you guys see? How do you look at that, you know? You know, it's genuinely fun for an open source engineer to put together a Linux distribution. It's like the thing you want to do and customize it and tailor it and the beauty of open source is you can absolutely do that. And so what I saw from Linux kit, I too got a little preview. You know, it seems it comes out of the part of Docker that also works on Unicernals, Alpine to an extent and they've built a container optimized or Docker optimized OS from Docker. So if you want Docker all the way down it sounds like Linux kit is a solution that they're working on, still working on. I'll say that Ubuntu containers are in our DNA. We've built a kernel and we built a security system around containers for quite some time and we continue to optimize that and we work directly with Microsoft, Google, Amazon to ensure that the Ubuntu that's running in those public clouds is ready to run Docker and other container systems out of the box and very consistently in a way that looks exactly like the Ubuntu that's running as the bash shell on the Windows desktop, as the Ubuntu desktop itself as the server that you might run in any one of the public clouds. It's a very consistent experience. We do tune that and tailor that but it's in ways that ensures portability. All right, so Dustin, you talked about kind of the history and how long people have been using it. You know, production should not be a question it's just where, what, how you're doing this. What things do you still see us needing to mature or what excites you about this going forward? Yeah, the management honestly and that comes back to security ensuring that running those containers at scale you're doing that in a secure manner. Minimal is part of it. We hear that quite a bit that I want a minimal image, I want a minimal host. That is an important part of it. We have to be a little bit careful that we don't go so minimal that we end up creating a bunch of snowflakes, special unicorns where every container image is a little bit different, every host is a little bit different because it's more minimal than the previous one. That actually creates more security problems. So I think thinking that problem through is, it's one of the most important problems that I think through, I'm working on right now and I think others are interested in working on as well. All right, Dustin, you've been way too pleasant through all of this interview so before we end up, as an Austin local here I have to ask you the divisive question of your favorite barbecue place. Oh. Your favorite bar band too, keep going. Okay, yeah, I mean, you can't go wrong with the award-winning Franklin's barbecue or like the gas station rooties, we love those. My favorite's a little hole in the wall out close to where I live. It's a trailer that's been serving barbecue out of that trailer since 1997. It's called Bee Cave's Barbecue. Those guys, they put together some fantastic barbecue five days a week. They sell it until they're out and then they close up the shop and they go fishing and you got to get there early and when they're done, they're done. Is there a connection between people that make barbecue and people that put together Linux distributions? It sounds like a lot of the same thing. Maybe so, maybe so. Yeah, I've got a smoker out back. I like to smoke meat as much as I can. Absolutely, all right, well Dustin, really appreciate you joining us. Welcome to the Cube Alumni List now and we'll be back with more coverage here from DockerCon 2017, you're watching the Cube.