 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. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host John Troyer, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program a longtime friend of theCUBE back from the earliest days. Randy Baez, Vice President with Juniper. Randy, great to see you. Absolutely, great to be back. Love you guys. So Randy, we've been talking about community and everything's going good, and attendance might be down a little bit, but how we fit in with containers and Kubernetes and everything, so we expect you to tear everything up for us and tell us the reality of what's happening in this community. I'll do my best. All right, so before we get to the Kubernetes stuff, you're working on, we used to call it OpenContrail, which you were involved in before Juniper acquired it, went through rebranding recently. Tungsten, which I was looking up, came from the word heavy stone, so let's give us the uproar date from the networking side. Yeah, so the short history is that there was a company called Contrail that created a software-defined networking controller. It was acquired by Juniper in 2012, 2013, and then that was open sourced. So Juniper for a long time was running with sort of two editions, OpenContrail, which was the commercial offering, and OpenContrail, which is the open source, and then shortly after I joined Juniper, I identified that we really needed to go back to the drawing board on the way that we had organized the community and transitioned it from being Juniper-led to community-led, and so over the past year, I spearheaded that effort, and then that culminated in us announcing at the end of March at ONS that OpenContrail was now Tungsten fabric. We renamed it, we moved it into the Linux Foundation under its governance, and now Juniper is one of many people of the community that have a seat at the table for the management, both from a business and a technical perspective, and we're moving forward with a new reinvigorated community. Yeah, so networking sits at the, really the intersection of this multi-cloud world that we're living in. There's so many players trying to be there, Cisco really moving to become more of a software company. When I interviewed their number two guy at their show, he's like, when you think of Cisco in the future, we're not even going to be a networking company, we'll be a software company. VMware, of course, pushed heavy through then a CIRA acquisition. Where does Tungsten fit to kind of compare and contrast for us where it fits about some of these other offerings out there in the marketplace? Yeah, I mean, I think most enterprise vendors are in a similar transition from being hardware to software companies. You know, we're no different than any of the rest. I think we have a pretty significant advantage in that we have a lot of growth in the cloud sector, so a lot of the large public clouds are our customers and we're selling a tremendous amount of hardware into them. So I think we've got a lot longer runway. But, you know, we just recently hired CTO, Bacosh Coley out of Google, and we're certain to see some additional folks out of Google like my new boss, Morgan. And what that's bringing with it is a very much a software-first type perspective. So Bacosh and Morgan really built everything for the Google network from the top of Rack all the way out to the win, and it's almost all software-based, dig it, disaggregated hardware software, opens our software running on top of white boxes. And so that kind of perspective is now really deep, start beginning to become embedded in Juniper. And at the head of that is Tungsten. So we see Tungsten fabric as being sort of a tool that we use to create, you know, a global ubiquitous network fabric that anybody can use anywhere without talking to Juniper at all, without knowing that Juniper is part of Tungsten. And then as they grow up and they get to a point where they need multi-cloud, they need federation, or they need kind of day two enterprise operations, you know, we have a commercial version and a commercial distribution that they can use. Randy, we talked a little bit about OpenCon Trail and last year at OpenStack Summit moving it to a more of a community-based governance model. And now that's happened now with the Linux Foundation. And can you talk a little bit about the role of open-source governance and corporate governance and foundations and just going forward? How do you, you know, what's an effective model for 2018 going forward for a foundation-led project? And what should, you know, or what, maybe in the context of Tungsten fabric and how is that, that's looking? Yeah, so again, OpenCon Trail is now Tungsten fabric. Might be new for some of the viewers. A lot of people are still coming to terms with that. So one of the things that we noticed is that when many people go and they say, hey, we want open-source first, like the AT&T's of this world, part of what they're saying, one of the aspects of being open-source first is we want to be one of many around the table. We want to have a seat at the table. We want to have the option to contribute code back. And we want to feel like it's a group effort. And so that was a big factor, right? It was an open-source project, but it was largely the governments was carried by Juniper. All of the testing infrastructure was Juniper. You know, all of the people who made architectural decisions were Juniper. All of the lead contributors were Juniper. And so going to the Linux Foundation was critical to us having a legal framework where the trademarks, the code, the licenses, the contributor license agreements are all owned and operated by the Linux Foundation, not by Juniper. So we basically have a trusted third party who can mediate all those things and create a structure, a governance model structure where Juniper has one seat at the table and all the other community members do as well. So it was really key to moving to that model, to create people, to increase people's interest in the project and to really go to the next level. There just wasn't any way to do it without doing this. All right, so Randy, let's talk about OpenStack. You were watching the keynote yesterday. You were in the Twitter stream. I don't usually watch Keynotes, man. But you know this community. So you know. I do know this community. Give us kind of the good, the bad and the ugly from your standpoint as to where we've gone, what's doing well and what your frustrated heck that we still haven't fixed yet. Well, I mean it's great that we have so much inroads amongst the carriers. It's great that there's a segment that OpenStack has been able to land in. I mean, at some points when I was feeling particularly pessimistic on some days, I was like, oh man, this thing's never going to go anywhere. So that's great. On the other hand, the promise that we had of being sort of the Linux operating center, operating system of the data center, and really getting inroads into private cloud and enterprise, that just hasn't materialized. And I don't see a path to that. And a lot of that has to do with history. I'm not sure how much of it I want to go into here. But I see those as being bright lights. I see the Cotta Containers effort and sort of having this alternative structure that's more like the umbrella structure that I lobbied for while I was on the board. So for several years on the board, I said we need to really look more like the Apache Software Foundation. We need to look less like the Linux operating system in terms of how we think about things. Not this big integrated monolithic release. You need more competition between projects and that just wasn't really embraced. And I think that that, in a way, that was one of several things that really kind of limited our ability to capture the market that we really wanted, which is the enterprise market. Yeah, well, I know in one of those sticking points there that I've talked to you many times over the years about how do I actually deploy this? Getting a base configuration and scaling this out. Simplicity is tough. Getting to those environments, getting it up in two weeks is good for some environments, but maybe not for others. Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of a spectrum, right? At one end of the spectrum, you say, hey, we're going to have a very opinionated approach like Kubernetes does, and we're going to limit what we say we can do. We're not all things to all people. And I think that opinion approach, like the Linux operating system works very, very well. And then the other end of the spectrum is, we've got no opinion like the Apache Software Foundation, and then it's up to vendors to go and take cherry pick the pieces they want and turn that into some kind of commercial offering, whether it's Hortonworks or Clidare or Hadooper or whatever it is. The problem is, is that OpenStack wound up in the middle where it had this sort of integrated monolithic release cycle, which it still does, which tried to be all things to all people, and it was never as great as it could be. So it's like, we got to support Hyper-V, and we got to support VMware, and we got to, and as the laundry list of all things we have to support grew longer, it became more and more difficult to have a compelling, easy to use, easy to scale offering that any enterprise could consume. Randy, a lot of talk this week about edge computing, whatever, with several different definitions, right? But it does strike me that, you know, there's a certain set of apps that you write them and they live fine in a big public cloud, in a big data center somewhere. But there's a lot of hardware that's going to be living out in the world, whether that's at the base of a radio tower or in a wall or in my shoe, that is going to be running hardware and is going to be running something, and sometimes that something can be OpenStack, and we're seeing some examples of it, many examples of that already. Is that an area of growth for OpenStack? Is that an interesting part of how this fabric is going to expand? Well, I probably have a contrarian view here. So I spent a bunch of time at Juniper, one of the things I worked on for a while was edge computing, and we're still trying to decide what we want to do there. And, you know, kind of to the first point you made is, everybody's edge is different, right? Is it on the mobile phone? Is it back in the data center? And the difference is between, the difference is that the real estate gets more expensive as you move out, right? And then it's in terms of latency, and it's in terms of bandwidth, and it's also in terms of the cost of storage and compute. As you move closer to the mobile device, it becomes progressively more expensive. And so that's why a lot of people sort of look and say, hey, wouldn't it be nice if we can get you out there closer, lower latency, and bandwidth, and so on? But as we looked at a lot of the different use cases, it became really interesting in that, it wasn't clear if there was that much value between five milliseconds and 20 milliseconds, right? I mean, that's pretty, either one's pretty close. Sure, there's a lot of difference between 20 and 100, but maybe not so much between five and 20. And so we kind of came to the conclusion that at least for right now, probably the bulk of use cases are fine with 20 milliseconds. And what that means is that regional systems like AWS is Lambda at the edge that are in Metro, those are probably good for most cases. I don't know that you need to be on the tower. I don't know that you need to be in the central office. So I think edge computing is still nascent. We don't know exactly what all those use cases are, but I think you might be able to service most of them from regional data centers. And then the question really becomes, what does that stack need to be? And if you have a regional data center that's got plenty of power, plenty of space, then it might be that open stack is a good solution. But if you're trying to scale down onto the tower, I got to have some doubts about whether open stack can really scale down that far. Yeah, right, Randy. Analytics is something we've been seeing the networking people use for many years at this show, starting to hear a lot of discussion about AI and ML. I love your viewpoint as to what you're seeing in that space. You know, I had some friends who started off on AI in very early days and he had a very pessimistic view. He said, you know, this stuff comes and goes, but I'm actually very positive and optimistic about it because the way I look at this is there's a renaissance happening, which is that, you know, now ML is really available to the masses. And you're seeing people do really interesting things like we have a protocol that formics. And what they do is they take ML and they apply it to operations. And I love this because as an operations guy, you know, I used to have these problems in production where something would go out. And the first thing I do is I'm starting to do correlation and then root cause analysis. Like what was the actual failure? Like I can see the symptom on this end and I have to get all the way back to what caused it. And the reality is that machine learning AI techniques and protocols can do all that heavy lifting for operators very, very quickly and basically surface a problem for somebody to do the final analysis on. And so I do think that ML and AI applied to very specific vertical problems is just a place where we're going to see a tremendous amount of revolution in the next couple of years. All right, and that hits right at really that intersection between kind of the developers and the operators there. Absolutely. What are you seeing from an organizational standpoint, companies you're talking to these days? How are they doing adopting that change, dealing with that, you know, often schism or bringing those groups together? Well, I think you remember that like in the early days I used to bring my deck along and I would talk about assembly line IT versus the robotics factory model of IT and I would sort of, you know, make that sort of analogy to sort of the car manufacturing process. And I think what machine learning is really going to do is take us to that next level past that, right? So we had the assembly line, we have all the specialists, we had the robotics factory where we had the people who knew how to build the robots on the software and it's really sort of like just turning it out with a lot of people on the line. And I think the next level after that is, you know, completely fully automated, you know, applications driving themselves, you know, self-driving applications. And I think that's when things get really interesting and maybe we start to remove the traditional operator out of the equation and it really becomes about empowering developers with tools that are comfortable and that leverage all the cloud era stuff that we built. All right, so Randy, you're credited with the Petch versus Cattle analogy. What's the latest? You're talking about some of the previous slide decks. What's Randy Bias looking on down the road? I mean, the stuff just comes to me, man. I don't, you know, I don't, I can't like predict, but the thing I've been talking about a lot lately is services as a platform. I think we might have talked about that last time, which is just this notion that, you know, if we look at where Amazon's invested and what's interesting, it's really not the infrastructure layer and it's really not the Paz layer. It's that thick layer in between with like databases as a service and no SQL as a service and messaging service and DNS and so on, where you can kind of cherry pick those things as you're assembling your own pass for your application. And I still think that's an area that is under discussed. And the reason is people back into basically doing that, building kind of the services as a platform system, but they're not like, you know, going into it kind of like eyes wide open. Yeah, so just following up on that last piece, one of the criticisms I have this week is when you talk about multi-cloud, most of the people talk about, oh, well people are clawing things back to their data centers. Juniper plays across the board, a strong partnership with Amazon. You're here, what are you hearing from customers? You know, what is, what do you see as kind of the balance there and you know, the public cloud's role in the world? I mean, they're still winning, right? I mean, I don't think there's any doubt. I haven't seen the client back here talking about, but we are starting to enter into the era of, okay, the stuff is out there and it's running, but I need to apply my governance model. I need to understand who's using what. I need to understand what it's costing me. And that's the sign of the maturation process. And so I think that, you know, we saw in the early days of cloud, people jump in the gun, you know, creating compliant services and, you know, SaaS products that would basically measure how much you're spending. And I think that that is, it's time for that stuff to come back in vogue again because the tooling needs to be there for people to manage these extended supply chain of IT vendors, which include the public cloud. And I think that, you know, the idea that we claw them back as opposed to like, just see that as a holistic part of what we're trying to accomplish doesn't make any sense. All right, well, Randy Bias, always a pleasure to catch up with you. John. John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of two days of three days of live coverage. Thanks for staying with theCUBE.