 from Seattle, Washington, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE on the ground at OpenStack Day Seattle 2015. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. We are on the ground, as part of our On the Ground series in Seattle for OpenStack Innovation Day. It's an Uber meetup. It's a big event, live stream. I'm here with Mark McLaughlin, technical director of OpenStack at Red Hat, also on the Foundation Board. Good to see you. Good to see you too. So OpenStack Innovation Day, we're calling it, but basically it's a meetup on steroids. A lot of people here in Seattle, a big technical community, bouncing off of LinuxCon, MesaCon. A lot of people in town. And OpenStack has a little mini event here, a pretty big event. What's going on? It's a huge week. There's just so much going on. As you said, all the LinuxCon, container economic events can't keep up with which ones it should be at. I think today is a really interesting day so far. Like it started out with Jonathan talking about, his view of things. He always does a great kind of setting the context for where OpenStack is at, why it's been so successful. But then with a great customer story from FICO, which is one of Red Hat's big customers, big reference of ours. They're running OpenShift on LOSP with Seth, with Cisco gear. And it's just great to hear one of our customers up there really talking about how successful they've been and the kind of competencies they've built and the business value they've been able to get out of it. So that's been great too. Which then you've seen some really technical discussion like say, for example, a guy from eBay was talking about integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack. And for me as a technologist, there's actually real interesting detail there that I've never seen before. So it's a great mix of stuff going on. And this is the rage right now. Kubernetes containers, the management side of it, orchestrating it and making it seamless in a way that's gonna extend the OpenStack mission. This is one of the things that you guys have been saying for the past year or at least two years. Getting stability, getting the support, but also pushing the functionality out into the community so people can cobble together whatever engineering solution that they want. Is that true? Oh, very much so. And actually next week I'm giving a talk at OpenStack Silicon Valley about containers, OpenStack questions enterprises have. Cause I think what we've seen is just a lot of hype, a lot of interest around Docker since it was launched a couple of years ago. And everyone's really excited about what it's going to enable, but then when you actually go to put it into production, it's not a standalone thing, right? You're not going to be setting up a siloed environment. You really have to figure out how to integrate it and what's going to run your infrastructure. And for most people, that's OpenStack and it's running containers on top. So figuring out the details there of how they really integrate and making that smooth and seamless is just a really good challenge. A lot of goodness is coming into the system now and with OpenStack and everyone is, OpenStack is dead, OpenStack's dying. And every year we hear that. Certainly resilient, it's not dying. Talk about the momentum it has right now and squash that narrative. Oh, well, from my perspective, I spent a few years working on the OpenStack project, upstream in the community, trying to make the community a success, building the technology. I'm just in the past year, I personally stepped back and I'm inside Red Hat now, trying to work directly with customers and partners. And so, my view these days is all just about what customers are doing. And it's a constant stream of some of our customers just rolling out the latest. It is real innovation. Oh, real innovation, doing some really cool stuff on top. And sometimes we can't talk about these customers and that's always unfortunate. So that was great today that FICO were up there. And I think what's really interesting about what FICO is doing is they're not just deploying OpenStack, or they're not even just creating a platform as a service for their internal users. They're actually selling a platform as a service access to data, that the analytics on top of all of that, they're selling this platform that they built with OpenShift and OpenStack. They're selling that as part of their system. Yeah, and also that you got the bellwethers like eBay running 20% of their production workloads in the company on OpenStack. You get some startups coming out interested in the management piece. So to me, this is a healthy ecosystem when you see that kind of thing. And so I got to ask you, that's all good stuff. What about the operators? What's the momentum with the operators? You mentioned FICO, who else is out there? What operators are being successful? And what does that tease out for a future momentum? Yeah, I mean, definitely a lot of the questions were in there were, but the challenges of OpenStack. So things like just deploying and operating and upgrading, we still know that that's not a solid problem with OpenStack and we're hard work at solving that. But people are definitely seeing those challenges. But I think they're being addressed in different ways. People are learning a lot by addressing those. People are figuring out how to really operate high SLA OpenStack services. And I thought one of the really interesting things there was I was talking about the different verticals that are adopting OpenStack. And it's really across the board, all verticals are adopting it. And I mentioned healthcare and someone from the audience clearly in the healthcare sector themselves was like wait, really healthcare adopting OpenStack? And I was able to talk about a customer of ours this morning that are moving production workloads, a healthcare customer moving production workloads to OpenStack right today. So they figured out how to do it. They figured out how to operate OpenStack to meet those regulations, to meet that SLA. So one of the things that we were talking on theCUBE certainly over many OpenStack events is just recently this morning is things don't happen for a variety of reasons. And let's talk about the adoption of say distros and or what I call the easy package and implementing OpenStack. One, awareness is how they even know what's out there. Two, the product sucks if it's a good or that's one inhibitor. And the third one is core competencies within companies. And I think those are the key inhibitors we're seeing. Break that down for us. Obviously the product's getting better and better. Awareness might be an issue. And the dynamic of customers having a core competency inside their organization. What are those three things? And where are we doing well with OpenStack? Where are we, we need more work? Well, I think it's just like, you know, we've built an amazing ecosystem with OpenStack, right? And so it's not just one thing. And just in terms of how people are consuming OpenStack or deploying OpenStack, it's everything from the DIY running trunk to, you know, it's a completely managed services running in a different data center. And, you know, Jesse today was trying to be controversial, I guess, trying to say, you know, that the death of the distro, you know, with the distro being, you know, kind of in the middle of that spectrum. But, you know, from my perspective, he was giving a pitch for outsourcing, outsourcing your IT operations. And that's certainly a good choice for many, you know, for many enterprises. I thought, again, FICO was, you know, a good counter example of that, where one of the things that Nick from FICO was very proud of today was just how amazing his team is and how they've been able to take it to their stride. And they've now developed that competency and they understand OpenStack. And it's, that team is now a big asset for FICO, right? And they've been able to develop that competency. That's what I was saying about this core competency thing. So, again, not to discreet, usually I just agree with Jesse, but in this case, I would say, you know, customers are looking at, to me, cloud as an engineering issue. Not so much, I want to buy a package or outsource someone else. They're afraid of the cost of ownership there. It's a fear, right? Oh my God, if I outsource it, what am I going to be paying for downstream versus should we just re-architect? Is cloud native is here? There's a path there for these cloud native apps. What is that conversation like when you talk to customers, when you talk to your peers, people really want to re-architect, but it's a dynamic environment. It's not like do it once, run all the time. It's always a provisioning challenge. It's always an orchestration challenge. It's a dynamic native apps are challenging. The cloud is an engine of innovation. It's a fascinating conversation because with each of these customers, it's about how are they fundamentally changing the business? How are they fundamentally changing how they're running their business? And some of the cultural challenges they come up against that, how they address that, whether it's a kind of a big bang effort from the CIO down, or whether it's, you know, they try and grow a small team that's insulated to build that competency. For every customer, it's different. And it's really interesting to see the spectrum there, but it's universally kind of true what each of them are trying to achieve. And it's really great seeing some of the kind of visionaries within these companies that they're, what they're trying to achieve. Well, the stakes are high. I mean, we're running production environment. That's ultimately the end game. I had asked on theCUBE at DockerCon in San Francisco specific questions around SLA. I mean, you guys at Red Hat have pretty much the gold standard. In my mind, you have a decade plus SLA on RHEL and others and stuff. So you've taken open source and guaranteed the bulletproof support. And that's pretty much, I mean, that's huge. You're talking about a couple of years with Docker now. They're like, they're happy to have like three years. I think it's three years. Kubernetes is now on the table. What's the SLA for those? So what is the mindset in the community around this notion of hardening for support for SLA? These are big, big issues. Yeah. Like for us, you know, we always say that, you know, innovation is hard and we believe in the open source community and the diversity of the open source community driving that innovation. But where Red Hat's mission comes in is, you know, integrating that innovation, like making that innovation something that people can actually consume in enterprises. So it is all about that SLA. It is all about that hardening. You know, sometimes that might mean things are a little bit older or, you know, we've had to, you know, invest a lot of effort into that hardening for people to be able to consume it. But, you know, we really take that series, that mission seriously to really deliver that amazing innovation from the open source community to. Yeah, and I think there's a business model innovation question here that needs to be discussed as well, not just open source, obviously open source is great, and what OpenStack shows is not just open source software, it's a software problem, but it's actually a DevOps or engineering challenge. So with that case, someone might not outsource, but they want a supplier. It might be a blue box, it might be Red Hat, but in the end of the day, the customers themselves have to build these new teams. What do you see and what do you recommend to customers when you talk to folks when they say, hey, Mark, you know, we really want to build this next generation engine of innovation, cloud, elastic resources, all this great stuff. What do you advise them on terms of teams, and are they advancing faster? Are they slow? Are they tire kicking? What's the status of that core new, I won't say IT team, software team, or infrastructure team? Yeah, these IT teams that are trying to make this transformation, it's everything from, you know, how do they navigate this complex ecosystem and make choices and they want trusted advisors there, but you're getting more towards that cultural shift, that adoption of DevOps. So one thing that's changed for us in the last year is since our acquisition of Inavance, and we brought in that great team from Inavance, one of their core competencies was, you know, coaching IT teams through that transformation. And you know, one of my favorite people at Inavance was the chief agility officer at Inavance, and he's really someone who believes deeply in agile and in DevOps and really coaching teams and really helping make that cultural shift happen. And it's really great to see him engaging with our customers and helping that happen. It's interesting, I said on the queue with Dave Vellante, the cloud is not your grandfather's IT, it's changing. And so what is those key changes quickly in 30 seconds? What is the key change? In IT now with cloud? Oh, for me, it's all about the abstraction, right? It's saying your IT infrastructure, if you want to deal with your IT infrastructure, it's through an API. You know, it's separating that concerns of the IT operations team from the developers on top. And you know, that shift can go beyond just IT operations to everything in your business. So Jeff Bezos talks about in Amazon, teams could only communicate to each other through APIs, and that's kind of what this is all about, right? It's about kind of setting that abstraction, that interfaces between teams, and allowing that enabling the business just to run faster. And efficiency too. Yep, absolutely. Okay, Mark, thanks for joining us here. We're on the ground. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier in Seattle for a special CUBE on the Ground series. Thanks for watching.