 in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events, I expect to see them in the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joining my co-host, Stu Miniman, filling in for Dave Vellante, and our next guest is us. Badani, vice president, general manager of OpenShift for Red Hat. One of the most anticipated interviews for Stu and I, because we love what's going on, platform as a service. We love all the activity going on in the Red Hat ecosystem, around operating systems and the future of open source. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me on. So, first give us an update on OpenShift, because, you know, there's a lot of fun, fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the market around, oh, these guys, you got this, and we got this, and some people say, oh, I never run into an account. So, for the record, straighten it out right now. You guys have traction, do you have traction? Can you give some examples of the update of where OpenShift is right now? But in our industry, I never heard of that before. Well, jokes aside, let's talk about that for a few minutes, right? So, for the folks who aren't as familiar with the OpenShift technology and the project, we started about three years ago with OpenShift Online, our public platform as a service. We run that off of Amazon EC2, seeing phenomenal growth. We've had over 1.6 million applications that have been created on the platform. Adds about 2,000 users every week. User count, app count growing by about 150 to 200% year on year. So, that is incredible to us. What that also allows for us to do is to be able to take that public cloud experience and translate that into the OpenShift Enterprise Private Pass. And all of this along with OpenShift Origin, which is an upstream community, right? So, there's a really virtuous, if you will, triangle that's formed between upstream, public, as well as private. Now, with regard to customer adoption, there are a number of customers that are public references for us, FICO, Cisco. In fact, there are many that you can meet with at the Red Hat Summit and talk to while you're here. So, with regard to the direction that we're going in, we feel pretty confident of the progress we've made so far and the amount of adoption we've seen in our online public pass, as well as our enterprise technology. It leads us to believe we're in the right path. So, before we talk about some of the news, the cool news you guys have with GearD and all the cool application delivery stuff, we already had Docker on earlier with the founder, Solomon, great guy. I love to meet with the founders of companies just because they're just so awesome to talk to because it's so hard to do a startup and have the kind of success that they're having, certainly both on a company basis and also in the community. Talk about the role of the past because in the cloud game, software communities are the critical part of the ecosystem's success. Rising tide floats all the boat, that's the open source way. Why is the platform as a service such a battleground right now, in your opinion? And what are you guys doing differently vis-a-vis-a Cloud Foundry and others approaches that are trying to offer a different alternative to the open source roadmap? Great question. So if you were able to attend the morning's keynote, Paul Cormier talked about the fact that the application is king, right? And what that means is there's a lot of energy focused on innovation that's happening at the application level. Consequently, what we're focused on is ensuring that all the work that happens underneath whether it's platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, is as commoditized as possible. So the amount of time and money enterprises can put to work is on the application itself. Now, with regard to the work we're doing, so Docker is a great example of that, right? And in Red Hat, in its true open source way, has entered a technological collaboration with Docker. We began the process around September of last year and what we've now done is expanded that. We're very active in the Docker community. We're amongst the top contributors with Docker into the technology stream that we have. And then of course, what we're also doing is the announcements that we made today are around taking some of the Docker technology and making the application that we have around OpenStack portable across environments, leveraging Docker. So OpenStack, obviously, is a huge bet for you guys. We're going to talk more about that tomorrow. But talk about how that plugs into OpenStack and are all the methodologies and the standards of the process of open source consistent with the two? Is it a nice fit? Explain the fit between the OpenStack and the past layer of what you guys offer. So the OpenStack teams work very closely together. There's a project called HOOT which allows for orchestration. It's an OpenStack-based project and we want to make sure the OpenShift is the first class citizen of that. There are heat templates that are now available from Red Hat, as well as in the community that you can download and use. That makes for OpenShift and OpenStack a great experience. We find numerous customers that are interested in running OpenShift and OpenStack, taking advantage both of the efficiency of the infrastructure service as well as the application flexibility that runs with the platform and the service on top. So one more point on that. How would you define success for you guys? Because it's always kind of elusive. Open source is all about feeling your way through, but also having some honor, transparency, and certainly on the contribution side, there's rules of the road, if you will. So how do you guys view success in the OpenStack-OpenShift collaboration? Is it shipment of code, guys high-fiving each other, customers getting value? How do you guys internally look at that, saying we can determine success if blank happens? So the author of Zappos, if you're familiar with him, he wrote a great book, and he talked about delighting customers. And in the way we think of success is if we are delighting our customers, our community, our users, then all good things will follow from that. So as long as we're doing all the things that avoid lock-in, make sure that application infrastructure is flexible, portable, we're taking costs out of that so customers can be more successful in the areas that they want to actually invest in. We believe not only will we be successful, but our users and community will be successful. So Ashash, when it comes to the discussion in middleware, obviously Red Hat has got a vested interest of having customers use JVOS. How flexible is OpenShift to be able to use more than just JVOS? So yesterday we demoed a lot of technologies, XPath services running off of OpenShift. And so it was actually quite an incredible demo. I don't know if you had a chance to catch that. That was actually OpenShift running off of OpenStack. And what we did was took in Twitter feeds and was able to use Fuse technologies to call other patterns, ensure that we were integrating that with the Salesforce and then set off a business process and then have Twilio send out email the text messages, right? So quite an amazing demonstration of the power of using technologies across the spectrum, right? IAS platform service as well as XPath and the JVOS service running on top. But the environment that both infrastructure service as well as applications platform service, the OpenShift platform has is that they're inherently flexible. So to the extent if people want to use other technologies they can go out and extend it themselves via building cartridges, quick starts, but also now increasingly using Docker containers or Docker images specifically in this case to be able to use that with an OpenShift. Can you talk a little bit about the marketplace that you guys launched? And I'm wondering if you could look at what, you know, Pivotal announced with the Pivotal Foundation which of course you've got the likes of GE and IBM who's obviously a good Red Hat partner kind of seems that they're signing up for that. It looks like a very different ecosystem that you have in the marketplace compared to what Pivotal's built. Right, so our focus has been consistently on an open ecosystem and a very open approach to partnering. So we announced the Red Hat OpenShift marketplace yesterday and the best way to think of that is, you know, there are certain services that we provide as part of the platform of the service but obviously that doesn't cover the entire universe of services that application users need. Also our partners wanted a way to be able to attach more to these millions of applications that have been created on our platform. And so we've launched our initial set of partners and of course it's open for more to join us. We also announced technology collaboration with the Hadoop data platform provider, Hortonworks, yesterday, and that's to ensure that we're able to take the application that are running off of OpenShift and integrate more closely with some of the technologies that are coming out of Hortonworks as well. And so I think our approach to collaboration is very open one and we're finding a lot of companies that are valuing that. Another one that actually has played out completely out in the open is with a company that delivered a completely open .NET implementation of OpenShift that runs natively in a Windows environment. So folks for folks who are using OpenShift, they can use both applications that are running off of Linux, but also off of Windows. So again, an example of open collaboration in part. Yeah, so when I look at Red Hat, Red Hat's always done a great job of taking an open source project and providing an enterprise version that's best to breed. You've done that with Linux, you've done that with KVM, you're working on doing that with OpenStack. So does OpenShift fit into that model or is it a fair critique to say that the ecosystem still needs to be built out some? I liked your .NET example there, but it just doesn't feel like there's as much of a community built yet and is that just kind of a work in progress? So it's been developing over a period of time, right? So I don't know if you again pay attention to an announcement that Cisco's made. Cisco's gone out and built what they call a CVD, a Cisco Validate Design, which is their reference architecture that integrates some of the Cisco technologies along with OpenShift. You'll actually see some more announcements with large partners coming tomorrow who are also working closely with us. So I don't think it's fair in the world that we live in to think of our marketplace as just dominated by the largest vendors, right? I would encourage for users to think about the adoption of the platform and the rate of change and innovation. So if you look at the OpenShift platform, we've had four product releases in the last 12 months. Our online platform has seen about 15 service updates and over 15 new features and enhancements have been built up. So our innovation model is one that happens out in the Open, along with a very nimble set of products. Okay, great. I'm wondering now if you can unpack for us kind of the XPAS announcement and to be honest, when I talked to most users, I think I said this before, most of them are still kind of having trouble wrapping their heads around what PAS is and you guys have kind of created, is it subcategories or what is the XPAS announcement if you can explain that? So one of the things that we're finding when we talk to customers around platform and services, we spend a fair amount of time just explaining what platform and services, different customers have different opinions of that. Think of XPAS in the simplest way of if I've used JBoss and JBoss Middleware, how do I ensure that those technologies are brought into a cloud world, right? Whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud. What we're trying to do with OpenShift is ensure that each of those sets of services, so whether they are around business process management, business rules, some of the technologies that come via Fuse, so a service bus, messaging technologies, data virtualization technologies are all consumed as first class services within OpenShift. So XPAS is just an extension of an application platform that is now able to allow for all these different technologies that people are used to consuming in their data centers to also be available in a cloud application platform. Shesh, I want to talk about what Jim talked about when I asked about the OpenStack in the past layer. He said, oh, John, you got to look at it with the host versus guest, host being the integrated stack, blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth. But I'll talk about the guest, multi-vendor, dealing with other people. Talk about the role and opportunity Microsoft has with Red Hat. They're got a big cloud-first initiative going on right now. This ability to play well with others is a real big part of this host versus guest kind of thought that Jim was putting out there. So talk about that opportunity and challenge that that might, that customers might have. There's a lot of Microsoft and a lot of the enterprises that got, Microsoft got Red Hat, all running on servers and storage, et cetera. So talk about the Microsoft opportunity. So Red Hat supports technologies that come from other large providers, right? So VMware technologies, Microsoft virtualization technologies are all supported within the, Red Hat Enterprise, the next platform from a virtualization perspective. The opportunity we have going forward, and I'm actually delighted to hear the announcement that Microsoft made most recently maybe a week or two ago with regard to an open source foundation and this kind of contributes some technologies into that. And so if Microsoft is starting to take steps in those directions, I think we have a lot of opportunities for collaboration. I mentioned to you the Docknet project that we've done for OpenShift, and that's out in the open now. That's, again, another area that we love to collaborate with them and make sure that the Azure platform interoperates with the OpenStack environment as well as the OpenShift. The good news is Satya Nutella knows this cloud and he's very open source driven. They donated some reference designs to the Open Compute Foundation. They had a lot of open source activity. So they're playing, I mean, Microsoft looks pretty good right now in terms of a partnership opportunity. So you see that as an opportunity. We do, and the other one that we've obviously been working closely with is Amazon. We run our OpenShift online platform of Amazon EC2 and increasingly lately working very closely also with the Google team and the Google Cloud platforms who announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux availability in the Google platform and then there's additional areas of collaboration that we embark on with them. So we're going to live in a world that's interesting. Okay, we're getting some tweets from the outside world. So I've got to bring the questions in. We're getting, so where is cloud foundry relative to your competitive positioning and where do you hold serve? And talk about the DevOps impact. So there's two questions. One is, how are you vis-a-vis the competitive aggressiveness of, say, cloud foundry and where are you guys holding serve or holding the line relative to your advantage over cloud foundry? So the Red Hat model has never been one of thinking of defining markets based on just what a competition does, right? We'd like to focus on the problems that we see when we talk to customers and how we're going to go off and address them. So I talked a lot about the rate of change innovation that we brought to bear. I can talk some more about the adoption that we've had, right, and our strategy remains consistent of open source community and online Paz public offering as well as a private Paz offering. And then working with partners to ensure that there's a differentiation as well as openness and participation that happens around that. So I guess what I would like to focus on is the fact that we continue making progress on the mission. So the announcements that we made today with regard to application portability across Docker as well as the new GearD project which really is focused on ensuring that not only is their first class developer experience right, it's really trying to bring DevOps to life for users, but also ensuring that as these applications are portable that there's a fair amount of consistency and certification that stays with it and that we're able to wire these different applications in complex enterprise application approaches. So Stu before, I know Stu's jumping for a question. I can see him biting at his lip there, but I want to just follow up on the DevOps and drill down and saying, ask you directly, what is the DevOps data center of the future? So if you talk to folks who are, for lack of a better term, DevOps purists, they'll tell you there is no such thing as a DevOps guy, right? And there's no such thing as a DevOps product only, right? So DevOps is a way of embracing the amount of change that's happening, the notion of continuous integration, continuous delivery, there are all these terms around industrialization. Some say it's just a mindset. And manufacturing, right? With regard to Kaizen, your continuous improvement, Kanban, all of these terms that come in. I mean, I'm sure there's some viewers who are playing DevOps bingo right now, I think all these terms are on the DevOps bingo card. So go ahead, go ahead and have your favorite drink of choice. But what I'll say is that the principles that are brought to bear, right? And the examples that we hear of continuously are around Netflix and Facebook and so on and every company wanting to become like that. Well, it's not appropriate necessarily for every company to become exactly like them, but there are lots of good practices that we can bring to bear. So again, with OpenShift, we focus intensely on the developer experience, right? And by the way, being in the public cloud leads to that. Because if you are not focusing on the experience, you will not get applications that have been created on your platform and users will walk away. So the integration with Git, right? And making sure that developer IDE is important. So you're basically saying it's a software-defined data center. You're basically saying that the future data center is software-centric. I guess what I'm saying is where DevOps will lead you to, is this notion that you need much more application flexibility and portability across environments, whether they're physical, virtual, public, or private. But all the while while doing it, making sure that the developer experience is paramount. So Ashish, we're running out of time. I've got one last question for you. I heard standing room only in the OpenShift session. When you talk to the users out there, what's kind of the early first steps? What's either the problem that they're solving or the use case that you're finding customers latching onto the 1.6 million apps that you've deployed? What are some of the early wins that customers can get by deploying OpenShift or just moving in? They're often different points of entry into OpenShift, right? So for example, in the case of OpenShift Online or the 1.6 million application app, applications that we've talked about, some folks may just be looking for a platform that's flexible and scalable. They can very quickly get their application up and running, right? So whether it's a mobile application, some kind of new web application they want to develop, maybe it's a departmental application of some sort, maybe someone's built a routing application. And I encourage all the users to go to OpenShift.com, check out our application galleries to see the diversity of application that we have in play there. But enterprises are sometimes looking in that direction, but what they're also really enjoying about platform service specifically OpenShift is the fact that we're supporting multiple different developer tools and frameworks, but at the same time with a very robust operating system, security that lies underneath, right? So infrastructure efficiency, density and flexibility that comes along with a great developer experience. Ash, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We'd love to spend some more time with you. Certainly we'll follow up with you on all the activity around OpenShift. Certainly obviously a key part of the industry battleground that we're watching closely, customers are as well, and obviously having Red Hat behind you, certainly has the wind at your back, validation, great success, congratulations on your growth of your community. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.