 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE on the ground. Covering KubeCon 2016. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, we are here live in Seattle for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, special on the ground coverage. And we're here with Red Hat, Shayan Saha, who's the head of product at Red Hat Gluster Storage. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, so we storage is all the action. As I said, in 2010, we started theCUBE. I said to Dave Vellante, storage is sexy again, because it used to be called Snorage, because it was like really boring. But really since 2010, even till now, storage has been the center of the disruption. Big data, cloud, there's so much action going on, more storage than servers, converged infrastructure, all these appliance, Nutanus goes public. So certainly a lot of action. More than ever, it affects the platform as a service layer. It affects what customers do, because that's where their crown jewels are stored, the database. Among other things on structured data as well. Your thoughts on where this industry's going and what Kubernetes and containers do it. You guys have container native stuff. What's the update? Give us the state-of-the-art Red Hat story. Yeah, I mean, what we have seen so far is software-defined storage has actually crossed the chasm. Gartner rated Red Hat as a visionary for distributed file systems and object storage a few weeks ago. But where we are seeing more is traditional. When we started on this journey a few years back, it was all about the cost play. Software-defined storage was more like a cost play. But it has changed in the last several years. More becoming of an innovation play and what's helping of this new kind of workload. Some of these, like container storage, where software-defined storage is a much better option compared to the traditional storage platforms or appliances out there. In Red Hat Gluster, we have added a series of innovations for the last several years, including adding major features, as well as enabling it to run in different kinds of environments, including inside a container, as well as public cloud, et cetera, so that you can have a consistent storage platform across the hybrid cloud. So in addition to that, we have tightly integrated with Kubernetes and have storage drivers for Gluster and other products. So yeah, it's moving on a free-fire. So my keyword here is customers need modern storage for their modern workloads and we see that happening. I always get fascinated by the Gardner quotes because how can Gardner have a magic quadrant when we have a horizontally scalable cloud market that's like all the quadrants get mingled in because you think about it, storage, the leaders are the old guys. So they got to start rethinking their quadrants, just little pontification on Gardner and their magic quadrants, as you know, so passionate about it because the cloud world isn't about pure play specific point solutions. There's an integration game going on. So you guys have to deal with a new mindset of the developer, management tools and development tools, at the same time satisfy the storage infrastructure. So with that, how are you guys different from NAS appliances that are out there because that's what customers have. They just roll out the stack and rack the storage, but the tools and software may not be in the language that the dev ops guys want. How do you guys solve that problem? Three key things that we want to stress that are key differentiators. One is flexibility. Second is programmability. And third is it's a fully featured storage platform. When we talk about flexibility, we've spent a lot of time working with Glouster to make it work inside a container. So you can actually download a Glouster container from the Red Hat registry and run, which serves out storage just like other, and provide storage services, like application containers, which does application. Number two is programmability. So we have worked on features for Glouster so that it makes it really easy to allocate storage volumes from Glouster. From a developer standpoint. From a developer standpoint, so that developers can simply request X amount of storage and get it from Glouster. And all of the black magic that needs to happen behind the scenes actually happens without they worrying about, well, do I need to go to my storage admin to ask them to carve out a loan for this or a volume? Or if I do that, how long it will take them? We've taken all of that guesswork out. They want storage, they ask for it. We allocate, they get it. So that's the thing. The last thing, but not the least, is Glouster is a mature storage product. It's been around for a while. It has a whole set of full set of enterprise-grade class features, which includes things like snapshot, cloning, erasure, cloning, tiering, the things that you will expect from a mature storage platform. So it's not a stripped-down storage platform, which is working with Kubernetes and containers that was just built for it. It's a fully-fledged, fully-featured storage platform, which is also flexible and programmable. And the main benefit for the customers is what? Main benefit for the customers in the developer world is the way we are looking at it, is it increases developer productivity. Because basically, you, as a developer, you don't need to worry about, or you don't want to get slowed down when you need some storage, and... So they can program storage as a service? Program storage, yeah. Basically, whenever they need it, they get it. Whenever they don't need it, they get rid of it. It gets back into the pool, and then somebody else can use it. So that's very efficient uses of storage. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you see the creativity with containers and how people are using it with microservices. So microservice is just a service. Storage could be a service. You guys have the cloud-native storage, which is essentially a container around the storage, which is super smart, because it's just another container that can be managed as a service, which really flexes well from a developer standpoint, relative to what's going on in the environment. Exactly. What's that plans for that with OpenShift? How does that fit into, like, say, OpenShift? So what we have done is, we have a product or a solution that we call container-native storage. We basically have built Gluster inside a container. So we have a Docker image for Gluster that you can run inside the OpenShift platform itself, which means is you run storage containers alongside application containers. They run in the same cluster, are managed by Kubernetes, upgraded using Kubernetes, managed using the same pane of glass. So you don't have to deal with a storage appliance sitting on the side, which you have to manage separately. All of it gets provisioned, deployed, and upgraded in the same way that you do application containers. And you don't have to deploy storage in every host inside the cluster. You can choose a set of nodes where you have a lot of disks and say, I'm going to run my storage container only on this disk. I'm going to run applications on everything else, or I'm going to co-locate. So you have all the flexibility using Kubernetes to be able to do that. So if you don't want to mix storage and app because you have concerns on performance, you can keep them separate. If you think that your app containers and storage containers can run together because your app containers are not demanding, you can co-locate. Or it's totally up to how you want to do it. So there's a separation between storage guys, the old world of Rack and Stack storage, and the developers. So you have some flexibility with containers. Has that changed the life of the storage guy? They still got provisioned storage, I mean standing down. They do have to do some initial provisioning, but after that, they don't have to necessarily, you know, babysit that environment forever. You know, once they set this up and let it go, Gloucester will allocate the storage volumes as needed, when needed, and de-allocate them when people don't need them. So they go back and yeah. So it's a pretty much set and forget, let the developers do their thing, don't stand in their way, you know. And then more resources come in. So I got to get the question on the roadmap. Since you were running product management, Gloucester, storage, Red Hat, I got to get the, what's next? I mean, what's the big feature that you guys are building the best product improvement? Can you share some color around the roadmap? What's next? The hottest thing. Yeah, so for the last year or so, what we have been working on is we initially, you know, shipped Gloucester with Red Hat Gloucester storage as a backend for OpenShift back, you know, November of last year, where Gloucester used to run in a separate Gloucester. We still support the configuration. We call it dedicated storage or container-ready storage. In March of this year, we actually went and containerized Gloucester and we ran it, we tested it, and it worked very well. In the summer of this year, we went and completely, you know, basically started, we gade our container-native storage solution where we run Gloucester inside OpenShift and manage it using Kubernetes. So that is now available, generally available. And going forward in a couple of months, actually a month from now, we're going to add dynamic provisioning where, you know, the developers are going to be able to simply ask for storage in Kubernetes terminology. It's like a claim will come in with X amount of storage, say 100 gigs, and we'll allocate it and give it to them, all happening without admin intervention. So right now, we use static provisioning, but it's going to go all dynamic provisioning settings, whatever one wants. That's the big feature. So that's the big feature coming and then rolling into, you know, next year, we're also looking at very tightly integrating Gloucester inside OpenShift. So we'll be using more and more OpenShift services like logging, monitoring, and we might also use Gloucester as a backend for some of the things that OpenShift needs for storage. So there's a lot of exciting things that are going to happen in the next six to eight months. And real quick, I know we're getting this, the signal here, but I want you to share what's happening at this event. Cloud NativeCon and KubeCon kind of coming together because Kubernetes is the only one feature of this ecosystem that's developing. What is the big thing that's happening at this show that you can say is hot for people to pay attention to? I think the biggest thing that's happening in this show that's hot for people to pay attention to is how enterprises are adopting Kubernetes. You know, they're describing their journey that this is how we started, you know, in 2014. And here we are. And there's a lot of learnings that people can gather from them. Like there's a lot of people who start first and then there are a lot of people who follow really quickly. I mean, there's a lot of learnings that people can take, you know, what people are doing for logging, what are they doing for monitoring, what are they doing for persistent storage? You know, there's a lot to learn from the innovators of the who have adopted Kubernetes later on. I think that's a big thing. So I'm trying to go at least to the talks where all the enterprises are coming, telling our Kubernetes journey, you know, that's. And then the operationalize is the big challenge. And we heard that from the Red Hat. Well, more on that coming later, you're here watching theCUBE at KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.