 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn and happy to welcome back to the program Mark Shuttleworth, who's the CEO of Canonical. Of course, the orange shirts of Ubuntu are seen all throughout the show. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you. Great to see you. All right, so for years actually, we've had these conversations at the OpenStack Summit. And it's interesting that every time you mention it around this show, you get snark online as like it is dead, Kubernetes killed it. And it's like, wait, no, no, we're talking about a couple of open source projects. I've been talking to people, especially in the telco space, that's like, oh yeah, well no, we just run OpenStack underneath and Kubernetes on top and put all things together. So give us a little bit your broad view of some of these big trends and open source monoliths and microservices and all these pieces like all kind of fly together. Yeah, I think if you're in the sort of Reddit sub channels then it can feel a bit like sort of turf war and gangster type free software riffing, right? But the reality is OpenStack solves business problems for people, they want large scale virtualized infrastructure that's cheaper than VMware. We are deploying OpenStacks in enterprise environments at double the scale and double the speed, in other words, like twice as many every month as we were a year ago. I think people have gotten comfortable with the idea that Kubernetes is an application operations construct. I think we will see virtualization blur into the Kubernetes lines, but mainly for security reasons, right? So I want deeper isolation of applications that come from third party vendors, for example, and I'm willing to trade performance for isolation in circumstances where I'm bringing in third party code into my sort of private infrastructure. After we see a couple of significant security compromises, I mean, we saw the GitHub compromise, right? And if you just, if you shave that yak, it gets to a very uncomfortable place of what are we actually running as route all over our data centers with Docker and Docker Hub. So people are going to want that kind of isolation of containers, the Carter containers work is going to bring that, but that's very different to the proposition of essentially give me large scale machine virtualization, which OpenStack addresses. OpenStack hasn't done itself any favors, don't need to go into that here, but nonetheless, as far as we're concerned, it's straightforward to deliver large scale, low cost, enterprise virtualization infrastructure for telcos or IT use cases. Yeah, so I want to get in, let's get into this ecosystem here. And I want to say the cloud native ecosystem. And I say that specifically because there are some that look at this and they say, oh, you know, there's, you know, dozens of projects now. You know, Kubernetes is a platform against platform. You know, somebody even mentioned the word big tent once. And, you know, we've seen some projects merging. We've seen some of the various pieces. I saw making a big intent on the, on the keynote. And I was like, I seem to remember a certain article that you wrote poking a hole in the big tent thing. So, you know, what, you know, what's the same, what's different? What's your take on this, you know, is it an ecosystem? Is it Kubernetes and friends, as Corey has like to say here? You know, what's your take? Look, I think we still trying to figure out what are the appropriate labels to attach to this kind of forum. It is a forum, right? There is a tremendous amount of value attached to being here, to the ideas that are getting bounced about, but I wouldn't call it a simple community in the sort of traditional open source sense. The reality is there are this very serious money behind every sort of project that's being framed as a community project. This is a new kind of consortium and that brings with it, you know, certain sort of delicate political, you know, posturing and so on. But nonetheless, it's a valuable sort of place to be. It's definitely staking out important concepts and operational sort of platforms, ideas, regimes, whatever you want to call it. This is going to be a fun week. Yeah, I started off my career in the Linux world. As a Grumpy Unix administrator because there really wasn't any other kind. And then I started dipping my toes into the Linux world and something that struck me almost immediately about Ubuntu was how welcoming everyone was in the community. There was no such thing as a stupid question and I asked the kind of questions you would expect from someone working on a computer wearing a suit. And it was, people were very eager to embrace newcomers into that. It was one of the absolute best things that I saw coming out of Canonical, in addition to the software itself. I love that you're here as a part of this. What is the larger picture? What do you see in the cloud-native ecosystem that's resonating with what Canonical's doing? So the big thing that we do is essentially try to figure out what's possible with open source that's hard to do and then make it really sort of straightforward so that more people can do the important stuff easily, right? That doesn't stop people from doing kind of all the kind of crazy stuff at the periphery that you can do with Ubuntu. It's generally easier with Ubuntu than any other platform. But we try to make the really most important things really easy for everybody. That's the first thing. And the second thing is we're a little non-judgmental about the fact that there are different perspectives on the same stuff. So in the Ubuntu ecosystem, we make a point of saying that the GNOME guys and the KDE guys and the LexQ guys and the Mate guys, the Ubuntu ecosystem is where they actually meet to hash out how they can do stuff in a way that means users get really a real choice between those, right? And there's a very similar role for us to play in an environment like this, right? It's kind of acronym soup out there, right? Like 50 new projects every KubeCon. They're all interesting. They're all important. There's a lot of overlap between them. There's work for us to do in figuring out which ones are going to be really more important in the tent. We did that very effectively with OpenStack. The people who kind of rode the OpenStack wave with us, you know, haven't had to abandon their OpenStacks because the stuff that we really chose to make sort of central and easy turned out to be the stuff that was the important poles in the tent, right? And we'll do exactly the same stuff here with Kubernetes. So to put that into context, I got, you know, it's been real fun to be on the booth. We've had just tons of people coming up and saying thank you for MicroKates. MicroKates is a single package of Kubernetes that works in lots of Linux distributions. It gives you like in about a minute it gives you a standard Kubernetes environment that's pure upstream that for a developer just lets you get productive, immediately figure out these new development application operations constructs. You can use it on an airplane, you can use it on a train. And of course it's compatible with all of the public cloud. So that's the second thing that we're doing. We work with Amazon, with the EKS team. I spoke at their event on Monday. We work with Azure, the EKS team. We work with Google, we work with Oracle, we work with IBM so that essentially making sure that all of them offer Ubuntu worker nodes for their Kubernetes SaaS offerings. That means that the developer who's doing stuff on their workstation with MicroKates can take those containers straight to any of the public clouds. So we're not trying to force people to use a particular solution. We're saying in all of these environments there are going to be choices people have. We want to make that as easy as possible for them. And we want to avoid unnecessary friction in that process. That kind of underlining culture is coming through in this forum as well. Yeah, so we've had many conversations about how you've always tried to make the job of that developer really easy. One of the things we always look at at the show is how much of it is the infrastructure people or the platform underneath and the developer and how much are they coming together? Anything different about this ecosystem or your customers here that you can share? Kubernetes is an application construct. You can think of it as kind of a next generation message bus, right? It's how components of an application find each other, communicate with each other, essentially coordinate with each other. And so that makes it very tightly woven into the developer experience. By contrast, you know, you can be sitting writing a Java application inside a bank and not know or care whether it's going to be running on a physical machine, a virtual machine, or an OpenStack cloud, right? Like you just don't know, you don't care, right? It's too far away from the application. Kubernetes is right there. I think that's one of the really interesting things is that it's bringing those infrastructure brains together with the application app dev brains in a very interesting way. It's going to be challenging, right? Like I wouldn't underestimate it. There are a lot of people sort of wandering around here feeling a little confused, but that's okay. You know what I mean? The stuff shakes out. So something that's been a recurring theme here has been the idea of going in a multi-cloud direction where people are talking about wanting to build workloads that they can seamlessly deploy across different providers. People talk about that periodically as a strategic goal but I'm not seeing people do it very often in the real world. You're much better positioned than a lot of us to see that. Is that something you're seeing people moving towards as an adoption? Well, yes, because we work with all of the major public clouds to optimize Ubuntu there in a way that I don't think any other Linux does, right? So you get an optimized Amazon Ubuntu on Amazon. You get an optimized Azure Ubuntu on Azure. Going very deep in the Amazon ecosystem, most of my customers are using Ubuntu far ahead of anything else out there. And it's the right answer for what they're doing. That's right. It gives them essentially the best of what Amazon's offering. It still gives them the ability to feel like if they want to go somewhere else, they can. And that actually works well for Amazon, right? In the early days, I think there was a little tension between us and the cloud guys, sort of because they were saying, look, if people use Ubuntu, then they could go somewhere else. Yes, but in a sense that makes them more likely to be relaxed about starting wherever they choose to start. So we don't advise enterprises as to which cloud to use, right? We advise them to engage with those clouds and figure out their differences. They are different. Amazon's really good at some things that are different to what Microsoft is good at. Oracle is really good at some things which are different too. And what we're starting to see is a level of maturity in the sort of enterprise governance process. They know they want to work with multiple clouds. They initially thought that was a straight kind of commodity exchange competition thing. They now realize that it's a bit richer than that, that there are actually business reasons to have deeper relationships with particular clouds based on what those clouds are prioritizing and what they're prioritizing, right? So we're not going to say you should use this cloud, you should use that cloud. Obviously we can draw a distinction between the clouds where we're deeply engaged and the clouds where you just don't have the benefit of that. But more importantly we can say, here are the set of practices that you can adopt internally that will give you comfort that you're getting the best out of those clouds, the ones that you've chosen. And you have the portability that you really need. The key turns out to be enabling your developers to use multiple clouds and challenging the developers to do different phases of the development life cycle on different clouds. So develop on your private cloud or your workstation, use microcades for example. Do tests on one cloud, do staging and production on a different cloud, right? And so now you already know that that whole seamless ecosystem works. If you want to go use a high value proprietary function effectively on a cloud, that's a business decision and it's not a bad business decision. You know, there's some spectacular capabilities from Amazon that are unique to Amazon or from Microsoft that are unique or from Oracle that are unique to Oracle, right? They're spectacular. Those are business decisions to use them. There's other stuff that effectively you can give yourself optionality on. I wouldn't be black and white about that. I'd make smart, put yourself in a position to make smart choices. And our best customers are getting that, right? PayPal, they're operating on Ubuntu in a very sophisticated way across multiple public clouds and private infrastructure. All right, so Mark, we're five years into Kubernetes now. We've seen adoption grow. People feel there's a certain level of maturity here. There's always that concern that we've reached that peak and we're about to fall off the cliff. What do we need to worry about? What does the ecosystem need to do to make sure we continue along the stability and security that customers are looking for? Look, there will be an overshoot regardless. I don't think there's any sort of leadership or governance approach that could avoid that. It's a little bit like, if your stock is going crazy, on the one hand, you're kind of happy. On the other hand, if you feel it's overvalued, it's a difficult sort of thing to say. You can say, guys, we're humans too. We've got our challenges to work through and no one likes volatility, but to a certain extent, there's always speculation and overshoot and over-enthusiasm and hype, right? Kubernetes will overshoot, right? There's a bunch of emperors walking around here that frankly have no clothes. My job, our job is very sort of calmly to sort of sort of sort through the week from the chart. Make sure that it's possible for people to experiment with everything, but that the stuff that we think has legs, effectively, is nicely integrated for people that they have that for the long term. They won't regret things. We have a good track record of doing that, right? We've done it in the Linux desktop. We've done it in, we did it in OpenStack. We're doing it on public cloud. We've done it here in the cloud native world. I'd say things like AI are going in the same direction. Again, tons of complexity, tons of new options. Helping people effectively navigate through that is what we do very well. Yeah, one of the questions that I start to see as well as we look at the way that these technologies continue to evolve has been that for better or worse, when developers are writing applications now and even infrastructure people are working with a lot of the things that they care about, what operating system, let alone what distribution they're using is increasingly slipping beneath the waves. People don't think about that as a primary area of focus anymore. And as, I guess, one of the foundational Linux vendors in this space, how are you seeing that evolving? And how does Canonical remain relevant in a world where suddenly people in a serverless future, I just throw some code over somewhere else and it runs is the limit where most companies get involved? Yes, of course we can point to the servers, right? And on the servers we can point to the operating systems and inside the containers we can point to the operating systems and underneath the serverless code we can point to the language runtimes, right? So the reality is that those things matter less and less to the developer. Yes. They still matter to the institution, right? And so I'm super comfortable with the language that says, you know, the OS doesn't matter. What it means is that that whole tangle is getting professionalized and abstracted, but to be confident in the abstractions someone needs to do a lot of work, right? So I know how much work we do with Google, with Amazon, with Microsoft, with Oracle, with IBM to make sure that nobody else has to feel like the OS matters, right? That that stuff essentially just works. You can extend that out to what we do with VMware, what we do essentially on bare metal, what we do on developer workstations, what we do with the Windows crowd effectively and Windows subsystem for Linux so that developers really can just build on Windows subsystem for Linux Ubuntu effectively and ship that container straight to Amazon EKS and have it just work, right? There are a ton of little lies that have to line up, right? Like it's containers are all kind of a fiction. The fiction breaks if those pieces don't line up. So being Ubuntu effectively and being able to be consistent in all of those places is a ton of work to enable it not to matter for anybody upstairs, right? That's allowing developers to go faster. It's allowing them to be more productive. It's allowing them to be more heroic and it's allowing the people who do worry about the middleware to have sort of far fewer nights scratching their heads as to, you know, why didn't this version of this library tie up to that driver with that kernel, right? All of those things are still there, right? When you drop that container onto Amazon, we've got to connect the GPGPU in the hardware through the hypervisor to the guest OS up into the container, right? And there's code getting injected all the way up. It's only the fact that we can typically have Ubuntu everywhere there that essentially allows those pieces to line up without, you know, some spectacular fireworks. It satisfies me when people say they don't have to worry about that. It's a victory condition. All right, Mark, want to give you the final word. What should we be looking for from Canonical, you know, through the rest of the year? So for us, this has been a big year in terms of visibility in the enterprise. In terms of penetration, Ubuntu is everywhere in the Fortune 500, everywhere in the global 2000. What's changed this year is the CIO suddenly is like seeing Ubuntu on their desk for two reasons. One is IBM Red Hat, right? The CIO suddenly wants to know, okay, what does this mean? What else are we running? Where else can we get 24 seven SLAs? Where else can we get long-term commitments to Linux and so on? And the fact is Ubuntu is already in the building. So that's one sort of easy connect. The other thing is there's sort of really interesting new workloads that Ubuntu leads in the enterprise. Obviously, the container story, the multi-cloud story. Edge, right? It's not just telcos. Every retailer, every logistics company, anybody that has kind of physical distribution is now trying to say, well, how can I automate compute in my sort of physical world, effectively? So Edge is super interesting. And IoT beyond that, like people transforming businesses through taking a Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu and putting a snap on it is really, really cool. Which of those is going to sort of drive the biggest headlines or the scariest headlines? Like I can't tell you. We're just trying to take care of security performance and operations across all of them. All right, well, Mark Shuddleworth, always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you so much for the updates. Great to see you. All right, for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching theCUBE.