 The Cube at OpenStack Summit at Lata 2014 is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Atlanta here at the OpenStack Summit. This is Silicon Angles The Cube, our flagship program. We're going to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm here with two great guests from HP, multi-tailored distinguished technologists, elected board on the board of directors of Rackspace Foundation, I mean OpenStack Foundation as an individual. Okay, and Eileen Evans, vice president, deputy general counsel with HP Cloud, who's also on the board of directors representing HP for the OpenStack Foundation. Welcome to The Cube, guys. Thank you. Rackspace, OpenStack, it's all one, right? Eileen, you're also on the Linux board of directors representing HP. And Monty, you're on the, as an individual on the board and an individual on the technical committee. That's right. That's awesome. And I think you guys have done this fantastic. And Eileen, you were involved in drafting the bylaws of the original eight members. Congratulations. I know you guys have done a great job. And what does it feel like to see all this? 4,200 people in there, double from Portland. Are you excited? The bumps were there along the way. Smooth sailing, still a little rocky. Give us the update. I find this very exciting, actually. I mean, I think it's, I was one of the original who helped found the foundation back in 2011-2012 timeframe. So this is really exciting. My first OpenStack summit was in 2011 that I attended. It was just a number, like hundreds of people rather than here we have, you know, 42, 4500 is the latest I'm hearing. But it's just significantly changed and expanded and grown. And I see all of the changes that have happened on the foundation side as well, which have been very exciting in moving the technology along and really supporting that through joint efforts with the Foundation Board, as well as the technical committee and the PTLs. What's it like for you? It's very much the same. I mean, I was there in the very initial days, you know, before day zero as it goes. And to see this many people in this large of a place doing this is kind of, it's kind of crazy. We all were in the same room in what Marriott or whatever it was in Austin back in 2011, 2011, 2010, actually, I think we had a meeting. Yeah, 2010. I remember in the 80s when I was getting my computer science degree, there was the computer issues being born by the people, young kids, right? Young Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were young. And the same things happening here in industries being built, right? And it's fun for me to watch because I've been watching you guys progress, but you guys are actually doing it. So I got to say congratulations, great stuff. But tell me about what happened last night. I haven't tried to get to this. So there's a meeting between the technical committee and the board of directors last night. It wasn't necessarily a secret meeting, but apparently it was secret because not everyone can get invited to that. So, Monty, what happened? I mean, what it was actually it's reasonably historic. It's the first time we've ever done it. We've talked about doing it a whole bunch since the beginning, but it's it's kind of hard. We have 24 members on the board of directors and we have 13 members on the technical committee. So finding a time when 37 people can am I doing the math right? Yeah. Find a time when 37 people can all get together in the same room, all of whom are massively busy. People is not it's not a it's not a day to day type of thing. So so we we sat down. We've been we've been trying to to sort out some things with the deaf core committee, trying to figure out how it is that we present OpenStack to the to the world, how we present something that we can we can tell users and consumers. Listen, you can really count on on these pieces and there's there's trademark. There's there's business implications of that. You know, there's a there's sort of a an agreement we're making with our users. Listen, this is what it how it's gonna work. And there's there's obviously technical ramifications of that. So it's it's not really a thing that sits just on the board or just on the technical committee in terms of their purview. It's it's really has to be a collaboration between both of them, which means you've got to get business and technical people in the same room and get them to, you know, talk. And it actually went really well. It wouldn't it wouldn't just smashingly well. One of the one of the challenges for me doing the cube is whatever I say gets recorded and you know, and when OpenStack started, I'm big thanks. I remember when Rackspace started, you know, I loved it. And then I was very critical of OpenStack at the beginning because I'm like, okay, it's a land grab. It became cloud washing 101 just put OpenStack on it. It felt like a marketing program, not a community. And and so we're a lot of people were vocal, including myself and all of a sudden it became contributed with code and then it shifted to value. So I want to talk to specifically about the meeting last night and what was the what was the vibe? I mean, right now you get a lot of people excited. People are worried that, you know, there's been some standards in the past. Eileen, you know, we've seen this movie before in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, you know, strategy that big vendors come in, stall, land grab and throw an else out to the side. They're worried about that. That's what everyone's worried about. You know, the vibe in the meeting yesterday, I think it was great. I think what also was very clear was we definitely needed that communication between the board and the technical committee. And that I think by setting aside the time to meet in person and again, everyone made it a priority to be there on a Sunday, you know, in person, meet with On Mother's Day. On Mother's Day. Yeah, my mom was really excited about that. Let me tell you. Yeah, my kids, yeah. But I think the great thing is so everyone came to the meeting, you know, fully immersed, focused on the issues at hand. And in addition, I think what was very clear was that we have some work to do into, you know, because there are so many decisions with this community that touch upon both technical and business issues. So we recognize that there really is a significant overlap between the technical committee, the board, and to work more closely together. We've, you know, came away with some specific actions as well to, you know, have closer collaboration. And we're going to continue to do this in person meeting the day before the summit in Paris as well. Monty, what are the threshold issues right now on the technical side? We had a big API debate with Randy Bison, who just spoke a few months ago. Oh, that was fun. Very active. I got that, I can pull up some of the conversations. Certainly, Randy's there to be controversial. Yeah. But it wasn't many months. I thought it was a healthy debate. What are the debate points right now? What are the thresholds? A lot of the debate on the technical side has to do with how we scale this thing going forward. It obviously works out. People are using it in production all over the place. So we've been very successful very early on. And so now that we've got people running this in production pretty much everywhere, we've got to deal with growing it and continuing to move it forward in a way that doesn't put people in a bad position, that allows people to upgrade in a sane way and allows us to keep scaling it out without continuing to meet the business needs of the people who are using it without all of a sudden throwing the technical community under the bus as it works. We want to grow both of those sort of in concert moving forward. And that's a tricky thing to do when you get this many people. As you said, in the past it turns into land grabs by people. And we've been very careful to keep away from doing that, to try and do everything we can to make sure that it's always a level playing field for everybody who's coming in to participate in the project. What do you guys say? Eileen, you mentioned the board has known each other. Is there a good working relationship and trust there? I think so. I think there's actually excellent working relationships amongst the board. And one of the things that I think has helped to create that has the fact that back in 2011 and 2012, that's when a number of us got to know one another. So if I look at the gold and platinum members on the board, by and large it's the same individuals that were there in 2011, 2012. So at that time we were working through some fairly difficult issues in terms of looking at things like how are we going to structure this? How are we going to create this? In many ways it was fairly new to what we were doing. And we also wanted to make sure we maintained things like technical meritocracy, the things that worked really, really well in the OpenStack Foundation and the OpenStack Project, we didn't want to break those. So I think we worked through a number of really significant issues together, so that way when we actually formed and launched the board in September 2012, we'd already gotten to know each other fairly well. And you're the only woman on the board? I am, yes. You want to make sure I get that on there? You're the only woman on the Linux board too? Yes. Okay, history. So I want to ask you a question around, can the community grow and win without a leader? Is it maybe having on our crowd chat earlier? It takes a leader sometimes in Linux but certainly it was IBM that put some money down that. And you guys also did a lot of work around Linux and remember the SEO indemnification, you guys did that, sorry about that. Same kind of thing now, you're seeing IBM here, you're seeing HP and you guys are not small companies, you have a lot of muscle, a lot of customers, a lot of enterprise customers. Can OpenStack win with the community or does there have to be some leaders in there? I think it has to win with the community. I think that that's actually a giant part of what makes us special and what makes us significant in the space. We're trying to do something a little bit different. A lot of times in the past you've had the sort of benevolent dictator as they like to call it. And that means that ultimately all of those are sort of top-down control structures in some way to some degree. And so the question really, one of the questions here is, can we actually come together as a group of equals, as a group of collaborators, work together without anybody being particularly in the position of telling somebody else this is what you're gonna do? And so far it's working really well. I mean, we've got multiple public clouds running on this stuff. We've grown from 100 something to 4,500. We've had, you know, we've got over 2,000 contributors on the technical side, average of 466 a month currently. And they're all coming in and landing giant amounts of code together without there being that sort of top-down command control structure. You want to drill down on that. So some people say OpenStack is a mindset. You gotta think about it in a certain way. It's not a product, it's a platform. That's been a consistent message we hear. Can you just parse that a little further? What does that mean? It's not a product, it's a platform. It's a platform. I think that it's- And who's thinking is, what's wrong with thinking about it's a product? You can't- I actually don't think that, I don't think you can't think of it as a product. I think that OpenStack wants to think of itself as a project as somebody that shipped something. But a lot of times when you say product, you think of something with maybe maybe a specific commercial interest behind it. You think this is gonna be a thing I'm gonna go buy or something like that. We want you to be able to consume OpenStack directly from us. We also want HP and IBM and Piston and Nebula and all of these guys to be able to sell products based on that, that are built with that. So on the platform perspective, it's a thing that isn't just what it is. It's also the thing that people can use to build the product that they want to build. And ultimately then it wants to become a meta platform really because we want to have multiple clouds out there so that we've got an ecosystem of clouds so that the ultimate end users of these can take their workloads, can take their applications and run them at HP, can run them at Rackspace, can run them at IBM, can run them at a local private cloud and have that be something that they can actually do in the same way that we can do with laptops today. I can buy a laptop from multiple people, of course I would only ever buy them from HP, but I could in theory buy them from somebody else. We had to put a little cube stickers on our laptops because we go to HP to discover they didn't like the Max. No, I'm sure, I'm sure they did not. We're independent media, so they ended up bringing our laptops. I want to get you. I want to talk about the Linux point you raised about the Linux indemnity. So I think that's another important piece here is HP was the first large enterprise company to offer an indemnity around Linux and this was a number of years ago and I think HP, we're stepping up and doing the same thing with OpenStack. We're providing an indemnity for OpenStack and that's something that we announced last week in conjunction with HP Healing on OpenStack and I think that's another important piece here is that we are standing behind the open source technology. Were you the first ones to do it in OpenStack? Not the first, but I think we're the first large enterprise to do it. So I'd say yes. Because IBM says they've done it before you guys. I'm not aware of that, my understanding is we're the first large enterprise to do it. We'll have to clarify that. We'll have to clarify that. All right, so guys, I want to ask you about the, what needs to get done for the community? I mean, you've been, you've seen this move before, you've been involved in open source communities, month of yourself included. What does OpenStack need to do from this point forward? The foundation's set to scale up this organization and this community from a legal, technical community outreach. What do they need to do? We'll start with that. Well, I mean, I think there are some tactical things that we need to accomplish. I mean, what Troy mentioned today in his keynote was, we're working on the DEF Core Committee and both Monty and I are involved in the DEF Core and all the work that's being done there. What comes out of that though, as well, is what Troy mentioned as well, which was we need to have some changes to the bylaws. And so once the DEF Core you know, completes the work that they're doing, we're going to have to make sure that that goes as well as making certain changes to the trademark policy so that they conform to the way that we're adjusting. Because again, I think one of the things is the project has grown significantly. So if we look at the way core technology in OpenStack is defined right now, it was great when we created the bylaws back in 2012. But I think we recognize we need to make some adjustments. So I think one of the key things I think that's important is that we continue to listen to the community and we continue to listen to the constituencies to try to make sure we're adaptable and really make that change rapidly. Yeah, we have to find the balance. A lot of it, so much of what we're doing with as many participants as we have is about finding balances of the different interests of the people. This is one of the things we've been working on as it relates to the trademark policy in that it's really important for our users that we have a trademark that means something. So that a person who consumes a thing that's called OpenStack is actually a thing they can technically count on to be of a certain quality or has a certain set of capabilities. We don't want to go too far with that and get really restrictive and not let companies sort of build out the ecosystem. We don't want to be too lax with that so that it's meaningless. Same thing with bringing things into the project. We're growing on a technical side by leaps and bounds. We want to still be able to be a player in the greater ecosystem. We want to be able to interact with other people like Cloud Foundry, but at the same time, we need to be able to service the people who want to consume things from OpenStack. So it's all about a balancing act. All right, share the folks out there. I want to get the HP word in there because I know that there's some changes at HP. Bethany Mayer is in there and Martin Fink is now running it. People don't look at HP as a big open source company, but there's a lot of action in there. Talk about the experience you guys have and maybe silence some of the skeptics out there around the experience of open source. Sure, yeah. Including your role, Linux is pretty open. Yes, absolutely. So Martin Fink, I think it's, he was our first VP of open source at HP. He actually wrote a book on open source. It was published about 10 years ago and it's the business and economics of Linux and open source. And to be honest, I reread the book recently a couple of times and there are things that in there that are so true today as they were 10 years ago. It's interesting how history repeats itself and I find it incredibly helpful, some of the key points in that book. But I think in addition, Martin, because he's got this deep historical knowledge and experience with an open source, he is uniquely qualified in position because he's now running HP Cloud to be in that leadership position and helping us drive forward because our Cloud portfolio was based on the open stack technology. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's been fantastic having him at the helm of the Cloud group. He brings that experience in both business and open source to the table, which is extremely important because if you don't have that experience, you start to think that you need to poke at things more and he's got the confidence to be able to say, listen, we're doing open stack, we're in, we're all in on it and so that means we're gonna go and we're gonna be good participants and good members of that community to drive it forward appropriately. And that actually isn't at odds with building a business around it. In fact, it's core to building a successful business around it. If you don't do that, then you're undercutting the thing that you're saying you're building a business on. So it's been a real boon to have him there. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We're cut for time here. I know you guys got to go too, but I'd like to give you guys both the final word. We'll start with Eileen. Share with folks out there in your own words. Why is this point in time so unique and so exciting from a technology perspective? What's going on this year that makes it so compelling? I think with the shift in technology and the industry, I think we're at that really interesting inflection point. And I think cloud is, I still think cloud is in its very early days. So I think we're really primed and set up for success to really help grow this and grow this in a way that it's open, that's interoperable, that's all of those things that are so important to the entire industry. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that we're at a very similar place as we were with the invention of the PC. Before that, it was extremely difficult for anybody to get their hands on a computer. There were the famous quotes about like, oh, there's really only gonna be four computers and the need for four computers in the world. And once we had the PC come out, you saw the explosion of the tech industry around that and what that did for forming the industry. Now we're at a place where to get a new computer, I click a couple buttons on a web page or I make a couple API calls and I have a computer right now. I mean, that's, it's the same sea change that we had with the original PC invention. So I think that we can only begin to imagine what applications we're gonna see of that in the next couple of years. Molly Taylor and Eileen Evans are both on the board of directors and Molly also on the technical committee of OpenStack Foundation. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.