 Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Vancouver for OpenStack Summit. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and we extract the sales from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. Stu Miniman, our next guest is Jonathan Brice, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. Welcome back to theCUBE. Yes, thank you for having me again. Great day one kickoff. OpenStack flourishing. The market in cloud is booming, okay? You got the big guys rolling in, a lot of startup. Some consolidation we saw last summer. Some companies moving here and there. But still overall, robust growth. Give us a quick update. What's happening? What's going on? What's the state of the union and the foundation and in the ecosystem? Yeah, well I think the things that I'm really excited about are what we announced this morning. We have two big initiatives. The first one is around interoperability between OpenStack environments. The promise of OpenStack has always been this global footprint of clouds that give you compute, storage and networking in the same way. And that allow you to basically take advantage of this footprint wherever you need resources. That's something that the community has worked towards for years. And we now have tests and validation in place that really make it a reality and prove how it works, which products and services are validated and in that. So that's a big piece. And the other one extends that even farther into federation between these clouds. So our latest release had a big update around federated identity that lets you take one cloud and connect it out to other OpenStack clouds. And if I have a user account in this cloud and a trust relationship with other clouds, I can provision resources in any of them. So we're really seeing the vision. We're really seeing the dream of what OpenStack can enable. Come forward and be real for these people. Great, so Jonathan, if we've been talking the last couple of years, OpenStack isn't a singular thing. You've got all these projects. There's more projects coming in. As you said, interoperability has always been one of the big promises. So can you unpack for us a little bit? What is, I believe, Defcore is kind of the big initiative that you've got a number of companies working on. Who's doing it? How do they determine what goes in and how interoperability works and what makes that foundation? Yeah, so OpenStack has this massive community that just pumps out innovation constantly. And it can be confusing sometimes to figure out what do I need to deploy today? What should I be looking at for next week? What should I be planning for next year? And that was really the thing that we wanted to solve with interoperability requirements. You mentioned Defcore. So Defcore was a committee that was formed from the OpenStack Foundation Board as well as the larger community to answer those questions and to come up with what is the foundation for OpenStack? And they took a really interesting approach to it. I think it took about a year and a half to get through this process. And it was all along the way based off of feedback from users, based off of feedback from this big strong ecosystem that we have, and looking at what is deployed, what's reliable, what's scalable, and making that the foundation for kind of all of the rest of those services. Yeah, so many of us lived through some of the early Linux days and what is supportable and what can I do with my applications? So where are we with OpenStack? How do I know if I do a solution that is, does it get a powered by OpenStack sticker on it? Or how do I understand what I get and how are there solutions to it? That's a great question. And the program that we have that's actually administered by the foundation, which is the independent nonprofit, is called OpenStack Powered. And as you said, there's a logo, the OpenStack Powered logo, that these products and services get when they meet those requirements. The thing that we also do, because sometimes you want a storage solution, sometimes you want compute, sometimes you want both, we require them to provide which components they support, which tests they pass, and to publish all that information. So you can see exactly what you're getting, what capabilities are there, and as you said, you know, they want to know what app can I build on this and what app can I move between one OpenStack Cloud and another. All right. So can you maybe just step back for a second, talk about just kind of the state of contribution and the OpenStack in general. The board's gone through a lot of changes over the last year. I loved in your keynote, you really said how many people have contributed and a lot of people that are here at this show. What's your feel kind of like a stalt of the OpenStack community today? It is really unlike any community that I've ever been part of and I've done a lot of open source stuff and been involved in a lot of different projects, but you know, there's something that is a true community movement here that I just have never seen before. The last release was Arkelo release and we had over 1500 individuals that contributed code in six months for that release. 1500 individuals from I think 140 different companies. So very broad support and you know, a lot of people who are pushing in changes. And sometimes you know, one of the things that people will say, it was funny when we started OpenStack, it was, oh, it's just a rack spacing. And now people say, oh, there are too many companies involved. You know, one way or the other. But the thing that people will sometimes say is like, it's just a bunch of vendors, you know, and they're supporting their code. But if you look at the top contributors to OpenStack, there are always users in that top 20 bucket. You know, it's not just Red Hat and IBM and HP. They're great, they push fantastic changes up, but we have Yahoo, we have Comcast, we have companies like Cibera, which is a small Canadian organization who are contributing and driving it back to user needs. Always, you know, keeping us focused on that. And that has been such a huge piece of what's made OpenStack work. You know, what about a marquee customer like Walmart? One of the things we look at is, you know, wow, you know, Walmart global company, you know, great market company. But you know, boy, they've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that could work on this. And the average enterprise, you know, wants to just be able to consume this. So, you know, how do you have that balance between a solution that works for a global audience versus, you know, kind of the typical enterprise? Yeah, the interesting thing about the Walmart, the Walmart deployment is he has a much smaller team than you might expect. You know, a team that you can count on two hands, we'll say. And you know, if you go back a couple of years, you definitely had to have engineers to do a serious OpenStack deployment. But the software has come so far, and especially in the last couple of releases, that we see a number of deployments, like Walmart's and others, that number in the thousands of nodes with teams that are very reasonably sized, you know, five, 10, 15 people to run massive infrastructure that's critical to these businesses. What's the evolution of the consolidation? We saw, you know, Piston Cloud last year, we saw Josh McKenzie go to Pivotal, get Cloud Foundry out there. We had a lot of the changes going on, Miranda's stay in the course, in the distros. What is the, what's going on in the consolidation? And what's the business model? It's the free market in the distro. Welcome to capitalism. But there's some business model, things that are in flux, and as you said, it's a robust community, so you guys done an amazing job there. Code is, people are shipping code and speaking with their code, so to speak. But the business model, what's the deal with distributions? Is there a model there? I mean, Miranda's obviously banking on that. Yeah, well, I think that what we're seeing five years in is we are really starting to see the market give us information about what models they want to consume, what models they're not, you know, is ready to consume. And I think that the other thing that's happening is, early on when a technology is brand new, there's a lot of value in just getting it in place, getting it installed and running. As the technology matures, you know, a company is going to have to do more in their product portfolio in order to, to really carve out a, you know, a defensible position in the market. I think it's a combination of, you know, people adopting cloud, people deciding how they want to use that as well as the technology progressing. We're getting to a point where, yeah, they're starting to be some shake out in how all of this works. And I think it's good, honestly, for the community and for the ecosystem, because it has to happen. Yeah, fail fast is the model, but all the messaging's there. You got interoperability, you got multicloud, any app on any device kind of concept going on with VMware's got that same messaging. I know we got pressed on time, but I want to ask you one final question. For the folks watching, you know, we were teasing up the intro, like, hey, you know, every year it's like, where's the meat on the bone? And you guys are always constantly pushing out milestones and showing some great progress. Summarize for the folks out there, what is the meat on the bone this year? What is the big, is the ball moving down the field faster than you want, slower, faster? Because of the pressure, you got the big guys, you got Azure, you got VMware, you got Google Cloud, you got IBM out there, HP, the big guys are all, their customers want Cloud now. They want it faster. Can you pedal any faster? What's the meat on the bone? I mean, the getting to interoperability and federation gives us an incredible footprint to build on. And tomorrow morning in the keynotes, we're going to get a sneak peek at some of those integrations. Companies want a platform that gives them stable, reliable compute storage networking so they can try out the next wave of technologies, pick the ones that work for them and build on that solid foundation. And that is where we are in OpenStack and that's what we're going to see this year. And it's really exciting how it's all coming together. So easy and efficient, fast and scalable, kind of is the mantra for the... Yes, those building blocks that every application need, you get them from OpenStack and you layer in the other technologies that can drive your business forward. And the monetization is at hand, waving at this point, like, look, there's just enough, there's so much business out there, it's not about can you monetize? The question is, how? Yeah, the thing that's interesting is, as you go, as the market around OpenStack continues to mature, if you go through our expo hall, we have 120 companies in there. And it moves to those other areas of value. It's not just about compute storage and networking, it's about big data, it's about platform as a service, it's about analytics, it's about mobile. And that's what we're now enabling is all of these other businesses besides just that core. The key point is enabling. Enabling platform creates a multitude of business models. It's actually on your view. I mean, if you're in the district business here or if you're in the app business, that's kind of the whole philosophy of the foundation. Right? Yeah, exactly. All right, Jonathan, thanks so much. I know we're tight on time. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming off the keynote here. Join us on theCUBE. This is theCUBE. We are live in Vancouver for OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back after this short break.