 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and RedHash. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live with the CUBE coverage Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Our next guest is our pit, Joshua Perra, general manager of networking, the Linux Foundation. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Thank you, nice to be here again. Always good to talk networking, as Stu and I always say, networking is probably the most active audience in our community because at the end of the day, everything rolls downhill to networking when the people complain. It's like, where the hell's my wifi? Where's the latency? Networking, SDN, we're supposed to solve all that. Stu, we're still talking about networking. When are we going to fix the network? It's always in the network, but important. All seriousness, all in all seriousness, a lot of action continues and innovation is in the network. What's the update? Update is very exciting. So first of all, I can confidently say that open source networking, not just networking, open source networking is now mainstream. And it's mainstream in the telcos, in the carriers, service providers, it's getting there in the enterprise. And Linux Foundation is really proud to host eight of the top 10 projects that are in open source networking. ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, FIDO, you know, it's just like the list goes on. And we are really excited about each of these projects. So, good moment. We've been seeing and talking about it too. And we are just joking aside the intro there, but in all seriousness, we've been saying, you know, we get better at the network. It's finally happening. Has it been a maturation of the network itself? Has it been industry forces? What have been the forces of innovation? Has it been OpenStack has done some great work? That kind of a lot of love these days from some people, but still, you've seen a lot of production workloads on OpenStack, OpenStack's still there, rocking and rolling, new projects are onboarding, you see the telcos getting business models around digital. What's the drivers? Why is networking mainstream now? I think it's a very simple answer to that. And that is before 5G and IoT hit the market, network better be automated. That's, it's a very simple requirement. And the reason is very self-explanatory, right? You can't have an IoT device on the call, on hold while you get your service up. Okay, so it's IoT, right? And it is same thing on 5G with a lot of new use cases around cars or around, you know, low latency apps. You need automation. And in order to have automation, a carrier or a solution provider goes through a simple journey. Am I virtualized? Yes or no? Am I using the building blocks of SDN and NFE? Yes or no? And the third, which is now reality, which is, am I using open source to do it? Yes, and I'm going to do it. And that's the driver, right? I mean, it's- Automation, and you started to run out a lot of TLA's, you know, when they talk about SDN and NFE, we got a four letter acronym that we need to talk about, the Open Network Automation Platform. Yeah. Why don't you bring our audience up to speed? What that is, the news that you have this week? Absolutely. So, ONAP was launched earlier in 2017. It's a combination of two open source projects, Ecom and OpenO. And we wanted to bring the community together versus sort of fragmented. And because our end users are asking for a harmonized solution. So we brought it together. It was launched earlier this year as we talked about. But the most significant thing is it has received tremendous support from the member community. So at OSS Today, we just announced that Vodafone has joined as a Platinum member. And they will be on our board. And as you know, Vodafone is one of the top providers. So if you add up all the subscribers that are being influenced by ONAP, they come to 55%. So out of the four and a half billion subscribers that exist, more than 55% will be influenced by ONAP. And the work that happens, that includes China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, right? All of the China, Bell Canada, AT&T obviously, who sort of was the founding member. Orange, right? Reliance Geo from India, right? So we got Comcast joined earlier the quarter, right? So we got cable companies, carriers, all joining. And to be very honest, I'll probably just give you the list of all the networking vendors that are participating here. And I have a list. Amdux, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Tech Mahendra, VMware, ZTE, Juniper, you name it. Yeah, so it's an orbit. I mean, the long story short is... Just because they're involved, does that mean it's actually working? It's not going to be critical on this. Actual, yeah. But come on, even Cisco's involved in the open source stuff, right? I mean, look, we've had lots of guests on from Cisco. Luke Tucker's been on many, many times. We know that open source there, but it used to be, networking was very proprietary. Now it wasn't, SDM's going to totally change everything. It's lots of different pieces, lots of different projects. It kind of felt like the river slowly wearing down the mountain as to this transition from proprietary to open source. I think what happened is if you just look at four years back, it was proprietary. Not because people liked it. That was the only game in town, right? When the open source industry, especially in the networking, and this is a hundred-year-old industry, telecom, right? When it came in the disaggregated manner, right? Hardware and software separated, right? Control plane separated from data plane. All of that happened, and what happened suddenly was each component started becoming mature. So they're production-ready components, and what ONAP and what Linux Foundation is intending to do this year is trying to bring all the components into a system solution, right? So that it's easy to deploy, and all you have to do is point-click a service. Everything below it will all be automated and integrated, right? Well, the telcos are under a lot of pressure. I mean, this has been a decade run over the top. They've been struggling with that from years ago, decade ago, or more, but now they're getting their act together. You're seeing, we're seeing some signs, even at VMware, Stu, you know, Pat Gelsinger said five Gs, the next big kahuna in networking, the next 20 years, you're kind of validating that. This is going to be a 20-year changeover. So as the Linux Foundation, which essentially is the organic growth engine for this air community, what do you guys see in that 20 years? Because actually five Gs are going to create all these connection points. IoT is going to be massive. That's going to increase the surface area for potential attacks. We're seeing a networking paradigm that's moving from old guard, Cisco, Juniper, and some of the names you mentioned, they got to make some changes. Correct. How are they adjusting? What's going on? So the next 20 years, we don't have more conflicts, more identity politics. So I'll tell you one thing, I come from a vendor community, right? So I really appreciate the work they're doing. Part of the reason you would have seen in the past a vendor dragging their feet is because of fragmentation in the community. You as a vendor do not know where to put your resources, people, and where you put your money, right? What we're doing at the Linux Foundation is starting to harmonize all that, right? And once you do that, and when you have enough of a scale and enough of a community, there is no shortage of people and developers that the vendors are contributing to. Put some of the proof points that you could share. Okay, so Onap, from start to now, about 1,100 Viki members already, right? That means 1,100 unique developers are joining the project. Over 50 members, right? We ran out of VMs. I mean, it's like that has not happened in any project for over five years. I mean, we had to fire up even more. So you can see that, and this is not just, these are competitors, but if you step back and look at it, they're competitors from an end user perspective. But they're solving the common problem in which they don't get any money. They don't make any money. These are things that absolutely need to happen. The plumbing, the infrastructure, the orchestration, the control layer, the data plane layer, all of that need to just happen. It should just work, and let them differentiate on top. So, you know, we are actively seeing almost everybody participating significantly. Let me get your thoughts on this. You guys are both, I view you guys both as experts and influencers in this networking ecosystem. So I got to ask you both a question. CNCF has gotten a lot of traction with funding. Sponsorships are off the charts. You're seeing massive attractions too. And we obviously see that KubeCon cloud native, but you have native clouds, I call them native clouds on Amazon, and then soon to be enterprise, that want to run software-defined networking. So the question is, do you see the same kind of support that went for your group as CNCFs getting something? Is it just fashionable at this point, CNCF? Why isn't the networking getting as much love at least from a sponsorship standpoint? Let's define love, right? So if you define love as the 2017 ONS, which is our largest networking summit, we grew that 10%. Everything was off the charts, right? The feedback, the content, attendance growth, attendance sponsorships, CFPs were five X over subscribed. Right, so call for papers, right? For submissions, five X over subscribed. So we had a hard time picking the best of the best. ONS 2018 is going to be here in LA. We've already started getting requests on, you know, so we're the same boat. So you feel good. We feel good. So it's not about their winning. No, but I tell you. But their sponsorship numbers, we know from the hype standpoint, so still we ask you a question, and maybe you guys can comment. So is it a matter of that there's more buzz and positioning involved in the hype side of CNCF now, and there's just meat and potatoes being done in the networking worlds too? Because you and I both know. So if someone has nothing to say, they've got to market them. So John, think back to five years ago, how much hype and buzz there was around SDN. You know, John, you and I interviewed like Martin Casado. He just bought for $1.4 billion, you know, all these startups, you know, lots of VC investment. So, you know, I think we're further down the maturity curve. Now networking is always- It's the people who want to work. They're doing their job. They're doing their work. It's real. It's real. It's in production. It's not power. I always say, you know, when you move from PowerPoint to production, right, real things happen. I always say, if there's going to be sizzle, I bet I see some steak on the grill. So what's happening is the steak is cooking right now. Here's the sizzle. What's the next question? So one of the things we say, you know, networking, you know, no offense to all my friends in networking, network is never sexy. It's like, you know- I always say it's cool again. Networking is never lost its end. It is majorly important, but our pit, take us in, you know, put, you know, Kubernetes is hot, you know, containers gets a lot of buzz and everything. Networking, critical piece of making sure that this works feels like, you know, I think back to the virtualization days. It took us like 10 years to kind of solve those things that that, you know, abstraction layer broke. It feels like networking is further ahead than it was. It's moving faster. We understand it's not something that's just kind of, oh, we'll let the networking guys get to it eventually. Networking and security, which often has that networking tie or front and center now. Very good point. And I think what you have to also sort of step back and look at is what are the problems that need to be solved from an end user perspective? So the hardest networking problems are the data plane control plan layers, check, right? Next big problem that remained to be solved was orchestration, data analytics and things like that. Check, solve, right, with own app. Now the next problems that need to be solved are containerization of enterprise app, which is where Kubernetes and then how does containerization work with networking? That's all the CNI, right, the interfaces. So you will, I would say next year, you will start to see the interworking and the blend of these, quote, hot projects where they can all come together. Stu, you were there in 2010, I looked right in the camera, I said to Dave Vellante, storage is not as sexy. And Dave called it snorage, the snorage was boring. And at that time, the storage industry went on a run and we've well documented that. Sexy is, networking is sexy. So, and I think that's- I call it cool. And I just tweeted 25G is a good indicator of a 20 year run in networking. It's the big kahuna, as Pat Gelsinger said, in IoT. So I think Stu, I think it's going to be very apparent, sexy. I just don't see a lot of amplification, so you don't see a lot of people marketing the sizzle. There's some things being done, I would agree, but Stu, there's more buzz and hype on the CNCF side than networking. That's fair. I think it is always, as you said, right? It's the initial phase of any project that gets a lot of clicks and a lot of interest. And people want to know about it. A lot of the buzz is around just awareness, right? The classic marketing cycle, right? And I think we're past that. It was there for ONAP in January, we've passed that. All right, so here's the question. Yep, final question. So the steak is coming off the grill on our metaphor here. What are people, what is that product? What's happening? What is the big deliverable right now from a networking standpoint that people can bet on and know that they can cross the bridge to the future with it? So you will see a visible difference. You as an end user, an enterprise, or a residential consumer, you will see a significant difference in terms of how you get services. It's as simple as that. Why? Because it's all automated, right? Network on demand, disaster recovery, video conference services, right? Why did over the top players, you know, why were they so successful? If you need a Gmail ID, you go in, you get one. It's right there. Try getting a T1 line, you know, five years ago. That would be six weeks, six months, right? So with the automation in place, the models are converging. So provisioning, what are the automations? Provisioning service. And then the thing that you will not see but you will see in the services impact is the closed loop automation that has all the analytics built in. Huge, huge. I mean, network is a richest source. And by the way, I'll come back next year and I'll tell you why we're cool again. Because all of a sudden, it's like, oh my God, look at that data and the analytics that the network is giving me. What can I do with it? Or you can do AI, you can do machine learning, you can do all these things. Well, we're looking forward to it. I mean, the eye of the storm is kind of happening now, I think in networking. Stu and I always have debates about this because we see a lot of great action. The question is, let's see the proof points, you guys doing some good work. Thanks for sharing, you have to really appreciate it. General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation, it's theCUBE, more live coverage from Los Angeles. The open source summit, North America. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more live coverage after this short break.