 The Cube, at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 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. Welcome back to Atlanta. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's live water well coverage of OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Joining us for this segment is Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp, the co-founders of the Cloudcast podcast. If you haven't heard it, this one's been around for about three years. We at the Cube always try to find the smartest people, extract the signal from the noise. These guys, I don't know if it's a signal from the noise, they just dig deep with some of the best geeks in the industry. We tend to up level a little bit more to the business conversation here. This has to be really your guys' audience here. The geeks, the developers and everything else. What have you thought of the show so far? Brian? Well, we were talking about it last night. So lots of people, which I guess is good. It feels like the small version of VMworld almost. A lot of familiar faces. No customers here. I mean, other than the ones they put on stage, I was joking with him last night because he was in the booth a little bit. I said, did you see any customers? Anybody who says, I saw a few, which I was kind of shocked about. But you know, there's this weird mix and I think you guys hit on it in your wrap-up yesterday. There's a weird mix of like really good energy and then, but where's the substance underneath it? And I don't know, I don't know where that is. Aaron, you've been working the booth. What have you seen so far? And like we were saying at lunch today, I am seeing a lot of customers actually, but it's really interesting of the level of depth of the customer here still is very introductory. The level of deep customer asking a lot of really in-depth questions. I'm not seeing a lot of that just yet. And a lot of just basically, how do you get going kind of questions? All right, let's up-level it a little bit and then I'm sure we'll dig back down in. So I think Amazon brought us the whole cloud world in 2006, about, gosh, what was it, in 2007 or 2008, kind of the whole private and hybrid cloud discussion got started about four years ago, OpenStack started making movement here. What do you see as the state of cloud and how does OpenStack fit into that whole discussion? So we were actually joking. So we've been doing the podcast three years now and it started out really small of, hey, let's just call some people and see if they'll actually get on Skype with us and talk. And it kind of snowballed from there, but we were saying earlier, a lot of the conversations are still the same. The industry isn't moving as fast as everyone wants it to move. And technology really isn't the problem a lot of times. It's all these outside factors that you can get into, but everyone's kind of gotten into them before, but the technology parts, a lot of times the easiest part. Yeah, I think we have a few benchmarks. I mean, we know roughly what Amazon does in terms of business, which is good. But if you think, if you put it in the big picture of things is still basically a rounding error, at least in terms of the IT industry, what, $5 billion versus $3 or $4 trillion. So it's, I don't know. I think the thing for us, we've seen a lot of growth of people trying to figure out these transitions. So like, in the past, we did a lot of stuff about conversion infrastructure. People kind of got that, but they wanted the latest. We've been doing a lot around DevOps. And at least for us, the uptake has been really high. So a lot of people are trying to figure out transitional shifts. In terms of the technology, it is what it is. I mean, if you really boil it down, like OpenStack can either be a replacement for VMware or a replacement for Amazon, however the heck you want to do it, the only thing interesting is the economics. Is anybody going to make any money? Is it going to save customers any money? Is it going to drive any business? And I don't know that we know that yet. We know what VMware does and we know what Amazon does, but I don't know that we know where OpenStack wants to live or what they want their goal to be. All right, so has OpenStack reached a level of maturity that it's a player out there to build a platform on? I mean, there's no doubt, Amazon, we've got a few billion dollars, they've got the ecosystem, they're doing their thing. From my standpoint, I would put Microsoft Azure and Google's GAE, GCE as a contender in that space. I don't know that I'd put OpenStack at that same level yet. Even if you take all the service providers and everybody's going to do it, it's kind of a, is it a second class cloud citizen? Oh, that's a good question. So there's a difference in my mind between can you stand it up and get it going, but what does it take to do that? What is the overhead today? I think it's still pretty heavy overhead-wise. Is it as almost, I wouldn't say frictionless, but less friction than some of the public clouds that are out there? Probably not, right? We're still working on that. Yeah, I would agree with you. I think, I mean, it's blasphemous to sort of say maybe it isn't a first class citizen here at this event, but I kind of think- Lightning's coming down. Yeah, I know, I know. No, I think it is. I think you have to be realistic and say, look, the hardest thing about OpenStack is if I were a user, if I'm a customer or something like that, A, which one do I pick? Because there is no one OpenStack. It's, you know, we're, I mean, this is the equivalent of like fiber channel where everybody had 10 different variants. This isn't Ethernet. They want it to be Linux. It's like Linux. It's like Linux. It's like fiber channel. And people, other than this crowd, doesn't know it. We were joking yesterday, we were talking to somebody. We said, look, the idea that the only way you're going to learn OpenStack is to go read the code is a dead end story. If I can't get decent documentation, I can't get an interface I know how to use and DevOps, blah, blah, blah, you won't grow it. It'll be, it's ham radio compared to Amazon or VMware or something like that. Right, I mean, one of the big things I've seen at the show is who's going to help make this simple to consume? So there's some of the orchestration players that are trying to sit on top and do that. And, you know, Aaron, you just joined SolidFire recently. I loved your tweet this morning. You know, most companies don't have time or money to really build that, you know, army of OpenStack ninjas. So, you know, I've talked with you guys many times as, you know, the enterprise guys, you know, they're not mostly DevOps guys. They're not mostly coders. How many do we need and how much are there going to be solutions that the enterprise can adopt that don't require that change? It goes back to your point at the beginning, Aaron, about, you know, it's the tech, but then it's the ripple and what it means to everybody that's got to deploy it. Exactly. For me, the number one thing is, yeah, I mean, consumability, right? How do you make this easily consumable? And you guys, I mean, you guys did smart stuff. I mean, we, you know, we've got some guys that we work with to do direct DevOps on our show. And the number one ask they have is not give us more DevOps. It's like, is there a vendor out there who will give me a full rack of equipment that has a base load of OpenStack installed on it? Like what you guys announced today, I think was very, very smart. You know, Dell announced something similar. We've seen it, you know, from an EMC perspective with things like Vblock and VCE, like people tend to downplay just stuff that will move the ball, just simple steps. Like, is it easier to get the gear? Is it easier to have it up and running, you know, and we've argued a bunch of times, the only guys making money in this space at this point are folks like Morantis who are helping people. They're not, they're not pontificating, they're helping, you know, whether you like that or not, helping people pay for help. They pay for problem solving. That underlying infrastructure, to quote Jeremiah Dooley, that underlying infrastructure is boring. But... It's complicated. It's complicated. It's complicated plumbing. Right, how do you take that plumbing and make it consumable easy plumbing to where plumbing is plumbing? Yeah, and the reality of OpenStack is, you can spend as many hours as you want to get OpenStack running. You still haven't made one application even begin to start working. And again, that's the goal of this thing, right? The goal is to get that running. So, you know, like I would almost argue, if you were on the Federation or you were the foundation for OpenStack, your goal should be, we should be the most invisible, easy to install plumbing on the internet. And I don't think they're there yet. So, but I don't know that they think that's their goal. They think it's something else. All right, so, Brian, you brought up, you know, let's talk about some of the money in cloud. You know, look at what is the funding and the motivation. You know, one of the challenges I see is if you look at the big companies that are here, any of the guys that sell traditional infrastructure with billions of dollars in their existing business, not sure how much it's in their best interest to move this along really fast. Because if I move to OpenStack, shouldn't I have some kind of portability between what I'm doing? I mean, you know, if it's one Cinder versus another, company like Morantis, I mean, they seem to have good brand name recognition at the show, but from what I've heard, they were sub 50 million dollars last year. So, compared to what the big companies are doing, you know, that's pennies. When you've got billions of dollars of existing stuff on the line, so please take on that. I don't think we've seen, and you sort of talked about it yesterday in your wrap up, like if this doesn't take off in a year or two, it'll implode. I actually think the faster that implosion happens, the better. I think you can't, think about it this way. So forget about how many vendors there are with distributions. If you're SolidFire or EMC or anybody who has to work with one of those distributions, even if you're Red Hat, just the pure cost, or if you're a customer, the pure cost of trying to go, I'm going to certify one of these things that comes out every six months, but it comes out in pieces, is ridiculously expensive. The faster we can get to even one or two distributions, and I don't really care who it is, get to a couple of distributions so it's somewhat consistent, it becomes more like Ethernet. And then, you know, then I think what you have is you'll have some take off like you do when you see a large company buy a startup and you go, I can put a sales force behind it, I can put resources behind it. I don't think any of the guys here, other than maybe Rackspace or Red Hat, and maybe HP now, have enough resources to make it successful. You're never going to see Scout Cloud Scaling or Piston or any of that. Great technologists, not enough money to go drive enough, you know, engagements with customers to make a number that's going to show up on your radar, I don't think. You know, one of the interesting things you look at is there's the companies here that are building clouds, and then there's companies that are helping the users build stuff on the private side. And OpenStack, I'm still trying to wrap my head around it because it's a provider, is it an arms dealer? Right, and even, you know, you talk about, is it even an operating system? I don't think it's fair to call it a Linux operating system because, you know, Linux always started with a little bit, you know, more of a complete operating system, you could say. Instead of doing, you know, Unix, I can do Linux. I can't, I still need bits and pieces to put together. I think I've heard it, you know, it might be part of the kernel, but to get to that full distribution, I've got to have more. Yeah, so it's interesting of what are the use cases that will ultimately drive what OpenStack will be. And I still think we're all over the map there. And I think, unfortunately, I don't know when that clarification will come or how it will come because, to Brad's point earlier, there's a lot of players here. There's a lot of opportunity here. How does that settle out over time? Is it just whoever has the deepest pockets wins long term? Where you just kind of starve everyone else out of the market? I don't know that answer, but the use cases and the customers have to come and say, I want that, right? Until somebody says I want that and some money starts going around that use case, it's going to be hard to determine a winner. Yeah, you get two challenges. And you know this from your analyst days. Like the worst thing you can be as a product, whether you're a startup or something, is to not fit into a bucket, right? It's great to go out, we're different. But if nobody can classify what you do, that's hard. And so yeah, are you a kernel? Are you the new Linux? Are you the new cloud? Whatever you are. And the other thing is, like you said, if you're Rackspace, you have totally different motivations than if you're Piston Cloud, right? I mean, totally different. If you're Rackspace, you love the community because in essence, you're trying to catch up to Amazon and you want free resources, you want the cheapest resources you can get. If you're Piston Cloud or Cloud Scaling or any of those kind of guys, you want to build a business that customers will pay you on a recurring date. Totally different. And how you resolve that, or you don't get people creating forks and variations, I don't know how that resolves itself. Other than they just have to collapse and some of those groups end up going to work for it. Now the good news is I think there's a ton of sort of consolidated talent at certain companies that somebody's going to end up buying them up and having a fantastic head start on something. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, Brian, Dave Vellante has often said, if there's one lawyer in a town, he's going to go broke. If there's two, they're going to be rich. What we have right now is of course the paradox of choice where there's dozens of environments and customers are just going to freeze up because if I have just vanilla chocolate and strawberry, no problem, but you go to the case in the dairy and it's like, oh my God, there's no way I'm going to please everybody or get the right, how do I, there's that fear that I'm going to make that wrong choice and who's going to stand with me. So I'll flip a question back at you then. So OpenStack long-term, have we reached a point though where we have momentum, you have a lot of players, you have a lot of money, too big to fail at this point? Yeah, so definitely, we've talked a lot about momentum lately and there's so many players that are involved. Brian, you brought up acquisitions. Are we poised? Could somebody come and say, hey, Morantis, they've got some great developers, they've got some good momentum, but if we put them into a company that's got 10, 20, $50 billion and thousands of people in the field, what could we do with them? And they might even squash the distribution, but they could have those coders, they have those leaders, and they can do something. So I guess, Aaron, to your point, I mean, we're all here and it's only my first time coming to the OpenStack Summit, but many people are here, there's a lot invested. Something drastic would have to be happened for the rug to be pulled up and us not to be coming to OpenStack Summit in two years. I agree. I think what Cisco's going to do, what VMware's going to do, we sort of know what HP's going to do, Oracle, but there's a few guys out there with a lot of money that either have portfolios to protect, markets to protect, or quite honestly, they're trying to figure out if they want to go play in the new game and fight Amazon or fight Google or somebody like that. So yeah, I think we'll be here, I think we'll be coming back to these things, how big they'll be, I don't know, but I suspect the show will be 30 or 40% larger and we'll have half the number of distributions last next year. And more billion dollar commitments. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Billion dollars is like the ante-up of this game. It's the new, yeah, it's the new end. Come on, IBM set the bar of the billion dollars back in the 90s. Shouldn't it be at 10 billion dollars now? I mean, we need that. Yeah, you know, inflation adjusted. That's what, I mean, that's what Simon, I mean, we've had Simon Wordley who we kind of buy into from an economics, he says, look, it's a billion dollars a quarter is the game. I mean, if you're going to try and compete, if you think you're going to compete with Amazon or Google, it's a billion dollars a quarter. Not, you know, Cisco's billion dollars over two years or IBM's billion dollars here, but it's a bigger game. And the thing I don't think a lot of the vendors understand is when you're an Amazon or a Google or a Microsoft, whoever running their own cloud, your learning curve is going like this. It's growing hockey stick-wise and people that are selling individually to each individual customer, it's a lot of relearning, a lot of retraining. You're playing at different speeds. You're playing, you know, elementary school against the pros. Yeah, so I finally found from Cisco that, talk to Lou Tucker and the inner cloud solution is service providers and Cisco will have their own cloud. If you look at the EMC Federation with EMC and VMware have the cloud hybrid service, HP's got their cloud, IBM's got their cloud. You know, how many clouds do you guys think we have in a few years? Yeah. Unfortunately, that's going to be the next area of consolidation. Once we consolidate this open stack market down, then we got to consolidate the public all the public clouds down. Because that seems to be, yeah, there's a big land grab there and I want to go fight against AWS. I want to go fight against Azure. I want to go fight against GCE. But, yeah. I mean, unfortunately, like you were saying earlier, like, what's the in for this game? What's the ante? Well, if it's a billion dollars a quarter, I would also say too, yeah, almost everyone has to have a public cloud. And then in three to five years, we're going to have less public clouds. That's the next cycle to consolidate. Now, I think we'll see a healthy number of clouds. I don't think you'll see like three or four, just for geography reasons and other stuff like that. But, yeah, it's going to be a big boy's game. I mean, it's like, if you want to be in the database space to compete with Oracle, you better come with a lot of guns and money. Same thing with cloud. How many? I don't know. And the other thing is we don't know. The only thing we haven't seen yet is, you know, everybody was like, you know, certain things would happen. And then five years later, I mean, Facebook came out of nowhere. Some other guys came out of nowhere. Nobody stepped up yet. Nothing out of the ordinary has affected AWS yet. They've been doing, they've been growing for about four or five years. There's the possibility that something comes along and happens that whether it's people marginalize it through, you know, Paz plays, if that ever takes off or the Snowden thing takes off or whatever it might be. We haven't seen anything yet that hasn't just stopped growth. And nobody grows 50% year over year infinitely. Yeah. All right. So we were saying earlier that, you know, you guys have been having a discussion for three years and in many ways that the conversation hasn't changed too much. So Brian, I know you're a fan of the Heath Brothers and what they wrote is that the path, the elephant and the rider, you know, what's holding us back? What do we need to do to actually make progress? Or is it just the fact that, you know, IT takes, you know, a decade for anything major to happen? I think that's part of it. I think IT changes slower than we think it does. I think we're at a stage where the skills that are needed are different, right? Either the economics of this, you know, between open source and cloud, the skills and everything's different. I think IT people are notoriously conservative and they're not in a rush to change for change's sake. I think we've seen a bunch of little incremental stuff. I mean, converged infrastructure is bigger than it was. You know, people actually using cloud platforms is bigger than it was. Some of it's just slow. It's just like, I hate to say that it moves slow but, you know, our industry, you know, five years is, five years is the old new 10 years but it's not, it hasn't become two years yet. And the other thing too, probably the number one, so, you know, we do the podcast and then usually we stop recording and then we sit around and chat for a little bit, the number one issue, no matter what kind of company is, no matter what they're in, what's the biggest problem? Talent. It is DevOps talent. It is cloud talent. It is, you know, in order to get that experienced person, you got to go develop the battle scars to be able to hire that person with the battle scars kind of thing and it's just not happening fast enough in our industry. And I think it's a combination of everything is going faster but at the same time to go to Brian's point, a lot of the IT staff don't want to necessarily branch out and take that risk and go get those new battle scars. They want to stay in their old battle scars and keep making money off the old battle scars. We joke about it, but I mean, we're kind of in the unicorn business. So you can't go to a show where people don't go, you need to know this, this, this, I mean, DevOps by itself is this premise that you know application development, which is a 20 year learning curve and ops, which is a 10 year learning curve and I don't know, I mean, we'll put it this way. Like, I think we would only now as podcasters think that we're marginally above terrible and it's taken us three years and we don't practice it very much. So stuff takes a long time to learn. And again, this is the thing we always end up telling companies is like, if you're going to compete against the guys who have this fast learning curve, people are the problem, you better figure out how to deal with that differently. And if you're just selling boxes or you're selling ELAs, like that learning curve will be the death of a lot of these companies or a variety with the death of a lot of these companies. Yeah, yeah, one of my favorite quotes yesterday, so far at the show, Evan Powell, who was one of the founders of Nexenta, now he's got a Swift stack, he said, we're trying to make our people be dancing unicorns. It's one thing for you to be an IT generalist and learn everything and now we want you to code too. So it's like, you know, dance for us monkey. Let's talk a little bit about careers in the clouds. I mean, you know, we've known each other for a bunch of years. We've all changed jobs at least once since we've known each other. Yeah, yeah, I mean, Aaron, you got, I think we're all hiring, right? So, you know, what are you seeing out there? You know, and give some commentary on that. So to kind of elaborate on that point a little more from earlier of, a lot of people want to hire the people that have all this experience in the industry, but at the same time, the discipline hasn't been around long enough to get that, you know, and there's not a lot of people really branching out and doing it new. Everyone wants it. I want the super experience. I want 15 years of cloud experience, right? And then the product, so it's a combination of the people don't quite have enough experience and aren't willing to branch out. And then the products themselves aren't necessarily consumable enough yet. So you have this weird match of, I really need somebody super experienced to install this because the product isn't necessarily consumable yet. Or they just live in the wrong place. I mean, you know, if you're going to go work for Amazon and you don't live in Seattle, you know, number of jobs get smaller or you want to work for whoever, that didn't, that wasn't the case. I mean, that's not the case when you have the normal sort of ecosystem. Now, I mean, look, it's a fantastic time if you have any skills that are 10 minutes farther ahead than anybody else. Like you can make a lot, a lot of money. You might travel a lot. You might get asked to be an expert at a lot of these things and people will call you out. But it's a crazy, I mean, we have more conversations with people going like, I don't know what to do with my career that five years ago they felt like they knew they're just going to kind of progress. And so, you know, you can look at it like our buddy, Ulander always goes, like you can look at it as just a massive failure, like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Or it's opportunity. And the opportunity is hard, but I mean, there's a million jobs out there and there's a million that as long as you're willing to sort of, you know, learn it faster than anybody else, you can be really successful. Yeah, so. Whether it's OpenStack or DevOps or whatever. So if I'm interested in tech, you're saying I don't have to move to the valley. You know, you guys live down in North Carolina. I'm in Massachusetts. It's sometimes hard. There are limited options if you want to, you know, stay in those environments. And yeah, especially in the OpenStack community, in the DevOps community, yeah. I mean, you really can, if you develop the right skills, it is not a requirement to live in the valley anymore. No, I mean, it's, you know, the company's in the valley but the customers and the needs are all over the place. So be willing to go where the customers are. All right, so we're running low on time. Last thing I want to focus, you've been doing this for three years. You're still having fun with it and is there any money to be made in new media? Enough to take our wives out to dinner. Yeah, occasionally. Well, I just, you know, I just realized for the first time, we're now like Siskel and Ebert because in the past, we always kind of had no competitiveness, at least in our regular jobs. Now we sort of do. Right. Now, I mean, you can make, trust me, you can make money if you want to. Our problem is always, we enjoy our regular jobs more in terms of paying our bills. So you have conflicts of interest but if you're willing to get out of having a conflict, there's a lot of money. There's a lot of companies that want to use you as an influencing source and people will have 10,000 followers or 50,000 blog posts a month. I don't know, we do it for fun. I mean, you guys do it for a living. You do an awesome job. You know, we had claimed a couple years ago that we were going to overtake the cube as an open thing. We like doing our little nichey thing. We'll be like the open stack of podcasts. It's stupid to be AWS. They're going to be the new big media. Exactly, exactly. No, it's exactly that. The biggest thing for us is three years in, yeah, it still has to be fun. You still have to want to take time out on nights and weekends away from family. We meet awesome people. That's the best part of that. Yeah, far and away the biggest thing is, yeah, you can say, yep, get to meet these people and yeah, CEO of a company is willing to give you an hour of their time. It's very valuable and very insightful. And that's been probably our biggest learning tool over the last couple of years. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, hey, I always love, you know, we have all these conversations over lunch and the hallways, at the evening parties and everything. Appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedules to, you know, share with our community and recommend everybody check it. The cloudcast.net is the site put out, you know, typically every week on that. They've been doing it over three years, lots of stuff. They even had me on one. So, you know, it was honored to be on. Always great seeing you guys. And this is theCUBE's continuous coverage from OpenStack Atlanta 2014. We'll be right back with our next guest after this quick break.