 The Cube, an open-stack 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. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder, SiliconANGLE joining my co-host, Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibond.org. And our next special guest has been in space, which is a notable Cube alumni first on The Cube. We have actually been in space. Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Bantu. Industry legend, founder, entrepreneur. Welcome to The Cube. It's great to be here, thank you. Great story, you were at the space in the Russian spaces and you actually had to work. What an experience, very notable. And we'd like to highlight the, when you're a tech athlete, like yourself, it's great. I would wash dishes if I got me into the space station again, isn't it? No issue with the working, yeah. And also, you know, obviously, serial entrepreneur, you had some great successes and been in the business for a long time. Super awesome. OpenStack, we are here in live in Atlanta, where it's been quoted already in this morning, this is one of the great communities of our generation. You've seen Linux and you've seen a lot of stuff like Apache and open source, just done the amazing things. What's your take on it? And I know Linux, you've been a great part of that with your participation in getting the code out there and your previous companies. And what's going on with OpenStack today? Tell the folks out there in your opinion, where are we with this? Well, so OpenStack is the bearing fruit of taking Linux from the individual node up to the cluster and to the cloud. There's no doubt in my mind that this is where the future of infrastructure is being defined, right here in Atlanta this week and Paris in six months time. Awesome community and also really a springboard for the next generation of thinking about computing at scale. That's why every vendor is here. That's why these conversations are so, you know, people are so passionate about these conversations. And that's why you started to see the beginnings of the next wave of innovation that sort of just assumes that you can consume resources at scale in a way that, you know, Linux itself first let you consume resources from a single node. So what's the value creation opportunity? We were just talking on the previous segment this morning around the disruption and what that really does when you start looking at kind of the value change within the operating environment or customer environments, whether it's an enterprise or service provider, the absolute devastation, decimation of value chains, roles are changing, the future of IT, future of software developments, even changing. And certainly the gear is getting better. Splash has helped with persistence. What does the disruption look like in terms of value creation? Where do you see it as an entrepreneur? You have that eye. What's the value creation opportunity? Well, I'm absolutely certain it's not in the obvious places, right? Just as it was some 20 years ago with the internet itself, there is always an obvious set of places that people focus on and the real value isn't there. In part because I think that too many people chasing them, it becomes too noisy, too confused, too much in the way of vendor politics. It's kind of the fog of disruption, right? You know instinctively that this is a profound change. Everything will change. But it's very difficult to identify where the great new companies will come from. My particular view is that we need open platforms, open ecosystems. OpenStack fundamentally depends on a healthy ecosystem to succeed. And we, Ubuntu, are an ecosystem enabler. We don't compete with the ecosystem. We are an interoperability enabler. We're on the largest OpenStack interop lab where we do continuous interop testing across the products of many, something like 14 of the major players and many more smaller players in OpenStack. So we essentially provide a great way for customers to know if they want to build a cloud with pieces from these six different vendors. You certify the picks and shovels, if you will, through the tooling and the technology. On a continuous basis, because that's what's so dynamic about the cloud, right? In the good old days, you could certify this product and that product to work with an operating system. But now you have to certify in this dynamic world, you have to certify that they continue to work, that you continue to be able to build clouds and scale them in a very real, real-time kind of way. So Mark, in the last survey of OpenStack users, Ubuntu was far and away, the number one operating system there. There are some that say that that really points to that OpenStack is really in test dev and it's a free operating system. Where do you think we sit today and what's Ubuntu's role going forward for OpenStack? Well, Ubuntu obviously became famous as the developer's choice, but that was 10 years ago. Today, the major production clouds, which are commercial engagements, those are on Ubuntu. And we provide commercial support on commercial terms, technical support on commercial terms, to the world's biggest OpenStack deployments, from banking, through telecoms, through media. Many of the references that will be celebrated on stage here, most, if not all of the references that will be celebrated on stage here are in fact building on Ubuntu and doing it commercially, right? It's a very serious infrastructure for them. I think people do see OpenStack and the cloud as a reset and so they don't necessarily wanna bring 20 years of baggage to that new world. They want the reassurance that their existing workloads and so on will work great and they do. We've done a lot of work across all of the Linux distributions and Windows so that OpenStack on Ubuntu is fantastic for running whatever kind of workloads you care about. As people put their toe in the water or actually come into the water for OpenStack, what do you advise them in terms of approaches? I mean, from a business model standpoint, some people look at it as a product versus a platform. What's the quick OpenStack 101 for the newbies coming in? Whether they're serious IT guys wanting to do with the reset. What do you advise them? Stay away from X, Y and Z, it's not this or that. What advice do you say when you describe OpenStack? The first thing I'd say is that you absolutely have to have an OpenStack story and the second thing is that you have to have an OpenStack story that doesn't depend on you winning everything, right? There's no single vendor that will own OpenStack. Plenty will try but it just won't work that way in the same way that it didn't with Linux and so the key thing is to be here to have a very clear idea of how your existing portfolio maps into OpenStack but also an idea of just how much OpenStack changes the world and what parts of your portfolio are gonna go away or commoditize, which is a very real issue for many existing players. But there's a lot of value to be had, it's just further up the stack. It's in more interesting new sort of greenfield opportunities. So Mark, do you think that OpenStack can really move forward without like a clear leader or a couple of companies that are, in charge, if I think about open source projects in general, that there's usually some strong people at the front from Linus Trivalis when he first started, Red Hat and Drupal, I've had some pretty strong, well-known names. So what should take on kind of the OpenStack leadership? Well, I think this is a very real question. The classic story is that nobody cares about an Open Source project until it is in fact well grounded and in that time of formation, that Open Source project really establishes its ground rules, it establishes its core leads and leaders. In the case of Linus, that was Linus and his deputies. And that then gives the project a sort of strong leadership core. OpenStack didn't have that. OpenStack became an industry focus before it really existed as a project. And I think that is a real challenge. It means that we don't really have an independent governance structure, sorry, we don't have an independent leadership structure. There's plenty of governance. However, I think that will emerge and the fact that all of the vendors are here ultimately is what makes OpenStack the important framework. Yes, it will make clarity difficult, but at the end of the day, the only question is, is this the place that everyone will be? And we have the answer right here, right? So I don't, I think there are challenges there but nothing that derails OpenStack. What do you take of all this past competition? Obviously Cloud Foundry, Red Hat's not involved in that but they've been getting people involved. Is that kind of a land grab or is that just part of OpenStack? Is that the way OpenStack should work? That people can have a part of OpenStack and be okay with it? Right, I think these new projects are really important. OpenStack won't be the, everybody's focus for 10 years, right? It's an interesting topic now, it will settle down and then the spotlight will move elsewhere and platform as a service is a very interesting area. We still think there's a lot of room for innovation, a lot of room for creativity, a lot of room for diversity. We kind of six months ago came out very strongly in favor of Cloud Foundry as one of the leading platforms and it's gratifying now to see others essentially follow that lead. We will have a fully supported Cloud Foundry option on Ubuntu for folks in that supported by both Pivotal and Canonical and other people will do Cloud Foundry distributions as well. But that said, I think a healthy ecosystem requires diverse perspectives, so OpenShift is, it's great that it exists and remains to be seen how the market will play out. Certainly Linux, Red Hat's got a good position on Linux, I mean just see how that plays out. What's your take on the developer market these days? Obviously has it changed? I mean a lot's changed in open source over the years. Certainly you're seeing Linux which had a lot of restrictions relative to memory management. Now with Flash we've seen some great innovations with Linux kernel and just in general this new generation of guys coming into the business. Young guns and old school dudes like us who have systems backgrounds. Is it changing and if it how, what are the key things you're seeing the software development? Certainly you talk to a young kid these days talking to a young kid in their 20s and he's like, I don't install patches. They don't get the concept of patching something. But okay that's a mindset, okay it's a new generation. What's changed? Well I think the key thing to learn is that us guys who've been around a little while we have to learn from the new generation. There's a reason people don't install patches because virtual machines don't live long enough for that necessarily to matter. There's been up another thousand tomorrow, right? And I think that is what's fun about the industry that key tenants become pillars and then eventually get torn down and replaced by new pillars. That automation, that orchestration story is very profound. And folks who haven't go to jujucharms.com and take a look at the next wave of automation and orchestration. The next generation, those kids, are essentially not interested in building everything from scratch. They want to consume the very best practices stuff, pull it together from the cloud and very quickly spin up their production operating sites. So something like juju gives you the ability to tap into crowdsource, operational and code excellence and then spin it up on any cloud. At any scale you like. So magic juju there is that you can move things up quickly. So that's the Lego block generation. Exactly. Okay, now the iPad generation. Now the kids are moving off to iPads. Now the babies now are not building Lego blocks. They're using the iPad. So be interested to see what that generation does. Look, juju's like software Lego. You essentially compose the pieces that you care about. Each of those is a project. They get better. You don't have to worry about it. And you can focus on the pieces that you really care about. So that's a layer above OpenStack or any other cloud essentially. That's where the real value comes from in empowering developers. So Mark, we talk about kind of the IT staff. Obviously this OpenStack and everything that's happening is going to change the makeup. Do you think that the Linux administrator has an advantage? Are they going to be able to go to juju chef puppet and the like easier than kind of a typical infrastructure person who our last guest on said, we can't wait for everybody to become a magical unicorn. If somebody that can manage everything and code, I mean coding is tough for a lot of people. So what's the IT staff of the future look like in your mind? There's always demand for folks who make stuff work, who understand the stack. I do think like everything, we're moving up the skill stack. And that's for most people, that's fun and enjoyable. Learn new things, grow your skills, expand your ability to deliver value. I have no doubt that there will be pressures on people to acquire new skills. One of the key stories in juju is to make it possible for folks to deploy, scale and manage things that they haven't deeply studied. You want a crowd source, all of the operational magic. That still requires highly specialized people to be able to balance resources, understand what the priorities are. And I think people enjoy doing things where they feel that they're more aligned with what work people are actually trying to get done, rather than in the guts of the machine trying to make it work. Mark, where do you see your business going as this evolves on? So you guys are doing the testing, which is really critical. That'd probably be much more real time, I guess, I can imagine. If we are living in an API systems architecture, if you will, how's that going to change your business and how you guys are going to execute? Sure. Well, as a platform, Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu. So we offer commercial technical support to the largest deployments of OpenStack and other kind of distributed infrastructures. And that's growing. The scale of this conference, I think, is an indication. The vast majority of the large commercial deployments here are all on Ubuntu and supported by us. On top of that, I think we'll see new layers of commercial opportunity, right? As people move up the stack and they focus more on what they get done with the cloud, that creates new opportunities. So we'll play both at the platform level, making sure that people are fully supported all the way down to the metal and in the higher levels, making it possible for people to innovate much faster. Mark, thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. I want to give you the final word. What should people be worried about right now in the ecosystem? What should they be watching, if you will? Because right now it's a healthy ecosystem. Lots of the numbers speak for themselves inside the hall, up from Portland, obviously standing room only. Tons of interest. It's a sea change. We want to look for where this potential could be smoked in fire. We want to keep the alarms open. What should we be afraid of? And what's the only thing holding back OpenStack? What should we watch out for? Well, no, I don't think there's any issues at the OpenStack level. I think if you come here, you get a real sense of vibrancy and so on. I think the risk is spending too much time staring at the perceived competitors. We saw it today. You don't create greatness out of being afraid of what someone else is doing. There's a huge amount of investment in the cloud. And the key thing for OpenStack and for this community is to be part of that rather than sort of defining itself as the antithesis of what other vendors are doing. For the final question, share the folks in your own words. Why is this point in time here in Atlanta for OpenStack Summit such a game changer? Why is everyone so excited about what's going on right now? Everything that you've been doing for the last 15 years is going to change to a greater or lesser degree. And OpenStack and cloud more broadly are part of that. This is the forum where the open cloud is being defined. So it's the only place where you can really get deep into that new level of infrastructure and really understand how it all comes together. So it's a lot of fun. And for folks who throw it together on Ubuntu, you'll have an absolute blast. Great, thanks for all your help. In the industry, you've been great. Your success has been fantastic. You've enabled a lot of folks, a lot of fans commenting on, they fall in love with the software from the beginning. It's been a big part of their lives and continuing that. And great to hear the stories and commentary. Mark, thanks for coming to theCUBE. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. We now have someone who's been in space and on theCUBE. That's going to go in our archives forever. So thanks for watching. We'll be right back after this short break.