 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem of support. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, John Troyer. This is theCUBE worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Coming into the show this year here at OpenStack, discussion of Edge was something that had a little bit of buzz last year's show in Austin, the telecommunication, all the NFV solutions. We're definitely one of the highlights. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Beth Cohen, who is the SDN and NFV Network Product Strategy at Verizon, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, yes. All right, so Beth, I mean we heard Cloud in the Box, Edge, all those pieces on the keynote Monday. People are excited, telecommunications. I worked in telecom back in the 90s. I'm excited to see that people are getting involved in looking at this, but before we get into all the tech, just tell us briefly about you and your role inside Verizon. So I actually work at Verizon as a new product strategist, so I come up with new products. So I do product management. This is actually my second product for Verizon. The previous one was Secure Cloud Interconnect, which is a very successful product. Who would have thought that connecting privately to the cloud would be a good idea? Turns out everybody thinks that's an excellent idea. But I worked in telecom back for GTE back in the 1990s and through BBN, so I've been in this industry for a while and I've always stayed kind of on the cutting edge of things, so I'm very excited to be working on these cutting edge projects within Verizon. All right, so speaking of cutting edge, let's cut to the edge. Cut to the edge. And give our audience a little bit about what the announcement was, the actual product itself. So virtual network services is a product we originally announced it in July with a universal CP box. That box was not what we're calling a white box, which I think is the industry term now. That one was based on the Juniper NFX250, which is we call gray box, so it's using the Juniper NFX software. But the new announcement is this is truly a white box. It's an X86 box. It's generic. Any X86 will work. And in fact, the product has, we realized actually working with customers that some customers want to have a very small box, very small footprint, low cost, that only supports maybe two, possibly three NFVs, virtual network functions. All the way up to our largest box is 36 core. So we have four core at the bottom. So that's used for the coffee shops or the small retail type functions where they're only looking for security and routing or security and SDN, or SD-WAN, or whatever, so very small compact use. All the way up to 36 core, which can support 10 or 12 different functions, so load balancing, routing, security, whatever you want. Cloud of the box. There's so many pieces of OpenStack and they've been for years talking about the complexity. This really, if I understand it right, I mean it's OpenStack at the edge in a small box, so how do we fit such a complicated thing in a little box and what kind of functionality does that bring, what will customers get with it? So obviously we didn't take all everything, of course, so it does include neutron for the networking and it does include Nova and the computes. And so it has the core components that you need for OpenStack and why did we choose that? Because OpenStack really gave us that consistent platform across both out at the edge and also within the core. So we are building the hosted network services platform, which we're using internally as well to host our, to support our network services and we're also supporting customers on the same platform. So that gives us the ability to give a customer experience both out at the edge and within the core. So of course, everybody wants to know the secret source. How did we cram that in? Containers, so we containerize OpenStack. One of the requirements is it had to be a single core. So it is a single core in the box because of course, particularly in a small box, you want to leave as much space as possible for services that our customers want because the OpenStack is the infrastructure that supports it all. That's great. So Beth, that was one of the highlights of the whole show for me, right? I like when tech blows my mind a little bit and the idea of something that we might have run in some embedded Linux or embedded OS before, now is actually running a whole cloud platform in a box in my office was amazing. As you're looking at the center of the network versus the edge, is that one, to you and to network ops, is that one big cloud? Is that a cloud of clouds? What's called the architecture? Yeah. Is it fog? Yeah, you could say it is a fog. Because one of the things when you pull the network out to the edge like that, Verizon lives, I mean, we live and breathe networks and networks are wands, wide area networks, right? They're everywhere. So we live and breathe that every day. So traditionally, as I mentioned in the keynote, is that cloud has been sort of data center centric, right? And that changes the equation because if you think about it, most data center centric clouds, the network ends at, there's some mystery thing that happens at the end, right? It just goes to that network router, NNI network to network, net router, and it just kind of disappears, right? Well, of course we know what's on the other side. So what we've done is we've said, okay, we have functionality within that data center, but we've expanded that out to the edge. And we understand that you can't just have everything sitting in the cloud and then rely on that edge to just work. So you need to move pieces of it out. So it's not reliant on that inside data center. So there's tools back there, but if that data center connection goes away, that function will still work out of the edge. That's great. You talked about both SDN and NFV, a big conversation at OpenStack for the last several years. Can you talk a little bit about maybe the state of SDN and NFV and how you all are looking at that and are we there yet? What places do you still see we need to go? So when I worked with the marketing team, they were like, oh, we have to use this NFV term, we have to use the SDN. And when I talk to customers, inevitably they're like, what is this NFV stuff? They have no idea. So really at the end of the day, I see NFV as a telco thing. Absolutely we need it, but we have to translate what that means to customers because all that backend stuff, as far as they're concerned, that's magic. That's the magic that we deliver the services. Those packets just arrive, they do what they're supposed to do. So I say, okay, network services is really what you're talking about. Because they understand, oh, yeah, I need the security, I need the firewall, I need that WAN optimizer, I need that load balancer. That they understand. Well, Beth, my telcom background, I think of there's lots of hardware, there's lots of cabling. There's the challenges that you have with wireless and we're talking a lot about 5G. You're talking about software though, and it's delivering those services that the customer needs. So right, is that what they ask for is that I need these pieces and now I can do it via software as opposed to before. We talked, it's the appliances to the software move. What are your customers asking for and how are they embracing this? Well, so our customers are very excited. I can't think of a single customer that I have gone to that have said, why would I do that? They're all saying, no, this is really exciting. And so what they're doing is they're really rethinking the network because they're used to having stacks of boxes. So the appliance base that was really pioneered back, of course Cisco sort of pioneered it back in the 90s, but I remember talking to Infobox back in the, oh like early 2000s, when they came out with the DHCP DNS appliance and I was like, wow, that's so cool. So this is sort of the next generation. So why do you need to have six different boxes that do a single thing? Why don't we just make it a cloud in the box and put all those functions together and service chain them? That gives you a lot more flexibility. You're not stuck with that proprietary hardware. And then worrying about, I mean, I can't tell you how many customers want to do this for tech refresh. They have end of life equipment. The vendor's saying, forget it. This is 10 year old equipment. We're not supporting it anymore. Yeah, but what are the security implications here though? We've seen the surface area of where tax can come from just seems to be growing exponentially. I think I go to the edge. I've got way more devices. There's more vulnerabilities. Your last product you said was security. How does security fit into all of this? What are you hearing from your customers? How do you partner with other people? So security is absolutely paramount to our customers. As I mentioned in the talk, we did a survey of our customers. Security was absolutely the top priority. But security is a lot more sophisticated, as you said, than it used to be. And the vectors for attack are much more sophisticated. And so it's not enough to just have a firewall. Your attack is, the squishies inside and the hard outside, forget it. That's just, this is not the area. The motor gone, they're in the castle. They're in the castle, right. So for us, it's very appealing to our customers with the idea that they can put the security where they need it. So they can put it out at the edge. And some of them do want it at the edge. And we give them the choice of setting up sort of a minimal basic firewall or a full featured next-gen firewall. We also find customers like the brand names. So we offer Palolato, Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper, and others will be coming. So that appeals to them. They tend to be a shop of one or the other. All on the software basis. All on the software basis, right. All virtual appliances, right. And at the end of the day, our customers don't actually care about the hardware. For them, it's the service. I wanted to take it over to OpenStack itself for a little bit. The great conversation here this week has been something about modularization, talking about the ecosystem, talking about containers, both the app layer up on top and the packaging layer down below, which is kind of really cool as well. How are you seeing the OpenStack community engage with the ecosystem, be available to different use cases like this, slim it down, take what you need, leave the rest, for a while the conversation was there were so many projects about everything. And do you feel like OpenStack is going where we need it to go now in terms of a usable partner and community to work with? I do believe that because, so my product is really a portfolio if you think about it. So it's a portfolio of services and I view our use of OpenStack in the same way. So we're really taking that portfolio of OpenStack services and pulling, putting together the package that we need to deliver the services. So what's out at the edge, that package of OpenStack services at the edge is not the same set of services as what's within the core data center. There's some commonality, but we've chosen the ones that are important to us for the edge and chosen the ones that are important to us for the core. So I think that the OpenStack community is really embracing this notion and we really welcome that thing. Now what I'm finding is that the vendors that we're supporting in the ecosystem at the application layer are still struggling with, okay, do we containerize? Do we, you know, do we support? What, how do we support it? You know, I can't tell you how many vendors I've gone to and I said, you know, if you want to be in our portfolio, you know, and obviously most of them do, you know, Verizon's a big company. You have to be virtualized. You have to be able to support, you know, run under OpenStack and they have to get past that, that issue. I noticed in some of your social feeds, you've attended some of the women at OpenStack event. I wonder if you have any comment on the events there and diversity in general in the community. So one of the things I love about OpenStack is it's really gone out of its way and within the open source community in general to really focus on the value of diversity and it really does track the number of women that are, you know, there's a metric that says the percentage of women at every summit and it's going up and the women of OpenStack community focus on mentoring and it's not just women because mentoring's very important, but it really allows, but women that have sort of special challenges and minorities have special challenges as well and we really try to embrace that fact that, you know, you do need to leg up if you're not a 50 year old white guy. Beth Cohen, really appreciate you joining us. Congratulations on the keynote, the product and wish you the best of luck, you know, going forward. We'll be back with more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston for John and myself. Thanks for watching theCUBE.