 Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Hi, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman, we're like co-host John Troyer. We've been here, this is now the third day of coverage, John. We've done a couple dozen interviews already. We've got one more day of coverage. But we had some kind of perceptions coming in and I have some interesting, differing viewpoints as to where we are for OpenStack, the project, where this show itself is going. So, first of all, John, give me your impressions overall. Vancouver, your first time here. City, I fell in love with last time I came here. And let's get into the show itself too. Sure, sure. I mean, the show's a little bit smaller this year than it had been in the past years. Some of that is because they pulled some of the technical stuff out last year or two couple years ago. By being a little bit smaller and being in a place like Vancouver, I get good energy off of the crowd. The folks we've talked to, the folks that have been going to sessions have said they've been very good. The people here are practitioners. They are running OpenStack or about to run OpenStack or upgrading their OpenStack or other adjacent technologies. They're real people doing real work. As we talked to folks and sponsors, the conversations have been productive. So I'd say in general, this kind of a small venue in a beautiful city allows for a really productive, community-oriented event. So that's been great. All right, so John, come on. In the analysis segment, we're not allowed to pull any punches. So attendance absolutely is down. So three years ago when we were here, it was around 5,500. Mark Collier on our opening segment said it's about 2,600. But to your point, I've not talked to a single vendor or attendee here. That was like, oh boy, nobody's here. It's not going on. Yes, the Expo Hall is way smaller and people flowing through the Expo Hall isn't great all the time. But why is that? Because the people that are here, they're in sessions. They have 40 sessions about edge computing, hot topic. We've talked a bunch about that. Interesting conversations. There is way more in containers. Containers for more than three years been a topic conversation. And there's so many other sessions. So people are digging in. The line you've used a couple of time is the people here are people that have more. It gets us in a good way. It means these are jobs. These are not them. Oh, I heard about this cool new thing. And I'm going to go check out beautiful Vancouver. Now, yes, we've brought our spouses or significant others and checking out the environment because yeah, this place is awesome. But there's good energy at the show. There's good technical conversations. Many of the people we've talked to even if they're not the biggest open stack fans, they're like, but our customers are using this in a lot of different ways. So, next, let's talk about open stack. Where is it? Where isn't it? What's your take from what you've heard from the customers and the vendors? Sure, I definitely think the conversation is warranted. As we came in from outside the community, there was a lot of conversation even back channel. Like why are you going to open stack summit? What's going on there? Is it still alive? Which is kind of a perception of maybe it's an indication of where the marketing is on this project or where it is on the hype cycle. But in terms of where it is and where it isn't, it's built into everything. So at this point, open stack, the infrastructure management, open infrastructure management solution seems to be mature. It seems to be inside every telco, every cable company, every transportation company, every bank. So people who need private resources and have the smarts and power to do that have leveraged open stack now. And so that seems stable. What was interesting here is that doesn't speak to the health overall in the history of the future of the project itself, the foundation, the summit. I think those are separate questions. The infrastructure and projects seem good. Also here, like we've talked about, that this show is not just about open stack now. It's about containers. It's about broadening the scope of these people and formerly known as infrastructure operators to the application level as well. Yeah, if you want to hear a little bit more about some two great interviews we did yesterday. Sean Michael Kerner, who's a journalist, been here for almost every single one of the open stack shows. He's at eWeek, had some really good discussion. He said, private cloud, it doesn't exist. Now, he said, what does he mean by that? There are companies that are building large scalable clouds with open stack. But it's like if some of the big China telecom, the big China cloud companies, Oracle and IBM have lots of open stack in what they do. And yes, there are, as you mentioned, the telcos are a big use case. We had some canonical customers talking about Edge as a new use case for a different type of scalability. Lots of nodes, but not one massive infrastructure as a service piece. But if I talk kind of the typical enterprise or definitely going the SME piece of the market, this is not something that they go and use. They will use services that have open stack. It might be part of the ecosystem that they're playing, but people saying, oh, I had my VMware environment and I want to go from virtualization to private cloud. Open stack's not usually the first choice, even though Red Hat has some customers that kind of fit into some of the larger sides of that. And we'll be talking to them more about that today. And the other, Randy Bias is the other one, I take a look. Randy was one of the early, very central to a lot of stuff happening in the foundation. He's in the networking space now and he says, even though he's not a cheerleader for open stack, he's like, why am I here? That's where my customers are. Right, right. I mean, I do think it's interesting that public cloud is certainly mentioned, AWS, Google, et cetera. But it is not top of mind for a lot of these folks and it's mentioned in very different ways depending on kind of the players. I think it's very different from last week at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat with their story and OpenShift on top of OpenStack, definitely talk public cloud for folks. Then they cross cloud, hybrid cloud. I think that was a much different conversation than I've been hearing this week. And I think basically kind of maybe depends on the approach of the different players in the markets do. I know you've been talking to different folks about that. Yeah, absolutely. So like Margaret Dawson of Red Hat helped us talk about how that hybrid cloud works because here, I hate to say it's some, oh yeah, public cloud, that's too expensive and you're renting and it's always going to be more. It's like, well, no, come on, let's understand. There's lots of applications that are there and customers, it's an and message for almost all of them. How does that fit together? I have some critiques as to how this goes together. You brought up another point though, John. OpenStack Foundation is more than just OpenStack projects. So Kata Containers, something that was announced last year and we're talking about there's Edge, there's the new CICD, Toolzool, which is now fully under the project. Yes, the joke of the week, there is no OpenStack, there is only Zool, but there are actually, there's another open source project named Zool too. So boy, how many CICD tools are out there and we've got two different unrelated projects with the same name. John, you look at communities, you look at foundations. If this isn't the core knitting of OpenStack, what is their role vis-a-vis the cloud native and how do they compare to say the big player in this space is Linux Foundation, which includes CMCF? That's a good one. I mean, in some sense, like all organic things, things are either growing or shrinking, they're growing or dying. On the other hand, in technology, nothing ever truly dies. So I think the project seems mature and healthy and it's being used. The foundation is global in scope and continues to run this, but I do wonder about community identity and what it means to be an OpenStack member. It's very community-oriented, but what's at the nut of it here if we're really part of a cloud native ecosystem? CMCF, it's part of Linux Foundation, all these different foundations, but CMCF, on the other hand, is kind of a grab bag of technology, so I'm not sure what it means to be a member of CMCF either. So I think both of these foundations will continue to go forward with slightly different identities. I think for the community as a whole, the industry as a whole, they are talking and they'd better be talking, and it's good that they're talking now and working better together. Yeah, great discussion we had with Lisa Marie Namphee, who's an OpenStack ambassador. She holds a meetup in Silicon Valley and when she positions it, it's about cloud native and it's about all these things. So like Kubernetes, front and center, whereas some of the OpenStack people are saying, oh no, no, we need to talk more about OpenStack and that's still, the dynamic here was, oh, we go great together. Well, sometimes that'll just protest too much. You know, Kubernetes doesn't need OpenStack. OpenStack absolutely must be able to play in this container cloud native Kubernetes world and there's lots of other places we can learn about Kubernetes. So it is an interesting dynamic that have been sorting out, but it is not a zero sum game. There's absolutely lots that we have. I actually was really impressed how many customers we got to speak with on the air this time. Nice with three days of programming, we had a little bit of flexibility and not just people that were on the keynote stage, not just people that have been coming for years, but a few of the interviews we had are relatively new. Not somebody that have been on since, very early in the alphabet, now we're at Queens. Anything more from the customers or that container Kubernetes dynamic that you want to cover? Sure, well, I mean, just that containers at least containers were everywhere here. And so I think that kind of question has been resolved in some sense. It was a little more contentious last year than this year. I'm actually more bullish on OpenStack as a utility project after this week than before. I think I can confidently look people in the eye and say that the interesting thing for me though, in coming from Silicon Valley, is you're so used to thinking about VCs and growth and new startups and where's the cutting edge that it's kind of hard to talk about this, maybe this open source business model where the customer base is finite and it's not growing at 100% a year. So sometimes the press has hard time covering that, analysts have hard time covering that. And if you wanted to give advice to somebody to get into OpenStack, I'm not sure who should if they're not in it already. There's definitely defined use cases, but I think maybe those people have already self identified. All right, so yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention is yeah, big thank to our sponsors to help get us here. The OpenStack Foundation, really supportive of us for six years of us covering it. Our headline sponsor Red Hat has some great customers. Talked about this piece is kind of, we talk about it's practically Red Hat Month on theCUBE for John with Red Hat Summit and OpenStack. And Canonical, Contron, Nuage Networks all helping us to be able to bring this content to you. So be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage in the past as where we'll be hit John Troyer, J Troyer on Twitter or myself, Stu on Twitter if you ever have any questions, people we should be talking to, viewpoints, whether you agree or disagree with what we're talking about. Big thanks to all of our crew here and thank you to the wonderful people of Vancouver for being so welcoming of this event and all of us. So check out all the interviews and for John Troyer, I'm Stu Minin. Thanks for watching theCUBE.