 OpenStack Summit, day one of a three-day broadcast here, Silicon Angles, exclusive coverage of OpenStack Summit 2013 here in Portland, Oregon. I'm John Furrier with the co-host Jeff Frick standing in for Dave Vellante, and we're here to bring you all the exciting developer action, all the big moves by the big companies and startups, joined by our next guest, Barton George from Dell, director of developer relations. Developer programs, yeah. Developer programs, so you guys, obviously we've known each other, you guys have done some great work, Sputnik was a big announce, no one talked more about that, so I gotta ask you, just to check in, what do you think about OpenStack, this event? Obviously the growth, we talked about some of the numbers, 3,000 people here, massive growth, some expect even bigger next event. Just what's your take? I mean, you've been involved in the community, developer community, and this world for a while since the beginning, all of us have. Just seeing it come from where it's come from to now is amazing. No it is, it's been pretty darn impressive because I went to the first event back at the Omni Hotel in Austin, when it wasn't public, they had a few select companies there, and it was just a few of us, and it's crazy now, I went to a bunch of them in a row and then I missed I think the last couple, so I haven't seen the growth, so I came here today and I saw all the people in the audience, I didn't realize that was the OpenStack, I thought I was at Oskan or something, it was huge. And then the other thing that was impressive too was when they asked how many people here are new, it seemed like about half the hands went up. So that's really exciting to see is that all of the new folks who are getting in, it's not just the old folks that are coming back, it's new people who are coming out, and I came in on the max, I was talking to one vendor who said, yeah, hey, we've heard about this OpenStack thing, and so now they're sending us out here to check it out, and I think you're seeing more and more of that going. Yeah, and just for the folks out there, a little prop to Bart and his team at Dell, they were really a big supporter of SiliconANGLE going back two years ago when we launched this site called DevOpsANGLE, which was at the time kind of like off the radar, why are you doing a site dedicated to DevOps? This show is about the DevOps revolution, it's changing and transforming the data center, not just enterprise, service providers, telcos and enabling developers, and you've been a big supporter, I want to say thank you for that, and we did some good work, we still have that site, go to devopsangle.com, but the DevOps now is a mindset shift, it's happening, as we say, there's meat on the bone, they've got use cases now, it's not just hey, renegades, guys doing some web apps, it's shadow IT, it's maturing as best practices, new paradigms, new products, DevOps is here to stay. Well, and I think one of the things too, is that we're seeing as if you look at the people who are buying, it's less the IT, but it's business plus developers working together, so what in the past you could sort of write off as hey, this is rogue activity that developers doing, it's not really mainstream, now the businesses are going to the developers and saying I need this now, and however you need to do it, you do it, and so they'll go and they'll find their own way of making it happen, so if IT does not start working with them in the developer and the operations, the two together, they're going to be circumvented, and it's bad for the business overall if they're not all three of these groups working together. Yeah, they say agile is about being agile, and you need the speed, and the developers have that speed now, now the ops and IT guys have to have it, it can't be the bottleneck anymore. Right, DevOps is all about removing friction and increasing velocity, and so with that, trying to make sure that your processes work as smoothly as possible, and that the sides are working together as opposed to tossing code over the wall, and then pointing fingers when things don't work. So let's just do a little check in with you and Dell, we saw you at the Dell world, we hit the cube there, we talked to Michael Dell, Marius Hossel, the top executive at Dell, I really don't want to make any comments about that current situation, it's pretty much just financial engineering at this point, but you guys have done some pretty good work, give us the update on what's going on with Sputnik and some of the developer stuff that you guys were doing. Sure, so we came out with the Sputnik laptop in November, and so this is basically what it looks like, kind of looks like what you got over there. I thought it was a MacBook Air. Yeah, no, this is what it looks like, so it's very thin, it's very, very svelte. Don't drop it, don't drop it, don't drop it. Yeah, exactly. It's hard to open. Yeah, there you go. Can you get a camera shot on that? There you go. So it's thin as a MacBook Air, a little bit sturdier in terms of about the same weight, maybe a little bit extra weight, but really close. And we've got eight gigs, and the version that we just released in February is 1080p, so nice resolution. And the neat thing about this is, this is something that really was driven by the community. So about a year ago, we had an internal incubation program where they were looking for ideas within locked up in people in Dell's heads that might help to spur innovation. So I went and I pitched this idea of, why don't we do a developer laptop running Ubuntu? And I got the green light, so I was given a certain pot of money and six months to go out and see if this could be real. And so we went out. Pot of money is good. Yes. Six months, that's a short time table. No, it was a very short time table. And the pot was kind of a small shallow pot, let's put it that way. But anyway, what pushed us over the edge from this being a project to a product was when we asked for people to apply for a beta program. And we had the beta cosmonauts as we called them. And we had 6,000 people from around the world who wrote in. And this wasn't just a tick box, yes, I want to be part of this. This was what languages you develop in, what laptop are you using now, what industry do you work in, what is the size of your company, et cetera. Very detailed. And we saw what that level of commitment and that kind of hunger for something like this, this needs to be real. In fact, one of the things right from the very beginning that showed us we struck a nerve was the amount of traffic I had on my website. So I announced it on my website. I'm sorry, my blog. Yeah, and normally over the life of an entry I'll get 500 hits, 500 views. This one now has about 65,000. Wow. So we just knew that people were very excited. And also we were expecting a little bit more, shall I say, balanced response. So a lot of skepticism we expected and I was overwhelmed with the amount of positive feedback we got and the support from the community for us to develop something like this. And so as I say, we announced at Oscond it was gonna be a real product and then in November we launched the first one. And then in February we came out with the next version with a better resolution and we also made it available in Europe. So it's available all over Europe and the States right now. So was there no laptop developer platform? Or is this so, or was there some other innovation? There's no tier one OEM that's doing a developer laptop or an Ubuntu laptop. And so that was the thing is that we were the first ones to do that. And so we had to work to get the drivers to all to work, save for things like the touchpad and then to push those upstream so that other distros can benefit from that as well. So that was one of the big parts. The other parts which we're now building out is the cloud connection. So we have what's called the cloud launcher and today that's the Linux containers. You can model your application environment and Linux containers on the laptop and then using Canonical's Juju you can push that to the cloud and deploy. So there's a whole DevOps tool chain right there because you're developing and then deploying through a single tool chain. We're also working on a version of that that will be running using Chef's Ops code. Sorry, Ops code's Chef and we'll be doing a version of that. And so we're gonna be demoing that here at the conference a little bit later. Then the other piece to it that we're gonna be start building out is the profile library. And the idea with that is we're gonna build profiles of say language stacks maybe that would be Android or Ruby or JavaScript. There will be the whole stack you need to develop in that language. And we'll put those out on GitHub so people will then be able to take those stacks and then using a Chef-based tool pull it down and install it on the laptop and get going. So if you've got new hires you can tell them to go and pull down the setup that they need. If you say normally work in Ruby and you're working with someone say an Android platform and you need to work together on that then they'll tell you what profile you want to go and pull down. So that's something we've been talking about for a while and we're now working on it again. We want to first focus on getting the laptop itself out and now that we've got this we're gonna be redebuting I should say the profile tool and the profile library. So look for that coming up soon. And then the cloud tool like I said you can deploy today using Juju and Linux containers and then going forward it will be Chef as well. So interesting choice, this was the code word right? Yes, Sputnik. Sputnik, which if you read any history on Silicon Valley and what an impactful event Sputnik was not only to the space program but to the chip manufacturers and this tremendous transformative investment that basically created Intel. So was that chosen on purpose or was it just cute or you're working down alphabetical list and S was the next letter on the list? This is an illusion to Mark Shuttleworth's trip into space. So Mark is the founder of Ubuntu, which this is based on. So he actually went up in an old Soyuz but that's not as cool as Sputnik. So I called it Sputnik. So that's how that name came up. And as we first started it was just going to be the laptop. And when I first pitched us to Mark about a week before I took it to the innovation fund he said, hey that's a great idea why don't you connect it to the cloud and that's where the whole idea of with Juju and making DevOps toolchain came in. And then very early on in the, when we had our alpha developers, our alpha cosmonauts someone else suggested the profile tool. And so those from the beginning now that becomes Sputnik it's those three main components that we have. And this is obviously the furthest along at this point. Yeah, interesting. Cause that was such a big event and really funded the early development of the microprocessors and cause it was all about the weight, right? It was all about we don't care how much it costs it's weight, weight, weight, weight, weight. And without that little flying, beeping mechanism going around the earth to be a different place. It was a big wake up call for a lot of people. So I think the thing about this product that interests me was the fact that a lot of developers program on local hosts which is their machine and then upload it to the cloud. So having a developer machine is of interest. The question is is that, and then people ask is what is that machine look like and how much customization can they do? So the question to you is what are you guys going to go with that? Well I think what we want to do is we have an initial version of this and this is what we'll support. So that's one of the things this comes with pro support when you buy it. But we're very open to the community and we would encourage the community to take it and start putting whatever distro you want on it. So people have done a port for this for Gen2 and Fedora and Sentos and I encourage that especially as we start pushing some of the drivers upstream that it makes a lot easier for other ones to come on. And also if you look at the forums on our tech center we're supporting this on 1204 but people have put 12.10 on it. They're putting 13.04 on it. And so we want people to take this as a platform beyond where we ever would think of it. And so that's something that we encourage although we don't have the resources to go and do each and every one of those. That's the beauty of the open source model. Well you guys did a great job there. Some other just to kind of shift into the kind of the open stack framework here. What is your feedback you're hearing from developers? Obviously the DevOps is a home run. We just covered that piece about it's the preferred method. What are you seeing about developers in some of the successful use cases? What are you seeing as no brainer? This is what's happening. Our efforts going into the clouds. Obviously mobile is big. Any other areas you can share with the audience on that you're seeing that's getting a lot of traction? Well I haven't been as plugged in in an open stack recently. I was very plugged in. Then I went off to focus on the web space. That was from the startups in the door rooms all the way up to the Facebooks and the Googles. And now I'm coming back to the cloud. So I'm just re-diving in. That's why I had sort of a lapse in my open stack time. But I am seeing a lot of stuff with storage. I think that's one of the big use cases that we're seeing a lot of people looking at this for. And I also think that general test and dev is something that's very popular at this point where you start with some basic infrastructure to service and start adding on top of that. Awesome. Final question before we get in tight on time to wrap up the next segment is what's going to happen next year for you guys? What are you looking at? What's your major to-do items? What are you looking at for the next, your roadmap for the next year or so? Well it'll be interesting to see. We have a few wild cards in our future that we can't predict. I don't think anyone can predict. But that being said. Outside of what will happen with Dell, I'll say it. Which as I've reported, I think it's going to be fine. It's just got to shake out that financial engineering plan. But Dell's not going anyway. It's not like Dell's not going anywhere. Right. There'll still be a pot of money for you. Right. But I think that the big focus for me going forward is to really beef up our outreach to developers. Because I think that as we go forward to be an end-to-end solutions company, we need to work and focus on this very influential constituency. We've been traditionally focused at the IT folks and they are extremely vital to what we do. But at the same time, we either need to talk to developers directly and we do outreach to that and also work with IT to help them understand and work with developers within their own group. And so that's really what I want to do is start working with this and build it out, as I say, on both the cloud side, the profile side, and then also as a whole program, look at how we better serve and understand developers going forward. And that's really where my efforts are. Because if you're going to play in the cloud space, you cannot exist if you don't have a keen interest and a keen involvement with developers. Yeah, no doubt developers are the focus right now. That's where the innovation is happening. You know, top of the stack with mobile and with socially new environments, it's just a massive creative opportunity right now. And the infrastructure's got to get retooled and we're seeing that with OpenStack. So, great to have you on theCUBE. Barton, it's always a pleasure to have you here on theCUBE. And thanks for your support over the years. Dell's been fantastic to work with. And thanks for the support for, at the time was a crazy idea that no one really kind of understood. devopsangle.com, which now is now the preferred cloud mindset for enterprises. Yes. And the world's coming up. If you're an enterprise, if you're not talking devops, you need to kind of hit the drawer on board again because it's coming right down the front door of your company. So, this is theCUBE, exclusive coverage at OpenStack here in Portland, Oregon. The world's changing. We're here on the ground with all the action. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and Jeff Frick. Wikibon.org. We're here inside theCUBE.