 of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack, Silicon Valley 2015. Brought to you by Morantis. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon AmJoy. Jeff Frick, who's the general manager of our CUBE operation based here in Palo Alto. We're in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum for the OpenStack SV, hashtag OpenStack SV or hashtag OSSV15, join the conversation. Our next guest is Sheng Liang. Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs. Welcome to theCUBE, hot startup in the container space. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, John. So we met at DockerCon, you were at the Mayfield party, obviously backed by Mayfield and Nexus Ventures. So you guys have a growing team. Rancher implies herding the cats or herding the sheep. I mean, I wouldn't call, I would say the developers more like bulls these days because they're really driving the innovation. So obviously developers are hot right now for mobile, cloud, kicking ass, taking names. What do you guys provide? I mean, let's talk about your company. Rancher, container management, is it infrastructure, share what you guys are doing? Exactly, so we really see containers are getting adopted very quickly by developers, by DevOps team, and they're beginning to be putting production. But in order to put containers in large scale production, they need tools for that, they need management for that, they need a way to hook up the containers into the cloud infrastructure. So this is where Rancher comes in. Rancher is effectively a container management platform that let organizations put together a container service. Just yesterday, a Google container engine went GA. It's a big deal for us. It's a big deal for the industry in a sense. I think it's going to really, I know Amazon container service is also being in production for a while. I think container service is really the next generation of an application deployment platform. It's going to become very popular. And we make organization-filled container services. Shane, so I want you to share with the folks watching what you've learned in this market today. And compare that vis-a-vis your experience. You have a lot of experience with internet infrastructure. Going back to web 1.0. And now we're in this new cloud mobile internet of things like conversion, big data, massive transformation happening, completely flipped upside down. What's the big deal? I mean, you had a company, cloud.com, sold to Citrix. You've been in the action going back to web 1.0. What's the big, what's the epiphany? What can you share with the folks? Why is this moment in time so compelling? This is a great question. And we had a great run at cloud.com, helped hundreds of organizations build very large-scale clouds. And if you count the number of open source installations, the number is probably even bigger. But at the end of the day, one of the challenges we ran into is a lot of these clouds where they were built, they were used, but the growth is actually not as big as I would have hoped for. You know, if you look at the cloud landscape today, when cloud stack, open stack got started, we thought we turned cloud into a commodity. We thought there would be, you know, hundreds. You know, if not thousands of clouds, there'll be public, private, hybrid. And you essentially can get infrastructure resources from anywhere, right? You can get cattle from anywhere. These are cattle. But you know, when you look at the market today, still the big public cloud providers pretty much dominate. And on the private cloud side, you know, server virtualization is still probably a very big side of the market. And what we're excited about containers is finally, there's an application packaging format, an application management platform that a lot of developers are gravitating towards. So if we could kind of build cloud 2.0, you know, build a container cloud that can really consume resources from anywhere. And I think that is, and it can really support the container workload well. I think that could potentially be how the computing in the cloud industry is going to play out in the next few years. So container cloud is a great way to position it. I like to use that word. But let's take that and drill down on it. So let's take container cloud and we'll just kind of make up a new category. Gardner can now cover it. You can call it container service. Really use it. Container service, up all container cloud because it's nice, nice bound buzzword. Gardner, get on that. You know, get a new category invented on theCUBE. But what that means is containers have shown the market a path of lightweight deployment, but also traversing multiple environments. And that's the use case that developers want. They don't want to have to deal with the plumbing and the provisioning, all the hassles, all the use cases. It's like really a bad exercise for the developer. It's like a rock fetch. They don't really want to think about infrastructure anymore. Why should I go fetch rocks and create a pile, move the pile around here and there? I want to focus on the development. So that implies lightweight. What's going on under the hood? Because open stack, cloud foundry, even Amazon, which is very nice stack right now, which is lighter than those other two, we have these heavy stacks, a lot of unbaked in white space. How do you handle, what's your advice there? What's your take on that? Does it need to have lighter, is it too fat? What we're seeing is people who use containers tend to not use all the capabilities out of the underlying infrastructure cloud platform. Obviously infrastructure is essential. Containers don't really manage infrastructure, right? So you need virtualization, you need open stack, you need Amazon web services, you need Google cloud. But at some point, I mean, give you an example. One of the great things I always loved about Amazon web services is very rich AMI library. That's something open stack hasn't even caught up yet. Just the fact you can get any software package packaged up as an AMI, and then you can just deploy this very vibrant ecosystem, very good. That's easy to stand up, it's lightweight. Yeah, exactly, it's great. But then you look at containers, if you look at Docker Hub, that what really initially attracted me to Docker was that ecosystem turned out to be even bigger. I just saw Ben Golub's interview actually at DockerCon. I think maybe even on this program, he was saying something like the Docker Hub images has grown to like, I'm not sure I'm getting it wrong, but I remember it's like 150,000 images. That's just mind boggling, and it's just continued. That's just getting bigger. Yeah, but it's just a starting point, right? Docker has a long growth ahead of it, and I'm just really excited about it. You don't need a service for the service, you need a compiler just to deal with all that stuff. I mean, this takes us to a whole other level. What is that level? Can you, in your mind's eye, share what you envision that preferred architecture look like? Let's just say Rancher starts exploding, you guys are public, you're a unicorn, things are evolving, seamless integration, full orchestration, what's the preferred future look like? I mean, I think really what developers and dev ops team would really like to see is focus on application development and use containers, Docker in particular, as the standard packaging and distribution format, right? And then everywhere they go, they can rely on the fact that the Docker runtime engine exists, because the Docker runtime runs on Linux, and it's going to soon run on Windows, Microsoft has shipped the Windows 2016 tech preview, and it's starting to score Docker, so we're very excited about that, having the standard runtime, standard packaging format, distribution format, then software systems like Rancher comes in that really help orchestrate the infrastructure around it, making sure that Docker runtime and the Docker application orchestration systems like Kubernetes and Compose can really run anywhere, seamlessly, on any cloud, you can stand up these systems very quickly, and you can manage them on an ongoing basis, so that's kind of our vision. You don't, developers at the end of the day don't need to worry about infrastructure as a highly differentiated and specialized, a separate set of issues they really need to worry about today as they develop the application. So I've got to ask you the trick question now, I've been asking every guest. It's not really a trick question. Well, let me ask a quick call for you to go there, because I know you're going next, but you said earlier that the market didn't evolve in as many clouds as you thought was going to happen. Does that potentially change now with kind of the container abstraction layer, making it easy, so you don't have to worry about a myriad of kind of cloud architectures, or is it just going to standardize on these five or six, or maybe there's a couple more coming, but does container change the way that potentially many, many cloud options grow? I mean, I think containers can potentially commoditize cloud offerings to the next level. As all of us know, I think Gartner pointed out in their latest major quadrant report for infrastructure to service, basically said infrastructure to service is highly differential, it's not a commodity. And at the end of the day, developers are primarily concerned about running containers, and I would say it provides an opening. Right, it's a very small, it's all right. Okay, so here's the trick question. Does hybrid cloud really exist, or is it a concept, or is it a category, is it a product line? Do customers buy private cloud, or is it subordinate? I mean hybrid, I mean hybrid cloud. Is private cloud, public cloud? We know they exist. Yeah, I'm a believer in hybrid cloud. I always believe in hybrid cloud. But in practice, it's being a little bit difficult to implement. As you know, Amazon's been the most popular cloud, and they don't provide an on-premise solution, right? Imagine if Amazon provided an on-premise offering, I think hybrid cloud would have become more real. But again, this is where, this is in a container ecosystem, though. We don't tend to talk about hybrid clouds, but I think it's actually a very good thing because from a container, a Docker container perspective, the runtime is standardized anyway. So in essence, the differentiation between infrastructure matters less. So we kind of almost take hybrid cloud for granted. So that hybrid cloud vision, it seems to me, has a real potential of turning into reality with containers, to the extent that people don't even talk about it very much, which I find it to be very encouraging. So what's the outlook on the industry? I mean, right now there's a lot of underlying change. We're seeing Wall Street react to the China crisis. Obviously, the economic crisis in China has got people talking about the bubble bursting. Obviously, in the enterprise space, certainly cloud mobile. There's a lot of underlying change that's independent of the financial business market. So unlike the dot-com bubble, which had no underlying major transformation, it was just the web, which is the internet. I mean, it was cool, but it wasn't like massive transformation. I'm very optimistic about the space we're in, the space cloud and OpenStack and Docker and containers. I just think across the board, I mean, obviously containers are even at earlier stages of evolution than cloud, but across the board, these all represent newer and more efficient way of doing things that provide more agility. So I'm very optimistic about it. A lot of people are scratching their heads and they're still saying, hey, is there a bubble going to burst now? I've been saying, you know, you don't have to answer for me, but I want to get your perspective on this. I've been saying that there's a lot of underlying major transformation disruptive enablers that are going to create a lot of wealth, technology-wise. Gotch reversalization was a starting point. You got containers, you got your developer environment, you got cloud, you got mobile. Could you share any insight? What you think is going on under the hood at the infrastructure level that is disrupting the entire market, the wealth and the existing incumbent. What's the disruption factors in your opinion? What are the key elements of that technology disruption? What do you think are the biggest things that people aren't aware of that's to kind of calm people down a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't tend to view these things as, personally, I don't tend to view these things as sudden disruptions. These movements has been going on for a long time, right? There's just had been so many more application development organizations, and these things then tend to generate demand for tools like Docker and runtime systems like OpenStack, infrastructure management systems like OpenStack. So I think it's a continuing evolution. And I think in this, in our world, I don't see it as much of a new sort of cloud style, cloud native style disrupting the old style of infrastructure. What I honestly tend to see in large organizations where they're busily putting together software development efforts, it can barely keep up with demand. And most people don't really want to think about infrastructure. They want to get the best stuff. Well, no one's buying, I mean, people buy storage. For it to work. They're not buying it the old way. They don't think EMC versus this. Now they want. And they probably care, at the end of the day, the cost of what's really exciting to me is that if you think about an organization where the majority of the cost is going, it's probably at the end you're not going to even the infrastructure, right? It's going to paying for the salary of developers. So the fact that these new waves, whether it's DevOps or OpenStack or Container make developers more efficient, it's just going to be widely adopted. So, yeah. Or the opportunity cost of missing something in your competitor gets there fast. I mean, that's where the huge, the huge change is. So John, I'm afraid like this is less, I think Container unfortunately is less of a disruption story. Like if you say, I mean, you can make an argument that. It's an accelerant. Yeah, exactly. It's an accelerant to the other disruption, which is how people buy storage. They're not pure play anymore. I mean, I don't buy servers. Who used to be I-Del servers for the startups and I want some EMC drives? With the developer market that's enabling this with containers and DevOps, people just want storage. There's no brand behind. I mean, you know what I'm saying? I'm seeing that's interesting trend, right? I mean, so the standalone devices. No, I mean, I think so. I think the general trend is infrastructure heading toward commoditization, right? Heading toward frameworks like OpenStack and heading toward, you know, all these vendors. I mean, you know, when you come to OpenStack Conference, you don't just see a little startup storage vendor. I mean, you see, I just saw a net app. Oracles here. You see the big vendors as well. I think everyone has something to contribute. And I, like I said, this is really about creating new opportunity for our whole industry. That's going to be my role. All right, final question for you, Shang. What did you learn at cloud.com that you're applying today to Rancher that's relevant in this new normal of cloud mobile, big data, social? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the one thing that really, it goes back to my original point. Back then, we built a lot of clouds. Some of them are very successful. A lot of them were not as successful. Not that these clouds were hard to build or even hard to operate. At the end of the day, they just weren't enough. Maybe they were not price right. They were not marketed right. So they weren't enough people using them, right? And I think I've seen that in other clouds as well. So build that they will come in challenge. Exactly. This is where I've really learned from the container space. The fact that so many people just come use the technology. So I would, you know, personally, I focus all my effort on how many people actually use our product. It doesn't matter if we just sell the product, but it has to lead to some consumption, right? And that's an area, you know. That's agile. That's how you, that's an agile venture. You want to see adoption. And I think, you know, I hope the industry as a whole could maybe talk, when we are at the point, we talk less about how difficult it is to install, configure and operate the technology. More about what are the tricks to actually stimulate adoption, you know? So I think that would be a very good development to have. Shane, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see the entrepreneurial spirit alive. You're a growing organization. You've got some funding behind you. Great VCs behind it. You've got a great team. Great market. Containers are exploding. You've got Kubernetes, all this orchestration happening. Absolutely. Congratulations. I hope to see you again. This is theCUBE live in Silicon Valley for the OpenStack Silicon Valley event we're broadcasting live for. This is our second day. We'll be right back after this short break.