 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2016. Brought to you by Docker. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Seattle, Washington for DockerCon 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. Brian Grace Lee, cloud analyst at theCUBE in Wikibon. Our next guest is Scott Johnston, who's the chief operating officer of Docker, formerly the SVP of products and product marketing. Promotion, welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks, John, good to be back. It's good, theCUBE does good things. You know, you guys are growing. The, just our third year, the size is significant. This event, you're now operating the train. It's like from 400 people two years ago, right? To like over 4,000, and the wait list is 600. So the wait list itself is more than that original conference two years ago, right? Which is- Even last year, we were saying- Humbly. Like there's a track just behind you. That's as big as the show was last year. Now it's the entire convention center. That's right. And obviously it's not just us, right? It's the communities here, the contributors on the open source side. There's been large enterprise vendors and partners who've come along. And so it's just grown in all different ways in the last two years. So you're the chief operating officer now. So you're now going to run the trains and keep them on time. Which sounds like it's organized, but as Jerry Chen said, startups are always in the chaos as it forces you guys to focus. What's the current status of the operations right now? Because obviously the growth's there. Docker numbers have been shared with us. Some significant stats were awesome. So as you guys go to the next level, what are some of the things that you're focused on right now with Docker vis-a-vis the business, the landscape, open source, and now with enterprises? It's a fair question, obviously lots of detail, but broadly speaking, right? If the last couple years were about ubiquity and working with partners to get the core runtime, the core platform out there and used by everyone, right? From drones flying in the air, to hardcore enterprise data centers, to cloud deployments. Next couple years from an operation standpoint is scaling up the complement to that, which is the monetization, right? Which is helping enterprise partners like HP that were announced last week and had a shout out today at the keynote. How do we work with them and a long list of others to take the management tools that help operations deploy all these applications that the developers are building, deploy them in production in ways that are scalable, safe, controlled, secure? And so, very high level, but the next two or three years are all about that build out right on the backs of the ubiquity build out. So it's exciting, we've been covering obviously big data cloud now, seven years with theCUBE and down on the trenches, now big data. It's interesting, the cloud now is maturing to the point where it really is enabling a tsunami of new class of applications. I'm glad you brought that up. Sorry, I don't have a job. We have seen a step function change in 12 months, right? So roll it back 18 months ago, 24 months ago. It's like, enterprise, yeah, we're going to have some public cloud experiments and kick the tires. We've seen like 180 turnabout, like no, we're going to the public cloud and now let's figure out our strategy, our tooling that we need to do that. So I agree with you 100%. Well, I want to get your thoughts on this because this is what we're hearing. We're hearing from practitioners and customers that, your customer's customer, which is, hey, now I have a clear line of sight on what the app development framework looks like. Docker containers are a nice vehicle for me to actually use existing apps as well as getting into the cloud native stuff, which is kind of the new headroom that they really are kind of betting their business on, drive more revenue. But I can now have programmable infrastructure and start really tooling my IT operations to be seamless under the covers enabling developers to be successful. No, that's right. I mean, they can't do that with these migrations and they can't actually do CI. Just start with just the dev test surface area, right? Forget production. They can't even do CI unless the automation's there, right? So in a crawl walk run or evolutionary revolution, like you got to start with automating that initial surface area and then it expands into clouds, into hybrid clouds from there. So a hundred percent. So now talk about the dynamic between startups to the other next level on this one is, okay, you got HPE, it was a great deal, HP Enterprise. You have Microsoft announcements today that you guys announced some significant, embedded points with Microsoft. And then you got some amazing startups. We were talking to Avi. Aviatrix. Aviatrix, yeah. Standing up networks. Yes. We had also Weavon. This is like startups, not just the big boys. No, that's right. So talk about that dynamic and the impact to you as looking at the landscape because if you got HPE, you got Microsoft on the high end, if Cisco's right behind us here. IBM. And you got IBM, and you got now the new guys. It's not a mutually exclusive ecosystem. It's not. Can you just share your thoughts on why that's happening? What is the signal to the customer? Yeah, no, thank you. It's not, right? Because on one hand you have the enterprise vendors that are already the trusted vendors to enterprise IT, right? And they have solution stacks that have many of their kind of proprietary value at solutions. And what we're doing largely with them at a very high level is making those solution stacks kind of docker native, right? So exactly the very workflow you were highlighting, the end to end dockerized applications from the developer laptop all the way into production that those platforms are docker application ready, right? So that's a big motion there. But as you know, John, we talked about it many times, the docker platforms, the horizontal platform with open APIs for all these various resources, for storage, for networking, for monitoring, for security. And so the smaller guys, as you say, the startup community or the innovators are really going great guns on providing docker native solutions for those plugins that plug into the infrastructure and enable special capabilities for networking, for distributed storage, things like that. So they're absolutely complementary and we're glad to see growth on both ends. I got to say, I'm impressed by the men. I've always been impressed by the management team at docker, but I like the new moves. So you were running product and engineering and product management. Mariana. Product management, product design. Product design, okay, technicality. Close enough. I mean, but you're a product guide. So product guide is now COO. Mariana is now, was VP of engineering, now she's doing alliances and strategic strategy stuff. So it's clear that signaling is it's a product-centric company. It is. It is. Where's the white space? So now everyone wants to know, where's the white space? Because the ecosystem is on fire and there's a lot of people that are bedding their life on docker right now, not life, but like their commercial business. I want to build on docker. I'm going to bet the ranch on docker. No pun intended. We got rancher labs here, but what is that white space? What do you tell your developers from a product standpoint? Here's where you want to play. Is there a known white space map that you guys have or? Well, I mean, think about it. We are a tool for the application delivery pipeline. Right? I mean, we start with developers, but our tooling is useful to QA. It's useful to operations. It's useful to security folks as well. And so the white space is not that we're a new application, but that we're a new set of tools for developers and the rest of the participants in the value chain to build, ship and run their software. And so I'd say it's less that we're gunning for this big kind of wide open space in their own kind of infrastructure, their workflow, but it's more like they face problems. They say, oh, we can only ship with our current processes, our current tools. We can only ship once a month, ship changes to production. I think that's what I hear you say is white space is kind of an old concept because what's different, that's an old map, white space. You get it for source now and you have really unknown opportunities that are flying into the coop, so to speak. So you really, the white space is everything. Anyway, but I mean, the currency is speed, right? The currency for the enterprise application teams is speed. And so how do we get in there and help them ship applications faster? And so maybe where you're going though is why is Docker scene as the go-to tool platform for that. And I'll go back to something we said a lot in these last two days, which is the democratization of really hardcore technology, right? So Docker March 2013 when it open sourced democratized containers. Containers as a body of technology had been around. They'd been around for decades, but they were difficult to use, they're difficult conceptually to get your heads around. And so hardcore system engineers, hardcore kernel engineers were the only ones that could really take advantage of that power. Docker took very powerful but very difficult to use technology, gave you the power with a dramatically easier to use interface such that all dance, all systems take advantage of it. I guess what I'm getting at is, I guess what I'm getting at is developers are afraid of taking one thing. I spend time developing, I don't want to get rolled over by Docker if they've built it. I know Solomon says, batteries are included, swapable, whatever that is. But Microsoft back in the old days, there when they were at the height of their developer, you knew what they were doing. If you cross in that path with the boundaries, you would release product, right? So the developers just was very clean. It's the line. We're not going to be an OS player, so we don't compete there. I had to swap. You mean the ecosystem. Where's the white space for the ecosystem? Got it. And that's where the people want to grow, right? Yes. So we're a horizontal platform first and foremost, right? Which means that when it comes to the APIs, the application facing APIs, like those are near and dear to us. Because why? Because the big value proposition of Docker is the portability, right? So the application facing APIs are sacrosanct, right? Like those have to remain 100% portable whether it's running on your laptop, cloud, data center, open stack, bare metal, right? The south bound APIs, if you will, the infrastructure facing APIs, those are open. And those are the white space. That's the have at, because we are not storage experts. We are not networking experts. We are platform experts. And we are enabling the ecosystem to grow at these very specific. They can be able to town all day long. And you look at behind us and you see a lot of folks in the booths, like that's where a lot of their energies are going. We've been talking about this with a number of companies, but Docker is a different kind of company now in terms of, how do your products open source? So it's, you can get it without engaging with Docker. Part of your roadmap is going to be out in the open source domain because you can see what's going on, right? Part of it is they're going to trust you to be a SaaS provider to help run their operations. What, as you talk to enterprise customers who are used to dealing with whoever, right? There was a way of dealing with, interacting with them, giving them, what do you, what do they want? How do they want to interact with you? If you're a large bank, how do they want to interact with Docker? How does a hospital want to interact with Docker? How's that changing? I'll oversimplify it, but it's not a bad conceptual place to start and then devil's in the details, right? The open source and the developer tools that we provide, we announced Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows. Those are about creating the market, right? Cause those are downloaded used by developers to create containers. And what happens is within the enterprise, IT operation says, oh, my devs are creating all these Dockerized apps, all these containers, like how am I going to manage them? And nine times out of 10, IT operations, particularly in the enterprise, they want to buy a solution. They don't want to build and cobble and maintain their own separate set of scripts or stacks or whatnot. So that's where we tend to get involved with the enterprise is where the enterprise devs are already doing some projects. Might be Skunkworks, right? But they're creating stuff that has to be managed and in a controlled fashion, in a deployable fashion or rollback fashion. And so they come to us and say, Docker, can you help us? We're saying, yes, we can. And that is a perfect conversation to have a commercial tool conversation where enterprise IT has budget, is willing to pay for once certified platforms, once validated security models and profiles. That's a direct conversation that they're used to. So what they might not be used to is like, wow, my devs are going crazy with open source. And then we come and say, hey, let us help you with that. Well, and it's becoming a little less of a binary. Like, do I go to the cloud or are you running it myself? There's sort of an in between now, right? And that's a different mindset. They've got to learn how to adapt to that. You're changing your business, well, you're evolving the business because you want to monetize it. You want to follow that. That's right, that's right. I mean, what we can talk about broad trends, right? I mean, I think none of us would disagree that, call it the last decade, maybe two decades, it's increasingly become a buyer's, a buyer driven evaluation cycle because there's so much information available online and there is open source and there is free tools and there's Google that is indexing all the information out there. And so we're seeing buyers just come to the table with a lot of information about what they're doing. They know about your stack. They know about your competitor stack really, really well. And so- It's a digital buying environment. Right? And so given that, how do you insert yourself in a very authentic way that gives them value? You've got to lower the surface area for them to participate. And so our cloud product, right? The Docker cloud allows them to go in with a credit card, swipe and get the benefits of container management, knockerized app management, without involving us or our sales cycle or our marketing. They just go in and start. So you can imagine a little development group starting like that. Then they say, hey, you know what? This is great, but we need it on-prem. And then that leads to the next motion of an enterprise on-prem software sale. I think you nailed that, right? And we just heard, we heard that 10 minutes ago or an hour ago from Alexi, he said, look, if you can't prove to somebody that you're good in five minutes or an hour, or whatever, like real fast. Yeah, right away. That's exactly right. And the thing of this digital progression now, as you point out, the discovery, developers are rabid on discovery. That's right. They're going to look at everything. They will find you. They're going to be sitting in a meeting, the developer there will spin it while you're doing a presentation. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Download it, try it, and raise their hand, ask questions about it, right? Did you just announce? So, it, it, it. All right, so I want to ask the question about the CIO that's out there watching or customer. Now the environment's changed. This is really agile. Now that person's under pressure called CXO, because now you've got CDOs, you know all kinds of new role, CXO security's huge, which we haven't even touched on yet. That executive has to be fast. They have to have a site that doesn't look like Netscape 1998, right? I know you were at Netscape, had to weave that in there. You know, you look at some of the hot, you know, agile companies, the websites are dynamic, it's got social network effects. The older sites just look like HTML. So like, that's the way they're living in the old app days. They got to modernize really, really fast. Add mobile, right? What's your message to the CIO about modernizing and building a true application development environment that's going to drive their business? What's your advice? Yeah, yeah. You know, honestly, we see use cases across the board, behaviors across the board to answer that question. And I'll give you a dramatic one first. We had one CIO, I'll keep their company's name nameless, but he saw that a developer-centric mindset inside his organization was the way to go. And he fired all the non-developers, right? And just hired only developers into his organization. And developers are also the ones carrying the pagers and answering the patient calls. And that was his admittedly very kind of dramatic way. To send a culture message. To send a culture message that we are going to be fast, we're going to think creatively, we're going to be hungry, we're going to go after it, right? That is obviously a tail case, right? Most organizations, they start with a small service area project. They start with a Skunkworks team and they lift and shift and just get it into dictators and start feeling that transition. I love that example, so I have to ask a follow on question. What was the operations team like? Did he fire the ops team? Or was that transformed? And because, no, you bring in developer-centric mindset, you have to have an operations team that can be really on the new security paradigms. On the cloud, on the cloud model. On the cloud delivery, so there's a lot of details on the ops operation side. That was once, five nines, no, no, no ops does not have to be DevOps. Well, I mean, the SLAs don't go down, right? I mean, no one wakes up and says, you know what, five by 12 is enough. We don't need 7.24, we're a bank, right? No one, no one does that, right? And so you've got to maintain your service levels while moving faster and that is the conundrum that we've been wrestling with for the last couple of decades. That's what drove DevOps, right? Which is like, how do you get all this benefits of agile over here in the development arm but get it flowing all the way through to app delivery? What's the trend in the IT ops that you see? That's significant. That's a different change from just five years ago or a decade ago where the practices are different. And can you share any anecdotal color around that concept? I mean, we are seeing public cloud be a defined thing on every CTO, CIOs roadmap. Like they must have a public, not just hybrid cloud, right? Not like private hybrid cloud. They have to have a public cloud and that's different than even 12 or 18 months ago. Obviously containerization, dockerization is a huge, is a huge trend and I'll say comfort with a variety of languages, programming languages because they want to entice developers to have the flexibility to choose Node or choose Python or choose Ruby. And so those are three big trends we're seeing in the development as well as in the operations organization. So the question I have to ask you that came up multiple times in this past two days was the whole theme that you go to markets looks a lot like VMware. You get a lot of VMware DNA in your company now what VMware didn't have at the time back then was they weren't really involved in open source. So what's interesting is that can you or is it true that you guys have a VMware like go to market or is that just kind of banter or? I mean, you can, given a random set of dots you can connect any line through them, right? So let's be careful to ascribe causation and correlation. Look, the way in which new emerging technology is adopted is a very similar pattern. I mean, did AWS pick up production workloads on day one? They did not. Did VMware pick up production workloads on day one? They did not. File and print, dev test, QA. And in that sense is Docker following VMware? Well, we're following a very successful playbook that has been done again and again and again since time immemorial of emerging tech, right? So yes, we are landing with developers, we're doing dev test and we expand from there. So that's a trajectory, a successful trajectory. That's right. You can put in whatever name you want to it. The second thing though that I will say is that because we are focused on a product, as you said, we are a product-centric company, we are very motivated to make partners successful, the ecosystem successful in terms of the distribution and the go to market. So our conversation earlier about HP and IBM and half a dozen other wonderful partners, that's very deliberate. And that you can say, well, gosh, VMware followed a similar play. But VMware was also very much a- There's a lot of alliances. How important they are to you because this is really a big deal in my mind. I think this is a Docker moment where you guys crack the code on potentially not just scale and market, but now relationships that you're fusing together kind of the Switzerland model where you have the goodness of the container stuff and we haven't gotten to secure yet, which we can talk to you, by bringing the big companies together and the startups in the white space and ecosystem, you're enabling the market. That's enabling platform. Yeah, that's right. How are you guys going to execute that? As the COO, what's the mandate? Just keep doing more deals. Is it deeper integration? Is there a playbook? I mean, is there a tier to pros? So you've got to give the industry as well as your partners, your subset of in the industry, you have to give them a roadmap, a playbook, right? And that playbook has things like what are the common use cases? What are the two or three common use cases? Because if you don't, your message just gets kind of pushed out and deluded and everyone's wondering kind of like, okay, how do I use this and when do I use this? So it starts with having a very common and concrete and specific set of use cases that everyone's going to play on, regardless of channel, regardless of partner type. Like these are the things we're going after. Backing that up is a set of reference architectures that, to your question, reference not only the partners role in that reference architecture, but also the startups role in that architecture. I want to do monitoring. I want to do logging. I want to do security. Great, we've got 450 registered partners through half dozen, dozen different categories that can plug into that reference architecture and basically provide the enterprise IT group with a blueprint of how to be successful with the solution. So those are two very specific motions that we're working on across the partnerships to make sure that the partners are successful, the customers are successful, and we're successful. And you're investing heavily in that. And you're investing heavily in that. Absolutely, absolutely, as an organization with the partners. I look over one of your shoulders, Amazon's there, Azure's over your other shoulder. There's a Docker cloud. Now, where does the Docker public cloud story go? I mean, if I go to Azure, they're going to tell me about the number of data centers they have and certifications and valid. You know, you're going to be in country. I mean, are we going to be hearing about that in Docker cloud? Where does the partnership go? Where are third party service providers fit and all that? No, good question, Brian. Remember, Docker cloud is the control plane. It's not where the workloads land. So Docker cloud drives workloads on Azure, on Amazon, on Google compute. And we're agnostic, right? And in fact, that's one of the value propositions of Docker cloud is that we're not tied to any particular cloud compute workload provider. And we see a lot of customers doing dual cloud approaches with Docker cloud as the common control plane across them, or dual clouds and on-prem, all being managed out of Docker cloud. And so that's where it fits in the landscape. Again, drawing back, if you're hearing a common theme, drawing back to the portability theme of Docker, it's portability not just in the literal application of artifacts and the runtime, but portability in the management tooling that spans hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. So it'll be anybody who wants to stand up and run Docker data centers as a service that can be tied to that Docker cloud often? That's one example as well. I'll give you a fun kind of hack where a lot of the early usage of Docker cloud was we have a bring your own node technology where you can drop an agent on the node and register it with Docker cloud and you can manage out of Docker cloud. One of the early use cases was developers bringing their laptop, putting the agent on their laptop and going back up to the firewall and managing it on Docker cloud because they just wanted tools to manage and deploy Docker containers, but they wanted to do it locally. So they'd fire up a couple of VMs, have a couple of nodes on their laptop, be managing that from Docker cloud, SAS multi-tenant service outside their firewall. Right? Really interesting. Yeah, kind of a backward way of thinking about it, or a reverse way of thinking about it. That was their way of kicking the tires. That's your digital progression of how people are discovering. Right. Exactly right. There's no boilerplate marketing anymore. That's right. It's got to kind of lower the service area. Follow the users, right? Follow the users. Fall lower in the service area for value. That's right. That's awesome. That's right. That's how you do business. Scott, final question, just next year, what's your key metrics for, top three metrics for the year that you're running the business on Docker this year? Look, I mean Docker wouldn't be anything without the community. That's this event that's the over 4,000 participants here. It's why you're here. So community is going to continue to be number one. We're just going to continue to see and want to see exponential growth in that community. And that's just numbers, right? But engagement and meetups and participation in those meetups and the conference and the talks and the quality of the talks. And so that's going to continue to be huge. Then you're obviously going to see downstream from that usage. And this goes to open source adoption. And you heard our announcement yesterday about Docker 112 building orchestration primitives as from the get go into the core engine. We think that is the right way to develop multi-container, multi-host applications. And so seeing that adoption pick up in the open source community. And obviously the third one after that is, okay, we've created a community. We've created an open source market of users, actively engaged users. And a subset of those will want enterprise tools to manage those workloads. And so we're going to have a business metric that's very important right on the backs of those first two. All right Scott, thanks for taking the time out of your super busy schedule to share your insight on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks for your support, by the way. Thank you. We've been here every year, DockerCon, Washington Grow and appreciate the executive support. You guys have been very candid on theCUBE. And I would appreciate your support, John, Brian. And it's exciting to be part of. Thanks. Thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Brian Gracie here. Scott Johnson, CEO, Chief Operating Officer of Docker. This is theCUBE, live in Seattle. Be right back after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.