 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE on the ground. Covering KubeCon 2016. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, we are here in Seattle for special theCUBE on the ground. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. We're covering KubeCon and cloud native. This is really one of the fastest growing conferences and events around application developers and software open source. And of course, we're here on the ground covering with theCUBE and our next guest is Richard Kaufman here inside theCUBE. Vice President of Samsung, SDS, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. It's great to be here. So Samsung, I'll see a big player at many levels. What are you guys doing? What's the news for you guys here at KubeCon and cloud native? So first thing is we're Samsung SDS. We're an IT outsourcing company, part of the Samsung group. There are a lot of companies. We're the IT outsourcing folks. And we're here for two reasons. One, we are working very hard and cloud native at my part of Samsung SDS. And we do two things. We do services inside of Samsung group where we help provide them and advice all the way from high level advice and how they should go after it to deployment and service operation for Kubernetes based services. We also offer the same service outside of Samsung. We have a few customers in North America and we've leveraged this business up to the point where we wanna very much go public with it and we also wanna contribute significantly back to the community. So all of the work that we do, we put back into open source where we've been working on Kubernetes for almost two years now. We were on stage at the 1.0 launch, doing some really interesting demonstrations and talks. And we also just now joined the foundation. So the cloud native computing foundation. So we're on the board and hoping to also contribute back to the community that way. Big jump in attendance this year from last year, isn't it? Oh my heavens, you can't walk on the show floor without getting trampled. I think that's incredible. I think that the nice problem they have is how to figure out the size venue for a few years down the road and predict what kind of exponential growth they have. And it's a nice mix of people too. It's like you have a lot of developers and builders out there who are doing this. And to me, the benchmark of a good conference like at this size, you can tell the heartbeat when the hallway conversations, the lobbies packed, people are talking. And they're not just smouging, there's real cool conversations. So you can feel the early momentum of what Kubernetes and containers has done to the application-developable worlds. Now this is blending in with IT because now the IT guys have to connect to the businesses. So you guys have been doing that. So take a minute to explain SDS and Samsung relative to obviously the parent company, Samsung. How big are you guys? What's the stats? You guys are a public company. What's your role? What are you guys doing? Do you have a cloud? Give us some color. Spend a minute to describe SDS. So SDS is a very small company in the Samsung Group, $7.2 billion in revenue last year. So that's small. We are quite large and have operations, most countries in the world. A lot of our work is inwardly facing into the other Samsung Group companies. So we're independently publicly traded. We compete for business. We also service customers outside of Samsung Group. But a lion's share of our revenue comes from within the Group. And in North America, we service Samsung Electronics America, but all the other Group companies as well, when we can earn their business. And I'm part of an outfit called SDS Research America. We work on things ranging from machine learning to cloud-native technologies. My little part of the turf is about- You're in the front end doing, you're kind of pioneering, getting out front, digging at, kicking the tires and all the new stuff. They hired us so that we could help them with infrastructure software technologies that would be relevant two to five years down the road. So we have a set of projects that address everything from short to long-term interest that would help SDS. Well, congratulations. It's a great endorsement to the community, and it's awesome to see you guys. It's seven billion dollars in revenues, small by your standards, but literally if you look at Amazon, it's almost catching up to those kinds of revenue numbers. It's pretty big. But really, this is about the future of this conference and a lot of work you do. And you mentioned Kubernetes in a couple of years for you guys. What does this all mean for folks? Because the rah-rah hallway conversations which we're seeing here is a lot of people motivated because they can see a straight and narrow for them a development standpoint. But now it's got to get operationalized in the enterprise. What's the impact for customers as they look at this? Is it the bridge between IT and business? What's the net net? Well, how do you see that? How would you describe that? So I think it's a strategy that if you look at it from the perspective of a potential customer of ours. So an IT shop that knows that they have to adapt to this. The reasons that they have to adapt to it, one is they need to achieve the same efficiencies of the Google and Facebooks of the world in order to compete. The second is that new developers that they hire all know this stuff and don't know the legacy stuff. So at a certain point, it would be like in a previous talk, somebody talked about, yeah, good luck finding a cobalt programmer. Yeah. In the next few years, it's good luck finding somebody who understands traditional virtual machines as opposed to cloud native technologies. So from this perspective of an IT provider, how do we both figure out how to make the new apps, the Greenfield apps, happy on this sort of technology? How do we host it? What kind of strategy do we have for running on other people's clouds? And how do we bridge this with our legacy stuff? And the Kubernetes is good because it provides a way to run this sort of technology in a way that's cloud provider independent. You can run it internally or externally without getting locked into one provider or your own vendor choices. The second reason is if you sort of adopt the overall techniques, you can deploy changes rapidly so you can turn your applications over quickly. You can also scale them up and down depending on workloads and you can run quite efficiently. Those three things are very important. And then finally, especially for a company that's running critical applications like Samsung Group does quite often, these applications, when you deploy them, they know how to heal themselves. And so outages that come from people, that fingering services, that source of failures is gone. The automation kind of kicks in, but this is interesting too, there's also kind of a chessboard going on here where you have Kubernetes providing that multi-cloud capability, which is nice from a hedge perspective or multi-cloud perspective, but also puts pressure on Amazon web services and Microsoft and others to actually get better because if the switching costs become almost zero, the competition shifts down below the stack for the cloud guys. I mean, we're seeing Amazon have Kubernetes, it's not native in ECS, but this is interesting dynamic. Your thoughts on that landscape shift, if you will, if Kubernetes continues to go, get the momentum it's getting, it should have an impact on forcing the major cloud guys to get stronger, better at the lower end of the stack. Right, so that's a fantastic question. And from the perspective of our customers, both inside Samsung and outside Samsung, our interest is in allowing them to be as flexible as possible without getting locked in to a one-cloud provider might actually be a competitor of theirs at some point. So don't get locked in for strategic reasons, don't get locked in for financial reasons, but also don't get locked in for geographic reasons. Samsung is an exceptionally global company and if we need to go into Africa, we need to go into Africa and it doesn't matter whether one-cloud provider is there or not, we need to be able to deploy there when we want. And with Kubernetes, you don't have to make the application changes at all. Absolutely correct, and even if it makes sense, you can run your service across multiple providers simultaneously. So this is the nirvana for the punch line of flexibility, we hear that a lot from vendors, we're gonna offer flexibility. I mean, come on, they can't get any more flexible than this. Right, it's wonderful when you can sell something as nirvana, we hope to get close. Well, it's still early days, but I'm seeing some forking going on VMware, for instance, but I'm gonna go there. Again, the market will adjust, but the bottom line is developers need to have this. Your thoughts on the staying power of this mission. How long do you think it's gonna last and will it continue? So a very, very positive sign is that the number two contributor to Kubernetes is everybody else. So 40-something percent Google, 43% was unidentified. That means individuals either from a company that they didn't bother saying what company they were from or actual users. So that's huge. The fact that it's gone in one year from being essentially a Google project to being a plurality Google, but majority other folks, and most of the other folks were miscellaneous developers working on it. So it's a wide ecosystem. That's a good proof point on one authenticity of the opportunity. Right. The checks and balances of is becoming a marketing program for people who are trying to, Kubernetes washed their strategy and say we have that too. So the nice thing about this is that the hype is matched with reality. There are a number of services that are up and running using Kubernetes. We have some. Pokemon Go runs on Kubernetes. So there's actually a there there and we have an open source project called Kraken that's on GitHub. Anybody can download it. It allows you to quickly get this stuff running up on Amazon. Pokemon Go, tell me about that for a second because that's interesting. How is that being orchestrated? Give me an example of some of the services that they're using. So this is Google's story and Pokemon Go story. I'm just referring to theirs. But Google Container Engine, which is a Kubernetes native service is hosting Pokemon Go. So that's huge. And you can imagine for something that's as successful as that, how the ability to flexibly grow and shrink the workload depending on the demand has to be a huge benefit to them. This is a great example that highlights your point about having the ability to move from one cloud to the other. If they need access compute, for instance, they could move them whatever cloud they're on to wherever. It's certainly the geography of Pokemon Go highlights that. Right. And just if you think about the Farmville folks years ago when they were trying to figure out how to scale their service and they were on Amazon and they were on data centers, the difficulty that they had deploying infrastructure. One of the talks you mentioned in the old days, if you wanted to spin up your bare metal infrastructure, it was to call your hardware sales rep and fight for a delivery slot three months later. Now we're arguing about it. In a data center that has potentially availability zone issues of itself. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's the nightmare, basically. And now it's... Farmville Milling and Zynga, the old first generation gamer. And now we're in a situation where as we go from virtual machines, we were at minutes, now we're at seconds for starting up new instances. Richard, thanks so much and congratulations on your success. I'll give you the final word here on this segment here, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon here in theCUBE. What's next? What do you see around the corner of that? And potentially others might not see, you're ahead of the curve. What's coming next? So I think the linear predictions would be just for adjacencies, which would be better integration with storage and networking technologies. The kind of the mean potatoes boring enterprise stuff like charge back and quotas and all the like. The more interesting thing farther down the road is integration with analytics, both providing analytics services, but also using it in every stage of operation. I think that's gonna be a very exciting area. That's an opportunity for cloud guys also to differentiate too. Data analytics in the cloud potentially could be a big opportunity to cross subsidize some of that value. Absolutely, and you never fail predicting that things will keep on climbing up the stack. So Paz goes to software as a service, goes to higher level services again. So I think we'll continue to see more interesting integrations climbing up the stack. Final question, since they just popped into my head to go to the final, final question. Velocity of code being pushed, just thoughts, what are you seeing out there? Obviously there's a demand for more and more Kubernetes folks, but just in the snapshot right now, what's the velocity of code being pushed here in this community? So the number of contributors is going way up. The quality of their contributions is going up. The need for the community to coordinate all of these actions is going up. Probably of the open source communities I've experienced, the role that the leadership has in keeping everybody together, the meetup culture that's all in Zoom video calls. Most of us organize our lives around those community calls. I think the community is keeping itself together and helping to productively control the velocity of contributions in new projects. I was Richard Kaufman here, president of Samsung, at SDS, independent public company, part of Samsung, but kind of not part of it. Doing a lot of work, Kubernetes. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. Okay, we are here on the ground in Seattle for the CUBE special on the ground coverage of CUBE BurnettisCon called KubeCon, KubeCon, not to be accused of this CUBE, and CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.